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NUCLEAR
Los Alamos Has "Immense" Plutonium Inventory Discrepancy, 150 Bombs Worth
FDA Approves Dirty Bomb Antidotes
Protect yourself from the harmful effects of radiation
Peru authorities search for missing radioactive material
New film exposd radioactive weapons used in Iraq
The US and UK deploy new uranium weapons
Hand over nuclear weapons and know-how, Iran tells Britain
Iran demands that Europeans back its nuclear quest: report
UN links Iran uranium trace to Pakistan
Findings Could Hurt U.S. Effort On Iran
Iran Seeking 'Peaceful' Nuclear Program
Iran Won't Abandon Atomic Technology Drive - Khatami
Saddam gave up all Iraqi WMD after 1991 Gulf War,
Japan Nuke Accident Raises Doubts Over Aging Plant
Rust and Neglect Cited at Japan Atom Plant
Japan Begins Probe Into Worst Nuke Accident
Japan Scrutinizes Nuclear Safety
China ups ante in ancient-kingdom feud with Korea
U.S., N. Korean Discuss Nuclear Impasse
Hunting nuclear waste dumped in Moscow
An American Hiroshima
Brand-new Ukrainian nuclear power plant shut down
Nuclear Energy Institute Praises Exelon-DOJ Used Fuel Settlement
Nukes Still Take Toll on Workers
Rocky Flats samples may be on hold
Kerry Vows to Scrap Nevada Nuclear Waste Repository
Kerry says Bush broke his word on Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage
Kerry Has Nevada's Ear on Yucca Mountain
Kerry Criticizes U.S. Plan to Send Nuclear Waste to Nevada
The Wild, Wild Wars in the West
Hanford reactor nearing its final end
U.S. Settles Nuclear Case Over Burial of Waste
MILITARY
Rumsfeld Drops In on Afghanistan
Darfur refugees face starvation
Sudan Accused of Arresting Those Who Disclose Dire Conditions
Congo Says U.N. Must Forcibly Disarm Rwandan Rebels
U.S. INTENDS TO SELL HARM MISSILE TO EGYPT
Terror Suspects Lose Internment Challenge
Cheney's Old Company Can't Account for $1.8 Billion
Taiwan stages war games as report shows China would win in six days
Iranians consider future of reform
Cemetery Fight Haunts Some U.S. Troops
Sadr Militia Goes on Attack in Baghdad Neighborhoods
U.S. Forces, Close to Attack in Najaf, Decide to Hold Off
U.S. Troops Fight Iraq Militiamen on Two Fronts
Black Hawks Scramble to Save U.S. Troops in Iraq
Sadr tells fighters: Carry on if I'm martyred
Israel's ongoing foreign energy dependence
EU criticises Israel
Blast Near Jerusalem Kills 2 Palestinians
U.S. commends Israel for removal of IDF roadblocks
Tehran invites Iraqi prime minister for official visit
Gauge of Mideast tensions on Lebanon's border with Israel
NATO training mission arrives in Iraq
Putin Finding Power in The Pump
US Blinded by Love for Saakashvili
Bush Nominates Rep. Goss to Run CIA
Goss Was Once Latin America Operative
Intelligence Insider Has Recently Displayed a More Combative Side
Intelligence Changes Concern Pentagon
Bush nominates Goss to lead CIA
Bush's CIA Pick: 'Business as Usual'
Video Purportedly Shows Killing of Iraq 'CIA Agent'
Analysis: CIA dismay at Goss appointment
Pentagon warns against making US intelligence
Control of intelligence assets at issue
Congo Says U.N. Must Forcibly Disarm Rwandan Rebels
Amnesty Demands End to Free-Speech Abuses in Sudan
Wounded Soldiers Are Adapting to Altered Lives
Heat of Battle Takes Toll on U.S. Forces
Soldiers use online resources to make voices heard
U.S. Searching for Four Missing Aviators
Pentagon favors resuming training Pakistani officers
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
US contests detainee lawyer rights
Libya seeks compensation for US air strikes in 1986
U.S. Overhauls Aviation Security Program
The Hill locked down with no new threats
Border plan expedites removals, extends visits
US border guard indicted for beating Chinese businesswoman
Guantanamo Prisoner Says He Was a Cook
U.S. Stance Prompts Calls to Dismiss 9/11 Case
Terror suspects' appeal rejected
Bin Laden calls for attacks on Britain
Libya to pay terror victims
Bin Laden hints major assassination
US Silent on Torture of Children
POLITICS
9/11 Panel Leaders Seek Pentagon Support
How Portland Paper Got Iraq Abuse Story
Kerry Attack Briefly Deleted
Kerry on the war
Teens keep eye on election, war
Bush mocks Kerry's concession on war
Book torpedoes Kerry's strategy
ENERGY
Unique tire-burning plant in Minnesota town
OTHER
Millions of Locusts Headed for Darfur, U.N. Says
ACTIVISTS
Protesters Push for Central Park Rally
New York lockdown
Group Marks 25 Years of Dissent
War Crimes Tribunal on Iraq: the case against Bush
EVERY DAY IS HIROSHIMA DAY
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Los Alamos Has "Immense" Plutonium Inventory Discrepancy, 150 Bombs Worth
AUGUST 11, 2004
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0811-08.htm
WASHINGTON - August 11 - All operations involving plutonium at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) should continue to "stand down" until "an immense discrepancy in the accounts for how much plutonium is in the waste at LANL" is reconciled, according to a letter from watchdog groups delivered today to LANL Director G. Peter Nanos.
According to the letter, "The Department of Energy (DOE) reported a discharge to waste from LANL of 610 kilograms of plutonium; Los Alamos indicates a figure of 1,375 kilograms . . . a discrepancy of 765 kilograms, the equivalent of 150 nuclear weapons. This is unacceptable by any imaginable standards and constitutes a crucial safety, environmental, and security issue."
The letter was sent by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), Nuclear Watch of New Mexico and Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety. Copies were simultaneously delivered to DOE Secretary Spencer Abraham, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and key members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Calling the accounting discrepancy "huge," it continues, "If the LANL number is anywhere close to correct, then there may be very serious implications regarding the lack of due care in minimizing losses of an extremely expensive, proliferation-sensitive, and dangerous material. On the other hand, if the 1,375 kilograms that is now booked as waste is not, in fact, in the waste, the security implications are obvious." Plutonium is both a core ingredient for modern nuclear weapons and a cancer-causing contaminant for humans.
The LANL plutonium accounting discrepancy was first noted in a 1996 DOE memorandum, which the letter signers posted on the internet. An agency working group set up to address the issue at that time never issued a report. "To the best of our knowledge, LANL has yet to explain the large plutonium accounting discrepancy or address its security implications," the signers stated.
"It is completely unacceptable for a discrepancy of 150 bombs worth of plutonium to remain on the books eight years after it was first discovered," the letter to Nanos concluded. "Since you have already stood down LANL on other security and safety issues, we request that you seize this moment and immediately appoint an independent task force to investigate this issue until it is resolved."
The full letter to LANL Director G. Peter Nanos and the 1996 DOE memorandum identifying LANL's plutonium accounting issue are posted at http://www.ieer.org
Dr. Arjun Makhijani (301) 365-6723 Jay Coghlan (505) 989-7342 Joni Arends (505) 986-1973
----
FDA Approves Dirty Bomb Antidotes
August 11, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/health/AP-FDA-Dirty-Bombs.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Food and Drug Administration approved two new products Wednesday designed to help deal with the consequences of terrorists using dirty bombs.
Acting FDA Commissioner Lester M. Crawford told The Associated Press that the products, to be available by prescription only, are designed to speed up elimination of radiation from the body.
Dirty bombs have become an increasing concern. Unlike warheads designed to kill and destroy through a huge nuclear blast and heat, so-called dirty bombs are radiation weapons. They would rely on conventional explosives to blow radioactive material far and wide. A successful bomb could make a section of a city uninhabitable for years.
The agency said the goal is to provide protection from both nuclear accidents and threats. It said the two drugs are safe and effective for treating contamination from the elements plutonium, americium or curium.
The FDA said that while these drugs have been in use on an experimental basis for several years, until this action there have been no approved drugs for treatment of internal contamination by the three radioactive elements.
Plutonium, americium or curium can enter the body through a variety of routes including ingestion, inhalation or direct contact through wounds. By removing them quickly the victim may avoid possible future effects including the development of certain cancers, which may occur years after exposure, FDA said.
Approved were:
--Penetate calcium trisodium injection, Ca-DTPA.
--Penetate Zinc trisodium injection, Zn-DTPA.
On the Net:
FDA: http://www.fda.gov
----
[Read this, as with all postings, skeptically. If you have alternative information, please post to editor@nucnews.net.]
Protect yourself from the harmful effects of radiation or radioactive exposure with this new information
Emedia Wire,
August 11, 2004
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2004/8/emw148374.htm
Just released - The world's only alternative medicine manual on how to detoxify and rebuild the body after excessive radiation or radioactive exposure.
(PRWEB) August 11, 2004 -- Top Shape Publishing LLC, has recently released a new book addressing the national security and health issue on how to detoxify your body of the effects from radiation and radioactive exposure.
Just recently there was another accident at a Japanese nuclear power plant in Mihama that didn't involve radiation, but killed four people and brings to light this on-going but unresolved concern. Now there is finally a plan of action.
Thousands of people are continually exposed to the dangers of excessive radiation every year. There are cancer patients who undergo radiation therapy, medical workers who deal with nuclear medicine, power plant workers, Gulf War veterans and military personnel who become exposed to depleted uranium, uranium miners and workers at plutonium processing facilities, scientists who do radioactive lab research and residents who live near old atomic testing grounds or active nuclear energy facilities.
"How to Neutralize the Harmful Effects of Radiation or Radioactive Exposure" is the first book of its kind that not only reviews the typical health results of radiation toxicity and sickness in layman's terms, but focuses on the various ways by which you can eliminate radioactive particles from your body and start healing yourself from the damaging effects of radiation exposure.
Author William Bodri says, "I wanted to write a book, as my own national contribution, that addressed a security concern that everyone seemed to be ignoring, which is the emergency detoxification of radioactive exposure. Scan the internet and most of what you find simply focuses on telling you that radiation is bad for you. Well, we don't need more studies telling us what we already know. While most of the radiation research is focused in that direction what we really need are alternative and naturopathic protocols you can use to help protect yourself or heal yourself from excessive radiation or radioactive exposure. Unfortunately, as one researcher told me, there's no funds for that type of research as there's no demand, meaning we're not thinking ahead in terms of real national concerns. We say we want to send astronauts to Mars and they also need this sort of information. Every little bit helps when it comes to adjunct naturopathic therapies, and if the hospitals and government stockpiles of potassium iodine or Prussian Blue run out in an emergency, this the very sort of information the public will be screaming for and it's what health care workers need to know."
Delving into options as diverse as seaweeds, chlorella, spirulina, teas, thiol compounds, amino acids, shark alkyglycerols and dozens of other natural substances that have been used at Nagasaki or Chernobyl, studied for their radioprotective effects or used in other incidents of radiation sickness and exposure, the book also focuses on various proven natural means that can help neutralize radioactive compounds and rebuild the body's blood, gastrointestinal and immune system after exposure to radiation.
How to Neutralize the Harmful Effects of Radiation or Radioactive Exposure By William Bodri www.RadiationDetox.com
----
Peru authorities search for missing radioactive material
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
By Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-11/s_26448.asp
LIMA, Peru - The head of the Peruvian Institute of Nuclear Energy said this week that two stolen nuclear measuring devices used by miners do not contain enough radioactive material to produce a "dirty bomb."
Institute president Modesto Montoya said that the missing 20-kilogram (44-pound) industrial measurers each contain about one gram (3.5 ounces) of removable, encapsulated cesium 137. They were stolen on July 31, most likely for sale to a scrap collector, he said.
Although the amount of cesium 137 would not be enough to make a radioactive bomb, it could cause serious burns if carried around in a pocket for several days, Montoya said. The radioactive material could also contaminate a scrap yard if accidentally melted down, he said after holding a news conference to warn Lima residents.
Montoya said the measuring devices were stolen from a Lima warehouse. Shaped like two cylinders separated by a U-clamp, the 35 centimeter by 20 centimeter (14 inch by 8 inch) contraptions can be attached to tubes and small tanks.
By emitting radiation, the devices can precisely determine the density of contents - or blockages - without opening the tanks or tubes. In all, 23 companies in Peru have 262 of the nuclear devices, Montoya said.
Cesium 137 is a soft, silvery white metal that melts at 28 degrees Celsius (83 F). Besides various industrial applications, it is also used to treat cancer patients with radiation.
The greatest source of cesium 137 contamination worldwide came from fallout generated by atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s and 1960s, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Most of that radiation has since decayed, however.
-------- depleted uranium
New film exposd radioactive weapons used in Iraq
August 11, 2004
For Immediate Release ...
Contact: Sunny Miller,
Traprock Peace Center,
413-773-7427
http://traprockpeace.org
German documentary exposes current radioactive warfare in Iraq.
http://www.traprockpeace.org/depleted_uranium_iraq.html
"The Doctors, the Depleted Uranium, and the Dying Children" exposes current radioactive warfare in Iraq.
Veterans, military families, activists and interested individuals can now order an English version of a documentary film produced for German television by Freider Wagner and Valentin Thurn.
This stunning new video, has just been released by Ochoa-Wagner Produktion in 2004 in Germany and is available through Traprock Peace Center.
"The Doctors, the Depleted Uranium, and the Dying Children" exposes the use and impact of radioactive weapons during the current war against Iraq. The story is told by citizens of many nations and opens with comments by two British veterans, Kenny Duncan and Jenny Moore, describing their exposure to radioactive, so-called Śdepletedą uranium (DU), weapons and the congenital abnormalities of their children.
Dr. Siegwart-Horst Günther, a former colleague of Albert Schweitzer, and Tedd Weyman traveled to Iraq, from Germany and Canada respectively, to assess uranium contamination in Iraq.
Weyman led the investigative team that gathered samples for analysis for the Uranium Medical Research Centre (UMRC). He discusses startling findings of the 2003 field investigations in Iraq. "The human and environmental samples have been found to contain depleted uranium and abnormally high levels of the artificial transuranic isotope, 236U. ... Viewers will see in the film, evidence of a new class of uranium weapons." These include "bunker defeat" bombs.
As an M.D., Dr. Günther is especially interested in the health effects that can be caused by such contamination. At a hospital in Basra, Dr. Jenan Hassan revealed an on-going health catastrophe--a ten-fold increase in cancers and a twenty-fold increase in congenital deformities. The grisly realities of the cancer ward provide an appropriate alarm that could help to stop the use of these weapons unless it can be shown they will not harm civilians for generations to come.
Dr. Duracovic, founder of the Uranium Medical Research Centre, and formerly a Colonel in the U.S. Army, says that the Canadian government wasted a million dollars on tests provided to Canadian veterans, using faulty methodology that looked for uranium in the hair, where uranium will not accumulate.
LINKS
To purchase "The Doctors, the Depleted Uranium, and the Dying Children" (VHS NTSC format) go to http://www.traprockpeace.org/depleted_uranium_iraq.html
The purchase price is $25.00 for non-commercial, non-institutional use and includes normal shipping - first class mail within the US. (If you require expedited shipping, please call Traprock at 413-773-7427 as the shipping rates will vary.)
For an exclusive article on this film by Tedd Weyman, leader of Uranium Medical Research Centre investigative team that gathered samples for analysis, go to http://www.traprockpeace.org/tedd_weyman_10aug04.html
For further description of the film see a summary of "The Doctors ... " by Sunny Miller. http://www.traprockpeace.org/depleted_uranium_iraq.html
Thanks to Marion Küpker for alerting us to this resource. She was a convener of the World Uranium Weapons Conference 2003 http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de
Sunny Miller, Executive Director, Charles Jenks, attorney at law President of the Core Group Traprock Peace Center 103A Keets Road Deerfield, MA 01342 413-773-1633; Fax 413-773-7507 charles@m... http://traprockpeace.org
-----
The US and UK deploy new uranium weapons contaminating Iraq's environment, civilians and the Coalition's own troops
Homepage for "The Doctors, the Depleted Uranium and the Dying Children"
August 10 , 2004
page created by Charlie Jenks
http://www.traprockpeace.org/depleted_uranium_iraq.html
In September/October 2003, five months after the cessation of the Shock and Awe bombing campaign and the Rapid Dominance ground force advance into Iraq, the Uranium Medical Research Centre (UMRC) sent in a team to collect biological and environmental samples, conduct a public health survey, and a field radiation survey. UMRC's objective for this field research is to determine the extent and nature of radiological contamination derived from the deployment of coalition weapons containing uranium. UMRC was guided by Dr. M. Al Shaickly. Dr. Shaickly and the UMRC staff, led by Tedd Weyman , traveled with Dr. Siegwart-Horst Guenther to survey Operation Iraqi Freedom battlefields in Baghdad and Al Basra. Dr. Guenther also conducted an independent survey of Iraqi hospitals and patients, interviewing physicians and surveying the medical effects and symptomotologies of both Gulf War I and the 2003 Iraq War of civilian patients coincidentally exposed to battlefield contaminants and the fallout of US and UK bombs and missiles.
The film, "The Doctor, Depleted Uranium and the Sick Children", filmed in the field and produced by Frieder Wagner, chronicles aspects of Dr. Guenther's and UMRC's combined and independent activities during their field visit. It also contains an interview with and excerpts of a meeting between Dr. Guenther and Dr. Asaf Durakovic, UMRC's International Director of Research. Dr. Guenther was the first physician to identify uranium contamination in Iraqis and their environment after Gulf War I. Dr. Durakovic first brought to the attention of the professional medical community and the NATO defence departments, Depleted Uranium contamination in US, UK and Canadian Gulf War I veterans.
The recent Iraqi field samples collected by UMRC were analysed by plasma mass spectrometer by Dr Axel Gerdes, Institute of Petrology and Geochemistry, JW Goethe University, Frankfurt. The human and environmental samples have been found to contain Depleted Uranium and abnormally high levels of the artificial transuranic isotope, 236U. The isotope composition of Depleted Uranium found in civilians as well as in surface soils and water courses shows the weapons used in Iraq were manufactured from two and perhaps three different metallurgical sources (stockpiles of uranium metals). The soil and water samples indicate DU was deployed in both mechanized battlefields and urban neighborhoods where aerial bombing took place.
The purity and quantities (abundances) of the Depleted Uranium found in the samples of soils taken from US- and UK-led battlefields are some of the highest levels published since UMRC and others began independent investigations into the use of radioactive dispersion weapons in 1991 following Operation Desert Storm. The abundances of uranium in water samples taken from a fresh water supply tank and from a run-off catchbasin in Al Basra are much higher than published results for DU levels in water samples attributed to the by-products of uranium weapons in either the Balkans or Iraq.
Biological samples taken from Iraqi civilians present during the Shock and Awe bombing campaign against downtown Baghdad and its government and telecommunications facilities are positive for Depleted Uranium. It is not possible to know the source of inner-city civilian contamination as virtually the entire city is contaminated. Unlike biological and environmental samples collected in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom, the team did not find deposits of Non Depleted Uranium. A biological sample taken from one Al Basra citizen, who was exposed to the urban bombing campaign in that city, has an unusual composition of isotopes showing an enriched, as opposed to a depleted or natural, ratio of 235U/238U. The enriched uranium was found in a person exposed to and living adjacent to the same battlefield led by the British Desert Rats, south of Al Basra. According to the DUOB (Depleted Uranium Oversight Board) of the UK Ministry of Defence, urine samples taken from members of the UK 1st Armored Division that fought the approach to Al Basra and occupied the city are excreting non-depleted uranium several hundreds of times the British biological norm. Smaller total uranium levels positive for DU have also been identified by the MOD in the UK forces that served in the Az Zubair - Basra - Shat Al Arabi area.
Viewers will see in the film, evidence of a new class of uranium weapons. The new weapons identified by their unique ballistic signature in the field are high explosive, anti-tank and bunker-defeat warheads (as distinguished from bunker-buster bombs). One example can be seen in the film where a high level of radioactivity is detected on the surface armor of an Iraqi tank displaying unusual spallation, surface craters and holes forged through the hull. The ballistics of this warhead is unlike the clean penetration channels of "inert DU kinetic energy penetrators" (non-explosive types) shown in other examples throughout the film.
The US and the UK have not yet publicly admitted to the use of uranium in their armor and bunker defeat warheads, which are a relatively unknown class of warheads called "explosively-loaded penetrators". Two new types of explosively-loaded penetrators using uranium have been identified in Iraq: (1) explosively-formed penetrators; and, (2) shaped charge penetrators. The ballistic effects of the EFP-type can be seen in the film on a tank inspected by Dr Guenther. Similar radioactive and ballistic effects were logged separately by UMRC showing the use of uranium in explosively-formed penetrators along with the better known inert depleted uranium penetrators in both US and the UK battlefields.
UMRC's biological samples show that some civilians exposed to battlefields and remaining in the bombed urban areas are contaminated with Depleted Uranium, which they were continuing to excrete in urine five months after the end of the major hostilities. Surface soils and water exposed to the uranium weapons are so highly contaminated that UMRC's field team became contaminated by inhalation of Depleted Uranium during their field survey activities. UMRC has also identified Depleted Uranium contamination in US troops of the 442 Military Police Unit, stationed in As Samawah, the location abandoned by the Dutch forces because field readings indicated elevated radioactivity levels. Subsequently the Japanese Defence Forces have taken over the Coalition's duties at As Samawah.
The laboratory results from the soils' samples collected in Iraq by UMRC have been peer reviewed and presented at the 2004 Health Physics Society Annual Conference, July 2004. The biological sample results have been peer reviewed and will be published in 2004. Details of these results following their presentations at scientific conferences and publishing are made available in conference poster presentation format at http://www.umrc.net
Tedd Weyman Deputy Director Uranium Medical Research Centre
Published by Traprock Peace Center August 10, 2004 http://www.traprockpeace.org
Thanks to Marion Küpker for alerting us to this resource. She was a convener of the World Uranium Weapons Conference 2003 - http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de
Traprock Peace Center 103A Keets Road, Woolman Hill Deerfield, MA 01342
Phone: (413) 773-7427; Fax:(413)773-7507
-------- iran
Hand over nuclear weapons and know-how, Iran tells Britain
By Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor
11/08/2004
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/08/11/wiran11.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/08/11/ixworld.html
Iran has issued an extraordinary list of demands to Britain and other European countries, telling them to provide advanced nuclear technology, conventional weapons and a security guarantee against nuclear attack by Israel.
Teheran's request, said by British officials to have "gone down very badly", sharply raises the stakes in the crisis over Iran's nuclear programme, which Britain and America believe is aimed at making an atomic bomb.
Iran's move came during crisis talks in Paris this month with senior diplomats from Britain, France and Germany.
The "EU-3" were trying to convince Iranian officials to honour an earlier deal to suspend its controversial uranium enrichment programme, which is ostensibly designed to make fuel for nuclear power stations but could also be used to make fissile material for nuclear bombs.
Iranian officials refused point-blank to comply, saying they had every right under international law to pursue "peaceful" nuclear technology.
They then stunned the Europeans by presenting a letter setting out their own demands.
Iran said the EU-3 should support Iran's quest for "advanced (nuclear) technology, including those with dual use" - a reference to equipment that has both civilian and military applications.
The Europeans should "remove impediments" preventing Iran from having such technology, and stick to these commitments even if faced with "legal (or) political . . . limitations", an allusion to American pressure or even future international sanctions against Iran.
More astonishingly, Iran said the EU-3 should agree to meet Iran's requirements for conventional weapons and even "provide security assurances" against a nuclear attack on Iran.
This is a reference to Israel's nuclear arsenal, believed to include some 200 warheads and long-range missiles to deliver them.
The EU-3 are still debating over how to respond, but British officials said the Iranian letter was "extremely surprising, given the delicate state of process". Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, will have to decide whether to adopt a more confrontational policy.
America is demanding that the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which meets next month, refer Iran to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. US officials are also openly discussing "covert" means of disrupting the Iranian nuclear programme, while Israel has openly threatened military action.
However, there were signs yesterday that the next report of Mohammed ElBaradei, the IAEA director general, may give Iran a boost.
A key mystery for the past year has been the source of traces of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) found by IAEA inspectors at several sites in Iran. Teheran claimed this was "contamination" of equipment imported from other countries, rather than proof that it had secretly made HEU.
According to diplomats, inspectors have confirmed that in at least one case the contamination did come from Pakistan, as Iran claimed.
Other contamination issues remain unresolved, and may never be settled. Moreover there are several other open questions.
----
Iran demands that Europeans back its nuclear quest: report
LONDON (AFP)
Aug 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040811001849.zpz5qlvr.html
Iran is boldly demanding that Britain, France and Germany actively support its quest for advanced nuclear technology for both civilian and military purposes, rather than opposing it, the Daily Telegraph newspaper reported Wednesday.
Iranian officials made the "extraordinary" demand during talks in Paris on defusing international tension over Tehran's nuclear intentions, the newspaper's diplomatic editor reported.
During the meeting, which the Daily Telegraph said took place earlier this month, the Europeans tried to convince their Iranian counterparts to honour an earlier deal to suspend a controversial uranium enrichment programme.
Instead the Iranians set out their own demands, stating that Europe's three biggest nations -- two of them nuclear powers -- should back Iran's quest for "advanced (nuclear) technology, including those of dual use".
Britain, France and Germany, they said, should "remove impediments" preventing Iran from having such technology, and do so regardless of any "legal (or) political... limitations," an apparent reference to US pressure or international sanctions, the newspaper said.
Furthermore, the Iranian side stated that London, Paris and Berlin should agree to meet Iran's requirements for conventional weapons, and to "provide security assurances" against a nuclear attack on Iran, it said.
The latter was an apparent reference to Israel's nuclear firepower, which includes long-range missiles, the Daily Telegraph said.
While Britain, France and Germany are still debating how to respond to the demands, the newspaper quoted British officials as calling them "extremely surprising, given the delicate state of process".
It added that, according to the British officials, Iran's demands had "gone down very badly".
Officials from Britain, France and Germany met with an Iranian delegation in the French capital in the last week of July, but European Union diplomats revealed nothing afterwards about Iranian demands such as reported in the Daily Telegraph.
Rather, they said the talks had produced "no substantial progress" as each side repeated their positions. "There were no changes," one diplomat told AFP in Tehran on August 1.
Under an agreement reached last year with the three European powers, Iran agreed to suspend sensitive uranium enrichment, allow tougher inspections and file a comprehensive declaration of its nuclear activities.
Those measures were aimed at "building confidence" while the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) conducted a major probe into Iran's bid to generate electricity through nuclear power -- seen by the United States as a cover for secret weapons development.
But since then, experts from the UN's nuclear watchdog have found omissions in Iran's reporting. Inspection visits have also been delayed, and Tehran has backed away from a pledge to suspend all enrichment-related activities.
----
UN links Iran uranium trace to Pakistan
11.08.2004
REUTERS
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/latestnewsstory.cfm?storyID=3583613&thesection=news&thesubsection=world
VIENNA - The UN nuclear watchdog has linked highly enriched uranium particles found in Iran to Pakistan, which fits Tehran's explanation they came from equipment bought on the black market, a Western diplomat said on Tuesday.
Iran says its nuclear programme is aimed solely at generating electricity and that particles of enriched uranium, including some bomb-grade samples, which UN inspectors have found in the country were not produced in Iran.
While the finding by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) appears to strengthen Iran's case against Washington's charge that Tehran is trying to build a nuclear bomb, diplomats warned the finding was far from conclusive.
US State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said that the enriched uranium question was only one of several troubling issues which also included Iran's failure to abide by agreements and co-operate with the IAEA.
"Obviously we think Iran has a weapons programme, we think the evidence points to that," he said.
"What's troubling is that there are not clear, consistent answers that are provided in an open and transparent way, and that's what we're looking for."
A Western diplomat told Reuters the IAEA had matched contamination from uranium enriched to 54 per cent to a sample from Pakistan.
"The IAEA has tentatively concluded that at least one instance of the 54 per cent contamination matches a sample provided by Pakistan," he said, confirming a report on Tuesday by Jane's Defence Weekly.
Uranium contamination is one of two key questions the IAEA wants answer to in its investigation of Iran's nuclear programme. The other is the extent of Iran's work on advanced P-2 centrifuges, machines that enrich uranium.
If enriched to a low level uranium can be used as fuel for electricity generating reactors. Bomb-grade uranium must be enriched to 90 per cent or above.
Jane's said 36 per cent enriched uranium contamination had also been matched with a foreign sample.
That contamination came from Russian equipment that China supplied to Pakistan and was then sold to Iran by the illicit nuclear network set up by the founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme, Abdul Qadeer Khan, Jane's said.
Diplomats contacted by Reuters could not confirm that report but said that if it were confirmed, many questions about Iran's nuclear programme would still remain unanswered, including the origin of weapons-grade uranium samples found in Iran.
"There are many important outstanding questions remaining. It's great that the agency is now becoming able to start to link things up, but by no means is the process over," one diplomat said.
The IAEA declined to comment, saying its latest findings would be presented in a report ahead of its September 13 Board of Governors meeting.
Washington has been pressing the 35-nation board to report Iran to the UN Security Council for hiding its uranium enrichment programme from the IAEA for nearly two decades.
State Department spokesman Ereli said other troubling issues included Iran's centrifuge programme and experiments with plutonium-separation and polonium-210, which can be used to initiate a chain reaction in a nuclear bomb.
----
Findings Could Hurt U.S. Effort On Iran
U.N. Traces Uranium To Tainted Equipment
By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 11, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54948-2004Aug10.html
U.N. nuclear inspectors have determined that traces of enriched uranium found in Iran came into the country on contaminated equipment bought through middlemen and dealers, some of whom were connected to Pakistan's nuclear black market, according to experts and diplomats working on the investigation.
The findings do not rule out the possibility that Iran may be concealing a weapons program, but they do lend support to the country's contention that it unknowingly imported tainted equipment.
U.S. officials have cited the residue as proof that Iran was enriching uranium or importing the material as part of a program to build a nuclear bomb, but the new findings could complicate U.S. efforts to muster international pressure on the Islamic republic over its nuclear program.
The uranium issue is expected to feature prominently when the International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-member board meets in Vienna next month to determine whether Tehran is violating international law.
The Bush administration, Iran and Europe's main powers are locked in a standoff in the face of mounting evidence that Tehran has concealed elements of a nuclear program that the country insists is designed to produce peaceful energy.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said recently it was increasingly likely that Iran's behavior would have to be brought up with the U.N. Security Council. But France, Britain and others have been reluctant to do so without clear-cut proof of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.
On Monday, President Bush vowed to keep up the pressure on Iran but stopped short of threatening to use force.
IAEA inspectors have been scouring the country during the past 18 months to determine whether Iran is hiding anything. In earlier assessments, the agency said Iran's cooperation was weak, and it found inconsistencies in the country's reports about its nuclear program.
Yesterday, however, experts involved in the investigation said they now believe that particles of enriched uranium found in the country came from equipment sold by A.Q. Khan, the architect of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, who was exposed earlier this year for supplying nuclear parts to Libya and Iran.
White House and State Department officials did not respond to calls for comment about the findings.
Inspectors, who found two levels of enriched uranium, said that particles enriched to 54 percent came directly from Pakistan's weapons program and that particles enriched to 36 percent came from Russian equipment Pakistan may have bought secondhand or thirdhand years ago and which Khan later sold to Iran.
"The consensus has been for a while that the 36 percent enriched uranium had to have come from Russia because only Russia was producing that type of uranium," said Michael A. Levi, a science and technology fellow at the Brookings Institution. "The big question was always how the material made it from Russia to Iran," but Levi said contamination would explain that.
The IAEA is still trying to determine how and where Khan's network obtained the equipment, according to the experts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The agency has been trying to keep the results of its investigation private until it can brief its board in a status report due next month. But some details were first revealed this week by the publication Jane's Defense Weekly.
"We expect to report any findings that we have on our analysis of the samples in our next report to the board in early September," said Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the IAEA.
Inspectors have interviewed more than a dozen middlemen and traders in an effort to learn about Khan's nuclear black market and how it supplied Iran. More questions remain regarding Iran's centrifuge program and whether it could work well enough to refine uranium to the 90 percent range necessary for creating a nuclear explosion.
France, Britain and Germany, hoping months ago to defuse tensions, had reached an agreement with Tehran on a suspension of suspect nuclear activities there in exchange for economic incentives. But the deal unraveled in June when the three European nations and the IAEA board rebuked Iran for failing to fully cooperate with inspectors.
Two weeks ago, officials from all four countries met in Paris to try to salvage the deal, but neither side offered new incentives and instead traded blame for the deal's failure, European diplomats said.
--------
Iran Seeking 'Peaceful' Nuclear Program
August 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran is ready to ``pay the price'' for pursuing a peaceful nuclear program, even if that means being brought before the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions, President Mohammad Khatami said Wednesday.
At the same time, Iran successfully test fired a new version of its ballistic Shahab-3 missile, which already was capable of reaching U.S. forces in the Middle East and since has been upgraded in response to Israeli missile development. The Shahab-3 can carry a nuclear warhead.
The commander of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Rahim Safavi, warned that Iran ``will crush'' Israel if it attacks the Persian state, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
Khatami said Tehran was ready to give guarantees that its nuclear program, including enriching uranium, would not be diverted toward making weapons, as Washington suspects. He said atomic weapons go against the teachings of Islam.
``We have nothing more than a word -- 'yes' -- to peaceful nuclear technology,'' Khatami said after a Cabinet meeting.
``This is our national interest and prestige. This is our strategy. But if they want to deny us of our basic right (to develop a peaceful nuclear program), we and our nation have to be prepared to pay the price.''
Washington strongly suspects Iran is using a civilian nuclear program as a cover for a secret nuclear weapons project. President Bush has labeled Iran part of an ``axis of evil'' with North Korea and prewar Iraq.
The United States has been lobbying for the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran's nuclear dossier to the Security Council, which could impose sanctions.
Iran has rejected Washington's allegations, saying its nuclear program was geared only toward generating electricity.
Khatami said Iran does not want its case referred to the Security Council, but it will not worry if that happens.
``It's a remote possibility that (our dossier) is referred to the Security Council in September. Even if that happens, nothing will change. The pressure will continue. They (Americans) already condemn us and exert pressures now,'' a smiling Khatami said.
The IAEA is investigating nearly two decades of secret nuclear activities by Iran that were first revealed in 2003.
On Tuesday, the Bush administration said it was waiting for the agency's full report but was standing by its suspicions.
``Obviously, we think Iran has a weapons program, we think the evidence points to that,'' said Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman. ``What's troubling is that there are not clear, consistent answers that are provided in an open and transparent way ... as promised.''
But Khatami said new IAEA findings proved Tehran's claim that traces of weapons-grade enriched uranium found on some products in Iran were produced elsewhere.
``We didn't produce enriched uranium in Iran. The equipment was contaminated,'' he said.
The new agency findings were revealed Tuesday by diplomats in Vienna, Austria. The diplomats, who are familiar with Iran's nuclear dossier, told The Associated Press the IAEA has established that at least some enriched particles found in Iran originated in Pakistan.
The origin of hundreds of other samples has not been established. Still, the finding bolsters Tehran's assertion that all such traces were inadvertently imported on ``contaminated'' equipment it bought on the black market.
Khatami said Islam does not allow Iran to seek nuclear weapons.
``Due to our ideological beliefs, we can't acquire nuclear weapons ... we can't use nuclear weapons even if they are used against us,'' he said. ``We will give all the necessary guarantees to ensure that Iran doesn't work toward acquiring nuclear weapons.''
Khatami said Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Hasan Rowhani, will embark on a mission to try to defuse tensions over the nuclear program. He did not elaborate.
Earlier this month, Iran confirmed it resumed building nuclear centrifuges. The centrifuges are used to make uranium hexaflouride, which can be enriched to low levels to be used as fuel or to high levels to make weapons.
Iran restarted its effort after Britain, Germany and France failed to close Iran's dossier at the IAEA in June. Iran has called on the three to back its right to ``dual use'' nuclear technology that has both peaceful and weapons applications.
The three European nations have held out the prospect of supplying Iran with such technology only if suspicions about its program are eliminated.
The Shahab-3, which Iran last successfully tested in 2002 before providing it to the elite Revolutionary Guards, is the country's longest-range ballistic missile, with a range of about 810 miles.
A Defense Ministry statement reported by the official Islamic Republic News Agency said the test was successful.
``The previously assigned aims were achieved in this test,'' the statement said.
Iran's development of the missile prompted Israel and the United States to jointly develop the Arrow anti-ballistic missile system, one of the few systems capable of intercepting and destroying missiles at high altitudes.
Safavi was quoted by IRNA as saying, ``If Israel is mad enough to attack Iran's national interests, we will come down on them like a hammer and will crush their bones.''
It was unclear what prompted Safavi to make his remarks. Israel destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor in a 1981 airstrike to prevent it from making atomic bombs.
--------
Iran Won't Abandon Atomic Technology Drive - Khatami
August 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-iran-khatami.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran declared on Wednesday that threats to send its nuclear case to the U.N. Security Council would not make it drop its quest for peaceful nuclear technology.
The statement by President Mohammad Khatami came after U.S. officials expressed growing confidence in recent days that international resolve was hardening to deal with Iran's nuclear program and report it to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions.
Iran has angered Britain, Germany and France -- who have sought to broker a diplomatic solution to Tehran's nuclear case -- by re-starting parts of its nuclear program and refusing to abandon efforts to master uranium enrichment.
Washington says Iran wants to enrich uranium to bomb-grade levels. Tehran says it only wants to make low-grade enriched uranium for use in nuclear power reactors.
``We don't want our case to be sent to the United Nations. We hope to resolve the issue through justifications and explanations,'' Khatami told reporters.
``But if anyone wants to deprive us of our right (to peaceful nuclear technology) we and our nation would be ready to pay the price,'' he added.
Iran's claim that it has no intention of building nuclear arms was given a boost on Tuesday by reports that U.N. nuclear inspectors had traced highly-enriched uranium particles found in Iran to equipment bought from Pakistan.
This supports Iran's stance that the uranium samples, including some of bomb-grade level, were caused by contamination.
``We haven't done any enrichment in Iran. The parts were contaminated,'' Khatami said.
Diplomats in Tehran said Washington would probably push hard to include a trigger mechanism to send Iran's case to the U.N. Security Council in any resolution adopted by the next meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in September.
But they said Washington lacks sufficient support on the IAEA's 35-member Board of Governors to push through such a measure unless U.N. inspectors provide shocking new revelations about Iran's nuclear program in their next report -- something diplomats consider unlikely.
Khatami said that if Iran's case was sent to the Security Council, Tehran would lobby the five permanent members -- the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia -- hard to avoid any measures being adopted against Iran.
``While we consider the veto right at the U.N. Security Council to be unfair, there are five members and we can negotiate with them,'' he said.
-------- iraq / inspections
Saddam gave up all Iraqi WMD after 1991 Gulf War, says former nuclear chief
LONDON (AFP)
Aug 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040811214222.jy8n4137.html
Saddam Hussein gave up all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, the scientist who headed his nuclear programme, Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, said in a BBC interview Wednesday.
"There was no capability. There was no chemical or biological or any what are called weapons of mass destruction," said Jaffar in what BBC television called his first-ever broadcast interview.
Speaking in Paris, where he now lives, Jaffar -- who ran Saddam's nuclear programme for 25 years -- said there was "no development" of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons "at any time after 1991".
He said he knew that for a fact "because I am in touch with the people concerned".
Saddam's quest for weapons of mass destruction -- and the fear that they might fall into the hands of global terrorists -- was one of the prime reasons given for the US and British invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Nearly 18 months on, no such weapons have been uncovered -- a fact that both US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have been forced to concede.
Jaffar told the BBC he remained loyal to Saddam's regime until he slipped out of Iraq via Syria two days before the fall of Baghdad which signalled the collapse of the longtime Iraqi dictator.
The nuclear scientist -- who was educated in Britain, and has been described by some as the father of Iraq's nuclear programme -- said he had been approached by the United States to defect, but was never tempted to do so.
"I don't think it's right to defect," he said.
A transcript of Jaffar's interview with the current affairs show "Newsnight" was released in advance of broadcast. Excerpts also appeared on the BBC's website (www.bbc.co.uk/news).
He revealed that under Saddam, Iraq "specifically" adopted a programme to build a nuclear bomb in late 1987 -- six years after Israeli warplanes bombed the country's Osiris nuclear reactor for fear it might actually do just that.
Asked how close Iraq actually got to building a bomb before the 1991 war, Jaffar replied: "I cannot say really how close... It's difficult to estimate, but perhaps a few years."
"The facilities of the programme were damaged during the war and Iraq did not have, would not have had the resources under (UN) sanctions to continue," he explained.
He added: "Saddam took a decision in July 1991 to abandon the (nuclear) programme and destroy what remained of its equipment."
"We had orders to hand over the equipment to the Republican Guards, to the special Republican Guards, and they had orders to destroy the equipment that we handed over to them."
"Everything was destroyed, such that the programme couldn't be restarted at the time at all, and it never restarted," Jaffar said, adding that there was also no request to do more research.
On chemical weapons that UN arms inspectors were never able to account for, Jaffar said "books were not kept, you know, precisely" because nobody thought they would return in the weeks before last year's US-led invasion.
On British and US allegations that Iraq had tried to procure uranium from Niger, Jaffar said it did so in the 1980s, declared as much to the International Atomic Energy Agency, but did not seek more afterwards.
"We had 500 tonnes of yellow cake (uranium) in Baghdad at the time, so why should we go and buy another 500 tonnes from Niger?" he said.
On US and British claims prior to the March 2003 invasion that Saddam had restarted Iraq's nuclear programme, Jaffar said with a laugh: "My reaction? I knew they were lying to their people. That was my reaction."
-------- japan
Japan Nuke Accident Raises Doubts Over Aging Plant
Story by Masayuki Kitano
REUTERS JAPAN:
August 11, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/26530/story.htm
TOKYO - A leak of high-pressure steam that killed four workers at a Japanese nuclear power station has raised questions about the condition of some of Japan's aging facilities and the rigor of procedures for maintaining them.
Although there was no radiation leak, four workers were scalded to death and seven others injured when steam leaked from a broken pipe at the Mihama plant operated by Kansai Electric Power Co. in Monday's incident, the worst in terms of deaths at a Japanese nuclear facility.
Strategic Forecasting Inc, a U.S.-based analysis group, said the accident could force Japan to shut down its nuclear reactors for inspections.
"If the accident proves to have originated in a critical system, the implications of the Aug. 9 non-radioactive steam leak will prove deep and immediate, forcing the government to order another round of safety inspections," it said.
"Early indications are that the bursting pipe that released the steam was already through 28 years of its 30-year lifespan, raising the possibility that similar pipes on all plants might have to be replaced," it added.
The accident is likely to further dent public confidence in the Japanese nuclear industry, undermined by safety scandals.
Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc (TEPCO), Japan's biggest electricity producer, was forced to close all its 17 nuclear power plants temporarily by April 2003 after admitting it had falsified safety documents for more than a decade.
A number of towns have held referendums in the past few years and voted against the construction of nuclear plants.
NO CHECKS SINCE 1976
Monday's accident occurred when a pipe burst in a building housing turbines for the Number 3 reactor at the Mihama plant in Fukui prefecture, 200 miles west of Tokyo.
The pipe had not been checked since it started operations in 1976, according to Kansai Electric.
"There are around 10 reactors that are older," said Satoshi Fujino, a member of Citizens' Nuclear Information Center, a non-profit organization critical of the use of nuclear power. The Japanese authorities have asked power utilities for urgent checks on reactors they operate that are of the same design as the Mihama plant.
Kouji Yamashita, a nuclear plant safety inspector at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), said there were 22 nuclear power generators in Japan of that design, 10 run by Kansai Electric, the remainder operated by four other firms. Trade Minister Shoichi Nakagawa offered an apology to the victims yesterday and said he wanted to ensure the safety of other nuclear plants while making sure there were no disruptions to energy supply as summer demand peaks. "We must not undermine trust in nuclear energy policy," said Nakagawa, who was to visit the Mihama plant later yesterday.
"We would like to investigate the cause and make sure it does not happen again."
Japan, which depends on nuclear power for a third of its energy needs, has 52 nuclear reactors in 14 nuclear power plants.
The accident has also raised questions about whether Kansai Electric took sufficient safety precautions.
Kyodo news agency said Fukui police suspect Kansai Electric neglected safety standards by letting more than 200 workers prepare for an annual inspection at the Mihama reactor while it was still running.
The worst previous incident at a Japanese nuclear facility was at a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura, north of Tokyo, in September 1999, when an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction was triggered by three poorly trained workers who used buckets to mix nuclear fuel in a tub.
The resulting release of radiation killed two workers and forced the evacuation of thousands of nearby residents.
The only previous fatal accident at a Japanese nuclear power plant was in 1967, in a fire at a plant in Ibaraki prefecture just north of Tokyo. There was no radiation leak.
----
Rust and Neglect Cited at Japan Atom Plant
August 11, 2004
By JAMES BROOKE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/11/international/asia/11japan.html?pagewanted=all
TOKYO, Wednesday, Aug. 11 - A section of steam pipe that blew out Monday, killing four workers at a Japanese nuclear power plant, had not been inspected in 28 years and had corroded from nearly half an inch to a thickness little greater than metal foil, authorities said Tuesday.
"To put it bluntly, it was extremely thin," Shoichi Nakagawa, Japan's minister of the economy, trade and industry, said Tuesday after touring the power plant, in Mihama, about 200 miles west of here. "It looked terrible, even in the layman's view."
Although the carbon steel pipe carried 300-degree steam at high pressure, it had not been inspected since the power plant opened in 1976. In April 2003, Nihon Arm, a maintenance subcontractor, informed the Kansai Electric Power Company, the plant owner, that there could be a problem. Last November, the power company scheduled an ultrasound inspection for Saturday.
"We thought we could postpone the checks until this month," Akira Kokado, the deputy plant manager, told reporters at Mihama. "We had never expected such rapid corrosion."
But on Monday, four days before the scheduled shutdown for the inspection, superheated steam blew a two-foot-wide hole in the pipe, scalding four workmen to death and injuring five others seriously. The steam that escaped was not in contact with the nuclear reactor, and no nuclear contamination has been reported.
Initial measurements showed that the steam had corroded the affected section of pipe from its original thickness of 0.4 inches to 0.06 inches, less than one-third the minimum safety standard. Kansai Electric said in a statement that the pipe "showed large-scale corrosion."
"We conducted visual inspections but never made ultrasonic tests, which can measure the thickness of a steel pipe," said Haruo Nakano, a Kansai Electric spokesman.
In response, Japan's nuclear and industrial safety agency ordered ultrasound inspections at four other power companies that own nuclear plants with the same type of pressurized water reactors. The inspections will involve nearly half of Japan's 52 nuclear power plants.
The Kyodo news agency reported Wednesday that corrosion problems had prompted operators in recent years to replace the steam pipes at 16 plants of a design similar to that of the plant at Mihama.
With television news helicopters swarming over the Mihama plant on Monday, government officials were quick to promise that a full investigation would take place.
"We must put all our effort into determining the cause of the accident and to ensuring safety," Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Tuesday. He added that the government would respond "resolutely, after confirming the facts."
On Tuesday, the police opened an investigation to determine why 221 workers were in the reactor facility at the time of the accident. The subcontractor has said they were moving in equipment and testing materials in preparation for a shutdown on Friday and subsequent inspection.
Kyodo reported that investigators believed that the company might have neglected safety standards by allowing workers to prepare for an annual inspection while the plant was still running. But government leaders also tried to bolster flagging public support for nuclear power.
"Nuclear power has a significant impact in our lives," Mr. Koizumi said Tuesday. "We have to pay close attention so that our lives won't be affected by this accident."
Japan planned to build an additional 11 reactors in this decade, increasing the nation's reliance on domestic nuclear power to 40 percent of its electricity needs. Already slowed by local opposition, that program may now be stalled by the accident, the most deadly in the history of nuclear power in Japan.
"In Japan it's virtually impossible to build new nuclear facilities now," Asahi Shimbun, a liberal newspaper, said in an editorial on Tuesday. "But facilities are wearing out, and there are worries about increasing problems with corroding pipes, rupturing valves and the reactor core."
Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a business daily, worried that the accident could undermine public support in Japan for nuclear power.
"We must find the cause of the accident and urgently come up with measures to prevent such an accident from happening again," the newspaper editorialized. "This accident seriously damaged public confidence in nuclear safety."
Yomiuri Shimbun, a conservative newspaper, warned, "Care must be taken not to overemphasize the dangers involved in the operation of nuclear power stations, which could lead to an overreaction."
Japan has the world's third-largest nuclear power industry, after the United States and France.
Mainichi Shimbun, a liberal newspaper, said further expansion of nuclear power in Japan was now in play. It said in an editorial, "As we investigate the cause of the accident, the outcome could determine the course of Japan's nuclear energy policy."
--------
Japan Begins Probe Into Worst Nuke Accident
August 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-japan-accident.html
TOKYO (Reuters) - Investigators milled around a rusty 30 cm (12 inch) steel pipe at a nuclear plant in western Japan on Wednesday trying to determine what caused it to rupture, causing the deadliest accident in Japanese nuclear industry history.
As they gathered evidence that could lead to charges of negligence, the government ordered stepped-up checks on pipes such as the one that burst at the Kansai Electric plant at Mihama, gushing super-heated steam that killed four workers.
The steam was not radioactive, but the accident further undermined public trust in the nuclear industry and analysts said it could force the government to delay its plans to build more reactors and use controversial reprocessed fuel.
The company has said the pipe had not been inspected in 28 years and nuclear safety inspectors, who arrived at the site on Wednesday, said that its 1 cm (0.4 inch) wall had been worn down to a 10th of its original thickness.
Television footage showed Kansai Electric President Yosaku Fuji on his knees apologizing profusely to the family of Hiroya Takatori, who was killed in the accident, as Takatori's father tearfully begged him to give back his 29-year old son and make sure such accidents did not happen again.
``My son's death should be the last,'' Minoru Takatori said.
The government's nuclear watchdog ordered utilities to go through inspection records to see if checks have been carried out on similar pipes and report back by August 18.
Officials have said plants may have to shut down if records show companies have neglected proper inspections.
``It's shocking that such a fatal accident occurred at a nuclear plant where the greatest safety precautions should be taken,'' the Nihon Keizai Shimbun financial daily said.
Analysts said the accident, the latest in a series of safety scandals involving nuclear facilities in Japan, is expected to stall the government's plan to use reprocessed fuel.
The government has said it wants to have 18 or 19 nuclear plants using reprocessed fuel by 2010. Currently, no commercial reactors use the mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel in Japan.
The MOX plutonium-uranium enriched fuel is controversial because critics fear it could be used to build nuclear weapons.
Power companies plan to build five nuclear reactors by 2010, in addition to the 52 operating now.
Industry Minister Shoichi Nakagawa said on Tuesday that the government would stick to its energy plans. ``We must not undermine trust in nuclear energy policy,'' he said.
LACK OF PUBLIC TRUST
Many people were skeptical that the government will come up with suitable safety measures following a series of scandals.
``Japan is the same with everything. Too slow. The government is always the same with such measures,'' said Tokyo carpenter Ryutaro Ariga, 28. ``They are useless. I really feel it.''
Masayoshi Abe, a 67-year-old retired employee of a fiber-manufacturing company, said authorities should have made sure that proper inspections had taken place.
``I was amazed that they just neglected like that.''
Japan aims to complete what is calls the ``nuclear fuel cycle,'' in which spent nuclear fuel from reactors are reprocessed and used again, thereby solving the issue of having to store radioactive spent fuel. Some storage sites are nearing capacity.
``The plan has basically been sent back to the start,'' said Masanori Maruo, an analyst at Deutsche Securities in charge of utilities firms, referring to the use of reprocessed fuel.
He added that at best, there may be two or three reactors using MOX fuel by the government's target date of 2010.
Japan has virtually no sources of crude oil or coal and relies on nuclear power for more than 30 percent of its power needs. Most of its oil comes from the volatile Middle East.
The use of reprocessed fuel has been repeatedly delayed by incidents and mishaps at nuclear plants and the failure of the companies who run them to disclose information to the public.
Kansai Electric's plans to use MOX fuel were put on hold late in 1999 when it emerged that state-owned British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) had falsified quality-control data on MOX fuel intended for use at Kansai Electric's reactors.
The revelation in 2002 that another utilities firm, Tokyo Electric Power Co Ltd, had tampered with safety documents, also forced its use of MOX fuel to be postponed.
``It's an issue of trust,'' said Tomohiko Iwasaki, an analyst at the Japan Research Institute, adding that electric companies must change their tendency to cover up problems and make efforts to gain the public's trust by disclosing information.
Some analysts said that given Japan's reliance on nuclear energy, it must go ahead with plans to use reprocessed fuel.
``Japan needs the technology to reprocess used fuel from an energy security point of view as well,'' Maruo said.
``It may take time, but electric companies must talk to the public and win back trust.''
--------
Japan Scrutinizes Nuclear Safety
August 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Japan-Nuclear-Accident.html
TOKYO (AP) -- The Japanese government deepened its investigation Wednesday into a deadly nuclear power plant accident amid calls for an overhaul of safety standards at reactors.
About 30 investigators swept through the plant in Mihama, 200 miles west of Tokyo, collecting evidence and questioning officials of operator Kansai Electric Power.
The company is being investigated on suspicion of negligence after announcing on Tuesday that the cooling pipe that caused the accident had not been properly checked, despite a warning of danger from inspectors last year.
The pipe exploded on Monday, spewing workers with boiling water and superheated steam. Four workers were burned to death, and seven others were injured, two seriously.
The accident, the deadliest ever at a Japanese nuclear plant, triggered calls for tighter safety measures at reactors.
Seishiro Nukaga, a senior ruling Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker who is heading the party's nuclear committee, urged nuclear plants nationwide to re-inspect their facilities.
``We must conduct a thorough investigation of the accident and find out the cause,'' he said. ``In the meantime, we also should check all the nuclear plants nationwide.''
The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency ordered Kansai Electric and four other utility companies with similar plants Tuesday to review inspection records and check for the possibility of erosion in cooling pipes.
``We told the utility companies to check as soon as possible and come back with their reports,'' said agency official Koichi Shiraga.
Separately, the government's nuclear accident investigative committee was scheduled to hold its first meeting later Wednesday in at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, to discuss the accident.
The Nihon Keizai newspaper on Wednesday called for a major overhaul of safety standards.
``Why did such a significant erosion occur and why was it overlooked? Wasn't there a lack of safety concerns and negligence?'' the paper asked in an editorial. ``It is necessary to review safety control and management.''
A Kyodo News service survey, released late Tuesday, showed pipes in 17 nuclear power plant reactors in Japan had been replaced or are scheduled to be replaced because of similar corrosion.
Though there was no radiation leak in Mihama, the accident rekindled concerns about the safety of the country's 52 reactors. It also raised questions about plans to build 11 reactors by 2010.
Proponents say nuclear power eases Japan's dependence on foreign oil, more than 80 percent of which comes from the Middle East. They say nuclear energy is also better for the environment because it does not emit greenhouse gases.
Detractors say this offers little comfort to worried citizens.
-------- korea
China ups ante in ancient-kingdom feud with Korea
By David Scofield
Aug 11, 2004
Asia Times
http://atimes.com/atimes/China/FH11Ad03.html
A growing political rift with China is exactly what South Korea doesn't need right now, given that relatively unfettered access to China's markets and labor is vital to keeping the Korean economy growing. But the unresolved ethnic parentage of Koguryo, a 1,400-year-old kingdom that stretched from Inner Mongolia in the north and included most of what is today North Korea in the south, has put the two nations on a collision course, and China isn't blinking.
Both South Korea and North Korea, however, are mute and seemingly paralyzed by this latest affront and example of China's much-vaunted "peaceful rise", one that could have territorial, military and strategic implications that eventually could benefit Beijing - but not the Korean Peninsula or North Asia. The deafening silence from Seoul and usually obstreperous Pyongyang stems in large part from economic reliance on China and historical deference to Beijing at a time when North and South should be working together to counter what appear to be China's politically motivated claims.
Just last Friday, China revised its Foreign Ministry website, deleting reference to Korea's Koguryo Kingdom. Also last Friday, South Korean lawmakers were denied visas to visit related Koguryo tombs in China, Beijing citing procedural delays. South Korea has endured a host of Chinese transgressions, such as Chinese hackers, at least one from a government-run institute, breaking into 10 sensitive South Korean government security websites. Hardly a murmur of protest.
The kingdom dates from 37 BC and endured countless battles and attacks until AD 668, when it was absorbed by the unifying southern kingdom of Shilla. For Koreans, Koguryo is more than a historical relic, it was the first and largest of Korea's three founding kingdoms (Shilla and Paekje being the other two), and a pillar of Korean identity. But despite South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun's "quiet diplomacy" behind the scenes, China's leadership has been increasingly vigorous in claiming Koguryo as its own, strongly alleging that it was governed by one of China's many ethnic minorities.
The ethnicity of the Koguryo kingdom is still hotly debated among scholars of early Korean history. Some say the language spoken in Koguryo was linguistically closest to Old Japanese. Indeed, there are those who believe Koguryo was actually ethnically Old Japanese, and still others who say the Old Japanese actually migrated from what is today North Korea and the Chinese northeast.
The issue has been growing since China's high-level interest in revising local history came to the fore in February 2002 under the banner of the Northeast Asia Project, a history study that has received unprecedented political and financial support from Beijing. The budget of some US$2.2 million and keen political interest by senior figures in an area that for all intents and purposes is not in dispute was prompted by Pyongyang's application to UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in 2001 to have Koguryo-era tombs and murals, cultural trophies of the kingdom, registered as North Korea's first World Heritage site. (Only a few kilometers are disputed along the China-North Korea border, but this has never been high on China's agenda.)
China then applied to register still more of the tombs on its side of the Yula (Amok) River as a World Heritage site as well. If UNESCO designated the tombs as Chinese cultural artifacts, then the kingdom that produced the tombs would logically be Chinese - North Korea becoming historically Chinese.
UNESCO accepted Korean and Chinese claims
UNESCO ruled on July 1 and accepted claims from both North Korea and China to have ancient tomb complexes in both territories accepted by the international body as World Heritage sites. The UN body, however, steered well clear of indicating national parentage of the kingdom itself.
Undaunted, the Chinese wasted no time in furthering their claim over the kingdom. Last Friday they removed all references of Koguryo - as a period of Korean history - from Chinese Foreign Ministry website. Chinese academics, all on the state payroll, have been revising history fast and furious, with new "evidence" and "findings" being dutifully published by the state-controlled media.
Cultural artifacts that once only interested a handful of archeologists and anthropologists have now caught the attention of political scientists and international-relations specialists, as China's claims to the kingdom and, one would assume a claim to the lands it occupied, could have very real ramifications on contemporary Korean politics and the regional balance of power.
Many South Koreans are slowly awakening to China's unique approach to political archeology. Perhaps a good thing, some analysts conclude, for at least now South Koreans will begin to realize that China is not the all-benevolent fraternal ally many naively believed it to be.
So what of the ever-bombastic North Korean leadership whose nation's cultural fabric is being threatened? The silence is deafening, but perhaps not surprising.
North Korea is even more beholden to China than South Korea, as the state functions largely through support from China. Chinese pipelines guarantee a subsistence fuel supply, and China's maintaining the 1961 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance is the country's only remaining security agreement. North Korea's first dynastic leader, Kim Il-sung, may have been installed by Josef Stalin, and the unparalleled growth of the Kim personality cult may have far exceeded what even Stalin could imagine, but it was China that reclaimed the North for Kim Il-sung, prolonging the Korean War for two years in the process.
Today, when regime-change options for North Korea - part of the "axis of evil" - are discussed in Washington, it is the reaction of China and its emphatic declarations that it will not tolerate US troops on its border that often quash the idea. Any change in the system in the North could lead to a destabilizing power vacuum, the theory goes, prompting China to enter North Korea to restore order and guarantee the geographical integrity of the area, as prescribed in the 1961 treaty. Here, mutual assistance would be the key justifying China's intervention.
China's strategic eye for North Korea ports, airfields
It's in a post-Kim - now Kim Jong-il - regime scenario that China's latest, highly public, historical claim becomes most concerning. Treaty obligations could well be used as legal justification to enter the country militarily, while China's historical claim over the territory could ensure the enduring presence of Beijing's troops, giving China access to North Korea's eastern ports and airfields, ensuring power projection potential (vis-a-vis Japan) far beyond China's possibilities at present.
China has never been as important to Koreans on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) as it is today. China has become South Korea's largest export destination, and while the two economies will be locked in competition for foreign markets in the near future, today it is China and its demand for exports that are keeping the South Korean economy from slipping into recession. For North Korea, it is China's fuel aid that keeps the military's wheels greased, and it is China that ensures North Korea's political survival.
But it is not only economics that makes the North and the South so feckless in the face of China's politically motivated (China says its own interest is purely historical accuracy) Koguryo claim, it is also history. Prior to Japan's colonization of Korea at the beginning of the 20th century, Korea was a vassal state of China for much of the previous 400 years. This client-patron relationship that endured for centuries, coupled with the deep cultural, ideological ties, has left an enduring legacy of respect for China within Korean culture and has strongly affected the Korean psyche.
Korea has been criticized for being quick to react to even the slightest transgression by either the United States or Japan, while China often gets a pass, even when the transgressions are great. Three weeks ago, Seoul's National Intelligence Agency discovered that a group of Chinese hackers, at least one from a government-run institute in China, had hacked into sensitive computer networks at 10 South Korean government institutes related to national security. The breach, characterized by officials as severe, lasted at least a month. Yet the incident has been downplayed by the government, with little follow-up by the media, nor any public outcry.
Last Friday, a group of South Korean lawmakers were forced to delay a trip to China to visit the tomb sites in China's northeast because Chinese government officials delayed issuing visas, citing procedural issues. Tainted Chinese food exported to South Korea, poaching of Korean fish stocks on both sides of the sea border - there is no shortage of "incidents" involving China. And yet it seems nothing the Chinese do can is sufficiently egregious to raise the ire of Koreans. The Koguryo Kingdom issue may change that and South Korea may demonstrate some backbone.
If nothing else, China's apparently politically motivated revision of local history may prompt Korean academics throughout the peninsula, North and South, to pool their resources and work together. While North Korea remains uncharacteristically mute, South Korean politicians and scholars are hoping they can turn this into an opportunity for the two Koreas to join forces. They could forge a meaningful, mutually beneficial intra-Korean initiative that isn't predicated on South Korea's traditional blank-check policies of rapprochement and turning a blind eye to Pyongyang's repression of its people.
David Scofield, former lecturer at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University, is currently conducting post-graduate research at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom.
----
U.S., N. Korean Discuss Nuclear Impasse
August 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-North-Korea.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- In a series of informal meetings that included an intimate dinner, senior U.S. and North Korea officials discussed how to resolve a long-standing impasse over the communist country's nuclear weapons, the two sides and diplomatic sources said Wednesday.
The talks produced no apparent breakthrough, but both sides called them useful.
Often, these diplomatic dinners are more productive than formal meetings, though in this case it was not known whether there was any progress. The Asian diplomatic sources said the atmosphere was good.
The discussions between Li Gun, deputy head of U.S. affairs at North Korea's Foreign Ministry, and Joseph DeTrani, the U.S. special envoy for negotiations with North Korea, took place ahead of a new round of six-party talks on the nuclear standoff expected to be held in Beijing by the end of September.
Li said it was ``obvious and natural'' that he would talk to DeTrani since they were in the same room for 1 1/2 days at the conference, which began Tuesday morning.
When DeTrani was told that Li said they had talked, and was asked how the discussions went, he replied: ``We had very good meetings.'' He then left, refusing to answer any more questions.
The U.S. State Department said DeTrani did not schedule any bilateral meetings with participants at the Conference on Northeast Asian Security. The conference was organized by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, a nonpartisan organization that invites scholars, diplomats, and experts to focus on key issues and conflicts involving U.S. interests.
But Li and DeTrani not only met informally during the conference, they dined together Tuesday night with South Korea's ambassador to the United States, Han Sung-joo, and the U.S. State Department's director of policy planning, Mitchell Reiss, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said last week that the United States would like to convene a working party meeting of the participants in the six-party talks as soon as possible to prepare for the next session.
DeTrani and Li have represented their countries at the working party meetings. Besides the United States and North Korea, the other participants in the talks are South Korea, China, Japan and Russia.
Li and Yang Xi Yu, director of the Korean peninsula office in China's Foreign Ministry, insisted that there was no bargaining, negotiations or decisions about the six-party talks at the conference.
Asked what he saw as the next step in the six-party talks, Li said, ``They have voted to have the fourth round of six-party talks and we are working on it.''
During this week's conference, he said, ``We talked about issues, but this is not negotiations, but only exchange of views.''
``The opportunity has been useful and every party has explained their original positions. We ... introduced our original positions,'' Li said. ``It was cordial. We exchanged (views) in a frank manner and it was businesslike.''
Little progress has been made in the three sessions of six-party talks so far.
At the most recent meeting in June, the United States proposed a three-month preparation period during which the North would freeze work on its nuclear program, submit a list of all nuclear activities and remove key weapons ingredients.
North Korea offered to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for energy, the lifting of U.S. economic sanctions and removal from Washington's list of countries that sponsor terrorism, saying the freeze would be a step toward eventual dismantling.
But the U.S. proposal required the North to go further, helping to dismantle facilities and allowing outside monitoring. Under the plan, some benefits would be withheld to ensure the North cooperates.
-------- russia
Hunting nuclear waste dumped in Moscow
Fallout of arms race hits close to home
C. J. Chivers
NYT
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=533426.html
MOSCOW The radiation experts arrived at Viktor Avram's auto repair shop last month, appearing beside the wall separating the shop from an enormous factory next door. The men warned Avram to take care where he strolled.
"They told me I could walk on the road," he recalled, nodding toward a dirt track that descends to the Moscow River. "But they said I should stay to the left. To the right is radiation."
Avram works beside a disquieting legacy of the early years of the nuclear arms race, a large radioactive waste site inside a city of 11 million people.
In the territory of the Soviet Union the work of finding and recovering radioactive waste does not go on solely near the plutonium-producing reactors in Siberia or the Urals and on the test range in Kazakhstan where Moscow's first atomic bomb was detonated in 1949.
It also proceeds in the midst of daily life in Moscow - near offices, factories, train stations, highways and homes.
It is a result of the peculiar history of a rushed Soviet effort to tease secrets from the atom. Every country with atomic programs has been left with the difficult task of recovering the byproducts and waste. But the Soviet Union, under orders from Stalin, undertook extensive nuclear research in its most populated and central place, its capital.
"The program of creating the nuclear bomb, the atom bomb, started in Moscow," said Sergei Dmitriyev, general director of the Moscow region's branch of Radon, an arm of the Russian government charged with locating, retrieving and securing radiological waste.
Radon works to undo the consequences of an incautious time, when researchers, working in totalitarian secrecy and with only an incomplete understanding of radiation's dangers, built a network of institutes and factories with little planning for dealing with the discarded material. These sites left behind all manner of radiation-emitting waste; more than 1,200 abandoned sources have been retrieved in Moscow over the years, according to Alexander Barinov, chief engineer of Radon's Moscow branch.
Moscow's own development made matters worse. Some radioactive material piled up at factories or laboratories. Much was hastily dumped in forests that, at the time, were outside the city limits. Then Moscow grew, overtaking its outskirts and sending down roots into illicit radioactive dumps.
"Eventually, housing and offices were started in these areas," Dmitriyev said.
Radon, a network of more than a dozen regional waste storage centers throughout Russia, began its work in 1961, after nearly two decades' worth of waste had been abandoned. Work became more intensive after the explosion in 1986 at Chernobyl, when the Soviet Union ordered Radon to survey population centers and search for waste. A map of work completed shows recoveries throughout the city, from Moscow's inner ring near the Kremlin to subway stops and residential areas at its edge.
Barinov said Radon recovers and stores only low- and medium-level radioactive waste. As the materials are not fissile, they are incapable of the reaction leading to a nuclear explosion. Their danger lies in emission of radiation.
Radon says much of the material has posed probable health risks, and its retrieval is essential, both to reduce these risks and to ensure that radioactive waste will not be used in terror attacks. Its officials note that the medium-level sources are sometimes sufficient for "dirty bombs," which use conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials.
Since 1996, Radon has also been required by law to monitor new construction sites, in case workers unearth long-forgotten waste. And it retrieves unwanted sources from hospitals, institutes, factories and the city's nine nuclear research reactors, while working on several old waste sites where cleanup is incomplete, its officials say.
Once material is recovered, it is trucked to a dump about 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, northeast of the city, near Sergeiv Posad. Some of the waste is burned in intense heat and converted to black obsidian-like blocks, and the ashes are mixed with cement. All is entombed beneath cement, clay and soil, to keep the radioactivity from spreading.
Part of the work receives support from the United States, which regards the collaboration as an important area of security cooperation. "They've got a just daunting task," Paul Longsworth, deputy administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous agency in the Department of Energy, said on a recent visit to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
Excavation of contaminated soil and the retrieval of other waste continues at several sites in Moscow, including the Kurchatov Institute, a nuclear research center that had its genesis in the Stalin era, when its grounds were beside an artillery range in the forest. Now it is well within the boundaries of the city.
Another active site is the Plant of Polymetals in southwestern Moscow, beside Avram's garage.
Last fall, an entire building on the plant's grounds was dismantled, carted away and entombed at Radon's dump. An extensive area of contaminated soil remains, Radon says.
American officials noted that although Stalin's legacy is atypical, with so much abandoned waste in a national capital, the broader problem of Russia's radiological inheritance is not unique.
The other side of the arms race at times also conducted work in cities. In 1942, for example, before the U.S. government decided that nuclear tests should be conducted far from population centers, the world's first manmade nuclear reaction was made on a squash court at the University of Chicago.
On average, the Department of Energy recovers three unwanted, high-risk radiological sources every week in the United States, McGinnis said, and not only from isolated sites. He noted that four sources of strontium-90 were recovered inside Houston earlier this year on the day the city was host to the Super Bowl.
Still, the problem of urban radiation in Moscow is of an entirely different order, sometimes forcing residents to evaluate the safety of where they live or work. Avram, for his part, takes an accommodating view.
Shirtless and streaked with grease, he said he was not especially worried about the radiation near his garage. "I'm from Moldova and I drink Moldovan wine," he said. "It cleans everything. Radiation doesn't hurt me."
-------- terrorism
An American Hiroshima
The risk that a nuclear explosion will devastate an American city is greater now than it was in the cold war, and it's growing.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF,
11. August 2004
NYT and Der Spiegel
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,312760,00.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/11/opinion/11kris.html
ASPEN, Colo. - If a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, a midget even smaller than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, exploded in Times Square, the fireball would reach tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.
It would vaporize or destroy the theater district, Madison Square Garden, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal and Carnegie Hall (along with me and my building). The blast would partly destroy a much larger area, including the United Nations. On a weekday some 500,000 people would be killed.
Could this happen?
Unfortunately, it could - and many experts believe that such an attack, somewhere, is likely. The Aspen Strategy Group, a bipartisan assortment of policy mavens, focused on nuclear risks at its annual meeting here last week, and the consensus was twofold: the danger of nuclear terrorism is much greater than the public believes, and our government hasn't done nearly enough to reduce it.
Graham Allison, a Harvard professor whose terrifying new book, "Nuclear Terrorism," offers the example cited above, notes that he did not pluck it from thin air. He writes that on Oct. 11, 2001, exactly a month after 9/11, aides told President Bush that a C.I.A. source code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda had obtained a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon and smuggled it into New York City.
The C.I.A. found the report plausible. The weapon had supposedly been stolen from Russia, which indeed has many 10-kiloton weapons. Russia is reported to have lost some of its nuclear materials, and Al Qaeda has mounted a determined effort to get or make such a weapon. And the C.I.A. had picked up Al Qaeda chatter about an "American Hiroshima."
President Bush dispatched nuclear experts to New York to search for the weapon and sent Dick Cheney and other officials out of town to ensure the continuity of government in case a weapon exploded in Washington instead. But to avoid panic, the White House told no one in New York City, not even Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Dragonfire's report was wrong, but similar reports - that Al Qaeda has its hands on a nuclear weapon from the former Soviet Union - have regularly surfaced in the intelligence community, even though such a report has never been confirmed. We do know several troubling things: Al Qaeda negotiated for a $1.5 million purchase of uranium (apparently of South African origin) from a retired Sudanese cabinet minister; its envoys traveled repeatedly to Central Asia to buy weapons-grade nuclear materials; and Osama bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, boasted, "We sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to other Central Asian states, and they negotiated, and we purchased some suitcase [nuclear] bombs."
Professor Allison offers a standing bet at 51-to-49 odds that, barring radical new antiproliferation steps, a terrorist nuclear strike will occur somewhere in the world in the next 10 years. So I took his bet. If there is no such nuclear attack by August 2014, he owes me $5.10. If there is an attack, I owe him $4.90.
I took the bet because I don't think the odds of nuclear terror are quite as great as he does. If I were guessing wildly, I would say a 20 percent risk over 10 years. In any case, if I lose the bet, then I'll probably be vaporized and won't have much use for money.
Unfortunately, plenty of smart people think I've made a bad bet. William Perry, the former secretary of defense, says there is an even chance of a nuclear terror strike within this decade - that is, in the next six years.
"We're racing toward unprecedented catastrophe," Mr. Perry warns. "This is preventable, but we're not doing the things that could prevent it."
That is what I find baffling: an utter failure of the political process. The Bush administration responded aggressively on military fronts after 9/11, and in November 2003, Mr. Bush observed, "The greatest threat of our age is nuclear, chemical or biological weapons in the hands of terrorists, and the dictators who aid them." But the White House has insisted on tackling the most peripheral elements of the W.M.D. threat, like Iraq, while largely ignoring the central threat, nuclear proliferation. The upshot is that the risk that a nuclear explosion will devastate an American city is greater now than it was during the cold war, and it's growing.
In my next column, I'll explain how we can reduce the risk of an American Hiroshima.
-------- ukraine
Brand-new Ukrainian nuclear power plant shut down
KIEV (AFP)
Aug 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040811205609.peu8m6sx.html
A brand-new nuclear reactor in Ukraine has been shut down three times, twice because of problems with its cooling system, Interfax reported Wednesday, quoting an unnamed official.
Automatic security systems at the Khmelnitsky nuclear power plant first cut off the reactor from the power grid Sunday only hours after it was launched, an official with Ukraine's governmental commission for atomic energy said.
The reactor was reconnected to the grid three hours later, but had to be totally shut down later because of a failure in the cooling system caused by a power breakdown, the official added.
It was restarted Monday, only to be stopped again Tuesday, officially to test its shut-down system and cooling units.
It is scheduled to be relaunched Thursday.
A plant spokesman contacted by AFP declined to comment, stressing that there had been no rise in radioactivity levels in and around the plant.
The K2 Russian-type water reactor, which has a capacity of 1,000 megawatts, came on stream on Sunday, at a ceremony attended by Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma.
In a separate case, Ukrainian authorities on Wednesday gave the go-ahead to the controversial launch of a new nuclear reactor at the Rivne nuclear power plant on the country's western border with Poland, despite European protests and safety concerns.
Nuclear plants produce half of Ukraine's energy, which is otherwise forced to rely on supplies from Russia and its own decrepit and dangerous coal mining industry.
In 1986 one of the reactors at Chernobyl in Ukraine blew up in the world's worst nuclear accident, contaminating a large part of Europe.
Since the disaster, an estimated 25,000 people from all over the former Soviet Union who came to clean up after the accident have lost their lives.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Nuclear Energy Institute Praises Exelon-DOJ Used Fuel Settlement
Washington DC (SPX)
Aug 11, 2004
Space Daily
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclear-civil-04j.html
Exelon Corporation and the US Department of Justice announced Tuesday they have reached a settlement under which the government will reimburse Exelon for costs associated with storage of used nuclear fuel at the company's nuclear power stations pending the Department of Energy's fulfillment of its contractual obligations to accept used nuclear fuel.
The following is a statement by Nuclear Energy Institute Executive Vice President Angie Howard regarding the settlement:
"The settlement agreement announced today is hugely significant and a direct result of the federal government's failure to meet its statutory and contractual obligations to begin disposing of used nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants."
"The agreement means that taxpayers in every state - including those who do not receive electricity supplies from nuclear power plants - are now officially paying the cost of the federal government's failure to meet its obligations."
"The government's willingness to enter into this settlement is the fair thing to do since it hasn't met its obligation to Exelon and the company's customers."
"Dozens of the nuclear power plants that supply electricity to one of every five U.S. homes and businesses are running out of storage capacity in their on-site used fuel pools because of the government's failure to meet its obligation."
"Congress has it within its power to minimize the impact of the government's delay and ease this mounting burden on taxpayers."
"Two notable steps that Congress can take are: one, to endorse the Environmental Protection Agency's 10,000-year radiation compliance standard for the planned Yucca Mountain repository in the Nevada desert; and two, to enact funding reforms assuring that monies put into the nuclear waste trust fund by ratepayers are available in sufficient amounts so that, along with congressional oversight, the Yucca Mountain repository will be built in an efficient and safe way."
"The nuclear energy industry and our customers, the users of electricity produced at nuclear power plants, have met our obligation. Since 1983, including interest, we have paid roughly $24 billion into the federal Nuclear Waste Fund for development of an underground repository for used nuclear fuel."
"This settlement is the result of the government's failure to meet its obligation. From this day forward, until the Yucca Mountain repository is open a minimum of six years from now, the meter will continue to run, costs will climb, and the burden of government inaction will continue to be borne by taxpayers from coast to coast."
----
Nukes Still Take Toll on Workers
By John Gartner,
Wired,
Aug. 11, 2004
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,64502,00.html
(First of two parts.)
Workers who toiled for the Department of Energy at nuclear weapons sites during the Cold War unknowingly faced a domestic enemy that continues to cause serious health problems -- beryllium.
The DOE is launching a nationwide initiative in October to bring critical information to hundreds of thousands of blue- and white-collar workers who were exposed to the metal at plants that produced nuclear weapons. Beryllium, which can cause potentially fatal lung diseases and cancers, is a light and strong metal used to make triggers and other nuclear warhead components. It continues to be used in a number of industries, including aerospace, computers and consumer electronics.
In 2000, the U.S. government acknowledged that many DOE workers did not know they were being exposed to beryllium and dangerous levels of radiation. The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act of 2000 (PDF) states that "a large number of nuclear weapons workers ... were put at risk without their knowledge and consent."
While the majority of workers were unaffected by exposure to beryllium, a small percentage have become seriously ill or have died. Exposure to beryllium can cause chronic beryllium disease, or CBD, a condition that often takes 20 or more years to show itself. CBD damages the lungs, causing shortness of breath, fatigue, cough and weight loss. It also increases the chances of developing lung cancer. According to the National Jewish Medical and Research Center, CBD will affect 2 to 6 percent of workers exposed to beryllium, but some tasks put the risk at nearer 20 percent.
Glenn Bell, a 56-year-old machinist who works for the DOE in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was diagnosed with CBD in 1993. He was originally misdiagnosed with asthma, and now spends at least one week a year in the hospital getting treated for the disease. "Some days I can barely get out of bed because I'm so short of breath," said Bell, who missed 100 days of work in 2003 because of the illness.
Bell said when he was hired in 1968 "we were told you could eat the stuff and it wouldn't hurt you." Despite the presence of beryllium dust throughout the workplace, Bell said workers were encouraged to eat and drink at their machines.
More than 200 of Bell's co-workers have been diagnosed with CBD, prompting him to start a victim's support group. In 2000, Bell and a "ragamuffin group" of CBD sufferers went to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress for the compensation act that would eventually become law. "We were sick, and we didn't have a lot of money, but we went and crashed on someone's front lawn (near D.C.) so that we could be heard."
The DOE has set up resource centers near 10 of the largest nuclear weapons facilities, where former workers can get free CBD screenings and receive information.
In October, the DOE will broaden its effort into a nationwide initiative to identify potential claimants because it is not reaching enough former workers around the country, according to documents on the DOE website. The Nationwide Medical Screening Program will consolidate the individual resource centers into a single program that standardizes the forms and establishes a toll-free number for individuals who would like to be tested.
Mark Hoover, a senior research physical scientist at the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety, said that in 1949, the DOE adopted a safety recommendation for handling beryllium from the Atomic Energy Commission, based on its use during the development of the atomic bomb.
The AEC recommended that the concentration of beryllium in the air should not exceed 2 micrograms per cubic meter.
"That limit has proved not to be protective enough" of workers, said Hoover, who has been studying beryllium in the workplace since 1980. Hoover said the reported cases of CBD dropped dramatically after 1949, but beginning in the late 1970s, there was a marked increase in workers who became ill from beryllium. The decades of delay between exposure and contracting the disease caused the DOE to underestimate the potential harm, Hoover said.
Hoover said the DOE is being more proactive in attempting to prevent workers from contracting CBD. In 1998 the DOE lowered the permissible amount of beryllium in its facilities to 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter. To further reduce the incidence of CBD, Hoover said, "it would be prudent to set the amount as low as possible."
In 2001 the DOE and the Department of Labor began to search for people who worked for the DOE weapons program, its contractors and subcontractors, so they could be tested and apply for compensation. The Department of Labor identified 362 government and contracting facilities where former workers may be eligible for compensation, according to spokeswoman Dolline Hatchett.
The 2000 compensation act provides workers who contracted CBD or cancers due to exposure from radiation with a payment of $150,000 and reimbursement of their medical expenses. The government so far has paid out more than $900 million for 11,539 claims, but because the number of potentially injured workers is unknown, the total compensation could be much higher, according to Hatchett.
When asked for the breakdown between beryllium and radiation-induced illnesses, Hatchett said the Department of Labor does not differentiate claim types in its data collection.
The claims paid thus far represent only a fraction of the total number of potential claimants, as the government has yet to reach many former workers who may have relocated or retired, according to Dr. Laura Welch, medical director for the Center to Protect Workers Rights, a group supported by labor unions to identify safety hazards. Welch said fewer than half the construction workers who worked at a DOE site in Hanford, Washington, knew they were exposed to beryllium when the DOE contacted them.
Welch said the likelihood of contracting the disease is related to length and level of exposure. "In jobs where workers have inhaled the most beryllium -- such as machinists in beryllium operations -- 10 to 14 percent of the workers have gotten CBD," she said.
Machinist Bell said the compensation process can be arduous. His claim was denied the first time, but after he filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain his medical records, he won his case.
"I know of two people who died waiting for their claims to be paid," Bell said. Some workers decline to be screened because a positive result would hurt their chances for promotion by making them ineligible to assume duties in areas where beryllium is present.
-------- colorado
Rocky Flats samples may be on hold
By Todd Neff, For the Enterprise
August 11, 2004
Boulder, CO Daily Camera
http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/broomfield_news/article/0,1713,BDC_2495_3101567,00.html
A Rocky Flats cleanup oversight group might not take additional soil samples from the former nuclear weapons plant site, saying the process could be too expensive and repetitive.
The U.S. Department of Energy and its main clean-up contractor, Kaiser-Hill Co., plan to complete the $7.2 billion clean-up effort by December 2006. At that point, all but 1,000 acres of the roughly 6,300-acre site will be turned over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to create the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.
A group of Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments members began work Monday to determine how to best "validate what they said they'll do, they will do," as former Broomfield City Councilman Hank Stovall put it.
Led by representatives from the City and County of Broomfield, the Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments is investigating how to independently verify that the site meets agreed-upon clean-up standards.
Independent verification has helped in the past. It led to a drastic lowering of soil radioactivity clean-up thresholds across the Rocky Flats site. Stovall, who leads the independent verification committee, took part in the previous effort, as well.
Over the years, government samples haven't shown much contamination in Rocky Flats "buffer zones," but some have questioned the results.
An early draft of the committee's independent verification plans said additional "measurements and/or samples will be collected at selected locations and analyzed to confirm the accuracy and adequacy of the data presented in the documents and plans." But representatives from local governments now agree that additional sampling - a time-consuming and expensive process - would not be merited unless a consultant hired by the coalition showed them to be necessary.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment are regulating the cleanup.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is making its own plans to make sure the prospective wildlife refuge is clean.
The service expects to receive the results of tissue analyses from about two dozen deer within the next couple of months, said Andrew Todd, a contaminant biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service.
The deer had been culled to test for chronic wasting disease. But the Fish and Wildlife Service has sent off the animals' remnants to test for isotopes of plutonium, americium and uranium.
Todd also said the Fish and Wildlife Service is considering taking soil samples on prospective trail routes as well as other measures to ensure that "what we're taking isn't a lemon."
The Fish and Wildlife Service seeks to create up to 19 miles of trails in the site's former buffer zone, although it has not finalized plans for the future refuge.
-------- nevada
Kerry Vows to Scrap Nevada Nuclear Waste Repository
August 11, 2004
LAS VEGAS, Nevada, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-11-10.asp
The plan to bury much of the nation's nuclear waste beneath Nevada's Yucca Mountain should be abandoned, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said on Tuesday. Kerry said the safe storage of the waste has not been scientifically proven and the safety, security and economic risks of transporting nuclear waste to the Yucca Mountain site are too great for the plan to proceed.
"I can sum up my stance on the Yucca Mountain Plan in four words: Not on my watch," Kerry told a Las Vegas audience. "As a Senator, I voted against it. And as president, I will do everything in my power to ensure that your backyard does not become America's nuclear waste dump."
Kerry's opposition to the Yucca Mountain repository is in stark contrast to the position of President George W. Bush, who has vowed to push forward with the plan. The issue could play a large role in determining which candidate gets Nevada's five electoral votes, which were won by Bush in the 2000 election.
The facility, some 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the intended destination for 77,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste from Defense Department sites and spent nuclear fuel from the 103 operating nuclear reactors across the United States.
Federal officials have raised an array of concerns about the project, including a finding that the manufactured storage containers in which the government plans to store nuclear waste at the facility will probably leak and concerns that the waste will stored at temperatures above the boiling point of water.
The site is also on a fault line and sits above a freshwater aquifer that provides drinking water to residents of Nevada and California.
The state of Nevada has sued to block the plan and sent a letter Monday to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission asking regulators to reject the U.S. Energy Department's application for a license to open the facility.
Last month a federal court ruled the federal government's 10,000 year federal safety requirement for the highly radioactive waste is illegal because it is inconsistent with the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences.
But the court also rejected Nevada's constitutional challenge to the repository and supporters of the plan say this overshadows the decision on the safety standard.
Last month Deputy Energy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow told the Senate Energy Committee that the court ruling is not a major concern and he expects the facility will open and begin receiving shipments of nuclear waste in 2010.
Kerry said the Bush administration is ignoring the scientific concerns about the site, including the risks of transporting highly radioactive waste from at least 39 states to Nevada.
"This is not just a Las Vegas issue, or a Nevada issue - it is an American issue," he said. "Under the Yucca Mountain plan, more than 50,000 shipments of waste would travel just yards away from homes, hospitals, parks and playgrounds in states across this country."
The Bush campaign said Kerry is pandering to Nevada residents who are wary of the Yucca Mountain plan.
Bush-Cheney '04 Spokesman Steve Schmidt said Kerry has voted six times in support of the Yucca Mountain, including a vote to make Nevada the sole repository site for the nation's nuclear waste.
That vote and "his later flip-flop on Yucca Mountain is just another example of a candidate who tells voters what they want to hear," said Steve Schmidt, Bush-Cheney '04 Spokesman. "Nevada voters are not going to trust Kerry if he continues to mislead them on this issue."
The pro-Yucca Mountain votes highlighted by the Bush campaign were either procedural amendments or provisions within larger pieces of legislation, according to the Kerry campaign.
The vote that blocked consideration of any site other than Yucca Mountain, for example, was part of a $17.6 billion budget package in 1987.
Kerry supporters note the Massachusetts Senator voted against the 2002 final designation of the site.
Kerry said his opposition to Yucca Mountain does not mean he is against nuclear power, which provides some 20 percent of the nation's electricity.
Nuclear power can play an essential role in providing affordable energy while reducing the risk of climate change, according to the Kerry campaign, as long as challenges such as nuclear waste disposal and plant security can be met.
The Democratic nominee recommends creating a National Academies advisory panel to determine how best to deal with the nation's nuclear waste, a problem is growing in scope and expense.
As of 2003, nuclear reactors in the United States had generated some 54,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel and by the year 2035, the United States will have produced more than twice that amount.
Sustained delay to or failure to proceed with the Yucca Mountain project would force state governments to deal with the waste.
Several court cases have ruled that the federal government is liable for the costs of storing the nuclear waste until the Yucca Mountain site is ready.
The industry says that total bill could be some $56 billion - the first of several cases that could determine that figure began last month.
On Tuesday, Exelon Corporation, which operates 17 nuclear reactors in the United States and provides some 20 percent of the nation's nuclear power, said it has agreed to settle its case with the Energy Department.
Under the settlement, Exelon will immediately receive $80 million in reimbursements for costs incurred for storing spent nuclear reactor fuel.
That figure will total some $300 million if a national repository opens by 2010 and the Energy Department begins accepting spent nuclear fuel
Nuclear Energy Institute Executive Vice President Angie Howard said the settlement underscores the costs of the prolonged delay of the Yucca Mountain project.
The nuclear industry has paid some $24 billion over the past two decades for the development of an underground repository for used nuclear fuel, she said, and should not have to carry the financial burdens of the government's delay.
"This settlement is the result of the government's failure to meet its obligation," Howard said. "From this day forward, until the Yucca Mountain repository is open a minimum of six years from now, the meter will continue to run, costs will climb, and the burden of government inaction will continue to be borne by taxpayers from coast to coast."
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Kerry says Bush broke his word on Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
By Nedra Pickler,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-11/s_26465.asp
LAS VEGAS - Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry, making a play for a state that supported President Bush four years ago, accused the president of breaking his word with a plan to bury nuclear waste in Nevada.
Kerry said the president broke the promise he made in the 2000 race to ensure science and not politics determined his decision whether to ship waste to Yucca Mountain. Bush approved Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear dump site after winning the presidency, even though many scientific studies remained unfinished.
"It's about promises kept and promises broken," Kerry said. He made his own campaign promise: "When John Kerry is president, there is going to be no nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. Period," he said.
Kerry remained focused on Yucca Mountain while campaigning in Nevada, even as other events dominated the presidential campaign. He let his advisers defend him from Bush's criticism of his stance on the war in Iraq. And he did not speak about President Bush's selection of Florida Rep. Porter Goss to head the CIA, instead responding by written statement from his campaign headquarters in Washington.
Kerry's statement called for quick Senate hearings on Goss' nomination but kept the heat on Bush to name a national intelligence director and other recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission.
For years, Nevada has been fighting plans to move the nation's used reactor fuel to Yucca Mountain.
Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt accused Kerry of flip-flopping on Yucca Mountain because Kerry has voted for some measures that included provisions that would have allowed nuclear dumps there. But every time he has faced the simple choice of voting whether or not to send waste to Yucca, Kerry has voted against it.
Kerry said he is concerned about the safety and security of storing the waste 90 miles outside of Las Vegas at a mountain that sits atop the region's major water supply. Kerry also noted seismic activity has been measured at the mountain and could pose a safety threat.
Kerry said he would leave waste at nuclear sites around the country while he instructs the National Academy of Science to study how the world should deal with nuclear waste and storage.
Kerry and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, said Nevada voters should choose Kerry for another reason: He saved the life of one of their senators.
Kerry and Reid recalled how, on July 12, 1988, Nevada Republican Sen. Chic Hecht was attending a weekly GOP luncheon in the Capitol when a piece of apple lodged in his throat. Kerry, running late for the corresponding Democratic luncheon, was just getting off an elevator when he saw Hecht buckled over in the corridor. He rushed over and performed the Heimlich maneuver.
"I suspect that I was late for that meeting and I walked out of that elevator because there was a higher power that said that was the moment that I was blessed to be there for Chic Hecht," Kerry said.
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Kerry Has Nevada's Ear on Yucca Mountain
Plan He Opposes Nuclear Waste Storage Project
By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 11, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54586-2004Aug10.html
LAS VEGAS, Aug. 10 -- John F. Kerry told community leaders here Tuesday that he strongly opposes burying nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, providing a contrast to President Bush on one of the dominant political issues in this crucial state.
The Democratic presidential nominee said Bush is threatening the security and the economic vitality of Nevadans with his plan to ship spent nuclear waste from around the country for storage in the mountain 90 miles northwest of here.
Kerry said that if he is elected he will cancel the project, which has cost the federal government billions and eventually could cost as much as $60 billion.
"Yucca Mountain to me is a symbol of the recklessness and the arrogance for which they are willing to proceed with respect to the safety issues and concerns of the American people," Kerry said on the 12th day of his post-convention coast-to-coast swing through battleground country. "When John Kerry is president, there will be no nuclear waste at Yucca."
In the 2000 campaign, Bush said he would oppose the Yucca Mountain site unless it was deemed scientifically safe, a position state political analysts credited for helping the Republican narrowly carry Nevada. One year after taking office, however, Bush designated the mountain the final -- and environmentally safe -- resting place for the nuclear waste stored at more than 100 locations nationwide.
Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters here that Bush "lied" in 2000 and would pay the price of losing Nevada this fall. "The state of Nevada is going down the drain" for the GOP, he said.
Republican strategists concede that this issue alone could cost Bush the state's five electoral votes in a close race. In a blow to Bush, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) recently said Kerry would be better for the state on this pivotal issue. Matthew Dowd, a top Bush strategist, said the president will not lose the state over Yucca Mountain because his polls show voters here are more concerned about terrorism and the economy.
Politically speaking, Yucca Mountain is to Nevada what corn is to Iowa or oil to Texas. It is a rare issue that unites Democrats and Republicans alike and can turn an election. Bill Clinton became an enthusiastic opponent of the Yucca site and carried the state in the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections.
Kerry is hoping for the same result this year. While the Massachusetts senator voted in 1987 to consider Yucca Mountain as the exclusive storage site, he has generally opposed it on environmental and safety grounds over the past decade.
Kerry's running mate, Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), has supported a nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain during his first term in office but now opposes it. Reid said Edwards called him the night before being named the Democratic vice presidential candidate and told him, "I am on the Yucca Mountain bandwagon."
In a statement, Ensign said: "Nevadans should not be fooled by election-year pandering."
Outside the state, the larger issue of what to do with the nation's highly radioactive nuclear waste from fuel rods and other sources has vexed federal policymakers for more than two decades. Most lawmakers want a single site to store tens of thousands of metric tons of nuclear waste deep below Earth's surface, where it will never contaminate land or water. But nobody wants nuclear material buried in his back yard, and nobody can guarantee that the nuclear material will not eventually seep into groundwater or rise to the surface. Bush and supporters of the Yucca plan say studies prove it is a safe and wise idea.
Further complicating matters is how to transport such dangerous materials, in some cases across the country. An accident -- or terrorist attack -- on a vehicle transporting nuclear waste could prove disastrous. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, opponents of the Yucca Mountain plan have increasingly pointed to this potential for terrorism to support their case that the waste should stay in its current resting places. "The bottom line here is to make America safe," Kerry said. "In an age of terror, we need to make sure the movement [of the material] . . . is able to be guarded" from attack.
If elected, Kerry would "establish an international, independent, blue-ribbon panel to recommend world-class, state-of-the-art scientific methods for nuclear waste storage," according to a campaign policy paper. Only then, he said, would a Kerry administration determine where the waste would be stored -- but it would not be at Yucca.
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Kerry Criticizes U.S. Plan to Send Nuclear Waste to Nevada
August 11, 2004
New York Times
By JODI WILGOREN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/11/politics/campaign/11kerry.html
LAS VEGAS, Aug. 10 - Seizing on an issue that this state's Democratic senator calls "the most important to the people of Nevada," Senator John Kerry vowed Tuesday not to send nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain and accused President Bush of breaking a similar promise he made four years ago.
In a state that Mr. Bush won by four percentage points in 2000, Mr. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, hammered at the administration's support for the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"Yucca Mountain to me is a symbol of the recklessness and arrogance with which they are willing to proceed with respect to the safety issues and concerns of the American people," Mr. Kerry said of the administration.
"This is not just a Nevada issue; this is not just about Yucca Mountain," he told a small crowd of invited guests at a middle school here. "This is about America. This is about a relationship between the people who lead and the people, you, the governed. It's about promises kept and promises broken."
In 2000, Mr. Bush followed his opponent, Vice President Al Gore, in promising to veto plans to store high-level nuclear waste at the mountain, saying in late September that he would not send waste to any site unless it was proved safe scientifically. Once in office, amid scientific debate over safety, Mr. Bush accepted an Energy Department recommendation to approve the storage site.
Showing its own awareness of the issue's importance in the state, the Bush campaign circulated memorandums on Tuesday scouring Mr. Kerry's Senate record to show six instances over a decade in which he cast votes that could be construed as supporting storage at Yucca Mountain. Republicans also noted that Mr. Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, backed storage at the Nevada site before joining the ticket.
"The Kerry-Edwards ticket was for Yucca Mountain before they were against it, and Nevadans should not be fooled by election-year pandering," Nevada's Republican senator, John Ensign, said in a statement circulated by the Bush campaign.
But Mr. Ensign himself, when pressed on a cable television program last week, said of Mr. Kerry that "on this one issue he's been better than George Bush, but that's on one issue." And campaigning alongside Mr. Kerry on Tuesday was Mr. Ensign's Democratic counterpart, Senator Harry Reid, who dismissed the votes cited by the Republicans, saying, "John Kerry has been with us every time we've needed him. ''
The daylong focus on the storage plan, which is currently stalled in the courts, signals the power to frame the political fight of swing states like Nevada, whose swelling population has increased its value to five electoral votes, from four.
At an evening rally that drew more than 10,000 people to the University of Nevada-Las Vegas basektball arena, Mr. Kerry declared firmly, "When I'm President of the United States, I'll tell you about Yucca Mountain: Not on my watch! No!" To loud cheers, he added with a flourish that if Congress tried to change environmental standards to overcome legal obstacles, "Veto pen, gone, out!"
Several recent polls here have shown the race in the state to be in a virtual dead heat. In 2000, polls showed that Mr. Gore overtook Mr. Bush in Nevada after opposing Yucca Mountain and then lost the edge when Mr. Bush echoed the opposition.
The debate over Yucca Mountain stretches back two decades, and has captured attention in part because some 100,000 shipments of waste would have to be trucked across 44 states to get to the facility, in some cases skirting homes and schools. Congress picked Yucca as a national repository for high-level waste in 1987, but a federal court this summer dealt the plan a major setback, saying it could not proceed because the government lacked standards to prevent leaks after 10,000 years.
Mr. Kerry and Mr. Reid said that instead of storing waste at Yucca they would keep it at the nation's 100-plus nuclear reactors. Mr. Kerry also invoked the legacy of Roosevelt and Truman's leadership supporting the invention of the atomic bomb, saying, "what we need now is the reverse of that: we need a Manhattan Project that learns how to tame the negative consequences of that power of the atom."
In a 45-minute give-and-take in which he uncharacteristically read from notes, fumbling somewhat with statistics and quotations from government studies, Mr. Kerry sought to broaden the seemingly parochial issue into a symbol of differences between himself and Mr. Bush on the environment and science, two mainstays of his campaign.
"The United States of America deserves a president of the United States who believes in science," he said. "It's not just the science of Yucca Mountain, it's the science of global warming. It's the science of stem cell research and the possibilities of the future; it's the science of clean air and clean water."
Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, said Tuesday that Mr. Bush had based his decision on Yucca mountain on "sound science," as he had promised to do in 2000.
Asked about Mr. Edwards's support for storage at Yucca Mountain, Mr. Reid said Mr. Edwards had called him after being tapped by Mr. Kerry and said he was now "on the Yucca Mountain bandwagon."
Mark Kornblau, Mr. Edwards's spokesman said: "John Kerry has very clearly stated that his administration will oppose the storage of dangerous nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain and John Edwards is very comfortable with that policy."
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The Wild, Wild Wars in the West
by Rebecca Solnit
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
by TomDispatch.com
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0811-13.htm
In July, the Feds handed down to Nevada its bitterest defeat and sweetest victory in ages; the former, a termination of thousands of years of Western Shoshone history; the latter, a reprieve from an apocalyptic future as the world's biggest -- and maybe dumbest -- nuclear waste dump. In one three-day period, Nevada's past got cancelled while its future was salvaged. But this Indian war and these nuclear politics are just part of a panoply of glaringly weird things going on in the state; there's a gold rush, a water war, and vast military operations, just for starters, and all of them are ecological bad news.
Nevada's invisibility may be as alarming as the apocalyptic dimensions of its plight. The state is a truly peculiar place, a hole in public consciousness. Where else could you set off a thousand nuclear bombs unhindered -- from 1951 to 1991 at the Nevada Test Site -- while even most antinuclear activists were arguing about nuclear war as a terrible possibility rather than an ongoing regional catastrophe? Once nuclear testing went underground in 1963, and American babies stopped having fallout-induced radioactive milk teeth, Nevada fell off the map even as the nuke-a-month program continued unimpeded for almost three more decades.
Western Shoshone Showdown
Across the U.S., the contemporary Indian wars are invisible in part because most non-Native Americans believe they all happened in the picturesque past, in part because they're fought by other means, in part because the mainstream media don't give a damn. One of the most egregious of them has been the ongoing battle between the Western Shoshone and the federal government for title to most of Nevada. It began in 1848 when the U.S. government claimed the Southwest from Mexico, heated up in the post--World War II era when the Shoshone went to court to protect their rights, and may have ended July 7, when President Bush signed into effect the Western Shoshone Distribution Bill.
That bill dishes out money the government set aside a few decades ago as payment for much of eastern and southern Nevada. The area had looked so worthless to the bureaucrats of the nineteenth century that they drew up a treaty letting the Western Shoshone, unlike most indigenous nations, retain title to their lands. The bureaucrats of the twentieth century realized that the best way to seize title to Nevada was to pretend that the land had already been taken -- back when it was more affordable. Of course, you have to overlook the fact that, as Western Shoshone bumper stickers say of their homeland, "Newe Sogobia is not for sale." The price set was $26 million or 15 cents an acre, discount prices even for the 1870s. (With interest, the sum to be disbursed is now $145 million.)
Reasonably enough, the Western Shoshone point out that they never offered their land for sale and many of them refuse to take the money. The disbursement was made against their strenuous opposition. (Others believe that $30,000 per person is the best they'll ever get and are willing to settle up.) The case matters in part because Western Shoshone "traditionalists" have strenuously opposed mining, military operations -- 20% of all military-controlled land is in Nevada -- and nuclear activities on their land. Though environmentalists sometimes decry their cattle-grazing as destructive to the desert, they look like far better stewards of Nevada's arid lands than the federal government ever has been. They have deep roots in the past and are interested in the long-term future of the place. Then there's the simple matter of justice: the Western Shoshone are being stripped of their birthright and their rights just as surely as any Palestinian on the wrong side of Israel's Great Wall of Intolerance or the Iraqis whose resources have been redistributed to various American corporations.
The corporations reaping twenty-first century profits from the great Shoshone land grab and already engaged in a gold rush in the heartland of Shoshone territory aren't even American in most cases. An 1872 mining law allows virtually anyone to acquire public land for pennies in order to mine it; the Toronto-based Barrick Corporation, for instance, paid less than $10,000 for land containing an estimated $8 billion in gold. Unfortunately, we're not talking about the gold nuggets in pretty engravings of the Forty-Niners. Barrick and the other mega-corporations are mining microscopic gold, dispersed throughout the subterranean rock along the Carlin Trend in northeastern Nevada, enough gold to make the state the world's third most productive gold-mining region.
To get it, you dig up huge hunks of the landscape, pulverize them, and then run a cyanide solution through the resultant heaps, which pulls the gold out. It takes about a hundred tons of ore to produce an ounce of gold. Western Shoshone activist Carrie Dann (whose ranchlands and family cemetery have been ravaged by gold-mining) suggests that whenever Americans buy gold jewelry, they should get the slag that goes with it as well -- a splendid, many-ton toxic heap for a keepsake with every ring and ornament. It's toxic because grinding up the bedrock releases other heavy metals in the ground, which is why Nevada -- with less than 1% of the nation's population -- was, until a court changed the measurement standards in 2001, tops in the release of toxic substances. Its annual half-billion tons of toxics amounts to 10% of the nation's total, and a soaring 88.7% of its mercury releases; to say nothing of the applied cyanide, which at least is an organic compound that breaks down under the right circumstances. Mercury is forever.
Water Wars
The environmental price of gold is pretty high, and that's not even counting groundwater. But groundwater counts too. Much of the Carlin Trend gold is underneath the water table, so the mines pump out vast quantities of groundwater in this driest state in the union and discard it. They are, in other words, mining water as well as gold, and as recent attempts around the world to privatize water -- by Bechtel in Bolivia, for example -- demonstrate, pure water is getting more and more valuable. The elderly Western Shoshone activist and mystic Corbin Harney had a vision about water scarcity long ago and has made it a focus of his work ever since. In Nevada's gold-rush districts, water is being contaminated or dispersed into nearby waterways, where it will run away, never to return. According to Great Basin Mine Watch, Nevada mines wasted enough water in 2001 to serve a city of half a million people.
It takes thousands of years to recharge an aquifer. To drain one, or even drop the water table, creates "drawdown," the drying up of surface waters that would otherwise feed agriculture, rural communities, and wildlife. That's one of the reasons why environmentalists and rural citizens are up in arms about the latest plans to suck out the water under White Pine, Lincoln, and Nye counties, as well as rural Clark County for the benefit of urban Clark County (aka Las Vegas). This conflict is already being compared to the Los Angeles vs. Owens Valley water war immortalized in Roman Polanski's movie Chinatown. What Polanski's movie didn't show is the dry lake bed breeding dust storms, the habitat drying up, the ecological disaster Los Angeles lawns and carwashes demanded (and Mono Lake activists partially reversed in recent years).
Currently, Las Vegas gets most of its water from the Colorado River. In 1900, the city's population was in the single digits; it had only made it to about half-a-million when I started swinging through in the 1980s to protest the nuclear testing taking place 60 miles to the north; the city now has 1.4 million people, almost two-thirds of the state's population, and 5,000 new Vegans arrive every month -- which is why the entire Nevada congressional delegation is behind the water grab. That's where the votes are.
Even the usually environmentally respectable Senator Harry Reid is so behind the bill to start building the two-hundred-mile Lincoln-to-Vegas pipeline that he's threatening to attach it to some larger piece of legislation bound to pass. "They have enough water for the existing population," says Jan Gilbert, a longtime state activist. "They don't for this explosive growth."
Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, struck a different note when she said, "The notion that we have a finite supply of water, and when that finite supply is gone you stop growing, is in the past." Welcome to Nevada, driest state in the union, where water is infinite; you can wait until the late twentieth century to make things happen in the nineteenth century; gold is cheap; and the future is radioactively bright. Or was. Not all the news is bad.
Repealing the Apocalypse
Once again, it was the water that was the problem, only this time it wasn't a shortage. Yucca Mountain, it turned out, was all wet, and a truly lunatic place to put seventy-seven thousand tons of high-level nuclear waste.
The government created the nuclear power industry with a promise to reactor operators that the essential crisis of the industry, the dangerous, exceedingly long-lived waste it produces, would be taken off their hands. In all the subsequent decades of nuclear power production, spent fuel rods have been piling up in "cooling ponds" onsite, while the operators waited for the government to make good on its promise to get rid of the stuff (mostly located in the population-heavy, resource-light East). Three New England reactors are already suing the government for failing to come up with a dump.
For more than two decades, the Department of Energy (DOE) has done everything it can to create one of the most scientifically dubious dumpsites imaginable, at Yucca Mountain, about ninety miles north of Vegas on the northern edges of the Nevada Test Site, where all those nuclear bombs were detonated (and will be again if Bush has his way).
The initial plan was to compare sites in three western states and choose the safest one, but two of the states -- Texas and Washington -- had the political clout to get out of the competition. So the "comparative study" never studied anyplace but Yucca Mountain, and yet the longer it was studied the less suitable it seemed even for the mandated 10,000 years it was supposed to keep us and the waste apart (forget the quarter million years the stuff would actually remain dangerous). Somehow, this never seemed to stop plans from proceeding. For a lot of geologists, the fact that Yucca Mountain had, in geological terms, recent volcanic activity and has very contemporary seismic activity might be grounds enough for doubt. But the DOE officials just kept lowering the standards, fudging the facts, firing the dissenters, while spending nearly $100 billion to try to make it happen -- the cost of a nice, short foreign war these days.
Nevada itself has fine activists who have stood up to some of the atrocities, and the state itself has vociferously fought the federal plan to make it into what might have been the world's largest nuclear waste dump. And for now, this time, on this issue, they won, which is no mean feat. The Yucca Mountain plan was nicknamed early on the "Screw Nevada" bill, and the feckless plans to send the stuff across the country from the mostly eastern nuclear reactors is popularly known as "Mobile Chernobyl." (Click here to see how close the stuff gets to your house -- and within half a mile of fifty million other Americans.)
Easterners imagine that the Wiley Coyote landscape of Nevada means true inert dryness, and the New York Times has seldom been able to resist coupling the adjectives "sterile, empty, barren, and useless" to any description of the place. But underneath it is a surprisingly high water table that could rise further in a changed climate, and flowing through the mountain's billion fissures is rainfall which leaches out the chemicals in the rock, making a brew capable of eating through almost any metal, including pretty much every metal proposed for nuclear-waste containment.
Originally, the rock itself was supposed to isolate the stuff. When it turned out that wet Yucca Mountain was uniquely unsuited for the task, the idea was that the metal containers would isolate the waste. When it turned out that the leaching would eat them away, the plan switched to little titanium umbrellas on top of each cask -- so we'd gone from protection by the thick mantle of the earth to parasols in a couple of decades of study. And they call it science.
The state's Nuclear Projects Office (which means anti-dump) geologist, Steve Frischman, told me long ago that they picked 10,000 years as the period during which the waste must be isolated because you can at least pretend to estimate geological and climate changes over ten millennia; beyond that, it's the utter unknown -- Nevada could be a rainforest; its ancient lake beds could refill; and God knows who's going to look after the stuff then. The Western Shoshone? Among the more surreal aspects of the whole Yucca Project have been the many schemes to create warning labels for the waste that would make sense to unknown civilizations of the deep future.
But surprisingly, on July 9, two days after the Western Shoshone Disbursement Bill was signed by Bush, a federal appeals court ruled that the standards for Yucca Mountain were wrong: the Environmental Protection Agency should have accepted a ruling by the National Academy of Sciences that the safety standard should be not 10,000 years but the point of peak radiation -- which could be 300,000 years away, long after the metal containment casks have corroded into irrelevancy. Joe Egan, an attorney for the state of Nevada, told the Las Vegas Sun that this means "the department will have to apply a standard that all their own evidence says they can't meet."
This could mean the death of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, though the decision could also be appealed in the next few weeks and the Department of Energy is rushing to get the place licensed by December in what might be a last hurrah for the Bush Administration. Senator Kerry has taken a strong stand against Yucca (while Edwards, from nuke-plant intensive North Carolina, has waffled).
This is startlingly good news for Nevada. Scientists have always said that Yucca Mountain was a disaster-in-the-making, even leaving aside those 50 million Americans living within half a mile of the shipment routes the Yucca-bound nuclear waste would travel on for decades to come, or the 90 to 500 estimated accidents of unknown scale that statistics suggest would take place en route over the years. (Who needs terrorist dirty bombs when our own tax dollars can supply them?)
When you consider the human rights abuses, the squandering of resources for the benefit of the few, and the lunatic decisions being made for the long-term future of the state, the war in Iraq looks a little like a decoy from troubles at home, or a parallel universe with all the same ingredients. Except that there's almost no opposition to Nevada's impending catastrophes -- outside of Nevada. But you can bring back another perspective from Iraq too. One is that Goliath doesn't always win: the David of local activists and the Nevada State government has been fighting Yucca for decades, and this round Goliath lost. Another is that if you're tenacious enough, what looks like defeat can change, and the Western Shoshone have patience and commitment on their side.
Rebecca Solnit's 1994 book 'Savage Dreams' dealt at length with the Western Shoshone land wars and with nuclear testing in Nevada. Her most recent book is 'Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities'.
-------- washington
Hanford reactor nearing its final end
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
By The Associated Press
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002002185_hanford11m.html
RICHLAND - Workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation have begun draining sodium from the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF), a one-of-a-kind reactor that local groups had been hoping to save from demolition so it could be restarted.
"This is just another step in the deactivation process we've been engaged in for some time," said Colleen Clark, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Energy's Richland Operations office. "The focus is on doing it safely and on schedule."
The FFTF was built to test advanced nuclear fuels. It operated from 1982 until 1992 and was used for research, to produce medical and industrial isotopes, and to make tritium.
The Energy Department ordered the facility shut down permanently in 1993, unable to justify the $100 million operating budget. The department later agreed to try to find another use for it.
In January 2001, the Clinton administration ordered FFTF shut down for good. When the Bush administration took office, it also tried and failed to come up with a mission for the reactor and, in December 2001, ordered FFTF decommissioned.
With the focus at Hanford on cleaning up decades of waste left from plutonium production for the nation's nuclear-weapons arsenal, watchdog groups had opposed any new activities that might produce waste at the site.
Proponents of saving the reactor had pushed for its commercialization for a number of activities, including the production of medical isotopes.
One company, Mirari Medical, had proposed buying the reactor, but the Energy Department turned down the latest proposal Friday, said John Deichman, Mirari Medical chief executive.
By late afternoon Monday, 15,000 of the 150,000 gallons of liquid sodium in the reactor's primary cooling loops had been drained. Earlier this year, the secondary cooling loops were drained.
Once the sodium is drained, restarting the reactor would be prohibitively expensive.
"The sodium drain has given us no option to go forward," said Benton County Commissioner Claude Oliver, who had fought for a restart.
A Monday night meeting that drew 70 supporters of restarting the reactor was gloomy.
"This is the most advanced, most safe, most efficient and, in my opinion, most beautiful nuclear reactor in the world," said Wanda Munn, a retired engineer who spent nearly 20 years working at FFTF. "This is a tragedy."
The Energy Department has requested bid proposals from small businesses for the estimated $500 million cleanup and closure of the reactor. The agency also will be seeking public comment on whether the reactor should be left standing or torn down and what should happen to its waste.
The sodium being drained from the reactor is being stored as a solid in steel canisters at the site. The Energy Department plans to have it processed into a caustic substance that can be reused in turning other Hanford waste into glass for permanent disposal.
-------- us nuc waste
U.S. Settles Nuclear Case Over Burial of Waste
August 11, 2004
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/11/business/11nuclear.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 - The federal government promised on Tuesday to pay at least $300 million in damages to the Exelon Corporation, for its failure to accept nuclear waste for burial, in a settlement that implies a total cost to the Energy Department in the billions of dollars.
Exelon operates about one-sixth of the nation's nuclear reactors. Its predecessor companies, like the owners of all the power reactors in the United States, signed contracts with the Energy Department in the early 1980's agreeing to pay Washington one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour of power produced at the reactors; in return, the government promised to take their nuclear waste, beginning in 1998.
Exelon and 64 other companies have sued the Energy Department for failing to do so.
The government would pay the $300 million if the Yucca Mountain, Nev., nuclear repository begins accepting waste in 2010, as is now scheduled, but many experts think that if it opens at all, it will be much later. Under the settlement, if Yucca Mountain opens in 2015, the total will rise to $600 million.
The Energy Department wants Congress to reverse a decision made last month by an appeals court in Washington that threw out some of the rules under which Yucca was to have been licensed, saying they were too lax. The nuclear industry, which wants Yucca opened in part to help pave the way for a new generation of reactors, quickly asserted that the settlement should prompt the government to open Yucca as soon as possible.
Under Tuesday's agreement, Exelon will get $80 million immediately, for storage costs already incurred, and the rest of the money by 2010. The company now operates 17 reactors and has four more that are shut down.
But Brian J. O'Connell, director of the Nuclear Waste Program Office at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, said that if the Exelon settlement formed a pattern for other companies, total damages would clearly run into billions of dollars. Spokesmen for the Justice Department and the Energy Department said they had no estimate.
The initial payment will come from a Treasury Department fund for judgments, but the Treasury will recover the money from the Energy Department, Mr. O'Connell said. He predicted that Congress would appropriate the money or redirect it from other Energy Department programs.
The costs for the delay differ from reactor to reactor. Some plants, like Maine Yankee, Connecticut Yankee or Yankee Rowe in Western Massachusetts, have either been torn down or are being dismantled, and their fuel has been moved into dry casks. In those cases, the presence of the waste is the only reason for a guard force, and sometimes the only reason why the land where the reactors stood cannot be re-used.
In the case of Exelon's two reactors in Zion, Ill., which have been shut down, the fuel is still in the spent fuel pools inside the plant. That requires the continued operation of many mechanical systems that might otherwise have been shut down.
At other reactors, costs are mostly limited to the construction of dry casks, which are small steel and concrete silos with no moving parts, sitting on a concrete pad surrounded by barbed wire. As the years go by, at more and more sites the waste will have outlasted the reactors that produced it.
At the Nuclear Energy Institute, the trade association of reactor owners, Angelina Howard, a vice president, said in a statement that the settlement was "hugely significant."
"The agreement means that taxpayers in every state, including those who do not receive electricity supplies from nuclear power plants, are now officially paying the cost of the federal government's failure to meet its obligations," she said. "The government's willingness to enter into this settlement is the fair thing to do since it hasn't met its obligations to Exelon and the company's customers."
The nuclear utilities' payments to the Nuclear Waste Fund since 1983, plus interest, total $24 billion, she said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Rumsfeld Drops In on Afghanistan
August 11, 2004
By THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/11/international/asia/11CND-RUMS.html?pagewanted=all
JALALABAD, Afghanistan, Aug. 11 - Traversing Afghanistan's political, and geological, fault lines, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made an unannounced trip today to a provincial reconstruction headquarters here to view preparations for October's election and review efforts to counter insurgents and the narcotics trade.
"It is so clear that the Afghan people are winning the struggle to rebuild this nation," Mr. Rumsfeld said during his seventh visit to Afghanistan since an American-led coalition routed Al Qaeda here and its Taliban hosts in late 2001.
Mr. Rumsfeld's return trip today, made with Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was meant as an important statement that the Bush administration has not forgotten the unfinished business from its first front in the campaign against terrorism, even as considerably more troops and funds are devoted to the mission in Iraq.
Mr. Rumsfeld's helicopter followed a breathtaking path below the rim of a narrow desert canyon, its walls of near-vertical strata shoved upward in a prehistoric tumult; the view was a fitting metaphor for the turmoil that has wracked Afghanistan for decades and that the new government in Kabul and its American allies have vowed to end.
During his visit to the Provincial Reconstruction Team, one of 16 across Afghanistan, Mr. Rumsfeld was shown ample evidence of progress.
A unit of the new Afghan National Army based here snapped smartly to attention, their range of faces evidence of recruiting among a broad ethnic and regional mix that has been the government's goal to end years of security based on local warlords who drew their ranks from clan or tribe.
Brigadier Ahmad Khalid, commander of a new antinarcotics task force that is also based here, bragged that his soldiers have rolled up almost two dozen opium laboratories and halted an undisclosed number of shipments.
"We focus on the laboratories and the traffickers, not the growers," he said of a mission that is not intended to punish individual Afghan farmers trying to eke out a living.
Maj. Lou Sand, the reconstruction team's deputy commander, said the region was hit by a rash of insurgents attacks from mid-June to mid-July, including a car bombing that killed two Afghan election workers outside the gates of the base. But things have been quieter for the past three weeks, said Major Sand, a reservist with the 401st Civil Affairs Battalion out of New York.
To that end, the military in recent days deployed to the base six "A Teams" - the 12-man Green Beret units that are the heart and soul of Army Special Forces - to gather intelligence on insurgents and carry out attacks ahead of the Oct. 9 presidential election here.
During his daylong visit to Afghanistan, Mr. Rumsfeld also toured the United Nations election headquarters in Kabul, where young Afghans plugged voter registration information into a warehouse-sized room filled with computers.
Julian Type, an Australian official at the United Nations Electoral Management Board, showed the prototype ballot now being printed in Canada. Almost as large as a broadsheet newspaper page, the ballot has both names and photographs of all 18 presidential candidates, a combination viewed as important in a land with high illiteracy.
At a news conference with Mr. Rumsfeld in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai, the Afghan leader who now is seeking the presidency by popular vote, said that 9.4 million people had registered, over 40 percent of them women.
The Afghan leader drew gasps when he initially dismissed questions about an undetermined number of people here who filed multiple voter registrations, saying: "This is an exercise in democracy. Let them exercise it twice."
He returned to the topic moments later to describe the steps already in place to guarantee only one ballot per registered voter, including identification cards that are punched at the polling place and plans to mark the finger of all those who vote with an ink that cannot be washed off for three days.
Mr. Rumsfeld carefully avoided inserting himself into Afghan presidential politics, structuring his day to include separate meetings with Mr. Karzai and a chief rival, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, the powerful vice president and defense minister dumped from the ticket by Mr. Karzai in late July.
Marshal Fahim has said he will not support President Karzai in the election, and will instead back the former education minister, Yunus Qanooni. Marshall Fahim is expected to pull the support of a number of militia commanders and resistance fighters.
During his appearance with Mr. Karzai, Mr. Rumsfeld said his discussions with Marshall Fahim did not stray from military affairs: disarming and demobilizing militias, building the Afghan National Army and halting the narcotics trade.
But there was little doubt that by focusing on Marshall Fahim's official role in a stable, representative government, Mr. Rumsfeld did not need to explicitly state the Bush administration's insistence that should Marshall Fahim choose to battle Mr. Karzai for power, that struggle must be contained solely within the democratic political arena.
-------- africa
Darfur refugees face starvation
August 11, 2004
By Levon Sevunts
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040810-104336-4710r.htm
SHEGEK KARO, Sudan - Hawa Bashi's new home is a thorny little tree the locals call katera. She and her four children will have to sleep under that tree until they move to another tree.
Mrs. Bashi is among thousands of people who fled their villages in the Darfur region of western Sudan, terrorized by Sudanese forces and the Janjaweed Arab militia.
Their village, just a few miles from this picturesque valley, was bombed by the Sudanese air force and torched by the Sudanese army and the Janjaweed.
It's a story that repeats again and again in every village once inhabited by the Zaghawa, a camel- and cattle-herding society that dates back to the seventh century and today lives primarily along the Sudan-Chad border.
"First, we heard the planes," Mrs. Bashi said, holding her 2-year-old son, Hari. "They bombed us and then the army and the Janjaweed came and burned our village."
Arab Muslims, who control Sudan's government are attempting to ethnically cleanse western Sudan of the Zaghawa, who practice a blend of Islam and animist beliefs.
When her village was attacked, Mrs. Bashi picked up her four children and ran. The village is now under control of the rebel Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA), but Mrs. Bashi and dozens of women and children who found refuge under the neighboring trees are too afraid to go back.
It was a rebellion by the SLA and others against the Khartoum government that unleashed the punishing attacks by the government and the Janjaweed against the black Muslim population of western Darfur.
Yesterday, Mrs. Bashi and her neighbors got lucky: SLA soldiers distributed a quarter of a sack of corn flour to each family.
But that help might be too late for little Hari. He can't walk anymore and has trouble sitting by himself.
The boy is severely malnourished and has lost any interest in food. He can't even wave off the flies that nest in the corners of his eyes.
Mrs. Bashi's older daughters are cooking "go," a paste made of corn flour and served with sami, a local spice.
"He won't eat more than two spoons," Mrs. Hari said with a sad smile. "I don't know what to do."
Until now, she, like every family in this part of Darfur has survived on makhet, a tiny pealike fruit. It has to be soaked in water for days before it becomes edible. Still, it never really loses its bitter taste.
Under the neighboring tree, Fatima Timan is trying to feed her grandson, Teja Khater Khamis. Like Hari, Teja is severely malnourished and he has a nasty cough. It doesn't look like the toddler has much time left either.
But Mrs. Timan perseveres. "I can't lose him," she said as she tried to convince Teja to eat a spoonful of go. "I lost my husband when the army came to our village. They took him away, and I haven't heard of him since."
Mrs. Timan is the matriarch in this little community of 25 children and 7 women, sheltering under the trees.
Every woman here has a story, but they go numb when asked about the fate of their husbands. Only Mrs. Timan seems to have reconciled herself to the thought that she'll probably never see her husband again.
"They probably killed him," Mrs. Timan said, trying to calm Teja, who seems to be terrified of the white reporter.
"You look like an Arab," she said, explaining Teja's terror.
--------
Sudan Accused of Arresting Those Who Disclose Dire Conditions
August 11, 2004
By MARC LACEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/11/international/africa/11darfur.html?pagewanted=all
NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug. 10 - A human rights group accused the Sudanese authorities on Tuesday of rounding up scores of people in the conflict-torn western Darfur region because they had spoken to visiting officials and journalists about the dire situation there.
According to the rights group, Amnesty International, the detainees included 15 men arrested in the Abushouk camp near El Fasher after a visit to Darfur by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on June 30, and 5 people taken after a visit on July 27 to the same camp by the French foreign minister, Michel Barnier.
Six men were arrested from July 15 to July 17 in Abu Jereda, a village near El Fasher, after they had spoken to members of the cease-fire commission run by the African Union, according to a report by Amnesty International, which is based in London.
"The Sudanese government should give assurances that none of those arrested will be tortured or ill-treated while in detention and that Sudanese people can speak freely about Darfur without fear of reprisals," the rights group said.
More than a million people in Darfur have been driven from their homes, caught up in a civil conflict that involves government troops, militias backed by the government and two rebel groups. Now living in camps scattered across the region, residents have been blunt in their criticism of the government - even with officials within earshot.
The displaced people, from black African tribes, freely describe how government troops supported by Arab militias have destroyed their villages and committed rapes and mass killings. "What more can happen to us?" said one man who told his story recently under the watchful eye of government officials.
As international condemnation of the government's role in the chaos has grown, Sudan has dispatched officials to Darfur to quell the antigovernment sentiment. The officials interrupt camp dwellers as they speak to foreigners, correcting their stories with authorized accounts.
In response to the Amnesty International report, Sudanese officials told Reuters on Tuesday that the detentions in Darfur have been security matters and not reprisals for speaking to foreigners.
But Amnesty International said it had gathered information from North Darfur, one of the three states affected by the violence, indicating that at least 47 people had been arrested from June 26 to Aug. 3, most of them after they had spoken to members of one or more of the many foreign delegations that have passed through Darfur.
Other forms of opposition were being squelched, the group said. A human rights lawyer, Abazer Ahmad Abu al-Bashir, was arrested July 24 by security officials in Nyala after submitting a petition to the governor that called for an end to the conflict.
There were new signs on Tuesday that the complicated armed struggle was continuing to rage despite recent pledges by the government to reign in the militias, which are known as the Janjaweed.
The United Nations issued a statement in Geneva on Tuesday criticizing the Sudanese government for ordering new helicopter gunship attacks in Darfur.
Pro-government militias also continued to attack the local population, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said. The agency said the Sudanese authorities were also pressuring people to return to their villages even though there was inadequate security to protect them there.
--------
Congo Says U.N. Must Forcibly Disarm Rwandan Rebels
August 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-congo-democratic-rwanda.html
KIGALI (Reuters) - The United Nations must forcibly disarm Rwandan Hutu militias at the heart of years of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the country's four vice-presidents said on Wednesday.
Vice-president Azarias Ruberwa said Congo wanted the U.N. Security Council to beef up the mandate of its 11,000-strong peacekeeping mission in Congo (MONUC) to help hunt down and forcibly disarm the Interahamwe.
``We are going to push the Security Council to give MONUC a stronger mandate to work hand in hand with the Congolese government to disarm the Interahamwe by force,'' Ruberwa told journalists after meeting Rwandan President Paul Kagame in Kigali on Wednesday.
Rwanda has repeatedly complained that neither the U.N. nor the Congolese are rooting out extremists known as Interahamwe, who fled to Congo after committing the 1994 genocide, when some 800,000 people died in 100 days of ethnic slaughter.
The presence of thousands of Rwandan rebels in eastern Congo over the past decade has fueled ongoing regional instability and was specifically used by Kigali as justification for invading Congo in 1996 and 1998.
The U.N. mission estimates about 10,000 rebels remain in eastern Congo. For the moment, however, its mandate only allows it to disarm and repatriate combatants that put themselves forward for the process.
The U.N. Security Council last month told its troubled peacekeeping mission to remain in place for two more months while it overhauls the mission's mandate.
RAPID REACTION FORCE
Rwanda expressed outrage last week after 25 Rwandan rebels who were surrounded by Congolese forces and interviewed by U.N. civilians held on to their weapons and escaped the next day.
Congo's army, which pledged to investigate the escape, has in the past collaborated with the Hutu rebels but denies it still does so.
The partially reformed army is still weak and remains largely divided as Africa's third largest nation struggles to recover from a five-year war that killed 3 million people, mostly from hunger and disease.
Although a cease-fire took effect in 1999, regular outbreaks of violence continue in the resource-rich east, where diplomats say some militia groups serve as proxies for Rwanda and Uganda.
Ruberwa, the leader of a former Rwanda-backed rebel army during Congo's war, said Congo was creating several mobile reaction forces to actively hunt down the Interahamwe, though he did not specify when they would be ready.
``We are soon going to set brigades, two or three, which will be charged with attacking these forces wherever they are, especially in the two Kivu provinces,'' he said, referring to the region bordering Rwanda.
The Security Council hopes to complete by Oct. 1 a top-to-bottom revamp of the mission that likely would include a big increase in the number of peacekeepers and creation of a rapid reaction force to contain violence in eastern Congo.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan is to offer his recommendations on needed changes by mid-August, after he reviews a report by a U.N. team assessing needs across Congo.
-------- arms
U.S. INTENDS TO SELL HARM MISSILE TO EGYPT
Wed, 11 Aug 2004
[MENL]
http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2004/august/08_12_1.html
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration plans to sell an advanced anti-radar missile to Egypt.
The administration, in a move first reported by the Washington-based Defense News, has informed key members of the House and Senate that the United States plans to export the AGM-88 High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile to Egypt. This would mark the first sale of the HARM to an Arab state.
"There is a rush by the administration to help Arab allies of the United States," an official said. "The feeling is that helping Egypt, Jordan and other Arab allies could help the situation in Iraq."
The administration has prepared a list of new weapons meant for export to Egypt. They include the AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile, or AMRAAM, as well as the Joint Direct Attack Munition and the KC-135 air tanker....
-------- britain
Terror Suspects Lose Internment Challenge
August 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Britain-Terrorist-Suspects.html
LONDON (AP) -- Evidence obtained by other governments through torture could be used to detain terrorist suspects indefinitely in Britain, the Court of Appeal ruled Wednesday.
The case was brought by eight foreign terrorist suspects who claim they had been locked up by British authorities without charge or trial based on information obtained through the torture of suspects at U.S. detention camps such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or at Bagram air base in Afghanistan.
Ben Emmerson, a lawyer for the appellants, argued at a hearing last month that ``it is an affront to the public conscience for the state to rely in judicial proceedings on evidence obtained by torture.''
But three judges sitting at the Court of Appeal in London dismissed the appeal Wednesday by a 2-1 vote.
Lord Justice Laws, one of the two justices in the majority, said British authorities could not use evidence obtained by torture ``which the state has procured or connived at.''
However, the government and Home Secretary David Blunkett, Britain's top law enforcement official, were under no compulsion to ignore information obtained through torture by other states.
``But I am quite unable to see that any such principle prohibits the secretary of state from relying ... on evidence coming into his hands which has or may have been obtained through torture by agencies of other states over which he has no power of direction,'' Laws ruled.
The government has not told the detainees why they were arrested, or on what evidence.
Blunkett welcomed the ruling.
``Let me make it clear, we unreservedly condemn the use of torture and have worked hard with our international partners to eradicate this practice,'' he said. ``However, it would be irresponsible not to take appropriate account of any information which could help protect national security and public safety.''
Blunkett insisted he had not relied on material ``obtained by torture or other treatment in violation of Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights.''
The United States is not a signatory to the convention. The Home Office said Britain would not use any evidence gained through torture by British agents, although Britain has argued in recent court cases that the European Convention applies in territories signed on to it but not, for instance, in Iraq.
``This judgment is an aberration, morally and legally,'' said Amnesty International, which said ``the rule of law and human rights have become casualties of the measures taken in the aftermath of 9/11.''
Gareth Peirce, a lawyer for the appellants, said the Court of Appeal's decision was ``terrifying.''
``What this judgment says by a 2-1 majority is that, if it is obtained by agents of another country and not procured or connived at by U.K. agents, it is usable without any restriction and there is no obligation on the secretary of state to inquire into the origins of it,'' Peirce said.
The eight men were challenging their detention under the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act introduced after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States.
The law permits the indefinite detention of foreign nationals suspected of terrorist offenses if they cannot be safely removed to another country.
The law allows police to arrest and continue to hold foreign nationals if there are ``reasonable grounds to suspect'' links to terror groups. The law also allows officials to keep the allegations secret from both the prisoners and their lawyers on the ground of public safety.
The detainees, who are being held at two high-security prisons and one secure psychiatric hospital, argue that the secrecy means they cannot properly defend themselves.
They also say that the government unfairly stretched the definition of links with terrorism to include individuals with only tenuous connections.
The eight men were joined in the legal action by two others who have been deported under rules open to all foreign suspects that allow for their release from custody if another country accepts them.
Moroccan national Jamal Ajouaou, who is accused of links to a man suspected of plotting to attack Los Angeles Airport during millennium celebrations, returned to Morocco in December 2001, several days after he was detained. Another unidentified man, a joint Algerian-French national, traveled to France in March 2002, two months after he was detained.
It was not immediately clear whether the men would now appeal to the House of Lords, Britain's highest court of appeal.
-------- business
Cheney's Old Company Can't Account for $1.8 Billion
Aug 11, 2004
Capitol Hill Blue
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_5017.shtml
Pentagon auditors have concluded that Halliburton Co., the company that Vice President Dick Cheney headed before joining the Bush Administration, failed to adequately account for more than $1.8 billion of work in Iraq and Kuwait, a Pentagon report says.
The amount represents 43 percent of the $4.18 billion that Houston-based Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root unit has billed the Pentagon to feed and house troops in the region.
The findings in the 60-page Pentagon audit report, dated Aug. 4 but not publicly released are likely to increase pressure on the U.S. government to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars of payments to Halliburton.
This, it said, potentially threatens the services that KBR provides U.S. troops and other personnel in Iraq and Kuwait.
Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive from 1995 to 2000.
No one at Halliburton was immediately available to comment on the report. KBR officials dispute the report's conclusions.
The officials say they have worked within the same Defense Department system for more than 10 years without problems, and believe differences can be resolved without the withholding of large payments.
In a June securities filing Halliburton said a move by the Pentagon to withhold substantial payments or demand refunds could "materially and adversely affect our liquidity."
KBR filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last December under the weight of asbestos claims.
Halliburton has until Sunday, after two prior extensions, to provide Army officials with all necessary cost information for its logistical work in Iraq and other locales.
This could lead to the withholding of as much as $600 million of payments, though KBR officials are confident the Army will again extend the deadline, and the Army is considering doing so.
Halliburton shares closed on Tuesday at $29.83 on the New York Stock Exchange.
-------- china
Taiwan stages war games as report shows China would win in six days
TAIPEI (AFP)
Aug 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040811075029.onla5r7o.html
Taiwan's armed forces staged a drill simulating an invasion by rival China Wednesday, as a military computer exercise showed Taiwanese troops could withstand a similar onslaught for just six days.
The scenario of the maneuver, the first of two rehearsals for a major exercise to be held on August 25, was that Taiwan troops had failed to hold off an amphibious landing by Chinese forces, TVBS cable television showed.
As Taiwan troops tried to stop simulated Chinese forces from pushing further inland, a fleet of US-made Cobra gunships fired laser-guided Hellfire missiles while howitzers and tanks fired on targets.
China, which has some 600 ballistic missiles aimed at the island, has itself been staging large-scale military exercises on Dongshan island off its southeastern coast.
The drill came as Defense Minister Lee Jye confirmed a report that in a recent computer-simulated exercise, Taiwanese troops were wiped out 130 hours after the People's Liberation Army (PLA) started invading.
The Apple Daily said the blitz was simulated as happening in 2006, the year when Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian is scheduled to push for a new constitution, which Beijing has warned against.
After the first day of the Chinese "attacks", Taiwan's airports, bunkers, harbours and key government buildings were destroyed by extensive bombings featuring 700 ballistic missiles.
The simulated battles ended when the PLA captured the capital Taipei in the sixth day of the attacks.
Since pro-independence Chen was re-elected in March Beijing has stressed its long-standing vow to take Taiwan by force should the island try to declare formal independence.
The two sides split in 1949 at the end of a civil war.
-------- iran
Iranians consider future of reform
BBC
By Lucy Williamson
11 August, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3555046.stm
It was only seven years ago that 70% of Iran's voters turned out to bring the pro-reform president Mohammad Khatami to power. But since then, support for the reform parties has waned and the last time Iran's voters were invited to go to the polls, about half - mostly reformists - stayed at home.
With parliament now in the hands of the conservatives, is the reform movement in Iran in terminal decline?
The president draws mixed feelings from those who voted for him The music in Siamak's parents house is quieter than usual. There was a party here last night and he and his friends all have hangovers.
Siamak would like to see more reforms in Iran - more social freedoms, more freedom of speech, more jobs - but he is not looking to President Mohammad Khatami to realise them.
If I showed you a picture of President Khatami, I ask him, what would come to mind?
"Nothing," he answers. "I voted for Khatami three years ago, and I still support the opposition groups in Iran, but Khatami isn't the opposition any more."
He is not the only one to turn away from the president he helped elect. Many of Mr Khatami's former supporters are - like Siamak - joining underground protest groups. Others are turning to social issues like women's rights, but many more are giving up on their demands altogether.
Maryam is studying business administration in Tehran. She also supported Mr Khatami when he first became president, but now she has turned away from politics.
"It's interesting for me how Khatami can create hate and create love," she says, during a long wait in Tehran's gridlocked traffic.
"When I was at university, I really loved him and I worked so hard for his campaign.
"But now, when I think about him, I hate him. I don't know when people will trust politicians again. Khatami broke many things."
'Balance needed'
Iran's most important reform party, Hezb-e Mosharekat, is holding its annual conference when I arrive in Tehran. Posters shout slogans - Women's Participation Increases Democracy, says one - but the reform parties are having trouble getting their supporters to participate at all.
Elahe Kollaie, a member of Hezb-e Mosharekat, says she is aware that many in Iran are saying Mr Khatami - and his party - are finished.
Some say students are less radical than a few years ago "I see the situation, but it's important to build confidence," she says.
"There must be a balanced relationship between the people and the political system. If the system cannot offer suitable answers to people's demands, they will try to change the political system."
Across town from the parliament lives someone who is trying to do just that - Maryam's brother.
To see him, I need to use a buzzer and get through two doors. He is more security-conscious than most Iranians, but he has had a few unwanted visits from the security forces in his time and has spent some of the past few years in jail on charges of inciting Iran's students.
To avoid getting him into any more trouble, we will call him Mahmud.
Until a few years ago, Iran's universities were a focal point for political reform - student groups would blaze onto the streets every now and then to make their voices heard.
Radical student groups still provide one alternative for those disillusioned with the official reform parties but, says Mahmud, the atmosphere on campus is not what it used to be.
"The big change compared to when I was at university is that students aren't ready for self-sacrifice," he says.
"They're not idealistic any more, they don't want to pay a high price - going to jail for example - they just want an easy life.
"At the same time, when their private life isn't compatible with the ruling establishment, then they're prepared to challenge it. They're ready to pay the price for their personal life but not for a communal one."
'Bad things'
Back at his parents' flat, nursing a cup of tea, Siamak says he is not convinced the underground group he belongs to is doing very much at the moment - maybe a few articles, he says, maybe a conference or two.
For him, like many others now, the political is very much about the personal.
Clothes and parties can be a form of protest in Iran "We guys, the young generation, we don't need to do something very political. When we're not into doing all the stuff the Islamic Republic wants, it means we want reform."
So having a party is a political act?
"It's not a political act," Siamak says. "But here in Iran right now, it is a political act."
Next to him on the sofa sits his girlfriend Tera, nursing a sore throat after smoking too many cigarettes. She is wearing her favourite T-shirt - sleeveless and white, with red shoulders. Across the chest, in English, is written a slogan: I Do Bad Things.
"What bad things do you do?" I ask her.
"That's the point," she says. "It's challenging - you don't know what a bad thing might be. It could be smoking, it could be sex.
"When you wear this in Iran, it means a lot. People come up to me and say: 'Wow, that's weird, are you saying you're a bad person?'
"And I'm like: 'No! It's good to do bad things sometimes, it's good to be bad'."
For now, the new conservative parliament seems content to swap a little social liberalism for a little political quiet. But with Iran's reformers still looking for change, the question is how long that balance will last.
-------- iraq
Cemetery Fight Haunts Some U.S. Troops
'It Doesn't Feel Right Sometimes,' Soldier Says of Eerie, Perilous Battle in Najaf
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53557-2004Aug10?language=printer
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 10 -- Bats flapped out of crypts, startling soldiers creeping through the cemetery with guns up. Graves opened beneath their combat boots. And an old enemy displayed a new professionalism, darting in clearly practiced moves between tombstone and mausoleum to stalk the Americans from above ground and below.
In the battle to control one of the world's largest graveyards, U.S. Marines and soldiers say they are coping with a lot, including lingering regret. The vast cemetery in Najaf is sacred to Shiite Muslims, perhaps 2 million of whom lie buried in miles of desert adjoining the shrine of Imam Ali, son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad.
Soldiers involved in the fighting described how many of the most recent graves are marked by photos, which crumble when U.S. forces shell the cemetery walls to reach the militiamen hiding within.
"Wives, daughters, husbands," said Sgt. Hector Guzman, 28, of the 1st Cavalry Division's 5th Regiment. "You just know you're destroying that tomb."
The Houston native shook his head. "It doesn't feel right sometimes."
"We feel bad that we're destroying, that we're desecrating graves and such," added Staff Sgt. Thomas Gentry, 29, of Altoona, Pa. "That's not what we want to do."
What the reinforced U.S. force in southern Iraq wants to do, commanders say, is destroy the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to Moqtada Sadr, the militant Shiite cleric. The militia has bedeviled the U.S.-led occupation force in Iraq since October, when its largely impoverished, disaffected young gunmen first ambushed a U.S. patrol in a Baghdad slum. A far larger, sustained uprising in April and May undid much of the occupation's effort to establish security in Shiite-populated central and southern Iraq.
The current engagement, which began Thursday with another ambush, is billed by all sides as the final showdown.
Sadr this week brushed aside overtures from Iraq's interim government and vowed to fight to his last drop of blood. Iraqi officials, who consult closely with the U.S. commanders of the 160,000 foreign troops in Iraq, said the door was closed on negotiations.
To close observers, the final signal for decisive battle came with the departure of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior Shiite cleric in Iraq and a longtime opponent of Sadr, who is widely regarded as an upstart. Sistani, who is famous for not having left his Najaf house in six years, traveled to London last week, just as the fighting with Sadr's militia erupted. The official explanation -- treatment for a heart condition -- brings a smile to the lips of U.S. commanders here.
"A lot of people think it's the green light for us to do what we have to do," said Maj. David Holahan, executive officer of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which has responsibility for Najaf.
"The people will tell you they want it to end," said Army Lt. Col. Myles Miyamasu, a battalion commander in the 1st Cavalry Division's 5th Regiment, which hurried from Baghdad on Thursday to reinforce the Marines. "They're ready for this to be over."
On Tuesday, while senior commanders huddled to discuss an endgame, the cemetery once again doubled as a killing field.
While U.S. armored vehicles probed the huge brown expanse of graves and mausoleums, a small armada of warplanes, helicopters and armed drones circled overhead. When the vehicles drew fire, spotters located the attackers and radioed the coordinates to a crowded, vaguely air-conditioned room in a Marine operating base on the north side of Najaf.
"Looking for clearance for Reaper," a junior cavalry officer chirped late Tuesday afternoon. A patrol had spotted a sniper, but his perch was close enough to the shrine of Ali that permission to fire could come only from a senior officer, who after several minutes gave it from a base 15 miles away. An Apache helicopter, using two Hellfire missiles, destroyed the building where the sniper was hiding.
Holahan said 19 insurgents were killed in a separate strike by a Predator drone equipped with a Hellfire missile. The noon sky over the city of 600,000 was darkened by billowing smoke from a hotel set alight by U.S. fire several hundred yards behind the shrine.
Avoiding damage to the shrine -- and the outcry that surely would follow from the world's Muslims -- is a U.S. objective so well known that the gold-domed mosque has become a refuge and staging ground for the guerrillas, U.S. officers said.
"There's nothing good that can come of it," said an Army operations officer, laying out the possible outcome of any strike on the mosque. "We win, we lose. We lose, we lose."
The cemetery was deemed less sacrosanct, however. Marines first followed militia fighters into it on Thursday morning after being ambushed while moving to reinforce the main Iraqi police station in Najaf, which had come under siege by several hundred militiamen.
The battle for the graveyard went on for 36 hours. In the end, the Marines counted four of their own dead and more than 300 militiamen. But veterans of the battle said the lopsided casualty count -- disputed by Sadr's officials -- did no justice to the weirdness of fighting on a sweeping landscape that venerates death.
"You're on top of the vehicle, you can see forever, but all you're looking at is tombs," said Gentry, of the Army regiment's Bravo Company.
"It was like New Orleans meets Baghdad," said one Army officer.
The jumble of tombs, mausoleums and catacombs also made it treacherous ground to fight on. Militia fighters hid underground and overhead, soldiers and Marines recalled. "Most of the time," Guzman said, "it was like jungle warfare, only without the jungle."
Soldiers said the insurgents showed signs that they had been training during a cease-fire that had kept violence here to a minimum since early June. U.S. units accustomed to the disorganized, hit-and-run strikes of insurgents in Baghdad and elsewhere were impressed to see the black-clad fighters of the Mahdi Army moving in coordinated units of five: typically three armed with rifles, which they fired to provide cover for the launch of rocket-propelled grenades, the weapon that has been most damaging to U.S. forces in Iraq.
Additional evidence of training: flash suppressors on rifles, simple Starlight-brand night-vision scopes and the evacuation of wounded. Weapons were secreted throughout the cemetery.
"These people are a trained militia," said 1st Lt. Ronald C. Krepps of the 1st Cavalry, who added that one mausoleum contained photos of Mahdi fighters performing battle drills.
"More professional," said Miyamasu, the 5th Regiment battalion commander whose troops provided Najaf reinforcement. "I don't mean to give them too much, but they're good. These guys really make us work to kill them, but in the end, they're dead."
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Sadr Militia Goes on Attack in Baghdad Neighborhoods
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 11, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54968-2004Aug10.html
BAGHDAD, Aug. 10 -- Supporters of the militant Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr challenged authorities in Baghdad on Tuesday by setting up makeshift checkpoints and attacking police stations in a bid to widen a confrontation centered in the southern city of Najaf. An official at the Health Ministry said 10 people were killed here and more than 100 wounded.
Gunmen briefly asserted control of some Baghdad neighborhoods and called for a curfew over the entire city. Authorities rejected the demand and said the city remained securely under government control, despite scattered reports that some policemen had chosen to hide rather than fight.
Residents of several neighborhoods said streets emptied when members of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to Sadr, came through, apparently unchallenged by the police.
"They send small groups to the streets to set up checkpoints and terrify people," said a police official in Zayouna, an upper-class neighborhood of Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It is difficult to fight them in the residential neighborhoods and narrow alleys because the Mahdi Army controls these places."
But Sabah Kadhim, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, dismissed the accounts of roving Mahdi Army patrols as "rumors and lies. They are cowards, and they use a hit-and-run method to create chaos to confuse the police. We will not give them a chance to control the streets."
The Mahdi Army appeared to control Sadr City, a Shiite stronghold in northeast Baghdad, flouting a government-imposed curfew in the area. U.S. troops remain largely outside Sadr City, and Iraqi police and security forces have not challenged Sadr's forces there. A resident of Sadr City said Tuesday that it was quiet there until evening, when clashes resumed.
Heavy clashes were reported in Baghdad's Mansour district, and there were numerous mortar strikes in Baghdad on Tuesday morning, many of them targeting police stations and government buildings. The ministries of oil and information both were struck, but they sustained minimal damage.
Meanwhile, kidnappers released a Lebanese businessman taken hostage last month. But a video on a Muslim Web site purported to show the beheading of an Egyptian man who confessed on the tape to working "as a spy for the Americans in Iraq." The authenticity of the video could not be immediately established.
In neighboring Iran, the government announced that it had invited Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to visit, an apparent attempt to defuse the growing antagonism between the two countries, which fought a devastating war from 1980 to 1988. Iraqi authorities have accused Iran of sending fighters, spies and weapons to Iraq, an allegation that Iran has denied.
In another development, the U.S. military said pretrial hearings for four soldiers accused of abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison would be held in Germany this month.
The two-day hearings for Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II, Sgt. Javal S. Davis, Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr. and Spec. Megan Ambuhl are scheduled to start Aug. 23 in Mannheim. The legal procedures, known as Article 39 hearings, are equivalent to civilian court arraignments.
"The civilian defense attorneys requested that the Article 39 hearings not take place in Iraq due to the travel, the expense and the danger," said Col. Jill Morgenthaler, a spokeswoman for U.S.-led military forces in Iraq. "However, the venue for any courts-martial has not changed. They will still take place in Iraq."
Correspondent Jackie Spinner and special correspondent Luma Mousawi contributed to this report.
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U.S. Forces, Close to Attack in Najaf, Decide to Hold Off
August 11, 2004
By ALEX BERENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/11/international/middleeast/11CND-IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 11 - After spending today preparing for a major attack against insurgents loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, American forces called off the assault, at least for now.
Officers here said the delay had resulted from a need to extend planning and said the attack could still be carried out at any time. The abrupt reversal came after a day of hawkish announcements by American officers here.
American forces have been close to capturing or killing Mr. Sadr before, but have repeatedly backed off. This time American commanders had vowed to crush his guerrillas, known as the Mahdi Army.
The delay came after a day of intense preparation for the attack, with a convoy of tanks and armored vehicles leaving its base.
Officers declined to discuss why they did not go ahead with the attack.
"Preparations to do the offensive are taking longer than initially anticipated," said Maj. David Holahan, second in command of the Marine battalion in Najaf.
"We never said what time we would do it."
But a known concern of the American military is that fighting in Najaf's old city, where many of Mr. Sadr's guerrillas are hiding, could damage the shrine of Imam Ali, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam.
Damage to the mosque by either side could provoke immense anger among Iraq's 15 million Shiites, and marines and soldiers have been told that the consequences could be catastrophic.
Any attack must still be approved by Ayad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister. Officers said they could not disclose whether Mr. Allawi had delayed the attack,
Until now, the old city has been off-limits to American troops. Since Tuesday, American patrols have warned most residents of Najaf to evacuate, and have warned Mr. Sadr's guerrillas to leave the city or be killed.
The congestion of the old city mitigates American advantages in firepower, air support and technology. Much of the fighting would need to be conducted on foot.
Before the delay, Col. Anthony M. Haslam, commanding officer of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Najaf, said in a statement: "Iraqi and U.S. forces are making final preparations as we get ready to finish this fight that the Moktada militia started.
"The desired end state is one of stability and security, where the citizens of Najaf do not live in fear of violence or kidnappings, and where the city of Najaf can once again return to peace and prosperity."
The Marine Corps and Army have suspended most of their patrols and operations as they prepare for the broader assault, and senior officers planned the details of the attack in a series of meetings today. American forces have roughly 5,000 soldiers in the area, including 2,000 troops whose primary duties are support and logistics.
There was light fighting here this morning, but the city has been essentially quiet since then.
Violence continued elsewhere in Iraq when a bomb exploded in a market just north of Baghdad, killing at least six Iraqis and wounding 10, according to news reports.
The blast occurred in the village of Khan Bani Saad, hospital workers told Reuters. Officials had no further details on the explosion.
Mr. Sadr's guerrillas have battled the Iraqi police and American forces for more than a year, and last year an Iraqi judge issued a secret warrant for Mr. Sadr's arrest on charges of murdering a moderate Shiite cleric.
After the warrant was disclosed in April, Mr. Sadr's forces fought the American military for two months in a nationwide uprising before the two sides reached a truce when the United States agreed not to try to capture or kill Mr. Sadr.
American commanders have worried that any direct move against Mr. Sadr might increase his strength among Iraq's Shiites, who make up the majority of Iraqis.
But over the last week, most Shiites in Najaf have remained on the sidelines as American and British troops have fought Mr. Sadr's militia.
In a statement today, Mr. Sadr urged his militia to keep fighting even if he is killed.
"Keep fighting even if you see me a prisoner or a martyr," Mr. Sadr said, according to Reuters. "God willing you will be victorious."
In weighing an attack, Mr. Allawi and American commanders must consider the risks of damage to the holy Shiite shrine against the opportunity to break the rebel Mahdi Army without provoking a wider rebellion.
Since becoming prime minister in June, Mr. Allawi has taken several steps to strengthen his control over Iraq, including reinstating the death penalty last week.
Meanwhile, American commanders are anxious to win a high-profile victory after their efforts this spring to oust Mr. Sadr from Najaf's old city and take control of Falluja ended in truces that did not achieve the American goals.
At their base this afternoon, marines said they were ready for an attack.
"With the amount of firepower and amount of marines and army we have going in there, I think it's going to be overwhelming," said Gunnery Sgt. Jeffrey Godfredson. "I think they're going to break."
--------
COMBAT
U.S. Troops Fight Iraq Militiamen on Two Fronts
August 11, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS and ALEX BERENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/11/international/middleeast/11iraq.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 10 - American troops fought simultaneous battles on Tuesday with rebel Shiite militiamen in Najaf and the Baghdad slum of Sadr City. But American commanders, preparing new battle orders, appeared to have deferred for the time being any decision to mount full-scale assaults on the rebels, weighing the consequences for their wider aim of bringing stability to Iraq.
On the sixth day since fighters loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr renewed their challenge to the American presence here, American units showed signs of rising impatience. In Najaf, loudspeakers atop patrolling Humvees urged residents to evacuate the city and warned Mr. Sadr's fighters to "leave the city, or you will die." As night fell in Sadr City, tanks and attack helicopters moved into militia-controlled neighborhoods, and American attack jets and pilotless Predator drones patrolled overhead.
Faced with the uprisings in Najaf and Sadr City, and rebel attacks in Basra and other southern cities, the new Iraqi-American hierarchy in Baghdad - Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, Ambassador John D. Negroponte and Gen. George W. Casey, the military commander -appeared to have reached a watershed as critical as any since American troops toppled Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003.
With elections planned by the end of January, many Americans and Iraqis here say that Mr. Sadr's challenge offers a difficult choice. Either it will have to be answered with force now, at the risk of igniting an explosion of anger among Iraq's majority Shiite population, or with negotiation as it was at the time of Mr. Sadr's last lengthy uprising in the spring, with consequences that could cause the election plans and much that lies beyond them to unravel.
When he emerged from hiding on Monday to speak to reporters at Najaf's Imam Ali shrine, the holiest in Shiite Islam, Mr. Sadr rejected Dr. Allawi's urging over the weekend that he take part in the elections. Mr. Sadr said efforts to build a democracy in Iraq could begin only after American troops leave.
Perhaps the biggest threat posed by the rebels, to shut down oil exports flowing from the country's richest southern oil fields, appeared to have receded for the moment with the announcement by the Oil Ministry in Baghdad that full production resumed on Tuesday after quick repairs to a pipeline that was blown up by saboteurs on Monday. An official said the two main export pipelines flowing to shipping terminals from oil fields near Basra were pumping again, though the risk of renewed rebel attacks remained high.
For days, American troops had avoided plunging into Sadr City, remaining mostly on the western rim of the sprawling district, pushing back militia bands threatening to break for the center of Baghdad, five miles away. It was not clear on Tuesday night how deep the new offensive had gone. But reporters returning from another day of skirmishes said practically all of Sadr City appeared to be under the effective control of militiamen who hide down side streets and alleys, promising a potential bloodbath in the event of any full-scale challenge from the Americans and Iraq's new security forces.
In Najaf, American armor and helicopter gunships continued to attack around the vast cemetery that adjoins the Imam Ali shrine, now a base and armory for Mr. Sadr.
Thunderous explosions were audible miles away, and black smoke curled into the sky after an American jet bombed an inner-city hotel 400 yards from the shrine that American officers said had been used as a firing point by the rebels. At a base 20 miles away, senior Army and Marine officers, awaiting orders from Baghdad, met to plan a wider assault on the old town, a warren of alleyways and bazaars surrounding the ancient shrine where hundreds of militiamen have been reported to be holed up.
American officers said the command in Baghdad was preparing to move another 1,000 American troops into the city, on top of the 2,000 already available to commanders there, with a view to pressuring the rebels and adding punch to a new offensive. American forces planned attacks on the old city before, during Mr. Sadr's uprising in April. But they pulled back and signed a series of fragile truces with the cleric because of concern about the repercussions, among Iraq's 15 million Shiites, of damaging the Imam Ali shrine or of wounding or killing Mr. Sadr, a populist leader in his early 30's who is the scion of one of Iraq's most revered clerical dynasties.
The officers who spoke of plans for a new offensive acknowledged privately that they hoped that the disclosure of the plans, and of the American troop reinforcements, would persuade Mr. Sadr to back down and disband his militia, known as the Mahdi Army. Another option discussed by some American officers - using the fledgling Iraqi security forces to carry out an assault on the mosque, and keeping American troops back to blunt Shiite objections - appeared to have been ruled out after American commanders concluded that the Iraqis fighting in Najaf have had trouble achieving minor combat objectives.
Still, American commanders insisted that they were ready to press ahead if Mr. Sadr fails to surrender. "All indications are that we are committed this time," said Lt. Col. Myles Miyamasu, who commands the First Battalion of the Fifth Cavalry Regiment, the Army unit that took over the fighting in the cemetery on Sunday, relieving units of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit. "There's a will to win this fight. There are a lot of people we don't want to let down, including ourselves."
Mr. Sadr, who vowed Monday that he would fight "to the last drop of my blood," showed his canny, mocking brand of politics when an aide in Baghdad announced that the Mahdi Army had declared a curfew across the capital, starting at 1 p.m. and ending at 8 p.m. the next day, beginning immediately and continuing until hostilities against Mr. Sadr's fighters end. A day earlier, American forces imposed an indefinite curfew on Sadr City, one of the cleric's strongholds, ordering the slum's two million people off the streets from 4 p.m. to 8 a.m., the most stringent curfew in the 16 months since American troops captured Baghdad.
A representative of Mr. Sadr in Baghdad, Qais al-Khazali, called on "all citizens, and especially employees" to obey the curfew and remain at home during the curfew hours, and to support the militiamen in their fight against the Americans. In a statement broadcast on the Arabic-language television channel Al Arabiya, he renewed the militiamen's warnings to Iraqi police, soldiers and national guardsmen, saying they should refuse to "assist the occupiers," or face reprisals.
The Sadr curfew, and a video-taped warning from another Sadr-linked group of attacks on Iraqi government workers who report for duty, appeared aimed at crippling the capital's economy. American commanders have said that 15,000 jobs provided to Sadr City residents to work on $70 million in new sewer, water and electricity projects have been scuttled, at least for now, by the uprising in the slum.
The rebels' call for a citywide curfew appeared to have an almost immediate effect. By late afternoon on Tuesday, a tour of half a dozen of the city's inner neighborhoods showed that traffic that has choked many streets since the American-led invasion last year was sharply down. Gas stations that have had long lines in recent weeks after rebel attacks on refineries, pipelines and road tankers were mostly empty, or closed. Many other businesses were shuttered, and those that were open said they were ready to shut at a moment's notice.
For American commanders, one reason for mounting a full-scale offensive on Sadr City would be to curb attacks on Baghdad. Since the uprising in the spring, the United States command has concentrated mainly on containing the Sadr militiamen in the slum, not challenging their control there. But leaving Mr. Sadr's fighters free rein has meant that Sadr City has become a Shiite counterpart to Falluja, the Sunni Muslim city 35 miles west of Baghdad. Falluja has been under rebel control since a Marine offensive there was halted in the spring. As long as the two cities are under rebel control, they will pose a threat to any effort to achieve lasting stability in Baghdad.
The threat from Sadr City has been underscored in recent days by repeated nighttime mortar and rocket volleys fired from somewhere in the vicinity of the slum and aimed at the International Zone, the newly renamed American command center in what used to be Mr. Hussein's Republican Palace compound.
Americans officers have often mocked the errant marksmanship of the Iraqi rebels. But the volleys recently have become much heavier, sometimes as many as 30 heavy mortars and battlefield rockets in a night, and an increasing number of them have struck inside the secured zone, where the Americans and Dr. Allawi work. On Monday night, one shell hit and severely wounded the Iraqi interpreter for General Casey, the American military commander. American officials said the man was expected to survive.
The American offensive that began Tuesday night appeared to have curbed the shelling.
In Najaf, the American appeal to residents to evacuate appeared to have prompted at least a partial exodus. An Iraqi reporter working for The New York Times said that the Humvees making the appeal passed through neighborhoods that account for about 75 percent of the city's population, and that traffic leaving the city picked up quickly in neighborhoods where people had previously stayed off the streets.
John F. Burns reported from Baghdad for this article and Alex Berenson from Najaf.
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Black Hawks Scramble to Save U.S. Troops in Iraq
TAJI, Iraq (Reuters)
By Matthew Green
Wed Aug 11, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=reutersEdge&storyID=5933751
- An American soldier screams as medics hoist him into a helicopter on a stretcher, his face twisted with pain from shrapnel wounds to his arm and head.
Roaring rotor blades drown out the young man's cry as the Black Hawk lurches upwards, its wheels seeming to brush the flat roofs of central Baghdad in a full-throttle race to hospital.
For U.S. medics riding to the airborne rescue of the wounded, a surge in fighting in Iraq since Aug. 5 has shattered weeks of relative calm at their base.
Working round the clock, crews have tripled their missions since the clashes erupted between U.S. forces and militia loyal to Shi'ite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad and Najaf.
The leap in activity not only points to a sharp increase in U.S. casualties, but provides an insight into the cost in life and limb to the men doing the fighting.
"It's not like anything in the movies," said Major Christopher Knapp, 40, a pilot and commander of the 45th Medical Company based at Taji, just north of Baghdad.
"There's torn flesh, blood everywhere. There's no way to be able to describe it, it's just horrific," he said on Tuesday at the base housing Black Hawk transports and Apache gunships.
At least U.S. soldiers can expect to be whisked to surgeons in Iraq, or if necessary, treated at U.S. bases in Germany. For wounded Iraqis, medical facilities are often makeshift at best.
SEVERED ARTERY
As the helicopter banked toward the U.S. military hospital in Baghdad, a medic in a bulky flying helmet and visor searched the wounded soldier's wrist for a pulse.
There was none. A roadside bomb blast that morning appeared to have severed an artery, draining the life from the man's arm, swathed by his comrades in bandages stained with dried blood. Continued ...
-----
Sadr tells fighters: Carry on if I'm martyred
Reuters
August 11, 2004
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200408/s1174383.htm
Radical Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is urging his militia to keep fighting US forces in Iraq even if he is killed, raising the stakes in a bloody confrontation that shows no sign of ending.
The challenge comes as sporadic clashes echoed from the heart of the southern city of Najaf, where hundreds of Iraqis have been killed or wounded in the past week.
Najaf is the site of some of Iraq's holiest Shiite Muslim sites.
"Keep fighting even if you see me a prisoner or a martyr," Sadr said. "God willing, you will be victorious."
The fighting between US forces and Sadr's Mehdi Army in Najaf, which is part of a broader Shiite uprising in several southern and central cities, is the toughest challenge yet for the six-week-old administration of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
The crisis appears to have created cracks in Mr Allawi's administration after Deputy President Ibrahim Jaafari urged US troops to leave Najaf to end the fighting.
"I call for multinational forces to leave Najaf and for only Iraqi forces to remain there," Mr Jaafari said.
"Iraqi forces can administer Najaf to end this phenomenon of violence in this city that is holy to all Muslims." Sanctuary
US forces have been pounding Sadr's militiamen in Najaf from warplanes and helicopters for days.
The Iraqi fighters have taken sanctuary in the vast cemetery near the Imam Ali Shrine.
Marines have cordoned off the area but have not made a full assault, a move that would enrage Iraq's majority Shiites. They have also said they were not hunting Sadr.
The cleric says he still wants Iraq to remain united and he thanks "those who tried to resolve the crisis peacefully".
In the past 24 hours, at least 30 people have been killed and 219 wounded in five Iraqi cities including Baghdad, the Health Ministry says.
The figure does not include Najaf nor casualties among foreign forces.
US forces say they have killed 360 Sadr loyalists so far in Najaf.
Sadr's spokesmen say far fewer have died during the second rebellion by the militia in four months.
The rebels have ignored an order from Mr Allawi to leave Najaf.
The latest fighting raises questions about what role Sadr wants to play in postwar Iraq, especially ahead of landmark elections scheduled for January.
Mr Allawi's attempts to bring Sadr into the political fold appear to have failed, for now.
Aged about 30 and a prominent figure in a revered clerical dynasty, he does not speak for all Iraq's Shiites but his tough anti-US rhetoric has won him many admirers and swelled the ranks of his Mehdi militia.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel's ongoing foreign energy dependence
August 11, 2004
By Andrea R. Mihailescu
UPI Correspondent
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040810-111754-1597r.htm
Washington, DC, Aug. 11 (UPI) -- Israel's lack of significant hydrocarbon reserves is forcing the country to form business agreements with several other nations -- including Middle Eastern countries with which it continues to clash -- for energy supplies. Even with Israel's recent offshore natural gas discovery, it is not enough to meet domestic energy demand. Israel currently purchases approximately 80 percent of its oil from Russia and the former Soviet republics, with the rest coming from Rotterdam and Egypt.
Israel signed an agreement with the United States in February 2000 in an attempt to diversify energy supplies, but still heavily relies on fossil fuels instead of branching out to other alternative energy resources. Oil currently accounts for approximately 67 percent of Israel's energy balance, coal makes up 30 percent and natural gas makes up less than 1 percent. Israel imported 279,000 barrels of oil per day in 2003.
In the past, Israel had more access to oil than it does now. With the onset and aftermath of the Iraqi war, the United States considered reviving the Mosul-Haifa pipeline, which has remained unused since the 1948 Israeli war. The pipeline links Iraq's northern oil fields to the city of Mosul, passing through Syria and Jordan on its way to the Israeli port city of Haifa. The pipeline would need massive financial investments for restoration. Moreover, when Israel annexed the Sinai oil fields in 1967, the country had a source of oil until the the Sinai peninsula was returned to Egypt under the Camp David Accords.
For the first quarter of 2004, when crude oil prices averaged $32 per barrel, profit for the company, Israel Oil Refineries, stood at $14.34 million with revenue increasing by 5 percent to $914.8 million. As of May, the price of OPEC oil stood at $22-28 per barrel.
Israel may be able to offset some of its spending on imported fuel by investing in energy infrastructure. The country is currently in talks to build a natural gas pipeline with Egypt. At the World Economic Forum conference in Jordan on May 4, Israel's Minister of National Infrastructures, Joseph Paritzky, met with Egypt's Minister of Petroleum Sameh Fahmi to discuss an Israel-Egypt natural gas deal. Israel Electric Corporation sought to purchase natural gas from Eastern Mediterranean Gas, which is owned by Israel's Joseph Maiman, Egypt's Hussein Salem and the Egypt National Gas Company. EMG requested that IEC provide a $180 million bank guarantee, despite the fact that EMG and the Egyptian government refuse to provide any financial guarantee at all, but provided only a written official commitment guaranteeing natural gas deliveries. Fahim told Paritzky that he favored Paritzky's proposal to construct a natural gas pipeline to carry gas to both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Israel also plans to help finance a pipeline and power station in Kazakhstan. Bateman Engineering Israel and one of Kazakhstan's largest private infrastructure companies announced on May 23 that the companies jointly intend to construct a $190 million 270-megawatt power station on the Kazakh shore of the Caspian Sea as part of the Kashgan oil fields development. The Kashgan oil fields have a reserve capacity of approximately 8 billion barrels. The power station project could expand to 320 megawatts. Italy's Agip will finance the project. Bateman is also bidding for other projects of similar scale in Kazakhstan. Bateman is also undertaking a feasibility study for upgrading Central Asia's main natural gas pipeline.
Israel's National Infrastructure Minister Joseph Paritzky visited Turkey on May 25 to discuss an energy corridor. Turkish Energy and Natural Resources Minister Hilmi Guler told Ankara Anatolia on May 25, "Israel wants to buy electricity, natural gas, oil and water from Turkey with a single project. Feasibility activities of this project continue at the moment and we will act accordingly with these feasibility activities."
Israel also plans other massive infrastructure projects over the next several years to develop its domestic gas market. In a meeting with Russia's Gazprom's Chairman Alexei Miller on June 1, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon emphasized Israel's interest in long-term contracts for gas supplies. Gazprom is interested in providing Russian gas shipments and the company's participation in creating gas infrastructure in Israel. By 2025, Israel plans to increase the share of gas in the energy balance from less than one percent to 25 percent. But in order to do so, the country must build gas pipelines, low-pressure grids, and new power plants that will use gas. The Israeli government wants Gazprom to design and build the gas grids.
Gazprom is exploring supplying Russian gas through Turkey utilizing the Blue Stream pipeline and building a new gas pipeline through the Mediterranean Sea. According to Gazprom CEO Aleksey Miller, the Blue Stream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Turkey is the most promising route to export Russian natural gas to Israel. Gazprom will also look into supplying liquefied or compressed gas. According to Gazprom's Head of Strategic Development Department Vlada Rusakova, the company will supply 7.85-10.46 billion cubic yards annually.
Gazprom and Israel have been discussing the project since 1998 when Israel only wanted 2.6-3.9 billion cubic yards of gas annually, making the venture unprofitable for Gazprom. According to Rusakova, the construction of a gas pipeline required tremendous investments. Given Israel's increase in desired gas supplies, Rusakova told Interfax on June 1, "This is interesting to us, at this level of supplies investment will be paid back." Israel projects gas consumption to increase as the energy sector grows. According to the Infrastructure Ministry, natural gas consumption will reach 15 billion cubic yards in 2025.
Israel's gas company PazGaz intends to acquire gas activities and companies in Eastern Europe for millions of dollars. This acquisition will make PazGaz the first Israeli company to enter the liquid petroleum gas market overseas. Paz Oil Company and brothers Ehud and Mordechai (Modi) Ben-Shach own PazGaz 50-50.
But in an interview with Globes on August 5, Ehud Ben-Shach said that though the Israeli energy market is ripe for such projects, its business environment still presents some hurdles.
"Israel has the business and intelligence density per square mile of few other countries. (But) if you add Israelis' aggressiveness and government over-regulation, it's no wonder that many companies are heading overseas. Under these circumstances and because the gas market has been quantitatively declining for years, PazGaz decided to move our know-how, experience, managerial capabilities and some of our investments overseas. We're now seeking gas infrastructure and marketing opportunities in Eastern Europe, especially in countries slated to join the Euro between 2007 and 2010."
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EU criticises Israel
11/08/2004
(SA News 24)
http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1571328,00.html
Brussels - The European Union's head office levelled harsh criticism against Israel on Wednesday while announcing $1,6m to aid thousands of Palestinians whose homes were demolished during Israeli army incursions in the Gaza Strip last spring.
"These funds do not absolve the occupying power of its responsibilities to uphold international humanitarian law," said Poul Nielson, EU commissioner for humanitarian aid, in a statement.
Citing EU and United Nations declarations, he added: "House demolitions are disproportionate acts that contravene international humanitarian law... and show a reckless disregard for the lives of civilians."
The grant is the second this year from the European Commission to aid victims of home demolitions in the Gaza Strip, following $1,2m allocated last March.
The money will go through a UN agency to help provide temporary lodging for about 3 800 people whose homes were destroyed or damaged during the incursions in May and June in the Rafah refugee camp, on the border with Egypt.
The army entered the area to search for weapons smuggling tunnels after seven Israeli soldiers were killed in the area. Three tunnels were uncovered.
Palestinians said 45 Palestinians were killed in the operation. The United Nations said 360 families were left homeless. The Israeli army said some houses that had been used in attacks against soldiers were destroyed, but did not give a number.
The EU money also will go to replace lost household items and repair shelters and infrastructure, including water and sewage systems and two schools, the commission said.
Edited by Andrea Botha
----
Blast Near Jerusalem Kills 2 Palestinians
August 11, 2004
By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/11/international/middleeast/11CND-ISRA.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM, Aug. 11 - A Palestinian bomber detonated explosives 200 yards from a busy checkpoint at the northern edge of Jerusalem today, killing 2 Palestinian passersby and wounding at least 13 people, including 6 Israeli border police officers, 3 of them seriously.
Israeli officials said that an hour before the late-afternoon explosion they had hard intelligence that at least one Palestinian bomber was headed toward Jerusalem.
The police and army went on high alert and set up additional checkpoints near the Kalandia crossing, which thousands of Palestinians use every day on their way to work in Jerusalem.
The officials said that as Israeli soldiers approached a suspicious-looking car on foot, there was an explosion. The bomb was in a bag resembling a backpack left by the side of the road and was detonated by remote control as the police neared, an Israeli police spokesman, Supt. Gil Kleiman, said.
"We think it was a suicide bomber who saw the police presence and fled, leaving the bag by the side of the road," Superintendent Kleiman said in an interview tonight. "Our intelligence said the bomber was headed for Jerusalem."
A Palestinian was later arrested in the West Bank on suspicion of involvement in the bombing, Superintendent Kleiman said, but he would not provide more details.
At the scene, two cars were smashed together and burned, but did not appear to have been distorted from an explosion inside either of them.
Zacaria Zubeidah, the Jenin leader of Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigades, part of Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement, took responsibility in a telephone call to a Palestinian journalist in Jenin. He said that 44 pounds of explosives had been detonated by remote control and that the target had been the Kalandia checkpoint. He said he regretted the deaths of the Palestinians. He did not mention the Israelis.
Superintendent Kleiman disputed Mr. Zubeidah's assertion, saying that Israeli intelligence believed the intended target of the bomb was farther inside Jerusalem and that the explosion was premature. "We suspect the sudden appearance of the police caused the explosion," he said.
Later, Mr. Zubeidah told The Associated Press that the bomber was headed for Jerusalem and had been forced to abandon the bomb as the police closed in. "We found ourselves forced to detonate it at the spot," he said.
About 30 yards from the site of the explosion, a deep trench cuts through the main road between Ramallah and Jerusalem, intended for the "separation barrier," as the Israelis call it, intended to divide Jerusalem from the West Bank. Large chunks of concrete for the barrier - in this area, a solid, high wall of concrete - lie beside the road. Construction of this part of the barrier was halted by the Israeli Supreme Court last month.
"The explosion occurred just where the construction of the fence was stopped by a court order a few weeks ago," Mr. Kleiman said with some disgust. "As police, we've been pushing for this fence for a long time. It's a political decision, of course, but it's already a godsend. The terrorists' intent is to continue to try, but they're not succeeding in crossing over into Israel. So if it's not a metal or concrete fence that stops terrorists, it will be a human fence, like those six border police wounded today."
An Israeli Army spokesman at the scene, Capt. Jacob Dallal, agreed. "This is the most common route of the terrorists from Ramallah to Jerusalem," he said. "It's easy to go around the main road here, it's porous. That's why we say that building the fence, barrier or wall, whatever you call it, is essential. It is designed to force everything through the Kalandia checkpoint."
On July 11, a bomb planted next to a bus stop in Tel Aviv killed an Israeli soldier and wounded five other people. The last suicide bombing inside Israel occurred in mid-March, in the southern port city of Ashdod, when two suicide bombers killed 10 Israelis.
The use of a remotely detonated bomb is a step backwards for the Palestinian militants, giving them less control than a suicide bomber has over where and when a bombing will take place, said Boaz Ganor, an analyst at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Tel Aviv.
"A remote detonation would show that the terrorists are having trouble infiltrating suicide bombers or that members of a cell did not want to die," Mr. Ganor said.
He praised the quality and timeliness of Israeli intelligence, which had developed a great deal since the second Palestinian uprising, or intifada, began. "You see it in two ways," he said, "first in defensive actions like today and also in targeted assassinations."
"It's always a competition between the terrorist and the counterterrorist, to find the technology or the methods to counter the other side," he said. "It never ends." The dead, both Palestinian passersby, were identified as Salah Abu Sneineh, 60, and Ayed Mustafa, 45. Three other members of Mr. Abu Sneineh's family were wounded, including his grandson, Mahdi, 6, who was described by Ramallah hospital officials as in serious condition.
At least seven other Palestinian bystanders were hurt, with five of them in Jerusalem hospitals, the police said.
"Of the six border police wounded, three are in serious condition, one of those in very bad condition," Mr. Kleiman said.
The Israelis have been active in the arrest and killing of Palestinian terror suspects in Jenin, Nablus and Gaza, and Palestinians have vowed revenge.
Ely Karmon, another analyst at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism, said that it was clear that the Palestinians had the organization and the will to commit further suicide attacks and would continue to try, "but the successes of Israeli security forces are growing." The bomb today was "less than perfect," he said. "But it still kills and wounds."
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U.S. commends Israel for removal of IDF roadblocks
Haaretz
August 11, 2004
By Aluf Benn
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/463066.html
The U.S. has recently commended Israel for fulfilling its commitment to remove roadblocks in the territories to ease the Palestinians' freedom of movement. The Israel Defense Forces has removed about 100 roadblocks in the last month, and Palestinian officials told the Americans conducting a field investigation that they feel the improvement. The removal of roadblocks was one of four commitments Israel made to the American government. The other three are evacuating illegal outposts, limiting settlement construction to built-up areas, and unfreezing hundreds of millions of shekels in Palestinian Authority tax money.
Outpost evacuation, which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared he would carry out in the June 2003 Aqaba summit, remains the most difficult problem. American ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer is close to reaching an agreement with Baruch Spiegel, the defense minister's adviser, on how many outposts must be evacuated. According to the defense establishment, 23 illegal outposts have been established in the West Bank since March 2001.
After an agreement is reached, the U.S. will expect Israel to evacuate the outposts, but will not intervene in the evacuation itself. The U.S. stands firm on its demand that the outposts be removed, American Middle East envoy Elliott Abrams clarified in his talks with officials in Israel over the weekend.
Washington vehemently rejected Israeli officials' idea that it is better to leave the outposts aside for now and focus instead on the disengagement plan, which will include the evacuation of settlements in the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank. The U.S. maintained that there was no link between the two issues, since Israel committed to evacuate outposts long before it came up with the disengagement initiative.
America sees the implementation of the pullout plan as a test of the credibility and capability of Sharon, who is trying to persuade the U.S. that he is being up-front about it. Earlier this week he told U.S. Senator Norm Coleman from Minnesota, the point man between the Republican party and the Jewish community, "I committed to evacuate the illegal outposts, and I intend to stand by my commitment."
Another issue Kurtzer and Spiegel are discussing is settlement construction, but those talks are still in the initial phase. They are due to determine the construction line in each settlement. Israel has proposed beginning with setting the construction line for the isolated settlements and postponing discussion of the large settlement areas.
Recent reports of the Defense Ministry's approval of 550 housing units in the West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim surprised the Americans, who were not familiar with the construction plan. They are investigating Israel's claim that the plan relates to an old project that was approved before last May, when Israel committed to limit settlement construction, and that the housing will be built in an existing construction zone.
Sharon's adviser Dov Weisglass will go to Washington next week for talks with U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and members of her team.
-------- mideast
Tehran invites Iraqi prime minister for official visit
REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
By Paul Hughes
August 11, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040811-123522-9820r.htm
TEHRAN - Iran, stung by charges it is arming the Iraqi insurgency, said yesterday it had invited Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi for an official visit.
Tehran has been incensed by accusations from Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan, who this week said Iraq's powerful Shi'ite Muslim neighbor was Baghdad's prime enemy and that its fingerprints could be seen in the past week's fighting in Najaf.
That fighting continued for a sixth day yesterday as U.S. forces pounded Shi'ite militiamen from the air and ground while using loudspeakers to urge the defiant fighters to surrender.
Plumes of smoke rose from the city's ancient cemetery, where members of Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr's militia, known as Mahdi's Army, have dug in and stored caches of weapons. U.S. warplanes attacked their positions at sunset.
Tensions between Iraq and Iran, which fought a war from 1980 to 1988 in which hundreds of thousands were killed, were exacerbated by the kidnapping last week of an Iranian diplomat by a group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq.
Mr. Shaalan told Al Arabiya television on Monday that Shi'ite Muslim rebels were using arms manufactured in Iran to wage the uprising in Najaf.
Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Tehran had sent a written invitation to Mr. Allawi, who chose not to visit Iran during a tour of regional countries earlier this month. He gave no date for the proposed visit.
Iran has cautiously welcomed Iraq's new government as a step toward full Iraqi sovereignty and routinely denies U.S. and Iraqi charges of meddling in its western neighbor's affairs.
Mr. Kharrazi said he discussed Mr. Shaalan's accusations with Iraqi counterpart Hoshyar Zebari by telephone yesterday.
"The Iraqi foreign minister expressed regret and said [Mr. Shaalan's comments] were not the official stance of the Iraqi government," Mr. Kharrazi told the official IRNA news agency.
"Such remarks are designed to create an atmosphere of animosity between the Iraqi and Iranian nations. ... The Iraqi government must prudently stop this," he said.
U.S. Marines have thrown a tight cordon around the cemetery and the Imam Ali shrine but have yet to make a full assault on fighters holed up in the sites, a move that would enrage Iraq's majority Shi'ites.
The fighting is the toughest test yet for the administration of Mr. Allawi, who is also struggling with a spate of kidnappings aimed at pressuring foreign forces and firms to leave Iraq.
An Islamist Web site carried a videotape yesterday purporting to show the beheading in Iraq of a man identified as an "Egyptian spy" working with U.S. forces.
But in a relief for the cash-strapped government, Iraq resumed full oil production in its southern oil fields after quickly repairing a pipeline valve blown up Monday by saboteurs, an Iraqi oil official said.
Sheik al-Sadr's uprising has killed and wounded hundreds of Iraqis across central and southern Iraq. Yesterday, his militia attacked an Iraqi police checkpoint in Najaf, killing and wounding several uniformed men, one witness said.
Between firefights, Marines broadcast messages through loudspeakers, urging militiamen to surrender and civilians to steer clear of the area.
Clashes also broke out in a poor Shi'ite Baghdad suburb called Sadr City as fighters brazenly ignored a curfew order.
The Health Ministry said 10 persons had been killed and 104 wounded in fighting over the past 24 hours in Baghdad, including Sadr City. An official said he had no toll from Najaf.
U.S. Marines say they have killed 360 al-Sadr loyalists since Thursday in Najaf, home to 600,000 people some 100 miles south of Baghdad. Sheik al-Sadr's spokesmen say far fewer have died.
In another sign of Iraq's lawlessness, the chief of Mr. Allawi's party in the volatile Sunni city of Ramadi was found dead two days after he was reported missing, family members said.
In Tehran, Mr. Kharrazi said Tehran and Baghdad were in close contact to secure the release of Iran's consul to Karbala, Fereidoun Jahani, kidnapped last Wednesday by a group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq.
Mr. Jahani's captors have issued a statement accusing him of inciting sectarian violence in Iraq.
-----
Gauge of Mideast tensions on Lebanon's border with Israel
August 11, 2004
By Nicholas Blanford
The Christian Science Monitor
http://csmonitor.com/2004/0811/p07s02-wome.html
UNITED NATIONS POSITION 4-28, SOUTH LEBANON - From this UN border post, the sleek lines of two Israeli Merkava tanks 500 yards to the south are barely visible through the shimmering midday haze.
Indian soldiers serving a yearlong tour with the UN Interim Force In Lebanon (UNIFIL) keep close watch on this volatile stretch of the Blue Line, the UN's name for Lebanon's southern frontier, ever mindful that the tranquil scene could erupt into violence without warning.
When Israeli troops withdrew from an occupied strip of south Lebanon in May 2000, it appeared that UNIFIL's 26-year tenure was coming to an end. But the collapse of the Middle East peace process and the tension from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have persuaded the UN Security Council to prolong the mission's existence.
The Council recently renewed UNIFIL's mandate for another six-month period. In his report on UNIFIL, UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan warned that "considerable risk remains that hostile acts will escalate and lead the parties into conflict."
The Blue Line is a barometer of broader Middle East tension. When Ahmad Yassin, a senior official of the Palestinian Hamas movement, was assassinated in March in Gaza, Lebanese Hizbullah fighters shelled Israeli border posts. When Israeli jets bombed an old Palestinian training camp near Damascus last year, retaliation came along the Lebanon-Israel border with a Hizbullah sniper killing an Israeli soldier.
"Heightened tension in the region sees heightened tension along the border," says Milos Strugar, UNIFIL's senior adviser. "We are the eyes and ears of the UN and the international community."
The Indian battalion's 4-28 position sits in a grassy plain flanked to the east by mountain peaks of the Shebaa Farms and the rolling hills of the Golan Heights. The Shebaa Farms is a strip of mountainside occupied by Israeli troops and claimed by Lebanon.
The last bout of violence was in July when Hizbullah and Israeli forces exchanged fire across the Blue Line. Two Israeli soldiers and a Hizbullah fighter were killed. It's during these tit-for-tat incidents, with neither side usually willing to back down, that UNIFIL's role as an intermediary is appreciated.
"We are becoming increasingly important and vital in liaison," Mr. Strugar says. "It's perhaps the most important role we have now, preventing incidents from getting out of control."
Although it comprises 2,000 armed soldiers drawn from seven countries, UNIFIL is unable to intervene directly with the parties on the ground. UNIFIL is in Lebanon at the request of the Lebanese government. It is therefore obliged to respect the policies of Beirut, even if those contradict the mission's peacekeeping efforts, such as sanctioning Hizbullah attacks in the Shebaa Farms.
On the edge of the Shebaa Farms, 3,000 feet above the sweltering plain, clouds descend over the limestone mountain peaks, smothering an Israeli outpost. Another Israeli position a few hundred yards away looks ghostly in the fog banks.
"We generally see no movement by the Israelis or Hizbullah. We know Hizbullah is in the hills around here but they don't show themselves," says Maj. Ajay Kothiyal, whose company patrols the edge of the Shebaa Farms.
The absence of regular conflict means that the busiest member of the 650-strong Indian battalion is Maj. K.B. Mrityjunjaya, a veterinarian. In the seven months since the battalion arrived in Lebanon, Major Mrityjunjaya has treated 24,000 animals.
"My phone never stops ringing," he says, struggling with an uncooperative sick cow. The Indian battalion also holds medical and dental clinics.
Although UNIFIL is appreciated by villagers in south Lebanon (it adds $35.7 million to the local market each year), the force will not remain forever.
Beirut has irritated the UN and the international community by refusing to deploy troops to the border. Its claim that Lebanon cannot serve as Israel's "border guards" in the absence of regional peace has gotten little sympathy from the UN.
"The Lebanese government uses UNIFIL's presence ... as an excuse not to deploy their own forces," a Beirut-based diplomat says. "We can't baby the Lebanese forever. Sooner or later they will have to take responsibility for the border themselves."
-------- nato
NATO training mission arrives in Iraq
ROME (AFP)
Aug 15, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040815130412.wv8yhlvx.html
A NATO team which will help train Iraq's new army arrived in the country over the weekend, said the alliance's southern command in Naples.
Several of the 50 officers assigned to NATO's Training Implementation Mission in Iraq, led by Dutch Major General Carel Hilderink, began arriving in the country a week earlier.
The NATO experts "will contribute to the goal shared by the entire international community -- to help Iraq provide for its own peace and security", NATO's Joint Force Command (JFC) Naples said in a statement dated Saturday.
The mission's tasks include liaising with the Iraqi interim government and US-led coalition forces, helping Iraq establish defence and military headquarters and identifying Iraqi personnel for training outside the country.
The dispatch of the NATO team follows a request by the new government in Iraq for the alliance's help in training a new army and other technical assistance.
NATO's 26 member nations were only able overcome a row and agree to send the mission last month by sidestepping the delicate issue of its command. France, which supports the training mission, is opposed to it being under the command of the US-led coalition forces.
-------- russia / chechnya
Putin Finding Power in The Pump
Oil Seen as Creating New Oligarch Class
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54967-2004Aug10?language=printer
MOSCOW -- As the Russian state launched its legal campaign against oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky last summer, many allies and enemies of the government saw the fingerprints of a mysterious Kremlin aide, Igor Sechin.
A reputed former KGB agent who followed President Vladimir Putin to Moscow, Sechin led a powerful Kremlin faction that, according to insiders, resented Khodorkovsky's defiance of authority. The Sechin clan bristled, for instance, when Khodorkovsky publicly implied that a deal involving the state-owned Rosneft oil company was a corrupt scheme to benefit powerful insiders.
A year later, Khodorkovsky is in prison, awaiting the outcome of a trial on charges of fraud and tax evasion, and the state is preparing to dismember his company, Yukos, Russia's largest oil producer. Among those ready to snap up the pieces at a state-run fire sale is aggrieved rival Rosneft. The chairman of Rosneft, as of two weeks ago, is Igor Sechin.
Putin's allies portray his assault on Khodorkovsky as a crackdown on the men known as oligarchs, who became rich overnight through the often-rigged sale of state assets in the 1990s. But the assault may actually be creating a new generation of oligarchs loyal to Putin, according to analysts, politicians, business leaders and former aides.
Now that oil has replaced military might as the source of Russian power, Putin is using it to assert himself on the global stage while picking winners and losers at home, these sources said.
"At first, when they started, it seemed there had been some personal conflict between Putin and Khodorkovsky that started the affair," Vladimir Milov, deputy energy minister under Putin until 2002, said in an interview. "Now it seems it may be connected to efforts to redistribute property that was privatized in the '90s."
"There are two groups of oligarchs, the old and the new ones," Mikhail Delyagin, an economic adviser to Putin's first prime minister, said at a briefing last week. "The new oligarchs have beaten the old ones," and the Yukos case has been prosecuted "only in order to take resources away from one group of oligarchs and give them to another group."
"It will be crony privatization like in the 1990s," Delyagin added, "the only difference being that in the 1990s they privatized state property and in this case they will privatize former state, now private property."
Oil's Importance Grows
Putin appears to be restructuring Russia's oil industry at a time when it has reestablished the country as a major international player.
Daily production has soared from 6 million barrels to a new post-Soviet record of 9.3 million barrels last month, according to government figures. Russia now rivals Saudi Arabia as the largest producer in the world. Its importance to world markets became increasingly clear last week when the Yukos turmoil sent oil prices to record highs.
The power of the pump has enhanced Putin's influence abroad. China and Japan have been trying to outbid each other for Russian oil as Putin weighs where to build a multibillion-dollar pipeline to supply one of the Asian giants. The United States has sought to persuade Putin to build a new terminal in the northern city of Murmansk to ship crude to U.S. companies, but so far it has been snubbed.
Putin appears intent first on consolidating power over the oil industry. Russian officials point out that Saudi Arabia and other major exporters retain state control over their oil industries, while Russia's was largely sold off in the 1990s. Today the state controls 7 percent of the oil industry. If the government seizes Yukos's primary production unit as planned to satisfy a back-tax claim and sells it to a state company such as Rosneft, the share of production in state hands would rise to 18 percent.
Rosneft is not the only potential beneficiary. Other possibilities include state-controlled Gazprom, the country's natural gas monopoly, and Surgutneftegaz, a private company run by a veteran Soviet oil executive loyal to the state. But Sechin's appointment as chairman of Rosneft confirmed the company as the front-runner.
"The fact that Rosneft got such an influential guy means that it looks that Rosneft will play a more political role and a more important role in the economy," said Sergei Markov, a political consultant who has worked with the Kremlin. "This is a signal."
Putin has also stepped into the oil sector by increasing its taxes. In recent months, the government eliminated loopholes used by Yukos and raised tax rates on production. Last week it pushed another production tax increase through parliament and approved an increase in oil export duties. Putin is also stripping local governors of influence over energy resources in their provinces with a new regulatory plan endorsed by parliament last week.
Putin has tamed private oil companies by making Yukos an example. The tax service hit Yukos with nearly $7 billion in bills for back taxes, with more to come, for employing previously unchallenged tax shelters. Sibneft, an oil company controlled by an oligarch on good terms with the Kremlin, used the same shelters but has been spared similar treatment. In fact, state auditors examining Sibneft last month declared the tax shelters legal.
Lukoil, the main Yukos rival, voluntarily paid $200 million to compensate for use of the same tax shelters without being billed by the government, a move hailed by Putin allies as an example for others. "If it's aimed at minimizing taxes, it's not legitimate," Leonid Fedun, vice president and part-owner of Lukoil, said of the shelters. "There are such tricks in almost all tax codes in all countries. So we decided to abandon all these schemes for tax minimization."
In an interview, Fedun did not dispute the characterization of Lukoil as Kremlin-friendly. "We think the fact that the state is domineering now is good," he said. "Oil is a strategic thing, and of course the state should participate . . . [because] oil is the basis for the economy."
Foreign Firms Look Ahead
As Putin moves against Yukos, he has tried to reassure foreign investors that he does not want to renationalize the industry. Last month he met with ConocoPhillips President James J. Mulva on the same day the government announced it would sell its remaining 7.59 percent share in Lukoil. Last week, officials set a minimum $1.26 billion price for the stake, and ConocoPhillips is widely considered the state's favorite.
Other foreign companies have watched the Yukos saga warily, uncomfortable with making further investments in Russia yet unwilling to abandon some of the world's largest oil reserves.
"Are there concerns about Yukos? Sure," said Robert Dudley, president of TNK-BP oil company. "But the Yukos situation appears to be a special set of circumstances and has not impacted how we intend to do business."
TNK-BP was forged last year as a 50-50 joint venture between Russia's Tyumen Oil Co. and Britain's BP, which poured $7.5 billion into the newly merged company, the largest foreign investment in Russian history. Russia desperately needs more foreign capital to develop new fields -- investments Dudley and other oil executives worry may be deterred by the Yukos case.
"It hasn't discouraged BP," said Dudley. "You can see we're going to continue to invest large amounts each year through TNK-BP. But it's for these capital-intensive, long-term payouts that people have to have a lot of confidence before they invest, and it remains to be seen whether the Yukos situation will discourage that."
Others doubt that foreign investors would want to take that chance. "How do you know what happens next?" asked Stephen O'Sullivan, an analyst at United Financial Group, a Moscow brokerage house. "Do they go after somebody else?"
Milov, the former energy official who now heads the nonprofit Institute of Energy Policy, said the Yukos case jeopardizes Russia's comeback. "It's a very dangerous thing for the Russian economy," he said. "Yukos was one of the leaders of the Russian recovery. . . . The people who are leading the attack against Yukos, maybe they don't understand what they're doing to the oil sector and the economy in general -- or if they understand, they don't care."
The 'Yukos Effect'
Troika Dialog, an investment firm, termed the new post-Yukos industry "people's oil" and predicted in a report last week that it would "end up less cost-efficient, more highly taxed, prone to higher capital spending and less transparent for minority shareholders." The report lowered long-term Russian oil growth projections by 3 percent because of the "Yukos effect."
Private enterprise has powered the growth in Russian oil. Output by the three largest private oil companies rose 90 percent from 1998 to 2003, compared with marginal growth by state firms, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a multinational agency. Private oil accounted for up to one-quarter of Russia's recent economic growth, the report said.
Rosneft's new chairman has no oil experience. Sechin, 43, studied French and Portuguese at Leningrad State University, and Russian news media have reported that he was recruited by the KGB. He went to Africa as an interpreter for a Soviet equipment export company, returning to work in city government in Leningrad, since renamed St. Petersburg. In 1991, he became an aide to Putin, then a city official, and has followed his boss's rise.
Now Kremlin deputy chief of staff, Sechin has rarely appeared in public and does not give interviews. Along with fellow deputy chief Viktor Ivanov, another KGB veteran, he leads the clan of hard-liners called the siloviki, or men of power. He has an inside line to the prosecutors pursuing Khodorkovsky, since Sechin's daughter last year reportedly married the son of Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov.
The rise of the siloviki has inspired fear. When NTV television asked Arkady Volsky, president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, who he thought was behind the moves against Yukos, he refused to say. "I am very scared to name names now," he said. "I am simply scared. I have six grandchildren, after all, and I want them to live."
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US Blinded by Love for Saakashvili
Moscow Times
by Mark Almond
August 11, 2004
http://antiwar.com/orig/almond.php?articleid=3283
Can the Caucasus ever escape from the cycle of coups and violence that have beset the region since the collapse of the Soviet Union? Not if the rhetoric of Georgia's new 36-year-old President Mikheil Saakashvili is anything to go by.
Before setting out on a visit to the United States last week, Saakashvili announced that he had given an order to fire on all ships - including cruise ships - that violate Georgia's territorial waters. "I say this so that tourists who are now coming to Abkhazia will hear it," he told reporters Aug. 3.
Saakashvili's rhetoric echoes the justifications given by Soviet officials in 1983 after a South Korean airliner was shot down for violating the Soviet Union's "sacred, sovereign airspace," as Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov put it at the time. More than 200 civilians were killed. But Georgia today is run by a team of thirty-something post-Soviets educated in the West. Shouldn't it behave in a very different way?
Sadly, Saakashvili's approach to asserting Georgian sovereignty contains more than echoes of Soviet practice. More recent blood-soaked disasters in his country's history seem to set a precedent. On Aug. 14, 1992, the Georgian government's conflict with Abkhazia escalated from words to armed combat when Tbilisi sent its motley army into the coastal region to assert Georgian sovereignty. The orgy of murder, plunder and rape that followed engendered a bitter Abkhazian backlash. One year later, the Georgian army had fled and a third of a million Georgian-speaking civilians followed the defeated rabble out of Abkhazia.
Despite his bloodthirsty rhetoric directed at Georgia's two breakaway regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Saakashvili enjoys bipartisan support in Washington. Even at the height of a bitter domestic election campaign, the supporters of both U.S. President George W. Bush and challenger John Kerry have nothing but praise for the Columbia Law School alumnus. George Soros may have pledged millions to oust Bush, but he has boasted that his money helped to install Saakashvili in power last November. The Open Society Institute helped train the protesters who toppled Eduard Shevardnadze to the applause of the Bush White House.
Yet support on both sides of the aisle for a Georgian president with a tough approach to separatism is nothing new.
Twelve years ago, when Shevardnadze stormed back to power in the ex-Soviet republic he had led as Communist Party boss until 1985, the Washington consensus backed the first President Bush's endorsement of the new Georgian president even though he had toppled an elected predecessor. In 1992, the State Department and international observers accepted Shevardnadze's claim to have received over 90 percent of the vote. Last January, neither the State Department nor international observers saw anything suspicious in official results showing that 97 percent of Georgians voted for Saakashvili.
There is an almost Orwellian aspect to the way in which the U.S. establishment has erased its love affair with Shevardnadze from the pages of history while it carries on in exactly the same fashion with his successor. After all, then-Secretary of State James Baker went to Georgia in 1992 to praise Shevardnadze's anti-corruption drive and democratization efforts, even finding time for a photo-op with the notorious mafioso Dzhaba Ioseliani.
In 1999, James Baker presided over the ceremony awarding Shevardnadze the Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service. Then in 2003 the same James Baker returned to Georgia and blasted the Shevardnadze regime for corruption and election fraud.
Baker's message was clear: Washington's love affair with Shevardnadze was over.
Now Washington embraces Saakashvili with the same ardor. Watching Saakashvili's tirades against separatists and his enthusiastic reception in the United States is like witnessing a crazy rerun of Georgia's smash-up in 1992.
Saakashvili may have ousted Shevardnadze with only a few broken skulls - what the media call a "bloodless revolution" - but Abkhazia and South Ossetia may be tougher nuts to crack. Shevardnadze's police and army could be bought off to serve a new master. But the rebels have no obvious way of reintegrating themselves into a Georgian force.
Don't be taken in by the carefully staged photos of Georgian troops in U.S.-style uniforms under banners reading "USA-Georgia, United We Stand" arranged for the benefit of Colin Powell or Donald Rumsfeld. The hundred-plus U.S. soldiers training Georgia's new army complain that different men show up for training every day, rendering the exercise pointless.
Maybe Georgia's army is better dressed than Shevardnadze's ragtag paramilitaries in 1992, but uniforms do not make soldiers. Whether Saakashvili's forces will prove any better disciplined on the battlefield than their predecessors remains to be seen. Let's hope it is still not too late for the president to back away from putting them to the test.
It is true that, apart from a few beatings, Saakashvili recovered control of Adzharia in May without serious bloodshed. But Adzharia is very different from the two breakaway regions that Saakashvili is provoking now.
Adzharians are Georgians and would have seen violence with Saakashvili's forces as a civil war. Adzharia lacked an army. Abkhazians and Ossetians have no fellow feeling with Georgians. They speak different languages. More importantly, they suffered from the ravages of Shevardnadze's paramilitaries in the early 1990s and they know that many of Saakashvili's hard-line supporters were among the gangs that looted Sukhumi in August 1992 under the guise of "restoring national unity." Abkhazians and Ossetians have soldiers who fought in the past against Georgian invaders and routed them.
Is it worth risking another bloody conflict? Another round of ethnic cleansing would be the result if Saakashvili won. If you were an Abkhazian or Ossetian listening to his daily rants threatening retribution, would you trust the new Georgia to treat you and your family any better than the discredited Georgia of Shevardnadze?
Like Iraq or Sudan, Georgia and the rest of the Caucasus are awash with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. A Caucasian tinderbox may be about to catch fire. If it does, Americans in the region could carry the can for Washington's failure to rein in Saakashvili's aggressive tendencies.
People there know he studied at Columbia. They cite Soros' backing for him, including his payment of many ministers' salaries. When told that Soros' Open Society Institute has nothing to do with the Bush White House because it is a nongovernmental organization, Georgians just laugh. So when people across that unstable region hear Saakashvili threatening to sink tourist boats, an invisible logo flashes through people's minds: "Made in America."
Neither candidate in the U.S. presidential race may be thinking much about ex-Soviet Georgia this summer. Electoral college votes in the South are probably uppermost in their minds. But if the United States stands by and lets Saakashvili invade Abkhazia or South Ossetia, the president's enemies will regard him as Washington's proxy.
Resistance to any rash attack by Georgia could easily spawn terrorism. The pipeline that Washington has promoted to carry oil across Georgia from the Caspian Sea could prove as vulnerable to sabotage as any in Iraq. American personnel operating in Georgia could also be targets if Abkhazians, Ossetians and their friends decide to target the people they see as Saakashvili's sponsors.
As the United States' attention is locked on its own presidential battle, real conflict is looming in the Caucasus, and Americans there could pay the price for repeating the mistakes of 12 years ago. Certainly, ordinary people there on both sides of the tattered cease-fire line have little cause for optimism.
Reprinted from the Moscow Times
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Bush Nominates Rep. Goss to Run CIA
Democrats Question Independence Of Republican Veteran of Agency
By Dana Priest and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53253-2004Aug10?language=printer
President Bush nominated Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), a CIA officer-turned-politician, as director of central intelligence yesterday and said he would rely on Goss's counsel on the politically volatile issue of intelligence reform in the midst of a presidential campaign.
"He knows the CIA inside and out," Bush said in a Rose Garden announcement yesterday morning. "He's the right man to lead this important agency at this critical moment in our nation's history."
Key Senate Democrats, who have the power to hold up the nomination by filibuster, indicated they would not oppose Goss outright but would question his independence at a time when the prewar intelligence on Iraq and the failure to thwart the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have become tender subjects for the White House.
"I am concerned with the president's choice," said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Porter Goss will need to answer tough questions about his record and his position on reform, including questions on the independence of the leader of the intelligence community."
The nomination appeared, at least in part, to be an attempt by Bush to demonstrate leadership on intelligence as it becomes a defining factor of the campaign. Two weeks ago, the White House said it was in no hurry to find a permanent replacement for acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin. But since then, Bush's Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), has gained ground in public opinion polls for embracing all of the reforms urged by the Sept. 11 commission and challenging Bush to act. By naming Goss, Bush hopes to counter charges that he has been inattentive, and to gain a loyal leader with deep experience in intelligence matters.
Goss becomes the nominee at a time of historic demands on the intelligence community, with an elevated terrorist threat level in three major cities, a high-tempo hunt for al Qaeda around the world and a boiling insurgency in Iraq. Meanwhile, political leaders in Washington are locked in a fight over whether and how best to restructure the entire intelligence apparatus without endangering operations.
Democrats, including some who recently criticized the prospect of a Goss appointment, moderated their comments about him yesterday to avoid being viewed as obstructionist, keeping their rhetorical focus on the president.
Kerry issued a statement that did not say whether he supports Goss's nomination but that reiterated his support for the Sept. 11 commission's recommendation to create the post of national intelligence director to manage the CIA and the 14 other U.S. intelligence agencies and their budgets.
"We need to move urgently on this and other recommendations by the 9/11 Commission to make America safer," the statement read. "I hope that Congressman Goss shares this view and will now support the creation of this important post."
If confirmed, Goss will come to the job with his own ideas about reform. He recently introduced legislation to greatly elevate the authority of the CIA and its director, giving the chief the budgetary and personnel power over all 15 intelligence agencies -- an approach that bears some similarities to the Sept. 11 commission's proposal. Both Goss and the commission, however, would go further in some ways than Bush, who supports naming a national intelligence director but opposes granting that person spending and hiring-and-firing authority.
Goss announced yesterday that he would step down as committee chairman immediately, with no obvious successor. The Senate intelligence committee has not yet scheduled a nomination hearing, and leaders said they are likely to take up the matter in early September.
Goss, 65, served as a CIA case officer for nine years during the Cold War, recruiting spies in Central America and Western Europe. He retired from the agency when it appeared his traveling days were over; started a newspaper on Sanibel Island, a Florida resort; became mayor of Sanibel and then county commissioner; and was elected to the House in 1988. He took over the chairmanship of the intelligence panel eight years ago.
Although Goss has hammered the CIA in the recent past for its performance in Iraq and before Sept. 11 -- at one time calling its human intelligence "dysfunctional" -- he is viewed as a friend of the CIA to the extent that some consider him too friendly to the agency.
Former CIA officers said his appointment would bring much-needed stability at a time of great uncertainty.
"Porter Goss has always been an avid supporter of intelligence," said James L. Pavitt, who retired last week as the CIA's deputy director of operations. "If he comes in with the intent to make intelligence better and to build on the efforts we've already made . . . I think the building will get behind him. It is critically important we have a director leading the place now."
At the same time, many intelligence experts believe that Goss is partly responsible for the shortcomings of the intelligence community, given his role as chairman of the House oversight committee. "Our oversight is broken," said Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the panel.
John MacGaffin, the CIA's former number two at the Directorate of Operations and a senior FBI adviser, said: "He's better qualified than anyone else around today. At the same time, he's also part of the problem; that is, all the things the 9/11 commission chronicled went on during his watch and came as no surprise to him. The question is, when push comes to shove, can he avoid politicization and move forward on the changes?"
As intelligence committee chairman, Goss managed oversight of the CIA's budget, its performance in the field, the accuracy of its intelligence estimates, and its counterterrorism and covert operations. The agency's failures are to some extent the failures of the oversight committees, which because of secrecy demands conduct much of their work without public scrutiny.
Goss has acknowledged the need for change. "The way the intelligence business has expanded, given what we are confronted with, I'm sorry to say, but the days of a handful of people" overseeing intelligence "are gone," Goss told The Washington Post in an interview this spring.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), said the question for Congress "is how Mr. Goss used his front-row seat as chairman of the House intelligence committee to make this country safer over the last seven years."
"In my view, the answer to that question will offer a valuable indication as to how Mr. Goss would protect Americans as the director of central intelligence," Wyden said.
Some intelligence experts said yesterday that they consider Goss too close to the agency to become an effective leader in a time of change.
Former CIA director Stansfield Turner, who served in the Democratic Carter administration, called Goss's nomination, "the worst . . . in the history of the job."
"To put somebody who is so highly partisan in this job will further diminish public confidence in our intelligence," Turner said.
Goss was not always seen as a partisan on intelligence matters.
On the unusual joint House-Senate panel that in 2002 investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, Goss fought aggressively with the White House and the intelligence community over access to information.
"He would always tell me, 'We are going to follow the facts wherever they lead,' " said Eleanor Hill, executive director of the joint inquiry, the first to expose the deep problems in the intelligence community. "He was extremely helpful to me. He pushed on declassification. We got a lot of push-back from the intelligence community, and he wasn't intimidated by them."
Goss's tenacity won him the respect, and now the endorsement, of Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who co-chaired the joint inquiry with him and first appointed him to a Florida county commission seat in 1983.
"He helped keep a potentially divisive, partisan circumstance under control," Graham said. "He worked hard to see the Republicans and Democrats on this committee were kept in the loop. . . . He's an independent person by nature and understands what has to be done to modernize the community."
Staff writers Helen Dewar and Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
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Goss Was Once Latin America Operative
August 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Goss-Latin-America.html
MEXICO CITY (AP) -- There was plenty for a young CIA officer to do when Porter J. Goss, almost fresh out of Yale, arrived in Latin America in the early 1960s.
The Republican congressman nominated Tuesday to head the CIA apparently spent most of his career as a clandestine operative in the region, with postings to Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, though the dates for his service in each country remain unclear.
Cuba was the dominant issue. Its 1959 revolution -- at first a broadly based movement to topple a dictator -- was sharply veering toward the left, putting a major Soviet ally just 90 miles off U.S. shores in the middle of the Cold War.
Details of Goss' career remain shrouded by four decades of secrecy. It is among the least-explored decades of any current U.S. politician's past. Neither he nor the CIA have given any but the sketchiest description.
Goss apparently joined the CIA just out of Yale, where he earned a degree in ancient Greek in 1960.
He worked in Miami, which was becoming a magnet for Cuban emigres. Some were recruited by the CIA and trained for what turned out to be one of the agency's greatest disasters: the 1961 invasion of Cuba that was crushed by Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs.
A year later, the world narrowly averted nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis involving the United States and Soviet Union.
During a 2002 interview with The Washington Post, Goss joked that he performed photo interpretation and ``small-boat handling,'' which led to ``some very interesting moments in the Florida Straits.'' He acknowledged he had recruited and run foreign agents.
The Bay of Pigs plan had been inspired partly by a successful CIA-backed overthrow of Guatemala's populist government in 1954. That helped set off Guatemala's 34-year civil war, which was growing as Goss worked in the region.
It also sent a then-obscure Argentine wanderer, Ernesto Guevara hurrying to Mexico City. There ``Che'' met and joined up with Castro's guerrillas as they returned to Cuba in 1956 to start the revolution.
Goss arrived in Mexico City only a very few, if eventful years later.
Haiti -- just off of Cuba's eastern tip -- was governed by the famously brutal dictator Francois ``Papa Doc'' Duvalier.
The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, was torn with political turmoil, a struggle between backers of the populist President Juan Bosch and his conservative foes.
Jittery about the example of nearby Cuba, the United States invaded the island with thousands of troops in 1965.
Mexico was both Cuba's closest friend in the Americas and one of the CIA's great playgrounds.
It was the only country in the region to snub Washington's calls to cut ties with Castro's government. But it also allowed CIA operatives to watch flights to and from Cuba, as well as the Soviet and Cuban embassies in the Mexican capital. Cuba at the time had no other embassies in Latin America.
That monitoring allowed U.S. officials to photograph Lee Harvey Oswald entering the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City not long before he assassinated John F. Kennedy.
Cuba, meanwhile, was openly trying to spread revolutions around the hemisphere -- with the notable exception of Mexico. U.S. espionage helped track down Guevara's rebel band in Bolivia in 1968. He was captured and killed.
Mexico, meanwhile, was growing turbulent itself.
The government preached a populist, sometimes quasi-socialist politics, but largely cooperated with the United States and crushed leftist dissent.
A few scattered radicals took up arms and became guerrillas in the cities and mountains in the 1960s. They grew greatly in number after the government's security forces massacred student demonstrators in 1968 just before that year's Olympics, causing many Mexicans to give up hope of reforms.
It is not clear if Goss was involved in following that event. He apparently left the region in the late 1960s for London.
During a 1970 trip to Washington from his home in London, Goss collapsed in his hotel room, suffering from a mysterious blood infection that affected his heart and kidneys. Goss survived but his career as a field operative was over. He retired from the CIA in 1971.
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Intelligence Insider Has Recently Displayed a More Combative Side
By Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54960-2004Aug10?language=printer
For most of his 15 years in the House, Porter J. Goss had a reputation as a Florida Republican true to his Connecticut and Yale roots: conservative in his outlook but accommodationist in his tactics and rarely itching to start a public fight.
The low-key approach helped the multimillionaire former CIA officer form lasting alliances with many of his Democratic colleagues despite his role in the conservative House GOP leadership. He voiced criticism of both the CIA and the Bush administration during a congressional inquiry into intelligence failures before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
But over the past year or so, Goss's accommodating style on intelligence matters has begun to change. This summer, he took to the floor of the House on behalf of the Bush campaign, leading an unusually pointed attack on Democrats and their presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.). He feuded with Democrats on his own House intelligence committee over how deeply the panel should probe intelligence missteps before the Iraq war and other issues.
This apparent transformation appears likely to be at the heart of an extensive Senate debate this fall over Goss's nomination to head the CIA. Republicans yesterday hailed Goss's extraordinary career as both a clandestine intelligence officer and chairman of the House intelligence committee, while Democrats and CIA critics argued that too often he curried favor with the Bush White House and is too closely identified with the hidebound culture of the CIA.
Over the past month, Goss, 65, exhibited little enthusiasm for the broad intelligence changes proposed by the Sept. 11 commission, urging caution instead and proposing legislation to expand the power and budget of his old agency.
"It's regrettable that he's as close to the agency as he is," said Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative Washington think tank. "He's been implicated in the dysfunctional congressional oversight that the 9/11 commission documented. I don't know that those things are disqualifying, but there may be other candidates that are better."
Because of his experience with intelligence, "no one is going to blow smoke at him," said Robert McNamara, former general counsel at the CIA. "But one of his challenges he'll have is to completely divorce himself from the policy side of things."
Bush officials and leading Republicans said yesterday that Goss's history as an old CIA hand and political mediator would serve him well as CIA director, even as Congress and the administration quarrel over proposed changes in the intelligence system during a presidential campaign. Old friends and colleagues from both parties also said that the skills needed to steer the CIA are similar to those used by Goss 30 years ago, when he began as a small-town Florida mayor balancing the needs of environmentalists and land developers.
Sen. Bob Graham, the departing Florida Democrat, worked closely with Goss during the Sept. 11 inquiry and on numerous other intelligence issues over the years. When Graham was Florida's governor, he appointed Goss, then the GOP mayor of Sanibel, to the Lee County Commission, which had been rocked by scandal over the construction of a regional airport.
"He helped bring the commission back to a position of public respect," Graham said.
Goss's time in Lee County also provided a glimpse of his early concerns about terrorism -- including the commission's purchase in the 1980s of eight Uzi submachine guns for police officers at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport.
Goss grew up in Waterbury, Conn. He attended the Hotchkiss preparatory school and went on to Yale University, where he joined the Army ROTC, majored in ancient Greek and had his first encounter with the CIA.
He worked in the CIA's clandestine operations division over the next decade, recruiting and supervising spies in Central America and Western Europe, though Goss has always declined to provide many details. In 1970, during a trip to Washington from London, Goss collapsed from a blood infection that attacked his heart and kidneys. The illness required months of difficult recuperation.
The CIA offered him a desk job, but Goss reluctantly decided to retire from the agency instead. He moved to Sanibel Island, an environmentally pristine enclave of high-end homes near Fort Myers on Florida's west coast that is also home to many former clandestine officers. With two other agency veterans, Goss started a local newspaper, the Island Reporter. He made his first venture into politics during the development wars that roiled Florida in the 1970s.
Goss's political maneuverings in Sanibel provide a glimpse of his later role in Washington, friends and associates say. As Sanibel's first mayor in 1974, he was instrumental in incorporating the city and helped fend off landowner lawsuits challenging restrictive zoning laws that kept out most development.
Yet staking out a position as an anti-growth environmentalist did not stop Goss from gaining the support of local builders' groups, who noticed his penchant for balancing business and preservation interests after he was appointed to the Lee County board by Graham.
Through most of his career on Capitol Hill, Goss has been seen as a straight shooter, well regarded on both sides of the aisle, even though on most key issues he has sided with the conservative GOP leadership. Part of Goss's high profile in the House stems from his less publicized role as vice chairman of the House Rules Committee, the body that plays traffic cop to legislation reaching the floor. Democrats see him as part of the highly partisan Republican leadership that has sharply constricted votes permitted on controversial bills.
Several Democratic aides said yesterday that he has taken a more partisan stance recently as the Bush administration's intelligence record has come under heavier criticism from Democrats.
Immediately after the 2001 attacks, Goss worked closely and smoothly with Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democrats on terrorism and intelligence issues, one senior Democratic aide said. But more recently "Porter has been under heavy pressure from the administration to carry its water on a lot of things on the Hill," the aide added.
In one example widely cited by Democrats, Goss helped derail -- although only temporarily -- a bipartisan, bicameral deal to create the Sept. 11 commission in the fall of 2002. Negotiators thought they had a deal, but Goss insisted he had not signed off on it.
More recently, Goss angered some Democratic colleagues this summer during a debate over the intelligence budget, when he held up a sign quoting Kerry in 1977 as saying, "Now that that struggle, the Cold War, is over, why is it that our vast intelligence apparatus continues to grow?"
"I got books full of that stuff," Goss said at the time. "There is no doubt where the record is. The Democratic Party did not support the intelligence community."
When Rep. Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.) said he was stunned Goss would "distort the record on the floor of the House," Goss backed down, saying he did not mean "to be combative or confrontational or to be insensitive or to in any way offend my colleagues on the other side."
Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), a member of the House intelligence committee that Goss chairs, said Goss has refused to investigate why the administration falsely asserted Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, as well as a possible intelligence connection to prisoner abuse in Iraq and the media leaks surrounding a CIA officer's identity.
"We have not done our job; we have not had the kind of oversight we should have had in those areas," Reyes said, adding that when it comes to probing the agency, Goss "was much more aggressive when we had a Democrat in the White House."
Goss had planned not to run for reelection in 2002, but President Bush and other Republicans urged him to continue after the Sept. 11 attacks because of his intelligence background.
Two years later, Goss had definitively ruled out running for another term and had indicated that he and his wife, Mariel, planned to spend more time together at their 575-acre farm in Rapidan, Va., where they raise Piedmont cattle, karakul sheep and seasonal produce.
On Sanibel Island yesterday, his old friend Sam Bailey was thinking about the evenings they have spent together, sipping wine, in Goss's waterfront Florida home.
"I feel a little sorry for him; he won't have much time to use it now," he said.
Staff writers Helen Dewar, Juliet Eilperin and Dana Priest in Washington and Manuel Roig-Franzia on Sanibel Island; researcher Don Pohlman; and research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.
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Intelligence Changes Concern Pentagon
Creation of New Director May Hurt Military Operations, Officials Warn
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 11, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55054-2004Aug10?language=printer
Several senior Pentagon officials warned yesterday against allowing the proposed creation of a powerful national intelligence director to obstruct the flow of timely information to troops in the field.
Testifying before a House committee, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz cautioned that establishing the new intelligence post -- as well as other measures recommended by the Sept. 11 commission -- would require further study to ensure future military operations are not handicapped.
The importance of this issue to military commanders was driven home by Army Gen. Bryan D. Brown, head of the U.S. Special Operations Command.
"I want to make sure . . . that every piece of intelligence that's available is instantly available to my guy on the ground wherever he is, or my guy in the air or out in a boat," said Brown, appearing with Wolfowitz. "I would not want any impediments."
But two leaders of the commission stressed that the recommended changes in U.S. intelligence could be instituted in ways that would not block critical tactical information from reaching the battlefield.
Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton testified that the proposed reforms were meant to ensure greater cooperation among the government's 15 intelligence agencies, not interfere with military operations. The Pentagon's intelligence needs, they said, would be protected by the appointment of a top Pentagon official as a deputy to the new intelligence director and by keeping "tactical intelligence" activities in military agencies.
"It is unimaginable to us that the national intelligence director would not give protection of our forces deployed in the field a very high -- if not highest -- priority," Hamilton said.
The unusual August hearing by the House Armed Services Committee reflected the urgency that lawmakers have attached to considering the commission's recommendations.
Before the session, Democrats met behind closed doors with Kean and Hamilton. House Democratic leaders later released a letter urging President Bush to summon both chambers back to Washington during the current congressional recess to act on the recommendations.
"There is no reason why some of the recommendations could not be put in place by Sept. 11 and all of them by the time Congress adjourns in October," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and three other Democratic leaders said in the letter. "That schedule is made more difficult, however, if the August recess is not interrupted."
Without a formal session, legislation cannot be introduced or formally worked on by committees, making the current hearings little more than conversations, they said.
Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry recently made a similar proposal for a special recess session to consider the proposals. Bush rejected it, saying Congress could act in September.
Yesterday's hearing marked the first opportunity for the Pentagon's civilian and military leadership to present views on the commission's recommendations. Wolfowitz, Brown and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said their caution should not be interpreted as opposition to the proposed changes. Their concern, they said, is to avoid major shifts that might do more harm than good to military operations.
"It's important to work out the details thoughtfully and carefully," Wolfowitz said. "Done right, it will actually, I think, make more information available to the war fighter because it will break down some of the stovepipes; it will produce, hopefully, more of a common culture.
"Done wrong," he said, "it will sort of hoard everything into Washington, and somebody will have to decide at a high level who gets to look at it. And that would be a mistake."
Brown made clear that his reservations extended to the commission's recommendation that the CIA no longer direct covert paramilitary operations and that, instead, the Special Operations Command assume responsibility for such activities.
The commission concluded that the Special Operations Command is best qualified to direct such operations and that military professionals should be running operations in which weapons greater than side arms are needed.
But Brown called the issue of CIA involvement very complex and said the agency might still have a role in paramilitary actions.
"I just think we need more study on it," he said.
The Pentagon's appeal for careful consideration left some committee members suspecting an attempt to undercut the recommendations.
"I'd like to ask in plain English, because I've listened now for several hours today, whether the Pentagon is going to put its weight behind the recommendations of the 9/11 commission," said Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.). "Because I am very worried we're hearing a lot of sweet talkin', slow walkin' here."
Wolfowitz denied that the Pentagon is playing an obstructionist role. He said that the commission "correctly identified important areas where we can do a lot better," and he offered assurances that Pentagon lawyers are working with others in the administration on the recommendations.
Staff writer Helen Dewar contributed to this report.
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Bush nominates Goss to lead CIA
Florida Republican is former CIA, Army intelligence agent
Aug. 11, 2004
The Associated Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5658900/
WASHINGTON - President Bush on Tuesday nominated Florida Repulbican Rep. Porter Goss to head the embattled CIA, saying the former agency operative "knows the CIA inside and out."
advertisement "He is well prepared for this mission," the president said of Goss, chairman of the House intelligence committee. "He's the right man to lead and support the agency at this critical moment in our nation's history."
"Porter Goss is a leader with strong experience in intelligence in the fight against terrorism," Bush added in a Rose Garden ceremony with Goss at his side.
Goss, for his part, said he believes "every American knows the importance of getting the best possible intelligence we can get to our decision-makers."
A one-time Army intelligence operative and CIA agent, Goss will not automatically take over at the CIA, and instead faces a confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Members include Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., and Sen. John Kerry's running mate.
Some Democrats had objected to Goss when his name came up in recent weeks, saying he was too close to the CIA to help reform it after the Sept. 11 intelligence failures.
Goss currently chairs the House Intelligence Committee and had been considered a front-runner since the resignation last month of George Tenet.
The president said Goss will advise him on how to implement the recent recommendations made by the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission. Bush has already embraced a key recommendation: creation of a new intelligence czar to oversee the activities of the CIA and more than a dozen other intelligence agencies.
If the president names an intelligence czar, his CIA chief would lose some power in the reshuffling and essentially would be required to report to the new head of all intelligence operations.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan would not rule out Goss being picked as intelligence czar if Congress creates that position. He also would not say if Goss was a leading candidate.
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Bush's CIA Pick: 'Business as Usual'
August 11, 2004
Inter Press Service
by Jim Lobe
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=3287
After endorsing an appeal from the bipartisan 9/11 Commission to drastically overhaul the U.S. intelligence community, President George W. Bush on Tuesday nominated as his next director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) the longtime chair of a congressional panel that the commission called complacent in the run-up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The choice of Rep. Porter Goss, who has chaired the Intelligence Committee of the House of Representatives since 1996, drew skepticism from a number of sources, who said Goss' tenure had been marked primarily by his coziness with former CIA Director George Tenet, at least until the administration decided it would try to blame all its pre-war claims about Iraq on the agency.
"When George Tenet announced his retirement I made it clear that I thought his replacement should be someone of unquestioned capability and independence who could restore the credibility of America's intelligence community," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the ranking opposition Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which must now hold confirmation hearings on the Goss nomination.
"I said then and I still believe that the selection of a politician - any politician, from any party - is a mistake," Rockefeller added, noting that the nominee "will need to answer tough questions about his record and his position on reform, including questions on the independence of the leader of the intelligence community."
Others were more blunt. Stansfield Turner, the CIA director under former President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) described the nomination as the "worst in the history of the post," while Mel Goodman, a former top CIA analyst, currently at the Center for International Policy (CIP), said the Florida congressman "has all the wrong credentials," including a nine-year stint in the 1960s as a covert CIA operative in Latin America and Europe.
Still others described Goss as a "cat's paw" for Vice President Dick Cheney, whose office, according to a number of retired intelligence officials, played a key role in corrupting the intelligence process in the run-up to Washington's attack on Iraq in March 2003.
The nomination, which is also for the position of director of central intelligence (DCI), comes amid an increasingly intense debate sparked by the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission to urgently reorganize the intelligence community in light of its total failure, despite numerous opportunities, to detect and prevent the 9/11 attacks.
The most far-reaching of the proposals include the creation of a White House-based national intelligence director (NID) who would allocate the $40-billion-a-year budget among the 15 different agencies that make up the intelligence community, and hire and fire the directors of each one. While the DCI is supposed to oversee all 15 agencies, only the CIA falls under his direct control, and about 90 percent of the intelligence budget goes to agencies that are controlled by the Pentagon.
After considerable pressure from the 9/11 Commission itself, Bush accepted the notion of creating a NID but rejected giving the post such far-reaching powers. His reaction drew scorn from reform proponents in Congress, which last month created a special committee to draft legislation that would put most of the commission's proposals into practice.
The fact that the intelligence community's future is so uncertain made Goss' nomination for a position whose job description may be substantially altered in the coming months particularly remarkable, especially because the administration recently retreated from signs that it was in a hurry to replace Tenet with a political appointee.
But White House concern that Bush would be blamed for not providing new leadership to the flagship spy agency in the event that a new terrorist attack takes place on U.S. territory before the November elections apparently forced the decision. Having nominated Goss, the administration would be able to shift blame onto the Democrats if a terrorist attack does in fact occur and its nominee has not yet been confirmed.
Goss, who has long been mentioned as a leading candidate for the job and has actively campaigned for it, has spent 16 years in the House, where he acquired a reputation as a relatively moderate Republican and Bush family loyalist who was primarily interested in intelligence and the environment. Like Bush himself, Goss, who is 65, was born into wealth in Connecticut and graduated from Yale University before joining the CIA.
First as a member and then chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Goss made himself a champion of the CIA and Tenet on Capitol Hill, until the moment in June when Tenet announced his resignation - and then Goss transformed himself virtually overnight into one of the agency's fiercest and most partisan critics.
That "abrupt shift," as the Wall Street Journal described it, was particularly dramatic on the release of a staff report by the committee that accused the CIA of "ignoring its core mission ... for too long. There is a dysfunctional denial of any need for corrective action," the report declared, adding that the CIA was heading "over a proverbial cliff" after years of mismanagement and neglect.
Goss' sudden about-face was particularly galling for Tenet, who fired back, calling the staff report "frankly absurd." The Los Angeles Times called Goss' behavior "particularly brazen," noting that if things were so bad, "where was Mr. Intelligence Committee Chairman all those years?"
That criticism was less directly expressed in the 9/11 Commission's final report, which scored both congressional intelligence committees for failing to take seriously al-Qaeda and other terrorist threats in advance of 9/11, but noted that the House committee had the worst record of the six major national-security panels, having held only two hearings devoted to counter-terrorism in the three and a half years before the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
Goss has also been criticized for excessive loyalty to the Bush administration.
At Cheney's behest two years ago, he fought for denying the 9/11 Commission the power to subpoena witnesses and key White House documents in negotiations in Congress, according to a Newsweek account. More recently he has battled his Democratic vice chair, California Rep. Jane Harman, over resisting hearings on the role of Bush political appointees - particularly in the Pentagon and Cheney's office - in pressuring the intelligence community, especially the CIA, to tailor its analyses to the administration's political goals.
Goss' role as the Bush-Cheney campaign's choice to criticize Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's speech on national-security issues in early June also did little to endear him to Democrats; indeed, it prompted House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to rule out the possibility of supporting him for CIA director.
Several retired CIA officials agreed that Goss has been both too close to the CIA and to the administration to be a credible director. Ray McGovern, a retired career officer, scorned him for being a "Republican party loyalist first and foremost," who "has long shown himself to be under [Cheney's] spell and would likely report primarily to him and to White House political adviser Karl Rove."
"Goss was a very strong supporter of the agency and not one who was ever associated with any proposal for change, or, for lack of a better word, reform," said David McMichael, a former CIA analyst. "To find him being the nominee can be interpreted as saying, 'This is business as usual.'"
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Video Purportedly Shows Killing of Iraq 'CIA Agent'
DUBAI (Reuters)
Aug 11, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5941769
DUBAI (Reuters) - A Web site used by Islamic militants carried a video on Wednesday purporting to show militants beheading a "CIA agent" in Iraq.
The four-minute long footage showed a Western-looking man sitting on a chair surrounded by armed masked men. One of the men struck the captive's neck repeatedly with a sword, severing his head amid shouts of "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest).
A militant later held up the severed head for the camera.
An Arabic sign placed around the man's neck identified him as a "CIA agent." The video, which could not be immediately authenticated, showed what seemed to be the captive's picture identification card with the caption "visitor."
The Web site did not say which group issued the video, nor did the masked men identify themselves or make any political statements as previous kidnappers in Iraq had.
The men could be heard speaking in the background but the audio quality was too poor to understand.
The tired-looking captive was wearing a plain shirt and trousers.
Militants in Iraq have waged a campaign of kidnapping aimed at driving out individuals, companies and troops supporting U.S. forces and the new Iraqi interim administration.
Scores of hostages have been kidnapped by armed groups. Some have been freed but at least nine have been killed -- including an American, a South Korean and a Bulgarian.
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Analysis: CIA dismay at Goss appointment
UPI
By Richard Sale
August 11, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040810-042745-1484r.htm
President George W. Bush has nominated Rep. Porter Goss as new CIA director, a proposal which has so far caused little rejoicing at the agency, according to several serving and former agents interviewed by United Press International.
During an announcement made in the White House Rose Garden, Bush described Goss, 65, a Florida Republican as "the right man with strong experience in intelligence and in fighting against terrorism."
This was immediately disputed by two former senior agents.
"When was he in the CIA?" asked former top CIA Iraq analyst Judith Yaphe of Goss's agency career.
When told that Goss had been a case officer from the mid-1960s until 1971, dealing with Latin America, Yaphe said: "But that is so long ago. It's not as if the cultures at the agency now were anywhere near what they were back then. I would worry about his genuine depth of knowledge."
Yaphe said weeks ago Goss deliberately made statements that undercut Acting CIA Director John McLaughlin, adding, "John is a decent, well-meaning man, and Goss really screwed him."
Goss did not return phone calls.
Former CIA agent Larry Johnson also questioned Goss's qualifications. "There is one thing Goss didn't really do for the last several years -- he didn't chair the House Intelligence Committee, in spite of what his resume claims," said Johnson. "Instead, he did the dead man's float."
Johnson said Goss did not have the experience claimed. Goss did not "push through real reforms, for example, getting more funding for badly clandestine assets. He didn't do any of it."
Former CIA Counter-terrorism Chief Vince Cannistraro agreed: "Goss has never been very distinguished, but he's protected. He's a Bush loyalist and has been in the forefront of those who have tried to place the major blame for the 9/11 attacks on the agency."
But several serving intelligence sources said Goss and other Bush advocates are ignoring the degree of internal CIA opposition to such mistakes as the inclusion in the State of the Union address of allegations that Niger was attempting to sell uranium to Iraq, disowned by many agency and State Department analysts long before the speech.
For example, a congressional investigative memo -- confirmed by agency sources -- is strongly critical of Robert Walpole who, as the agency's national intelligence officer for proliferation, played a key role in promoting the bogus claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in October 2002.
According to a congressional document, when the experts from the CIA's Office of Directorate of Intelligence, especially the Weapons Inspection and Proliferation and Arms Control, or WINPAC, began to dispute Walpole's claims, getting support from technical experts assigned to it from the agency's director of science and technology, Walpole simply bypassed them.
Walpole had a close relationship with Robert Joseph on the National Security Council staff who held the same hard-line views, congressional sources said.
According to the document, Joseph was a key advocate of putting the Niger allegations into the speech and succeeded -- aided by Walpole.
Walpole also did not return phone calls.
The normal practice in writing a first draft of an national intelligence estimate -- a policy finding that must be in place before action can be taken -- is to assign it to someone at WINPAC in the directorate of intelligence. Walpole skirted experts in his own agency and went over to a hard-line deputy NIO at the Defense Intelligence Agency, a person known to be hawkish and close to the neo-conservatives, the document said.
A former senior CIA official said, "Anyone in the DIA opposed to the views of the hawks had either been forced out or they had quit in disgust."
"Everyone, including Goss, was aware that within the agency, among the lower or technical levels," there was intense opposition to including the Niger allegations in the State of the Union address, a former very senior CIA official said.
"Goss took no stand at all, provided no support," a former senior CIA operative said.
Congress is, at this moment, attempting to call as witnesses CIA GS-9s and GS-10s who signed off on documents that branded the Niger allegations as false and based on forgeries, congressional sources said.
Goss was born in Connecticut, graduating from Yale in 1960, according to his office bio. He went to work for U.S. Army intelligence and after two years, moved to the CIA. He left the agency in 1971, was active in business, and in 1989 was elected to Congress where he has remained. He is currently chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the bio says. Goss's appointment comes at an awkward time. His nomination, which must be approved by the Senate, comes as Bush is expected to act on a number of executive orders for intelligence reform recommendations from the commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks.
Yaphe, who thinks Goss would be too partisan said: "This whole appointment is a cheap political trick. One of the recommendations of the commission is that no political appointee be made director. But this is so clearly political. If Goss isn't a political appointee, than I don't know what is."
The aging CIA is badly in need of streamlining and reforms, according to more than a half a dozen serving and former agency officials interviewed by UPI.
The sharpest criticisms centers on faulty analysis, too many layers of bureaucracy, too much movement between "accounts" or assignments, and too many managers.
But will Goss's appointment forward these aims? Yaphe makes this prediction: "This will do nothing but cause more disarray at Langley."
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Pentagon warns against making US intelligence community overly centralized
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Aug 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040811171734.c0p68zka.html
The Pentagon on Wednesday warned against oversimplifying the US intelligence community's command structure by appointing a "czar" to oversee the work of 15 different agencies.
US President George W. Bush last week announced plans to heed a recommendation by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States calling for the creation of a national intelligence director and a national counterterrorism center, with oversight authority over 15 US intelligence agencies, including the CIA.
Several Defense Department officials, who testified in Congress on the recommendations of the commission investigating the September 11, 2001 attacks, questioned whether the proposed measures would "create new problems more difficult to overcome than the ones we intend to fix," as Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone put it.
Meanwhile, General Raymond Odierno, commander of an infantry division deployed in Iraq from March 2003 to March 2004, stressed the importance of ensuring that reforms would not keep commanders on the ground from getting vital intelligence.
If the report's recommendations are approved, Pentagon officials will "salute smartly and make it happen," Cambone said. But they will pursue discussions to plan "how we are going to work that relationship between the Department of Defense and the supply of intelligence essential to its Title X responsibility in a way that the commander on the front line can be assured that when he picks up the phone and says he needs it, it will be there."
"We worked that relationship in the current structure over the course of some 40 years or more. We would have to reset those relationships in a way that ensures the same outcome," he said.
"It's all about access to data and the commander on the ground having that ability to prioritize and go up his chain of command and feel confident that his priorities will be met in terms of having the data available necessary to execute precision targets," Odierno said.
"The one thing we learned in Iraq was you don't have much time," he added. "Targets are fleeting. You have hours. And so you have to have immediate access to that information."
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Control of intelligence assets at issue
August 11, 2004
By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040811-121644-7817r.htm
The Pentagon would be stripped of its control over intelligence assets critical to fighting wars under the September 11 commission's recommendation for a national intelligence director, the bipartisan panel's leaders told Congress yesterday.
It is for that precise reason that "one of the national intelligence director's deputies must be the Defense Department's undersecretary for intelligence," September 11 commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton said in a joint statement to the House Armed Services Committee.
Such an undersecretary - the post currently is held by Stephen A. Cambone - would be well-suited to be a deputy because his current job is to balance U.S. intelligence resources "to satisfy both the needs of the war fighter and the national policy-maker," Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton said.
The remarks came as part of the September 11 commission's continuing effort to persuade Congress to endorse the recommendations in the commission's 567-page final report, the most significant of which calls for the creation of the national intelligence director and center.
The director would oversee the entire U.S. intelligence community, including agencies currently under Pentagon control, such as the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The White House has announced support for the commission's recommendation for a national intelligence director, although President Bush has not specifically endorsed the plan to give the director control of the intelligence communities' multiple budgets.
Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton enjoyed a largely warm welcome from the Armed Services Committee, although the committee's chairman, Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican, expressed doubts about the need to shift control of defense intelligence agencies away from the Pentagon.
Mr. Hunter said that in his own reading of the September 11 commission's report, he'd come across no "specific mention or instance of a failure or a negligence on the part of a [Department of Defense] agency."
He then asked Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton whether any such failures were noted in the report. The commissioners acknowledged that there were not, but stressed that an overall lack of coordination between agencies within the intelligence community contributed to the nation's failure to stop the September 11 plot.
Mr. Kean pointed to former CIA Director George J. Tenet's 1998 declaration of war on al Qaeda as an example.
"That's a very important thing when the head of an intelligence agency declares war," Mr. Kean said. "Nobody got it in other agencies.
"If you have that coordinated and that declaration of war had been made under the system we recommend, the military, the diplomatic side, the intelligence side, they all would have gotten it, and the nation would have moved as one," he said, adding, "The Defense Department being part of that coordination, is very, very important, we think, for the future defense of the country."
Under the September 11 commission's proposal, a Senate-confirmed national intelligence director wouldn't be a Cabinet-level post, but would have hiring and firing power and control over budgets of the intelligence community's 15 agencies, which include the CIA and FBI.
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Congo Says U.N. Must Forcibly Disarm Rwandan Rebels
Reuters
Aug 11, 2004
By Finbarr O'Reilly
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=574&ncid=723&e=1&u=/nm/20040811/wl_nm/congo_democratic_rwanda_dc
KIGALI (Reuters) - The United Nations must forcibly disarm Rwandan Hutu militias at the heart of years of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the country's four vice-presidents said on Wednesday.
Vice-president Azarias Ruberwa said Congo wanted the U.N. Security Council to beef up the mandate of its 11,000-strong peacekeeping mission in Congo (MONUC) to help hunt down and forcibly disarm the Interahamwe.
"We are going to push the Security Council to give MONUC a stronger mandate to work hand in hand with the Congolese government to disarm the Interahamwe by force," Ruberwa told journalists after meeting Rwandan President Paul Kagame in Kigali on Wednesday.
Rwanda has repeatedly complained that neither the U.N. nor the Congolese are rooting out extremists known as Interahamwe, who fled to Congo after committing the 1994 genocide, when some 800,000 people died in 100 days of ethnic slaughter.
The presence of thousands of Rwandan rebels in eastern Congo over the past decade has fueled ongoing regional instability and was specifically used by Kigali as justification for invading Congo in 1996 and 1998.
The U.N. mission estimates about 10,000 rebels remain in eastern Congo. For the moment, however, its mandate only allows it to disarm and repatriate combatants that put themselves forward for the process.
The U.N. Security Council last month told its troubled peacekeeping mission to remain in place for two more months while it overhauls the mission's mandate.
RAPID REACTION FORCE
Rwanda expressed outrage last week after 25 Rwandan rebels who were surrounded by Congolese forces and interviewed by U.N. civilians held on to their weapons and escaped the next day.
Congo's army, which pledged to investigate the escape, has in the past collaborated with the Hutu rebels but denies it still does so.
The partially reformed army is still weak and remains largely divided as Africa's third largest nation struggles to recover from a five-year war that killed 3 million people, mostly from hunger and disease.
Although a cease-fire took effect in 1999, regular outbreaks of violence continue in the resource-rich east, where diplomats say some militia groups serve as proxies for Rwanda and Uganda.
Ruberwa, the leader of a former Rwanda-backed rebel army during Congo's war, said Congo was creating several mobile reaction forces to actively hunt down the Interahamwe, though he did not specify when they would be ready.
"We are soon going to set brigades, two or three, which will be charged with attacking these forces wherever they are, especially in the two Kivu provinces," he said, referring to the region bordering Rwanda.
The Security Council hopes to complete by Oct. 1 a top-to-bottom revamp of the mission that likely would include a big increase in the number of peacekeepers and creation of a rapid reaction force to contain violence in eastern Congo.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan is to offer his recommendations on needed changes by mid-August, after he reviews a report by a U.N. team assessing needs across Congo.
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Amnesty Demands End to Free-Speech Abuses in Sudan
antiwar.com
by Jim Lobe
August 11, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=3282
Amnesty International is calling on the Sudanese government to immediately release all those it has arrested or detained in Darfur for communicating their opinions with foreign visitors about their plight.
In a communiqué released Monday night, the London-based group charged that scores of people have been arrested over the past six weeks for talking with foreign government leaders, including U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, and members of the African Union's (AU's) Ceasefire Commission, as well as western journalists.
"The Sudanese government should give assurances that none of those arrested will be tortured or ill-treated while in detention and that Sudanese people can speak freely about Darfur without fear of reprisals," the group said.
Amnesty's statement came as the government in Khartoum agreed to take part in peace talks to be mediated by the African Union (AU) in Nigeria with two rebel groups from Darfur set to begin in twoweeks.p
At the same time, however, Sudan's foreign minister, Mustafa Ismail, said his government would reject the AU's proposals to increase the number of troops it hopes to deploy as monitors and peacekeepers in Darfur from 300 to as many as 2,000.
Sudan received backing from the Arab League at a foreign-ministers' meeting in Cairo Sunday which rejected "any threats of coercive military intervention in the region or imposing any sanctions on Sudan" to end what the United Nations has called the world's "worst humanitarian crisis."
Some 30,000 people in Darfur have reportedly been killed over the past 18 months of violence, and as many as 50,000 more are believed to have died of malnutrition or disease over the last several months.
Virtually all of the victims are members of African ethnic groups who have come under attack by Arab militias, called the Janjaweed, who have been armed and supported by the government.
At least 1.2 million Africans were forced from their homes of whom some 200,000 have made it to relative safety across the border in Chad. The rest have been internally displaced or herded into camps which relief groups have found impossible to supply with adequate amounts of food, tents, blankets and medicine.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) predicted in May that 300,000 people are likely to die of malnutrition or disease by the end of the year even if relief agencies are given full access to those in need.
In recent weeks, the government has reportedly begun withholding support for the Janjaweed, although many members of the militias have reportedly been absorbed into the army and police, and raids against African targets have continued.
After several weeks of lobbying, the UN Security Council ten days ago approved a resolution giving the Sudanese government until the end of August to take control of the situation in Darfur and cooperate fully with the UN and other relief groups in providing supplies to the displaced and to disarm the militias.
The United States and the European Union (EU) had wanted the resolution to call for the imposition of sanctions against the Janjaweed and certain members of the government if the situation had not vastly improved by that time, but other Security Council members balked, so it remains unclear what will happen if its demands remain unmet at that time.
Already, Sudan's powerful vice president, Ali Osman Taha, told the BBC Sunday that the deadline was unrealistic and that more time would be required to disarm the Janjaweed and the two rebel groups in particular. Taha is believed to be the leader within the government of a group of Arab chauvinists that has strongly backed the Janjaweed against the Africans. Both the militias and the African population in Darfur are Muslim.
The Janjaweed campaign has given rise to charges - endorsed by the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Holocaust Museum, and the Congressional Black Caucus, among others - of genocide, although most international human rights groups, such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, have said it is not yet clear that genocide, as opposed to ethnic cleansing, is what is taking place.
In its statement Monday, however, Amnesty charged that Khartoum is actively retaliating against people who have been interviewed by foreign delegations who have come to Darfur to assess the situation over the last six weeks.
In North Darfur, for example, it said security forces had arrested at least 47 people, including 15 men from a camp near al-Fasher shortly after a visit by Powell on June 30 and that five more men were arrested at the same camp two weeks after after a visit by Barnier.
Six more men, including the mayor of the town, were arrested in mid-July, allegedly after talking with the AU Ceasefire Commission, while two others were arrested by Janjaweed militia.
In South Darfur, a prominent human-rights lawyer, Abazer Ahmad Abu al-Bashir, was arrested by the intelligence services in Nyala in late July after submitting a petition to the state governor, while a leader of the Sudanese Women's Union was arrested shortly afterward apparently for calling for the disarmament of the Janjaweed.
In West Darfur, four leaders from the Masalit ethnic group were arrested in mid-July at a camp near Al-Jeneina for having talked to "foreigners" but were released last week.
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Wounded Soldiers Are Adapting to Altered Lives
By Timothy Dwyer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54883-2004Aug10?language=printer
Archie Staley sat on a silver stool in a small office in the depths of Walter Reed Army Medical Center and stared straight into the eyes of Vince A. Przybyla Jr.
Staley is 20 years old, a U.S. Army tank driver with a quick wit and an accent lush with the tones of the mountains of western North Carolina where he grew up. Staley was nearly killed when a mortar round exploded and blew him 15 feet into the air on a roadside north of Baghdad on Easter Sunday. He lost his left eye and his face was crushed, burned and scarred by shrapnel, which also pierced his neck, cutting his carotid artery.
Every war has its toll, measured in stark numbers representing those who are killed and wounded. But the numbers don't show the emotional toll of war, the impact each death has on families and the life changes forced on those who suddenly find themselves without a leg to walk on, a hand to button a shirt or lace a shoe, or a lung to catch a breath. Depression is common among recovering soldiers, and it often turns to frustration as they face the task of figuring out what they are going to do with the rest of their lives because plans changed in the time it took for a mortar round to explode.
Families of the 750 U.S. soldiers who have died in action in Iraq and Afghanistan bury their loved ones and then face life without them. But for the 6,113 soldiers wounded in the war on terrorism, the issues are even more fundamental. For many of them, Washington and its military hospitals are the first stop in the journey to the rest of their lives -- a place to heal their wounds, replace lost limbs and plan their future.
Losing his eye is what brought Staley to Przybyla.
Przybyla, a 48-year-old Detroit native, is an ocularist; he makes artificial eyes. He had recently fitted Staley with a new eye, and after a few days of testing it, Staley was back in his office for a follow-up visit before heading home to Millers Creek, N.C.
"I think it's fine," Staley said of his artificial eye, "but my mom thinks it looks a little high."
Przybyla leaned on his workbench, which is loaded with plastic containers of paint that he uses to get the color of the artificial eyes just right.
"I don't want you kicking my butt, but your mom might be right," the doctor said. "It needs to come down a hair. Not much. . . . Bring your head here, we're going to take it out."
Staley stayed put.
"Oh, I forgot," Przybyla said. "I know you want to take it out yourself."
Staley bowed his head and manipulated the artificial eye out of the socket. He lifted a mirror from the workbench and held it in front of his face, staring hard with his one good eye at the wound he brought back from Iraq.
"I can't say for sure that anybody ever wants to go to Iraq," he said. "Once you get there and come back, it's family, and you want to go back. If they told me I could go back to my unit tomorrow, I would."
Staley, a specialist with the 2nd Battalion, 63rd Armored Regiment, will forever carry the scars of war. But he has maintained a positive attitude and said that his brush with death has taught him to be a little more goal-oriented than he was before he joined the Army. For now, his goal is simple: to get used to his new eye, get healthy and then get out of the Army and into college.
Many soldiers are treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Northwest, where doctors have seen 3,358 soldiers from the war in Iraq, including 741 battle casualties. The rest have suffered from non-combat conditions, such as heat-related problems and injuries suffered in vehicle accidents.
The cost of treating America's wounded is difficult to measure because much of the medical infrastructure is permanently in place. A spokesman for Walter Reed said the hospital spent $42.3 million in fiscal 2003 treating wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. So far in fiscal 2004, the cost has been $37.1 million, and it is expected to rise.
Up and Running Again
The war cost Sgt. Mike Cain a leg.
Cain, 23, grew up in Berlin, Wis., and was on his high school basketball, track and cross country teams. He loved running best of all. He joined the Army after high school, was posted to Italy and then to Fort Hood, Tex., where he met his wife, Leslie. She grew up in Gladstone, N.D., a town with a population of 233 on the edge of the Badlands, and that is where they will live and raise a family.
Cain went through periods of depression during his rehabilitation. With the help of family and the support of the hospital, he came out of it, and now he hopes to get his retirement papers by Sept. 1. He wants to get home to Gladstone in time for the birth of his first child. After spending time at home with his wife and new baby, he intends to find a college nearby and study physical therapy so that he can work with amputees.
A few months ago, Cain began running again. It was a huge deal, not only because he accomplished a goal he set for himself with his new life, but because he was able to do something that he loved doing before a mine blew off his leg.
On Aug. 1, Cain ran in his first road race as an amputee, a five-miler in New York City sponsored by the Achilles Track Club. The race began in the rain about 8 a.m., and Cain was almost as excited about running with pro wrestler Nick Foley as he was about being in the race.
He finished in 1 hour, 45 minutes. "The first couple of miles I was feeling good," he said. "I was hurting at three miles, and at four miles I was hurting really bad. At five miles, I finished the race, walking at the end."
It was his first trip to Manhattan and he took in the usual tourist spots, Times Square and Central Park. He said that his artificial leg did not bother him, but that his left ankle, which was broken when he was wounded, was killing him, and that is what slowed him down in the race.
While Cain receives treatment at Walter Reed, he is living in Malone House, a hotel for soldiers on the hospital campus.
On a recent sizzling summer morning, Cain and a group of soldiers boarded a bus for a few hours of fishing and then lunch at a waterfront restaurant. It is one of many trips organized for wounded veterans -- ranging from an Orioles game to a weekly Friday night steak dinner at Fran O'Brien's Stadium Steakhouse in Northwest. The trips, many organized by the Disabled American Veterans, are designed to relieve the boredom of rehab, but there is another important element to getting the soldiers out in public. It gets them used to being in the real world again, where people will ask about their wounds or glance at their artificial limbs. It also gives the public an opportunity to thank them for their sacrifices, which happens quite often, and each time is gratifying for soldiers.
Cain stood up, rested a fishing pole against an iron railing, baited his hook and then drew the pole over his right shoulder and made a humpback cast into a stiff breeze.
He was standing on the edge of the Washington Channel at the end of Water Street, just past the Harbor Patrol police station. Cain is 6-foot-3, solidly built with wide shoulders. He was dressed in an Achilles Track Club T-shirt, shorts and sneakers. A temporary prosthetic he received at Walter Reed was visible, beginning below his right knee and disappearing into a sock and sneaker.
Cain felt a bite on his line and gave the pole a yank. "I definitely felt something," he said.
"I love doing this stuff," he added. "I'm always willing to go out and do anything like this. It's better than sitting around the hospital and doing nothing."
On Aug. 10, 2003, Cain, a member of Delta Company of the 4th Forward Support Battalion, 1st Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, was a passenger in an Army flatbed truck in Tikrit when a land mine exploded, severely wounding both legs and breaking his jaw. Cain spoke in a flat voice when he recalled his last moments in Iraq. "Nothing, really," he answered quietly when asked what he remembers. "Just waking up and seeing the blood all over the place. . . . It's the worst pain you can ever feel in your life."
He wasn't awake for long. He lapsed into a coma and woke up about a week later at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. His mother, father and two sisters, flown in from Wisconsin, were there when he came to.
"I remember when I looked up and I saw them," he said, giving the fishing pole a slight jerk to try to get a fish interested. "I was happy as hell. [The doctors] just told me that I was in an accident, an explosion. And I was, like, 'Yeah, no [expletive].' And then they told me I lost my leg."
As he baited his hook and cast once again, he was asked whether he felt appreciated for the sacrifice he had made in the war. "I do," he said. "I feel it by the way the community reacts to you. You know, it is all about the soldiers now."
Ready to Move On
Mike Cuscianna, 25, an Army specialist from Braintree, Mass., was about 50 yards downstream from Cain, working what he told everyone was his lucky spot. Suddenly, he let out a whoop as his pole bent nearly in half.
"This sucker is big," Cuscianna said, his words carrying the accent of his Massachusetts childhood. "Get a net," he yelled, "we're going to need a net for this one."
Cuscianna was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, and as he reeled in the fish, a scar that ran like a zipper from his breastbone to his backbone was visible. His right bicep was scarred and not as muscular as his left because he had lost some bone and muscle, the result of a bullet ripping through his arm.
Cuscianna, the son of a dentist, joined the Army with plans to spend eight years in the service and then get out to become a police officer in his hometown. Assigned to the 1st Battalion, 77th Armored Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division, he was riding in a Humvee on patrol in Balad in the Sunni Triangle on April 19 when his unit came under attack. He was shot three times, once through the arm and twice in the upper body. Despite his wounds, he said he kept firing until his sergeant noticed blood coming out of his mouth and decided to get him out of there.
He's had five rounds of surgery since and has lost two-thirds of his right lung. He's ready to get out of the Army, and has started looking for a job.
"Well," he said, "if I didn't appeal my disability rating, I'd probably be out by now. They didn't give me a very good disability rating. They consider not having one of your lungs not a disability. It kind of pisses me off a little bit, to do all of this and then have them not recognize what you've done." He said the Army ruled that his injuries left him 10 percent disabled, while he thought losing most of his lung left him nearly fully disabled.
Cuscianna pulled in his catch with the help of a buddy, who snagged the fat catfish in a net that almost couldn't hold it. "Hey," he screamed so all the soldiers could hear him, "I told you I was going to catch the biggest fish today."
Cuscianna commutes to Boston each weekend to see his family and his girlfriend. Last week, he went for an interview at the Plymouth County Sheriff's department, where he's applied for two positions -- prison guard and sheriff's officer. His life is in limbo while he waits for his release from the Army and his return to civilian life.
'Taking Way Too Long'
On Feb. 25, Victor Thibeault left Walter Reed and went on a field trip to Congress. Testifying before the House Armed Services subcommittee on Total Force, Thibeault talked about fighting off depression and feeling alone when he had to come to grips with the fact that the career he had planned in the military was no longer an option because of wounds he suffered fighting the Taliban.
"This was going to be my career in life," he told the committee. "But now it has changed. So I have to make a change in my life. It's a rapid change. So it's hard for me to make certain decisions. And I don't know about getting out of the military and going on to college or doing whatever."
Thibeault, 22, of Riverside, Calif., spent about seven months at Walter Reed after his left hand was blown off by a grenade that had been tossed into the Humvee he was driving in a crowded marketplace in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Dec. 3, 2003. Thibeault, an Army specialist with the 110th Military Intelligence Battalion of the 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, N.Y., grabbed the grenade and tossed it under his seat. He said the grenade had a seven-second fuse, and just about the time he got it under the seat, it exploded, ripping off most of his hand and cutting up his legs with a shower of shrapnel.
His reaction was purely logical. "My buddy didn't see it, and so that's why I grabbed it. My thought process was, if it crossed over my body as I threw it out the window, it might have killed me and my buddy. If I threw it out into a crowd on the side of the road, it would have killed innocent women and children, and we would have all kinds of bad propaganda." So he ditched it under his seat, and when he pulled up his arm, his hand was pretty much gone except for his little finger. He kept driving with the hand he had left, getting himself and his buddy to safety and treatment.
Thibeault is now back at Fort Drum, reporting for duty every day and then doing nothing. He submitted his retirement papers in April and was told that it would take a few weeks for his retirement to be finalized. He accepted a job with the Disabled American Veterans office in Philadelphia and recently rented an apartment near the Temple University campus.
But the Army told him that his retirement papers might not come through for another three months or longer because of paperwork. Thibeault said he worked through the rehab just fine, though he found it difficult to deal with the depression when he first landed in the hospital.
"The depression is too great," he testified in February, "and you don't have anyone there supporting you to help you get through that depression unless you go find someone yourself."
Now the depression is gone. But it has been replaced by deep frustration. He is paying rent on an apartment in Philadelphia and has a job waiting for him and he's more than ready to start his new life.
"I stand around and I wait," he said recently. "I wait until they give me a final answer. I have to report for duty every day, and I can't even tie my own boots and I can't button the buttons of my shirt unless I button it first and then slip it over my head. . . . There are a lot of wounded soldiers who are taking way too long to get out of the military and I think it should be a quick process."
Thibeault wears a glove on his left hand. He said surgeons offered to remove one of his big toes and attach it to his hand like a thumb, but he declined, saying he didn't want to lose any other body parts.
Making Adjustments
Archie Staley joined the Army on his 18th birthday with plans to serve out his time and then use his GI benefits to go to college and study psychology. If it were not for his body armor, he would have died on the battlefield. He faces another year of treatment at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, where doctors will try to get rid of the scars that run from his hand to his shoulder like highways on a map. The young man from the mountains was nearly blown apart, and now Army doctors and Przybyla are slowly putting him back together.
Przybyla is part artist and part mechanical engineer. He is the only ocularist in the Department of Defense and one of only about 100 in the United States.
He met Staley on June 14, when he came to his office. It took another seven visits to get the eye finished. In addition to the eight visits, it took Przybyla 15 hours of solitary work to make the eye.
He gets great satisfaction from helping to heal soldiers and make them whole again.
After shaving down the edge of the eye, he came out of the back room and handed it to Staley.
"Vince," Staley said, laughing, "what did you do to this? You got it all slick now. I can't get it in. Oh, you got it slick, man."
"That's that WD-40," Przybyla joked.
Staley was dressed in a white T-shirt and blue jeans. He is beanpole thin. Doctors had to reconstruct his crushed jaw and then wire it shut for six weeks, during which time he said he ate every kind of creamed soup you can imagine. He lost 30 pounds and has put only a pound or two back on despite eating all the time.
Staley joined the Army to become a tanker. Growing up, he loved any kind of vehicle. He enlisted on Jan. 16, 2002, trained at Fort Knox, Ky., and was based in Vilseck, Germany, with the 263rd, whose motto is "Seek, Strike, Destroy."
He said his Army recruiter was a tanker and he caught the bug. "How could you not like it?" Staley said. "It is a 72-ton vehicle with a 1,500-horsepower turbo engine and a 120mm cannon."
He was deployed to Iraq on Feb. 14, 2004. On the day he was wounded, he was riding in a Humvee, out on patrol to engage enemy troops just north of Baghdad.
"They started lobbing mortar rounds," he recalled, "so we spread the vehicles out to minimize the damage and casualties. After we spread the vehicles out, I got out of the back passenger-side door to go around to the rear, for rear security. And as soon as I got out, a mortar or artillery round went off. I was told that I was 45 feet from the round when it went off."
He was wearing his body armor, a neck protector and protective glasses, as well as his helmet. He remembers nothing after getting out of the Humvee.
Once his treatment is finished in about a year, he will leave the Army and go to college. For now, he is getting used to life with one eye. He has had therapy on his left hand, trying to get it to close completely. He's left-handed, and his mother said that his penmanship was chicken scratch before he was wounded, and that it's about the same now.
He's been told that he'll be picking shrapnel out of his hand for the rest of his life, but other than that, he considers himself perfectly healthy. "I see perfect," he said. "I see just like I got two eyes. I drive the same that I always have. There is no difference; you just have to turn your head to the left a little, that's all."
He was sitting on the silver stool, coaxing his new eye back into the socket. Once he got it in, Przybyla took a good look at him and said that the adjustment had worked. His eyes were now even.
"Can I go now?" Staley asked.
"Archie," Przybyla answered, "you're good to go, but we are going to want to do a follow-up with you in a couple months."
Staley stood and the two men embraced. Then Staley walked out of the office with his grandfather by his side, taking it step by step down the corridor with his new eye, heading toward his new life.
----
Heat of Battle Takes Toll on U.S. Forces
Despite military efforts, troops are unable to avoid combat during summer. Health woes have sidelined some as temperatures near 130.
August 11, 2004
By Edmund Sanders
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
http://www.dailypress.com/news/la-fg-summer11aug11,0,6840840.story?coll=dp-breaking-news
NAJAF, Iraq - In two days of combat, U.S. Army Spc. Steve Koetting dodged bullets, overcame sleep deprivation and endured the stress of fighting grave-to-grave in a cemetery against an enemy who rarely showed his face.
In the end, however, it was Iraq's oppressive heat that put the 21-year-old soldier on his back and out of the fight.
Koetting is one of about half a dozen soldiers who have been evacuated from the front line in recent days because of heat exhaustion and related problems. Several dozen more have been treated on the battlefield in this south-central Iraqi city, where U.S. troops and armed followers of radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr are squaring off.
With temperatures approaching 130 degrees, medics fear that casualties will increase. "This could become a significant problem," said Brian Humble, senior medical officer with a Marine emergency facility at a camp just outside Najaf.
In the run-up to last year's invasion, military strategists voiced concerns about fighting during Iraq's unforgiving summer. By sending troops into Iraq in March and reaching Baghdad in a matter of weeks, the military avoided major combat in the hottest season. By August, operations consisted mostly of patrols and raids.
Even so, several soldiers died of heatstroke and other heat-related problems last year, military officials say. Now, with the resumption of battle in Najaf, the military is facing exactly what it wanted to avoid.
In addition to increasing casualties, extreme temperatures are a severe morale buster for troops. Tempers get short, behavior gets more aggressive and battlefield mistakes are more common, troops say.
"It really demotivates you," said Koetting, who suffered from cramps and lethargy before being treated for dehydration Monday. "It's by far the hardest part of all this."
In the most serious cases, victims can become disoriented, lose consciousness and die. Military officials are so concerned about this that they've ordered officers to conduct urine checks of soldiers to look for signs of dehydration, Humble said.
Before arriving in Iraq, the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit's 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, trained in the California desert, and every Marine had to sit through a presentation on the risks of dehydration.
But nothing prepared the Camp Pendleton-based Marines for the Iraqi summer. In battle, troops can sweat about 2 quarts of water an hour, but the body can absorb only a bit more than half that amount in the same time, regardless of how much is consumed.
"So when you're out there fighting, you can never get enough water," said Capt. Sudip Bose, an Army emergency physician who has been treating heat-exhaustion victims in Najaf.
Body armor and equipment weigh up to 40 pounds and can raise body temperature by 5 degrees. M-16 rifles can heat up so much, they become literally too hot to handle.
In the cemetery where much of the fighting has occurred, the only place for soldiers to escape the sun is in sweltering Humvees and tanks or in some of the hundreds of large crypts and mausoleums, where photographs of the dead stare back at them.
"It's eerie," said Capt. Patrick McFall, standing inside a mint-green concrete tomb. "This is someone's sanctuary."
In the summer sun, Bradley fighting vehicles can turn into virtual ovens, with temperatures surpassing 150 degrees. Most of the serious heat-exhaustion cases so far have involved soldiers who fought on foot, then climbed back inside tanks, Humble said.
Ice, brought in coolers by supply convoys, is a precious commodity on the front lines.
"We've got nine guys in my Bradley and only room in the cooler for five bottles," said Staff Sgt. Daniel Padgelt of the 1st Cavalry Division's 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, which has been fighting in the cemetery for the last three days.
The unlucky must settle for warm, sometimes hot, water.
"On the bright side, it's easy to make coffee in the morning," said one red-faced soldier, sitting on top of his Bradley and holding a water bottle filled with coffee. "Want some?"
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Soldiers use online resources to make voices heard
By Joseph L. Galloway
Wed, Aug. 11, 2004
Knight Ridder Newspapers
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9374647.htm
WASHINGTON - Two young Army officers with time in Iraq are the brains behind a new Web site called Operation Truth that will be launched later this month.
Former Capt. David Chasteen and 1st Lt. Paul Rieckhoff, who is still serving in the Army National Guard, hope to "educate the American public about the truth of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the perspective of the soldiers who have experienced them first-hand."
Toward that end they hope that their Web site, www.optruth.org, will provide a forum for soldiers and Marines still serving in Iraq or just returned, to tell their stories, post their digital photos and voice their complaints.
Chasteen, a native of Muncie, Ind., and Rieckhoff, a native of New York City, said Operation Truth is a nonprofit soldiers advocacy organization and is nonpartisan, nonpolitical and not affiliated with any candidate. But, like the soldiers they hope will post on their website, they have more than a few bones to pick with those in charge of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rieckhoff told me, "This is just a big, big After Action Review. After an operation in the military we sit down and talk it over. What was good, what was bad and how do we fix what was bad. The only people who ought to be afraid are those who have screwed up."
Both Chasteen, a chemical and biological war specialist, and Rieckhoff, a Guard infantry officer, served with the 3rd Infantry Division in the attack that took Baghdad early last year.
What they know is that today's all-volunteer military is made up of a very small part of America's population. Most Americans don't know anyone in uniform and no one in their family has served in the last generation or two.
"The dialogue between soldiers and the people they serve is gone, and we want to restart it," Rieckhoff said. "If the majority of Americans are content to be protected and defended by a small minority of volunteer soldiers then they need to pay attention to those soldiers and take care of them and their families."
Although it is nonpartisan, Operation Truth and the issues it wants to debate before the American people are likely to cause the Bush administration some heartburn. Their brochure says, "We intend to publicize how poorly planned policies and approaches have manifested themselves as problems on the front lines and back at home. We will act domestically to protect our troops and to aid them in their fight to protect us."
Some of the issues they hope veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan will sound out on include:
-Stop-Loss: The involuntary extension on active duty of soldiers whose enlistment or obligation has ended. Stop-loss is, Operation Truth says, a back-door draft, "a Band-aid solution implemented to provide additional troop strength." They say stop-loss is destroying the concept of a volunteer military, damages morale and "yet another indication that the original plan for war was flawed."
-The role of private contractors in combat zones: Operation Truth says the relationship that companies like Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater have with the military is very disturbing. The organization says they are weakening the military by drawing away some of the most experienced war-fighters with offers of much higher wages and better benefits. They add that introducing profit to the battlefield sets a bad precedent.
-The Veterans Administration: The VA budget will be cut nearly one billion dollars by the Administration in fiscal 2006 budget. In addition the VA is closing or drastically reducing services at 11 VA hospitals. Further, Operation Truth says, some 572,000 veterans are believed to be owed disability pensions but are unaware they are owed the money and no effort is being made to inform them. "In time of war it is immoral and unconscionable to treat our heroes of the past and present in this manner," they said.
The two also hope to press for improved national support systems for National Guard and Reserve soldier families who are left to fend for themselves when their loved one deploys to war. Those families need the same network of support and services the Army provides active duty troops and their families.
These young American veterans, both in their 20s, raise valid issues and solid questions as they prepare to launch a Web site which could just as well be named The Voice of the Soldier.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young." Readers may write to him at: Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, 700 12th St. N.W., Suite 1000, Washington, D.C. 20005-3994.
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U.S. Searching for Four Missing Aviators
August 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Japan-US-Plane.html
TOKYO (AP) -- U.S. military planes searched Wednesday for four missing Navy aviators whose surveillance plane crashed on an uninhabited island near Iwo Jima, military officials said.
The S-3 Viking plane from the USS Stennis crashed into Kita Iwo Jima island in the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday evening during a training exercise, the U.S. Seventh Fleet said in a statement.
Aircraft from the Stennis and the USS Kitty Hawk were searching the island for the four missing aviators, whose identities were not being released pending a waiting period following notification of kin.
The crew was part of the ``Blue Wolves'' squadron based at Naval Air Station North Island in Coronado, California.
An investigation was under way, the military said. The mission was part of routine joint training between the Stennis and the Kitty Hawk in the western Pacific.
About 50,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in Japan under a security treaty.
Iwo Jima, a famous World War II battleground, is about 700 miles southeast of Tokyo. Kita Iwo Jima is about 45 miles north of Iwo Jima.
The $27 million S-3B is an all-weather aircraft equipped for surveillance, electronic warfare and search-and-rescue. It can be armed with Harpoon and Maverick air-to-sea and air-to-ground missiles.
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Pentagon favors resuming training Pakistani officers in US academies
Aug 11, 2004
WASHINGTON (AFP)
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040811050029.salhf19r.html
A top Pentagon official said he favors resuming training Pakistani officers in US military academies as a way of increasing US influence in the country's armed forces and reducing that of Islamic radicals.
"You don't promote military reform in a country like Pakistan by cutting off education for Pakistani military officers here and pushing them into the one alternative, which is the Islamic extremists," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday.
"It's not as though if we leave them alone, nobody else will go out to recruit them," he added.
The United States cut off military assistance to Pakistan in 1990 following the discovery of its program to develop nuclear weapons.
Sanctions were further tightened after Pakistan's nuclear tests in May 1998 and the military coup of 1999 that brought President Pervez Musharraf to power.
But the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and Pakistan's quick agreement to support Washington in the war on terror have prompted the administration of President George W. Bush to reconsider its stance.
The sanctions were waived to enable the United States to resume its military assistance program to provide spare parts and equipment to enhance Pakistan's capacity to police its western border.
In 2003, Bush announced his intention to provide Pakistan three billion dollars in economic and military aid over the next five years.
But training of Pakistani cadets in US military academies has not resumed.
"I think one of our problems in Pakistan today is that for too long we deprived ourselves of one of the most important instruments of influence in a country where the military is one of the most important institutions, and that is the contact between our military and their military," Wolfowitz stated.
The deputy defense secretary praised Pakistan's contribution to the war on terror, saying that hundreds of suspected operatives of the al-Qaeda terror network amd more than 10 of its more senior leaders have been arrested on Pakistani territory since the fall of 2001.
Wolfowitz called President Musharraf "a friend of the US," adding that "no leader has taken greater risks, or faces more daunting challenges from within and without."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
US contests detainee lawyer rights
AFP
August 11, 2004
http://dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story.jsp?sectionid=1274&storyid=1759260
THE US government today contested the right of detainees held at a naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to be represented by a lawyer before tribunals to determine whether they were really "enemy combatants" when they were captured.
The US Supreme Court ruled in June that the Defence Department had failed to give the inmates, most of whom were detained during the Afghanistan war in 2001, their full rights.
In response, special tribunals began July 29 to determine whether the detainees really were "enemy combatants" when they were captured.
However, in a 26-page document released today, US federal prosecutors stated their opposition to a request by lawyers representing several dozen Guantanamo detainees for the right to talk to their clients.
The June Supreme Court ruling does not explicitly state whether the detainees could be represented by a lawyer.
The ruling "says nothing at all" to suggest that the inmates have "a right to counsel, much less a right to the type of unrestricted access to counsel they seek, in order to pursue their case", according to the brief released by the government.
No "principle of law or reason entitles alien enemy combatants detained on a military base outside the sovereign territory of the United States to define the terms of their access to counsel", the brief read.
The Supreme Court indeed "has left a great deal of issues in doubt in its June decision", said Georgetown University professor Jonathan Turley. "There are more holes than cheese in its opinion, in defining the specific rights and process detainees must be accorded."
The Bush administration "uses those gaps to the fullest to minimise the rights of the detainees", he said. "It shows the government will not yield voluntarily any right to the detainees."
Many experts say the Supreme Court will have to make a new ruling on the tribunals, which have also had a poor response from the inmates.
Six of the first 12 inmates - three Afghans, an Algerian, an Iranian, a Moroccan, Pakistani, a Saudi, a Tunisian and three Yemenis - whose cases were reviewed by panels of three military officers refused to attend the hearings.
The whole process will take weeks or months and US military experts are not sure how many inmates will attend.
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Libya seeks compensation for US air strikes in 1986
TRIPOLI (AFP)
Aug 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040810230948.bdnh6e4y.html
Libya's Kadhafi Foundation, which negotiated the terms of a compensation deal for victims of Berlin nightclub bombing, Tuesday demanded compensation from the United States for subsequent air strikes against the north African country.
The foundation expressed "complete satisfaction" with the deal announced Tuesday under which Libya will compensate victims of the 1986 bombing at the "La Belle" discotheque, which was frequented by US servicemen, in then West Berlin.
But the foundation said: "In the same context we should not however forget that this painful incident does not represent but a part of the major sorrowful picture because as a consequence of this incident air raids were launched on the two cities Tripoli and Benghazi" early on April 16, 1986.
Meanwhile the Libyan Foreign Affairs Ministry stressed that the negotiations on the Berlin disco bombing were "not official" and did not implicate the Libyan state.
The US strikes killed 41 people and wounded 226 others, "who undoubtedly deserve to be properly compensated and honored and those who carried (out) this action be brought to justice," said the foundation, which is chaired by Saif al-Islam, son of Libyan leader Moamar Kadhafi.
The foundation said it "hopes that solving the problem of 'La Belle' be part of the whole solution to that major unfortunate and more painful picture."
Two GIs and a Turkish woman were killed and more than 250 people were wounded in the Berlin attack.
Immediately after the bombing in Berlin, former US president Ronald Reagan accused Libya, which has never accepted blame, and retaliated by ordering airstrikes on its capital.
Earlier Tuesday, Libya's ambassador to Germany, Said Abdulaati, said that Tripoli had agreed to pay a total of 35 million dollars (28.4 million euros) to non-US nationals who were hurt at "La Belle."
The United States welcomed the news that Germany and Libya have reached an agreement on compensating non-US nationals wounded in the bombing but reminded Tripoli that the families of the two American victims should receive compensation as well.
The German government confirmed the news and welcomed a deal that is seen as vital to restoring Libya's international legitimacy.
"Germany favours in agreement with its European partners a new quality in relations between the European Union and Libya," it said in a statement.
"With the agreement that has been reached, nothing more stands in the way of an early visit to Libya by the federal chancellor" Gerhard Schroeder, it said.
However the Foreign Ministry in Tripoli was keen to stress that the Libyan state had agreed nothing.
"There have not been official negotiations between Libya and Germany on this question," the ministry said in a statement.
"These were negotiations between the charitable Kadhafi Foundation and the families of victims," it added.
"Libya, as a state, will not pay damages except under conditions which it has given the German government on this question," it said, without giving any details.
-------- homeland security
U.S. Overhauls Aviation Security Program
August 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Passenger-Privacy.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than two years and millions of dollars ago, it seemed like a good idea: develop a computerized system that checks airline passengers' backgrounds to make sure they're not terrorists.
But so many people objected to one part of the plan or another that the government is scrapping major portions of the project, the Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System, commonly known as CAPPS II.
The makeover will include a new name, though that, too, is turning out to be a dilemma for the Homeland Security Department.
The working title, ``Secure Passage,'' was abandoned because it had the same initials as another aviation security program. In a city that loves its acronyms, it's best not to double up.
No one thinks a name change alone will be enough to resurrect CAPPS II.
Dennis McBride, director of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a research institute that focuses on science and technology, was briefed by Homeland Security officials on CAPPS II's progress last week.
``Getting there from here won't be easy,'' McBride concluded.
The Homeland Security officials working on the project are likely to get rid of one element that CAPPS II's critics dislike: making sure people are who they say they are by running their personal information against commercial and government databases.
Any new system would probably have a different process for verifying identity, according to Homeland Security officials.
Another problem is how to give airline passengers the ability to correct mistakes if they're wrongly identified as terrorists or suspects.
Homeland Security spokesman Dennis Murphy said the department is working on that.
``That's something we clearly intend to test, to have a process for people to get redress if they feel that they're being screened unnecessarily or too frequently,'' Murphy said.
But what's really needed, say CAPPS II's numerous critics, is for the project's developers to drop their passion for secrecy.
Business Travel Coalition chairman Kevin Mitchell said CAPPS II wouldn't have become a political debacle if Homeland Security officials had been open about how the system was supposed to work. The coalition is an advocacy group that tries to lower the cost of business travel.
``It was badly handled,'' Mitchell said. ``It scared everybody. The lack of transparency and inclusiveness is what really doomed it.''
Mitchell said privacy advocates and airline passenger groups might not have objected so strenuously to CAPPS II if they'd been included in the project's development.
``People would have been able to contribute solutions and buy into the process,'' Mitchell said.
But privacy advocate David Sobel thinks CAPPS II may be so fundamentally flawed that no amount of reshaping or repackaging can save it.
Sobel characterizes CAPPS II as a secret system of surveillance on tens of millions of people who fly on commercial airlines.
``It's a fundamental dilemma that arises when the government attempts to use intelligence information against average citizens,'' said Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based research group.
But Paul Rosenzweig, a researcher with the Heritage Foundation think tank, predicts Homeland Security officials will come up with a successor to CAPPS II.
``They're strongly committed, as I think they should be, to the idea that we need to know something about people who travel on planes,'' said Rosenzweig, who attended the meeting last week with Homeland Security officials.
On the Net:
Transportation Security Administration: http://www.tsa.gov
Homeland Security Department: http://www.dhs.gov
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The Hill locked down with no new threats
August 11, 2004
By Elizabeth Green
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20040811-123534-9050r.htm
The U.S. Capitol Police conceded yesterday that onerous security measures around the Capitol were imposed by fears of threats to congressmen, not new intelligence about imminent terrorist attacks.
"The Capitol has always been a target since 9/11," said Sgt. Contricia Sellers-Ford, a Capitol Police spokeswoman.
The Capitol Police's statement comes amid questions about the timing of street closures and vehicle checks around the congressional buildings. Similar measures have been implemented at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since Aug. 1, because of recent intelligence about terrorists' targeting those institutions.
Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer had sought to impose harsh restrictions since the September 11 terrorist attacks as recently as this spring, when he supported plans to build a fence around the Capitol and congressional buildings to deter would-be terrorists.
However, Chief Gainer had to wait for support from two congressional committees and three other congressional law-enforcement officials before he could tighten security around the Capitol, said a congressional source familiar with the topic.
Meanwhile, the Army yesterday began deploying Avenger anti-aircraft missiles near the Capitol. One battery of missiles and associated troops were seen deploying Monday afternoon at the northern end of Bolling Air Force Base.
The missiles - vehicle-mounted versions of the Stinger missile - can shoot down hijacked airliners. Their location in Southwest will provide anti-aircraft protection from attack for the Capitol and other federal buildings.
A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on the missile deployment.
The last time Avengers were deployed in Washington was during Memorial Day weekend, based on terrorist threats related to the opening of the National World War II Memorial on the Mall.
House Sergeant-at-Arms Wilson "Bill" Livingood urged increased caution in a memo last week to members of Congress, Time magazine reported Monday.
The memo suggested that legislators remove lapels from their suits and license plates from their cars that identify them as members of Congress, said Sgt. Sellers-Ford, who has seen the memo.
But Sgt. Sellers-Ford emphasized that congressional law-enforcement officials have made several similar suggestions since September 11.
"We have always encouraged members to be prudent, especially now, not to draw attention to themselves. That we've always encouraged them to do," she said.
A spokesman for Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, yesterday said the senator was briefed on an updated threat to the Capitol last week.
FBI officials contacted the senator in Delaware via a secure line to alert him of a threat to Congress. But Mr. Biden "was not impressed" with the sources of the information, some of whom have provided false intelligence in the past, he said on CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.
A White House official on the program also seemed to suggest that there was new information about a threat to the Capitol. Frances Townsend, President Bush's homeland-security adviser, said "continuing streams of intelligence" included some threats against the Capitol and members of Congress.
But a White House official speaking on the condition of anonymity yesterday said Mrs. Townsend's statements actually agree with those made by the Capitol Police. The stream of intelligence she referred to on "Face the Nation" was separate from the one that identified financial institutions as targets of extensive surveillance, he said.
"There's a not specific, credible, direct threat against Congress as an institution, or its members," the spokesman said, quoting a statement by Chief Gainer from a report in The Washington Post yesterday. "Fran Townsend would absolutely agree with that comment."
"Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer had asked Mrs. Townsend whether intelligence was behind Capitol Police's decision to heighten security around the Hill, but a source familiar with the decision said yesterday they were able to tighten security because of new support, not new information.
House and Senate committees have oversight of the Capitol Police's budget and must approve any increases in security, the source said.
With their approval, the Capitol Police Board collaborates to decide how to move forward. That board includes Chief Gainer, the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms and the chief architect of the Capitol.
Support from the board and Congress came Aug. 1 after Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge raised the threat level from yellow to orange at five financial institutions, including the World Bank and IMF.
Since then, Capitol Police have shut down part of First Street NE on the Senate side of the Capitol and implemented 14 security checkpoints in the area.
Bill Gertz contributed to this report.
-------- immigration / refugees
Border plan expedites removals, extends visits
August 11, 2004
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040811-121651-6741r.htm
The Department of Homeland Security yesterday said it will expedite the removal of non-Mexican illegal aliens from the United States, while allowing "legitimate" Mexican visitors to stay in the country for up to 30 days instead of the current 72-hour limit.
"We want to send a clear message that those individuals who follow legal immigration procedures will benefit while those who choose to break our nation's immigration laws will be promptly removed," Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson said in announcing the border plan.
The plan focuses on a growing number of foreign nationals using the Mexican border to enter the United States illegally - as well as the burden they place on the immigration court system.
More than 42,000 illegal aliens from countries other than Mexico, called OTMs by Homeland Security, have been arrested along the U.S.-Mexico border in the past 16 months. Under existing policy, they are detained for processing in U.S. immigration courts, which can take more than a year. Mexican nationals caught at the border generally are returned home immediately.
The announcement came a day before President Bush was scheduled to campaign in Arizona, considered a battleground state. Mr. Bush has vigorously sought the Hispanic vote.
The extension for Mexican visitors with Laser Visa border-crossing cards has long been sought by the Mexican government and border-state politicians concerned about cross-border trade. About 425,000 Mexican nationals hold laser cards.
The biometric and machine-readable Laser Visa cards allow visitors who have undergone criminal background checks to enter the United States to make "positive contributions" to the U.S. economy. Current rules limit cardholders to visits of up to 72 hours within 25 miles along the border in Texas, New Mexico and California and 75 miles of the border in Arizona. The new plan extends the time limit, but does not affect the 25- and 75-mile restrictions.
Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, who introduced a bill last year to extend the visitation period for Mexican nationals to six months - the same as Canadians - called the 30-day rule "a positive step in the right direction," although he noted it was "not yet where we want to be."
Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican and chairman of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, described expedited removals as "a start," but said it was like "treating a patient who is bleeding to death with a Band-Aid."
"For over a year, we have been hearing from Border Patrol agents about the huge increase in the number of individuals from countries other than Canada and Mexico crossing our borders illegally," he said. "Even the most conservative estimates of the number of folks getting by the Border Patrol are two or three times the number caught.
"When you add up all the ifs, ands or buts associated with this proposal - well, it really isn't much of a proposal," he said.
Expedited removals have been used for Mexican nationals since 1997. Mr. Hutchinson said their expansion would speed the removal of illegal aliens caught trying to enter the United States by fraudulent means or while attempting to elude Border Patrol agents. He said the new plan will apply only to those caught within 100 miles of the Mexican border, and only if they are apprehended within their first 14 days in the United States.
Mr. Hutchinson said illegal aliens from countries other than Mexico who are apprehended will be placed in expedited removal proceedings and returned to their home countries as soon as circumstances allow. They will not be released into the United States and will not be provided a hearing before an immigration judge unless they are determined to have a credible fear of return, he said.
He said captured aliens who seek asylum will be referred to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) asylum officer to determine whether they have a "credible fear" before being removed from the expedited removal process.
-------- police
US border guard indicted for beating Chinese businesswoman
Asia - AFP
Wed Aug 11, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/afp/20040811/wl_asia_afp/us_justice_china_border
NEW YORK (AFP) - A US border guard was indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday for allegedly beating up a Chinese businesswoman, in a case that was taken up at the highest diplomatic level between Beijing and Washington.
Robert Rhodes, who was charged with violating the civil rights of 37-year-old Zhao Yan near Niagara Falls in July, could face up to 10 years in prison and a fine of 250,000 dollars if convicted.
US Attorney Marty Littlefield said Rhodes would be arraigned in court at a date to be announced.
According to the indictment, Rhodes struck and hit Zhao with his knee and then "forcibly drove her head into contact with the pavement."
Zhao and two friends were reportedly crossing the Rainbow Bridge over Niagara Falls on the US-Canada border, when they got caught up in the arrest by border guards of a man for marijuana possession.
Rhodes had argued that Zhao had tried to run away when approached and he had been compelled to subdue her.
Zhao, from Tianjin city, had complained that she told the officers who stopped her that she had legal documents, including a passport and business visa, but they beat her anyway.
The case got high-profile attention in the Chinese media and was discussed by US Secretary of State Colin Powell and his Chinese counterpart Li Zhaoxing in a phone call last month.
The English-language China Daily had run a photograph of Zhao, showing her face swollen with bruises and contusions, while the People's Daily quoted her as saying the United States was the "most barbarous" country she had ever visited.
The US State Department has formally voiced regret over the incident.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Guantanamo Prisoner Says He Was a Cook
Associated Press
By STEVENSON JACOBS,
Wed Aug 11, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=589&ncid=734&e=6&u=/ap/20040812/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/guantanamo_review_hearings
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - An Afghan prisoner made an impassioned plea for his release Wednesday, telling a U.S. military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay that he worked as an assistant cook for Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime but was never an enemy of America.
The 24-year-old Afghan prisoner rocked back and forth and fidgeted with his shackled hands as he asked to call four witnesses at his afternoon hearing.
He said the witnesses could verify claims that he was forced to join the Taliban as a cook and had tried to escape but was recaptured.
"I swear to God I was never an enemy of America and I never will be," said the prisoner, whose name the media is prohibited from releasing.
The tribunal president, whose name journalists are also prohibited from releasing, refused his request. "Whether or not the detainee was forced to join the Taliban, or in what role they served in the Taliban, is not relevant," he said without elaborating.
The man has been held at Guantanamo Bay for more than two years. Some of the men have been held for nearly three years since the mission began in January 2002. All of the approximately 585 of them are accused of links to the Taliban or the al-Qaida terror network.
During the session, the detainee said he was captured by the Taliban while buying tea and sugar in his village and was later brought to Kandahar and Kabul. No dates were given.
He said his duties included bringing food to the Taliban fighters. He said he was never given a weapon and didn't receive weapons training.
"If you keep me here for 10 years I'll still be the same person," he said. "If you let me go there will be no threat from me. You're wasting food and time on me because I'm not worth it."
The military said he was associated with the Taliban and said he was conscripted to work as a cook's assistant. He was captured by the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in Kabul.
He was the 16th detainee to go before the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which are being conducted to determine whether the detainees should set free or continue being held as enemy combatants, a classification that gives them fewer legal protections than prisoners of war receive under the Geneva Conventions.
The tribunals are separate from the military commissions set up to try charged detainees. Preliminary hearings for four men charged with crimes ranging from conspiracy to aiding the enemy are scheduled to begin the week of Aug. 23.
The Associated Press, which was told on Tuesday that there would be no morning tribunal session, was informed late Wednesday afternoon there had been a session in which a Saudi detainee refused to participate. Navy spokesman Lt. Chris Servello said it was an oversight that the media were not informed of the morning session.
The 25-year-old Saudi didn't say why he didn't want to participate, Servello said. He is the seventh prisoner who has refused to participate in the tribunals.
The Saudi has been held in Guantanamo for more than two years and allegedly traveled to Afghanistan in March 2001 to fight with the Taliban.
The U.S. military said the Taliban trained him how to fight, and he allegedly attended an al-Qaida affiliated training camp in Afghanistan and fought against the Northern Alliance.
--------
U.S. Stance Prompts Calls to Dismiss 9/11 Case
By Shannon Smiley
The Washington Post
Wednesday, August 11, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54958-2004Aug10.html
BERLIN, Aug. 10 -- Defense attorneys urged a German court Tuesday to throw out charges against a Moroccan man accused of helping the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers, saying that any evidence the U.S. government gleaned from al Qaeda prisoners would be tainted by allegations of torture and abuse.
The arguments in the retrial of Mounir Motassadeq, 30, came as the court was read a U.S. government statement indicating that American officials would provide some unclassified evidence obtained from two men in secret U.S. custody but would not allow video testimony or release interrogation transcripts.
In a previous trial of the defendant, the U.S. government refused to turn over evidence from the two, Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheik Mohammad, who investigators say helped plan the hijackings. An appeals court cited that omission in overturning Motassadeq's conviction and ordering a new trial.
During Tuesday's proceedings in Hamburg, attention was focused on questions about the type and value of evidence the court would hear.
"The importance of the U.S. material and evidence for this case can hardly be overemphasized," defense attorney Josef Graessle-Muenscher told the court, according to a written version of his statement. But he argued that, in view of revelations of the mistreatment of prisoners, any evidence coming from the U.S. government would be suspect.
"Ending the trial is justified because it is no longer possible for this court to make its own evaluation of the evidence," he said. "No court can arrive at the truth . . . in this swamp of torture and the camps."
The chief federal prosecutor, Kay Nehm, emphasized to American officials on a recent trip to the United States "how urgently we need the information, especially in light of the federal court's decision" ordering the retrial, Frauke-Katrin Scheuten, Nehm's spokeswoman, said in a telephone interview last week.
The defendant is accused of membership in a terrorist organization and 3,066 counts of accessory to murder. In 2002, Motassadeq was the first person to go on trial in the German government's troubled efforts to convict people it contends are remnants of the Hamburg-based cell that led the attacks.
Another Moroccan, Abdelghani Mzoudi, was acquitted of similar charges this year.
In Motassadeq's first trial, prosecutors successfully argued that he knowingly aided the hijackers in their plot by completing tasks such as paying their bills. He acknowledged having been friendly with the hijackers but said he was unaware of their intentions and helped them only out of an obligation to fellow Muslims.
In the statement read in court, the U.S. government declined to release classified material about the prisoners on grounds that doing so would compromise sources and techniques. It claimed that allowing the court to have "interactive access" to the prisoners could hamper continuing interrogation and divulge secret information, according to news service reports.
In addition to providing unclassified information, the Americans will allow a U.S. intelligence officer to testify in court.
--------
Terror suspects' appeal rejected
bbc
11 August, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3553978.stm
The Court of Appeal has ruled the government acted legally by detaining 10 terrorism suspects without charge.
The foreign nationals were challenging a decision made by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission that the government was right to hold them.
Their lawyers argued their arrests were based on information gained through torture at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba.
Home Secretary David Blunkett said he was pleased with the ruling, but the men's solicitor called it "terrifying".
Some of the men have been held since December 2001 in Belmarsh prison, south-east London, and in a psychiatric hospital.
It is a fundamental duty of all courts to act as a bulwark against human rights violations
They were detained under the 2001 Anti-Terrorism and Security Act, which came into force after the 11 September attacks on the US.
The men's solicitor, Gareth Peirce, said of the court's decision: "It shows that we have completely lost our way in this country legally and morally," she said.
"We have international treaty obligations which prevent the use of evidence obtained by torture in any proceedings.
"What this judgement says by a two-one majority is that if it is obtained by agents of another country, and not procured or connived at by UK agents, it is usable without any restriction and there is no obligation on the secretary of state to inquire into the origins of it."
Amnesty International UK said the court's ruling would encourage other countries to obtain evidence through torture.
Director Kate Allen said: "It is a fundamental duty of all courts to act as a bulwark against human rights violations.
Belmarsh Prison, where some of the men were held
"Today, the Court of Appeal has shamefully abdicated this most important duty.
"If there is sufficient evidence to warrant holding these individuals, they should be charged with a recognisably criminal offence, and tried in proceedings which fully meet international fair trial standards.
"Otherwise, they should be released."
Under the terrorism act's emergency powers, the government must show only that it has "reasonable grounds to suspect" that foreign nationals have links to terror, before issuing certificates to hold them.
The Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) last October ruled there was "sound material" backing the view that the men were a risk to national security.
Last week, a cross-party group of peers and MPs said Home Secretary David Blunkett should end the detention of foreign terror suspects without trial "as a matter of urgency".
'Powers used sparingly'
Mr Blunkett said in a statement after Wednesday's ruling: "I am pleased that my decision to certify these individuals as suspected international terrorists who pose a threat to our national security has been upheld by the Court of Appeal."
He added: "The Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act was introduced in response to the public emergency we face, in order that government can fulfil its primary obligation - to protect national security.
"I have used its powers sparingly and proportionately in only the most serious circumstances, to prevent foreign nationals who we believe are international terrorists, but are unable to deport, from remaining at large in the UK."
The detainees' case has been backed by civil liberties groups who have described Belmarsh as "Britain's Guantanamo".
Five of the prisoners said at the time of the Siac ruling that it marked "a new dark age of injustice".
Now after Lords Justice Pill, Laws and Neuberger rejected their case at the Court of Appeal, the detainees' lawyers are expected to take steps to take the case to the House of Lords.
-------- terrorism
Bin Laden calls for attacks on Britain
reuters
By Mike Collett-White
11 August, 2004
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=563429
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden has called for attacks on targets in Britain and the United States, Pakistani intelligence officials say, but it was not clear if his appeal was accompanied by more detailed orders.
"Osama has given the go ahead to target important places and personalities in the U.S., U.K. and Pakistan," one Pakistani intelligence source said on Wednesday.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said bin Laden's order emerged during the interrogation of al Qaeda suspects in Pakistan caught in a month-long crackdown that has dealt the network a major blow.
One of at least three top operatives, Tanzanian Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, also gave authorities information that led to the arrest on Sunday of two Turkish al Qaeda members linked to an attack on a Jewish target in Turkey and who fought in Chechnya, officials revealed on Wednesday.
Officials say the network's local and global threat has been reduced, but they warn of further attacks by al Qaeda and local Islamic militant allies in Pakistan who are incensed by the country's decision to back the U.S.-led war on terror.
Wednesday's Washington Times, citing U.S. intelligence officials, said al Qaeda could be planning to target an American or foreign leader either within the United States or abroad.
The sketch of a plot to target U.S. President George W. Bush surfaced on an online magazine of al Qaeda's organisation in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.
A one-line answer to a Saut al-Jihad reader's query said: "The plan you have drawn up to assassinate Bush is good but would need a lot of preparation."
"Perhaps you can take part in it, if possible, and thanks," the magazine told the reader -- named only as Madad -- without giving further details. The reader's question was not published.
RED HERRING?
A Middle East security expert who reviewed the site said it would be rare for a known al Qaeda figure to discuss a detailed plan over a Web site. He said, however the message may have some "operational value", but using Bush's name indicated if a plot were afoot, it was in an early stage.
The specific reference could also be a red herring.
Pakistani intelligence agencies have been questioning key al Qaeda figures including Ghailani, wanted for the attacks on U.S. embassies in east Africa in 1998, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a top al Qaeda operational chief in Pakistan, and computer engineer Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan.
Khan's laptop computer has proved a treasure trove of information on al Qaeda's plans to launch attacks, including in the United States and on Heathrow airport in London.
He was believed to have acted as a communications middleman between operatives in remote areas of Pakistan and those in Europe and the United States.
Sunday's arrests of the two Turks were the latest in the sweep that has netted more than 20 suspects and led to a security alert in the United States and the arrest of 13 suspects in Britain under anti-terror laws.
The two who identified themselves as Salman and Faisal, confessed to travelling to Afghanistan after the attack in Turkey, and from there to join Muslim rebels in Russia's breakaway region of Chechnya.
A laptop computer, CD discs and literature were found in their possession. The officials did not give details of the attack with which the men were linked. Car bombs exploded outside two synagogues in Istanbul in November last year, killing 25 people.
TIGHT SECURITY
Wary of a backlash in a country torn by religious militancy, police in the capital Islamabad have set up extra checkpoints and several cabinet ministers have been told to restrict their movements. Pakistan celebrates independence day on Saturday.
Further details emerged on alleged contacts between Ghailani and bin Laden, believed by U.S. officials to be hiding somewhere along the rugged and porous Afghan-Pakistan frontier.
Some experts question how able bin Laden is to coordinate live operations, since he is unlikely to be using satellite communications and is on the run from tens of thousands of U.S. and Pakistan troops in the region.
Pakistani intelligence officials say Ghailani admits he saw bin Laden in 2002 and last had contact with him in June, 2003.
The officials also said Ghailani had been training suicide bombers in the city of Gujarat with a view to attacking a military airbase near the capital, and Islamabad airport. Khan revealed that Abu Musa al-Hindi, known as Abu Eisa al-Hindi, an al Qaeda suspect seized in Britain this month, was in charge of plotting attacks on the United States and Britain.
Acting on information gleaned from Khan and his computer, the United States issued a security warning of an al Qaeda attack on financial institutions.
--------
Libya to pay terror victims
August 11, 2004
By Geir Moulson
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040810-104336-2715r.htm
BERLIN - Libya agreed yesterday to pay $35 million to some victims of a bloody terror bombing at a Berlin disco nearly two decades ago, taking another step in Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's effort to rebuild relations with the West.
The deal, coming after much larger settlements for the bombings of two U.S. and French airliners, does not cover 169 American victims, including two soldiers who died in the blast at the La Belle disco on April 5, 1986. Attorneys are seeking separate compensation for them in U.S. courts.
German lawyers and officials of a Libyan foundation run by Col. Gadhafi's son agreed to the settlement, which deals with 163 non-U.S. citizens, including Germans who were wounded and the family of a Turkish woman killed by the bomb.
"I'm pleased with this fair compromise," German lawyer Ulrich von Jeinsen said after the agreement was sealed at a Berlin hotel.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli welcomed the accord, but he emphasized that the claims of U.S. victims also must be met.
"We've made it clear to the Libyans in numerous meetings ... that this is an issue of importance to us, and we are following it closely, and we think it needs to be resolved," Mr. Ereli said.
After the deal was announced, the German government said that it hoped to improve relations with Libya and that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder would visit Libya soon.
Libyan Ambassador Said Abdulaati called the accord "a step forward for the relations of Libya to Germany and the European Union." But he told Associated Press Television News that Libya did not accept guilt for the disco bombing, calling the settlement "a humanitarian gesture."
Libya's government did accept responsibility last year for the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 persons, and agreed to pay $2.7 billion in compensation.
On Jan. 9, Libya signed a $170 million compensation agreement with families of victims of a French UTA passenger jet that was blown up over West Africa in 1989. The 170 killed include 54 French citizens and seven Americans, including the wife of a U.S. ambassador.
In another step toward ending its status as an international pariah, Col. Gadhafi's regime renounced weapons of mass destruction in December and allowed international inspectors to visit its arms stockpiles.
Col. Gadhafi was visited by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in March, and the Libyan leader traveled to the European Union's headquarters in April.
Under the disco bombing settlement, the slain woman's family is expected to get $1 million. Persons who were seriously injured will get $350,000 each and those with lesser injuries will receive about $190,000 each, attorney Stephan Maigne said.
The disco was a favorite hangout of American soldiers during the Cold War. In retaliation for the bombing, President Reagan ordered U.S. air strikes on Tripoli and Benghazi that killed 41 persons, including an adopted daughter of Col. Gadhafi, and wounded 226.
-----
Bin Laden hints major assassination
By Bill Gertz
August 11, 2004
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20040811-123531-3824r
U.S. intelligence officials say a high-profile political assassination, triggered by the public release of a new message from Osama bin Laden, will lead off the next major al Qaeda terrorist attack, The Washington Times has learned.
The assassination plan is among new details of al Qaeda plots disclosed by U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports who, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the killing could be carried out against a U.S. or foreign leader either in the United States or abroad.
The officials mentioned Saudi Arabia and Yemen, two nations that are working with the United States in the battle against al Qaeda, as likely locales for the opening assassination. The planning for the attacks to follow involves "multiple targets in multiple venues" across the United States, one official said.
The new details of al Qaeda's plans were found on a laptop computer belonging to arrested al Qaeda operative Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan of Pakistan. "We're talking about planning at the screwdriver level," one official said. "It is very detailed."
Khan was arrested July 13 in Lahore, Pakistan, along with Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian who was indicted in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa and was on the FBI's list of most-wanted terrorists.
U.S. and allied counterterrorism officials are pursuing leads on other terrorists based on the data from Khan's seized laptop. At least one arrest in Britain has been made so far, and others are expected, the officials said.
Additionally, U.S. intelligence officials said they think that several al Qaeda terrorists already in the United States are part of the plot, although their identities and locations are not known.
The targets, in addition to the financial institutions in New York, Washington and Newark, N.J., that have been the subject of public warnings, include such economic-related targets as oil and gas facilities with a view toward disrupting the November election.
"The goal of the next attack is twofold: to damage the U.S. economy and to undermine the U.S. election," the official said. "The view of al Qaeda is 'anybody but Bush.' "
The officials also said the terrorist group has begun using female members for preattack surveillance and possibly as suicide bombers, thinking that women will have an easier time getting past security checkpoints at airports, borders and ports.
The al Qaeda attack plans call for bombings using trucks and cars, and hijacked aircraft, including commercial airliners and helicopters.
"There is a particular concern that chemical trucks will be used," one official said.
Regarding the new bin Laden message, the officials said there are intelligence reports, some of them sketchy, that a new tape from the al Qaeda leader will surface soon.
In the past, video and audio messages by bin Laden or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, were broadcast days or weeks before an attack, the officials said.
"The message likely will be the signal for the attack to be launched," one official said.
A second U.S. official said one intelligence agency was aware of unconfirmed reports of a new bin Laden tape.
"There may be such a tape, but it hasn't surfaced and we haven't seen it," this official said.
Bin Laden last released a taped message in April. The CIA said that the audiotape probably was the voice of bin Laden and that the mention of the March 11 Madrid train bombings shows that the tape was current.
That tape offered a "truce" for any European state that pledged to stop attacking Muslims and end cooperation with the United States.
Contrary to what some Democratic critics of the Bush administration have said, intelligence officials said the new details of al Qaeda planning were obtained from the Khan laptop. The terrorist group was in the process of updating older attack plans, the officials said.
On Aug. 2, the Bush administration raised the terrorism threat level from "elevated" to "high" for five finance-related sites in the District, New York and New Jersey, based on the intelligence in Khan's computer, as well as other intelligence.
Frances Townsend, a White House homeland-security adviser, said Sunday that the government has received a steady "stream" of intelligence indicating that an al Qaeda attack is planned.
"What we know now that we didn't know six months ago is that they've done a good deal of planning and surveillance work to accomplish that goal," she said on CBS' "Face the Nation."
-------- torture
US Silent on Torture of Children
TheNewStandard
by Lisa Ashkenaz Croke
August 11, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/croke.php?articleid=3286
Just as the U.S.-led forces refused to release thousands of adult prisoners after the June 28 handover of partial sovereignty to Iraq, U.S. and UK authorities continue to incarcerate children.
The Pentagon says around 60 teens, "primarily aged 16 and 17," are still being detained, though unnamed sources at the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command (CentCom) said some prisoners are as young as 14 years old, according to Scotland's Sunday Herald. The British Ministry of Defense also admitted that it had interned minors, and that one was still in custody.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) documented the imprisonment of up to 107 children as of this May and revealed mistreatment of some young prisoners, according to German television show Report Mainz.
UNICEF, the UN's fund for children, issued a confidential report in June on the matter, acknowledging that it held "several meetings" with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and Iraq's Ministry of Justice last summer "to address issues related to juvenile justice and the situation of children detained by the coalition forces."
Despite sworn testimony from eyewitnesses, a "highly placed source in the Pentagon" told the Sunday Herald that investigations have found no evidence that children interned in Iraq have been mistreated. This directly contradicted sworn statements from witnesses given to Army investigators in January, as well as the recent statements of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
In a speech on July 7, Hersh confirmed rumors that children and women were raped on camera at Abu Ghraib prison. His remarks, made during an address before the American Civil Liberties Union, implied that he had personally seen some of the footage.
"And basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been [video] recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling," Hersh told the audience in San Francisco, "and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking."
"We have done investigations into accusations of juveniles being abused and raped and can't find anything resembling that," an unnamed "Pentagon official" told the Sunday Herald.
Nevertheless, details of the known child abuse cases are slowly emerging, primarily in the European media. Stories in the mainstream American press have focused on abuse and torture of adults, often skimming over U.S. soldiers' possible actions against their younger captives, with a few exceptions
In a May 21 piece on the previously unreported witness statements from Abu Ghraib prisoners, the Washington Post reported the account of detainee Kasim Mehaddi Hilas. According to the Post, Hilas, whom American personnel had been beaten, stripped, photographed and threatened with sexual assault, also witnessed a teenage boy being raped in October 2003 at Abu Ghraib by someone the Post identified as "an Army translator."
Curiously, the paragraph following the account begins, "Hilas, like other detainees interviewed by the military, said he could not identify some of the soldiers because they either covered their name patches or did not wear uniforms." The implication is that Hilas did not know the assailant's name.
The Post's website hosts links to the 14 sworn statements taken by Army investigators in January. Hilas' actual statement, excerpted in the Sunday Herald, reveals that Hilas actually did name the assailant, but notes that the soldier's name has been is censored from the report.
In fact, the copy carried on the Post's site shows this deletion to Hilas' statement, which makes no mention of an Army translator, only the rapist: "I saw [deleted] who was wearing the military uniform," adding that a female soldier was taking pictures. This deletion is significant because both his statement and the Post story do name some U.S. personnel involved with abusing adult prisoners.
According to Rolling Stone, Abu Hamid is the name of the translator who raped the teenage boy. "I saw Abu Hamid, who was wearing the military uniform, putting his dick in the little kid's ass," reads Rolling Stone's July 28 story, though the name was not reported by the Sunday Herald weeks later.
The Sunday Herald did report the statement of detainee Thaar Salman Dawod, mentioned in neither the Washington Post's nor Rolling Stone's articles, who recounted his own abuse at Abu Ghraib and said he witnessed "a lot of people getting naked for a few days getting punished in the first days of Ramadan."
According to Dawod's statement - which can be found on the Post's website but was not reported in May - two boys were brought in to the cellblock, naked and "cuffed together face to face, and Graner [Specialist Charles A. Graner, Jr., of the 372nd Military Police Company] was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures from top and bottom and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners. The prisoners, two of them, were young. I don't know their names."
The Post did report the account of a third abused prisoner who also witnessed mistreatment of a child in Abu Ghraib. According to that paper's retelling of prisoner Mohanded Juma's statement: "American soldiers brought a father and his son into the cellblock. [Juma] said the soldiers put hoods over their heads and removed their clothes."
The Post's version then directly quotes the witness's statement: "When the son saw his father naked he was crying. He was crying because of seeing his father."
But even this incident is misrepresented. According to Juma's statement - again carried on the Post's own website - the father and son were brought into the cellblock already naked: "They put them in front of each other and they counted 1-2-3, and then removed the bags from their heads."
Hersh said in his speech last month that the U.S. government is terrified that the photographs and video evidence proving the abuse and rape of children will come out.
"I can tell you some of the personal stories of some of the people who were in these units who witnessed this," Hersh commented. "I can also tell you written complaints were made to the highest officers. And so we're dealing with an enormous, massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there and higher."
Army investigator Major General Antonio M. Taguba stated in a February 2004 report that all of the above witnesses' accounts were "found to be credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses." Months later, it is not known that any action has been taken against the translator or guards apparently implicated in the Army's own reports.
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
9/11 Panel Leaders Seek Pentagon Support
August 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Sept-11-Commission.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Senior Defense Department officials joined skeptical House members Tuesday in questioning whether an all-powerful, Washington-based national intelligence director could hinder a special forces captain on a distant battlefield.
Leaders of the Sept. 11 commission told a House hearing their proposal wasn't designed to prevent up-to-the-minute information from reaching a combat zone. Chairman Thomas Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton said the panel was instead trying to ensure the 15 intelligence agencies cooperate, something they failed to do before the 2001 attacks.
Gen. Bryan Brown, the military's Special Operations commander, told the Armed Services Committee he wants information ``instantly available to my guy on the ground or my guy in the air. I would not want any impediment,'' he said.
``Done wrong, it will horde everything into Washington ... and that would be a mistake,'' said Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
The hearing was the first chance for top Pentagon officials to testify extensively on recommendations by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly called the 9-11 commission.
Wolfowitz, Brown and Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said their caution did not mean they opposed commission proposals for the new office and a central depository for intelligence.
Some committee members were just as skeptical, indicating some lawmakers have problems with the Sept. 11 panel's recommendations.
``I don't see any specific mention of failure on the part of a DOD (Department of Defense) agency,'' said Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the Armed Services panel.
Kean and Hamilton have been lobbying Congress to pass the terror-fighting recommendations in their 567-page report, saying the need is urgent. They testified the same day President Bush announced he was nominating House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla., as CIA director.
Members of both parties returned from their August recess to attend the hearing. Before the session, Democrats met behind closed doors with Kean and Hamilton. And House Democratic leaders later held a news conference to urge Congress to return this month to overhaul the intelligence system.
At the hearing, Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., sharply asked Wolfowitz whether the Pentagon was engaged in ``sweet talking and slow walking'' to thwart the commission's recommendations.
Wolfowitz denied it, saying the commission ``correctly identified important areas where we can do a lot better'' and Pentagon lawyers were working on the recommendations.
Kean, a Republican, and Hamilton, a Democrat, told Hunter they had no specific example of a military intelligence failure, but said the nation's pressing problem was the lack of coordination that prevented agencies from connecting pre-Sept. 11 information.
When then-CIA Director George Tenet declared a war on terrorism prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, Kean said, ``Nobody got it in other agencies. It was like he never said it.''
Hunter recalled the image of a special forces soldier in Afghanistan who was sitting on a horse, possessing up-to-date intelligence through satellite communications. The military shouldn't have to borrow the satellite from a national intelligence office, he said.
``We did not intend to make any recommendation that would adversely impact the warfighter,'' Hamilton responded. The commission leaders said their proposal for a national director would protect the military by having a top Pentagon official serve as a deputy to the new official.
Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., said the commission's toughest opposition will come from the intelligence agencies that would lose some of their power, saying, ``The problem is the arrogance of the entrenched agency bureaucracy.''
Kean responded, ``We were told by a number of wise heads around this town that these (recommendations) are hard; people before you tried.... and failed. This may be our generation's chance because of the timing,'' he said in reference to the nation's readiness to respond to the terrorism threat.
Acknowledging skepticism about changing the military intelligence structure, the two leaders said in a joint statement that the secretary of defense should be permitted to change a military operation he opposed.
``Or, the head of the NCTC (National Counterterrorism Center) would have to bump this issue up to the National Security Council
and the president for resolution,'' they added.
On the Net:
CIA: http://www.cia.gov
House Armed Services Committee: http://www.house.gov/hasc/
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States:
http://www.9-11commission.gov/
-------- propaganda wars
How Portland Paper Got Iraq Abuse Story
The Oregonian
By Charles Geraci
August 11, 2004
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000604284
NEW YORK A reporter for the newspaper that broke a story about human rights abuses in Iraq after the U.S. handover of sovereignty said that the news emerged from his recent stint as an embed, and required three weeks of intensive checking.
This past weekend, Mike Francis, a reporter for The Oregonian (Click for QuikCap ) in Portland, exposed the high-level U.S. military decision ordering Oregon National Guardsmen to return abused Iraqi prisoners to their Iraqi jailers after the American soldiers had come to their aid. The incident occurred on June 29 -- Iraq's first official day as a sovereign country. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has now asked the Pentagon to investigate.
The story was accompanied by 15 photos, a few quite graphic. Some were shot from a distance through the scope of a rifle. The Oregonian is not saying exactly who took them or how they got them.
It all began when Francis, while embedded in the 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry regiment of the Oregon Army National Guard in Iraq, received a tip from one of the guardsmen in mid-July. This soldier referred to a certain "detention facility" but would say nothing more. Subsequent conversations with about a dozen other soldiers confirmed a troubling episode inside the compound of the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
In the midst of Francis' questioning, he received a written account from Capt. Jarrell Southall, an Oregon guardsman who witnessed the abuse.
Despite an Army order that soldiers were not to discuss the events, Southall agreed to go on the record, while other soldiers clung to anonymity. Francis said that he had "multiple conversations" with Southall alerting him to the seriousness of the story and ensuring he had no problems coming forward.
"I asked Southall if he was sure about wanting to do this," said Francis. "He said 'yes' -- that he was moved by what he saw." Southall did contact a military lawyer and afterwards stressed that he was speaking as an individual, not as an army officer.
Francis received varying levels of cooperation from the Oregon national guardsmen. "Some seemed to be burdened by [the abuse] and wanted to talk," Francis said. "Others were much more tight-lipped. Some wanted to speak about it but said they couldn't."
While in Iraq, Francis obtained numerous photos from a "confidential" source illustrating the abuse. The Oregonian ran four of these on Sunday's front page and eleven others in full-color inside. They depict the beating of blindfolded Iraqi prisoners and the injuries they suffered.
Some were taken by a national guardsman, or by others in the American military, and some are believed to have been taken by Iraqi jailers.
"We didn't think the pictures were overly graphic," said Steve Engelberg, the paper's managing editor/enterprise. "They were sufficiently important to justify having them appear in the Sunday morning newspaper that would be on the breakfast table."
The bombshell story this week appeared in the Oregonian about three weeks after Francis first learned of the abuse.
The paper's editor, Sandra Rowe, outlined the reasoning behind the paper's decision to run the story. "It's clearly important because it goes to the heart of some of the questions the United States has to face [in Iraq], the role of the military, and the challenges and potential conflicts," she said.
There remain a lot of questions Francis would like answered. "I am looking forward to the official military response," he said.
"But this is a very solid story," Francis asserted. "The U.S. Embassy has referred to the events as 'brutality.' We have photos of the abuse. And nobody up the chain of command has denied the abuse occurred."
Charles Geraci (cgeraci@editorandpublisher.com) is a reporter for E&P.
----
Kerry Attack Briefly Deleted
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55050-2004Aug10.html
The Bush-Cheney campaign briefly stripped from its Web site yesterday an attack on Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) by Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), several hours after President Bush nominated Goss as the director of central intelligence.
The campaign later restored the statement and said removing it was a mistake.
Democrats have said they will make Goss's partisanship an issue in his confirmation hearing and pointed to his activity on behalf of Bush's reelection campaign.
The four-paragraph statement by Goss says that Kerry's June 1 speech on national security "amounted to little more than political 'me-tooism.' "
"He laid out some old goals that everyone agrees to without offering concrete proposals to achieve them," Goss said. "He also neglected the president's historic achievements in this area."
David J. Sirota of the liberal Center for American Progress called the removal "an effort to revise history and expunge his record of partisan attacks."
Republican officials pointed out that Kerry has removed many items from his site.
Bush-Cheney communications director Nicolle Devenish said: "We regret the mistake. It will remain on the site."
-------- us politics
Kerry on the war
Washington Times
August 11, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040810-100236-4111r.htm
As they say in Chicago, if you don't like the weather, wait a minute. The same applies to John Kerry's position on Iraq. Speaking to reporters on Monday, Mr. Kerry said he would still have voted to give President Bush the authority to go to war, even if he had known that intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs was flawed, that Saddam Hussein possessed no WMD and that there was no link between Saddam and September 11. "Yes, I would have voted for the authority," Mr. Kerry said while visiting the Grand Canyon. "I believe it was the right authority for a president to have." This was in response to a direct challenge by President Bush.
By now, we probably don't need to inform our readers that Mr. Kerry's current position on Iraq contrasts with his previous positions, which have wavered from hawk to dove, and whatever odd ducks fall in between. As late as July 11, Mr. Kerry called the Iraq war a "mistake."
Search articles from 1999 to the present in the Insider archives
They might, however, come as a bit of a surprise to a whole lot of Kerry supporters. For instance, at the Democratic Convention in Boston, 95 percent of delegates were opposed to the Iraq war. A July 19-21 Gallup Poll found that 72 percent of Democrats believe the United States should not have gone to war. In short, Mr. Kerry, the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, is at odds with the vast majority of Democratic voters on the fundamental issue in this year's presidential election.
He might not have realized he was doing so at the time, but Mr. Kerry's concession only works to erode one of the core criticisms Democrats have leveled against the Bush administration. Far from responding to Mr. Bush's challenge with defiant resolve, Mr. Kerry has further undermined his party's position. Back in the heady days of the Democratic primaries, say in January, voters to some degree understood that Mr. Kerry would not only have avoided invading Iraq, but he also would scrap the policy of pre-emption that stands as a pillar of Mr. Bush's foreign policy. Now, it appears as if Mr. Kerry just endorsed pre-emption. Forget the swing vote - Mr. Kerry owes an explanation to his Democratic base.
Yet this failure on the part of the Kerry campaign goes beyond politics. Building a coherent position on the war - both before the invasion and the current situation - is not like pitching another campaign perennial that everyone takes for standard populist rhetoric. Mr. Kerry's reliance on foreign leaders - the only element in his acceptance speech in Boston that resembled an Iraq "plan" - is turning a little stale. His further insistence that his vote for the war but against the funding of the troops was consistent is laughable, in light of his concession on Monday.
Should Mr. Kerry be elected in November, he will inherit Iraq, and he better start figuring out what he truly thinks about it beyond Election Day.
-----
Teens keep eye on election, war
By Amy Fagan
August 11, 2004
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040811-121655-9176r.htm
The nation's teens say they have a great stake in the outcome of this year's presidential election, list social issues such as abortion and same-sex "marriage" as top concerns and generally support the war in Iraq, according to results of a survey released yesterday.
"Simply put, they are more involved ... more concerned about what is happening," said Peter D. Hart, president of Peter D. Hart Research Associates, which conducted the eighth annual survey on the nation's teens in May for the Horatio Alger Association.
The poll of 1,007 randomly selected teens found that 44 percent said going to war in Iraq was the right decision, 33 percent said it was wrong, and 18 percent didn't know.
Mr. Hart said that breakdown is essentially the same as among adults, but shows that for the upcoming generation, "the events of the world are now events in their world."
Last year's survey found that 58 percent of teens supported the war in Iraq. Mr. Hart said the drop in support this year could be attributed to the timing of the 2004 survey, which was taken after the Iraqi prisoner-abuse story broke.
Today's teens also overwhelmingly reject the idea of a military draft, the report says. Seventy percent oppose required military service, although 55 percent think a draft will happen during their lifetimes.
Sixty-two percent said the November elections will make a "very large" or "fairly large" difference in the country's future, and 70 percent care who wins the presidential contest. The teens' specific opinions of President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, will be explored in a survey released in the coming months.
Unlike the adult population, which tends to be more concerned with the economy and the war in Iraq, young people list social issues such as same-sex "marriage" and abortion as their top concerns, with education and the war in Iraq tying for second place.
When it comes to the war in Iraq, more of the male respondents said it was the right thing to do at 53 percent, compared with 29 percent of the female respondents who felt the same way. The young women were 25 percent more likely to say social issues or education are their top concerns, and the young men were 22 percent more likely to worry about the economy and the war in Iraq.
Ninety-two percent of high school students intend to continue their education, with 73 percent planning to attend a four-year college. As a result, 43 percent said pressure to get good grades is a major problem for them, up from 26 percent in the 2001 survey.
As part of the survey's release, the Horatio Alger Association hosted a panel of teens. The panel said the Internet is a intricate part of their generation and makes life easier, allowing them to shop, get news and research papers with the click of a button. Sixty-five percent said they use the Internet daily.
"If I have a research paper due, the first thing you do is a Google search," said Glen Saunders, a 15-year-old from Millsboro, Del.
Shattering the angry-teen stereotype, the survey found for the second consecutive year that three-quarters of today's teens say they get along "very well" or "extremely well" with their parents.
-----
Bush mocks Kerry's concession on war
By Bill Sammon
August 11, 2004
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040811-121653-6678r.htm
PENSACOLA, Fla. - President Bush yesterday mocked Sen. John Kerry for agreeing that Saddam Hussein should have been removed from power, even if he didn't have weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Bush took obvious delight in the concession as he stumped across Florida with Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam whose service has not attracted the criticism that Mr. Kerry's has.
"Almost two years after he voted for the war in Iraq, and almost 220 days after switching positions to declare himself the anti-war candidate, my opponent has found a new nuance," Mr. Bush told a raucous rally here. "He now agrees it was the right decision to go into Iraq.
"After months of questioning my motives and even my credibility, Senator Kerry now agrees with me that even though we have not found the stockpile of weapons we all believed were there, knowing everything we know today, he would have voted to go into Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein from power.
"I want to thank Senator Kerry for clearing that up," he deadpanned, drawing howls of derisive laughter. "Although, there are still 84 days left in the campaign."
The jab came less than 24 hours after Mr. Kerry responded to the president's challenge to declare, one way or another, whether he would have voted to give Mr. Bush the authority to wage war on Iraq "knowing what we know now."
"I'll answer it directly: Yes," the Massachusetts Democrat told reporters at the Grand Canyon. "I would have voted for the authority."
He added: "But I would have used that authority effectively."
The concession was welcomed by the White House, which used it to reinforce its portrayal of Mr. Kerry as an overly "nuanced" flip-flopper.
"As on other issues, he has been all over the map when it comes to this one on Iraq," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters aboard Air Force One.
Seeking to limit the political damage, the Kerry campaign arranged for retired Gen. Wesley Clark to hold a conference call with reporters, including those traveling with the president.
Mr. Clark, who was vanquished by Mr. Kerry in the Democratic presidential primaries, chided Mr. Bush for "going back and looking at two-year-old votes."
Mr. Clark also added yet another nuance to Mr. Kerry's position by emphasizing that the candidate would have waited longer than Mr. Bush to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom.
He said Mr. Kerry would have waged war "only after we had exhausted all options," adding that "we were a long way from" that point.
Rand Beers, Mr. Kerry's national security adviser, tried to further clarify his boss' position.
"The issue has never been whether we were right to hold Saddam accountable," he said. "The issue is that we went to war without our allies, without properly equipping our troops and without a plan to win the peace."
Susan Rice, Mr. Kerry's chief foreign-policy adviser, told reporters: "It's way past time for the president to stop playing games, stop asking silly questions."
Asked by The Washington Times why Mr. Kerry would answer what he considered a "silly question," Miss Rice did not reply.
Last night, at a rally with thousands of supporters at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Mr. Kerry continued to respond, saying he has been consistent and that it was Mr. Bush who let the country down.
"I've been consistent all along, ladies and gentleman," the senator said. "I thought the United States needed to stand up to Saddam Hussein, and I voted to stand up to Saddam Hussein, but I thought we ought to do it right."
He said that only by electing a new president can the United States gain the international support that will "get the hand out of the pocket of the American taxpayer and get our troops home."
But Mr. McCain defended the president's liberation of Iraq from Saddam's tyranny.
"This president took the fight to the enemy," he said while introducing Mr. Bush to a thunderous ovation in Pensacola. "This president went to Iraq - it is a noble and just cause.
"And believe me, America," he added, "Iraq is a better place for having been liberated."
Mr. McCain will continue stumping with Mr. Bush today.
•Stephen Dinan contributed to this report from Las Vegas.
-----
Book torpedoes Kerry's strategy
By Charles Hurt
August 11, 2004
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040811-121646-2130r.htm
John Kerry's strategy of making his military service a centerpiece of his presidential campaign is under fire with the release of "Unfit for Command," which arrives in bookstores this week.
The book accuses the Democratic nominee of lying about what he saw as a Navy officer during his four months of combat in Vietnam, inflating his own record to garner enough Purple Hearts to go home early and later joining an anti-war group that discussed plans for assassinating members of the U.S. Congress.
" 'Unfit for Command' is a shocking indictment of a politician who slandered his fellow veterans, danced on the edge of treason, and has shamelessly exaggerated his own war service for political ends," proclaims the dust jacket for the book, written by John E. O'Neill and Jerome R. Corsi and published by Regnery.
Mr. O'Neill was the officer who succeeded Mr. Kerry as commander of PCF-94. It was aboard that Navy "swift boat" that Mr. Kerry patrolled the Mekong River in 1968 and 1969.
The Kerry campaign dismissed the book as angry political rhetoric from a group that is funded heavily by some supporters of President Bush's re-election campaign.
The Kerry campaign did not respond to several phone calls and e-mails made to its Washington headquarters to ask about the book's accusations.
Asked about the charges contained in the book and whether they would damage Mr. Kerry's campaign, spokesman Chad Clanton e-mailed an Associated Press story in which one of the book's co-authors - Mr. Corsi - apologized for disparaging comments about Catholics, Muslims and the pope he posted on an Internet message board.
Mr. Kerry has repeatedly invoked his Vietnam War experience as a reason why American voters should trust him to fight the war on terror.
The final night of last month's Democratic National Convention featured a film highlighting Mr. Kerry's naval service.
The senator's "band of brothers" - a group of Vietnam veterans who served with Mr. Kerry and who campaign for him across the country - then appeared on the convention stage. Mr. Kerry was introduced by Jim Rassmann, who as a lieutenant in the Army's Green Berets was rescued by Mr. Kerry during a 1969 firefight in Vietnam.
During his speech accepting his party's nomination, Mr. Kerry made seven references to his four months of combat experience and just one reference to his 20 years of service in the Senate.
"As president, I will wage this war with the lessons I learned in war," he told cheering delegates, later adding: "I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as president."
The new book, based on interviews with veterans and FBI records on Mr. Kerry's postwar activities, levels several charges against the Democratic nominee.
The veterans charge that Mr. Kerry's three Purple Hearts - his ticket home to a desk job in New York, eight months before the scheduled end of the standard 12-month tour of duty in Vietnam - were awarded "for minor injuries, easily treated with Band-Aids, not requiring a single hour of hospitalization."
The book also accuses Mr. Kerry of filing false accounts of battle action and inflating his own heroism in official reports. The authors accuse him of carrying a home movie camera back to the scene of action to film "exaggerated" versions of his role in firefights.
The book also highlights Mr. Kerry's actions as national spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Mr. Kerry attended one meeting of the group during which members discussed killing U.S. officials who favored the war. Mr. Kerry says he quit the organization shortly after that meeting.
Since excerpts of the book were posted on the DrudgeReport (www.drudgereport.com) last week, the Internet has exploded with mostly unflattering messages in chat rooms and Web sites about Mr. Kerry's service in Vietnam. A Google search for "Kerry," "Vietnam" and "unfit" turned up 27,900 matches yesterday afternoon.
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
Unique tire-burning plant in Minnesota town brings promises of jobs and worries
Associated Press
By Gregg Aamot,
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-11/s_26467.asp
PRESTON, Minnesota - Bob Maust thinks he has the perfect place for all of those scrap tires that litter Midwest landfills and shop yards: his hometown.
Maust dreams of building a tire-burning plant in this idyllic farming community that would bring 30 jobs or more, create electricity, and chip away at the millions of tires stockpiled across the country.
Not everyone agrees, however, and a local dispute over the plant illustrates the pressure for economic development in shrinking small towns. Developers here who are eager to capitalize on the new tire-burning technology are squaring off against environmentalists and outdoors enthusiasts who fear pollution and a dent in the region's tourism.
Hunting, trout fishing, and biking draw thousands to this community of about 1,400 tucked in the rolling hills of southeastern Minnesota. It's a quiet and remote region, where the Amish ride buggies along the county roads and vacationers find respite at local bed-and-breakfasts some 100 miles southeast from Minneapolis.
Critics point out that the plant's smokestack would tower 20 stories in the air, dwarfing the tallest buildings in town.
"The aesthetics of it in a small, rural community - with that smokestack? - is absolutely unbelievable," said Dick Nelson, a former mayor who discussed the plant one recent morning at a coffee shop in downtown Preston.
Maust's plant would be the first in the nation to recycle all of the steel inside a tire. And it would only burn tires - 200,000 a week - collecting them from hundreds of miles in either direction, as far as Chicago to the east and Kansas City to the south.
"A vast majority of our young people, like most places, go off to bigger cities to find employment and comparable jobs," Maust said. "But it's very nice to be able to live in rural Minnesota.... And these would be good jobs."
Moreover, he said, the proposed $50 million plant would have it's own pro-environment message: It would rid the area of many of those pesky scrap tires, 290 million of which were generated across the nation last year alone. The facility would produce enough power to supply an estimated 8,000 to 20,000 homes and help relieve landfills of tires, which collect water where mosquitoes can breed.
An environmental group has slowed the plant's development, filing two lawsuits, one questioning state regulators who concluded that the plant wouldn't emit significant pollution, and the other objecting to permits granted to the proposed business, Heartland Energy and Recycling Inc.
A judge ordered the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) to review its environmental assessment, and it will likely be late summer or fall before the judge decides whether Maust can go ahead with his plans.
So hot are emotions that the plant is shaping up as a top issue in the city elections this fall.
Engineers hired by Heartland claim the plant will remove sulfur and emit low levels of nitrogen oxide, but critics say the plant would produce other noxious fumes and be only a half-mile from a school and a nursing home.
For City Councilman Jerry Scheevel, who farmed near Preston for years before moving to town, it's all about taking care of his town, which lost 100 residents in the last census. He dismissed the opponents of the plant as "tree-huggers" and said the regulators have done their due diligence.
"I'm a conservationist, and I wouldn't be for (the plant) if I thought it would be dangerous for the town," he said. "I don't think it will be, and if it is, the MPCA will shut her down."
It's been nearly four years since Maust first approached City Hall with his plant idea, but he remains undeterred. The plant will open within two years, if not sooner, he predicted.
"We're gonna get her done," he said.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Millions of Locusts Headed for Darfur, U.N. Says
Aug 11, 2000
By Phil Stewart
ROME (Reuters)
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&u=/nm/20040811/sc_nm/environment_locusts_sudan_dc_1&printer=1
- Millions of locusts are probably heading for Darfur, a U.N. agency said on Wednesday, where violence has already created a humanitarian disaster and two million people are short of food and medicine.
"Swarms could get into Sudan any day, but we of course don't know when," said Dr. Clive Elliott, senior officer in charge of the locust group at the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
"The FAO is in contact with the authorities in Sudan and our coordinators in Cairo are working with the countries around the Red Sea to get as prepared as possible for an invasion from the west," he said.
Elliott denied reports that desert locusts had already arrived in the Darfur region of western Sudan.
"We're expecting it, but I'm not aware of any information that desert locusts have arrived in Sudan," he said.
The region is facing its most serious locust crisis for 15 years, with swarms of desert locusts moving from northwest Africa into Mauritania, Mali and Niger, where many of the inhabitants are subsistence farmers.
Desert locust swarms usually contain about 50 million insects per square kilometer and can travel up to 150 km (93 miles) a day. They can devastate entire crop fields in minutes, adult locusts munching their own weight, about two grams, of food a day.
At least one swarm has reached Chad, bordering west Sudan's Darfur region where fighting between militiamen and rebels has displaced more than one million people and created severe shortages of food, medicine and shelter.
Elliott said the last swarm spotted in Chad was on July 27 in Batha province, only about 400 km (250 miles) from the Sudanese border. He said the swarm was smaller than those seen in Mauritania, reaching only about 4 km in length.
"If they arrive in Darfur, they will eat anything green ... So if the farmers have planted their crops, and they are nicely sprouting, those crops will clearly be at risk," he said.
"They may not necessarily stay in Darfur ... It depends on the conditions," he said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protesters Push for Central Park Rally
By Michelle Garcia
The Washington Post
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55028-2004Aug10.html
NEW YORK, Aug. 10 -- With little more than two weeks left before the Republican National Convention, organizers of a massive antiwar march have backed away from an agreement to hold the rally on Manhattan's far West Side, setting the stage for a showdown with the Bloomberg administration.
The march and rally are widely expected to draw more than 250,000 people on the convention's eve. But United for Peace and Justice, the group organizing the march, announced Tuesday that it has decided to fight again for a rally spot in Central Park.
"Exiling a rally to a remote sun-baked highway makes a mockery of the constitutionally protected right to assemble," said Leslie Cagan, the group's national coordinator.
Meanwhile, city officials faced headaches on another front, as city firefighters and police officers refused to rule out a strike or sickouts during the convention. The uniformed services argue that they deserve bigger raises than other city workers because they risk their lives daily. City officials say they have offered more money, for money-saving labor concessions.
Parks Department officials have refused to budge on the site of the demonstration. In a written statement, the Parks Department denied the protest group's latest request "for the same reasons stated in the denial of your earlier application." Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe has said that large numbers of protesters trampling the grass would cause irreparable harm to Central Park's Great Lawn. Activists sought to answer this criticism by offering to use three sites within the park, rather than concentrate in one meadow.
"They can't just rubber-stamp" the rejection, said Bill Dobbs, spokesman for United for Peace and Justice. "It's clear they didn't even consider this application seriously, because . . . it's entirely different."
Republican Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg issued a written statement Tuesday calling on organizers to concentrate on the permitted route and "stop the theatrics."
The city's refusal of a Central Park rally permit has rankled antiwar activists and civil libertarians, who say the park has great symbolic import and functions as the city's unofficial "town square." The activists decided to revisit the question after news reports in the past two weeks revealed that the park's refurbished grass was designed to withstand hard use. Parks officials have granted permission for smaller groups, including some Republicans, to use the park during the convention.
A recent public opinion poll conducted by Quinnipac University found that most New Yorkers support a rally in the park.
Cagan, the protest group's national coordinator, also noted that the alternative site, along the West Side Highway just north of Ground Zero, is problematic. The group is worried about the heat and water supplies in an area that offers no shade. "Our medical people have advised us against taking people into this area," Cagan said.
City officials have declined to pay for water, saying the city cannot subsidize protest. Critics noted that Bloomberg contributed an estimated $7 million to the convention.
Staff writer Michael Powell contributed to this report.
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New York lockdown
While anti-Bush activists in New York are adopting new techniques to try and disrupt the Republican party convention later this month, the police have got some new strategies of their own
Michelle Goldberg
Wednesday August 11, 2004
UK Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/salon/story/0,14752,1280907,00.html
If you're a delegate attending the Republican national convention at Madison Square Garden later this month, Jamie Moran knows where you're staying. He knows where you're eating and what Broadway musical you plan on seeing. For the past nine months, Moran has been living off savings earned as an office manager at a nonprofit and working full-time to disrupt the RNC.
His small anarchist collective, RNCNotWelcome.org, runs a snitch line and an email account where disgruntled employees of New York hotels, the Garden and the Republican party itself can pass on information about conventioneers. So far, the collective has received dozens of phone calls and hundreds of emails with inside dirt on GOP activities.
Recently, a woman with a polished, middle-aged sounding voice left a message saying, "For some God-unknown reason I'm on the Republican mailing list, and they sent me what they call a list of their inner-circle events." The events hadn't been publicised elsewhere, she said, and she wanted to fax the list to Moran.
Moran feeds information like this to a cadre of activists desperate to unleash four years' worth of anger at the Bush administration. By dogging the delegates wherever they go, RNC Not Welcome hopes to make the Republicans' lives hell for as long as they're in New York.
"We want to make their stay here as miserable as possible," says Moran, who has sandy hair, a snub nose and a goatee. The son of a retired Queens cop, he's 30 but looks younger. "I'd like to see all the Republican events - teas, backslapping lunches - disrupted. I'd like to see people from other states following their delegates, letting them know what they think about Republican policies. I'd like to see impromptu street parties and marches. I'd like to see corporations involved in the Iraq reconstruction get targeted - anything from occupation to property destruction."
There's a showdown coming to Manhattan. Backed by the most intense security the city has ever seen, the Republicans are about to turn the blue-state bastion of New York City into the backdrop for George Bush's coronation. The RNC chose New York because it was the site of the September 11 terror attacks, which to Bush's opponents and even some ordinary New Yorkers seems a brazen provocation.
On one side are 36,000 cops - a force that city councilman Peter Vallone Jr calls "perhaps the world's 10-largest standing army". On the other side are at least 250,000 protesters expected to converge on the city from all across the United States and Canada - a demonstration six times larger than the legendary antiglobalisation protests that rocked Seattle in 1999. They're facing off at a time when police are increasingly adopting military tactics in response to protest, and protesters are responding likewise, conducting their own reconnaissance on Republican plans and plotting actions designed to hit where the cops are weakest.
The police have infiltrated the protesters, but the protesters have infiltrated the convention; according to anti-RNC organisers, they have at least two moles working undercover with volunteers the city has recruited to help makes things run smoothly at Madison Square Garden.
Plans to oppose the convention are multiplying, suffusing activists with a giddy, growing tension. Marches and rallies, legal and illegal, are being planned for every day that the Republicans are in New York. There will be street theatre, including a Roman-style vomitorium in the East Village a few days before the convention starts, meant to signify Republican gluttony. Cheri Honkala, an organiser from Philadelphia, is mobilising homeless people, public housing tenants and others for a big, illegal "poor peoples' march" on August 30. Activists are holding weekend workshops where direct-action novices practice street blocking, and DIY medics learn to treat victims of pepper spray and police violence.
No one knows where it's all going - whether it will look like Chicago '68 or Seattle '99 or something altogether new. But activists see the coming conflict as history-making. "I want to see something so gigantic that it can't be misinterpreted," says Jason Flores-Williams, a political writer at High Times Magazine, who's been playing a dual role as a journalist covering the movement and an organiser shaping it. An intense man in his 30s with a shaved head and silver earring, Flores-Williams recently published the High Times Activist Guide to the Republican National Convention, which is part primer and part call to arms.
In May, eager to kick off a summer of activism, he put together a small early-morning protest near Rockefeller Center and was arrested along with two others during a traffic-blocking die-in on Fifth Avenue. For the RNC, he dreams of "a total expression of seething hatred that will go down in history as a moment in time when people stood up to the worst administration we've ever had."
Among other things, he envisions protesters locking down the streets of New York by chaining their arms together inside metal tubes, creating what's called a sleeping dragon. "You lock your arms in," he says. "When the cops come, they have to saw through these steel tubes. You get 30 people and you lock down a street for six hours. While this is happening, it gives other protesters a great opportunity to make their statement, to be further disruptive. They can lie down with these people, they can chant at the police, they can sit down where they are and be arrested for that or block further public space. They can disrupt the normal flow of society."
"It's coming together," he says with enthusiasm after a June meeting of a hundred or so anti-RNC activists at an East Village church. "Part of it is going to be fun and beautiful, but part of it has to instil fear into the power structure."
That won't be easy. The last four years have given police plenty of practice in instilling fear themselves. Relationships between cops and protesters have rarely been warm, but since September 11, they've grown toxic, with law enforcement routinely denying march permits and using overwhelming force against nonviolent demonstrators.
In 2000 at the Republican convention in Philadelphia, police infiltrated activist groups and made mass preemptive arrests. The Democratic convention in Los Angeles that year was little better. "Even protests with the city's permission have been met by legions of heavily armed police officers dressed in full riot gear," CNN reported.
The police fired tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds of demonstrators, injuring protesters and journalists alike. "It looked like a reenactment of a civil war battle," said Al Crespo, a photographer who was shot with a rubber bullet. Since September 11, things have only got worse. In the past three years, protest in America has increasingly come to resemble that in countries such as Egypt, where demonstrations are allowed only within tightly controlled spaces and riot police rush in at the first hint of spontaneity or disorder.
In April 2003, after the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center issued a bulletin about the potential for terrorist violence at an antiwar protest in Oakland, police opened fire on the peaceful crowd with wooden pellets. It later turned out there had been no real basis for the terrorism warning.
Mike Van Winkle, spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, told the Oakland Tribune that it was made because protest itself can be seen as a form of terrorism. "You can make an easy kind of link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest," he said. "You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act."
Something similar happened in November, when some 10,000 union members and retirees demonstrated at a free trade summit in Miami. They were met by 2,500 cops brandishing new crowd-control weaponry, paid for in part by a little-noticed $8.5m appropriation tacked onto the Iraqi reconstruction bill. Videos taken at the scene show nonviolent protesters being beaten with wooden clubs, shocked with Taser guns, shot in the back with rubber bullets and pepper-sprayed in the face.
"For a brief period in time, Miami lived under martial law," concluded a scathing report on police misconduct issued by a local panel charged with investigating the debacle. "Civil rights were trampled, and the sociopolitical values we hold most dear were undermined."
Since the free-trade summit protests, activists have come to refer to a militarised response to protest as the Miami model - and it's a model that other police forces have studied. Lt Bill Schwartz, a spokesman for the Miami police department, said that law enforcement officials from Georgia and New York travelled to Miami during the free trade summit to learn tactics for dealing with upcoming protests in their cities.
Georgia was getting ready for the G-8 summit in June, which brought together the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia. And New York, of course, was preparing for the RNC.
Upon his return from Miami, Bill Hitchens, director of Georgia's department of homeland security, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "We need to do much the same as they did."
They certainly tried. In May, shortly before the G8 economic summit was scheduled to take place on Sea Island in Georgia, the state's Republican governor declared a state of emergency, citing a danger from "unlawful assemblages." That enabled him to call out the National Guard, flooding the streets with soldiers in full camouflage.
Protesters who tried to attend a candlelight peace vigil had to pass through a checkpoint manned by armed troops. There probably won't be soldiers on the streets of New York, although, according to a February New York Daily News story, convention planners have discussed the possibility. But there will be a massive police presence, with 8,000 officers providing security around Madison Square at all times. According to Vallone, the NYPD has received $50m in federal money to prepare for the convention, and $18m is being used "for the latest in crowd-control devices," including nonlethal weaponry and "high-tech video surveillance devices."
Overseeing it all will be the Secret Service, which is in charge of the convention site. Under Bush, the Secret Service has proved particularly hostile to protest. They often set up "free-speech zones" to corral demonstrators far from the president, and they ask local police to arrest anyone who strays from the designated areas.
In October 2002, South Carolina activist Brett Bursey was arrested for trespassing when he waded into a crowd of Bush supporters waiting to greet the president and held up a "no war for oil" sign. On July 4 this year, police say, the Secret Service directed them to arrest a couple for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts at a presidential speech in West Virginia - despite the fact that the speech was open to the public.
The NYPD doesn't need much encouragement to shunt protesters aside. The department has attempted to control demonstrations against the war in Iraq by using interlocking metal barriers to create pens around groups of demonstrators, making it difficult to get in or out. The New York Civil Liberties Union sued to stop the practice, but on July 19 a federal judge ruled that police can continue to use the pens as long as they make it easier for protesters to enter and exit.
The city's security plan provides for a "designated protest area" on the south-west corner of Madison Square Garden. Those who want to protest the convention legally will be confined to this corner and probably sealed off in pens flanked by deep walls of men in blue. All of this has alarmed local Democratic politicians, many of whom are planning to take to the streets with the demonstrators.
"I am very concerned that activities during the Republican convention will be silenced or pushed out of the way, supposedly for the 'comfort' of those participating at the convention," State assemblyman Richard Gottfried said in a statement. "Our civil rights cannot be sacrificed for political purposes."
Meanwhile, as protesters themselves feel squeezed, their urge to rampage grows greater. "I think people will fight back if they're provoked," Moran says. "Usually a riot is an explosion of energy and anger at a situation. The cops create a situation where peoples' desires are completely foiled, so they lash out. I don't think that's unhealthy."
The city's reluctance to issue protest permits has engendered especial bitterness. Groups that applied for permits to hold legal marches during the convention were stalled for so long - sometimes more than a year - that the Democrat-dominated city council held hearings to investigate whether the mayor and the police department were deliberately stifling free speech. In July, the cops finally relented and issued a few permits, but by then many activists had given up on the system and resolved to break the law.
"In the last couple of months, the conversations have started shifting toward direct action," Moran says. "People are like, 'We've voted, we've asked for permits, we've played nice.'"
The targets, Moran says, should be far from Madison Square Garden. "Don't go where they're strongest," he says. "There's going to be a ton of people who are going to want to go to Madison Square Garden, they're going to want to yell at the building even though it's two avenues away." The activists' strength, he says, "is our ability to be creative and act in surprising ways."
Vallone concedes that with so many police deployed around the convention, the force will be stretched thin in the rest of the city. "There will be a drain of police officers from other areas," he says. "It will be difficult. But we have the best police force in the world to deal with it."
And what, exactly, will they be dealing with? Moran bristles when asked for specifics about the kind of actions New York is likely to see. "There's such an over-concentration on that question," he says, irritably. "It's really problematic. I don't want to be predictive."
Part of this is simple evasion. But Moran really doesn't know what people are going to do with his group's information. Indeed, not knowing is inherent in his anarchist model, which relies on decentralised cells or "affinity groups" of five to 20 people who dream up and carry out autonomous actions. When larger numbers are called for, affinity groups temporarily team up, forming larger units called "clusters," and then disband when the deed is done.
RNC Not Welcome gives them tools - links to maps showing the location of "war profiteers'" offices and delegates' hotels, schedules of Republican events, instructions on protecting oneself from pepper spray and tear gas, directions for occupying rooftops and recipes for tofu cream pies to be thrown in the faces of ideological enemies. The collective sends out email bulletins whenever they learn something new about the Republicans' plans. What people do with it all is up to them. "We're trying to provide some sort of structure for people who are only coming in for five days to plug into," Moran says.
Moran hasn't always been a radical. His introduction to activism was as conventional as it gets. As a student at SUNY Buffalo surviving on student loans, he joined student government and fought against cuts in state funding for education. He got involved in militant politics somewhat by accident, when he wandered drunk out of the infamous Lower East Side nightclub Save the Robots and into Blackout Books, an anarchist bookshop. He picked up a free copy of Earth First! magazine and was intrigued enough by its combative environmentalism to go to an Earth First! meeting a few weeks later. That led to a 1997 trip to an Earth First! gathering in Wisconsin. Afterward, he was arrested while protesting a proposed mine in northern Wisconsin and spent five nights in jail. It was the first of many arrests, including one for throwing a pie in the face of a biotech CEO in Berkeley.
Moran calls himself an anarchist but is weary of the subcultural poses adopted by so many of his young black-clad comrades. Recently, he and the four other members of RNC Not Welcome put out a "position paper" urging radicals to leave their black Balaclavas and facial piercings behind, and instead attempt to blend into crowds.
"Outside of marches, all-black clothing is rather conspicuous, so our dress code should be 'business casual," they wrote. "Sunglasses are suggested, the bigger the hipper. And hats are always in. Would you make the small sacrifice to cut your hair or take out your septum ring to stay out of jail? Racial and political profiling are commonly practiced here and we need you in the streets!"
Some are already adopting social camouflage. Upon learning that RNC CEO Bill Harris was scheduled to woo local Hispanic business leaders at a Harlem restaurant on June 22, two activists donned white shirts, ties and slacks and sneaked in. They went unnoticed as they replaced the Bush-Cheney stickers, posters and pamphlets with their own agitprop and covered the bathroom in anti-RNC stickers.
"The point was to let them know that yes, we are out there, and yes, they are not welcome in our city," one of them wrote in an email account of the action.
For Moran, dressing like a moderate isn't to be confused with acting like one. He has an almost Zen-like attitude toward the possibility that property-destroying protesters could spark a brutal police backlash, saying, "There's a certain empowerment that happens when you shed your fear."
Most activists believe that if violence does break out, the city is to blame. Mayor Bloomberg and the cops, says Bill Dobbs, spokesman for United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), are "flirting with or inviting chaos". As the most established of the anti-RNC organisers, there is pressure on UFPJ to condemn the tactics of activists like Moran, especially when it comes to property destruction. Journalists, says Dobbs, constantly call him and fish for negative quotes about radicals planning illegal actions, seeking to create what he calls a "good protester/bad protester" dichotomy. But right now, activists from all parts of the movement are presenting a united front. A memorandum is even circulating in which different types of organisers - mainstream and radical, those working within the law and outside it - promise not to undercut each other.
"We've each got our own approaches," Dobbs says. "We can still support and stand in solidarity with each other generally amidst individual differences in tactics." Moran, for his part, says, "We're not dissing anyone for applying for permits." As police pressure is ratcheted up, the lines between Dobbs' approach and Moran's are starting to blur.
On the evening of June 11, over 100 people gathered at Saint Marks Church for one of the monthly No RNC Clearinghouse meetings, in which organisers plot strategy and apprise each other of their progress. The room was stifling and the meeting tedious until a strikingly pretty dark-haired woman stood up and electrified the crowd with her call to civil disobedience.
"The Republicans are coming," she began. "In a shameless effort to exploit the tragedy of 9/11, they will craft an agenda that erodes the very freedoms they claim to fight for.
"This is where we step in," she continued. "On Tuesday, Aug. 31, a day of nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action will commence." It will start, she says, with a shout. "As clocks strike 11 a.m., two days before the renomination of George W. Bush, the people of the world will shout 'no' with one voice. From Brooklyn to Baghdad to London to Lisbon, from Selma to Sao Paulo, we'll raise our voices in this global expression of outrage ... Here in New York we will converge on Madison Square Garden. We will sit down in the streets and refuse to move ... We want more than speeches and protest pens. We want change!"
The crowd erupted in cheers, whistles and applause.
It's telling that this woman was frustrated with protests as usual because she's a colleague of Dobbs' at United for Peace and Justice, a group whose raison d'etre is big, traditional marches. UFPJ has nothing to do with the call to action issued at the meeting. Indeed, it's premised on the notion that old-school demonstrations are increasingly insufficient.
Few blame this on UFPJ, headed by veteran organiser Leslie Cagan, a squat woman with short silver hair who helped bring more than half a million people to Central Park in 1982 for a record-setting disarmament rally. Cagan is a radical, but she's also a professional, the kind of person who knows her way around the permitting process and is willing to work with police and city officials. Over the past year, though, the NYPD has done much to undermine her and UFPJ.
United for Peace and Justice is planning another huge march on August 29, the day before the convention begins. Cagan wanted to have the protest culminate at Central Park's Great Lawn, but the Parks Department refused to allow it on the grounds that attendees might destroy the lawn's newly planted grass. UFPJ offered to put up a bond to pay for potential damages, but the city hasn't relented. At one point, a city official suggested that UFPJ hold the rally in Queens instead. "The Parks Department slammed the door in our face," she says.
In June, Cagan told a City Hall hearing that the NYPD was "creating the potential for chaos" by refusing to let demonstrators use the park. Bill Perkins, the city council's deputy majority leader, had convened the hearing to investigate the city's response to convention protest plans. He was worried, he said, that "overzealous antiterrorism policing is creating an unnecessary burden on New Yorkers' rights to assemble." The city's refusal to let protesters use the Great Lawn left him angry and incredulous. "I am very concerned," he said at the hearing, "that we have such high regard for the rights of grass." So far, the rights of grass have prevailed. On July 21, UFPJ reluctantly accepted the city's offer to allow a rally on the West Side Highway, far from shops and foot traffic. UFPJ was told that it had no other choice - the city wouldn't negotiate. "This was not a happy decision to make," says Dobbs. "It reflects the bullying of Republican Mayor Bloomberg."
Among other problems, the West Side Highway site lacks shade and access to places to buy drinking water. Because the site is so long and narrow, the rally would have stretched along dozens of city blocks, making projecting sound a challenge.
UFPJ's compromise enraged many activists. Posters on anarchist sites like Indymedia.org condemned the group and promised to rally in Central Park regardless. "Who asked UFP&J to play hall monitor?" an activist from Philadelphia wrote.
"I'm almost glad the City has decided to deny us a permit for Central Park and that UFPJ caved," wrote another. "Now, we will take the Park in defiance of both the capitalist bosses and the self-appointed leaders of the 'movement.'"
The reaction was so negative, in fact, that Tuesday UFPJ abandoned its agreement with the city and announced that it will continue to fight for the use of the park. "Part of organising is listening to what people are saying," says Dobbs. "We are indeed marching by Madison Square Garden, and we are not, not going to that dreadful West Side Highway." UFPJ has reapplied for a permit to use the park but it seems unlikely that the city will grant it. If denied, Dobbs says his group might sue. And after that? "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."
Some are urging UFPJ to schedule the rally in the park without waiting for a permit. "Note to UFPJ," said one Indymedia poster. "If you abandon West Side Highway, and declare your intention to rally in Central Park with or without a permit, you will regain much of your credibility with the rank and file."
Right now, though, UFPJ isn't going that far, though Dobbs acknowledges that many people will try to take the park regardless. "The mayor has set up this volatility," he says.
Such volatility is good news for people like Flores-Williams, who are eager to see widespread confrontations with police. "There comes a time when you have to have an appropriate response," he says. "If nothing happens and it's a gentle response, that's going to be used as a sign of complicity and acceptance of the Republicans' presence here."
Flores-Williams seems like he's been waiting for this moment all his life. He was an expat in Prague in the early '90s, and after that a writer of polymorphously perverse, William Vollmann-style fiction in San Francisco. Now he talks as if he's standing on the precipice of a new era. "I like what happened in Seattle. But the real vision I have is what happened in Paris in 1968," he says, referring to the student uprising and general strike that convulsed the city.
"In my opinion, chaos serves to energise the human spirit. I've seen it. I lived in Eastern Europe when the walls were coming down. It was a beautiful period when art flourished. It was like the blinders came off." Yes, the cops will be out in force. "But there will be so many protests," he says, snapping his fingers. "Here 5,000, here 500. Popping off in all these different places. The cops will be stretched thin. Tempers will rise. All hell will break loose. That's what everybody wants - they just won't admit it."
That's not entirely true. Plenty of Bush opponents worry about what this grand carnival of rejection, while cathartic for some, will actually mean. There was nothing liberating, after all, about the welts and bruises protesters sustained in Miami last fall. "Stark brutality can paralyse people with fear," says Moran. "Miami hangs like a black cloud." So does the Chicago Democratic National Convention of 1968, where Mayor Richard Daley took a hard line against demonstrations and the cops clashed with protesters on the streets around the convention centre. Few doubt that the police, if provoked enough, will respond with equal force this year.
This terrifies Bush opponents, who worry that violence on the streets of New York will help the Republicans by making them look like Middle American moderates besieged by nutty radicals. They note that the Chicago '68 debacle helped cement Richard Nixon's reputation as the law-and-order candidate.
"The wilder and more disreputable the demonstrators look, the better for the Republicans," says Paul Berman, a former student organiser and author of "A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968. "At the height of the antiwar movement, Nixon specifically directed his motorcade to go through the middle of an antiwar riot in California in order to have people throw rocks at him or shout obscenities so that the TV would pose the question that night to the American public: 'Whom do you prefer, President Nixon, or a dope-smoking hippie communist rock thrower?' And the country had no doubt. This was just genius on his part. If Bush ends up winning the election, it will be because of this kind of tactic."
Thirty-five years ago, Berman's generation was notorious for its scornful dismissal of older, cautious liberals. Today, Moran sounds like their rightful descendant, insisting that Berman's lesson doesn't apply. Rather than being alienated by upheavals in Manhattan's streets, he believes ordinary people will join in.
"I've heard some old-timers say, 'If you people riot it will hand Bush the presidency,'" he says. "I think that's just lazy thinking. Any situation where we are joined by regular New Yorkers in the streets is a positive thing." Besides, it's too late to hold back the protests now. "The last four years definitely created a lot of rage in people," Moran says. "People may decide to unleash that rage on war profiteers. Our collective isn't going to condemn that. It's not our objective."
What is their objective? The Republicans should leave New York, he says. "It was a really bad mistake to come here."
· Michelle Goldberg is a senior writer for Salon based in New York.
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Group Marks 25 Years of Dissent
Nukewatch continues civil disobedience on military bases
Wednesday 11 August
by Kristina Gronquist,
Pulse of the Twin Cities
http://www.pulsetc.com/article.php?sid=1259
For 25 years, Pepper Wolf has been a school teacher - and, on the side, a political dissident with the Wisconsin-based group Nukewatch, now celebrating a quarter century of activism.
Wolf said she was drawn to Nukewatch by its creative protests, and by longtime Nukewatch activists Bonnie Urfer and John LaForge. Urfer and LaForge have been arrested and jailed with numerous others over the years for trespassing at Project ELF - the Navy's first strike nuclear war communication system - in northern Wisconsin. In addition to demonstrating at nuclear silos and recruiting centers, Nukewatch also monitors the transportation of radioactive waste around the country and around the world on an ongoing basis.
On Saturday, August 7, Nukewatch celebrates 25 years of nonviolent resistance, education and action. Wolf will appear with guest speakers Progressive magazine editor Matthew Rothschild, longtime activist Donna Howard and World Policy Institute Research Associate Frida Berrigan.
The event takes place at the group's headquarters, the Anathoth Community Farm in Luck, Wisconsin.
Being a part of the organization is, as Nukewatch activist Jerry Mechtenberg-Berrigan jokingly told a federal judge in court last October, "a terrible career move," as members have spent a great deal of time imprisoned.
"...In this courtroom we say No! to pre-emptive war and occupation, the slaughter of innocent people and the use of depleted uranium in Iraq," he said after being arrested for another nonviolent protest on the Wisconsin military site. "We say No! to the Trident system and Project ELF, and to the extension the 12,000 nuclear bombs in the U.S. arsenal. May they never be unleashed..."
"...The power holders of this country, the president and Congress, the judicial system, the corporations, the defense industry, and the military establishment are becoming increasingly lawless and murderous," member Molly Mechtenberg-Berrigan said during her appearance for the same protest. "Therefore, it is my obligation to refuse to cooperate with what is an evil system. As Gandhi said, "Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good...'"
Urfer said the significance of Nukewatch's 25-year anniversary is that they still exist as a peace and justice organization when so many other groups formed in the 1980s to oppose nuclear proliferation dissolved or changed focus. Nukewatch never accepted the notion that the nuclear threat lessened with the end of the Cold War, and Urfer says that the nuclear power and weapons industry remain an extremely dangerous and powerful force, one that is heavily subsidized with U.S. tax dollars. She believes that citizens have been "duped and bamboozled" into believing that nuclear power is safe or that there are fewer nuclear weapons today, which, she added, every single U.S. president has threatened to use.
The nuclear power and weapons industry feed off each other, she said, and their interconnected relationship makes the other grow stronger, a pestiferous enlarging. The nuclear weapons industry needs the nuclear power industry because its weaponry is built from plutonium, the toxic by-product of nuclear power.
"Every time we turn on our lights or our stereos, we feed these systems," she said.
Bonnie Urfer grew up in what she calls the "duck and cover" days. In grade school she remembers repeated classroom drills, warnings and instructions about what to do in case of a nuclear attack, including being told to "go home and shower" afterwards to "safely remove" the nuclear fallout dust. As a young adult she began working at The Progressive magazine. When she participated in her first action, Urfer says she knew that nonviolent resistance was her natural calling, her means to confront the horror of war that she had grown up with as a child.
When Bush proclaimed to the world that weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq, Urfer said she did not react with the fear that most Americans felt. Instead, she said, she found the idea of the United States proclaiming small "rogue" nations to be dangerous threats appeared absurd.
As the organization reflects this month on a quarter century of resistance and grassroots action, its members resolve that, as long as nuclear weapons and war industries remain a potent force in our nation, so will they. ||
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War Crimes Tribunal on Iraq: the case against Bush
By Heather Cottin
Tuesday 10th August 2004
http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/tribunal0812.php
Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general, has charged that President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard B. Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Attorney General John David Ashcroft are guilty of "crimes against peace and humanity and war crimes."
Clark added that the U.S. government under George W. Bush was "assuming powers of an imperial executive unaccountable to law."
Clark's statement was read to thousands who gathered to protest the Democratic National Convention on Boston Common July 25.
Ramsey Clark's charges will form the basis for the Iraq War Crimes Tribunal set for August 26 from 3:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. at the Martin Luther King Jr. Auditorium, located at 65th St. and Amsterdam Ave. in New York City.
Dozens of leading anti-war activists from India, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Italy and other countries, as well as from the U.S., will be traveling to the tribunal to give testimony against the Bush administration.
"It is important," said John Catalinotto, an organizer for the tribunal, "that people coming to protest the Republican National Convention understand the international character of the anti-war movement and hear the findings of the international war crimes tribunals on Iraq."
The event will be a first in the series of protests against the Republican National Convention in the city.
The two big-business parties both promise to expand the number of U.S. troops occupying Iraq. But opposition to this brutal occupation is growing too.
Check out PeopleJudgeBush.org
Ramsey Clark is writing the indictment that will charge the Bush administration with causing the death and maiming of tens of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of U.S. GIs, and providing false and deceptive rationales for war.
The gravest charge is that the U.S. government is guilty of crimes against peace--a crime prohibited by the United Nations Charter, the Nuremberg Principles, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Clark states that the U.S. is responsible for "authorizing, ordering and condoning assassinations, summary executions, kidnappings, secret and other illegal detentions of individuals, torture and physical and psychological coercion of prisoners."
The tribunal will investigate the "ordering and condoning [of] direct attacks on civilians, [and] civilian facilities." They will charge that the U.S. has threatened "the independence and sovereignty of Iraq by belligerently changing its government by force and assaulting Iraq in a war of aggression."
The International Action Center, organizing for the tribunal, has created a new web site. PeopleJudgeBush.org will collect history, statistics, testimony and pictures, and give people a concrete way to vote against the illegal war in Iraq. The website will provide information and photographs of the depredations of the war censored by the U.S. media.
The web site solicits testimony by e-mail of "photos, eyewitness accounts, research and ideas that can be used as evidence to build a case against the perpetrators of U.S. war crimes against Iraq."
It lists the crimes that expert witnesses with testify about--including war profiteering and privatizing of national resources, cultural genocide and the systematic looting of Iraq's art, archives and cultural institutions.
Testimonies will describe the use of prohibited weapons, including cluster bombs and depleted uranium. The tribunal will expose and oppose the theft of trillions of dollars from domestic social services so that the U.S. can pursue its policy of "Endless War" that has already targeted Haiti, Iran, Palestine, the Philippines, North Korea and Cuba.
The PeopleJudgeBush.org website concludes, "We have a responsibility to hold this administration accountable for the past and continuing horrors of the war and occupation... The people of the world know that it is those in the highest echelons of the U.S. government who are responsible for the atrocities, torture, deaths and war crimes in Iraq."
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EVERY DAY IS HIROSHIMA DAY
Fifty-nine years later, mushroom clouds are gathering.
By Alexander Zaitchik
August 11-17, 2004
NY Press
http://www.nypress.com/17/32/news&columns/AlexanderZaitchik.cfm
LIARS!" they screamed. "Liars!"
An SUV had stopped at a red light, and two young men were leaning out the windows, jabbing fingers at our small anti-nuclear rally in Bryant Park.
"Liars! You're all a bunch of goddamn liars!"
Speaking on the stage at that moment was a peace group from Japan. I doubt if many readers have witnessed a sight starker than two jarheads in an SUV hurling insults at elderly Hiroshima survivors. It was so grotesque, it was almost funny.
I remembered this incident last Friday, August 6, with a mixture of anger and fear. Anger for obvious reasons, and fear because the guys in the SUV spoke for this country as much as anyone at the peace rally. Probably more so.
Hiroshima Day is the world's most important shared anniversary. It's an opportunity to stop and reflect not only upon the Bomb's victims, but also upon the fact that our planet remains hard-wired for a quick and fiery climax. On every other day of the year, the daunting and long-term dilemma of nuclear weapons moves beneath us, out of sight, under tides of comforting pseudo-news. This is why we need August 6. Especially as the last living witnesses to that day die off, the burden falls heavier upon us to remember and imagine what can happen in a split second on an August morning.
Last week's Hiroshima Day was the most important in decades, though you wouldn't know it reading major U.S. dailies or watching CNN. The New York Times, to pick just one example, neglected to mention the anniversary anywhere in its August 6 edition, but found enough ink to eulogize photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose work, the paper editorialized, is "fundamental to our understanding of the 20th Century." As if we just emerged from the century of the Formally Perfect Photo Composition, and not the century of Total War.
On past Hiroshima Days, presidents from both parties have paused to at least make perfunctory remarks about the horrors of nuclear war. "We must never forget what nuclear weapons wrought upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki," Ronald Reagan said on August 6, 1985. "The United States...and all the nations of the world must work to ensure that the atom is never again used as a weapon of war, but as an instrument of peace."
Words, sure, but important ones.
Surprising no one, a Hiroshima Day statement again failed to emerge from the Bush White House last week. Though the president regularly puts his signature on official proclamations commemorating annual events such as National Safe Boating Week and Loyalty Day (May 1, don't forget), no presidential seal accompanied a single sentence about the memory and meaning of Hiroshima. In today's Washington, nukes-at least our own-have become damn-near cuddly. There is in 2004 no such thing as a bad weapon-only bad countries. For the first time since the early 80s, an administration is proposing that we stop fearing the bomb altogether and embrace it as a legitimate battlefield weapon, if not a tool of foreign policy. Times have changed, Bush officials say, and a well-placed nuclear charge may be the only way to smoke out the bad guys and their own, less freedom-loving nuclear weapons.
But just because they say so doesn't make it true. In honor of the 59th anniversary of Hiroshima's bombing, and in belated response to the guys in the SUV that screamed "Liar," here are three real lies, each directly related to the anniversary America forgot.
Lie #1: The U.S. needs new nuclear weapons to fight the "war on terror/axis of evil." The current administration has controversially secured funding for research into low-yield nuclear warheads called Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrators. It claims these will be needed to root out fortified underground weapons labs, thus preventing their products from detonating on the streets of Cleveland. But as former National Security Advisor Paul Nitze and others have forcefully argued, the U.S. possesses high-tech conventional weapons more than capable of taking out such bunkers. What's more, countries in the future are likely to disperse their labs and hide them in urban centers in order to deter attack, as Iran is believed to have done.
So why build the things? Most serious analysts agree that the targets of the proposed mini-nukes are the Russian command facilities inside the Yamantau and Kosvinsky mountains. The Bush administration's drive to build these weapons is thus heightening tensions with Russia, and is believed to have been the trigger for Russia's massive war games last January and February. Since most Americans are not eager to support post-Cold War arms racing with Russia, the terror card is necessary to rally support for this new generation of nukes.
Lie #2: We can prevent an "American Hiroshima" without arms control. Osama Bin Laden and his associates have spoken of their desire for an "American Hiroshima." There is every reason to take them seriously. Preventing al Qaeda and related groups from acquiring fissile materials should rank among any U.S. president's highest national security priorities. The Bush administration claims to understand this, yet demonstrates otherwise at every turn. Last week, the White House stated its opposition to including verification and inspection provisions in any future Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, which could put sharp curbs on nations' ability to produce weapons-grade uranium and plutonium.
How can we expect to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists if nobody knows how much exists and where?
Lie #3: We have to "fight them there so we don't have to fight them here." The flip side of the Bush Administration's nukaphilia is currently on display in the streets of Najaf. The administration's rationale for the doctrine of preemptive war plays on a false choice between fighting terrorists on their turf or ours. Putting aside the nationalist character of the Iraqi resistance, imagine a scraggly young fighter from Sadr City trying to get a visa at any U.S. embassy. Unlikely. Adorable teenage Polish girls can't even get into this country anymore. The only terrorists we're going to be fighting "on American streets" are those in sleeper cells already here.
As long as we boast and exercise the right to attack other nations at will, others will aggressively seek nuclear weapons. The more that happens, the harder it will be to control nuclear materials and keep them out of the hands of terrorists.
That is the whole point of pre-emption, isn't it?
LAST WEEK HIROSHIMA Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba called for the abolition of nuclear weapons by 2020. That isn't going to happen. For now, we should aim to put a freeze on new weapons and account for and secure the world's stockpiles of nuclear materials. This alone would do more for U.S. security than 20 preemptive wars and a missile defense shield that actually worked. Since it's obvious the Republicans aren't up to the task, we'll just have to trust John Kerry when he says that he is.
Here's hoping next Hiroshima Day is a slightly more hopeful one.
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