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NUCLEAR
An interim N-freeze for N. Korea, Iran
T. F. Mancuso, Who Led Radiation Study, Dies at 92
Hoon could give evidence to Gulf war illness inquiry
Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War
Israel Tells UN's ElBaradei Iran Wants Atomic Bomb
U.S. hauls nuclear material out of Iraq
U.S. Quietly Sneaks Once - Looted Uranium Out of Iraq
U.S. Removed Radioactive Materials From Iraq Facility
Radioactive Material Seized From a Nuclear Plant in Iraq
Iraqi 'dirty bomb' risk dismissed
Israel Tries to Shift Focus During U.N. Visit
Israel's Vanunu critical of ElBaradei
Israeli nuclear foe still fighting
Iran, Syria Say Israel Has Nuclear Arms, Is Threat
IAEA Chief Views Israel Nuclear Reactor
Israel stands firm over its nuclear secrets
S. Korea: North Deploying Intermediate-Range Missiles
Missile shield will destabilise region, Latham says
U.S., Australia Sign Pact to Work on Missile Defense
U.N. Didn't OK Uranium Transfer to U.S.
Bending the rules in Bay View Hunters Point
Los Alamos: Blinded by profits?
No decision from DOE yet on plutonium shipped to SRS
Plutonium may not be leaving SRS
MILITARY
Blair Says Illicit Weapons May Never Be Found
Retired judge to probe Gulf War illnesses
MoD chairs £1,000 each as troops face axe
Cautious Whitehall keeps the secret state alive
Outside View: Privatizing war
Syria claims to have confiscated Israeli goods bound for Iraq
Sunni Resistance to U.S. Presence Hardens
In Iraq, Daunting Tasks Await
Suicide Bomb at Funeral Kills 14
Iraq Approves Law Allowing Martial Rule
New Law in Iraq Gives Premier Martial Powers to Fight Uprising
Settler as Israel's victim: The right cries abuse
Top Militant Among Five Killed in Raid In West Bank
Mideast Clashes Kill 6 Palestinians and Israeli Officer
Israel's W.Bank Barrier Faces World Court Ruling
Tensions mount over South Ossetia
Bush Undecided on When to Name New CIA Director
Marine Is Free, Family Reports
Family of a Marine Says Iraqi Captors Have Released Him
Air Force Pilot Who Bombed Canadians Is Fined $5,672
U.S. Military Families Leaving Bahrain Over Terror Threat
Fighter Pilot Found Guilty of Dereliction in Mistaken Bombing
Lawmakers: Reserves Stretched to Limit
Army Commanders Punished in Iraq
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Coast Guard: U.S. Vulnerable to Cole - Style Attacks
U.S. Restricts 3 Oil Tankers in Security Crackdown
Prosecutors Given New Case Rules
Detainee Files Sought
Lawmakers Briefed on Terror Attack Threat
Israeli interrogators in Iraq - An exclusive report
POLITICS
9/11 Panel Defends Intelligence
9/11 Panelists Rebut Cheney on Information
She Tilts Against Power, but Don't Call Her Quixotic
Iraq is now another Palestine
Kerry Picks Edwards as Running Mate
ENERGY
LNG boom puts Korean shipyards on investor radar
OTHER
The bug that is poisoning millions
Record Numbers Infected With HIV
ACTIVISTS
T. F. Mancuso, Who Led Radiation Study, Dies at 92
The War Over Central Park Is Turning Cultural
Veterans oppose war in Iraq as deceitful
Two foreign activists refused entry, ask court to overturn ban
Michael Moore may make Blair film
-------- NUCLEAR
An interim N-freeze for N. Korea, Iran
By Daniel Poneman
July 7, 2004
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/07/07/an_interim_n_freeze_for_n_korea_iran/
WHILE THE WORLD watches the vital transition in Iraq, the other wheels of the "axis of evil" keep dangerously turning. Last week Iran signaled that it would resume its uranium enrichment activities, and North Korea hinted it might detonate a nuclear device.
US officials properly seek the verifiable termination and dismantlement of all nuclear weapon-related activities and facilities. But pursuing it through an all-or-nothing approach imperils US security by effectively sidelining diplomacy while Tehran and Pyongyang step up their nuclear activities.
Irreversible closure of a nuclear weapon program generally flows from profound political changes in a regime. In Libya, for example, Moammar Khadafy decided he needed cooperation with the outside world more than his weapons of mass destruction.
No one expects a Libyan-style epiphany in Tehran or Pyongyang. Further, regime change may not occur before those regimes have assembled substantial nuclear arsenals. Iranian hard-liners have been strengthened in this year's parliamentary elections, while Kim Jong Il has outlasted every political leader who has sought to contain his nuclear ambitions.
Seeking a comprehensive solution while eschewing interim steps grants a gift to the bomb-builders: time. Since 2002, North Korea has reopened its program, separated up to five or six bombs' worth of plutonium, and produced fresh plutonium every day in its restarted 5-megawatt reactor. Iran may use its reprieve to start producing highly enriched uranium, which is easier to fashion into a nuclear explosive. The recent US proposal to allow initial benefits to flow to Pyongyang in advance of a final deal represents a welcome shift toward a more effective approach. An interim freeze can be a vital first step toward our ultimate goal of stopping and dismantling existing nuclear efforts. Specifically, we should forge a united international front to present Tehran and Pyongyang with a clear choice. If they agree to a verifiable freeze for a significant period -- say, 10 years -- in their efforts to obtain the plutonium and highly enriched uranium used for nuclear bombs, during that period they will receive security assurances and economic benefits. If they do not, they will confront increased pressure and isolation from the international community.
The size and shape of a freeze as well as the inducements to be offered must be worked out through negotiations, but abandonment of a rigid take-it-or-leave-it strategy is more likely to gain the allied cooperation needed to make both carrots and sticks credible. So far Tehran and Pyongyang have not suffered significant penalty for their defiance of international norms or been offered significant rewards for compliance. Fatter carrots and stronger sticks may finally force leaders to make hard choices between their nuclear programs and the fundamental health and viability of their regimes. A freeze is a tourniquet, not a solution, and even so will be difficult to negotiate. Effective verification will be hard to achieve, even with more intrusive international inspections. Fashioning persuasive carrots and sticks will be harder for Iran than North Korea, given the former's oil wealth and extensive multilateral relationships. But a freeze would give the international community time to devise more carrots and sticks to use as leverage to obtain a permanent agreement to terminate and dismantle dangerous nuclear facilities.
Some will object that a freeze that does not end the nuclear threats from Tehran and Pyongyang will reward blackmail, but that is a red herring. A freeze with either country should go beyond existing obligations in scope and verification measures, and the essence of diplomacy is to confer benefits in exchange for undertaking expanded international obligations.
Others will object that negotiation with the surviving members of the "axis of evil" is useless -- wicked regimes will exploit a freeze and the complacency it could spawn to continue their nuclear weapons programs covertly. But similar concerns did not prevent negotiation of interim arms control agreements with the Soviets, which verifiably enhanced US security even though it did not reduce the need for vigilance.
While an interim freeze must not sway us from our ultimate objectives, each year that avoids increased nuclear dangers enhances our security. Ultimately, time will remove both Kim Jong Il and the current Iranian regime. If a freeze buys enough time to outlast them or to find a comprehensive resolution of the issue before Pyongyang and Iran unleash their nuclear arsenals, we win. If we seek instant victory regardless of the dangers, the consequences could be catastrophic.
Daniel Poneman, who served on the National Security Council under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, is coauthor of "Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis."
-------- accidents and safety
T. F. Mancuso, Who Led Radiation Study, Dies at 92
July 7, 2004
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/07/national/07mancusoobit.html
Thomas F. Mancuso, a pioneering epidemiologist at the center of a bitter dispute with the federal government over the possible long-term effects of small doses of radiation on nuclear bomb workers, died Sunday at an assisted-living center in Oakland, Calif. He was 92 and had esophageal cancer, his family said.
Until World War II, occupational epidemiology, or the study of health effects caused by work, centered on accidents or acute illness. Dr. Mancuso was instrumental in shifting the focus to long-term consequences, which required following up and finding the cause of death for people who had left the work force months or years earlier.
"He realized you had to follow people through death, and figure out what they died from,'' said Dr. David Michaels, a former assistant secretary of energy who is now a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University. "He would put together these long-term studies, put together old records and follow people into the present. That was a huge breakthrough.''
In 1977, Dr. Mancuso became a hero to the antinuclear movement when the Atomic Energy Commission terminated a contract he had held since 1965 to study the effects, if any, of small radiation doses on 500,000 bomb workers.
His conflict with the agency, the successor to the wartime Manhattan Project, had begun in 1974 when a Washington State epidemiologist presented data indicating that former workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation were dying of cancer at abnormally high rates. Dr. Mancuso was asked to endorse a press release that contradicted the finding, but he refused, saying that his research was not finished. He later presented a study, with Dr. Alice Stewart and George W. Kneale, concluding that low doses of radiation had caused an increase in the number of cancers.
His dismissal eventually led to Congressional hearings.
"This disillusioned him to a certain degree,'' said his son, Thomas P. Mancuso. "He was very clear about being scientific.''
In 1992, 15 years after the Atomic Energy Commission acted against him, and after a lengthy struggle for access to the data, he wrote another study, again with Dr. Stewart and Mr. Kneale, on cancer among workers at Hanford. The study, of 35,000 workers and financed with money paid by the owner of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactors to settle a case after the accident there in 1979, concluded that small doses of radiation were far more dangerous than official estimates.
The study has not been accepted by health regulators. But the government's nuclear weapons manufacturing complex, now under the control of the Department of Energy, acknowledged in 2000 that exposure to radiation and hazardous materials had, in fact, made some people sick.
In a career of more than 50 years in industrial hygiene and then epidemiology, Dr. Mancuso investigated the health hazards of a variety of chemical compounds and metals in industrial use, including asbestos, chromium and beryllium.
Born in Brooklyn on Feb. 19, 1912, he was prompted to go into medicine while he was a boy when his older brother died of heart failure on a high school football field, his son said yesterday.
In addition to his son, Dr. Mancuso is survived by his wife of 61 years, Raffaella Spinelli Mancuso, also of Oakland; two daughters, Jo-Ellen Mancuso of Watertown, Mass., and Margaret Mancuso of Berkeley, Calif.; and a grandson.
-------- depleted uranium
Hoon could give evidence to Gulf war illness inquiry
James Meikle, health correspondent
Wednesday July 7, 2004
The Guardian
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1255648,00.html
Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, and John Reid, the health secretary, are considering whether their departments should give evidence to an independent inquiry into illnesses suffered by veterans of the first Gulf war.
Lord Lloyd of Berwick, who is heading the inquiry, has invited government representatives to hearings in London this month, and said it was "essential" that they appear.
The cabinet ministers will have to weigh up the political consequences of refusing to cooperate with an investigation that has been set up only because the government has refused repeated calls to hold a public inquiry. But their participation would raise fresh questions about why the government did not sanction an inquiry earlier.
Although it has not ruled out the possibility, the government has maintained that more research is needed into possible causes of illnesses suffered by veterans since the early 1990s.
Lord Lloyd insisted his inquiry would succeed even if they did not cooperate. "I hope very much that they will. As far as I can see, they have as much interest as anybody else in finding out what the facts actually are."
He said ministers might find that "this is a relatively inexpensive way ... of doing what many people think they ought to have done already. If that is so, there won't be a need for a further inquiry."
He said: "There is no hidden agenda. Our terms of reference are to investigate the circumstances that have led to the ill health, and in some cases death, of over 6,000 British troops following deployment to the Gulf...
"Nobody has yet suggested that there is a single underlying cause for all the illnesses, nor are all the illnesses identical. So although they are sometimes referred to collectively as 'the Gulf war syndrome', this may be an inaccurate or, at least, insufficient description.
"Nor is it suggested that whatever may have gone wrong in 1991, the government of the day did other than act with the best of intentions. Our purpose at this stage is to find the facts, not to attribute blame."
Many veterans blame the cocktail of vaccinations they were given before the 1991 conflict for a range of health problems, including muscle weakness, depression and neurological conditions.
But low-level exposure to chemical agents and the effects of depleted uranium and stress are among other explanations put forward for their illnesses.
The Ministry of Defence said: "We have not yet responded to Lord Lloyd. Until a ministerial decision has been made it would be inappropriate to speculate on what our position would be."
The Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, welcomed the "well overdue" inquiry and hoped it would "bring closure to an issue that has devastated the lives of so many families for well over a decade".
Lord Morris of Manchester, the Labour peer who was behind establishing the inquiry, said he was "delighted by the positive response to the inquiry at Westminster from people of all parties, and of none".
It is expected to cost between £50,000 and £100,000 and will be held on at least seven days over the next few weeks. Lord Lloyd hopes to produce a report by the end of next month, although that will depend on the complexity of the evidence.
Witnesses will include about 30 veterans, as well as science experts and possibly ministers and former ministers. Written evidence is also being invited.
The inquiry is being funded by an anonymous donor, said by Lord Lloyd to take "a great interest in the affairs of ex-service people" but "utterly non-political". Lord Lloyd will receive no remuneration or expenses, while Sir Michael Davies, the administrator, will receive "a modest honorarium" and expenses, "if any". The medical adviser, Norman Jones, will receive expenses.
----
Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War
by Leuren Moret
July 7, 2004
World Affairs
The Journal of International Issues, July 2004
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOR407A.html
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOR407A.html
Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself. William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
The use of depleted uranium weaponry by the United States, defying all international treaties, will slowly annihilate all species on earth including the human species, and yet this country continues to do so with full knowledge of its destructive potential.
Since 1991, the United States has staged four wars using depleted uranium weaponry, illegal under all international treaties, conventions and agreements, as well as under the US military law. The continued use of this illegal radioactive weaponry, which has already contaminated vast regions with low level radiation and will contaminate other parts of the world over time, is indeed a world affair and an international issue. The deeper purpose is revealed by comparing regions now contaminated with depleted uranium - from Egypt, the Middle East, Central Asia and the northern half of India - to the US geostrategic imperatives described in Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1997 book The Grand Chessboard.
SOUTH REGION: "This huge region, torn by volatile hatreds and surrounded by competing powerful neighbors, is likely to be a major battlefield, both for wars among nation-states and, more likely, for protracted ethnic and religious violence. Whether India acts as a restraint or whether it takes advantage of some opportunity to impose its will on Pakistan will greatly affect the regional scope of the likely conflicts. The internal strains within Turkey and Iran are likely not only to get worse but to greatly reduce the stabilizing role these states are capable of playing within this volcanic region. Such developments will in turn make it more difficult to assimilate the new Central Asian states into the international community, while also adversely affecting the American-dominated security of the Persian Gulf region. In any case, both America and the international community may be faced here with a challenge that will dwarf the recent crisis in the former Yugoslavia." Brzezinski
The fact is that the United States and its military partners have staged four nuclear wars, "slipping nukes under the wire" by using dirty bombs and dirty weapons in countries the US needs to control. Depleted uranium aerosols will permanently contaminate vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations living in those regions, where there are resources which the US must control, in order to establish and maintain American primacy.
Described as the Trojan Horse of nuclear war, depleted uranium is the weapon that keeps killing. The half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years, the age of the earth. And, as Uranium-238 decays into daughter radioactive products, in four steps before turning into lead, it continues to release more radiation at each step. There is no way to turn it off, and there is no way to clean it up. It meets the US Government's own definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
After forming microscopic and submicroscopic insoluble Uranium oxide particles on the battlefield, they remain suspended in air and travel around the earth as a radioactive component of atmospheric dust, contaminating the environment, indiscriminately killing, maiming and causing disease in all living things where rain, snow and moisture remove it from the atmosphere. Global radioactive contamination from atmospheric testing was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs, and still contaminates the atmosphere and lower orbital space today. The amount of low level radioactive pollution from depleted uranium released since 1991, is many times more (deposited internally in the body), than was released from atmospheric testing fallout.
A 2003 independent report for the European Parliament by the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), reports that based on Chernobyl studies, low level radiation risk is 100 to 1000 times greater than the International Committee for Radiation Protection models estimate which are based on the flawed Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Studies conducted by the US Government. Referring to the extreme killing effects of radiation on biological systems, Dr. Rosalie Bertell, one of the 46 international radiation expert authors of the ECRR report, describes it as:
"The concept of species annihilation means a relatively swift, deliberately induced end to history, culture, science, biological reproduction and memory. It is the ultimate human rejection of the gift of life, an act which requires a new word to describe it: omnicide."
1943 MANHATTAN PROJECT BLUEPRINT FOR DEPLETED URANIUM
In a declassified memo to General Leslie R. Groves, dated October 30, 1943, three of the top physicists in the Manhattan Project, Dr James B Conant, A H Compton, and H C Urey, made their recommendation, as members of the Subcommittee of the S-1 Executive Committee, on the 'Use of Radioactive Materials as a Military Weapon':
"As a gas warfare instrument the material would be ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke and distributed by a ground-fired projectile, land vehicles, or aerial bombs. In this form it would be inhaled by personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small ... There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty ... it will permeate a standard gas mask filter in quantities large enough to be extremely damaging."
As a Terrain Contaminant:
"To be used in this manner, the radioactive materials would be spread on the ground either from the air or from the ground if in enemy controlled territory. In order to deny terrain to either side except at the expense of exposing personnel to harmful radiations ... Areas so contaminated by radioactive material would be dangerous until the slow natural decay of the material took place ... for average terrain no decontaminating methods are known. No effective protective clothing for personnel seems possible of development. ... Reservoirs or wells would be contaminated or food poisoned with an effect similar to that resulting from inhalation of dust or smoke."
Internal Exposure:
"... Particles smaller than 1΅ [micron] are more likely to be deposited in the alveoli where they will either remain indefinitely or be absorbed into the lymphatics or blood. ... could get into the gastro-intestinal tract from polluted water, or food, or air. ... may be absorbed from the lungs or G-I tract into the blood and so distributed throughout the body."
Both the fission products and depleted uranium waste from the Atomic Bomb Project were to be utilised under this plan. The pyrophoric nature of depleted uranium, which causes it to begin to burn at very low temperatures from friction in the gun barrel, made it an ideal radioactive gas weapon then and now. Also it was more available because the amount of depleted uranium produced was much greater than the amount of fission products produced in 1943.
Britain had thoughts of using poisoned gas on Iraq long before 1991:
"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good... and it would spread a lively terror..." (Winston Churchill commenting on the British use of poison gas against the Iraqis after the First World War).
GUIDED WEAPONS SYSTEMS
Depleted uranium weapons were first given by the US to Israel for use under US supervision in the 1973 Sinai war against the Arabs. Since then the US has tested, manufactured, and sold depleted uranium weapons systems to 29 countries. An international taboo prevented their use until 1991, when the US broke the taboo and used them for the first time, on the battlefields of Iraq and Kuwait.
The US military admitted using depleted uranium projectiles in tanks and planes, but warheads in missiles and bombs are classified or referred to as a 'dense' or 'mystery metal'. Dai Williams, a researcher at the 2003 World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference, reported finding 11 US patents for guided weapons systems with the term 'depleted uranium' or 'dense metal', which from the density can only be depleted uranium or tungsten, in order to fit the dimensions of the warhead.
Figure 2 - Hard target guided weapons in 2002: smart bombs & cruise missiles with "dense metal" warheads (updated September 2002)
Warhead weight
Warhead weights include explosives (~20%) and casing. Dense metal ballast or liners (suspected to be DU) estimated to be 50-75% of warhead weight - necessary to double the density of previous versions. AUP = Advanced penetrators. S/CH = Shaped Charge. BR = BROACH Multiple Warhead System (S/CH+AUP). P = older 'heavy metal' penetrators. (c) Dai Williams 2002
source: Depleted Uranium weapons in 2001-2002 : Occupational, public and environmental health issues - Mystery Metal Nightmare in Afghanistan? Collected studies and public domain sources compiled by Dai Williams, first edition 31 January 2002
Extensive carpet bombing, grid bombing, and the frequent use of missiles and depleted uranium bullets on buildings in densely populated areas has occurred in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. The discovery that bomb craters in Yugoslavia in 1999 were radioactive, and that an unexploded missile in 1999 contained a depleted uranium warhead, implies that the total amount of depleted uranium used since 1991 has been greatly underestimated. Of even greater concern, is that 100 per cent of the depleted uranium in bombs and missiles is aerosolized upon impact and immediately released into the atmosphere. This amount can be as much as 1.5 tons in the large bombs. In bullets and cannon shells, the amount aerosolized is 40-70 per cent, leaving pieces and unexploded shells in the environment, to provide new sources of radioactive dust and contamination of the groundwater from dissolved depleted uranium metal long after the battles are over, as reported in a 2003 report by the UN Environmental Program on Yugoslavia. Considering that the US has admitted using 34 tons of depleted uranium from bullets and cannon shells in Yugoslavia, and the fact that 35,000 NATO bombing missions occurred there in 1999, potentially the amount of depleted uranium contaminating Yugoslavia and transboundary drift into surrounding countries is staggering.
Because of mysterious illnesses and post-war birth defects reported among Gulf War veterans and civilians in southern Iraq, and radiation related illnesses in UN Peacekeepers serving in Yugoslavia, growing concerns about radiation effects and environmental damage has stirred up international outrage about the use of radioactive weapons by the US after 1991. At the 2003 meeting of parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, discussing the U.S. desire to maintain its nuclear weapons stockpile, the Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi AKIBA stated,
"It is incumbent upon the rest of the world ... to stand up now and tell all of our military leaders that we refuse to be threatened or protected by nuclear weapons. We refuse to live in a world of continually recycled fear and hatred".
ILLEGAL UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW
Four reasons why using depleted uranium weapons violates the UN Convention on Human Rights:
LEGALITY TEST FOR WEAPONS UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW
TEMPORAL TEST - Weapons must not continue to act after the battle is over.
ENVIRONMENTAL TEST - Weapons must not be unduly harmful to the environment.
TERRITORIAL TEST - Weapons must not act off of the battlefield.
HUMANENESS TEST - Weapons must not kill or wound inhumanly.
International Human Rights and humanitarian lawyer, Karen Parker, determined that depleted uranium weaponry fails the four tests for legal weapons under international law, and that it is also illegal under the definition of a 'poison' weapon. Through Karen Parker's continued efforts, a sub-commission of the UN Human Rights Commission determined in 1996 that depleted uranium is a weapon of mass destruction that should not be used:
RESOLUTION 1996/16 ON STOPPING THE USE OF DEPLETED URANIUM - DU
The military use of DU violates current international humanitarian law, including the principle that there is no unlimited right to choose the means and methods of warfare (Art. 22 Hague Convention VI (HCIV); Art. 35 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva (GP1); the ban on causing unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury (Art. 23 §le HCIV; Art. 35 §2 GP1), indiscriminate warfare (Art. 51 §4c and 5b GP1) as well as the use of poison or poisoned weapons.
The deployment and use of DU violate the principles of international environmental and human rights protection. They contradict the right to life established by the Resolution 1996/16 of the UN Subcommittee on Human Rights.
FOUR NUCLEAR WARS
"Military Men Are Just Dumb, Stupid, Animals To Be Used As Pawns In Foreign Policy" - Henry Kissinger
Although restricted to battlefields in Iraq and Kuwait, the 1991 Gulf War was one of the most toxic and environmentally devastating wars in world history. Oil well fires, the bombing of oil tankers and oil wells which released millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Arabia and desert, and the devastation from tanks and heavy equipment destroyed the desert ecosystem. The long term and far reaching effects, and dispersal of at least 340 tons of depleted uranium weapons, had a global environmental effect. Smoke from the oil fires was later found in deposits in South America, the Himalayas and Hawaii. Large annual dust storms originating in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia will quickly spread the radioactive contamination around the world, and weathering of old depleted uranium munitions on battlefields and other areas will provide new sources of radioactive contamination in future years. Downwind from the radioactive devastation in Iraq, Israel is also suffering from large increases in breast cancer, leukemia and childhood diabetes.
RADIATION RESPECTS NO BORDERS, NO SOCIOECONOMIC CLASS, AND NO RELIGION
The expendability of the sanctity of life to achieve US political ends was described by US soldiers on the ground, and from the air, along the Highway of Death in Iraq in 1991:
"Iraqi soldiers [whether they] be young boys or old men. They were a sad sight, with absolutely no fight left in them. Their leaders had cut their Achilles' tendons so they couldn't run away and then left them. What weapons they had were in bad repair and little ammunition was on hand. They were hungry, cold, and scared. The hate I had for any Iraqi dissipated. These people had no business being on a battlefield." (S Hersh, New Yorker , May 22, 2000)
American pilots bombing and strafing, with depleted uranium weapons, helpless retreating Iraqi soldiers who had already surrendered, exclaimed:
"We toasted him.... we hit the jackpot....a turkey shoot....shooting fish in a barrel....basically just sitting ducks... There's just nothing like it. It's the biggest Fourth of July show you've ever seen, and to see those tanks just 'boom', and more stuff just keeps spewing out of them... they just become white hot. It's wonderful." (L A Times and Washington Post, both February 27, 1991)
Nearly 700,000 American Gulf War Veterans returned to the US from a war that lasted just a few weeks. Today more than 240,000 of those soldiers are on permanent medical disability, and over 11,000 are dead. In a US Government study on post-Gulf War babies born to 251 veterans, 67 per cent of the babies were reported to have serious illnesses or serious birth defects. They were born without eyes, ears, had missing organs, fused fingers, thyroid or other malfunctions. Depleted uranium in the semen of the soldiers internally contaminated their wives. Severe birth defects have been reported in babies born to contaminated civilians in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and the incidence and severity of defects is increasing over time. Women in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq are afraid now to have babies, and when they do give birth, instead of asking if it is a girl or a boy, they ask 'is it normal?'.
KNOWN ILLNESSES INFLICTED BY INTERNALIZATION OF DEPLETED URANIUM PARTICLES
Table 1: Compiled by Leuren Moret from Interviews with Gulf War Vets and their families
GENERAL
abnormal births and birth defects
abnormal metabolism of semen: contains
amine & ammonium alkaline
acute autoimmune symptoms (lung-, liver-, kidney failure)
acute myeloid leukemia (deadly within days or weeks)
acute immune depression
acute respiratory failure
asthma
auto-immune deficiencies
Balkan-syndrome
blood in stools and urine
body function control loss
bone cancer
brain damage
brain tumors
burning semen
burning sensations
calcium loss in body
cardiovascular signs or symptoms
chemical sensitivities
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
chronic kidney and liver disorders
chronic myeloid leukemia
chronic respiratory infections
colon cancer
confusion
diarrhea
digestive problems
dizziness
Epstein Barr Syndrome
fluid buildup
fibromyalgia
gastrointestinal signs/symptoms
general fatigue
genetic alterations
glandular carcinoma
Gulf war-syndrome
headaches (severe)
heart attack/disease
high blood pressure
high frequency of micturition
Hodgkin lymphoma
immune system deficiency
infections
insomnia
involuntary movements
joint/muscle/leg pain
kidney failure/damage
leukemia
liver carcinoma
loss of feeling in fingers
Lou Gehrigs Disease -ALS
low blood oxygen saturation ( low HbO2)
low lung volume
lung damage
lung cancer
lymph cancer
lymphoma
melanoma
memory loss
metallic taste
Microplasma fermentans/ incognitis infections
mood swings - violence
homicide/suicide
multiple cancers
multiple myeloma
myeloma
muscle pain
nerve damage
neuro-muscular degenerative disease
non-Hodgkin lymphoma
other malignancies
pancreas carcinoma
Parkinsons disease
petit & grand mal fits
rashes
reactive airway disease
reduced IQ
respiratory ailments
shortness of breath
sinus diseases
skin cancer
skin damage: sweat glands with trapped du-particles
skin infections
skin spotting
smell, loss of
sleep disturbances
stiffening of fingers
teeth crumbling
thyroid cancer
thyroid disease
unable to walk
unusual fevers/night sweats
unusual hair loss
vision problems
weight loss
CHILDREN
alimentary disorders
asthma
bladder & sphincter paralysis
blindness
complete range of known and unknown Congenital Defects
deafness
dyspraxia
headache
kidney disease
leukemia
lymphoma
malformations of legs, arms,
toes & fingers
respiratory disorders
stillbirth
neural tube defects
FEMALE
abdominal pain
breast cancer
breast cancer at very young age (20)
cervix cancer
endometriosis
headaches
incontinence
joint pain
lung cancer at age 20 and non-smoker
menstrual problems
miscarriages
nausea
ovarian cancer
paralysis of digestive system
thyroid problems
uterine cancer
MALE
(acute) headache
acute myeloid leukemia
arthritis
avoiding people
breathing problems (stridor)
chemical sensitivity
chronic myeloid leukemia
endometriosis in partners
gastrointestinal disorder
hip and leg pain
joint pain
lung cancer at young age
lymphoma
skin cancer
skin eruptions
stomach pain
suicide
testicular cancer
unable to walk
VISIE: http://www.xs4all.nl/~stgvisie/VISIE/du-diagnosis.html
DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORM website: http://www.ushostnet.com/gulfwar/articles.htm 04/1504
Soldiers who served in Bradley fighting vehicles, where it was common to sit on ammunition boxes where depleted uranium ammunition was stored, are now reporting that many have rectal cancer.
For the first time, medical doctors in Yugoslavia and Iraq have reported multiple in situ unrelated cancers developing in patients, and even in families who are living in highly contaminated areas. Even stranger, they report that cancer was unknown in previous generations. Very rare and unusual cancers and birth defects have also been reported to be increasing above normal levels prior to 1991, not only in war torn countries, but in neighbouring countries from transboundary contamination.
Dr. Keith Baverstock, a senior radiation advisor who was on the staff of the World Health Organization, co-authored a report in November 2001, warning that the long-term health effects of depleted uranium would endanger Iraq's civilian population, and that the dry climate would increase exposure from the tiny particles blowing around and be inhaled for years to come. The WHO refused to give him permission to publish the study, bowing to pressure from the IAEA. Dr. Baverstock released the damning report to the media in February 2004. Pekka Haavisto, Chairman of the UN Environment Program's Post-Conflict Assessment Unit in Geneva, shares Baverstock's anxiety about depleted uranium but UNEP experts have not been allowed into Iraq to assess the pollution.
"DEPLETED URANIUM SCARE" - Claimed by President George W. Bush on the official White House website:
"During the Gulf War, coalition forces used armor-piercing ammunition made from depleted uranium, which is ideal for the purpose because of its great density. In recent years, the Iraqi regime has made substantial efforts to promote the false claim that the depleted uranium rounds fired by coalition forces have caused cancers and birth defects in Iraq. Iraq has distributed horrifying pictures of children with birth defects and linked them to depleted uranium. The campaign has two major propaganda assets:"
"Uranium is a name that has frightening associations in the mind of the average person, which makes the lie relatively easy to sell; and Iraq could take advantage of an established international network of antinuclear activists who had already launched their own campaign against depleted uranium."
"But scientists working for the World Health Organization, the UN Environmental Programme, and the European Union could find no health effects linked to exposure to depleted uranium."
The US war in Afghanistan made it clear that this was not a war IN the third world, but a war AGAINST the third world. In Afghanistan where 800 to 1000 tons of depleted uranium was estimated to have been used in 2001, even uneducated Afghanis understand the impact these weapons have had on their children and on future generations:
"After the Americans destroyed our village and killed many of us, we also lost our houses and have nothing to eat. However, we would have endured these miseries and even accepted them, if the Americans had not sentenced us all to death. When I saw my deformed grandson, I realized that my hopes of the future have vanished for good, different from the hopelessness of the Russian barbarism, even though at that time I lost my older son Shafiqullah. This time, however, I know we are part of the invisible genocide brought on us by America, a silent death from which I know we will not escape." (Jooma Khan of Laghman province, March 2003)
In 1990, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) wrote a report warning about the potential health and environmental catastrophe from the use of depleted uranium weapons. The health effects had been known for a long time. The report sent to the UK government warned "in their estimation, if 50 tonnes of residual DU dust remained 'in the region' there could be half a million extra cancers by the end of the century [2000]." Estimates of depleted uranium weapons used in 1991, now range from the Pentagon's admitted 325 tons, to other scientific bodies who put the figure as high as 900 tons. That would make the number of estimated cancers as high as 9,000,000, depending on the amount used in the 1991 Gulf War. In the 2003 Gulf War, estimates of 2200 tons have been given - causing about 22,000,000 new cancer cases. Altogether the total number of cancer patients estimated using the UKAEA data would be 25,250,000. In July of 1998, the CIA estimated the population of Iraq to be approximately 24,683,313.
Ironically, the UN Resolution 661 calling for sanctions against Iraq, was signed on Hiroshima Day, August 6, 1990.
THE PARALLELS
War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods. - Ludwig von Mises
The parallels between Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan are startlingly similar. The weapons used, the unfair treaties offered by the US, and the bombing and destruction of the environment and entire infrastructure. In every city of Iraq and Yugoslavia, the television and radio stations were bombed.
Educational centres were targeted, and stores where educational materials were sold were destroyed on nearly the same day. Under UN sanctions, Iraq was not even allowed pencils for schoolchildren. Cultural antiquities and historical treasures were targeted and destroyed in all three countries, a kind of cultural and historical cleansing, a collective national psychic trauma.
The permanent radioactive contamination and environmental devastation of all three countries is unprecedented, resulting in huge increases in cancer and birth defects following the attacks. These will increase over time from unknown effects due to chronic exposure, increasing internal levels of radiation from depleted uranium dust, and permanent genetic effects passed on to future generations. Clearly, this has been a genocidal plan from the start.
Fig. 3: Map of regions within a 1000 mile radius of Baghdad and Afghanistan which have been contaminated with depleted uranium since 1991. Depleted uranium dust will be repeatedly recycled throughout this dry region, and also carried around the world. More than ten times the amount of radiation, released during atmospheric testing, has been released from depleted uranium weaponry since 1991. In 2002 the US government admitted that every person living in the US between 1957 and 1963 was internally contaminated with radiation. Note that the contaminated region corresponds with the "South" region on the Eurasian chessboard in Fig. 1.
What has happened to Human Rights, to the Rights of the Child, to civil society, and to common humanity?
It is up to the citizens of the world to stop the depleted uranium wars, and future nuclear wars, causing irreversible devastation. There are just a few generations left before the collapse of our environment, and then it will be too late. We can be no healthier than the health of the environment - we breathe the same air, drink the same water, eat food from the same soil.
"Our collective gene pool of life, evolving for hundreds of millions of years has been seriously damaged in less than the past fifty. The time remaining to reverse this culture of 'lemming death' is on the wane. In the future, what will you tell our grandchildren about what you did in the prime of your life to turn around this death process?" (Rosalie Bertell, 1982)
THE DEEPER PURPOSE: G
"It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas." (US President George W. Bush, Beaverton, Oregon, Sep. 25, 2000).
"If they turn on the radars we're going to blow up their goddamn SAMs (surface-to-air missiles). They know we own their country. We own their airspace... We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need."
(US Brig. General William Looney in 1999, referring to Iraq).
Millions of years ago, before India crashed into the Eurasian continent and uplifted the Himalayas, the ancient shallow Tethys sea stretched from the Atlantic across what is now the Mediterranean, Black, Caspian and Aral seas. Rich oil deposits are now located where ancient life accumulated and 'cooked' under just the right conditions to form large oil deposits in the ancient sediments. Long before 1991, Unocal in Afghanistan, Amoco in Yugoslavia, and various oil companies interested in Iraq oil deposits, had conducted extensive exploration and characterisation of oil deposits in the Middle East and Central Asian regions, including the northern half of India.
Britain has maintained an interest in Middle Eastern oil deposits for a century, and has been the staunchest military partner of the US since the first depleted uranium war in 1991 in Iraq. Germany, another military partner in Yugoslavia with forces now in Afghanistan, was one of the major economic beneficiaries of the breakup of Yugoslavia and the colonisation of the Balkans. US interest in Yugoslavia had much to do with building pipelines from Central Asia to the Mediterranean warm water ports in Yugoslavia. A silent and hidden partnership between the US and Japan provided large amounts of cash from Japan to finance the 1991 Iraq and 1995/1999 Yugoslavian wars, with additional help in Afghanistan by providing not only cash, but fuel for the war, from Aegis warships of the Japanese Self Defense Forces in the Indian Ocean. Nippon Steel, Mitsubishi, and Halliburton are now partners in a Central Asian oil pipeline project. In 2004, despite much citizen opposition in Japan, the Japanese government has sent Self Defense Forces to Iraq for 'reconstruction'. This action taken by the Japanese government, of placing troops on the ground in a war zone, will lead to rescinding Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which forever prohibits military aggression by Japan.
THE IRON TRIANGLE (all under one roof): MILITARY, BIG BUSINESS, POLITICS
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
But what do oil, military partners, depleted uranium wars, and US foreign policy have to do with nuclear weapons? The answer came to me in 1991 when I became a whistleblower at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory near San Francisco, California. Richard Berta, the Western Regional Inspector for the Department of Energy, told me "The Pentagon exists for the oil companies... and the nuclear weapons labs exist for the Pentagon."
Depleted uranium was used beginning in 1991 for three reasons:
- To test the radiobiological effects of 4th generation nuclear weapons, which are still under development
- To blur and break down the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons
- To make it easier to reintroduce nuclear weapons into the US military arsenal
Today, the US is number one in 4th generation nuclear weapons research and development, followed by Japan and Germany tied for number two, and Russia and other countries follow.
The Carlyle Group, a private massive equity firm, the 12th largest defense business with an obscenely high profit margin, is a business "arrangement" between the Bush and Bin Laden families, wealthy Saudis, former British Prime Minister John Major, James Baker III, Afsaneh Masheyekhi, Frank Carlucci, Colin Powell, other former US Government administrators, and Madeleine Albright's daughter. The Carlyle Group is the 'gatekeeper' to the Saudi investment community. It owns 70 percent of Lockheed Martin Marietta, the largest military contractor in the US, and because Carlyle is privately owned, has no scrutiny or accountability whatsoever. A journalist who calls himself 'a skunk at the garden party' described investigating the Carlyle Group, he said 'it's like shadow boxing with a ghost'. The Group hires as lobbyists the best known politicians from around the world, in order to influence the politics of war, and privately profit from their previous public policies. The conflict of interest is obvious: President George W. Bush is creating wars as his father, former President George Bush, is globally peddling weapons and "protection". Lockheed Martin Marietta now owns Sandia Laboratories, a private contractor that makes the trigger for nuclear weapons, with a Sandia laboratory facility across the street from Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories, where the nuclear bombs are made.
At the May 2003 University of California Regents meeting which I attended, Admiral Linton Brooks was present and newly in charge of the nuclear weapons programme under the Department of Energy. Admiral Brooks informed California Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante and the UC Regents that the management contract for the nuclear weapons laboratories, held unchallenged by the University of California for over 60 years, will be put up for competitive bid in 2005. The favoured institution, with a faculty member on the 'blue ribbon committee' making the contract award, is the University of Texas. This privatisation and management contract transfer of the US nuclear weapons programme will put control of the US nuclear weapons programme close to the Carlyle Group. The incestuous relationship between the US government, private companies, and the Bush and Bin Laden families in a way answers many of the lingering questions in everyone's minds about many of the ill fated decisions and policies that have been implemented.
Leuren Moret has worked at two US nuclear weapons laboratories as a geoscientist. In 1991 she became a whistleblower at the Livermore nuclear weapons lab, and since then has worked as an independent citizen scientist and radiation specialist in communities around the world, and contributed to the UN subcommission investigating depleted uranium. Her research on the environmental and public health effects of low level radiation from atmospheric testing fallout, nuclear power plants, and depleted uranium weaponry, is available on the internet and at http://www.mindfully.org . In 2003, she testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan held in Japan, and presented at the World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg, Germany, and at the World Court of Women at the World Social Forum in Bombay, India in January 2004. She is a Global Research Contributing Editor, a City of Berkeley Environmental Commissioner, and the Past President of the Association for Women Geoscientists.
More on Mindfully.org by Leuren Moret
Websites:
- International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan written opinion of Judge N. Bhagwat : also at http://www.traprockpeace.org/tokyo_trial_13march04.doc
- Question 11: What does the US Government know about depleted uranium: http://traprockpeace.org/moret_25nov03.pdf
- World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference: http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de
- Radiation and Public Health Project: http://www.radiation.org
- "A comparison of delayed radiobiological effects of depleted-uranium munitions versus fourth-generation nuclear weapons" by A. Gsponer, J.-P. Hurni, and B. Vitale, 4th International Conference of the Yugoslav Nuclear Society, Belgrade, September 30-October 4, 2002. http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0210071
- "Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons: The Physical Principles Of Thermonuclear Explosives, Inertial Confinement Fusion, And The Quest For Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons" by Andre Gsponer and Jean-Pierre Hurni http://www.inesap.org/publ_tech01.htm
- 54 minute VPRO Dutch TV "Carlyle Group" documentary on internet: http://www.vpro.nl/info/tegenlicht/index.shtml?7738514+7738518+7738520+11838857
For media inquiries: editor@globalresearch.ca
-------- iran
Israel Tells UN's ElBaradei Iran Wants Atomic Bomb
July 7, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-israel.html
TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Israel told the U.N. nuclear watchdog on Wednesday that Iran's atomic program is a front for developing nuclear weapons that could one day be used against the Jewish state, prompting angry reactions from Syria and Iran.
``They (the Israelis) were expressing concern about Iran,'' Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters after meeting Israel's nuclear energy commission director, other officials and a former head of the Mossad secret service.
ElBaradei, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency, is on a three-day visit to Israel, which refuses to admit or deny having nuclear weapons under a policy of ``strategic ambiguity.''
International experts believe it has 100-200 warheads, based on estimates of the quantity of plutonium that has been produced at its Dimona desert reactor.
ElBaradei said his attempts to promote the idea of a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East ran up against Israeli concern about Iran's nuclear ambitions and about the hostility to Israel of some states in the region.
``The majority of the countries in the Middle East feel that there is this security imbalance in the Middle East, this double standard,'' ElBaradei said of the assumption that Israel has atomic weapons and other Middle East states do not.
``Here the Israelis are saying you cannot even discuss that because we cannot lower our security threshold before we have a comprehensive peace where we are fully accepted as part and parcel of the region,'' he said.
Iran, which -- unlike Israel -- has signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), says it wants nuclear technology solely for the peaceful generation of electricity.
But Washington and Israel accuse Tehran of concealing research that could be related to nuclear arms for nearly two decades until last year. ElBaradei has said ``the jury is still out'' on whether Iran is seeking the bomb.
``NUCLEAR SECRETS''
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said the Israelis were pointing the finger at Iran in an attempt to avoid censure for Israel's nuclear weapons program.
``The Zionist regime's claims about Iran's nuclear program are aimed at veiling its own nuclear activity and avoiding revealing its nuclear secrets to the IAEA,'' state television quoted him as saying.
Syrian state radio said in a commentary that ElBaradei's visit was a reminder that Israel ``is ignoring all international efforts to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, at the head of which are nuclear weapons.''
IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky told reporters ElBaradei could act as a kind of ``go-between'' between Israel and its neighbors so that they could work out their differences and come to a security arrangement that did not include nuclear weapons.
Asked if the Israelis agreed with ElBaradei's view that the Israel must begin talks on disarming itself as a parallel process to Middle East peace negotiations, Gwozdecky said:
``They're certainly listening. We need to talk with the prime minister.''
ElBaradei will meet Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom on Thursday and analysts said Iran was likely to come up again in those talks.
-------- iraq
U.S. hauls nuclear material out of Iraq
July 07, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040706-034512-7190r.htm
Washington, DC, Jul. 6 -- Nearly two metric tons of radioactive materials have been removed from Iraq to prevent them from falling into the hands of terrorists or rogue nations.
The Energy Department said Tuesday the materials were brought to the United States in late June and included low-enriched uranium and other materials from Iraq's former nuclear research center.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said the transfer was made to prevent the material from spirited out of now-autonomous Iraq to other nations developing nuclear weapons, or from falling into the hands of terrorists.
Materials with low radiation levels that can be used for peaceful purposes in a hospital, industrial or agricultural setting, were not taken.
----
U.S. Quietly Sneaks Once - Looted Uranium Out of Iraq
July 7, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-nuclear-un.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Washington has spirited 1.8 tons of enriched uranium out of Iraq for safekeeping, more than a year after looters stole it from a U.N.-sealed facility left unguarded by U.S. troops, U.S. and U.N. officials said on Wednesday.
The slightly enriched uranium, which could be used in a dirty bomb, was airlifted to an undisclosed U.S. site after its removal from the Tuwaitha nuclear complex south of Baghdad, a one-time center of Iraq's nuclear weapons development program.
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham called the shipment to a secure Department of Energy facility ``a major achievement for the Bush administration's goal to keep potentially dangerous nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists.''
``It also puts this material out of reach for countries that may seek to develop their own nuclear weapons,'' Abraham said in a printed statement making no reference to the looting.
Washington suspects Iraq's neighbors Iran and Syria of harboring ambitions to develop nuclear arms.
The Tuwaitha nuclear complex was dismantled in the early 1990s after the first Gulf War. But tonnes of nuclear materials remained there, under the seal of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, until the second Gulf War, when it was left unguarded by the U.S.-led invading forces and looted by Iraqi civilians.
In June 2003, after repeated IAEA warnings that the looted materials could be used to make weapons, an embarrassed United States allowed an IAEA team to return to the site to try to gather them up.
Alarms had been raised as villagers near Tuwaitha, especially children, showed symptoms of radiation sickness.
Much of the material, the IAEA experts found, had been dumped on the ground by residents more interested in the containers than the materials themselves.
MOST ACCOUNTED FOR
The IAEA team managed to account for all but some 90 pounds (40 kg) of the 1.8 tonnes of uranium, which had been enriched to 2.6 percent uranium-235. That level of enrichment makes the material suitable for use in a dirty bomb or -- with further enrichment -- a nuclear weapon.
A dirty bomb is a device that uses a conventional explosive to disperse radioactive material over a wide area.
The team wrote off the remaining missing material as so small an amount as to pose no security threat.
The Energy Department said it seized the materials ``consistent with its authorities and relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions,'' and removed them from Iraq ``to ensure the safety and security of the Iraqi people.''
But IAEA officials said the United States lacked the legal authority to seize the materials.
``Now that the Americans have taken it, the IAEA has no access to it and no right to account for it or inspect it,'' said one agency official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
While the IAEA was given advance notice in June 2003 of Washington's intention to sneak the materials out of Iraq, it was asked to keep quiet due to security concerns.
The agency next learned, a week ago, that the transfer had taken place on June 23, 2004, the IAEA said in a letter to the U.N. Security Council made public on Wednesday.
The United States also removed from Iraq nearly 7 lbs (3 kg) of other stores of uranium ``of various low enrichments'' and some 1,000 ``highly radioactive sources'' used in medicine and industrial processes, the Energy Department said.
Iraqi officials were briefed and ``radiological sources that continue to serve useful medical, agricultural or industrial purposes were not removed from Iraq,'' the department said.
----
U.S. Removed Radioactive Materials From Iraq Facility
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 7, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32195-2004Jul6.html
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced yesterday that almost two tons of low-enriched uranium and about 1,000 radioactive samples used for research had been removed from Iraq's Tuwaitha Nuclear Center and brought to the United States for security reasons.
The airlift of the radioactive materials was completed June 23, Abraham said in a statement, "to keep potentially dangerous nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists." Less sensitive radiological materials -- used for medical, agricultural or industrial purposes -- were left in Iraq, according to a Department of Energy statement.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, which in the prewar period had kept the Tuwaitha uranium under seal, was told in advance of the U.S. removal, as were Iraqi officials.
Tuwaitha was once the center of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons effort, but its equipment was dismantled at the direction of U.N. inspectors in the early 1990s as part of the agreement following Iraq's surrender in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The U.N. inspectors removed highly enriched uranium that could be used for weapons and shipped it for storage in Russia. The low-enriched uranium was placed under seal in storage at Tuwaitha but under the control of the IAEA.
Before the U.S.-led coalition's invasion of Iraq, as the Bush administration alleged that Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear program, Tuwaitha was a target for U.S. intelligence.
In April 2003, just days after the statue of Hussein in Baghdad was pulled down, a U.S. Marine engineering company took a close look at Tuwaitha, which is 30 miles south of Baghdad. There they found guards had abandoned their posts and looters were roaming the giant facility. At one storage building, which later was found to hold radioactive samples used in research, the radiation levels were too high to enter safely, although the entrance door stood wide open.
A month later, the Pentagon rejected suggestions that U.N. inspectors be allowed to reenter Iraq but agreed the IAEA experts could return to secure the uranium that had been under its seal for years.
----
ATOMIC INSPECTION
Radioactive Material Seized From a Nuclear Plant in Iraq
July 7, 2004
New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/07/politics/07NUKE.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, July 6 - American officials have seized about 1,000 sources of radioactivity and nearly two tons of low-enriched uranium from an Iraqi nuclear center, and shipped the material to an undisclosed location in this country, the Energy Department announced Tuesday.
None of the materials were usable in a nuclear bomb, but the uranium could have been further enriched to make it useful in a weapon, said Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the Energy Department.
He also said the radioactive sources could have been mixed with conventional explosives to make a "dirty bomb."
The Defense Department airlifted the material to the United States on June 23, the announcement said.
The material came from Tuwaitha, an important location in Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons development program until it was largely shut down after the Persian Gulf war of 1991. The site was looted by villagers soon after the American invasion of Iraq last year.
Tuwaitha reportedly has hundreds of tons of uranium. The Energy Department said Tuesday that it had "repackaged" some materials at the site that were "less sensitive," and left them there.
The radioactive sources included "a huge range of all types," including isotopes of the elements cobalt, cesium and strontium, Mr. Wilkes said. Such sources are commonly used to provide radiation for cancer treatments, or for industrial X-rays, he said. They can also be used to sterilize medical equipment or kill bacteria in food.
The department did not give any details, but such sources can be quite small and, before dispersal, can give off large amounts of radiation. The sources were consolidated at Tuwaitha from around Iraq by the Defense Department and the Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology, according to the Energy Department.
Some of the sources were in powdered form, which would make them easy to use in a dirty bomb, Mr. Wilkes said.
A dirty bomb or, more formally, a radiological dispersion device, is not likely to give off lethal doses of radiation, according to experts, but could contaminate valuable real estate with low levels of contamination in a way that would require an expensive cleanup or simply make an area unusable.
The Energy Department said that it had left behind radiological sources "that continue to serve useful medical, agricultural or industrial purposes," and that the action had been taken "to ensure the safety and security of the Iraqi people."
----
Iraqi 'dirty bomb' risk dismissed
Troops have not unearthed any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
Wednesday, 7 July, 2004,
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3874315.stm
The UN's atomic watchdog says it is confident there is not enough radioactive material missing in Iraq to make a nuclear "dirty bomb".
Vilmos Cserveny, a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said: "We don't have concerns about any missing uranium" in Iraq.
Earlier, the US revealed that it had secretly removed more than 1.7 metric tons of radioactive material from Iraq.
Some nuclear material remains in Iraq under IAEA control, Mr Cserveny said.
"The remaining sources are not suitable for malevolent purposes," he told BBC News Online.
US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said on Tuesday that the US had removed 1.77 tons of enriched uranium and about 1,000 "highly radioactive sources" from Iraq's former nuclear research facility at al-Tuwaitha on 23 June.
The IAEA and Iraqi officials were informed ahead of the operation, which happened before the 28 June handover of sovereignty.
'Dirty bomb' fears
The threat of a terrorist "dirty bomb" explosion in a city is a major concern of Western intelligence agencies, correspondents say.
Al-Tuwaitha was Iraq's biggest nuclear complex Rather than causing a nuclear explosion, a "dirty bomb" would see radioactive material combined with a conventional explosive - probably causing widespread panic and requiring a large clean-up operation.
In June last year, the IAEA said it had accounted for most of the uranium feared stolen from the al-Tuwaitha site, south-east of Baghdad.
A statement from the US energy department (DOE) on Tuesday said 20 of its laboratory experts had repackaged "less sensitive" nuclear materials that would remain in Iraq.
Such materials could be used for medical, agricultural or industrial purposes, it said.
Al-Tuwaitha - dismantled in the early 1990s under UN ceasefire resolutions - played a key role in Iraq's drive to build nuclear weapons prior to the 1991 Gulf war.
The 1,000 "sources" evacuated in the Iraqi operation included a "huge range" of radioactive items used for medical and industrial purposes, a spokesman for the US National Nuclear Security Administration told AP news agency.
Bryan Wilkes said much of the material was "in powdered form, which is easily dispersed".
It was flown out of the country aboard a military plane in a joint operation with the Department of Defense, and is being stored temporarily at a DOE facility.
-------- israel
Israel Tries to Shift Focus During U.N. Visit
July 7, 2004
New York Times
By GREG MYRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/07/international/middleeast/07CND-MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, July 7 - The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, came to Israel looking to open a dialogue on making the Middle East nuclear-free zone. But Israel, the only country in the region believed to have nuclear weapons, sought to put the focus on Iran's nuclear program during talks today.
"They're expressing concern about Iran," Mr. ElBaradei told reporters after talks in Tel Aviv with senior officials in Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, including the chairman, Gideon Frank.
Israeli security officials often refer to Iran's nuclear program as potentially the most serious threat facing Israel, though Iran asserts that its program is intended solely for power generation, and not for nuclear weapons.
Under its policy of "strategic ambiguity," Israel has always refused to say whether it does or does not have nuclear weapons, and government officials have made clear that Mr. ElBaradei's visit will not bring about any change in that policy.
Mr. ElBaradei, in turn, said he did not have the authority to pressure Israel on this issue, though he would like to see nuclear issues discussed more openly in the Middle East, with the aim of creating a region free of weapons of mass destruction.
"I obviously don't have a magic wand," Mr. ElBaradei said. "But I think we need the security dialogue, and the sooner we start this the better."
A spokesman for Israel's secretive Atomic Energy Commission declined to comment on today's talks.
Israel established its nuclear program in the early 1950's and various estimates have said that Israel has produced enough plutonium to make up to 200 nuclear weapons.
Israel's critics argue that the country has been able to maintain its atomic program for a half-century, with the tacit backing of the United States, while other countries in the region have faced tremendous international pressure to abandon any nuclear aspirations.
In Tehran, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hamid Reza Asefi, said Israel was trying to deflect attention from its nuclear program.
"The Zionist regime's claims about Iran's nuclear program are aimed at veiling its own nuclear activity and avoiding revealing its nuclear secrets to the I.A.E.A.," he said on Iranian state television, in a dispatch by Reuters.
Dan Schueftan, a security expert at the Shalem Center, an Israeli research institute, said Israel was feeling "zero pressure" at present to change its nuclear policies.
"Should Israel be polite to ElBaradei? Certainly. Should Israel use positive language? Yes. Does Israel have any motivation to change it position? Absolutely not," Mr. Schueftan said. "And ElBaradei understands this."
"From the Israeli point of view, the only thing that would matter would be American pressure," he added.
Last month, Mr. ElBaradei and his agency rebuked Iran for its lack of cooperation with inspectors from the United Nations agency.
"Iran's cooperation has not been as full, timely and proactive as it should have been," the agency resolution said. Mr. ElBaradei called on Iran to clear up lingering questions within "the next few months."
However, Israeli officials believe that Iran is committed to seeking nuclear weapons, and they assert that this potential threat requires an Israel deterrent.
Israel's military intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, told Israeli television that he believed that Iran could develop a nuclear bomb by 2008 unless its program were stopped by the international community.
Israeli officials note that Iran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires the country to open its nuclear facilities to international inspectors.
Israel has always refused to sign the treaty, and has never permitted outside inspections of its nuclear reactor near the southern desert town of Dimona. Mr. ElBaradei said upon his arrival Tuesday that he would like Israel to sign the treaty.
Mr. ElBaradei, who has previously visited Israel, wraps up his visit on Thursday. He is to meet Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and deliver a speech at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
In another development today, the international sponsors of a Mideast peace plan, known collectively as the Quartet, met the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, and urged the Palestinians to introduce reforms of the security services.
"The envoys stressed that the Palestinian Authority must make progress on its security-related obligations," the Quartet said in a statement, which referred to the road map, the peace plan that was introduced last summer but that quickly stalled.
The Quartet, which consists of the United States, the United Nations, Russia and the European Union, said Israel's proposal to withdraw soldiers and Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip offered a possibility of reviving the road map.
Israeli officials said the government had no plans to meet with the Quartet at present. However, Christina Gallach, a spokeswoman for the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said Israel had canceled a scheduled meeting, The Associated Press reported.
In the West Bank city of Nablus, the Israeli military said soldiers shot dead an armed Palestinian who belonged to Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades.
----
Israel's Vanunu critical of ElBaradei
UPI
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story.asp?StoryId=CqoT1qeidAxnYywvSlw51A2vZ
JERUSALEM, July 7 (UPI) -- Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu says the International Atomic Energy Agency is failing to adequately investigate Israel's nuclear program.
Vanunu made the remarks to the Washington Times as IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei arrived for a rare visit to Israel. The former nuclear technician complained ElBaradei made no effort to get in touch with him even though the media has widely reported his whereabouts in East Jerusalem.
Vanunu served 17 years in an Israeli prison for revealing details of the country's nuclear secrets and is under court order not to speak to foreigners, enter Internet chat rooms or approach foreign embassies.
Vanunu urged the chief of the U.N. nuclear watchdog to demand entrance to the Dimona reactor, where he had worked and secretly photographed several underground and secret floors, including a plutonium-processing facility and what scientists later said was a model for a nuclear bomb.
"I think ElBaradei is operating in secret with (the Israelis)," Vanunu told the newspaper. "All he'll hear ... will be propaganda and disinformation."
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Israeli nuclear foe still fighting
July 07, 2004
By Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://washingtontimes.com/world/20040706-115347-8674r.htm
JERUSALEM - Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu demanded last night that he be allowed to brief the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, who was making a rare visit to the Jewish state.
Mr. Vanunu, the technician who served 17 years in an Israeli prison for revealing details of the country's nuclear secrets, also told The Washington Times that Mr. ElBaradei is failing to adequately investigate and criticize Israel's nuclear program.
It was the first time Mr. Vanunu has spoken to an American news organization since he left prison. Under the terms of his release, he is barred from speaking to foreigners, entering Internet chat rooms or approaching foreign embassies.
Last month, he made remarks to the British Broadcasting Corp., causing a journalist to be arrested by police and barred from returning to Israel.
Nevertheless, Mr. Vanunu chose the occasion of Mr. ElBaradei's visit to make a dramatic and, in hisown view, "very risky" entry into the discussion.
A representative of an international news agency was also present for a short period during The Times' encounter with Mr. Vanunu, which lasted several hours.
The former technician complained that Mr. ElBaradei had made no effort to get in touch with him, even though the media has widely reported his whereabouts in East Jerusalem.
Mr. Vanunu urged the chief of the U.N. nuclear watchdog to demand entrance to the Dimona reactor, where he had worked and secretly photographed several underground and top-secret floors, including a plutonium-processing facility and what scientists later said was a model for a nuclear bomb.
He shared these secrets with the Sunday Times of London in 1986, and was later lured to Rome by an attractive women, where Israeli agents kidnapped him.
"I think ElBaradei is operating in secret with [the Israelis]," Mr. Vanunu said yesterday. "All he'll hear in his planned meetings with Prime Minister [Ariel] Sharon and the others will be propaganda and disinformation."In a gesture of openness, Israel this week placed on a Web site the first photos of its nuclear plant, other than the more detailed ones taken by Mr. Vanunu in his last months at Dimona.
Responding to the ElBaradei visit, Mr. Sharon said Israel would continue to maintain its silence over whether it possesses nuclear weapons, even though the world's major intelligence agencies estimate Israel has up to 240 nuclear devices.
"I don't know what [Mr. ElBaradei] is coming to see," Mr. Sharon said. "Israel has to hold in its hand all the elements of power necessary to protect itself by itself.
"Our policy of ambiguity on nuclear arms has proved its worth, and it will continue," Mr. Sharon said.
Mr. ElBaradei urged Israel in December to dismantle its nuclear arsenal. But Israel has never signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, designed to prevent the global spread of atomic weapons.
While Israel's failure to sign means it is ineligible to receive technical aid and equipment for the peaceful use of nuclear energy, it also frees the country from inspections or sanctions by Mr. Baradei's agency.
Mr. Vanunu said Mr. ElBaradei owes it to the world to demand entry to the bottom five floors of Dimona and said U.S. lawmakers were duped in the 1960s when they visited the plant but were shown only the top few floors.
"The Israelis even built false walls at some points," he said.
Mr. Vanunu said Israel had erred in believing it could defuse Arab threats by building nuclear weapons. "It was a very bad policy led by Peres in the 1950s," Mr. Vanunu said, referring to Shimon Peres, the former foreign minister and prime minister.
"They believed they could make peace through nuclear weapons. Yet since those days, the weapons have been the source of all the wars."
Mr. Vanunu is a hero to some in Israel and the international community, but is considered a traitor by many of his countrymen.
He said he could have understood if Israel had produced only a handful of thermonuclear weapons, but not the vast array he suspected was being produced in Dimona.
He conceded that he had never seen any weapons, nor had anyone ever mentioned weapons production during his years at the plant. But he photographed a model that he says he recognized as a mock-up of a neutron bomb. He believes Israel has also developed hydrogen bombs.
"Having a conventional nuclear weapon may have been a deterrent," he said, referring to Arab declarations to destroy the Jewish state. "But I grew alarmed when I realized just how much Israel was producing." He said he still believes that if Israel had not developed its nuclear arsenal, the Arab states would not have been able to produce their own. "No foreign power would have helped the Arabs," he said.
He acknowledged that Israelis felt safer in the belief that their warheads will deter Arabs from dreams of total conquest. But he believes that if the full extent of Israel's weaponry were known inside Israel, it would produce a change in policy.
"Israelis are psychologically brainwashed - by their leaders and by media incitement," he said. "But I believe Israeli citizens will be against genocidal weapons if they heard the truth.
"I believe even now Israel should disarm its nuclear weapons," he said.
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Iran, Syria Say Israel Has Nuclear Arms, Is Threat
July 7, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-israel-iran-syria.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Two of Israel's most prominent regional enemies, Iran and Syria, on Wednesday used the current visit to Israel of the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog to assail the Jewish state over its presumed nuclear arsenal.
Iran accused Israel of focusing its talks with Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), on Tehran's atomic program to divert attention from Israel's own nuclear weaponry, estimated at up to 200 warheads.
Syria said ElBaradei's visit ``casts light on ... the Israeli threat to international security.''
ElBaradei, on a three-day visit to Israel, urged Israeli officials on Wednesday to consider holding serious talks on a nuclear weapons-free Middle East.
He told reporters the officials he met had voiced concern about the Islamic Republic's nuclear ambitions, saying they feared Iran was pursuing nuclear arms which it might use against Israel.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said the Israelis were pointing the finger at Iran in an attempt to avoid censure for Israel's nuclear weapons program.
``The Zionist regime's claims about Iran's nuclear program are aimed at veiling its own nuclear activity and avoiding revealing its nuclear secrets to the IAEA,'' state television quoted him as saying.
``The shameful ignoring of international demands by the Zionist regime indicates this regime is stubborn about accepting any obligation to have even the least transparent cooperation with the IAEA,'' he added.
``STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY''
Under a policy of ``strategic ambiguity'' Israel refuses to admit or deny having nuclear weapons. International experts estimate it has between 100 and 200 warheads.
Unlike Iran, it has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and therefore does not have to let IAEA inspectors into its nuclear facilities.
Syrian state radio said in a commentary that ElBaradei's visit was a reminder that Israel ``is ignoring all international efforts to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, at the head of which are nuclear weapons.''
``The Middle East region needs an international effort to rid it of all weapons of mass destruction headed by the Israeli nuclear (arsenal),'' Syrian radio said, indicating Damascus supported ElBaradei's initiative on a nuclear-free zone.
``So long as Israel continues to reject that, the region will be in the direst of dangers,'' it added.
Washington accuses Iran of funding anti-Israel militant groups and military analysts say the Jewish state is now within range of Iran's Shahab-3 ballistic missiles.
The United States has imposed economic sanctions on Syria after accusing it of developing chemical and perhaps biological weapons.
The United Nations has criticized Iran for not cooperating fully with the IAEA over its nuclear program, demanded to know the origin of weapons-grade uranium it found in Iran, and asked why Tehran bought parts for advanced uranium-enriching centrifuges.
Iran, which says its nuclear program is geared solely to producing electricity, says traces of weapons-grade uranium were already on second-hand parts when they were imported.
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IAEA Chief Views Israel Nuclear Reactor
By GEORGE JAHN
Associated Press Writer
Jul 7, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) -- The head of the U.N. atomic watchdog agency got an airborne glimpse Wednesday of the reactor linked to Israel's alleged weapons program, but made no progress in getting the Jewish state to talk about its nuclear capabilities.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, saw Israel's Dimona reactor during a flight over the country during which he was briefed on Israel's security needs.
In the face of overwhelming evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons, ElBaradei is keen for at least tacit acknowledgment as part of his efforts to restart talks on a Middle East free of arms of mass destruction that petered out in the mid-1990s.
But Israel has stuck to its policy of neither confirming nor denying it has nuclear weapons - which it sees as the best way to keep Islamic foes from attacking while denying them the rationale for seeking nuclear weapons.
On Wednesday, ElBaradei said Israel was alarmed by Iran's nuclear ambitions, indicating such fears worked against any change in Israeli policy.
"They're expressing concern about Iran," said ElBaradei after talks with senior officials at Israel's secretive nuclear energy agency.
IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky described ElBaradei's "fear for the Middle East" as a constant thread in his visit, which includes a planned meeting Thursday with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. He said ElBaradei would be happy to act as an informal bridge between Israel and the Islamic world, which resents what it considers unfair international tolerance of Israel's secret nuclear capacities.
As part of Israel's pitch for its right to use all means to defend itself, ElBaradei was flown over Israel, accompanied by a top Israeli air force officer, an official familiar with his agenda said.
The air force officer argued that that Israel has no defensive depth, because a plane can fly from one border to the other in three and a half minutes, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
ElBaradei has been denied access to Israel's Dimona reactor, said to be the source of plutonium for its alleged weapons program. But the official said that at one point, the plane flew over the southern Negev Desert within sight of the reactor. While declining to go into details about his talks, ElBaradei indicated Wednesday that Iran was a dominant theme.
ElBaradei's agency is probing nearly two decades of suspect nuclear activities in Iran that the United States, Israel and others say reflect attempts to make atomic weapons.
Tehran insists it only wants nuclear energy to generate power, but several IAEA reports over the past year suggest the Islamic republic has not fully cooperated with agency inspectors and has failed to clear up suspicions about its aims.
ElBaradei has suggested Israel should at least consider easing its taboo on talking about nuclear arms as part of any long-term Middle East settlement that would rid the region of such weapons.
In an indication Sharon will not bend on the issue, Israel Army Radio rebroadcast comments Sharon made in May. "I don't know what he (ElBaradei) is coming to see. Israel has to hold in its hand all the elements of power necessary to protect itself, by itself," Sharon told the radio at the time.
Israel has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which would force it to declare itself a weapons state and curb its nuclear activities.
But ElBaradei said he hoped to persuade Israeli leaders to agree to a separate protocol curbing nuclear exports and imports.
Such a move would be mostly symbolic - Israel already has strict export and import commitments - and is seen as an attempt to nudge it toward increased cooperation with the IAEA.
Evidence that Israel has nuclear arms is overwhelming, much of it based on details and pictures leaked in 1986 by Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, as well as research and statements made by Israeli leaders.
Israel is believed to be the only country in the region to have nuclear missiles ready to launch. Experts say it may already have as many as 300 warheads as well as the capability of building more quickly.
On the Net:
Israel Atomic Energy Commission, www.iaec.gov.il/
International Atomic Energy Agency, www.iaea.org
----
Israel stands firm over its nuclear secrets
By Ohad Gozani in Tel Aviv
07/07/2004
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=IM1RUAGMOBPATQFIQMGSM5OAVCBQWJVC?xml=/news/2004/07/07/wmid07.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/07/ixworld.html
Israel said yesterday that it would not abandon its "no show, no tell" nuclear policy, because the long-standing strategy of deliberate ambiguity had paid off.
As Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, arrived in Israel, officials from the Israeli prime minister down said there was no need for a change which could only set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Mohamed ElBaradei in Israel yesterday
Ariel Sharon told army radio: "I don't know what he is coming to see. Israel has to keep in its hand all the components of power necessary to protect itself."
The prime minister added: "Our nuclear policy has proven itself and will continue."
Israel is believed to have become the only nuclear power in the Middle East when its ultrasecret nuclear plant in Dimona in the southern Negev desert began operations in the 1960s .
But it has persistently declined to confirm or deny any nuclear capability under a tacit deal with America, declaring instead that it would not be the first to introduce atomic weapons into the region.
Briefing reporters on the eve of Mr ElBaradei's two-day visit, officials said that in his talks with Mr Sharon and other Israeli officials the IAEA chief would try to press for some Israeli acknowledgment of its nuclear capability.
Israeli officials expressed confidence that the visit would not be confrontational as Mr ElBaradei was fully aware of the Israeli position, which might remain in place as long as the Arab-Israeli conflict remained unresolved.
They said the United Nations official would not tour either the Dimona plant or the Israeli research reactor at Nahal Soreq, south of Tel Aviv. Instead his talks would focus on broad issues, including the need for a nuclear-free Middle East.
Israel has resisted pressure to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, and thus is not obliged to show or declare its nuclear capacities or activities to United Nations inspectors.
Experts believe Israel has stockpiled up to 200 nuclear devices with plutonium produced at the Dimona plant.
The extent of the Israeli weapons programme was revealed in 1986 by Mordechai Vanunu, who secretly took pictures of various phases of the operation and sold them to a British newspaper.
Mr Vanunu served an 18-year jail term for treason.
-------- korea
S. Korea: North Deploying Intermediate-Range Missiles
VOA News
07 Jul 2004
http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=79067694-7A65-41B4-881C7D03F7A7235D
South Korean defense ministry officials say North Korea is deploying intermediate-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching U.S. military targets on Hawaii and Guam.
Local newspapers quote officials as saying the missiles have a range of between 3,000 and 4,000 kilometers, and are being kept in underground bases to protect them. Sources tell the newspapers that a U.S. spy satellite recently detected some of the launching sites.
South Korea's government has declined comment.
Last year, the head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency told Congress North Korea had an untested ballistic missile capable of reaching the western United States. George Tenet cited intelligence reports that said the North Koreans had one or two plutonium-based warheads that could be placed on such a missile.
-------- missile defense
Missile shield will destabilise region, Latham says
Australian Broadcasting,
July 8, 2004
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200407/s1149054.htm
Federal Opposition leader Mark Latham says a proposed Australia-US missile defence shield will make the Asia-Pacific region more dangerous.
The United States and Australia have signed a 25-year agreement to cooperate in the development of missile defences.
Prime Minister John Howard says it is just prudent long-term planning and has dismissed suggestions the project could lead to an arms race with China.
But Mr Latham says it will not make Australia any safer.
"What it will do is increase missile proliferation and insecurity and dangers in our region," he said.
"That's why it's outside Australia's national interest and that's why the Labor Party opposes the 'son of star wars', just as the Hawke government opposed star wars itself."
A specialist in international relations agrees that the move could spark an arms race, but says it will not make Australia more of a target.
Dr Mike McKinley is the senior lecturer in international relations at the Australian National University and says a country like North Korea is unlikely to attack Australia.
But Dr McKinley says the missile defence program is likely to cause another arms race as it will be aimed at countries like China and Russia.
He says in terms of the son of star wars program, as it is known, the US has not learned from the September 11 attacks.
"Star wars reflects an American strategic objective of being invulnerable," he said.
"Something which you thought 9/11, if nothing else, might have taught them is impossible.
"It does nevertheless reflect that what we've signed on for is research with regard to missile detection, but again you ask the question who would want to attack Australia?"
Agreements were also signed to conduct more US military training exercises in Australia and to harmonise systems and procedures so their armed forces can fight together more efficiently.
Mr Latham has backed the new training agreement.
"We undertake all the commitments that are important in keeping the alliance strong and functional for the future and joint training is very much part of that and is very much in Australia's interests," he said.
Defence Minister Robert Hill and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed the memorandum of understanding at the State Department for joint missile defence system development and testing.
"We have a responsibility to address not only the threats of today, but the threats that we might face in the future," Senator Hill told reporters.
The agreement will include Australia as a participating country in the US missile defence program as well as development and testing of advanced radar technology capable of providing improved early detection of ballistic missiles after launch.
An early aim would be to equip a new Australian destroyer with missile defence capability.
The initial US system, costing more than $US50 billion over the next five years, is designed to shoot down any inbound North Korean ballistic missiles that could be fitted with nuclear, chemical or biological warheads.
Australia joins South Korea, Japan, Britain, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain among the countries working with the United States on missile defense, a US official said.
Critics have charged that the US program is the next version of former US president Ronald Reagan's failed 'star wars' missile defence shield, but Senator Hill cautioned against understating the program's possibilities.
"The new technologies have meant that there is the potential to protect against incoming ballistic missiles, and in the past that hasn't been possible. So why not take advantage of that?" he said.
The Labor Party has said it fears the program might prompt an arms race by China and India.
Mr Howard says there is no sign that China will start an arms race in response to the United States effort to build a shield against ballistic missiles.
"The reaction of the Chinese and the Russians has not been as difficult and bristling as some people suggested might be the case because they see it very much for what it is - a defensive exercise," he said.
"We have closest possible relationships with China, heavens above, we're one of China's best customers and the Chinese President addressed our Parliament the day after President Bush did last year.
"We are, side-by-side with our closeness to the United States, we are building a very close relationship with a country like China." Training deal
Senator Hill also signed an agreement for joint training bases in Australia which should be operational by 2007.
"That will mean us enhancing a number of our ranges, in particular the Shoalwater Bay training area in Queensland, the Delamare Air range in the Northern Territory and also the new Bradshaw range in the Northern Territory," he said.
He says simulation technology has allowed multiple Australian bases to be included in the agreement. "We haven't got to that detail but of course if you can simultaneously use a number of different bases within the one exercise, you can clearly exercise many more troops than we've been able to do in the past," he said.
Senator Hill says the United States is interested in establishing training opportunities in Australia and he can not understand concerns that it is a precursor to a full-scale US base.
"No, I don't understand that because there's no benefit to the United States in having permanent bases in Australia," he said.
Three military training facilities, including Shoalwater Bay near Rockhampton, will be upgraded under the deal.
Minister Assisting the Defence Minister Mal Brough says it will be the world's best joint training facility. "I make it very clear that this is not about having a permanent large scale defence force from the US on Australian territory," he said.
"It is a joint training facility of which Australia will be a major beneficiary as well.
"There's been no suggestion at all that either pre-deployment equipment for other operations be left here."
Federal Member for Lingiari Warren Snowdon says Delamere is already being used for international troop training excercises and Bradshaw will be a world-class facility when it is completed.
But he says the Federal Government has skimped on details of the agreement, stoking fears of a permanent US military presence in Northern Australia.
"I don't think even this Government is that stupid," he said.
"But what I think it does highlight is the lack of detail about the agreement that has been reached with United States and the failure of the Commonwealth to consult widely and appropriately.
"I understand that the Northern Territory Government is not aware of the details of the agreement and of course Bradshaw and Delamere are both in the Northern Territory."
The national coordinator of the Anti-Bases Campaign says the decision is bad news for everybody.
Dennis Doherty says Australia should not hitch itself so tightly to the US.
"This creates enemies and we are creating regional enemies," he said.
"You know at Bali when the bombers got up in the morning when they did the bombing they said, 'now we are starting a war against the United States, today we start war against the United States' and 88 Australians died, and that's the sort of thing that's going to happen more and more often."
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U.S., Australia Sign Pact to Work on Missile Defense
July 7, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-australia-usa-defense.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and Australia pledged on Wednesday to work together to develop, test and possibly operate a costly system to shoot down attacking ballistic missiles.
The two also agreed to conduct more U.S. military training exercises in Australia and to harmonize systems and procedures so their armed forces can fight together more efficiently.
President Bush has made building a missile defense system a top priority, despite critics' questions about its cost and viability and the shift of the U.S. security focus to counterterrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Under a pact signed on Wednesday, the two nations laid the groundwork to jointly develop, test and possibly run such a system, with early work on advanced radar that can help detect ballistic missiles soon after launch, the Pentagon said.
Another early aim would be to equip a new Australian destroyer with missile defense capability, it added.
The initial U.S. missile defense system, costing more than $50 billion over the next five years, is designed to shoot down any inbound North Korean ballistic missiles that could be fitted with nuclear, chemical or biological warheads.
North Korea is seen as a major threat to U.S. allies in the Pacific because of its long-range missile and suspected nuclear weapons programs.
The Pentagon plans to broaden the system and to layer in interceptors based at sea, lasers aboard modified jumbo jets and possibly space-based rockets that could attack all three phases of an enemy missile's flight.
The United States will launch its effort this year by deploying a radar system and ground-based missiles in Alaska, designed to hit long-range missiles flying eastward across the Pacific.
Australian officials said they want to find ways to protect themselves, even though Australia faces no current threat from ballistic missiles.
``We have a responsibility to address not only the threats of today, but the threats that we might face in the future,'' Australian Defense Minister Robert Hill, who signed the pact with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, told reporters.
Australia will join South Korea, Japan, Britain, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain among countries working with the United States on missile defense, a U.S. official said.
-------- u.n.
U.N. Didn't OK Uranium Transfer to U.S.
July 7, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Dirty-Bomb.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- The United States didn't have authorization from the U.N. nuclear watchdog when it secretly shipped from Iraq uranium and highly radioactive material that could be used in so-called ``dirty bombs,'' U.N. officials said Wednesday.
The nearly 2 tons of low-enriched uranium and approximately 1,000 highly radioactive items transferred from Iraq to the United States last month had been placed under seal by the International Atomic Energy Agency at the sprawling Tuwaitha nuclear complex, 12 miles south of Baghdad, the officials said.
``The American authorities just informed us of their intention to remove the materials, but they never sought authorization from us,'' said Gustavo Zlauvinen, head of the IAEA's New York office.
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham disclosed the secret airlift from Iraq on Tuesday as ``a major achievement'' in an attempt to ``keep potentially dangerous nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists.'' The material was taken to an undisclosed U.S. Energy Department laboratory for further analysis. The airlift ended on June 23, five days before the United States transferred sovereignty to Iraq's new interim government.
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said in a letter to the Security Council circulated Wednesday that Washington informed the agency on June 19 that ``due to security concerns'' it intended to transfer some nuclear material stored at Tuwaitha to the United States.
The agency took note of the U.S. intention to remove the nuclear material ``from agency verification,'' he said.
According to the letter, the United States informed the IAEA on June 30 that approximately 1.8 tons of uranium, enriched to a level of 2.6 percent, another 6.6 pounds of low-enriched uranium, and approximately 1,000 highly radioactive sources had been transferred on June 23.
A U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was some concern about the legality of the U.S. transfer because the nuclear material belonged to Iraq and was under the control and supervision of the IAEA.
The U.S. Energy Department statement said ``the U.S., consistent with its authorities and relevant United Nations resolutions, took possession of and removed the materials to ensure the safety and security of the Iraqi people.''
Iraqi officials ``were briefed about the removal and sources prior to evacuation,'' the statement said.
In 1992, after the first Gulf War, all highly enriched uranium -- which could be used to make nuclear weapons -- was shipped from Iraq to Russia, the IAEA's Zlauvinen said.
After 1992, roughly 2 tons of natural uranium, or yellow cake, some low enriched uranium and some depleted uranium was left at Tuwaitha under IAEA seal and control, he said.
So were radioactive items used for medical, agricultural and industrial purposes, which Iraq was allowed to keep under a 1991 U.N. Security Council resolution, Zlauvinen said.
IAEA inspectors left Iraq just before last year's U.S.-led war. After it ended, Washington barred U.N. weapons inspectors from returning, deploying U.S. teams instead in a so far unsuccessful search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
An exception was made in June 2003 when Washington allowed an IAEA team to go to Tuwaitha to secure uranium after reports of widespread looting when the fighting ended.
The IAEA recovered most missing material and Zlauvinen said the uranium was put in sealed containers and left for the Americans to guard.
But because U.S. authorities restricted inspections of Tuwaitha, the IAEA team was unable to determine whether hundreds of radioactive items used in research and medicine across the country were secure.
ElBaradei's letter said that an unspecified amount of nuclear material still at Tuwaitha consists mainly of natural uranium, some depleted uranium and some low enriched uranium waste, which is subject to IAEA monitoring.
Some radioisotopes are also still in the country and come under the agency's responsibilities, he said.
Tuwaitha is now under the control of Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Bending the rules in Bay View Hunters Point
by Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, M.D.
7/7/04
San Francisco Bay View
http://www.sfbayview.com/070704/bendingtherules070704.shtml
The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires that prior to approval of a development project, an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) must be certified by the City of San Francisco. This certification means the environmental impacts of the project were adequately analyzed under CEQA.
An EIR is a disclosure document required by statute for the construction of new facilities. CEQA guidelines require that an EIR address the description of the proposed project and its environmental setting and potential impacts on human health and the environment.
Environmental impacts include significant effects of the proposed action, including those which cannot be avoided. Mitigation measures must be proposed to minimize negative impacts as well as feasible alternatives to avoid or lessen the projects negative impacts. Negative impacts must be identified, including irreversible environmental changes, growth inducing impacts and cumulative impacts.
On Friday, July 2, at 3 p.m., I filed with the clerk of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors an Appeal of the Negative Declaration of the Final Environmental Impact Report for Hunters Point Shipyard Phase I Development. The original EIR was certified by the Planning and Redevelopment Commissions on Feb. 8, 2000.
In so doing, I was almost four years, five months and 30 days late for the 30-day deadline required to appeal the EIR and its negative declaration ... but that's ok, because everyone bends the rules in Bay View Hunters Point.
You see, the Final EIR for the proposed development of Hunters Point Shipyard Parcels A and B was never certified by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors as mandated by CEQA and, in fact, the Board of Supervisors adopted the Hunters Point Shipyard Redevelopment Plan in 1997 without reviewing or certifying an environmental impact report - in violation of the City Administrative Code.
Nowhere in the EIR for the Shipyard's proposed development is there mention of the fact that Parcels A and B are radiation impacted and the sites of radiation impacted buildings, landfills, storm drains and sewer systems.
Nowhere in the EIR for the Shipyard's proposed development is there mention of the fact that the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard is a federal Superfund Site.
Here's the appeal:
To: Gloria Young, Clerk of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors
From: Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, member of the Restoration Advisory Board for the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard and chair of the Radiological Subcommittee
Re: Administrative Appeal of Negative Declaration Final Environmental Impact Report, Hunters Point Shipyard Phase I Development, Project Title: 2003.0241 HPS Phase I Development, File No. 1994.061E
Madam Clerk,
I wish to file an appeal seeking administrative action through the San Francisco Board of Supervisors challenging the validity of the Negative Declaration of the Final Environmental Impact Report for Hunters Point Shipyard Phase I Development certified by the San Francisco Planning Commission and Redevelopment Commission on Feb. 8, 2000, and the Addendum to the Environmental Impact Report published on Nov. 19, 2003, by the Planning Department of the City and County of San Francisco and adopted as a Negative Declaration by the Redevelopment Commission on April 20, 2004.
The project analyzed in the Final EIR is the reuse of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard following disposal by the United States Navy under the Base Closure Act, implementing the Hunters Point Shipyard Redevelopment Plan adopted by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1997.
The foundation of my appeal is grounded in irrefutable documentation that the 2000 FEIR and its 2003 addendum fail to disclose significant negative environmental impacts stemming from known radiological hazards on Shipyard Parcels A and B and that this documentation existed in the Draft Historical Radiological Assessment published on March 29, 2002, by the Department of the Navy, Southwest Division Naval Facilities Engineering Command.
Additionally, I am able to document that a contingent of Bay View Hunters Point representatives and a representative of the San Francisco District Attorney's office met with Deputy City Attorney Michael Cohen in April of 2002, at which time, as chair of the Radiological Subcommittee of the HPS Restoration Advisory Board, I presented maps, graphs and hard copy documentation derived from the Draft HRA of known radiological operations and potential hazards on Shipyard Parcels A and B with direct impact on HPS Phase I development.
In consultation with CEQA attorney John Gabrielli and with the help of Ms. Joy Navarrette, agency contact person for the Planning Department, I have confirmed that the 30-day Notice of Determination for the Addendum to the FEIR expired on June 7, 2004, and that no opportunity for judicial appeal now exists.
Ms. Navarette, however, in consultation with the City Attorney's office, reported the period of administrative appeal to the Board of Supervisors for the FEIR that was adopted as a Negative Declaration and certified on Feb. 8, 2000, by the Planning and Redevelopment Commissions expired after a 30-day Notice of Determination in that year.
I wish to challenge the validity of the 30-day Notice of Determination for the FEIR certified on Feb. 8, 2000, because the FEIR was not subject to review or certification by the Board of Supervisors.
Indeed, the Board of Supervisors approved the Shipyard Redevelopment Plan prior to certification of the FEIR and in violation of section 31.17(b) of the San Francisco Administrative Code, which requires consideration of the FEIR prior to redevelopment plan approval.
Additionally, I wish to challenge the validity of the adoption of the FEIR and its addendum on the grounds that the City and County of San Francisco is the principle beneficiary in the reuse of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, and CCSF government officials have acted in willful violation of federal, state and local law and political conflict of interest statutes to facilitate the speedy transfer and development of the Hunters Point Shipyard - a federal Superfund site - despite knowledge and documentation that imminent hazards to human health and the environment are sited there.
In 1995, San Francisco voters passed a law prohibiting campaign contributions from anyone bidding on or negotiating for a city contract or development lease if the recipient has a say in approval of the project.
In April of 2004, the San Francisco Chronicle revealed a principal member of a development firm negotiating for a redevelopment lease from Treasure Island was raising money to help Mayor Gavin Newsom retire his $400,000 campaign debt. In March of 2004, Darius Anderson held a fundraiser in his Sacramento office for Mayor Newsom. Anderson is a principal partner in Treasure Island Community Development, which includes residential builders Lennar Corp. of Miami. Newsom signed the Hunters Point Shipyard Conveyance Agreement granting Lennar Corp. of Miami exclusive development rights for the Hunters Point Shipyard on March 31, 2004.
In certifying the FEIR and its addendum as Negative Declarations, the Planning and Redevelopment Commissions, with deliberate intent, failed to disclose the following radiological hazards at the Hunters Point Shipyard documented in public records. Additionally the city agencies and commissions failed to acknowledge or offer mitigation measures for significant cumulative impacts to land uses designated for residential development and potential community sites expected to be developed on Parcels A and B as non-profit offices, studios, galleries, health and educational services.
1. The FEIR and its addendum assign land use for the Phase I development of Shipyard Parcel B in regions of known elevated gamma radiation levels. It is a cruel irony that Page 6 of the FEIR addendum actually states that community sites, including "health and educational services," have been proposed for siting on a Shipyard region known as the former submarine base area. The former submarine base area on Parcel B is designated IR-07 and IR-18 under the Navy's Installation and Restoration Cleanup Program.
IR-07 is a landfill disposal area with approximately two thirds of the identified debris fill area located northeast of Building 916 on Parcel B and 25 feet below Donahue Street. It is described in the Draft Final HRA as "flat land built by the Navy to support conventional submarine maintenance and is the site of potential disposal of waste from decontamination of Operation Crossroads ships."
The IR-18 region of Parcel B is also a landfill and waste oil disposal area. Radionuclides of concern include Radium 226, Cesium 137, Strontium 90 and Plutonium 239.
Additional considerations on Parcel B include the documentation in the addendum that Building 103 will be retained during Phase I development. Building 103 was used as a personnel radiation decontamination center and is documented in the Draft Final HRA as being radiation impacted and recommended for radiological survey.
2. The hastily prepared addendum to the FEIR was open to comments on Notification of Project Receiving Environmental Review in September of 2003, at which time the Draft Disposition and Development Agreement for Phase I of the Hunters Point Shipyard was not available in its entirety for public review.
Thus, the provisions of the DDA could not be relied upon to adequately address the generation of new impacts or the increase in severity of non-mitigable significant impacts, such as those stemming from radiological contamination of buildings on Parcels A and B, the basewide designation of the storm water and sanitary sewer systems as radiation impacted on Parcels B and A and the disposal of radioactive materials in landfills on Shipyard Parcel B and on Parcel E at the immediate boundary with Parcel A.
3. The hastily prepared addendum to the FEIR identifies the potential for new severe non-mitigable impacts in the siting of 362 residential housing units in Shipyard Parcel B adjacent to radiation contaminated and hazardous soils.
4. The hastily prepared addendum to the FEIR fails to incorporate the incontrovertible fact that since issuance of the March 2002 Draft Finding of Suitability to Transfer Revision 2 by the U.S. Navy, the Radiological Affairs Support Office designated three buildings on Parcel A as radiation impacted: Buildings 813 and 819 at the boundary of Parcel A with Parcel D on Spear and Fisher Avenue and Building 322 at the Innes Avenune entryway to the Shipyard.
During the fall of 2003, the Navy surreptitiously revised the Parcel A boundary to exclude Buildings 813 and 819 sited along Spear and Fisher Avenues in an attempt to hasten both the Shipyard Conveyance Agreement signing and the signing of the March 19, 2004, Draft Final FOST (Finding of Suitability for Transfer) Revision 2 by state and federal regulators.
The Planning Department, in issuing the addendum to the FEIR on Nov. 19, 2003, failed to incorporate the Navy's Parcel A boundary changes. And thus, the Redevelopment Commission, on April 20, 2004, voted to approve the signing of the Conveyance Agreement and adopted as a Negative Declaration the addendum to the FEIR - a document that includes the two radiation impacted buildings as well as Spear Avenue intact within the Parcel A boundary in a map labeled Figure 2: Phase I Development Area and Land Use Plan.
Additionally, the addendum negligently states on Page 30: "There is no indication at this time that newly discovered documents show potential radiological sources on Parcel A."
5. In addition to unanalyzed and new radiological impacts, the FEIR Addendum has potentially devastating economic impacts to the BVHP community in that revisions to the Phase I Redevelopment Plan change the mix of residential development to the near exclusion of light industrial and maritime development.
Thus the economic engine "driving" the local community's job creating strategy has been eliminated by the two-thirds reduction in non-residential land uses in the revision of the project description.
A more in depth Transportation Analysis is required in view of the increased air pollution and noise impacts projected by the new roadway system presented in the draft DDA that is growth inducing. According to comments on the Notification of Project Receiving Review, prepared to address the concerns of the BVHP Community First Coalition, the new arterial highway system will create more capacity than needed to serve both Phase I development and full build-out of the Shipyard.
"The supplemental EIR must analyze and mitigate cumulative traffic, air, noise and the esthetic impacts of the new roadway system as a whole and the development it would induce throughout the southeastern corner of San Francisco."
6. Finally, as the surviving offspring of a career Shipyard worker whose premature death was contributed to by pulmonary asbestosis and restrictive lung disease leading to settlement of a class action civil suit, I would like to emphasize the fact that a potential non-mitigable environmental hazard to development of the Shipyard is grounded in the geological fact that the Shipyard rests on the Franciscan Bedrock complex, and the predominant rock and soil of its working pad is derived from Serpentinite, which contains naturally occurring asbestos - a potent toxin to the human lung and a cause of interstitial pulmonary fibrosis. Up to 40 percent of patients with asbestosis develop lung cancer.
Respectfully submitted,
Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai
Contact Dr. Sumchai at (415) 835-4763 or asumchai@sfbayview.com.
-------- new mexico
Los Alamos: Blinded by profits?
By JJ Hermes,
7/7/2004
Daily Texan
http://www.dailytexanonline.com/news/2004/07/07/Opinion/Los-Alamos.Blinded.By.Profits-691803.shtml
Mitchell Feigenbaum represents one of the most eccentric and brilliant minds to inhabit the Theoretical Division of Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1970s. An atmospheric scientist who experimented with a 26-hour work day, Feigenbaum was one of the founders of chaos theory and embodies the non-nuclear side of LANL - perhaps the only side that Einstein would still be proud of. Far from the pressures of teaching and publishing, T Division gave brilliant minds like his a place to keep their heads in the clouds.
· · ·
In April 2003, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham declared the University of California responsible for the systematic failures in managing LANL, opening the lab contract for competitive bidding. By July 12, the UT System will formally announce its interest in operating the lab, according to Randa Safady, vice chancellor for external relations.
High on the list of flaws, including insufficient property maintenance and lax security, Abraham cited the fact that UC's performance in business services needed to be as good as its performance in science.
A Department of Energy report mirrored this language, stating that the culture at Los Alamos "exalted science and devalued business practices, and that changing this attitude would be the most difficult long-term challenge facing the laboratory." Overall, the DOE seems tired of what it deems UC's "hands-off approach" to management.
· · ·
Much like its research, there is a lopsided rift facing management of the lab: nuclear and non-nuclear. According to the UT System, the National Nuclear Security Administration makes up about 72 percent of the Los Alamos budget - nuclear weapons-related activities make up about 58 percent of the total budget.
Managing the nuclear security of Los Alamos is perhaps one of the most important posts in the world. The plutonium production zone of Technical Area 55 is often referred to as the "four most closely guarded acres on Earth." Not to mention the 3.2 metric tons of enriched uranium and 2.7 metric tons of plutonium that are stored at the facility, according to the last declassified DOE report on the matter in 1996 (about 55 kilograms of enriched uranium or smaller quantities of plutonium are required to make a crude nuclear device).
Clearly, the current system has shown potential bidders how not to manage nuclear security. In a Nov. 2003 Vanity Fair article, Rich Levernier, who conducted war games for the U.S. government, said, "In more than 50 percent of our tests of the Los Alamos facility, we got in, captured the plutonium, got out again, and in some cases didn't fire a shot, because we didn't encounter any guards."
UT officials have previously expressed interest in delegating security at the lab to a private partner, such as Lockheed Martin. Lockheed already manages a facility UT lost $800,000 trying to bid on in 2002: Sandia National Laboratory. It established a limited liability corporation to run the lab in order to shield the parent company from inherent failure risks. Even if the System goes in with a partner on security, it would not have the opportunity to cut and run from a massive accident or security breach, and most of the blame may likely fall on the shoulders of any remaining management.
A report for the DOE by Robin Nazzaro identifies some of the "mission support functions;" the mostly non-nuclear remaining responsibilities that would likely encompass managing the lab. They include emergency planning, ensuring projects are on time and within budget, restoring and maintaining the infrastructure of the complex, providing communications, carrying out repairs, purchasing and accounting for products and service, and providing a beneficial relationship with the local community. Perhaps most important, managing the lab would also entail directing the very research that goes on there.
The UT System has no stated position on what administrative aspects it plans to pursue. As of now, Safady maintains that, "Whether or not to pursue any portion of the contract will be entirely dependent on the expectations and requirements set by the Department of Energy and expressed in the final request for proposal."
· · ·
Although a hands-off approach to managing the nuclear security of LANL is a fatally flawed practice, groundbreaking research requires a buffer from the suffocating hands of constant oversight. Yet, the criticisms by the DOE have given the System a chance to offer a bid framed more toward business-friendly procedures.
While the DOE has better options to reverse the trend of "devalued business practices" at LANL through private firms such as the Battelle Memorial Institute, the UT System may fit its management agenda like a glove. Lab scientists are reluctant to research under private control, recently telling a panel at the National Academy of Sciences that only a contractor "untainted by desire for profits and market share can be trusted to advise the United States on the reliability of its nuclear weapons and whether to restart explosive nuclear testing after a 12-year hiatus." The System may act as a perfect mediator to bridge the narrowing gap between public and private.
System Chancellor Mark Yudof has already stated that payoff from the lab will be enormous: "If they happen to discover something, patent it, create a new business, a new product line - this is the economic future of Texas."
The hotbed of creativity of Mitchell Feigenbaum's Los Alamos may be a thing of the past, as business interests portend to strangle science at an already reeling facility. Since nuclear security may be a welcome burden lifted from UT's management duties, maintaining a top-notch research department at the lab is the next priority. If the UT System is really interested in advancing research and technology for students and professors, a bid framed for managing Los Alamos that compromises science for business is not the best way to achieve it.
Hermes is a physics junior and a design director for Texas Travesty.
-------- south carolina
No decision from DOE yet on plutonium shipped to SRS
(AP)
July 7, 2004
by Chris Rees
http://www.wistv.com/global/story.asp?s=2008466&ClientType=Printable
Columbia - The US Energy Department has told Congress it has not decided what to do with plutonium shipped from Colorado to the Savannah River Site near Aiken.
The Energy Department has said it plans to convert plutonium left over from nuclear weapons into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors, but the start of construction on a conversion plant has been delayed at least until next year.
The Energy Department shipped about six metric tons of plutonium from Rocky Flats, Colorado, to South Carolina over the past two years.
The report to Congress said there is currently no disposition path for the material.
----
Plutonium may not be leaving SRS
Federal report says no destination is set for nuclear waste at Aiken-area site
By SAMMY FRETWELL,
The State
Wed, Jul. 07, 2004
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/9094558.htm
A recent federal report is fueling fears South Carolina could become a permanent disposal ground for plutonium, a radioactive metal that is among the deadliest atomic materials in the world.
The U.S. Department of Energy, in a June 16 report to Congress, said it has not determined what to do with plutonium shipped from the Rocky Flats, Colo., nuclear weapons complex to the Savannah River Site.
That report said plutonium from the Rocky Flats site "currently is without a disposition path."
Energy Department officials have planned a $3.8 billion complex at SRS to turn the leftover bomb-grade plutonium into fuel for nuclear power plants near Charlotte. According to DOE plans, about 34 metric tons from federal nuclear weapons sites - including some from Rocky Flats - would be converted into fuel at the Aiken-area weapons complex.
DOE spokesman Joe Davis said late Tuesday the agency still plans to do that.
But anti-nuclear groups said the agency's own report indicates otherwise. They said the report raises questions about what to do with plutonium from at least four federal sites, including Rocky Flats.
Greenpeace activist Tom Clements said it is further evidence the government's program to turn plutonium into nuclear fuel is unraveling.
A key House committee already has cut $165 million from the mixed oxide fuel project this year. And the start of the fuel plant's construction has been delayed from this summer until at least next spring.
"That plutonium is being accumulated at SRS with no plans for its disposition is alarming news to people in South Carolina," said Amanda Martin, director of the Carolina Peace Resource Center in Columbia.
The Energy Department has shipped about six metric tons of plutonium from Rocky Flats to SRS in the past two years.
"We warned that accumulating plutonium at SRS could turn the site into a de facto permanent storage facility - and that appears to be coming true," Martin said.
The issue has been a hot one in South Carolina for more than two years.
Former Gov. Jim Hodges sued the DOE in 2002 and threatened to block shipments of plutonium to SRS unless the federal government could guarantee the state it would remove the deadly material one day.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., persuaded Congress to approve legislation requiring the plutonium's eventual removal. But Hodges maintained the law could be easily changed to suit the Energy Department's future plans.
Will Folks, a spokesman for Gov. Mark Sanford, said the governor expects the DOE to get rid of any plutonium it can't convert to mixed oxide fuel.
The Energy Department's report to Congress indicates it has a plan to take care of any plutonium it can't make into mixed oxide fuel: It could be made into glass, a process similar to one the DOE considered but abandoned as too expensive two years ago.
The Energy Department is conducting a preliminary study of the plan, the report said.
Like mixed oxide fuel, the idea behind the glass process is to make leftover plutonium useless for nuclear bombs. The United States and Russia have been working for years to render a total of 68 metric tons unusable for atomic weapons. Plutonium, a key component in nuclear weapons, can increase cancer risks if inhaled.
-------- MILITARY
-------- britain
ARMS ISSUE
Blair Says Illicit Weapons May Never Be Found, but 'We Know' Hussein Had Them
July 7, 2004
By ALAN COWELL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/07/international/europe/07BLAI.html?pagewanted=all
LONDON, July 6 - Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, America's closest ally in Iraq, said Tuesday that the unconventional weapons cited as the justification for the war against Saddam Hussein might never be found.
It was the closest Mr. Blair has come to acknowledging that his central argument for the invasion last year in the face of widespread public opposition might never be proved true or false. His handling of the weapons issue has damaged his credibility and his popularity with voters, while his decision to support the American-led war is depicted as the defining event of his premiership.
"We know Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but we know we haven't found them," Mr. Blair said, addressing senior government and opposition legislators at a routine meeting. "I have to accept we have not found them, that we may not find them."
He suggested that unlawful weapons "could have been removed, could have been hidden, they could have been destroyed." But he maintained that Mr. Hussein had been a threat and had been in breach of United Nations resolutions concerning unlawful weapons.
Mr. Blair declined to offer an apology for going to war as the junior partner in an alliance with the United States.
"I do not believe there was not a threat in relation to weapons of mass destruction," he said.
Mr. Blair's comments were taken by his political adversaries as evidence that his reasons for going to war were mistaken.
"The fact is we went to war for the wrong reasons," said Edward Leigh, a member of the opposition Conservatives who also supported the invasion of Iraq. "There was no threat at the relevant time. This is the defining issue of his premiership."
Mr. Blair was speaking eight days before an official inquiry by Lord Frederick Butler makes public a report into a range of concerns about Iraq's weapon systems.
The question of whether Mr. Hussein was, in fact, able to deploy biological, chemical or other unlawful weapons has been a delicate issue since the government published a report in September 2002 saying some unconventional weapons could have been made operational within 45 minutes.
In more than a year since the fall of the Hussein government, no such weapons have been discovered. But Mr. Blair said Tuesday that the fact that no unlawful weapons had been found did not mean that Mr. Hussein had not been a threat.
Underlying the dispute over Iraq is a sense among some Britons that Mr. Blair became too close to President Bush, offering support over Iraq but winning little in return.
Mr. Blair said Tuesday that his country had shown its influence in the strategy of transferring sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government and in other areas.
"If you look at what has happened in Iraq recently, I think we have a very great deal of influence," he said.
Mr. Blair's foes have also accused him of forfeiting his relationships with European allies as he pursues closer ties with the United States. He rejected that suggestion on Tuesday, saying he had a "good relationship" with the leaders of France and Germany. He emphasized, however, that he would not permit his relationship with the White House to be "subordinated to the interests of any other country."
He has also been assailed by critics for failing to secure the release of four Britons held by the American authorities at Guantαnamo Bay, Cuba. He answered that criticism on Tuesday by saying Britain did not have the "machinery" to ensure that the four detainees would not pose a security threat if they were handed over to Britain.
At the same time, though, he called the detention facilities at Guantαnamo Bay an "anomaly that has at some point got to be brought to an end."
Mr. Blair's political fortunes have been dogged by the war in Iraq, leaving him struggling to climb back in his second term to the popularity that provided the sobriquet "Teflon Tony" in his first term, which began in 1997. But his status sometimes seems ambiguous in light of the options facing British voters.
For instance, an opinion survey published Tuesday in The Times of London said the number of Britons who thought that the war in Iraq was a "good thing" had fallen from 65 percent in April 2003, just after the invasion, to just under 40 percent.
At the same time, the survey, taken by telephone among 1,000 people 18 or older last weekend, showed that Mr. Blair's Labor Party had gained in popularity, with some 33 percent of the respondents saying they would vote Labor in a general election, compared with 31 percent in early June. The poll also showed that the Conservatives had been damaged by the relatively strong showing in recent European Parliament elections of the anti-European U.K. Independence Party.
Mr. Blair's own popularity seemed also to have recovered somewhat, according to the poll, giving him a clear edge over both Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, and Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, who is seen as Mr. Blair's chief rival in the Labor Party.
--------
Retired judge to probe Gulf War illnesses
REUTERS UK:
July 7, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25888/story.htm
LONDON - A retired judge has launched a privately funded probe into why veterans of the 1991 Gulf War have become ill, but the government has not yet decided whether it will participate.
Lord Lloyd of Berwick, a former Law Lord, said yesterday an anonymous private donor had funded his inquiry to "assess the circumstances that have led to the ill health and in some cases death of over 6,000 British troops following deployment to the Gulf."
He said he had invited the government to participate. A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said it was considering the request but had not taken a decision.
The question of whether there is a "Gulf War Syndrome" of diseases that affect veterans of the conflict has been argued bitterly on both sides of the Atlantic.
Veterans and their supporters suspect that vaccines given to troops or other environmental factors have made thousands sick.
Both the United States and Britain pay war pensions to some veterans who have fallen ill, implying recognition of a link between their service and their illnesses.
But they say that no direct link has been established showing service in the Gulf caused particular symptoms, and that veterans are no more likely than others to die of ill health.
The government has repeatedly rejected calls for an official independent inquiry, saying it has spent millions of pounds on scientific research into the question.
"We accept that Gulf veterans report more ill health than other service personnel, and are determined to ascertain why," the Ministry of Defence said in a statement. "We are researching these issues at a cost of 8.5 million pounds."
The National Gulf Veterans and Families Association, a pressure group that has lobbied for the government to accept that there is a Gulf War Syndrome, said it welcomed Lord Lloyd's inquiry and hoped government ministers would take part.
--------
MoD chairs £1,000 each as troops face axe
telegraph.co.uk
By Michael Smith Defence Correspondent
12/07/2004
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/12/nmod12.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/07/12/ixportaltop.html
The Ministry of Defence has bought each of its 3,150 Whitehall civil servants a £1,000 chair as it plans the biggest cuts in the Armed Forces since the Cold War.
The Herman Miller Aeron chair, described as the "most comfortable office chair in the world", is also the most expensive.
It is the kind David Dimbleby uses on BBC1's Question Time and has been on display at the New York Museum of Modern Art as one of America's designs of the decade.
The purchase is part of a £342 million refurbishment carried out at the ministry.
It was sanctioned just as British troops were being sent to war in Iraq. It later emerged that many of them had been dispatched without the proper equipment.
The expense has come to light as Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, prepares to announce cuts forced on him by the Treasury, in part because his ministry's civil servants got their sums wrong.
Sixteen teams of civil servants, with minimal representation from the three services, have looked at every aspect of the Armed Forces to find ways of saving up to £1.5 billion.
The cuts are expected to be so bad that Mr Hoon will announce them on July 21, the day before Parliament rises for its summer recess, to limit criticism from MPs on both sides of the House.
The Royal Navy will lose up to seven surface ships, making it smaller than the French navy for the first time since the 17th century.
As many as four Army infantry battalions are expected to be axed and the RAF will lose five bases, about 7,000 personnel and many of its front-line aircraft.
The ministry denied that the Aeron chairs were an extravagance during a period of cuts, saying that they brought the working environment up to "acceptable modern standards" and would improve efficiency.
It said it did not pay the full recommended retail price of £1,050 for the chairs. A spokesman refused to say how much it did pay because "the exact cost is a commercially sensitive matter between the MoD and Herman Miller".
The spokesman said the ergonomic design would mean that fewer civil servants had to take time off work with back pain and that the chairs would last twice as long as ordinary ones.
Paul Keetch, the Liberal Democrats' defence spokesman, said he was sure that the ministry refurbishment was necessary but described the decision to buy Aeron chairs as "a joke" at a time when the Armed Forces were facing enormous cuts.
"The MoD has its priorities badly mixed up if it is happy to spend £1,000 on a chair while soldiers in Iraq have to buy their own boots," he said.
"It is a disgrace that, while the MoD is facing its worst cash crisis in a generation, soldiers are the ones who have to suffer. The Government must look after soldiers better before it can start buying fancy furniture."
----
Cautious Whitehall keeps the secret state alive
telegraph.co.uk
By Ben Fenton
12/07/2004
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/12/nsec12.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/12/ixnewstop.html
The Government's passion for secrecy while it talks about openness is revealed today after a study by The Daily Telegraph that raises serious concerns about the new Freedom of Information Act.
It shows that more than 76,000 files which have passed the normal 30-year closure period laid down by the Public Record Act remain hidden on the Lord Chancellor's instructions. Secrecy is still the watchword at the National Archives
More than a third - 27,000 - are regarded as so sensitive by the Whitehall departments which produced them that even a description of their contents has been suppressed.
The 76,000 files represent almost 0.8 per cent of the 9.5 million documents preserved in the National Archives, a process that began with the Domesday Book.
The secrecy surrounding the 27,000 anonymous files threatens to undermine the effectiveness of the Act when it is implemented next January because historians and researchers will not know which documents are worth applying to see.
With the news that the Treasury has insisted on search fees of up to £575 for Freedom of Information Act requests, it casts doubt on Labour's declared commitment to open government.
Descriptions of many of the 49,000 other closed files suggest that their contents are often so harmless as to question the entire way in which the system of retention is administered.
For example, a 1933 Home Office file details the application of a now-closed mental hospital in South Wales to name one of its wards after George V's eldest daughter. Under the present system, that file will be closed until 2034.
Among others that remain hidden from historians, researchers and journalists are Customs documents giving the names of shipping agents in Britain in 1941, the Ministry of Transport's appointment of members to the board of commissioners of Poole harbour in 1951 and a Colonial Office discussion of the insignia of the late Queen Sulote of Tonga in 1967.
Maurice Frankel, the director of the Campaign for the Freedom of Information, said he was astonished by the number of files still held back by the Government.
"It is a fantastic proportion and it is very valuable work to have disclosed it," he said.
"The Government's reaction to this will show if it is true to its commitment to get rid of the perception of secretiveness in Whitehall.
"There may be anodyne explanations for some of these decisions but, on the face of it, there is some explaining to be done.
"In particular, the existence of so many files where you cannot even tell what is in them is seriously worrying because it represents a black hole into which great parts of our history can fall."
The analysis of the hidden records shows up numerous inconsistencies and reveals that bureaucrats often turn to concealment as a first reaction despite the instructions contained in a Conservative White Paper on openness as long ago as 1992 that it should be only a last resort.
The Government believes that the Freedom of Information Act will solve all those problems, although critics such as Mr Frankel point to inherent weaknesses in the legislation.
A spokesman for the Department for Constitutional Affairs said: "The Freedom of Information Act will introduce a statutory right of access to records held by public authorities, including those held by the National Archives.
"It does contain exemptions and where it is not in the public interest to release information it will be exempt from disclosure. Each request will have to be considered on a case-by-case basis.
"The Act will place rights of access on a statutory footing and balance the right to know with the public expectation of effective government."
The continuing atmosphere of secrecy in Whitehall is a cause for concern among staff at the National Archives, which was formerly the Public Record Office.
A member of the archives staff, who asked not to be identified, said: "We are as frustrated as anyone else by the staggering number of files that remain secret, many with no explanation at all.
"Last year there was a great hoo-hah because of the release of details of the atomic bomb project Blue Danube and I can understand people being surprised that you can see a drawing of how to make a nuclear weapon in the PRO.
"But when you see the titles of some of the files that have not been released, it does leave you kicking the floor in frustration. We have to tell readers that such and such a file is unavailable but that we are at a loss to explain why.
"It seems that in Whitehall the prevailing view is that you can't get a genie back in a bottle, so it is better not to let it out at all."
Examples of inconsistency abound in the treatment of public records. While MI5 has released many files of its wartime activities and the Ministry of Defence has opened up the records on the work of secret agents of the Special Operations Executive, more than 250 files about floodworks in England, that were drawn up in the early 1950s by the old Ministry of Agriculture, are apparently still considered too secret for release.
Efforts by successive governments to force bureaucrats to trawl through their files and release closed documents seem to have met with limited success. Historians point out that those are the same bureaucrats who will be dealing with the public on Freedom of Information Act inquiries.
Matthew Jones, professor-elect of international studies at Nottingham University, said: "These figures illustrate why it is so difficult to get at useful files in the archives and I think they also show that the first instinct of Whitehall is to preserve secrecy."
-------- business
Outside View: Privatizing war
July 07, 2004
By Greg Guma
A UPI Outside View commentary
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040704-085932-9320r.htm
Burlington, VT, Jul. 7 (UPI) -- The use of mercenaries was once a dirty, little secret most governments were loath to acknowledge. But today they're called private military contractors and perform almost every function essential to military operations. The Financial Times has labeled this trend the "creeping privatization of the business of war."
During the first Gulf War, about two percent of U.S. military personnel were private workers. As of 2003, it had reached 10 percent. The Pentagon employs more than 700,000 private contractors, and at least $33 billion of the $416 billion in military spending overwhelmingly approved by the Senate last week will go to PMCs.
In Iraq, these companies supply more trainers and security forces than all remaining members of the "coalition of the willing" except the United States. Approximately 15,000 civilian security guards are stationed there, at least 6,000 of them armed. Some contractors maintain sophisticated weapons systems that used to be handled by the army. More than $20 billion -- almost a third of the Army's budget for Iraq and Afghanistan -- goes to contractors.
One advantage of using private forces is to keep down the casualty count. Although non-military casualties aren't included in official Pentagon reports, Peters Singer, author of "Corporate Warriors," estimates that at least 30 contractors have been killed in Iraq and about 180 have been wounded.
But giving contractors prominent roles does pose risks. For example, Caci International and the Titan Corporation have been implicated in charges of torture, humiliation and rape leveled at the U.S. military in Iraq.
How did we get here?
In 1969, the U.S. Army had about 1.5 million active duty soldiers. By 1992, the figure had been cut by half. Over the last decade, however, the United States has mobilized to intervene in several significant conflicts, and as a result, a corporate "foreign legion" has filled the gap between policy imperatives and what a downsized, over-stretched military can provide.
The push to privatize gained significant traction during the first Bush administration. After the Gulf War, the Pentagon, then headed by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, awarded a Halliburton subsidiary nearly $9 million to study how PMCs could support soldiers in combat zones. The company has since won at least $2.5 billion to construct and run military bases, some in secret locations, as part of the Army's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program.
Although the number of active duty U.S. troops has recently climbed to 1.4 million, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's desire to make forces lighter and more agile has helped to accelerate the trend.
Use of high-technology equipment also feeds the process. Private companies have capabilities that the military needs, but doesn't possess. Contractors maintain the B-2 stealth bomber and F-117 stealth fighter and operate some of the newer weapons systems, such as the Global Hawk and Predator unmanned drones. Military systems like the Army's Guardrail surveillance aircraft are designed to be operated and maintained by private companies.
DynCorp, the largest PMC in Iraq, has Department of Defense contracts worth more than $2 billion to provide "post-conflict police training" around the world. Over the last decade, it has dispatched trainers to Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Liberia, East Timor, Afghanistan and now Iraq.
The company has also handled aviation services for drug-eradication programs in Latin America as part of Plan Colombia; updated information systems for the State and Justice departments, Department of Defense, FBI, Internal Revenue Service, Security and Exchange Commission and Drug Enforcement Agency; and maintained or managed U.S. border posts, weapons-testing ranges, Air Force bases and the president's fleet of planes and helicopters.
All this government work made it an attractive acquisition target for Computer Sciences Corp., a software company that branched into federal contracts. One of its key clients became the National Security Agency. Acquiring DynCorp cost $950 million, but meant that a leading information technology firm was joining forces with one of the largest PMCs, making it a major force in the military-intelligence-industrial complex.
It was a timely move. In April 2003, just a month after the deal with completed, DynCorp won a 5-year, $500 million contract to build a private police force in post-Saddam Iraq, with some of the funding diverted from an anti-drug program for Afghanistan.
With 92,000 employees worldwide, CSC works with virtually every major U.S. agency. Through its State and Defense Department contracts, it implements foreign policy by proxy. Its "private security personnel" are effectively immune from criminal sanctions.
Through its Information Technology work with the NSA, it upgrades and maintains the world's most expansive and highly secure surveillance and communication systems. It also manages Air Force bases and information warfare planning, Army weapons systems, naval security, most of NASA's air fleet, and Department of Homeland Security border-crossing technology.
In Britain, the debate over military privatization has been public and sensitive, since the activities of one U.K. company, Sandline, in Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea embarrassed the government in the late 1990s. But no country has clear policies to regulate PMCs, and the limited oversight that does exist rarely works.
In the United States, hey have mostly escaped notice, except when U.S. contract workers in conflict zones are kidnapped or killed.
It's a troubling situation. PMCs have become an adjunct foreign policy apparatus that is largely invisible, rarely mentioned by the press, and not currently subject to congressional oversight. The Freedom of Information Act doesn't apply, and any background on how they operate is private, proprietary information.
In some cases, the use of private contractors is a way to get around congressional scrutiny. But it also represents something deeper: the gradual outsourcing of U.S. defense and national security.
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Syria claims to have confiscated Israeli goods bound for Iraq
Associated Press
Tue., July 06, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/448110.html
DAMASCUS - Syrian customs authorities on the Syrian-Jordanian borders have foiled an attempt to smuggle Israeli goods through Syrian territory to Iraq, according to newspaper reports Tuesday and an official at the border in the southern Dar'a region.
The official said five Jordanian trucks loaded with beams for laying electric cables worth $60,000 were seized June 24, adding that the trucks were heading to the northern Iraqi city of Irbil via Syria. The beams have Hebrew writing on them and some had "made in Israel" printed in English, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Syria remains in a state of war with Israel and bans any kind of business with the Jewish state, or the transit of Israeli products through its territory.
The goods manifest indicated the beams were of Italian origin and were ordered by a Turkish company in Ankara to be sent later to Iraq, the official said.
He said the goods were confiscated and a $480,000 fine was imposed.
Al-Baath newspaper, meanwhile, quoted Hasan Hamdo, the head of the Naseib customs department on the Syrian-Jordanian border, as saying the drivers of the trucks, all Jordanians, had forged the manifest of the smuggled goods to be able to cross the borders.
It said authorities were questioning the drivers.
-------- iraq
Sunni Resistance to U.S. Presence Hardens
Main Iraqi Insurgency Will Persist as Long as Troops Remain, Observers Warn
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 7, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32356-2004Jul6?language=printer
BAGHDAD -- The violent insurgency against U.S. occupation has slackened noticeably in the week since formal political authority was turned over to an Iraqi government. But according to Iraqi and U.S. sources, the bloodshed is far from over.
The insurgency is likely to persist as long as U.S. soldiers remain visible in Iraq, they said, because it cuts across several irreducible currents in the country's long-dominant Sunni Muslim minority. These include nationalism and Arab pride, local and transnational Islamic fundamentalism, and tribal loyalties cultivated by ousted president Saddam Hussein.
"If you don't remove the causes, you will never get rid of the resistance," said Saleh Mutlak, a onetime Hussein official who helped negotiate the ragged truce protecting Fallujah, the embattled city 35 miles west of Baghdad that is his family home and the insurgency's main stronghold.
One major expression of the insurgency, the Shiite Muslim uprising led by Moqtada Sadr, has been put on hold while Shiite leaders seek to enlist the rebellious cleric in the political process and persuade him to lay down his arms. For the time being, that truce has removed thousands of Iraqi youths from the conflict and halted what risked becoming a marriage of wartime convenience between Iraq's 60 percent Shiite majority and the 20 percent Sunni minority that traditionally has run the country.
But Sheik Abdul-Satar Abdul-Jabbar of the Council of Islamic Scholars, Iraq's preeminent Sunni organization, said the main, Sunni-based insurgency is likely to rage as long as Iraqis' sense of nationalism is bruised by the presence of U.S. military forces on their soil. The emergence of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's interim government has changed that equation little, he said, because the insurgents regard it as an extension of the military occupation with no roots of its own in Iraq.
Abdul-Jabbar cited in particular a statement made in Washington on Friday by Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, predicting that 145,000 U.S. troops would probably be in Iraq for the next five years. "That will incite even more Iraqis to enlist in the resistance," Abdul-Jabbar said.
The increasingly frequent appearances of U.S.-trained Iraqi National Guard soldiers and policemen in the streets of Baghdad and other cities have drawn a favorable response from many Iraqis who express dislike for U.S. occupation troops but say they have wearied of the constant violence. In addition, many Iraqis, including prominent Sunni and Shiite leaders, shuddered at the number of Iraqi policemen and civilians killed by car bombs during a high point of violence on June 24.
Taken together, these developments could suggest public doubts about the insurgency, at least in its bloodiest forms. But Iraqi sources with knowledge of the insurgency pointed to what they said was a worrying trend in the opposite direction: a radicalization of young Iraqis caught up in the battle.
One Iraqi source estimated that at least 28 different insurgent groups have formed in recent months, some -- but not all -- based in Fallujah. This intensifies the danger of bloodshed, he and other Iraqi sources said, because the most youthful and rash of these groups are increasingly embracing tactics imported by foreign fighters, such as the car bombings of civilian targets.
"We are not under any illusion that we can eliminate international terrorism and opposition to the government. There still is more sting in that snake," said Minister of State Adnan Janabai.
U.S. officials have often called attention to their campaign to hunt down Abu Musab Zarqawi, an elusive Jordanian linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network who is the most prominent foreigner believed to be fighting here. Four airstrikes in recent days targeted what the U.S. officials said were safe houses in Fallujah used by his followers. But the same officials have also attributed to Iraqis nearly all the attacks against American soldiers or Iraqi security forces.
"We must admit that most of the violence in this country is carried out by people who were born and raised in this country," said a senior U.S. military official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Zarqawi, whose soft, round face adorns wanted posters across the country, has been blamed for the car bombings, which are often carried out by suicide drivers. But Mutlak and Abdul-Jabbar said that in Fallujah, where most of the foreign fighters are reported to be concentrated, only a handful of those battling U.S. Marines entrenched outside the city are non-Iraqis.
The main components of Fallujah's fighting force, Mutlak and other Iraqi sources said, are the city's own fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, together with officers, soldiers and intelligence agents from the Hussein years, many of whom have family in Fallujah. Added to them, he said, are young men seeking revenge for family members killed by U.S. forces and other residents drawn into the battle out of solidarity with their neighbors and resentment over U.S. attacks on their home town.
The fighters and their leaders have more or less run Fallujah since the truce was arranged in early May. As a result, U.S. military officials have expressed worry that Fallujah may become -- or perhaps already has become -- an incubator for insurgency recruits.
The Fallujah Brigade, a security force under the command of former Iraqi army officers, was supposed to take control of Fallujah in early May in collaboration with the U.S. Marines. Instead, it has ceded authority to a sort of commune that has sprung up in recent weeks, guided by the Mujaheddin Advisory Council under the leadership of the town's senior Sunni cleric, Sheik Abdullah Janabi, and his main lieutenant, Sheik Dhafer Obeidi.
L. Paul Bremer, who was the U.S. administrator in Iraq until the transfer of political authority on June 28, arranged as one of his final acts to have warrants issued for the arrest of Janabi and Obeidi, according to Mutlak and Baghdad news reports. If U.S. troops tried to take the two Sunni clerics into custody, Mutlak predicted, Fallujah would erupt into even greater violence.
A similar order against Sadr in April touched off the weeks-long confrontation between the cleric's Mahdi Army militia and U.S. troops in the Najaf area, about 90 miles south of the capital. Mutlak said that episode showed that U.S. authorities are mistaken in confronting insurgent fighters rather than seeking to negotiate with them.
Allawi, the interim prime minister, while speaking out sharply against attackers, has also indicated a conciliatory attitude. His spokesman, Georges Sada, told reporters the government was working out an amnesty for resistance fighters who had not been involved in attacks that qualified as terrorism. In addition, Allawi has spoken of bringing former Baath Party and Iraqi army officials into the new system, in effect abandoning the de-Baathification program put in place by Bremer.
Many former intelligence agents and military officers have formed cooperative relationships with Islamic insurgents in Fallujah and elsewhere, even though Hussein's Baath Party was, in principle, secular. Their expertise in such areas as explosives and arms has boosted the firepower of insurgent organizations.
U.S. officials have speculated that former government officials might also still have access to money to help finance attacks. The most senior official from Hussein's regime still at large is Izzat Ibrahim, who specialized in internal security.
After Fallujah, the other main insurgency stronghold is Baqubah, a farming town 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. Residents there, as in much of the swath of central Iraq known as the Sunni Triangle, had strong ties to Hussein's Baath Party.
Successive U.S. Army units stationed in Baqubah have had particular trouble in Buhris, a village on the edge of the city where tribal sheiks were traditionally courted and paid off by Hussein's government. The web of tribal loyalties woven by Hussein's intelligence services around Baqubah has been difficult to pierce for U.S. military officers, whose men for months were shot at every time they entered Buhris.
Baqubah residents have said gunmen from elsewhere have also played a role in the violence there. Fighters proclaiming loyalty to Zarqawi were seen in the streets of Baqubah during the last eruption of large-scale fighting there on June 24.
"It's from outside," said Ali Abdul Kareem Madani, the senior Shiite Muslim cleric in Baqubah.
Baghdad itself, often a target of the bombings, was also discovered recently to be the site of several facilities where car bombs were being assembled and rigged into vehicles. About 50 people were arrested and bomb-making equipment was seized in a series of raids reported Saturday by the U.S. Army's 1st Cavalry Division.
One of the deadliest recent attacks, a series of car bombings in Mosul on June 24, was attributed to Ansar al-Islam, a small group in northern Iraq formerly associated with Zarqawi. The explosions, targeting Iraqi police buildings, killed more than 80 people in the city, 220 miles north of Baghdad.
Abdul-Jabbar said Ansar al-Islam was one of several names used by Zarqawi and his foreign or Iraqi followers. Others cited on Islamic Web sites include the Monotheism and Jihad Group, the Ansar al-Sunna Army and the Sharp Sword Against the Enemies of God and His Prophet, all of which have asserted responsibility for taking foreign hostages and in some cases beheading them.
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In Iraq, Daunting Tasks Await
Phase 2 of Transition May Be as Difficult as Occupation
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 7, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32312-2004Jul6?language=printer
The symbolic handovers -- of political power and Saddam Hussein -- are over. Now the real challenges begin in Iraq. Baghdad's new interim government, the United States and the United Nations have only seven months to stabilize Iraq, accelerate reconstruction and hold the country's first democratic elections.
This next stage -- the second of Iraq's three-stage transition -- could prove to be even tougher than the 14-month occupation, U.S. and U.N. officials predict.
"We won't achieve it all. I don't think we can pacify the country in seven months," said a senior State Department official who insisted on anonymity. "On reconstruction, we'll certainly see change, but the scope is huge and the better timeline is really two years from now.
"Where you will see the most progress is in the electoral process . . . and achieving security remains the $64 million question. I can't say it will be fully addressed with any degree of confidence."
In the meantime, several wild cards could undermine early support for the interim government. Electricity shortages alone could unravel the process, U.S. and U.N. officials warned. Repairs during the winter only triggered new problems, as Iraqis bought refrigerators and air conditioners that overwhelmed the new output capability, according to Ross Mountain, acting U.N. special envoy to Iraq.
The calendar for the next phase of the transition centers on two political events. The first is a national conference of 1,000 tribal and provincial leaders, professionals, academics and other prominent Iraqis later this month. The second is, by the end of January, the first democratic election of a national assembly -- the real barometer of success.
"If we pull off, with the assistance of the international community and particularly the United Nations, an election in December or January of 2005, as we're trying to do, that will be one of the more monumental occurrences in the Middle East in several hundred years," Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said in a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt last week.
That election will pave the way for the final phase of Iraq's transition, when the new assembly is due to choose a transitional government with real executive powers -- which the current interim government lacks -- and draft a constitution. That year-long phase will end with elections for a permanent government.
But the second phase contains political hurdles and physical dangers for all parties to get over first. The United Nations has not overseen an election in such a large country or such a hostile environment. The United States faces an escalating insurgency. And Iraq's new leadership is still struggling to get its bearings.
The challenge begins with convincing Iraqis that their new government is legitimate -- a big step in itself -- and then explaining democracy and getting them to register to vote, form political parties, select candidates, develop platforms and campaign, Iraqi and U.S. officials said. That all has to be accomplished in slightly more than 200 days.
The first task may be as much psychological as political. "The Iraqi government must do what the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] conspicuously did not, which was to win hearts and minds," said Rend Rahim Francke, Iraq's top envoy to Washington, at a recent American Enterprise Institute conference. "To do that, we must sell the new order to the entire Iraqi population, and we must sell it to segments of the Iraqi nation that hitherto may have not been totally persuaded."
The United States and the United Nations both want to take a back seat, letting the inexperienced Iraqis control the process so it gains domestic credibility, U.S., U.N. and Iraqi officials said.
A U.N. team is helping set up the structures for an election but it will not run the polling, as it did in Cambodia and East Timor. The team will mainly train and advise the seven-member election commission, which it selected. The Iraqi commissioners will set the rules, procedures, timeline and logistics, including distributing ballot boxes, U.N. officials said.
Washington will also largely defer political assistance to others, mainly by funding nongovernmental U.S. organizations to help with voter education and the creation of a civil society. The new U.S. Embassy will not engage in any aspect of Iraqi politics, State Department officials said.
U.S. officials and analysts differ widely on the prospects for this second phase. "Obviously, looking out over the next six to eight months, the key question is whether they get security enough under control that credible elections can be held in January on schedule," former U.S. administrator of Iraq L. Paul Bremer told a small group of reporters in Washington shortly after returning from Baghdad. "I believe they can."
But Iraq experts are concerned that public support for the new government could quickly dissipate.
"If the new government is unable to contain the insurgents and terrorists, and if it is unable to win the support of the diverse ethnic and sectarian communities in Iraq, then a weak and discredited central government will be no match for local warlordism and the growth of terrorist infrastructures," said Judith Yaphe, a former CIA expert now at the National Defense University. "If this happens, the outcome will not be the hoped-for democratic Iraq of 2005 and beyond, but a country more like Lebanon in the 1980s or Afghanistan in the 1990s -- only in this case a country replete with oil wealth and a great capacity to wreak havoc beyond its borders."
The tone of the second phase will be heavily influenced by the outcome of the national conference, progress in reconstruction and security.
The conference is designed to launch "a national dialogue of the new who's who in Iraq," said a U.N. official, and expand participation beyond the handful of largely exiles handpicked by the outside world. It will select about 100 Iraqis to serve on an interim national council, which will not legislate but will create the first check on government by being able to question its ministers on policy and actions.
"A national gathering that legitimizes the selection of the new leadership and captures the attention of the Iraqi people with a major Iraqi-run political event, tied directly to the phased, scheduled withdrawal of the coalition security forces into cantonments, would set the conditions for successful elections," wrote Keith W. Mines, a former CPA official, in an article for the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Jump-starting the economy through reconstruction must be a parallel process, with the interim government trying to win Iraqi participation by feeding "their wallets and their bellies," Francke said.
The United States estimates that foreign aid could create a million jobs over the next two years -- with concern about whether the pace will be fast enough. Iraqis also want a new aid strategy, switching from large, high-tech infrastructure projects, which went largely to U.S. and foreign corporations, to more labor-intensive projects to generate more jobs for Iraqis.
But the biggest factor will be ending the violence, U.S., U.N. and Iraqi officials agree. "Unless you get security under control, everything else will be held hostage," the senior State Department official said.
A two-pronged strategy is evolving that centers, first, on Iraq's attempt to co-opt its own, largely Sunni Muslim, insurgents -- estimated at around 5,000 -- by bringing more former Baathists, Sunnis and critics into the system, Iraqi and U.S. officials say. "Some of them may not be perfect democrats, and some may be Baathists," Francke said. "But I would rather err on the side of inclusion than exclusion at this point."
While training Iraqis as eventual replacements, troops from the U.S.-led multinational force will focus largely on pursuing extremists loyal to Abu Musab Zarqawi, estimated to number about 200, and Arab foreign fighters, also in the low hundreds, U.S. officials said.
Despite a relatively hopeful first week for the new Iraqi government, analysts cautioned that expectations should be modest.
"It took Britain nearly 900 years and a civil war to evolve into a truly representative government. It has taken the U.S. more than 225 years and a civil war to achieve its current state of democracy," Yaphe said. "How can the Iraqis be expected to achieve this in one year?"
Correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran contributed to this article from Baghdad.
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Suicide Bomb at Funeral Kills 14
Official's Brother Slain 2 Days Earlier; Allawi Vows Hard Line
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 7, 2004; Page A14
BAGHDAD, July 6 -- Two days ago, gunmen attacked a house in the small town of Khalis and killed the brother of the deputy mayor, another in a string of insurgent attacks focused on local officials. On Tuesday, as the dead man's family and town dignitaries gathered to pay their respects in a tent set up for the funeral, a suicide bomber drove a car toward the tent and set off a powerful bomb.
The blast in Khalis, 40 miles north of Baghdad, killed 14 people and wounded 70, according to local officials.
"The hospitals are full of victims," Maj. Gen. Waleed Khalid Abdul Salam, the police chief in the nearby city of Baqubah, said on al-Jazeera television. "I think the explosion was aimed at the mayor."
There was no assertion of responsibility for the bombing, which occurred shortly after the governor of Diyala province and all the members of a local governing council had left the gathering.
The continuing attacks on Iraqis provoked a tough new response Tuesday from the country's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi. Vowing that "there will be no more safe havens for terrorists," Allawi said in a statement that the Iraqi government had pinpointed a house in Fallujah connected to the network of the Jordanian guerrilla Abu Musab Zarqawi and directed U.S. military jets to attack it on Monday. The airstrike, which employed two tons of precision bombs, reportedly killed 15 people, including women and children.
Allawi was unapologetic about civilian casualties: "This operation was launched to terminate these terrorists, whose vehicle bombs and suicide vests indiscriminately kill innocent Iraqis, and destroy Iraqi schools, hospitals and police stations. The people of Iraq will not tolerate terrorist groups or those who collaborate with any other foreign fighters such as the Zarqawi network to continue their wicked ways."
While Allawi laid down the interim government's hard line, four masked men holding automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers appeared on al-Arabiya television threatening to kill Zarqawi, who is believed to be responsible for a string of car bombings, kidnappings, beheadings and other attacks.
Calling themselves the Relief Movement, the men issued a challenge to Zarqawi, who U.S. officials say is linked to al Qaeda and who apparently began working in Iraq in the chaotic aftermath of last year's U.S.-led invasion.
"We tell Zarqawi, the criminal, that he has to go out of Iraq immediately, he and his followers," the group said. They railed that "innocent people were killed" by Zarqawi's action.
"What is his religion? Is it Islam, religion of peace, that allows him to do the explosions on a holy day in a holy city, or to car-bomb police stations or a commercial street to kill thousands of innocents? What religion is it that allows him and his followers to kidnap and slaughter foreign workers without any guilt? Who is he to threaten Ayad Allawi and kill our religious and patriotic personnel?"
U.S. officials have called Zarqawi the most wanted man in Iraq and have offered a $25 million reward for him.
In other violence on Tuesday, three U.S. Marines died in Anbar province in western Iraq. The U.S. military declined to provide details of the incident.
[On Wednesday, the U.S. military announced that another four Marines were killed Tuesday by guerrillas west of Baghdad, the Reuters news agency reported.]
U.S. military officials acknowledged that a child was killed and another child wounded Monday night when soldiers opened fire on a car that had failed to stop at a checkpoint in Baghdad. An Army spokesman said the driver of the car switched off his vehicle lights and kept moving after being ordered to stop.
Despite the deployment of Iraqi police in the city, traffic in Baghdad is chaotic and unruly. U.S. soldiers and Iraqi National Guardsmen and police are often tense at checkpoints, which have been the targets of frequent attacks. American soldiers often issue orders in English that Iraqi drivers do not understand.
In the southern city of Basra, one civilian was killed and two were injured by a roadside bomb apparently intended for a British military convoy, according to Iraqi police.
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Iraq Approves Law Allowing Martial Rule
Amnesty Offer to Insurgents Is Seen Near
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 7, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32275-2004Jul6.html
BAGHDAD, July 6 -- Iraq's interim government has approved a national security law that will give Prime Minister Ayad Allawi broad powers of martial rule in troubled areas, including direct command of army, police and intelligence units, a senior Iraqi government official said Tuesday.
Although the law will give Allawi new latitude to combat insurgents, the prime minister had sought even tougher measures, some of which were stripped out of early drafts because of objections from other members of the interim government and from foreign governments, said the senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The law will restrict the prime minister's power by requiring any declaration of emergency rule to have the consent of the country's president and its two vice presidents, as well as a majority of the 32-member cabinet. Iraq's highest court also will be able to overturn Allawi's martial law declarations.
Even so, the new law will allow Allawi to deploy Iraq's army to fight insurgents. When the country's old army was disbanded and a new army created, L. Paul Bremer, then the U.S. administrator of Iraq, issued a decree preventing the army from being used for domestic security. But Bremer lifted that restriction in a final order issued before he departed Iraq on June 28, the day political authority was transferred to the interim government.
The interim government is also preparing an amnesty offer to insurgents that it hopes to announce Wednesday, but terms of the deal have not been finalized, the senior official said. Preliminary drafts, which would have allowed Iraqis who attacked U.S. troops to claim amnesty, have been revised to exclude anybody who was directly involved in serious acts of violence, the senior official said.
"Anyone accused of killings will not be eligible," the official said.
A second senior government official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, described the national security law and the amnesty offer in the same way.
The amnesty, which would provide fighters with a full pardon in exchange for laying down their arms, appears to be aimed more at low-level insurgents than senior leaders. Among those the government hopes to attract are poor Iraqis who have been bankrolled by Baath Party financiers to mount attacks and members of an illegal militia loyal to firebrand Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr.
Allawi and top members of his security team hope the offer will bifurcate the insurgency by winning over nationalist Iraqis who have been fighting to evict foreign troops from their country, while isolating foreign Islamic militants who have conducted suicide bomb attacks and assassinations in an attempt to turn Iraq into a battleground for their broader fight against the United States.
"The government feels we need to send a signal that there is an opportunity . . . to drive a wedge between the people committing bad acts," the senior official said.
Although an initial draft of the amnesty offer excluded only those responsible for "killing or raping Iraqis," the exclusions in the new version will be significantly broader, the official said. The change was made after U.S. officials objected, Iraqi political sources said.
The national security law will give Allawi the power to place himself or another administrator in charge of Iraqi soldiers, police and other security forces in areas under martial law. The government could also declare curfews, conduct emergency searches without court orders and ban public demonstrations in those areas. Further details were expected to be announced as early as Wednesday.
Early drafts of the law would have allowed Allawi to declare a state of emergency with a simple majority vote of his cabinet. Under the final version, such a declaration also needs the support of the president and the two vice presidents. A provision to allow for a nationwide state of emergency was deleted from the law, the senior official said.
Allawi is "not talking about blanket national martial law procedures with extreme measures," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 25.
In an allusion that could be applied to the current controversy over emergency powers, Wolfowitz said of Allawi: "I imagine he'll make mistakes, or at least he'll make errors of judgment, that he'll go in one direction and the political process will scream and say, 'You've gone too far.' I think he's a smart enough man to tack and change a bit."
Declarations of martial law will be valid for 60 days. Any extension will require the written approval of the prime minister and the president.
The country's top court, the Court of Cassation, will have the power to review emergency declarations and rescind them if it deems necessary. "There will be checks and balances on the prime minister's power," the senior official said.
The senior official said Allawi's draft was revised after "wide-ranging consultation" with members of the interim government. Among those who sought changes, the political sources said, were ethnic Kurdish leaders and the country's interim president, Ghazi Yawar, a Sunni Muslim tribal sheik.
A former senior U.S. intelligence official with personal knowledge of Allawi's past and present activities said the prime minister recognizes the interim government is "in a real dogfight, and everyone realizes if they don't establish security, create jobs and bring back the electricity, this government will not be worth a plugged nickel."
"He's the security prime minister," the retired official said. Fellow Iraqi politicians, who endorsed Allawi's appointment, "turned to him because they are not looking for democracy, they are looking for security, and they think he knows how to deal with it," the official said.
Pincus reported from Washington.
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New Law in Iraq Gives Premier Martial Powers to Fight Uprising
July 7, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/07/international/07CND-IRAQ.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 7 - Iraqi officials announced a new national safety law today that allows Iraq's prime minister to declare emergency rule in any part of the country threatened by instability.
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi on Tuesday signed the law of broad martial powers that allow him to impose curfews anywhere in the country, ban groups he considers seditious and order the detentions of people suspected of being security risks.
Putting a law in place that permits him to establish emergency powers is one of the first official actions Dr. Allawi has taken against a tenacious insurgency and lays the groundwork for a forceful response to civil unrest. The law was written with the input of lawyers and the ministers of justice and of human rights, he said in an interview on Tuesday.
His hard-line approach had already become apparent in his office's announcement early Tuesday that Iraqi forces provided the American military with intelligence for a Monday airstrike on what was described as a rebel safe house in Falluja. At least 10 people were killed.
The national safety law was announced today by the justice minister, Malik al-Hassan, and the human rights minister, Bakhtiar Amin, at a news conference here.
The law allows the prime minister to declare emergency rule in any part of the country threatened by instability, Dr. Allawi said in an interview in his cavernous office near the new American Embassy on Tuesday.
"Whenever and wherever it's going to be necessary, we will apply this law," Dr. Allawi said, speaking in a slow, gruff voice on his ninth day in office.
Postings appeared on Islamist Web sites on Tuesday denouncing Dr. Allawi as a puppet of the occupation forces.
Skeptics say the Iraqi security forces do not have the numbers, weapons or training to enforce emergency law and will need to lean heavily on American forces. Dr. Allawi said that the government was "beefing up these resources" and that "Iraqis should shoulder the responsibility, should be the people who enforce law and order in Iraq and against the terrorists."
The law was announced as street clashes raged in central Baghdad. A Reuters photographer said two American helicopters fired at a building during the fighting in the Haifa Street area, a commercial area near the Tigris river.
Earlier, machinegun fire and grenade explosions rang out. A witness said at least three Iraqi soldiers lay dead on a bridge and two wounded policemen were taken to a hospital after an attack on a police station.
A draft of the law obtained by The New York Times independently of Dr. Allawi's office stated that the prime minister has the right to "impose restrictions on the freedoms of citizens or foreigners in Iraq" in the event of a "dangerous threat" or "the occurrence of armed instability that threatens state institutions or its infrastructure."
The restrictions include the curtailing or banning of travel, group meetings and the possession of weapons.
The prime minister also has the power to take direct control of all security and intelligence forces in the area under emergency rule. According to the draft, he can also "appoint a military or civilian commander to assume administration of an emergency area" with the help of an emergency force, as long as the president currently Sheik Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar approves.
The law also imposes some restrictions on the emergency powers, including court reviews. The prime minister can impose emergency law only for a specified duration and must get the approval of the president, according to the document. The person who provided the document to The Times said he was unsure whether it was the final version of the law. Deeply involved in Iraqi politics, he expressed concern that it did not guarantee that general elections, scheduled for January 2005, would be held.
In an interview before taking office, Dr. Allawi hinted that the elections might be pushed back, but then quickly retracted his statement.
When Dr. Allawi first said last month that he might declare a state of emergency, critics worried that elections could be canceled. Human rights advocates are now raising concerns that the powers might be arbitrarily imposed, saying they want guarantees of fair treatment and proper legal procedures for anyone seized under martial law. Hania Mufti, the head of Human Rights Watch in Baghdad, said she wanted to see how much legal counsel would be provided to people detained or arrested under emergency rule. In addition, she said, `one of the dangers in such a situation is that people would be arrested without a warrant; if they're not arrested with a warrant, then there's no paper trail.`
"We need assurances there will be no exceptional areas in regard to the fundamental rights of the accused," she added.
Under the formal American occupation, Iraqis in effect lived under martial law for 15 months. Soldiers imposed curfews, cordoned off neighborhoods or villages and detained people at will. United Nations Resolution 1546 still grants the American military many of those rights.
Since the American occupation authority formally turned over sovereignty to Iraq on June 28, Dr. Allawi, a former Baath Party official who worked from abroad against Saddam Hussein, has tried to strike a balance in dealing with the insurgency.
He said he had opened negotiations with those insurgents who were not hard-core fighters and had offered the possibility of amnesty to them. But he also wants to show he can rule with an iron fist.
"There are people who have been doing things around the periphery and who call themselves the resistance," he said. "I told them: What are you trying to achieve, let us know. Do you want to bring Saddam back to rule Iraq; do you want to bring bin Laden to rule Iraq? We will fight you."
But he said they would be welcomed into the political process if they severed their relations "to the hard-core and to the criminals and the terrorists."
"Believe me, it has worked with some," he added. "They have given me very important information. They also have spread the word to others across the country, and we are finding more and more positiveness on this attitude."
There are signs that some Iraqis might have become fed up with insurgent bombings in which ordinary people have been killed. One insurgent group released a video on Tuesday threatening to drive out the Jordanian fighter Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has taken responsibility for many kidnappings and bombings.
As for the new emergency law, a senior American military official said American soldiers could help enforce it in certain situations.
"We can certainly be supportive of the Iraqi government when asked, on a case-by-case basis, looking at our means and capabilities," the official said. "If they wanted us to put up additional checkpoints to support the public safety law, we could be helpful. If they wanted us to support their curfews as we have done up in Mosul, I'm sure we can be helpful in that regard."
The national safety law was signed Tuesday morning by Dr. Allawi, President Yawar and other top officials, the prime minister said.
He took great pains to emphasize that the exercise of emergency measures called "extraordinary powers" in the draft would adhere to strict legal standards. He said the highest courts in Iraq and a group of judges on call 24 hours a day would be available to approve search warrants and other actions.
The draft of the law states that a national assembly expected to be formed later this month could oversee how the law is enforced.
The prime minister's decisions under emergency rule are subject to the review of the court of appeals, which can cancel the decisions, the draft said. The document also forbids the prime minister to cancel the transitional administrative law during a state of emergency. The law was signed by American administrators and Iraqi Governing Council members in early March and functions as an interim constitution.
That clause appears to be a nod to the Kurds, who value the transitional law because it essentially gives them veto power over the permanent constitution. The emergency law also prevents the prime minister from exercising martial powers in the region of Kurdistan without consulting officials there.
In the past week, the new government has gathered Iraqi and foreign reporters twice to announce details of the emergency law, only to cancel at the last minute. Dr. Allawi said the unveiling of the law had been delayed because "we wanted to make very sure that things could not be derailed from a legal point of view nor a human rights point of view, yet empower the government to do whatever is necessary to protect the citizens of Iraq."
"In fact," he said, "we completed signing the law after really elaborate deliberations and discussions to ensure checks and balances and to ensure the adherence to the rule of law and to the human rights, the respect of human rights issues."
According to the draft, the law allows for the detention of "those suspicious by their behavior and to search them or search their homes and places of employment and to impose mandatory residence upon them."
Dr. Allawi said he hoped the government would not have to apply the emergency law at all. "But once it becomes necessary," he said, "we'll do it."
Ian Fisher contributed reporting for this article.
-------- israel / palestine
Settler as Israel's victim: The right cries abuse
Haaretz
By Bradley Burston
July 07, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=447626&displayTypeCd=1&sideCd=1&contrassID=2
For decades, settlers have seen themselves portrayed as a coddled, lavishly subsidized, politically omnipotent segment of Israeli society, a primary, if not the sole, root cause of the tragedies, rights abuses, and diplomatic and military dangers of the occupation of the Palestinians. After nearly four years in the assault-rifle sights of Al Aqsa snipers and drive-by submachine gunners, after months in the shadow of the first announced government plan to eradicate settlements in the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank, a number of strident settler voices Monday told the world that it is looking in the wrong direction for the true victims of Israeli rights abuses.
"Israel today has become non-democratic," said Rabbi Yishai Babad, Secretary of the Yesha Rabbis Committee of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. "There is no longer freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is only granted to those with power and the media."
He said Ariel Sharon had exercised power in anti-democratic ways in dismissing the Likud rank-and-file's rejection of the disengagement plan in a May vote, and that now the prime minister's government was silencing rabbis and rightists who on religious or other principles disagreed with his intention to cede land to the Palestinians.
"It cannot be that every statement by rabbis or the right is viewed as sedition, and becomes an immediate sensation, when the extreme left speaks out day in and day out against all that is sacred, against the Torah. All of the media are full of terrible slanders against words of Torah and they could have been put on trial scores of times" if authorities had applied laws justly, he said.
The sensitivity of settlers to what they viewed as an escalating attack on their rights to free speech, free assembly and, especially, freedom of choosing their place of residence, was abruptly magnified by a briefing given cabinet ministers Monday by the head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency.
Shin Bet Director Avi Dichter raised hackles and fears across the right Sunday by warning of what he viewed as growing extremism among militant opponents of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan.
Spurred by Dichter's comments, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz plans to convene the Shin Bet chief, the IDF Judge Advocate General, and senior police and Justice Ministry officials to discuss policies regarding bringing suspects to trial over incitement to violence.
"We cannot speak freely today, because if I use strong words today, an indictment charge will be filed against me tomorrow," Babad said. "How can a rabbi speak freely, if Mazuz in the past has said he understands the sarbanim ["refuseniks"] of the left, while he said yesterday that he is about to 'take care' of refusal and all this talk against disengagement."
Babad refrained from directly addressing such issues as whether force may be used in resisting evacuation. But he added that when there is a clash between Israeli law and halakha, "halakha must always be paramount."
'We won't allow people to rape us'
Last month, the Yesha Rabbis Committee made headlines when it issued a ruling stating that "No person, civilian, soldier or policeman, may aid or actively participate in uprooting settlements or in expulsion of Jews." The panel of prominent settler spiritual leaders was careful not to address the minefield issue of whether it believed soldiers should actively refuse orders to remove settlers.
But others stepped into the breach.
"We are not people bereft of human rights, we are not people lacking human respect, and we will not allow people to rape us," said settlement movement veteran Uri Elitzur, in the late 1990s chief of staff to then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, alluding with rising emotion Monday of the threat that evacuation poses for settlers.
"If they come to rape us, and to nearly kill us, we will not be sacks of flour. It won't work like that."
Elitzur was among the first to go public with a carefully worded but militant line on resisting a future evacuation. Last month, interviewed by a national religious publication, Elitzur touched off a fireball of debate by advising soldiers to refuse orders to evict settlers, declaring that resort to violence - although without weapons like firearms - was justified when defending one's home from expulsion for political reasons.
Elitzur said that there have been attempts to silence the right ever since the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir, a right-wing student implacably opposed to Rabin's peace moves with the Palestinians.
The left has long argued - and the right has long strongly denied - that Amir's actions were fostered by vehemently anti-government demonstrations that preceded the November shooting, and by rabbis' pronouncements indicating that Rabin fell under the category of din rodef, a precept of Jewish law permitting the killing of Jews who put fellow Jews under mortal risk.
Rightists maintain that the killing has been exploited time and again as a means to curtail their rights to free speech and expression.
"We've been hearing the mantra since the Rabin murder: 'A prime minister has already once been murdered in Israel,'" Elitzur said. "But it cannot be, and certainly at such a difficult time in Israel, that the opposition's mouth is shut with the explanation that there are crazy people in Israel. It's true - there are crazy people. I have absolutely no responsibility for Yigal Amir and those whom resemble him."
Bloodshed as a point of agreement
If there were any points of agreement between the Shin Bet men and the right, it was that bloodshed would be difficult to avoid.
Asked if he foresaw civil war breaking out in the wake of strife over settlements, ex-Shin Bet chief, now peace plan campaigner, Ami Ayalon said he preferred not to use the term. "But as to whether we are moving toward the possibility of civil violence, I believe so.
"If we are not careful, it will reach the level of violence," Ayalon said. "Those who speak of din rodef, those who permit the use of violence, are granting a license to kill."
For his part, Elitzur said, "To my regret, if heaven forbid the government attempts to carry out its inhuman plan, there will be bloodshed.
"I don't accept this with understanding. But you cannot shut the mouth of the opposition just because there are people on the fringes, and there are many of these. In this sphere there will certainly be many."
Weighing in later on Monday, the Chief Rabbinate announced a ruling that under halakha, settlers were barred from using violence to resist evacuation. It remained to be seen whether the determination would have a hoped-for moderating effect.
Rabin killing still relevant
Cabinet minister Gideon Ezra, himself a former senior Shin Bet official, declared the image of Rabin's assassination remains as relevant as ever. "We would not be hearing these things from the head of the Shin Bet had it not been for what happened to prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, of blessed memory."
Ezra recently stirred a storm of controversy by suggesting during a Knesset speech that Gaza Strip settlers should inform on anti-disengagement militants they believe could act with violence.
"Someone among the settlers or people outside of the settlements may interpret incorrectly the comments of rabbis and others concerning resistance," Ezra said Monday. "These people must be located ahead of time, and prevented from carrying out any insane acts."
Yesha Rabbis Committee spokesman Rabbi Daniel Shilo countered that if anyone were guilty of incitement, it was Dichter, who he said had tarred an enormous segment of Israeli society with the taint of sedition.
"It is unacceptable to me that the head of the Shin Bet should speak like this. Either he has solid evidence, or he would be better off not speaking, because this [spreading rumors without evidence] is incitement, rebellion, and stirring up fights."
Referring directly to Dichter, Shilo said, "First of all, the spreading of rumors must stop. The propagation of hatred must stop. Solid evidence must be related to, not these sorts of flimsy things. I know no one who says that it is permitted to shove or strike security forces personnel.
Shilo said that when opponents of evacuation discuss resistance, "they speak of 'fierce passive resistance.' Expulsion of people from places where they have lived for dozens of years, and who were directed there by the government - this is an act that is the crudest form of trampling of civil rights. So there's no need to be amazed if among the people condemned to this terrible act, that there will be irregular responses as well. One can expect this."
Justice Minister Yosef Lapid suggested that it was Elitzur who was engaged in incitement. "We are speaking of incitement to violence, and when we speak of someone like him, who has a public standing even as a private citizen, his influence is certainly even stronger."
Lapid, of the secular-centrist Shinui party, said that in order to safeguard democracy and freedom of speech, Israel was loath to use the words of individuals as the trigger for criminal cases.
But Lapid added that "Israeli criminal law has clauses for incitement and incitement to violence, and if people exploit the Justice Ministry's very liberal approach toward free speech for the purpose of inciting to murder, din rodef, and the right to harm soldiers, I assume even the patience of the attorney general will be put to a difficult test."
Lapid said that "for the present, we are sending warnings." Lapid also singled out Rabbi Avigdor Neventzal, rabbi of the Old City of Jerusalem, who said last week that the ancient concept of din rodef could no longer be put into effect, but added that, strictly speaking, the distinction applied to anyone who transfers parts of the land of Israel to non-Jews.
"Its possible to interpret this as a thin hint, " Lapid said, "but he is trying in advance to wash his hands clean. These are examples of playing with fire, and the grave of Yitzhak Rabin is a reminder of this."
--------
Top Militant Among Five Killed in Raid In West Bank
Professor, Israeli Commando Also Dead in Nablus Fighting
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 7, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31527-2004Jul6.html
JERUSALEM, July 6 -- Four Palestinians -- including a senior militant and a college professor -- and an Israeli special forces officer were killed in fierce firefights early Tuesday in the West Bank city of Nablus, according to an Israeli military spokeswoman and Palestinian security sources and medical officials.
Two more Palestinians were killed during an attack on an Israeli military vehicle in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli spokeswoman said. The men were shot and killed as they ran toward an Israeli jeep while firing assault rifles and hurling grenades, she said. Two Israeli soldiers were injured by shrapnel during the incident, and explosive charges were found on the bodies of the dead men, she said.
The senior militant killed in Nablus, a key center for radical Palestinian groups about 28 miles north of Jerusalem, was identified by Palestinian hospital officials and in announcements blared from local mosques as Yamon Faraj, the West Bank military leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. One of Faraj's senior commanders in Nablus, Amjed Hanani, was also killed in the fighting, Palestinian officials said.
The killings occurred on the 11th day of an Israeli military operation against top Palestinian militants in Nablus that began June 26, when Israeli soldiers discovered an underground hideout in the center of the city and killed six senior leaders from three radical groups, including the West Bank heads of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and Islamic Jihad and the local chief of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas.
Late Tuesday, another militant -- Wael Araysha, 26 -- was killed when his M-16 rifle exploded inside his car near the Balata refugee camp, according to Palestinian security sources, who said they believed the weapon was booby-trapped and detonated by Israeli operatives. An Israeli security source said: "We had nothing to do with it. We believe it was a work accident."
Tuesday's fighting began shortly after midnight and was concentrated along Sekeh Street in Ein Beit Ilma, a refugee camp in the northwest of the city. Israeli and Palestinian accounts of the incident differed on several points.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said a team of elite naval commandos went into the neighborhood to arrest some wanted Palestinian militants and identified two of them entering a house. When the men realized that they had been spotted, she said, they fled from the building, then fired at the commandos from short range, killing Capt. Moran Vardi, 25, and wounding two others.
Soldiers returned fire and killed one of the gunmen. His companion escaped into a nearby apartment building and opened fire from the windows, then went to the roof and continued shooting, wounding another Israeli soldier, the spokeswoman said.
Israeli helicopters and tanks were called in for reinforcement, and a helicopter fired a missile at the gunman on the roof, wounding him, according to the spokeswoman, Maj. Sharon Feingold. She said the man managed to escape from the building, and soldiers shot and killed him on the street.
Palestinian medical officials said that at the start of the Israeli operation -- at about 12:30 a.m., while the hunt was on for the two militants -- Israeli soldiers with a loudspeaker ordered the residents of one building to evacuate. It was unclear whether the building was one of those the militants had entered.
The first to obey the order, medical officials said, were Khalid Salah, 54, a professor of electrical engineering at Nablus's An-Najah National University for 25 years, and his 16-year-old son, Muhammad. But when the pair opened the door to the street, the medical officials said, Israeli troops opened fire, mortally wounding them.
The medical officials and neighbors said that the Salah family pulled the pair back inside the building and telephoned for an ambulance, but that an emergency medical unit was prohibited from entering the area by Israeli soldiers who had declared the street a closed military zone.
Medical technicians reached the father and son at about 4 a.m., the officials said, and found them dead.
Three other Palestinians were injured during the fighting, Palestinian hospital officials said.
A statement by the university said that Salah earned his doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of California at Davis in 1985. A spokesman for the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem said that Salah's wife said in a conversation Tuesday with consulate staff that he had a green card to work in the United States.
Feingold denied that Israeli troops had called for residents to evacuate any buildings in the area until the fighting was finished. "No one opened a door and was shot at," she said.
After the two militants were killed, Feingold said, residents of the building where the second gunman had taken shelter were ordered outside so troops could safely search the rooms. After that, the bodies of Salah and his son were brought out, but it was unclear when the pair was killed or by whom, she said.
--------
Mideast Clashes Kill 6 Palestinians and Israeli Officer
July 7, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/07/international/middleeast/07mide.html
JERUSALEM, July 6 - The Israeli military shot dead six Palestinians, and an Israeli officer was also killed during two clashes on Tuesday, one in the West Bank, the other in the Gaza Strip.
Of the Palestinians killed, four were militants, but the military also acknowledged the deaths of "two innocent Palestinians," identified as an American-educated professor and his teenage son.
In the West Bank city of Nablus, Israeli forces staged a nighttime raid to arrest two wanted Palestinians, but encountered heavy fire that killed Capt. Moran Vardi and wounded three other soldiers, the Israeli military said.
The Israelis shot dead one of the wanted Palestinians, who was taking cover in a shed, but the second escaped to a nearby apartment building, and fired at the Israeli troops as he worked his way to the rooftop, said Maj. Sharon Feingold, an Israeli military spokeswoman.
An Israeli helicopter unleashed a missile at the gunman, but he continued to return fire until he was killed by ground troops, Major Feingold said. The two dead gunmen belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, she said.
The shootout also claimed the lives of two residents of the building: Khaled Salah, who was in his 50's and taught in the engineering department at An Najah National University in Nablus, and his 16-year-old son, Muhammad.
Dr. Salah's daughter, Diana, 23, told The Associated Press that the family took cover during the intense shooting. She said her father and brother were each hit by a single bullet after the shooting died down and the army called on residents to come out of the building.
Major Feingold said the military did not know the exact circumstances, but regretted the deaths.
Dr. Salah received a doctorate in engineering from the University of California, Davis, in 1985, and was an American green card holder, according to An Najah National University and the United States Consulate in East Jerusalem.
In the Gaza Strip, two Palestinian attackers threw grenades and opened fire on cars traveling along a road used by Jewish settlers, the Israeli military said. Soldiers patrolling the area shot and killed both of them, the military added.
Israel's public security minister, Tzahi Hanegbi, said he feared that Jewish extremists might try to kill senior Israeli leaders in an attempt to halt the government's plan to dismantle Jewish settlements in Gaza.
Mr. Hanegbi told Israeli television that he believed "here are people who have already decided that, when the time comes, they will save the people of Israel."
"They will assassinate a prime minister, a minister, a military officer or a police officer," he said. "They don't always succeed and they don't always have the means to carry out the acts. But we are not lacking extremists."
For the past three days, Israel has been holding a fierce debate on the threat posed by Jewish extremists. Avi Dichter, head of the Shin Bet security agency, raised the issue at a cabinet meeting on Sunday.
Since then, many commentators have brought up the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister killed by a Jewish militant in 1995. Before his assassination, some had called Mr. Rabin a traitor for giving to Palestinians land that Israelis had occupied since the Arab-Israeli war in 1967.
The Yesha Council, which represents West Bank and Gaza settlers, said Monday that it was starting a campaign to work against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's evacuation plan. The group says it supports only peaceful and lawful opposition.
But some settlers have warned that violence could break out.
Rabbi Shlomo Breen, who heads a Jewish seminary in the West Bank, told the Israel radio that settlers "do not, of course, want a civil war, heaven forbid."
"But it will be impossible to stop the train once it reaches the brink of the abyss," he added.
A member of Israel's opposition Labor Party accused Mr. Sharon's government of expanding West Bank settlement outposts that the government has pledged to dismantle.
"This government is evading a promise it made to the United States," said Ephraim Sneh, a legislator who had served as the deputy defense minister.
The Middle East peace plan, known as the road map, calls on Israel to take down all settlement outposts erected since Mr. Sharon came to power in March 2001.
The Israeli government recently presented the United States with a list of 28 such outposts, but the Israeli monitoring group Peace Now says it has documented 53 outposts.
Most consist of just a few mobile homes on West Bank hilltops. But Mr. Sneh said the government was permitting the outposts to expand and, in some cases, providing services like roads and electricity.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell met with Israel's foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, in Washington on Tuesday and afterward called for the Israelis to take down the outposts.
"I explained to the minister that we have some disappointment in the rate at which outposts have been removed, and the minister gave me assurances they are hard at work on that," Mr. Powell said.
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, arrived Tuesday on a visit to Israel, a country that has always refused to confirm or deny whether it has nuclear weapons.
Dr. ElBaradei, who plans to meet with Mr. Sharon and other senior Israeli officials, has recently called for talks on making the Middle East a region free of nuclear weapons.
He said he would like to see Israel sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but said he was not in a position to pressure Israel on that or other issues.
--------
Israel's W.Bank Barrier Faces World Court Ruling
July 7, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-mideast-barrier.html
QALQILYA, West Bank (Reuters) - Every time Nisreen Hurub needs kidney dialysis, she has to take a long and painful detour to hospital around Israel's West Bank barrier.
Every day that passes without another bombing or shooting near his shop in northern Israel, Michael Nachmass is thankful for fences and walls that let him breathe a little easier.
In one of the highest-profile decisions of its 58-year history, the World Court rules this Friday on the legality of a barrier that Palestinians decry as a land grab that multiplies misery, but which Israelis call a life-saver.
Palestinians hope the court will say it is illegal for the Jewish state to build on land captured in the 1967 war, increasing international pressure on Israel and possibly triggering a call for sanctions.
But the advisory opinion of the Hague-based International Court of Justice is non-binding and Israel, with U.S.-backing, does not accept the court's right to rule.
The impact of the completed 200 km (125 mile) stretch of fence, ditch and concrete wall is already huge. Eventually it should stretch for 730 km.
``I cry from frustration,'' complains Hurub of her journey from the West Bank village of Habla to hospital in nearby Qalqilya. A once simple trip now takes hours.
Thousands more Palestinians have been cut off from farms, schools, relatives and cities they used to rely on.
But in the town of Hadera, Nachmass thanks the barrier for stopping a series of deadly attacks by militants from the nearby West Bank.
``People are not as frightened as before,'' he said, recalling carnage and panic on the street outside his shop.
PALESTINIANS MIGHT LOBBY FOR SANCTIONS
Israel calls the barrier essential to stop suicide bombings and shooting attacks like those that have killed hundreds of Israelis during nearly 4 years of conflict. It argues that the route is the best for security.
But the Palestinians, who pursued their call for a World Court hearing via the U.N. General Assembly, say the route curves deep into the West Bank to annex Jewish settlement blocs and to deprive them of a viable state.
They fear the barrier will cost them far more than they might gain from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's current plan to give up the Gaza Strip, where they also want a state.
If Friday's ruling favors the Palestinians, they might lobby in the General Assembly for sanctions against Israel -- similar to the move to ostracise apartheid South Africa after the World Court ruled its occupation of Namibia illegal in 1971.
``The next question would be to ask the international community what it is going to do,'' said the Palestinians' legal adviser, Michael Tarazi. He did not detail precise options.
Israeli officials are relying on their U.S. ally's veto in the U.N. Security Council to defeat any attempt to push through punitive measures if the ruling goes against them.
Both the United States and European Union shunned the World Court barrier hearings that began in February.
``We can't accept any external involvement from the International Court of Justice,'' said Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom. ``We don't believe it is the place that this issue should be discussed.''
The Palestinians won some cheer from Israel's High Court last week when it ruled that sections of the barrier needed to be moved to ease Palestinian hardship and ensure access to farmland, schools and cities.
But the court nonetheless said it recognized Israel's security concerns and its need to build the barrier inside the West Bank.
-------- russia / georgia
Tensions mount over South Ossetia
Wednesday, 7 July, 2004,
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3873351.stm
Russia has accused Georgia of provocation after Georgian troops intercepted a Russian convoy headed for the disputed region of South Ossetia.
Two Russian lorries which were carrying military equipment were impounded.
Relations between Georgia and Russia have become increasingly strained over the last few weeks as the situation in the breakaway region deteriorates.
Last week, talks between the three sides to try to find a solution to the 12-year conflict broke down.
Georgia's new President, Mikhail Saakashvili, refused to take part in any talks, until South Ossetia released three Georgian officers detained earlier.
'Serious concern'
Russia and Georgia share a peacekeeping role in the South Ossetia region.
The head of the Russian contingent, Maj Gen Svyatoslav Nabzdorov, said the convoy had been stopped by Georgian officials near the South Ossetian village of Kurta late on Tuesday.
Eight of the 10 vehicles were released. The two that were loaded with weapons - including more than 100 missiles - were sent to Tbilisi.
The equipment was destined for a helicopter unit that all three sides considered necessary, Maj Gen Nabzdorov said.
But a Georgian interior ministry spokesman said the large number of weapons on board did not correspond with Russia's peacekeeping duties in the area.
Moscow argued that Georgia had earlier agreed to allow the shipment into the peacekeeping zone.
"Georgia's moves cannot be qualified as anything but a provocation," Russian defence ministry spokesman, Vyacheslav Sedov, said.
Moscow's foreign ministry has expressed "serious concern" over the incident.
Central control
Moscow says it wants to help broker a peaceful solution, but many people in Georgia suspect the Russians of siding with the separatists, says the BBC's Chloe Arnold in Tbilisi.
South Ossetia broke away from Georgia in the 1990s, after a war that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It claimed independence from Georgia and wants to join North Ossetia, which is ethnically similar and part of Russia.
President Saakashvili has vowed to bring Georgia's breakaway regions back under central control.
-------- spies
Bush Undecided on When to Name New CIA Director
Associated Press
Wednesday, July 7, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32205-2004Jul6.html
President Bush said yesterday he has not decided whether he will nominate a new CIA director before the November election.
The agency's current head, George J. Tenet, leaves his post Sunday, his seventh anniversary at the agency. Poised to take over as acting director is his deputy, John E. McLaughlin, 61.
Asked whether he planned to wait until after the election to name Tenet's replacement, Bush said: "I haven't made up my mind on the nomination process."
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) is said to be the front-runner. Washington insiders have speculated for a month about who else may be in the running: Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage; former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.); Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.); retired Adm. William O. Studeman, a former National Security Agency director; and perhaps McLaughlin.
Among factors the White House must weigh when deciding whom to name -- and when -- is whether a confirmation process before the election would draw attention to intelligence failures and how it would be perceived should an attack occur with only an acting director in place.
Bush, who spoke during an Oval Office meeting with Prime Minister David Oddsson of Iceland, declined to comment about an upcoming report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which is expected to be highly critical of the intelligence community's assessments of Saddam Hussein's weapons capability in the months preceding the war in Iraq.
"I will wait for the report," Bush said. "I will look at the whole report."
Bush, however, added that Hussein harbored terrorists and was a threat to his people and the region.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also declined to comment.
-------- us
Marine Is Free, Family Reports
Associated Press
Wednesday, July 7, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32219-2004Jul6.html
BEIRUT, July 6 -- The family of Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun said Tuesday they had received word that the Lebanese-born U.S. Marine, who was kidnapped in Iraq and at one point was reported beheaded, was free and well.
A Lebanese government official also said Hassoun, 24, was released, though his whereabouts were unknown. The kidnappers freed Hassoun after he pledged not to return to the U.S. military, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Hassoun has been missing since June 19.
Hassoun's brother in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli said Tuesday he was confident that his brother was free, although he had not spoken to him. "We have received reliable information the guy is free," Sami Hassoun said. "We received a sign from my brother reassuring us."
Sami Hassoun said the family had received credible information from a person who came to their Tripoli home. The person, whom he did not identify, did not say where the Marine was, Sami Hassoun said.
On Saturday, a militant group calling itself the Ansar al-Sunna Army claimed on a Web site that it had beheaded Hassoun. On Monday, a group calling itself Islamic Response told al-Jazeera television that Hassoun was safe at an undisclosed location.
--------
HOSTAGE
In a New Twist, the Family of a Marine Says Iraqi Captors Have Released Him
July 7, 2004
By IAN FISHER and NEIL MacFARQUHAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/07/international/middleeast/07MAYH.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 6 - Three days after he was reported beheaded, a United States marine held captive in Iraq has been released, his family said on Tuesday. But the mystery surrounding the marine, Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, was still not fully resolved: his family said they had not spoken with him directly.
"We received a sign that he is alive and he is released and everything is O.K.," his older brother, Sami, 26, said in a telephone interview from Lebanon, where Corporal Hassoun was born and where some of his family still live. "The sign is something that came directly from him. There is something that nobody else could possibly know. It's a certain clue. He is alive and he is released."
The level of violence in Iraq is still high, and at least five people were killed Tuesday when a suicide bomber drove into a funeral service near the restive city of Baquba, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. Some reports put the death toll as high as 13, with more than 30 wounded.
The funeral was for two people killed two days before when gunmen attacked a municipal building in Baquba.
Bombings in which civilians are killed and wounded have outraged many Iraqis, and what may be a dramatic sign of that anger emerged Tuesday when a militant group issued a video threatening to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who has claimed responsibility for many deadly attacks and beheadings of captives here.
The video, released to Al Arabiya television, had all the trappings of similar taped threats against Western targets in Iraq, but seemed slightly more elaborate: four armed men, their faces wrapped in Arab headscarves, appeared before an Iraqi flag, as one of the men, with an Iraqi accent, read off a statement threatening to kill Mr. Zarqawi unless he left Iraq, and anyone who hid him here. A pistol and a rocket-propelled grenade lay next to a Koran on a table from which the man delivered the statement.
"We have prepared ourselves," he said, identifying himself as part of a previously unknown group, the Salvation Movement. "We swear we will track him down wherever he is and arrest him and his followers or kill them. This is the last warning for those who shelter him."
Iraqi and American officials have contended in recent days that a split has been growing between Iraqi insurgents and fighters who have come from other Muslim countries over the issue of killing innocent civilians. They have offered no hard proof of the claim, and the prime minister of the new interim government, Iyad Allawi, has said his strategy for taming the violence in Iraq is to try to appeal to Iraqis' sense of nationalism to reject the presence of foreign fighters like Mr. Zarqawi.
Even though the United States military recently increased to $25 million the reward on the head of Mr. Zarqawi, who is believed to be linked to Al Qaeda, a senior military official with the multinational force said the military did not condone the group's threats.
The official said that a bombing on Monday on what the military said was a safe house for Mr. Zarqawi's group in Falluja, west of Baghdad, had killed 12 to 15 people, among them suicide bombers. The official denied reports from Falluja that several civilians, among them children, had been killed.
The attack, which involved four 500-pound bombs, was the fifth time in recent weeks that the United States military had bombed targets that it said belonged to Mr. Zarqawi's group. The military said this bombing, the first since sovereignty was turned over to an interim Iraqi government last week, was carried out with coordination by and intelligence from the new government.
Near Falluja, the center of the resistance against American troops and the Iraqi police and government officials, three United States marines were killed on Monday when their armored car was struck by a homemade roadside bomb.
Marine officers said the troops had been searching for roadside bombs in Zeydan, a village south of Falluja. Two of the men were killed at the scene, and another died from wounds, they said. A number of marines were also wounded.
The claim by the family of Corporal Hassoun, 24, that he had been released was another turn in an unusual case. Corporal Hassoun, who worked as an Arabic translator, disappeared from his base on June 20.
On June 27, Al Jazeera broadcast a videotape of him blindfolded, with a sword held above his head. In that tape, Islamic Response said it would behead him if the Americans did not release all of their prisoners.
Then, last Saturday, two Islamist Web sites carried a message attributed to the leader of another militant group, the Army of Ansar al-Sunna, saying it had beheaded Corporal Hassoun and would shortly release images of his death. That message, addressed to President Bush, also said the corporal had been involved romantically with an Arab woman and had been lured off his base.
But on Sunday, Ansar al-Sunna posted an Internet message saying that it had not killed Corporal Hassoun and that someone had put a phony message on the two Web sites. Then on Monday, Islamic Response issued a statement saying that he had been moved to "a place of safety."
His brother, Sami, would not provide details of the sign he said the family had received that the corporal had been released, but said the family was much more hopeful about his safety than in recent days.
"We are still crossing our fingers and praying to see him again," Mr. Hassoun said in an interview from Tripoli, Lebanon. "It's a much better mood than the last couple of days. We are optimistic."
United States military officials, who said they did not believe that Corporal Hassoun was being held under duress, say he was absent without leave from the base. But his brother said that charge was not important.
"All I care about is that he is alive," he said. "That is worth the whole world."
The military also reported that an American soldier had killed a 4-year-old boy and wounded another child after the car the children were traveling in tried to drive past an American checkpoint in western Baghdad. The military official said the vehicle had approached the checkpoint, turned off its lights, then continued driving, nearly hitting the soldiers. The soldiers fired six shots into the rear of the car, killing the boy.
The driver, who was later released, said his brakes were not working, the official said. Soldiers on the scene tested the brakes, which they said functioned. The official said the military was investigating the incident.
Ian Fisher reported from Baghdad for this article, and Neil MacFarquhar from Cairo. Dexter Filkins contributed reporting from Baghdad.
---------
Air Force Pilot Who Bombed Canadians Is Fined $5,672
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 7, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32164-2004Jul6.html
An Air Force fighter pilot who mistakenly bombed a group of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan in 2002 -- killing four and injuring eight -- was found guilty of dereliction of duty yesterday and was fined $5,672 for an act that a military commander characterized as shameful.
Maj. Harry Schmidt, 38, avoided jail time and criminal charges, but he will not be allowed to fly Air Force jets again as a result of the nonjudicial ruling issued by Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Carlson found that Schmidt made a rash decision contrary to orders when he dropped a 500-pound laser-guided bomb from his F-16 on Canadian troops training near Kandahar on April 17, 2002.
Schmidt and another pilot, Maj. William Umbach, have said they mistook the Canadian live-fire exercise at the Tarnak Farm range as an enemy attack and have said they acted in self-defense. They also claimed through their attorneys that they were not warned about the Canadian presence and that they were under the influence of amphetamines that blurred their judgment.
In issuing the reprimand, Carlson ruled that Schmidt "flagrantly" disregarded a direct order to hold his fire, displayed a lack of flight discipline and ignored the rules of engagement.
"Your actions indicate that you used your self-defense declaration as a pretext to strike a target, which you rashly decided was an enemy firing position, and about which you had exhausted your patience in waiting for clearance from the Combined Air Operations Center to engage," Carlson wrote. "You used the inherent right of self-defense as an excuse to wage your own war."
Charles W. Gittins, Schmidt's attorney, said he and his client are shocked by the decision, calling the accident a product of senior leadership's failure to adequately plan and execute missions in Afghanistan.
"By placing the blame at the lowest possible level, the lowest ranked American in the chain, the Air Force has protected the criminal negligence of its general officer corps," Gittins said. "This bodes ill for the rank-and-file USAF combat aviator. They can expect to be sacrificed for the careerist generals who claim to be Air Force leaders but lack the moral courage to stand up and do what is right."
Schmidt appeared before Carlson on Thursday to plead his own case rather than be the subject of a court-martial, which could have yielded a harsher punishment. Schmidt can appeal the punishment by Monday, which Gittins said he is considering.
Umbach, the lead pilot on the mission, was reprimanded last year for his inability to control Schmidt and granted a request to retire from the Air Force. Schmidt, an instructor in the Illinois Air National Guard and a graduate of the Navy's "Top Gun" Fighter Weapons School, will remain in the Air National Guard but will no longer be permitted to fly Air Force aircraft, according to an Air Force release.
The incident caused outrage in Canada. A Canadian Department of National Defence board of inquiry found the pilots to blame for the bombing. Heather Brunner, a spokeswoman for the department, said Canadian officials were declining to comment on the appropriateness of the punishment.
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U.S. Military Families Leaving Bahrain Over Terror Threat
July 7, 2004
By JAMES GLANZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/07/international/middleeast/07CND-PULL.html
KUWAIT CITY, July 7 - The families of sailors, marines and other military personnel have begun leaving a major naval base on the tiny island nation of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf after the Pentagon warned that terrorists were planning imminent attacks against Americans there.
The American pullout from Bahrain, a nation with little violent crime, no significant history of terrorist activity and recent moves toward democratic rule that have been praised by the West as exemplary, has raised the ominous possibility that the terrorist threat has begun seeping through the entire Gulf region from known trouble spots in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and a few other states.
The pullout follows a State Department advisory warning Americans in Bahrain to leave and others to avoid traveling there, and an order authorizing employees' family members at the American Embassy in Bahrain that they may leave the country if they wish to.
Within Bahrain, a place that local officials refer to with almost autonomic regularity as an island of peace and stability, and where the United States Navy has maintained a presence for half a century, the move has caused deep consternation.
If other countries follow the move by the United States, it could have an impact on the critical financial and tourism sectors here, not to mention the Bahraini psyche, which has for so long functioned symbiotically with American expatriots who have found this a congenial, if temporary, home.
"We treasure and value a lot our special relationship with the United States," said Dr. Muhammad Abdul Ghaffar Abdulla, the minister of state for foreign affairs, who like many Bahraini officials spent years living and working in the United States. "If they leave," Dr. Abdulla said, "we wish that they come back soon."
In one indication that the American warnings have already had wider resonances, Canada has now posted on its consular affairs Web site a caution to its citizens on the dangers of traveling or living in Bahrain.
Dr. Abdulla said that he understood that the warning may have been less a reflection on Bahraini citizens than on transnational terrorists -- in particular, the ones across the 12-mile causeway connecting this nation with Saudi Arabia. But many Bahrainis also speculate that the arrest and quick release, two weeks ago, of six local terror suspects may have led to an overreaction by the United States.
The release was required by one of those democratic reforms that the United States has praised -- a law requiring that suspects may be detained for no more than 48 hours without compelling evidence.
"They were really arrested by law," said Maj. General Abdul Latif R. Al-Zayani, chief of public security at the ministry of the interior. "They were detained by law. And we made sure that we respected the human rights."
General Zayani said that the investigation continued, and then experts were combing through things like seized computers for any evidence that would justify going to trial.
An investigation into the terror threat was already in motion when the arrests were made, said Vice Admiral David C. Nichols, commander of United States Navy Forces Central Command and the Navy's Fifth Fleet, which is operating in the Persian Gulf.
"I would say the fact that they released them right in the middle of this probably didn't help," said Admiral Nichols, "but frankly I don't think the decison would have been any different in the short term had they held onto these guys."
Admiral Nichols said that he supported the decision, ultimately made by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, because so many family members of the 4,500 employees at the base live scattered about in the community -- unusual in the Middle East, where residence within secure compounds is more common. Admiral Nichols said that he now estimated that some 900 family members would be affected by the decision.
"My wife is here and she's not happy nor are any of the families happy, nor am I happy," Admiral Nichols said. "But the fact is this is a prudent thing to do."
Whatever the complexities of the local issues, said Gary G. Sick, a specialist on the Middle East at Columbia University who served with the United States navy in Bahrain in the 1960's, historically peaceful Gulf nations like this nation may have to face the unpleasant reality that terrorists can move easily across their borders -- and may be highly motivated to do so.
An attack by groups like al Qaeda in Bahrain, Dr. Sick said, "would in effect tell the Arab world that we can strike wherever. That there are no safe havens."
"It doesn't strike me as completely beyond the realm of possibility," Dr. Sick said. "Basically by striking in places where foreigners and in particular Americans have felt safe they could make quite a statement."
In dire language, the State Department advisory warns that "extremists are planning attacks against U.S. and other Western interests in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Credible information indicates that extremists remain at large..."
Helping to account for the puzzled reaction within the country itself, the downtown streetscapes are clean and modern to a fault, service in restaurants is punctual and polite and the casual traveler would be hard pressed to feel any sense of danger while traveling about town. There was exactly 1 murder in Bahrain in 2003, according to interior ministry statistics, and an average of 4.4 in the previous five years. Bahrain's population is just under 700,000.
One of the men arrested in the raid two weeks ago, Bassam Bohkawa, a software engineer with a history of outspokenness on things like Arab detainees at the American base at Guantanamo bay, ridiculed the notion that he might be a danger to foreigners.
"This is not Yemen," said Mr. Bohkawa in an interview in the lobby of the Diplomat Hotel. "We don't even know how to use a weapon. It's a very peaceful place."
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Fighter Pilot Found Guilty of Dereliction in Mistaken Bombing
July 7, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/07/national/07pilot.html
WASHINGTON, July 6 - A fighter pilot who mistakenly bombed and killed four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan two years ago was found guilty of dereliction of duty Tuesday, issued a written reprimand and fined $5,672 in pay, the Air Force said.
The Air Force announcement, not unexpected in view of recent developments in the case, apparently ends the flying career of Maj. Harry Schmidt, who dropped a 500-pound bomb on the Canadian troops on April 17, 2002. In addition to those killed, eight soldiers were seriously wounded.
Major Schmidt "acted shamefully" and exhibited "arrogance and a lack of flight discipline,'' Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, the Eighth Air Force commander, said in a statement issued at Barksdale Air Force base in Louisiana.
Major Schmidt will no longer be permitted to fly Air Force planes but will continue to serve in the Illinois Air National Guard, General Carlson said.
The deaths of the four, the first Canadian soldiers to die in combat conditions since the Korean War, seriously frayed relations between the United States and Canada as Washington was trying to build international support for its campaign in Afghanistan.
Major Schmidt, 38, could have been prosecuted on charges of manslaughter, assault and dereliction of duty, with a possible prison term of 64 years. From the start, he maintained that the Air Force had given him no warning that allies would be performing live-fire exercises on the ground in an area he would be flying over in his F-16. Major Schmidt said he mistook the Canadians for Taliban guerrillas.
In rejecting those arguments, General Carlson said the major had shown "a total lack of flight discipline" and had ignored controllers' instructions to "stand by" and "hold fire."
"Your actions indicate that you used your self-defense declaration as a pretext to strike a target, which you rashly decided was an enemy firing position, and about which you had exhausted your patience in waiting for clearance from the Combined Air Operations Center to engage," General Carlson wrote, adding, "You used the inherent right of self-defense as an excuse to wage your own war."
"Following the engagement in question," the general continued, "you lied about the reasons why you engaged the target after you were directed to hold fire and then you sought to blame others. You had the right to remain silent, but not the right to lie."
In June 2003, General Carlson offered Major Schmidt the option of nonjudicial punishment, but Major Schmidt demanded a court-martial. Last week, however, Major Schmidt changed his mind and said he would accept the nonjudicial process he had been offered a year ago.
The major presented his version of events, through written material and an oral explanation, during a one-hour appearance before General Carlson on Friday, the Air Force said. General Carlson's options for punishment in that forum did not include imprisonment.
Maj. William Umbach, who was flying with Major Schmidt the evening of the bombing, also faced manslaughter, assault and dereliction charges initially, but was reprimanded and allowed to retire.
Maureen Decaire, the mother of one of the Canadians wounded in the bombing, told The Associated Press that she believed that Major Schmidt had not intended to cause harm, but she also said that the decision had left her unsatisfied.
"I would like to see him accept responsibility, which I don't think has happened," Ms. Decaire told The Associated Press from Winnipeg.
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Lawmakers: Reserves Stretched to Limit
July 7, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Congress-Reserves.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a bipartisan show of concern that the military is dangerously overworked, lawmakers said Wednesday the Pentagon is stretching troops to their limit and perhaps undermining the nation's future force.
Amid worries the high level of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan could discourage potential new service members, Rep. John McHugh, R-N.Y., said it was not reassuring that most reserve components were falling below their recruiting goals for the year.
As of May 31, the Army National Guard was reported at 88 percent, the Air National Guard at 93 percent and the Air Force Reserve at 91 percent of their goals.
``We're taxing our part-time soldiers, our Guard and Reserves nearly to the breaking point,'' said Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. ``We have to be aware that the families back home are paying a significant price. We don't want to break the force.''
Added Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., the committee chairman: ``We're also concerned that insufficient force structure and manpower are leading the services to make decisions that I liken to eating the seed corn. That is, in order to make it through today, we do things that mortgage the future.''
The Army recently decided to deploy units that have been used to train other soldiers. Hunter also noted that the ratio of reserves to active duty soldiers in Iraq is increasing and he said he was concerned that troops are not getting enough turnaround time back in the states.
Defense Department officials testified at a committee hearing about troop rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The session followed last week's announcement that the Army was calling up soldiers who had already served in the Middle East.
Stretched by war needs, the Pentagon already had declared a ``stop-loss'' to prevent troops from leaving once they have finished their obligation.
The Army in April broke a promise to some active-duty units, including the 1st Armored Division, that they would not have to serve more than 12 months in Iraq. It also has extended the tours of other units, including some in Afghanistan.
Some lawmakers are seeking a permanent increase in the size of the military. But Pentagon personnel chief David Chu said defense officials can make better use of those in the service by reorganizing brigades, making sure uniformed personnel are not performing jobs civilians could do and temporarily increasing troops levels with stop-loss and other devices.
``I really think you're wrong,'' Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., told Chu.
Cole said the Pentagon is doing a superb job of managing it resources, but that ``in the end, it does take people, and you are using people pretty hard right now.''
``At some point there's a limit in terms of personnel, and I think you're there, Cole said.
Critics have charged that wide use of the stop-loss device and dipping into the Individual Ready Reserve amount to conscripting people to fight in Iraq.
For the first time since the 1991 Gulf War, the Army is forcing thousands of former soldiers back into uniform, a reflection of the strain on the service of the long campaign in Iraq, coming on top of the global fight against terrorism.
More than 5,600 former soldiers -- mostly those who recently finished serving and have skills in military policing, engineering, logistics, medicine or transportation -- will be assigned to National Guard and Reserve units scheduled to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, officials announced last week.
Members of the Individual Ready Reserve, perhaps thousands more are likely to be called up next year, the Pentagon said.
People in the Individual Ready Reserve are distinct from the National Guard and Reserve because they do not perform regularly scheduled training and are not paid as reservists.
They are eligible to be recalled in an emergency because their active duty stints did not complete the service obligation in their enlistment contracts.
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Army Commanders Punished in Iraq
The Associated Press
July 07. 2004
http://www.gadsdentimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040707/APA/407070778
The Army has given non-judicial punishments to three commanders linked to the drowning of an Iraqi civilian, saying they conspired to impede a homicide investigation.
Capt. Matthew Cunningham, Maj. Robert Gwinner and Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman were punished this spring under Article 15, which does not require a court proceeding or public record, the Army said Tuesday.
The Army would not disclose the punishments, citing privacy laws, but there was no criminal conviction or prison time.
Last week, the military said three other soldiers based at Fort Carson had been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the Jan. 3 drowning of 19-year-old Iraqi detainee Zaidoun Fadel Hassoun in the Tigris River, allegedly for violating a curfew. A fourth soldier is charged with pushing a second man, who survived, into the river.
First Lt. Jack M. Saville, Sgt. 1st Class Tracy E. Perkins, Sgt. Reggie Martinez and Spc. Terry Bowman Jr. face a July 22 hearing. They are from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team based at Fort Carson.
The military says Saville and Perkins conspired with Sassaman, Gwinner and Cunningham to mislead investigators by denying the Iraqis were shoved into the river.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Coast Guard: U.S. Vulnerable to Cole - Style Attacks
July 7, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-shipping-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States remains vulnerable to attacks by small, fast boats like the one that killed 17 sailors on the U.S. warship Cole in 2000, despite tough new global security laws, the head of the Coast Guard said on Wednesday.
Adm. Thomas Collins, commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, said the new United Nations International Ship and Port Facility Security code and related U.S. Maritime Transportation Security Act focused on large commercial ships, not the roughly 60 million U.S. recreational vessels.
The two new sets of regulations, designed to thwart seaborne terrorist attacks, came into force last Thursday.
``That (an attack by a small, high-speed vessel) is one potential vulnerability. It's not unique to the United States. Globally, that's one potential threat,'' he told Reuters in an interview.
In the Cole attack in Yemen, two suicide bombers on a small craft laden with up to 500 pounds (225 kg) of explosives pulled up to the guided missile destroyer and rammed their boat into the vessel as it was refueling in the port of Aden.
The new UN regulations, signed by 147 governments, require ports, stevedoring companies and owners of ships larger than 500 tons to draw up plans for responding to a terror threat, implement tighter security around facilities, train staff, and obtain security certificates proving compliance.
``The ISPS code and MTSA are largely focused on commercial facilities, commercial traffic, the larger carriers,'' Collins said.
There was no national registry or national system of operator licensing for recreational vessels, he said. Registration and licensing for these kinds of boats are handled by individual states.
``Do we have a way to control all those (small vessels) on a 7-by-24, day-in-day-out basis? No,'' he said, but added, ``We can address the issue of recreational vessels in a given port under certain threat conditions.''
Collins said the Coast Guard could take additional security precautions for small private boats -- such as limiting movement or increasing reporting requirements -- if intelligence indicated a terrorist threat.
But on a normal day, he said, ``we are not controlling recreational traffic in any port absent some specific threats.''
``Our problem is much more complicated and grander in scale than one-port countries,'' Collins said, pointing to the United States' 361 ports. ``It is a complex issue. It's difficult to start imposing severe control actions on recreational traffic.''
Collins said the Coast Guard was contemplating new reporting requirements for foreign vessels below the current threshold for commercial ships as part of efforts to enhance maritime security, but no decision had been taken yet.
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U.S. Restricts 3 Oil Tankers in Security Crackdown
July 7, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-transport-shipping.html
LONDON (Reuters) - The United States restricted operations of three oil tankers calling at its ports from July 1 to July 5 under new United Nations maritime counter-terrorism laws but did not deny them entry, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Wednesday.
Also denied entry or detained were six foreign-flagged ships that carry dry commodities like wheat or sugar in bulk, two container ships and one general-cargo vessel calling at its ports from July 1 to July 6, the Coast Guard said.
Shipping brokers said the movements of a crude oil tanker and two petroleum product tankers' movements were ``restricted'' by the Coast Guard as checks were made, but the vessels and their cargoes were later allowed to continue unimpeded.
The tankers were the Kuwait-flagged 106,000-toncrude carrier the ``Album'' steaming from Skikda, Algeria; the 17,500-ton petroleum product tanker ``Lake Eva;'' and the smaller 7,000-ton Panamanian-flagged Golden Craig.
It was not known whether the tankers were fully loaded or what they were carrying.
It named the six dry-bulk ships expelled or detained as the Panamanian-flagged, 49,000 deadweight ton Fanfare; the Danish-flagged, 28,000 ton Cozumel Cement; the 9,000 ton Antigua-flagged Tatjana; the 6,000 ton Panamanian-flagged Frio Pacific; the 1,200 ton Honduran-flagged Bay Island Trader; and the small Bolivian-flagged Ms Dedette.
The two container ships that were expelled from U.S. waters were the Cypriot-flagged Tolteca and the Dutch-flagged Onego Merchant, the Coast Guard said. The general-cargo ship denied entry was the Antigua-flagged Nera II.
According to Lloyd's Marine Intelligence Unit, the Fanfare was en route from Mexico, the Tatjana and Frio Pacific from West Africa and the Bay Island Trader from Belize.
The Coast Guard did not say what would happen to those detained or expelled from its waters. It also said it had no information on what commodities the merchant ships carried.
Admiral Thomas Collins, commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, told Reuters that ``three major tank vessels had some kind of deficiency, but that was quickly corrected.''
``All three have been cleared,'' he said, without giving further details.
The United States appears to be enforcing the new international security measures more strictly than other countries, denying entry to merchant ships that are not compliant with the International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) code that came into force on July 1.
On Tuesday the Coast Guard said it had denied entry to 19 merchant ships and detained 30 others under the strict new international security measures, but many of those had later taken steps to comply with the new law and were allowed to dock.
Collins said ``most of the infractions we're seeing are from the small, freight vessels, the small bulk carriers.''
He said offenders ``don't tend to be the higher-end, big players in the business, or with substantial corporate underpinnings.''
Washington, fearing an attack or infiltration by al Qaeda from the sea, has vowed to police the new rules strictly by turning away ships that are not security-certified or delaying ones that have called at ``contaminated ports.''
The regulations, signed by 147 governments, require ports, stevedoring companies and owners of ships larger than 500 tonnes to draw up plans for responding to a terror threat, implement tighter security around facilities and train staff.
-------- justice
Prosecutors Given New Case Rules
Associated Press
Wednesday, July 7, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32310-2004Jul6.html
The Justice Department is adding significantly to the workload for federal prosecutors, telling them they must include far more information in criminal indictments and seek additional indictments in thousands of pending cases to comply with a Supreme Court decision.
The Bush administration is fashioning a legal defense to that ruling, which has led several judges to declare federal sentencing guidelines unconstitutional.
In a memo Friday to federal prosecutors, Deputy Attorney General James Comey spelled out changes to be followed while the government defends the guidelines.
The nearly 20-year-old system of sentencing people convicted in federal court was called into question by the Supreme Court's ruling late last month in a state sentencing case. Justices said only juries, not judges, can decide factors that lengthen prison terms beyond maximums spelled out in state sentencing guidelines.
The ruling also appears to give defendants a right to demand that every factor that could lengthen a sentence be put to a jury and proved beyond reasonable doubt.
Comey said the government does not believe that ruling should apply to federal judges, who often make factual determinations that add years to prison sentences. To be on the safe side, however, he said prosecutors should include aggravating factors in indictments that could add time to prison sentences, to be decided by a jury. Comey said that new indictments should be sought with that information in pending cases.
He also said defendants pleading guilty should sign waivers that agree to let a judge decide their fates.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Detainee Files Sought
July 7, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/07/politics/07ACLU.html?pagewanted=all
The American Civil Liberties Union and its New York branch returned to federal court yesterday in a new effort to force the Bush administration to release documents about the detention of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Guantαnamo Bay in Cuba and other military-run facilities.
The motion, in the Southern District in Manhattan, asked the court to order the prompt release of the documents. It came eight months after the groups first filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the documents. In May the groups filed a new request, but the Defense Department and other agencies said they would not speed up their processing.
The only document the groups have received is a copy of a State Department outline for a news briefing about Abu Ghraib. Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the A.C.L.U., argued that the government had a legal obligation to release the documents.
-------- terrorism
Lawmakers Briefed on Terror Attack Threat
July 7, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Congress-Terror-Threat.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Top FBI, CIA and Homeland Security Department officials briefed House members Wednesday about a steady stream of intelligence indicating al-Qaida may seek to mount an attack aimed at disrupting U.S. elections.
All House members were invited to the 90-minute session at the Rayburn House Office Building with FBI Director Robert Mueller; Asa Hutchinson, Homeland Security undersecretary for border and transportation security; and John Brennan, a CIA official who heads the joint CIA-FBI Terrorism Threat Integration Center.
Rep. Christopher Cox, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he could not discuss specifics of the presentation. But he said there are broad concerns that al-Qaida wants to strike inside the United States this summer or fall and hopes to influence the U.S. election, as terrorists did in Spain with the deadly Madrid train bombings in March.
``There is a steady drumbeat of reporting and the threat has not abated,'' Cox, R-Calif., told reporters.
Still, Hutchinson said there are no plans to raise the nation's terror alert level. It's at yellow, or elevated, the middle of five levels.
The briefings were requested by congressional leaders, some of whom attended a similar event Tuesday at the White House at the invitation of Andrew Card, President Bush's chief of staff. The Senate was scheduled to hold a similar session Thursday with the FBI and CIA officials as well as Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.
No new intelligence is being presented at the briefings, said two federal law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. There is no credible information pointing to a specific time, place or method for a terrorist attack, they said.
Bush administration officials have said al-Qaida was emboldened by its successful March 11 attack in Spain, which killed 190 people and contributed to the election defeat of the ruling party. Spain subsequently announced it would withdraw troops from Iraq, seen by many analysts as a boon to terrorist goals.
With the Republican and Democratic presidential nominating conventions approaching, many lawmakers asked for briefings about the terror attack threat and the level of security precautions being taken.
The FBI has formed a special task force to respond to the threat, which also prompted the Secret Service to close roads and rail lines and restrict other access around the convention sites. The Democrats will meet at Boston's FleetCenter July 26-July 29, with the GOP convention to be held at Madison Square Garden in New York from Aug. 30-Sept. 2.
Congress is scheduled to leave town this month for the summer and return after Labor Day.
Associated Press reporter Mark Sherman contributed to this story.
-------- torture
Israeli interrogators in Iraq - An exclusive report
Jane's Information Group
07 July 2004
http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/fr/fr040707_1_n.shtml
At least one aspect of the occupation of Iraq was well planned by Washington. The USA needed help conducting mass interrogations of Arabic-speaking detainees. Foreign Report can now reveal that, to make up for this shortfall, the USA employed Israeli security service (Shin Bet) experts to help their US counterparts 'break' their captives.
The USA could have approached other friendly regimes in the Middle East, such as Egypt or Jordan, which have vast experience interrogating Muslim fundamentalists. The Israelis may be brilliant linguists, but they cannot match Arabs speaking their own language. But there is a significant difference between the Egyptian and Jordanian interrogation techniques and those of the Israelis. For the Egyptian and Jordanian secret services, physical torture is an essential part of interrogation and a key element in breaking the prisoner's will and making them co-operative.
In the past, Shin Bet would use torture when it interrogated prisoners. But 20 years ago, an Israeli government committee investigated the security service's practices and the use of torture was subsequently banned, forcing Shin Bet to adopt a variety of techniques that did not cause physical damage. These new methods are much more palatable to US sensibilities. They also brought faster and more convincing results.
Foreign Report has learnt that top Shin Bet interrogation experts were sent to Iraq to help with the most difficult interrogations, such as the captured heads of the Iraqi intelligence - and perhaps with former president Saddam Hussein. US sources say that in spite of the incidences of abuse in Abu Ghraib prison, such events are not representative of the sophisticated methods that Shin Bet used in Iraq.
Most of the Shin Bet interrogators are of Ashkenazim (European) origin who study the Arabic language only when they are in their twenties after joining the security service. Before each interrogation a psychologist who has studied in depth the mental profile of the prisoner is consulted. The interrogator will also read intelligence reports about their charge.
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
9/11 Panel Defends Intelligence
Commissioners Had Access to Same Sources as Cheney
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 7, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32309-2004Jul6.html
The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said yesterday that it has had access to the same information on alleged ties between al Qaeda and Iraq as Vice President Cheney, who suggested last month that the panel may not have been privy to all available intelligence when it found limited links between the two.
The one-sentence statement, issued by Chairman Thomas H. Kean (R) and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton (D), continues the debate over the findings on Iraq by the Sept. 11 commission, which issued a report last month concluding that Iraq and al Qaeda had limited contacts but had not developed a "collaborative relationship."
A day later, in a June 17 television interview, Cheney said he believed there was a "general relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda and said he "probably" had information that the commission had not seen. Commission officials asked the administration to give the panel any additional evidence, but they have said since that none has been provided.
"After examining available transcripts of the Vice President's public remarks, the 9-11 Commission believes it has access to the same information the Vice President has seen regarding contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq prior to the 9-11 attacks," Kean and Hamilton said in their statement yesterday.
Cheney spokesman Kevin Kellems said the vice president welcomed the commission's statement because it "puts to rest a non-story."
"As we've said all along, the administration provided the commission with unprecedented access to sensitive information so they could perform their mission," Kellems said. "The vice president critiqued some press coverage of the staff report. He did not criticize the commission's work."
Several commission officials did not return calls for comment yesterday.
Although the commission did not provide more details, the statement suggests that it will stand by its assessment of the relationship between Hussein's government and al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in its final report, which is due to be completed by July 26. The findings initially prompted some squabbling between Democratic and Republican commissioners, but one panel official said recently that "everyone is on the same page" after a detailed briefing by commission staff two weeks ago.
In two interim reports issued last month, the commission's investigators said that they found "no credible evidence" that Iraq and al Qaeda had cooperated in attacks on the United States and that a purported April 9, 2001, meeting between an Iraqi intelligence officer and Mohamed Atta, leader of the terrorist hijackers, never occurred.
The panel said that the FBI placed Atta in Virginia on April 4 through a bank surveillance video and that records show calls were made from the hijacker's cell phone in Florida on April 6, 9, 10 and 11. There is also "no evidence that Atta ventured overseas again or re-entered the United States before July, when he traveled to Spain and back under his true name," one of the reports said.
Cheney, who previously had said that the alleged meeting was "pretty well confirmed," said during the June 17 interview on CNBC that "we just don't know" whether it happened.
"We have never been able to confirm that, nor have we been able to knock it down," Cheney said.
---------
9/11 Panelists Rebut Cheney on Information
July 7, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/07/politics/07panel.html
WASHINGTON, July 6 - The leaders of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks on Tuesday disputed Vice President Dick Cheney's suggestion that he probably had access to more intelligence than the commission did about possible ties between the Qaeda terrorist network and Iraq.
In a one-sentence statement, the panel's chairman and vice chairman said that "after examining available transcripts of the vice president's public remarks, the 9/11 commission believes it has access to the same information the vice president has seen regarding contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq prior to the 9/11 attacks."
A report issued by the commission's staff last month found that there did not appear to have been a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and the terrorist network, a finding that appeared to undermine a justification cited by President Bush and Mr. Cheney for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein.
White House officials questioned the finding and insisted that there had been a close relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. While he did not directly criticize the commission, Mr. Cheney said in a television interview a day after the report's release that he "probably" knew things about Iraq's links to terrorists that the 10-member bipartisan panel did not know.
The commission chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, and the vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic House member from Indiana, then called on Mr. Cheney to turn over any reports that would support the White House's insistence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
A spokesman for Mr. Cheney, Kevin Kellems, said on Tuesday that the White House welcomed the statement, calling it proof that the White House had fully cooperated in providing the panel all available intelligence relevant to its work.
"We are pleased with today's statement from the 9/11 commission, which puts to rest a nonstory," he said. "As we have said all along, the administration provided the commission with unprecedented access to sensitive information so they could perform their mission. The vice president criticized some press coverage of the draft staff report. He did not criticize the commission's work."
-------- propaganda wars
LETTER FROM ASIA
She Tilts Against Power, but Don't Call Her Quixotic
July 7, 2004
By JANE PERLEZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/07/international/asia/lett.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BANGKOK - Supinya Klangnarong, a 31-year-old campaigner for a free press, is gutsy, well versed in media law and, in a refreshing way, not too impressed with herself.
Her specialty in the media goes to the heart of a delicate issue in Thailand, where the country's biggest media and communications company, the Shin Corporation, was founded by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and is controlled by his family. The government controls the major television channels, and the country's lone private channel, ITV, was taken over last year by Shin, which also dominates the Thai satellite communications and mobile phone businesses.
Last year, Ms. Supinya dared to say publicly what was obvious from Shin's recent financial performance: that the company, which earned a hefty $425 million last year on revenues of about $2.5 billion, has profited handsomely since Mr. Thaksin won the 2001 election. She accused the company of using those profits to enhance the fortunes of his political party.
"We think it's very dangerous when one company controls all ownership of communication tools in Thailand," she said in an interview.
Two months after her critique appeared in a Thai language newspaper, Thai Post, the corporation sued her for libel, arguing that its success was owing to its business acumen, not its political connections. The company also denied that it had helped the ruling Thai Rak Thai party.
In June, the criminal court here ruled that it would accept the case, a decision that took some by surprise but which Ms. Supinya said she viewed as a sterling opportunity.
"My lawyer can ask the prime minister and his wife to come to court,'' she said in the book-crammed offices of the Campaign for Popular Media Reform, a small nongovernmental organization where she carries the title of secretary general. "If they come, they will be equal to me."
The case against Ms. Supinya has rapidly evolved into far more than a standard libel suit. Not only is it highlighting the problems of media concentration, it is also being fought against a harsh backdrop of intimidation toward environmental and human rights activists in Thailand.
In June, a newspaper called The Nation published a list of 16 people it called "the dead and the missing" since the Thaksin administration took office. Among those either killed, or missing and presumed dead, were campaigners against logging, dams and wastewater projects. Prominent on that list was Somchai Neelapaijit, a lawyer who was defending Muslim militants in Thailand's south until he disappeared in early March.
The latest victim was Charoen Wat-Aksorn, shot dead last week after leading a long-running campaign against a coal-fired power plant. Mr. Charoen, a former fisherman who coined a phrase that has become a Thai version of Nimby, had just been in Bangkok, testifying before a parliamentary committee on questionable land deeds on the Gulf of Thailand. Nongovernmental organizations have played a vital role in Thailand's democratic evolution in recent years. They were brutally suppressed in the 1970's but revived in the 90's, most notably in pushing successfully for passage of a new constitution in 1997.
Since the rise of Mr. Thaksin, who is sometimes likened here to the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, those voices find it harder to be heard. Nobody is suggesting that the government is picking off local activists. Rather, they say, there has been a blossoming climate of commerce-at-any-cost that has given criminal actors - whom the government professes to want to eliminate - the leeway to protect their interests with impunity.
"This government would like politics to be completely stable like still water," said Pasuk Phongpaichit, a professor of economics at Chulalongkorn University here. "But the nongovernmental organizations active in defending the rights of people at the grass roots - and pushing ahead with political reform as laid down in the Constitution - their activities cause ripples."
The politicians, she said, do not appreciate pesky intruders in their still water. "So attempts are made to quiet them down."
Ms. Supinya said she believed she was sued because the corporation considered her an easy target - "just an activist," she said.
Supporting that argument, Somkiat Tangkijvanich, an economist at the Thailand Development Research Institute, delivered a paper at a seminar recently in which he said much the same thing that Ms. Supinya is being sued for: that Shin Corporation shares had benefited markedly from the "political connection factor."
"We get our facts and knowledge from the academics, but we use stronger words," said Ms. Supinya. In Thailand, she said, there was a hierarchy of punishment. "If you act too much, you'll be killed. If you talk too much, you will be sued. If you're an academic, you might be discredited."
She developed her interest in the politics of the media, and in particular access for the public to broadcasting, during an undergraduate degree at Chulalongkorn University. Her professor, Ubonrat Siriyuwasak, described Ms. Supinya as "extraordinary." "She has the courage," the professor said. "She understands the situation."
One of her main objectives, Ms. Supinya said, was to press for fulfillment of Article 40 of the 1997 Constitution that calls for the re-allocation of broadcast frequencies so that Thailand can have public television akin to PBS in the United States and the BBC in Britain.
When news spread about the Shin Corporation suit, she was invited to London to brief Amnesty International and Article 19, a group that promotes freedom of expression.
She reminded those audiences, she said, that more than 2,000 people suspected of breaking drug laws were killed during a three-month "war on drugs" by the Thaksin government last year, a move that prompted the State Department to criticize Thailand's "worsened" human rights record.
Part of her job abroad, she said, was to explain that Thailand was not just the paradise for tourists that many Europeans and Americans admire. "The prime minister wants the country to be modernized, and to be developed, but he doesn't want to hear different voices," she said. "They welcome investors. 'We're open,' he says. But actually it's not open for freedom of expression."
--------
Iraq is now another Palestine
The first Bush and his Gulf war paved the way for the age of terror
The Guardian
Salim Lone
Wednesday July 7, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1255575,00.html
Before Iraq had unravelled, Tony Blair last November delivered one of his most impassioned defences of the war at the Lord Mayor's banquet. He was hoping to undercut critics before President Bush's visit. Iraq, he said, was "the battle of seminal importance for the early 21st century. It will define relations between the Muslim world and the west. It will influence profoundly the development of Arab states and the Middle East. It will have far-reaching implications for the future of American and western diplomacy."
The prime minister was right - but a decade late in understanding the centrality of Iraq in the current world order. It was the first Gulf war in 1991 and the accompanying sanctions and stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia that had driven deep cleavages in relations between Islam and the west. More important, it had given rise to the age of global terror - beginning with the first World Trade Centre bombing in 1993. In the decades of Palestinian and Arab anger at the US for its close support of Israeli occupation, it had never before been targeted except in the Middle East.
To say this is not to underestimate the impact of the current war and occupation of Iraq, which have made the US a reviled power in the Arab and Muslim world, and are creating powerful new hatreds globally and seeing thousands of terrorist recruits joining the anti-US battle. Most of the world had opposed this war in fear of just such an outcome, but it now seems to feel powerless to influence the US in the face of Washington's determination to "stay the course".
In most countries, Bush is held responsible for the terror crisis, but this is unfair. The groundwork for the crisis was laid by President Bush Sr and his European and Arab partners who, in 1990, went along with his decision to mete out severe punishment to Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait. Many had warned of unprecedented Muslim fury if Iraq were attacked, since the UN had never before approved the use of force to counter an invasion. More important, Israel had for years been allowed to occupy Palestine and parts of Syria and Lebanon with impunity.
But the US, flexing its muscles as the sole superpower, was not to be deterred - and the war was ruthlessly prosecuted. Martti Ahtisaari, the then UN under-secretary general (and later Finnish president) went to Iraq to assess the damage. He told the general assembly: "The conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results and most means of modern life have been destroyed."
Worse was to follow, with the most punitive sanctions in modern history destroying Iraqi society and claiming the lives of at least half a million children.
But the predicted upheavals in Arab countries allied to the US failed to materialise after the war, and there was public glee in the nascent neoconservative movement, which saw in this the validation of its view that the US had been too constrained in using force in its Middle East dealings. No one was particularly interested in seeing the profound alienation that was developing among Muslims worldwide, and the related establishment of a global terrorist network.
The world again seems powerless to influence the US in the face of the even more rapid growth of anti-western sentiment resulting from the current war. There is no graver challenge than stemming the growth of terrorism practised by aggrieved Muslims. The rise of such militancy is driven by US policies and cannot be glossed over with self-serving assertions that "they" hate western freedoms and are inherently barbaric and uncivilised. Beheadings are indeed so, but so is the killing of over 600 innocent Fallujans in a week of aerial bombing, or the death of 500,000 children through UN sanctions.
The depth of this anti-US animus is recent. Muslims and Arabs gravitated towards the US for decades, and worked closely with Washington to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But even the most moderate now see the US as bent on crushing Islam.
There is only one way to confront the terrorism challenge, which is for the US to extend Muslims a hand of friendship and embrace their legitimate causes. This would allow Muslims themselves to confront those who might still continue to practise terror. But merely rolling back the aggressive Bush administration policies will not be sufficient to win Muslim trust; many more far-reaching changes than are part of current US political discourse are needed.
In the quest for peace, a just solution to the Palestinian crisis remains a vital priority, but we should discount wishful assertions that ending that conflict will make indirect US dominion over Iraq more acceptable. Over the past 14 years Iraq has for millions replaced Palestine as the touchstone of Muslim pain. A beginning must be made there, and a UN mission given the responsibility for reconciling that torn nation.
· Salim Lone is the former director of communications for the UN mission in Iraq
salimlone@msn.com
-------- us politics
Kerry Picks Edwards as Running Mate
Mass. Senator Calls Ex-Rival A Man of Middle-Class Values
By Jim VandeHei and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 7, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30354-2004Jul6.html
PITTSBURGH, July 6 -- John F. Kerry tapped freshman Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina as his running mate on Tuesday, calling his one-time rival for the Democratic nomination a politician of passion, middle-class values and clear conviction who can help the party "bring back our mighty dream" of a better America by ousting President Bush.
Kerry announced his decision at a downtown rally here Tuesday morning, describing Edwards as a man of courage and conviction who "has shown guts and determination and political skill in his own race for the presidency of the United States, a man whose life has prepared him for leadership and whose character brings him to exercise it."
Kerry, who kept his decision hidden until Monday evening from everyone but his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, informed Edwards of his selection during a 15-minute phone call around 7:30 a.m. "I was humbled by his offer," Edwards said in a statement, "and thrilled to accept it."
The announcement ended a long and secretive process in which Kerry and his team scoured through a list of about 25 names and consulted about 300 people before settling on the man whom many Democratic activists considered the obvious and most politically popular choice from the beginning.
Edwards, his wife, Elizabeth, and their children arrived here Tuesday afternoon to spend the evening with the Kerrys. The two candidates, once fierce rivals for the nomination, will make their first public appearance as the 2004 Democratic ticket Wednesday morning at the Kerrys' estate outside Pittsburgh.
Afterward, they plan to campaign in Ohio and Florida, two of the most populous and hotly contested battleground states, to rally voters with a message of prosperity and fairness at home and rebuilding U.S. credibility around the world. Kerry campaign aides said they hope to incorporate Edwards's populist message decrying "two Americas" -- one for the rich and another for everyone else -- and Kerry's broader themes into a potent call for change.
Edwards, 51, was a successful trial lawyer who made millions from his law practice before winning his Senate seat in 1998. During the presidential primaries, Kerry, 60, repeatedly questioned Edwards's qualifications for the presidency in private and in public, during and after the primaries. Aides said the presumptive nominee obviously no longer harbors such concerns.
Bush and Vice President Cheney gave Edwards a cordial welcome to the campaign, but the Bush campaign slammed the senator as an inexperienced leader unprepared to run the nation during a time of war and threat. It described the Democratic ticket as too liberal for mainstream America.
The Bush campaign also greeted Edwards with a television ad, titled "First Choice," that features Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) praising Bush as an unflinching wartime president. The ad is designed to suggest that Edwards was not Kerry's first choice.
Kerry considered McCain as a possible running mate, initiating a series of phone calls to the popular Republican during the spring about a unity ticket, but McCain made clear he was not interested.
James Johnson, a Washington businessman and Democratic veteran who conducted the running-mate search for Kerry, said on Tuesday that Kerry's outreach to McCain reflected his desire to restore some civility to the political debates in the country and that the dialogue "was well worth having." Johnson said Kerry considered other Republicans as well, but he declined to name them.
Kerry's campaign countered the Bush team by pointing to McCain's past praise of Edwards and by running its new ad in an effort to ride the wave of heavy news media coverage surrounding the decision. Posted online Tuesday night, the ad will begin airing on cable television networks on Wednesday. The ad marries the themes from the primary campaigns, with the narrator saying, "One is a combat veteran with over 30 years of experience handling the toughest issues facing America. The other is the son of a mill worker, who all his life has stood up for ordinary people against powerful interests. . . . Kerry/Edwards. A new team for a new America."
Cheney called Edwards to congratulate his new rival, but the pleasantries are likely to end there, as the GOP is preparing to relentlessly contrast the foreign-policy experience of the two vice presidential candidates. Several business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are also preparing anti-Edwards campaigns, condemning the former trial lawyer as hostile to businesses.
Still, the Bush campaign anticipates a big bump for the Kerry-Edwards ticket this month, which will culminate with the Democratic National Convention starting on July 26 in Boston, the presumptive nominee's home town.
Edwards, a boyishly handsome senator who was named by People magazine as the "sexiest politician" in 2000, is well-regarded inside the Democratic Party. Some Democrats say he has the campaign skills of Bill Clinton and the charm of a young John F. Kennedy.
He comes from humble origins, the son of a mill worker in the small town of Robbins, N.C., and he built his presidential campaign around the themes of economic and social injustice, particularly in states and communities dominated by Republicans in recent elections. Kerry and Edwards will campaign this weekend in North Carolina, including a stop in Robbins.
Kerry said his running mate "has honored the lessons of home and family learned in North Carolina and brings those values to this struggle to shape a better future for America."
Many Democrats see Edwards as an antidote to Kerry's serious and stiff style. "This is a ticket that can excite, motivate and most importantly defeat George Bush and Dick Cheney in November," Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.), whom Kerry had also considered as a possible running mate, said in a statement.
Strategists hope Edwards can boost the ticket in battleground states, among rural and suburban voters. Congressional Democrats predicted that the ticket will benefit the party's candidates across the board, especially in the South. Five southern Democrats are retiring from the Senate, and many candidates have been reluctant to embrace Kerry, but they are likely to be receptive to campaigning with Edwards.
Many Democrats had feared that Kerry might pass up his former rival, despite his obvious appeal within the party. For starters, there were questions about whether Kerry would select a running mate who has, in the words of one Democratic strategist, "luminescent" campaign skills, in contrast to Kerry's uneven performances.
Beyond that, they had worried that a perceived lack of personal chemistry would doom Edwards's chances, given their clashes in the primaries. This was such an obvious issue that Johnson, on the March day he was named to run the vice presidential search process, asked Kerry whether there was anything from the primaries or his Senate experience that ruled anyone out.
Kerry's reply, according to Johnson, was, "Absolutely not." Later, Johnson asked Kerry more directly about the reported tensions with Edwards, trying to gauge how much of an obstacle they might be. Once again, Kerry waved him off. "That was the campaign," Johnson recalled Kerry telling him.
If any candidate won a spot on a presidential ticket by actively campaigning for the job, Edwards is the classic example. When he dropped out of the presidential race, having won just one primary but lasting longer than any of Kerry's other main rivals, he instantly pivoted to become Kerry's most energetic surrogate.
"It had all the earmarks of a very carefully planned campaign," a longtime adviser to Edwards said. "There is nobody better at selling himself than John Edwards. He set out to sell himself to John Kerry and, once again, he's succeeded."
Johnson said that was not true, noting that at no time in the lengthy vetting process did Kerry evince any discomfort with Edwards's high profile. "It was absolutely not a problem," he said.
Edwards made the most of his popularity within the party. When Kerry had to turn down invitations to appear at Democratic conventions or meetings, his campaign team asked who the sponsors wanted as a substitute. Many asked for Edwards, who was almost always willing to take the assignment. As a result, he did far more than any of the other potential candidates. "It was a virtuous circle, where he was able to fulfill these demands and, as he performed, obviously at a very high level, he brought supporters as he went along," Johnson said.
He added that Kerry never felt pressured to take Edwards. "John always believed, and this is critical in the historical context, that he had full latitude, that it was really up to him, that it was not about counting noses, that it was not about interest groups," Johnson said.
Campaign officials said Kerry drew up a list of about 25 potential running mates and set Johnson and his team off to produce thick background papers on them. Johnson and campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill met with Kerry about every 10 days to discuss the choices and to gather more information.
Kerry, burned by his experience as a vice presidential contender four years ago, insisted on privacy, and the campaign never leaked a short list of candidates. Johnson said that as late as Thursday, he and Kerry were discussing candidates who had not been named for weeks in news accounts. Among those in contention were Gephardt, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack and Sen. Bob Graham (Fla.), but Johnson said they were not the only ones in the mix at the end.
Kerry met secretly with many of the contenders, and it is believed Edwards spent more time in direct conversation with Kerry and his search team than anyone else. On Tuesday morning, after asking Edwards to be on the ticket, Kerry called those whom he did not select, but neither Johnson nor Cahill would say who or how many were called.
Last Thursday, Edwards was flown from Florida to Washington for a late-night meeting. Kerry spent the weekend mulling his decision while on a bus tour of the Midwest. He informed Johnson and Cahill during a late-night dinner of fish soup and salad late Monday night.
Kerry was so secretive about the process that the second person he told of his decision was the man hired to paint "Kerry-Edwards" on the side of the campaign plane. Kerry called the decal applier, who had signed a confidentiality agreement, at 6:30 p.m., more than three hours before he told Cahill and Johnson.
In a sign of the times, Kerry then announced his pick via e-mail to more than 1 million supporters. With Edwards on board, Kerry is expected to soon top a once-unthinkable $200 million in contributions. He and Edwards are planning to attend fundraisers in New York on Thursday night and Friday morning.
Balz reported from Washington. Staff writers David S. Broder and Howard Kurtz contributed to this report.
-------- ENERGY
-------- energy
LNG boom puts Korean shipyards on investor radar
Story by Kim Kyoung-wha and Park Sung-woo
REUTERS SOUTH KOREA:
July 7, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25881/newsDate/7-Jul-2004/story.htm
SEOUL - Shares in South Korean shipyards are riding a wave of investor interest as bumper orders for lucrative liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers point to fatter earnings on the horizon.
Soaring demand for LNG, driven by energy-guzzling China and India, and falling gas output in the United States and Europe, has come as a boon to the shipbuilding sector in South Korea, which has 72 percent of the world's LNG tanker market.
Expectations that local shipbuilders would win multi-billion dollar deals from ExxonMobil Corp. (XOM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) have also given rise to a flood of foreign buying in the sector, analysts said.
Shares in Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering Co. (042660.KS: Quote, Profile, Research) , the world's largest LNG shipmaker that has won $2.2 billion worth of LNG contracts this year, have jumped 30 percent since early May. Daewoo is also the world's second-largest shipbuilder.
Shares in the world's third-ranked shipbuilder, Samsung Heavy Industries Co. (010140.KS: Quote, Profile, Research) , have risen 18 percent, while Hyundai Heavy Industry Co. (009540.KS: Quote, Profile, Research) , the world's top shipbuilder, has seen its shares rise just 1 percent amid mounting losses at its plant division, but, over the same period, Seoul's main stock index fell 3.6 percent.
"The LNG boom will drive an across-the-board profit recovery for the shipbuilding sector, which has already enticed foreign investors in droves," said Joe Lee, a Daiwa Securities analyst.
Chun Yong-bum, an analyst with Daishin Securities, agreed.
"LNG ship orders are likely to rise steadily because oil majors are issuing more and more tenders to meet rising LNG demand in the United States and Europe," he said.
"Moreover, the price of an LNG tanker is going up and up as buyers want larger ships. The value of one LNG ship is equivalent to about three oil tankers."
An LNG tanker was likely to cost $200 million from the second half of this year, compared with the current $170 million and $90 million last year, he said.
BOOMING LNG DEMAND
Behind the LNG tanker market boom is rapidly growing global demand for cleaner fuel. LNG demand should rise to some 200 million tonnes by 2010, and to 315 million tonnes by 2020, from 120 million tonnes in 2003, encouraged by a growing thirst in the United States, China and India, according to International Energy Agency data.
"In traditional markets like Japan and Korea, you've got increasing demand associated with increasing economic growth," said Gavin Law, head of global LNG at WoodMackenzie in London, explaining the mushrooming LNG demand.
The emergence of new LNG buying powers such as China and India, again driven by economic growth, was also a factor.
"Perhaps more importantly, (it has been) the demise of gas production in the U.S., UK and Europe," he said.
The United States and Europe, major markets for piped natural gas, are looking to import more LNG to meet soaring local gas demand to compensate for their own slowing production.
ExxonMobil currently has a tender out for 16 LNG carriers to ship gas from Qatar with an option for a further dozen 200,000 cubic metre ships. The U.S. oil giant is a partner in all of Qatar's existing LNG developments.
Korean shipbuilders look set to win most of the tenders, which are expected to close later this year, analysts said.
"BUY NOW"
Despite booming orders, Korean shipbuilders suffered a setback in first-quarter operating profits due to robust steel prices and a stronger won, and as lower-priced orders from 2002 were reflected in the books.
Analysts say the shipbuilding sector will see a turnaround in earnings next year when more lucrative LNG ship orders start to be priced in.
"History has shown that the best time to buy this sector is when operating conditions are still difficult - thus share prices are low - but a cyclical bottom is being reached," said Nam Kwon-oh, an analyst at Goodmorning Shinhan Securities.
Despite recent price upticks, shares in the sector had yet to stage a full comeback, analysts said.
Shares in Daewoo Shipbuilding are still 27 percent below a peak of 18,200 won last November, suggesting there is plenty of room to climb further.
Foreign investors have remained net buyers of Daewoo Shipbuilding since May 13, according to the Korea Stock Exchange.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
The bug that is poisoning millions
Researchers have discovered that bacteria are playing a key role in the 'worst mass poisoning in history'
Roger Highfield
07/07/2004
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2004/07/07/ecfarsenic07.xml&sSheet=/connected/2004/07/08/ixconn.html
Imagine if every person in Britain had only poisonous water to drink. Imagine if the same went for everyone in Ireland. And every person in Belgium too. Now you have a feel for the scale of the problem.
As a result of an initiative that went terribly wrong, groundwater throughout Bangladesh and West Bengal in India is now contaminated with naturally occurring arsenic from the sediments that form the region's aquifers, putting around 75 million people at risk.
At least 100,000 cases of wart-like growths, sores and calluses have been caused by the arsenic, and the region is braced for an epidemic of cancer over the next decade.
The World Health Organisation predicts as many as 270,000 may die from drinking contaminated water in the Ganges Delta region - an impact much bigger than that of other man-made disasters such as Chernobyl and Bhopal.
In the past week, however, a new insight into the cause of the disaster has come from research at Manchester University. The poisoning is caused by the activities of underground bacteria that have thrived over the past half century with the help of humans. And with this new understanding comes new hope.
The calamity arose from good intentions. In a typical year, over 70 per cent of the country is flooded during the monsoon season. But even though water in puddles and ponds is abundant, it's usually polluted and unsafe to drink.
Unicef led an effort to switch to groundwater that started half a century ago in response to epidemics of cholera, dysentery and a high infant mortality rate.
Up to 10 million shallow tube wells were drilled in a bid to provide rural Bangladeshis with safe water. But many draw water from shallow, arsenic-rich sediments. The initiative worked but traded one health disaster for another.
Current estimates are that one million wells are now polluted with arsenic, leading to what the World Health Organisation calls "the worst mass poisoning in history".
While the allowable standard for arsenic in the United States is 50 parts per billion, in many Bangladesh wells arsenic levels reach 500-1,000 parts per billion, with the worst at 2,400.
Arsenic is a slow poison: it takes several thousand parts per billion to cause immediate death. Sip by sip, the cumulative impact of the tainted water supply can lead to a spectrum of ailments. Most obvious are skin problems. Less obvious is the attack on internal organs, such as the bladder and lung, which can lead to cancer.
In collaboration with Kalyani University in West Bengal and the Daresbury Synchrotron Radiation Source, a team at the University of Manchester has undertaken a groundbreaking study that confirms how bacteria play a key role in releasing the arsenic into the water.
Dr Jon Lloyd, who leads the "geomicrobiology group" at the university, conducted tests with his colleagues on samples taken from a contaminated aquifer in Nadia district in West Bengal. The results provide the first direct evidence that the culprits are bacteria that reduce iron in the sediments and, in so doing, release arsenic into groundwater.
These highly specialised micro-organisms are known as anaerobic bacteria because they require no oxygen and can live underground - the samples used by the team came from a depth of 13 metres. "We have yet to identify the particular culprit. It could be caused by a complex community of these bacteria," said Dr Lloyd.
Air-breathing humans generate energy by breaking down pizzas, pasta and other food to generate electrons that are passed along a chain of electron-carrying proteins to oxygen. Instead of using oxygen, the bugs gain their energy by respiring (or "breathing") using iron-containing minerals in the sediments, a process called iron reduction.
By doing this, the bacteria give electrons to iron oxide rusts coating the sediments, causing a dramatic change in the chemistry of the minerals. And when the iron runs out, the bugs then dine on other metals, such as arsenic, which occur naturally. Again, the chemistry of the arsenic is changed and the "reduced" arsenic is able to pass into groundwater.
Their studies also show how the release of arsenic is boosted by the addition of organic matter, nutrients needed by the bacteria to thrive and transform the minerals in the sediments. This organic material could come from irrigation, from latrines or peat deposits.
Among the Manchester team was a Bangladeshi PhD student, Mrs Farhana Islam, who commented: "This research means we now have a much better idea how arsenic is released into drinking water in aquifers in the region, and the results could help to find the worst-affected wells.''
Dr Lloyd added: "We are now using these techniques to get a detailed understanding of how these naturally occurring bacteria reduce and mobilise the arsenic in the sediments, and we are also looking at how these processes can be reversed so that the drinking water is safe to drink.''
The discovery that the bacteria were responsible, published in the latest Nature, marks an important first step in testing methods to treat the contaminated water, not just in Bengal and Bangladesh but other arsenic rich groundwaters in Cambodia, Vietnam, Nepal, China and elsewhere.
One approach is to exploit how the iron and arsenic cycles are linked: bubbling air through contaminated water is one possibility, since this could reverse the toxic efforts of the bacteria, driving the precipitation of rust, which in turn scavenges arsenic from the water.
A more challenging approach could be to cut the flow of organic material that helps feed and nurture the micro-organisms, cutting off the arsenic at source. Another possibility is to boost the growth of underground micro-organisms that could reverse reduction and release of the arsenic, locking it away once more within sediments.
The latter method, called bioremediation, is being investigated by the Manchester team. Among a range of applications, Dr Lloyd is co-operating with the US Department of Energy to study bacteria that dine on nuclear isotopes such as plutonium and technetium, which can help decontaminate radioactive spills and clean up vintage nuclear sites. "There is a positive side to these bugs.''
-------- health
Record Numbers Infected With HIV
U.N. Cites Rapid Rise In Asia and E. Europe
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 7, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30273-2004Jul6?language=printer
BANGKOK, July 6 -- The global AIDS epidemic spread at an alarming pace last year with a record 4.8 million new infections, according to a U.N. report released Tuesday, which expressed concern that the virus is spreading quickly in Eastern Europe and Asia.
Issued in advance of the 15th International AIDS Conference, which opens Sunday in Bangkok, the report said that governments were not doing enough to prevent the spread of AIDS. Only one in five people worldwide have access to prevention programs, it said.
Sub-Saharan Africa continued to have the world's highest incidence of AIDS, the report said. But Eastern Europe and Central Asia are suffering from the fastest rate of growth in HIV infections, U.N. officials said. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.
In Asia, prevention has been inadequate "partly because of stigma and discrimination," the report said. There were success stories in Thailand and Cambodia, where prevention programs deal more openly with high-risk behavior, such as intravenous drug use and prostitution, said the U.N. report, which warned against "complacency."
"What's happening in Asia is determining the global outcome," Peter Piot, executive director of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, said in a telephone interview. "There is a desperate need for leadership, particularly in Asia and in Eastern Europe."
Thirty-eight million people worldwide were estimated to have HIV last year, 3 million more than at the end of 2001, the U.N. report said. It said that comparing the latest estimates with those published in previous years was "misleading" because the new figures had been revised downward based on "improved methodologies."
More than 20 million people with the disease have died since the first AIDS diagnosis in 1981.
The epidemic's spread throughout the world continued to be alarming, with about 9 million new infections since the last two-year reporting period, the report said.
In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, injected drug use is the major reason for new infections. But sub-Saharan Africa, where about 25 million people have HIV, remains the region hardest hit by the epidemic.
Life-prolonging drugs were not reaching enough patients in developing countries, where only about 7 percent of those who need treatment receive it, the U.N. report said.
HIV antiretroviral drugs are available to most of the estimated 1.6 million infected people in so-called high-income countries, including the United States. There were 950,000 people with HIV in the United States at the end of last year, 50,000 more than in 2001, the report said.
While the AIDS epidemic initially affected mostly men, the U.N. report said recent surveys showed that nearly half of all people infected between the ages of 15 and 49 were women. In Africa, more than half were women.
The increasing vulnerability of women makes it difficult to impose abstinence and condom use as strategies to prevent AIDS, Kathleen Cravero, the program's deputy executive director, said at a news conference.
"Most of the women and girls, as much in Asia as in Africa, don't have the option to abstain when they want to," she said. "Women who are victims of violence are in no position to negotiate anything, never mind faithfulness and condom use."
In Asia, with 60 percent of the world's population, 7.4 million people are living with HIV. The epidemic is fueled by injected drug use, infected sex workers and sex between men, but it is fast moving into the general population, the report said.
China and India have severe epidemics in a number of provinces, territories and states, the report said. In Indonesia and Vietnam, infections among people who inject drugs have soared.
"There's a window of opportunity to get prevention programs up to scale in Asia," said Cravero. "If we miss it, we will see an epidemic the likes of which we never imagined."
Far from leveling off, infection rates are on the rise in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In that region alone last year, 3 million people became newly infected with HIV. In seven African countries -- Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia and Zambia -- more than 15 percent of the population is infected.
Latin America continued to have low national rates, but there were serious local epidemics, again spurred by people who shoot drugs and by men who have sex with other men, Cravero said.
In the Caribbean, which has the highest incidence of AIDS outside sub-Saharan Africa, the epidemic is spreading most rapidly among heterosexuals.
In high-income countries such as the United States, experts are concerned about the resurgence of sexually transmitted infections and high-risk behaviors, such as having unprotected sex. "People are dropping their guard and that will have its consequences," Cravero said.
More people were also dying from AIDS-related illnesses, the report said. In 2001, 2.5 million people died from AIDS. Last year, 2.9 million died, the result of rising caseloads outstripping countries' abilities to provide treatment, U.N. experts said.
Improved data-gathering methods at the country level have resulted in a revised, lower estimate of the number of people with HIV, Cravero said. Two years ago, the last time the report was issued, the United Nations estimated that 40 million people had HIV.
"Whether it's 38 million or 48 million, it's a catastrophe that has to be dealt with," she said.
The report comes as the world has boosted its commitment and resources, but not enough to meet growing needs, the U.N. report said.
In recent years, countries and donor organizations have stepped up their contributions to combat AIDS, from $300 million in 1996 to about $4.7 billion last year. But this amount was still less than half of the $12 billion required for 2005, the report said.
"AIDS is likely to be with us for a very long time, but how far it spreads and how much damage it does is entirely up to us," said Piot, the program executive director.
-------- ACTIVISTS
T. F. Mancuso, Who Led Radiation Study, Dies at 92
By MATTHEW L. WALD
July 7, 2004
NY TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/07/national/07mancusoobit.html
Thomas F. Mancuso, a pioneering epidemiologist at the center of a bitter dispute with the federal government over the possible long-term effects of small doses of radiation on nuclear bomb workers, died Sunday at an assisted-living center in Oakland, Calif. He was 92 and had esophageal cancer, his family said.
Until World War II, occupational epidemiology, or the study of health effects caused by work, centered on accidents or acute illness. Dr. Mancuso was instrumental in shifting the focus to long-term consequences, which required following up and finding the cause of death for people who had left the work force months or years earlier.
"He realized you had to follow people through death, and figure out what they died from,'' said Dr. David Michaels, a former assistant secretary of energy who is now a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University. "He would put together these long-term studies, put together old records and follow people into the present. That was a huge breakthrough.''
In 1977, Dr. Mancuso became a hero to the antinuclear movement when the Atomic Energy Commission terminated a contract he had held since 1965 to study the effects, if any, of small radiation doses on 500,000 bomb workers.
His conflict with the agency, the successor to the wartime Manhattan Project, had begun in 1974 when a Washington State epidemiologist presented data indicating that former workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation were dying of cancer at abnormally high rates. Dr. Mancuso was asked to endorse a press release that contradicted the finding, but he refused, saying that his research was not finished. He later presented a study, with Dr. Alice Stewart and George W. Kneale, concluding that low doses of radiation had caused an increase in the number of cancers.
His dismissal eventually led to Congressional hearings.
"This disillusioned him to a certain degree,'' said his son, Thomas P. Mancuso. "He was very clear about being scientific.''
In 1992, 15 years after the Atomic Energy Commission acted against him, and after a lengthy struggle for access to the data, he wrote another study, again with Dr. Stewart and Mr. Kneale, on cancer among workers at Hanford. The study, of 35,000 workers and financed with money paid by the owner of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactors to settle a case after the accident there in 1979, concluded that small doses of radiation were far more dangerous than official estimates.
The study has not been accepted by health regulators. But the government's nuclear weapons manufacturing complex, now under the control of the Department of Energy, acknowledged in 2000 that exposure to radiation and hazardous materials had, in fact, made some people sick.
In a career of more than 50 years in industrial hygiene and then epidemiology, Dr. Mancuso investigated the health hazards of a variety of chemical compounds and metals in industrial use, including asbestos, chromium and beryllium.
--------
The War Over Central Park Is Turning Cultural
July 7, 2004
By DIANE CARDWELL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/07/nyregion/07protest.html
The battle over the right to stage protests in Central Park during the Republican National Convention racheted up a notch yesterday, as civil libertarians accused the city of favoring high culture over political expression and the parks commissioner countered that some events were just not horticulturally correct.
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, and Christopher Dunn, its associate legal director, complained in a letter to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that the city appeared to be closing Central Park to political rallies, even beyond the end of the convention. The letter says that at a meeting with city officials on June 18, lawyers from the Civil Liberties Union, representing a group seeking to hold a 50,000-person rally on the Great Lawn, were told that both the Great Lawn and the North Meadow were now off limits to political rallies because of concerns over potential damage to the grass.
At the same meeting, the letter states, Parks and Recreation Department officials said the Metropolitan Opera had recently staged a performance of "Madame Butterfly" at the Great Lawn that was attended by 40,000 people.
"It is wrong and unlawful to single out protest activity for exclusion from Central Park," the letter reads. "Beyond the discriminatory treatment of political rallies, the suggestion that concerns about damage to the grass can justify the closing of Central Park to political rallies raises fundamental questions about the use of public space in New York."
But Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, sees the matter differently. Pointing out that the agency had so far granted eight permits for protests in city parks during the convention, including one at the band shell in Central Park, he argued that the use of the park as a gathering spot for large political activities was an anomaly in the park's long history.
"There's an idea being circulated that Central Park has been used as a gathering place for large political events," Mr. Benepe said. "But up until the 1960's, you couldn't even walk on the grass in the park." Events like the "be-ins" of the 1960's and the nuclear weapons protests of the 1980's "corresponded with a time when the park was in very bad shape," he added, and had helped turn the Sheep Meadow and the Great Lawn into a great dust bowl.
Holding rallies on grassy lawns poses other risks, he said, like the chance of rain. Concerts either have rain dates or are canceled if the ground is wet for their planned performances, but crowds come to rallies rain or shine. A field trampled by a huge crowd on a rainy day would need resodding, which would close the field for a year. And, he added, at events like opera and classical music concerts, people arrive slowly and disperse over a large area, rather than concentrate in one spot.
For Mr. Dunn, however, the issue is one of numbers and fair access. "Fifty thousand people standing on the Great Lawn listening to people on a stage is the same whether they listen to political speeches or the Metropolitan Opera," he said. "A 175-pound person standing on the grass is a 175-person standing on the grass."
----
Veterans oppose war in Iraq as deceitful
BY R.A. DYER
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Wed, Jul. 07, 2004
http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/nation/9101236.htm
AUSTIN, Texas - (KRT) - The U.S. government has deceitfully committed the country to an unjust and costly war in Iraq, returning soldiers from Iraq alleged Wednesday.
Gathered with a handful of peace activists outside the Texas Capitol, two Iraqi war veterans and a former military chaplain in Vietnam called for a withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Capt. David Harris, a resident of Arlington, Texas, who recently returned from a 14-month tour in Iraq, said he began to oppose the war after it became apparent that Iraq possessed no stores of biological or chemical weapons.
"There was a belief amongst the troops that we were going there to take down Saddam Hussein because he had weapons of mass destruction," said Harris, 33. "We're 16 months after the invasion, and still not a one has been found. That would put some skepticism in anybody."
The active-duty U.S. Army reservist, who served as a logistics officer in Iraq, said poor planning, training and resource allocation constantly jeopardized his unit. The 12-year armed forces veteran said he plans to submit his resignation to avoid a second call-up to Iraq.
"I was informed last Wednesday that I might be on the list...and put into a unit that's going to be deployed," Harris said. "My resignation is already typed up. After 12 years, it's hard to walk away from it. But I can't see doing another year in Iraq."
Harris teaches ROTC at the University of Texas at Arlington. According to information provided by the Veterans for Peace organization, his decorations include the Bronze Star and the Global War on Terror medal.
But Harris said: "I just don't agree that we should have this endless war on terror with no end. I don't think we can change the landscape or the people in Iraq in one year, five years or 10 years."
Another Iraqi war veteran, Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Michael Hoffman, said, "The war has been based on lies from the start: there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."
Hoffman was among the first batch of Marines to cross into Iraq during the March 2003 invasion. With the recent handover of national sovereignty, U.S. forces now must fight behind ill-equipped and often untrained Iraqi security forces, Hoffman said.
"It seems that the handover is a sham as well," said Hoffman, 24, a resident of Morrisville, Pa., who drew applause from a handful of peace activists during the noon gathering.
Hoffman, who joined the Marines in February 1999, was deployed to Kuwait and traveled as far north in Iraq as Tikrit before returning to the United States on May 10, 2003.
Hoffman said he remains on inactive reserve.
San Antonio resident James C. Berbiglia, a retired military chaplain who served in Vietnam, said that with the creation of new U.S. military bases in Iraq, it appears that the United States plans to stay for a long time.
"Even if the mission is accomplished, we are still losing people," Berbiglia said. "If we do what our present administration says, we'll have 2,500 dead Americans over there in two years. ... We're for peace. We're for getting them (U.S. soldiers) home."
So far, more than 800 service members have been killed in Iraq - including more than 60 from Texas. More than 5,000 U.S. soldiers have been wounded.
----
Two foreign activists refused entry, ask court to overturn ban
By Relly Sa'ar, Haaretz Correspondent
12/07/2004
Haaretz (Israel)
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/450086.html
Two human rights activists who have been refused entry into Israel petitioned the Tel Aviv District Court on Sunday to overturn the Interior Ministry's decision to keep them out of the country.
The activists - Jamie Spector, 32, from San Francisco, and Christina Grafer, 46, from the Netherlands - planned to demonstrate against the West Bank separation fence as part of their involvement with the International Solidarity Movement. Security officials asked the Interior Ministry not to allow them into Israel when they arrived at Ben-Gurion International Airport on Saturday, saying they constitute a "danger to state security."
The Tel Aviv District Court on Sunday issued injunctions delaying their deportation while proceedings in the case continue.
Spector and Grafer are not the first to be denied entry into Israel during the past two weeks on the basis of their left-wing activity. As fellow ISM activist Ann Robinson Petter did when she was denied entry to the country at the end of June, Spector and Grafer also refused to return to their respective countries, were arrested by the immigration authorities at the airport, and petitioned the court to let them in.
Robinson Petter, a 44-year-old graphic designer from New York, has since appealed to the Supreme Court against last week's district court decision ordering her to keep away from Israel due to her activity in ISM. The Supreme Court will hear the case on Thursday.
Grafer's attorney Gabi Laski wrote in the petition that the Shin Bet, and not the Interior Ministry, has the real power over who is allowed to enter Israel.
"Despite the Interior Minister's broad discretion regarding foreigners' entry into the state of Israel, he functions as a rubber stamp for the security forces, led by the Shin Bet security service, who pass on the lists of those who have been denied entry to Israel," Laski wrote. "And so in effect, the widespread authority of deportation and distancing from Israel are given directly and uncritically to the Shin Bet."
The Interior Ministry did not dispute Laski's contention, saying, "In cases in which the security forces recommend not to approve entry into Israel, the interior minister indeed doesn't use his own discretion, and takes the recommendation."
Both Grafer and Spector are involved in the academic world. Grafer works in computers at a Dutch university and Spector, who is a Jew from San Francisco, works as an educational adviser in schools.
The petition filed by attorney Yael Barda on behalf of Spector discusses her right to live in Israel under the Law of Return, the family members she has in the country, and her involvement in the Tikkun Jewish renewal movement in San Francisco, together with her parents. "The entire family holds left-wing views, which they do not hide," the petition says.
Spector was questioned for seven hours, according to the petition, and was then told she would not be able to enter the country because of her affiliation with ISM. She was planning to "conduct humane activity in the territories, to document the construction of the separation fence, and establish artistic projects for Israeli and Palestinian children, and to meet with the leader of the Bereaved Families Forum, Yitzhak Frankenthal," the petition says.
--------
Michael Moore may make Blair film
BBC
7 July, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3872663.stm
Film director Michael Moore has said he does not rule out making a film about Tony Blair following the success of his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.
A message posted on Moore's website last month stated that reports of his plans for a film on Blair were false.
But speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Moore left the possibility of a film based on the UK leader open.
"I wouldn't completely rule it out only because I find Blair a more fascinating character than Bush," he said.
"Blair is not an idiot, Blair is smart, what's his excuse? He knows better," said Moore.
Worldwide release
When asked if his film about US President George Bush's policy on Iraq was "playing to the converted, singing to the same choir", Moore said he hoped it was.
"The choir in America has been asleep so I hope it plays to the choir - it means it will wake the choir up and give them a song to sing," he said.
"Considering the historic record-breaking box office it's been doing, I would say the film is accomplishing its goal," he added.
Moore said he hoped Fahrenheit 9/11 would result in President Bush losing this autumn's US election.
Censorship
"All I know right now is it's selling a lot of popcorn - we'll see in November." Moore told an international press conference in New York on Tuesday that he hoped the global release of his film would result in "regime change" in Australia and Japan, too.
He said the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 was still being negotiated in some countries like China, where there were concerns Beijing would censor portions of the film.
"I hope Chinese people would come away with the realisation that there are Americans, like myself, who can dissent," he said.
"Perhaps some day anyone in China will have the right to pick up a camera and do whatever they want."
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