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NUCLEAR
U.S. begins 2 probes at Palo Verde
Canada reactors worse off than expected
Iran claims report on its preventive operations 'distorted'
A Nuclear Shi'ite Empire?
Mishap may kill off Japan nuclear plants
Opinion: A nuclear disaster - How well are we protected?
Washington accused of ignoring nuclear terror threat
Fire Hazard - Bush Leaves Nuclear Plants at Risk
LANL said late on clean-up
S.C. State's partnership with national laboratory grows to 'another level'
State gets veto power over shipments
MILITARY
Iran Disquieted by Nearby U.S. Presence
Militants Leaving Shrine In Najaf
Clashes Slow as Cleric's Grip on Mosque Seems to Slip
Iraqi captors to 'free US journalist'
Arafat Pledges to Curb Corruption, Lawmakers Demand Action
U.S. Now Said to Support Growth for Some West Bank Settlements
US Signals Flexibility on Israeli Settlement Growth
Muslim Nations Urged to Meet About Najaf by Iran Leader
Philippines could lose out on 3,000 jobs with ban on workers in Iraq
US doctors 'aided' Abu Ghraib abuses
Pentagon says no evidence of medical collaboration
U.N. Bombing Anniversary Highlights Safety
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Across New York, a Death Penalty Stuck in Limbo
Homeland Security Monitors Canada Border
Homeland Security Talks Criticized
Hundreds Report Watch-List Trials
U.S. Increasing Surveillance of Canadian Border
Homeland Security officer charged in border incident
U.S. Indicts 3 on Charges of Helping Militant Group
POLITICS
Convention Boss's Other Hat: Lobbying G.O.P. for Defense Clients
9/11 Panel to Wrap Up Its 20-Month Inquiry
Bush Campaign Defends Its Use of Olympics in a Television Ad
OTHER
Wide U.S. Inquiry Into Purchasing for Health Care
ACTIVISTS
Protesters Greet U.S. Carrier in Japan
Peace activists reach out to students
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
U.S. begins 2 probes at Palo Verde
Recent woes raise concerns on safety
Max Jarman
The Arizona Republic
Aug. 21, 2004
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0821paloverde21.html
For the fourth time this year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is sending special investigative teams to the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station west of Phoenix to take a closer look at recent events at the plant.
Federal regulators said one group will determine whether air recently found trapped in key safety lines posed a significant threat to the plant.
Palo Verde concerns
Some events that have raised regulatory concerns at Palo Verde this year:
JANUARY: Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials call in Palo Verde managers to discuss concerns raised over allegations of deteriorating relations between management and workers.
FEB. 3: Unit 1 is shut down when radioactive water is discovered dripping from a drain line.
FEB. 19: Unit 2 is shut down when radioactive water is found leaking from a tube in the unit's steam generator. The NRC launches an investigation.
FEB. 29: Unit 3 is shut down because of electrical problems. Later, boron is found on a heater sleeve, indicating a leak of radioactive material.
MAY: NRC team sent to Palo Verde to investigate a potential erosion of a "culture of safety" after allegations of management-employee disconnect.
JUNE 7: Unit 3 shut down after turbine control fails.
JUNE 14: Units 1, 2 and 3 are shut down when a power surge cuts off outside power to the plant. NRC sends a team to investigate.
JULY 29: Air is found in a line that provides water for emergency cooling for the plant's three reactor cores.
AUG. 20: NRC sends team to Palo Verde to evaluate July 29 waterline issue and follow up on investigation of June 14 outage.
The other team will follow up on the investigation of a June 14 power surge in the West Valley that shut down the plant's three reactors. Regulators noted concerns about the way the nuclear plant had shut down and the age of some of the equipment at the Westwing electrical substation, where the surge should have been stopped.
Regulators say there has been an unusually high number of problems at Palo Verde this year, but they believe they are unrelated and not indicative of a pattern of neglect or faulty procedures.
"If they have questions, we'll answer them," said Jim McDonald, spokesman for plant operator Arizona Public Service Co. "We don't anticipate this being an ongoing problem."
Investigators probed a steam generator leak in February, and in May they investigated allegations of erosion of a "culture of safety" because of what was called a disconnect between management and workers.
The June 14 incident was one of five unplanned outages at Palo Verde this year that have caught regulators' eyes. Three of the events involved radiation leaks.
Anthony Gody, chief of the NRC's Region IV Reactor Safety Division, said Palo Verde has had an unusually high number of problems this year. "These things are supposed to operate pretty reliably," he said.
Palo Verde's first two units were completed in 1986 and are approaching middle age. Palo Verde is the nation's largest nuclear power plant and is commissioned for 40 years, although APS will likely seek an extension.
The initial investigation of the June incident concluded that the safe shutdown of the plant was "complicated by equipment failures, procedural issues and human performance issues."
Victor Dricks, a spokesman in the NRC's Region IV headquarters in Arlington, Texas, said the agency felt the incident needed a "closer look."
The second issue to be investigated involves air found inside lines that supply water for emergency cooling of Palo Verde's three nuclear reactor cores.
The pipes were dry when inspected July 29, raising concerns that the void could incapacitate the pumps when they were started.
APS simply filled the pipes with water after the discovery.
The commission said it wanted to independently assess APS' corrective action to determine if it is acceptable for the long term and that there are no generic issues for other nuclear plants.
The problem also has been identified at the Waterford Nuclear Power Plant in Louisiana.
Palo Verde Manager Dave Smith said the eventual replacement of water with air was because of the way the system was designed. If the NRC concludes that it poses a safety risk, Smith said, APS will take corrective action. He was unsure what that would involve.
All three of the plant's reactors are running at full capacity.
Meanwhile, Gregg Overbeck, APS senior vice president in charge of Palo Verde, was in Arlington on Friday to answer questions about a 2002 accident that damaged a radioactive fuel assembly being installed at the plant.
The accident was not immediately reported to plant managers, and an investigation raised concerns about "willful disregard for procedural requirements."
The NRC raised concerns this year about allegations of a disconnect between Palo Verde's management and its employees, which regulators said possibly could lead to an erosion of the plant's culture of safety.
Palo Verde led the industry last year with the number of allegations filed by employees with the NRC. The allegations are generally filed with the agency because the employee could not get satisfaction from management or they feared retaliation.
The 28 allegations ranged from safety concerns such as the showers and eyewash stations to more generic human resource issues.
-------- canada
Canada reactors worse off than expected
Pickering backup system to cost OPG $250 million More than double earlier estimate
JOHN SPEARS BUSINESS REPORTER,
Aug. 21, 2004
Toronto Star
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1093039812468&call_pageid=968350072197&col=969048863851
Ontario Power Generation Inc. will have to spend up to $250 million, more than double earlier estimate, to install backup generators at its limping Pickering B nuclear generating station.
Inspections have also shown the station's reactors are in worse condition than previously thought, forcing the company to do more inspections and to advance and lengthen planned shutdowns.
The news comes in OPG's second-quarter results. They show the company lost $41 million in the three months ended June 30, compared with a profit of $8 million a year earlier. Revenue was $1.349 billion, down from $1.467 billion a year earlier.
OPG's earnings are dampened by the fact it must rebate a portion of its revenue to customers because of its market dominance. The rebate totalled $208 million in the latest quarter, compared with $221 million a year earlier.
The rebate curbs power prices, but also cuts OPG profits that are supposed to help retire the unfunded debt of $20.2 billion left to taxpayers by the former Ontario Hydro. Far from being paid off, that debt continues to increase.
On the bright side, provincially owned OPG benefited during the latest quarter from a 27 per cent increase in output from its low-cost hydro-electric generators compared to last year. Higher output from three nuclear units that have returned to service in the past year, one operated by OPG and two by Bruce Power, also meant that OPG had less output from its high-cost fossil fuel units. Fossil fuel output was cut almost in half.
While production costs fell, the benefit was offset by higher pension costs and higher depreciation related to the planned 2007 shutdown of all OPG's coal-fired generating stations.
The second quarter had yet more detailed news of problems at the Pickering B nuclear station, whose performance has been overshadowed in recent years by the huge cost overruns of restarting the mothballed Pickering A plant.
Last year's blackout showed that Pickering B had inadequate backup power supply to run critical safety, communications and operating equipment.
Three months ago, OPG estimated it would have to spend $100 million to install better backup generators.
Now, the company says it will have to spend $40 to $50 million immediately to provide temporary backup "while a permanent solution is investigated." That will take several years and cost another $100 to $200 million, for a total of up to $250 million.
OPG spokesperson John Earl said technical staff need to study the size, type and configuration of backup units.
In addition, OPG says inspections have shown that Pickering B's fuel channels, which contain uranium bundles in the reactor core, are in worse shape than previously thought. That will trigger more inspections, lengthening planned shutdowns.
As well, maintenance work planned for 2007 to 2008 and costing $25 million to $50 million will now have to be done from this year through 2006.
That will further drag down Pickering B's performance record. The station ran at 62.8 per cent capability in the past three months, little changed from 60.5 per cent a year earlier. It has run at 67.2 per cent over the past six months, compared with 62.2 per cent a year earlier.
(The newer Darlington nuclear station, by comparison, has run at better than 80 per cent for the same period.)
Longer shutdowns at Pickering B will put more pressure on Ontario's over-all electricity supply. An industry task force warned in January that Ontario could have "insufficient power to meet its peak requirements" by 2006.
The news should raise some hard questions about the future of Pickering B, said Tom Adams, executive director of Energy Probe.
"The writing's on the wall for a multibillion-dollar rehabilitation decision on Pickering B coming up forthwith," he said.
The station reaches the end of its normal operating life by about 2009, at which point it will require a major overhaul.
The latest news raises questions about whether it's worth continuing to spend money on the plant, especially if more unexpected problems crop up, Adams said.
-------- iran
Iran claims report on its preventive operations 'distorted'
Xinhuanet
2004-08-21
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-08/21/content_1847243.htm
TEHRAN, Aug. 21 -- Iran on Saturday denied a report that it might launch a preemptive attack to prevent a possible raid on its nuclear sites by the United States or Israel, saying the report "distorted" its Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani.
Some media reported on Wednesday Shamkhani told the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV that Iran might launch a preemptive strike against US forces in the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear site.
The official IRNA Saturday quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi as saying remarks made by Shamkhani on the country's preventive operations have been "distorted."
"The Iranian defense minister, in his remarks, stressed that the Islamic Republic defends its territorial integrity and its national interests. However, his remarks have not been quoted precisely and have been misrepresented," Asefi said.
"We will not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us," Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV when asked if Iran would respond to a US attack on its nuclear facilities, speaking in Farsi through an interpreter into Arabic.
"Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly,"he added, according to the translator.
The US and Israel, accusing Iran of developing nuclear weapons secretly, have been threatening to launch a surprising attack upon Iran's atomic power plant at Bushehr.
Earlier on Wednesday, Brigadier General Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr, deputy commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, warned that Iran would strike Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona if Israel's threat was materialized.
----
A Nuclear Shi'ite Empire?
An early Iranian nuclear facility under construction
Paris (UPI)
Aug 21, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclear-doctrine-04h.html
European colleagues joke that German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's attractive new Iranian lady friend gives him particular insight into the thinking in Tehran. They could be right. Fischer has been saying for the last two years that Iran would be the big winner from the Bush administration's war on Iraq and the overthrow of Tehran's old enemy, Saddam Hussein.
That certainly seems to be the way that Ali Shamkhani, the Iranian defense minister, analyzes the situation. In an interview last week with al-Jazeera TV, Shamkhani mocked the idea that the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan were any kind of threat to Tehran.
On the contrary, he insisted, American soldiers in the region, tied down and bleeding daily to guerrilla attacks, were now hostages to Iran. The implication, which British officials in Iraq now consider to be more than half-true, is that Iran could turn the heat on the American troops up or down at will.
Shamkhani is supposed to be a worried man. He is meant to be frightened by the constant hints that Israel and/or the United States is weighing a pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear reactor at Bushehr and at its uranium enrichment facilities.
Shamkhani and the ayatollahs are supposed to be quaking in their slippers at the prospect of a formal U.S. demand to the next meeting of the International Atomic Energy Authority on Sept. 13 that Iran be declared in breach of its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty - the prelude to United Nations sanctions.
There is not much sign of alarm in Tehran. Speaking just after another successful test of Iran's new 800-mile range Shihab 3 missiles (which can reach Israel), Shamkhani also warned the U.S. and Israel last week that it was ready to launch its own military strikes to stop them from attacking its nuclear sites.
We will not sit idly and wait for what others will do to us, the defense minister said. Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly. America is not the only one present in the region. We are also present, from Khost to Kandahar in Afghanistan; we are present in the Gulf and we can be present in Iraq.
This could be bluster from Iran. It could reflect Tehran's confidence that it will not face any serious diplomatic pressure while the Americans remain at odds with their European allies.
It could also reflect Tehran's confidence that even the toughest hawks of the Bush administration will be restrained until the November presidential elections. If Tehran has been playing for time in its diplomacy with the Europeans and the IAEA over the past year, it has certainly won a lot of months to continue enriching uranium.
The latest threats of U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that Iran will either be isolated or submit sound less than convincing. Similar American threats do not seem to have had much impact on North Korea. The Bush administration may yet go down in history - despite the famous axis of evil warning -- as the team that let the genie of nuclear proliferation out of the bottle.
That moment of decision, when the West either accepts the inevitability of a nuclear-armed Iran or launches a military strike to pre-empt it, is looming ominously closer. And such an attack, while rallying Iranian opinion behind the ayatollahs, is unlikely to do more than buy a few years of delay.
Already, anxious officials in London, Berlin and Paris are trying to assess how long it will be before the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran inspires Turkey, Kazakhstan or even Saudi Arabia to follow suit.
The problem is to understand Iran's real motives. Tehran's desire to have a nuclear deterrent is understandable. It is surrounded by nuclear powers: Russia to the north; India and Pakistan to the West; and Israel to the east. The American superpower has already publicly placed Iran on the axis of evil hit-list.
But are Iran's ambitions more than just defensive? Israeli officials have for some time been talking about Tehran's hopes of building a Shi'ite empire, based on the religious ties between Iran's own Shi'ite population, the Shi'ite majority of Iraq, the Shi'ites of Southern Lebanon and the Shi'ite minority in Saudi Arabia, who mostly live along the coast of the Persian Gulf where the oil is.
If Tehran, or rather the ayatollahs of the holy city of Qom, could bring all these Shi'ites together into a political unit that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, and commanded the oil of Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that would be an extremely rich and influential entity. And if it also was defended by nuclear weapons, it might with impunity dominate the Middle East and the Islamic world.
There are formidable objections to this Israeli nightmare. The Shia sect of Islam has not historically been a powerful bond. It did not stop Iraqi Shi'ites (who are Arabs) from fighting Iranian Shi'ites (who are Persian) in the long war of the 1980s.
They do not even speak the same language, and there is a real and potentially divisive rivalry betwen the Shi'ite traditions of the Iranian holy city of Qom and the Iraqi holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. And despite Iran's long years of arming and training the largely Shi'ite Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, there is little sign of any meaningful and lasting political alliance.
Still, it is the kind of grandiose idea to catch the imagination of an ambitious ayatollah in Tehran or Qom, particularly when he sees the Sunni fundamentalists of al-Qaida seeking to combine the twin powers of Persian Gulf oil and nuclear weapons. If the Sunnis can dream such dreams of oil and nuclear power, why not the Shia?
History has been moving with gathering speed in the Middle East since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and Germany's Joschka Fischer is not the only seasoned observer who sees Iran as the likely beneficiary. The challenge now, with Washington distracted for the next 10 weeks of presidential campaigning, is to see whether the United States and its NATO allies can agree a common strategy for this turbulent future.
-------- japan
Mishap may kill off Japan nuclear plants
The Mihama accident was the country's deadliest
By Julian Ryall in Tokyo
Saturday 21 August 2004
Aljazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/CC9059A7-114F-49E0-81E2-625274117AD2.htm
The Atomic Energy Commission of Japan has admitted that the 9 August fatal accident at the Mihama nuclear plant in Fukui, central Japan, may force a rethink of the government's commitment to atomic power.
The accident, in which four maintenance staff were killed and seven others were injured, is only the latest in a list of the alarmingly frequent mishaps at Japanese nuclear plants, but could prove to be a telling blow.
Clearly chastened by the media and public backlash in the wake of the accident, in which a pipe failed and sprayed super-heated steam on the workers, Kansai Electric Power Co (Kepco) announced on 13 August that it was shutting down all eight nuclear plants that are presently in operation, for safety checks.
"The Japanese government has a long-term policy on nuclear power that is reviewed every five years," said Osamu Gotoh, director of planning at the Atomic Energy Commission of Japan.
"The policy will be reviewed next year and we have just started to gather information to be submitted - but we wonder about the impact of this very severe accident."
A spokesman for Kepco said the incident occurred at 3.28pm on 9 August and that automatic safety protocols immediately shut down the 826,000-kilowatt reactor, which went into service in 1976.
A task force headed by Kepco President Yosaku Fuji has been set up to examine the cause of the accident.
Steam burns
According to initial inquiries, a pipe running from the facility's secondary coolant system exploded, releasing high-temperature steam into the building.
There was no release of radioactive material, but the four men suffered 50% burns to their bodies and died of suffocation as the steam burned their respiratory tracts.
"Right now, we are not sure how much influence it will have on the government's policy, that will depend on the results of the inquiry, but it will have to be noted," Gotoh said.
"The steam leaked from the second loop of the plant, which does not have any radiation in it, so we believe there was no leak of radiation outside of the plant," said Kazue Suzuki, an expert on nuclear power with Greenpeace Japan.
"But it is still already the most lethal in the history of Japan's nuclear industry," he said.
Raising more questions
In September 1999, Japan was shocked by a critical accident at a Japan Nuclear Fuel Conversion Co plant in the town of Tokai that led to three employees being exposed to massive doses of radiation as they transferred liquid uranium into a mixing tank by hand, violating government rules.
Two of the three died and hundreds of nearby residents suffered varying levels of exposure to the radiation.
The latest incident is sure to raise more questions about safety in the nuclear industry in Japan.
"Kepco has been planning to put plutonium into its reactors, even though that has met some opposition from local people," said Suzuki. "After this latest incident, that opposition is certain to be stronger. People just don't trust nuclear power."
Power of future?
Kepco has been a strong advocate of using a pluthermal programme using MOX - mixed plutonium uranium oxide - fuel as the power of the future, with Fukui Prefecture Governor Issei Nishikawa in March giving the company permission to restart a programme that has been dogged by problems.
On 12 August, that permission was rescinded after the governor said the accident "resulted from your company's failure to place emphasis on taking safety measures".
Suspending the project, Governor Nishikawa said: "The safety of nuclear power plants is taken for granted, but it is no longer something that we can rely upon," adding that Kepco "should have known better".
There have been criticism that the MOX provided by British Nuclear Fuels does not meet technical specifications and it has also been pointed out that the programme will lead to the commercialisation of tonnes of weapons-grade nuclear fuel.
Third largest producer
Japan has 52 nuclear reactors that generate 45,740 megawatts of electricity, making Japan the third largest producer of nuclear power in the world, behind the United States and France.
Because it has very few natural resources of its own, the Asian country relies on atomic energy for more than one-third of its power needs.
"Japan has very few resources, with all the oil that we need, for example, imported from the Middle East or other sources," said Gotoh.
"Nuclear energy is a very good choice for us as it has many benefits and is important to our energy security."
Industry clean-up
But he accepts that the industry needs to clean up its act if it is to convince the public that the benefits of nuclear power outweigh the negatives.
"We do not yet know what caused the accident at Mihama, but it is clear that safety has to be the first priority," he said.
"Half a century ago, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the targets of atomic bombs so we believe that safety at private companies, universities and research institutes involved in nuclear power have to be very careful because one little accident can be very powerful for those who oppose atomic energy."
Despite the official line that safety is of the utmost concern, anti-nuclear campaigners are not convinced that enough is being done to protect the public.
Suspecting whitewash
"It is too early to know for sure, but we suspect the official report into the Mihama incident will be a whitewash because they are just looking at old, inadequate data," said Aileen Mioko Smith, of the Kyoto-based Green Action environmental group.
"We hope that this accident will have a trickle-down effect on the Japanese public, when they see the relatives of the dead crying and hitting out at the head of Kepco"
Aileen Mioko Smith, Green Action "We say they should shut all their plants down to conduct checks now; if they're not willing to do that, then already it's a whitewash," she said.
Representatives of Green Action held three hours of talks with senior officials of Kepco on 11 August, with Smith saying that while the company has been very quick to apologise to the families of the dead and injured, management has been equally speedy about trying to avoid legal responsibility.
Kepco's top echelons are "fleeing their responsibility" by saying that managers of individual plants should be held accountable for any mishaps, Smith said.
Minor impact feared
"We hope that this accident will have a trickle-down effect on the Japanese public, when they see the relatives of the dead crying and hitting out at the head of Kepco," she said.
"But we fear it will have a very minor impact on the government's nuclear power policy.
"There will be a big upheaval now, but then it will quickly go back to business as usual," she added.
"In Japan, there is a very big gap between what the public wants and feels comfortable with, and the need to have power and feed industry and the domestic market."
-------- russia
Opinion: A nuclear disaster - How well are we protected?
August 21, 2004
Bellona Foundation
http://www.bellona.no/en/international/russia/envirorights/info_access/34915.html
MOSCOW-Eighteen years have passed since the day of the Chernobyl catastrophe. As we well know, that tragedy was aggravated by the secrecy imposed by the state to keep information about it from reaching the people-who were denied any chance to take urgent self-protection measures to reduce the ruinous effect of radiation. Here is what USSR Deputy Prosecutor General Vladimir Andreyev wrote about the catastrophe in his 1990 letter to the Commission on Liquidating the Effects of the Chernobyl Acident held at the Supreme Council of the USSR:
"From the first days of the accident, as well as in the following months, the population of the regions affected by the radiation contamination was not receiving reliable information about the radiation situation. Decision No. 423 of September 24, 1987, made by the governmental commission on classifying information pertaining to the issues of the accident at the Chernobyl [Nuclear Power Plant] and of the elimination of its consequences, did not facilitate the organisation of all necessary measures needed to ensure the radiation safety of the population, [and] denied the people the opportunity to take, in time and with their own efforts, measures to protect themselves from ionising radiation. The circumstances mentioned above led in the years of 1986 through 1989 to the significant radiation over-exposure of the population on the territory of the [Ukranian Soviet Socialist Republic], [Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Russian Soviet Federative Social Republic]."
Since then have we become more protected against the impact of such catastrophes? Are there any guarantees that the potential damage inflicted on our health by the operation of radioactively hazardous sites can be compensated for in any way? Or are we still-just as we used to be-held hostage by the irresponsibility of powers that be?
Today, ensuring our own safety depends in many ways on the efficiency of the legislation and the active stance of the citizens-in other words, on our own actions.
Vadim Kantor/Greenpeace
Legal aspects
The legal base for managing radiation and environmental safety in the application of atomic energy, the determination of responsibility for infliction of nuclear-related damage, the financial coverage of expenses involved with the elimination of consequences of a nuclear accident, and other relevant issues are provided for in today's Russia by a dizzyingly comprehensive list of federal laws including: "On the Use of Atomic Energy," "On Radiation Safety of the Population," "On Funding Especially Radioactively Hazardous Manufactures and Sites," "On Special Environmental Programmes of Remediation of Radioactively Contaminated Sections of Territories," "On the Administrative Responsibility of Organisations for Violations of the Legislation in the Sphere of Application of Atomic Energy," "On the Protection of the Population and Territories from Natural and Technogenic Emergency Situations." Besides the federal laws, the following documents are in use: Decree No. 763 of October 15, 1992, "On the measures of social protection of the population residing in territories neighbouring sites of application of atomic energy," Decree No. 865 of July 14, 1997, "On the ratification of the Regulation on licensing activities in the sphere of application of atomic energy," Decree No. 306 of March 14, 1997, "On the rules of decision-making on the siting and construction of nuclear installations, sources of radiation and storage sites,"-all issued by the Government of the Russian Federation-as well as other normative and legal acts.
But despite this imposing and abundant list of laws and legal acts for managing environmental and radiation safety, the practical question of who will have to evacuate the population in case of a major nuclear accident and how this will be carried out remains unanswered.
The Federal Law "On the Use of Atomic Energy", or FL-170, dictates that the entire burden of responsibility for the safety of a nuclear installation is carried by the operator organisation. In accordance with this law, the operator organisation is responsible for the development and implementation of measures aimed at preventing accidents at the nuclear installation in question and-according to FL-170, Article 35-at "reducing the negative impact [of accidents] on the employees, the population and the environment"
Additionally, as required by Article 19 of the Federal Law "On Radiation Safety of the Population," organisations where the occurrence of a radiation accident is possible must have the following: a list of potential radiation accidents with scenarios describing the development of their consequences; criteria used for making decisions in the conditions of a radiation accident; a plan of measures for the protection of personnel and the population from a radiation accident and its consequences approved by local government authorities; means of providing information and means of eliminating the consequences of a radiation accident, and emergency and evacuation units formed by members of personnel.
Should a radiation accident occur on the territory of an organisation dealing with nuclear and radioactive materials, the organisation must:
-ensure the implementation of measures to protection personnel and the population from the radiation accident and its consequences;
-report the radiation accident to the relevant state authority, including the federal bodies of executive power that perform state supervision and control in the sphere of providing radiation safety, as well as bodies of local authority and the population of the territories that bear the risk of increased radiation exposure;
-take measures to provide medical aid to those who suffered in the radiation accident;
-localise the ground zero of the radioactive contamination and prevent the spread of radioactive substances in the environment;
-carry out an analysis and prepare a scenario for the development of the radiation accident and the radiation situation in the conditions of a radiation accident;
-take measures to normalise the radiation situation on the territory of organisations that carry out activities involving use of sources of ionising radiation after the radiation accident is eliminated.
It is thus determined by legislation that it is the responsibility of the operator organisation to take measures to reduce the negative effects of an accident on the population and the environment, including doing so in accordance with the plan of measures developed for the protection of its employees and the population from the radiation accident and its consequences.
In other words, all issues relevant to who and how will perform the evacuation of the population from the contaminated areas, who will provide the means of protection and other such issues must be detailed in these plans of measures of protection of the population-copies of which must be available both at the radioactively hazardous sites and the bodies of local authority.
At the same time, local authorities are also responsible for developing emergency and evacuation measures. Because any accident at a radioactively hazardous site that has led or can lead to human casualties, damage to the health of the population or the well-being of the environment, classifies as an emergency situation, by default, these issues are partially regulated by the Federal Law "On the Protection of the Population and Territories from Natural and Technogenic Emergency Situations" (from here on, FL-68).
In accordance with Article 11 of the mentioned law, bodies of local authority must implement the following by their own efforts:
As a result, many important parameters of these plans are decided by numerous internal instructions and regulations that inevitably lead to misunderstandings and lack of coordination between various bodies that share responsibilities protecting of the population.
For instance, some deputies of the Balakovo Municipality believe that the evacuation of the population residing in Balakovo-a town on the Western bank of the Saratov Reservoir on the Volga River in Central Russia, which is home to Russia's youngest nuclear power plant that operates four VVER-1000 reactors with a combined 4000-megawatt capacity-is the duty of the management of the Balakovo plant itself as Balakovo is included into the so-called "monitoring zone."
The management of the Balakovo Nuclear Power Plant, however, insists that the plant-or the operator organisation-only have the obligation to maintain the safe operation of the plant and protect its employees in case an accident occurs. Anything else that has to do with the population of Balakovo and the surrounding areas, they say, should be the responsibility of the local authorities. In a situation like this, one has the clear impression that no unified plan at all has been devised and accepted in Balakovo to protect the population, and that local residents are simply defenceless against a radiation accident.
Worse problems, however, have been known to arise. It is not uncommon that nuclear industry insiders simply ignore the probability of beyond-design-basis accidents and the necessity to develop measures to protect the population, including evacuation-which, needless to say, affects the very protection measures that would be needed for the population should an accident occur.
For example, during public debate over the issue of constructing a plutonium fuel manufacturer, representatives of the Siberian Chemical Combine, one of Russia's five gaseous diffusion plants used in uranium enrichment, were constantly making references to the minimal chance of a beyond-design-basis accident at the plant. This means that, from the point of view of the plant's management, there is apparently no need to develop any plans or measures to protect the population from beyond-design-basis accidents originating at the plant.
The director of the Balakovo Nuclear Power Plant seems to favour the same policy through the statements he has repeatedly made at his press conferences: No evacuation scenarios have been developed in any plans because even beyond-design-basis accidents would not lead to such levels of contamination in the area where evacuation would be necessary.
Where will the money come from?
Russian nuclear legislation makes virtually no mention of how local authorities are supposed to procure the money needed to implement their plans to protect the population in case a radiation accident takes place. The single source of funding mentioned-and which only indirectly relates to the issue at hand-is determined by Article 11 of FL-68. In accordance with this clause, local authorities must with their own efforts create their own reserves of financial and material for dealing with emergencies.
From what these such reserves should be accumulated or even how the frequently penniless executive bodies in small local communities are supposed to obtain such funds at all is not specified. Legislation is equally vague on the issue of who is responsible for funding the creation of the necessary infrastructure or for paying for measures to realise the plans of population protection. In the former case, the creation of an evacuation system is meant. For instance, Balakovo has long been divided by a bitter dispute about who is supposed to build a second bridge connecting the island part of the city with the shore-land for cases should an evacuation of the island's population of 70,000 ever be required. The only two-lane bridge that exists in the city is too old and unusable for evacuation operations in the conditions of a radiation accident.
In the latter case, issues remain equally hazy as to who provides funding to, for instance, public training and education for cases of radiation accidents. This endless story of fruitless debate and authorities passing the buck to each other overshadows the troubling truth: No such system for training the population to deal with a radiation catastrophe is in place.
"Hit the deck!"
Article 20 of FL-68 provides for the preparation of the population for emergency situations, including broad distribution of information regarding protection of the population and territories from emergency situations. Here is one example of what this article says: "The preparation of the population for acting in emergency situations is carried out in organisations, including educational institutions, as well as in places of residence. Local bodies of authority participate (along with other bodies of authority and organisations) in dissemination of information pertaining to the protection of the population and territories from emergency situations, for which they can employ the media."
Additionally, in accordance with Article 11 of the same law, bodies of local authority use their own efforts to educate the population about the means of protection and proper actions to take in situations of emergency.
It is worth noting that FL-68 does not specify in any way the obligatory nature of the preparation of the population and dissemination of information in the sphere of protection from emergency situations by executive bodies. At the same time, Article 19 of FL-68 does obligate the citizens of the Russian Federation "to learn the main means of protection of the population and territories from emergency situations, techniques of applying first medical aid, [and] rules of using collective and individual means of protection, [and] to constantly improve one's knowledge and practical skills in the mentioned sphere."
To gain a fair idea of where exactly matters stand with the preparation of the population for proper response to a radiation accident on territories located immediately inside the zone of potential impact of a nuclear hazardous site, or how exactly Article 11 of FL-68 is implemented locally, one need only have a look at the closed nuclear city of Zheleznogorsk, operating one of Russia's remaining three plutonium production reactors, and located in the Krasnoyarsk region in Russia's Central Siberia. Zheleznogorsk's is one of the 10 closed territorial administrative formations, or ZATOs, in its Russian abbreviation. These closed cities, once the pride of the Soviet scientific community with a combined population of about 2 million, have hit hard times since the fall of the Soviet Union.
The Krasnoyarsk regional branches of the Ministry of Emergency Situations carry out nuclear accident simulations only on the territory of Zhelesnogorsk. Supplements containing potassium iodide necessary as a prophylactic means against radiation impact used to be distributed through the management of local enterprises and organisations operating inside the closed city. The last time such supplements were made available, however, was 10 years ago.
Even as the country was struggling through the transition period in the early 1990s, the Zheleznogorsk ZATO had a working system of civil defence. Each city block had its own bomb shelter with readily available means of protection. Today, this system is derelict. The bomb shelters were sold off to newly formed businesses. The stocks of gas masks and other protection means still exist, but where exactly they could be found in an emergency is a mystery for Zheleznogorsk's residents. In earlier times, the population's training for nuclear-related emergencies was carried out at the work places. Such simulations and instructions were scheduled beforehand.
Today, simulations only take place at the Zheleznogorsk nuclear enterprise-which operated the plutoniu reactor and also stores spent nuclear fuel at the RT-2 facility-and only for its employees. Training alarms do take place as well, but mostly they concern management level employees.
Each of the main enterprises of the closed city has a so-called "propaganda corner"-visual agitation aids that demonstrate means of nuclear safety-as well as alarm and evacuation systems. All of these, however, were produced and arranged a long time ago, and new enterprises that have appeared in Zheleznogorsk can boast of no such level of preparation. Similarly, memos and leaflets used to be distributed among the city's population describing rules and regulations to follow in case of a nuclear accident. But as with other examples, none of this is done in these days, and younger generations know little about what to do should an accident occur.
In the case of Balakovo, the 30-kilometre "sanitary zone" around the Balakovo Nuclear Power Plant is home to around 250,000 people. Of these, 206,000 live in the city of Balakovo. The city itself does sometimes conduct small-scale simulations wit representatives of the Emergency Situations Ministry that include drills based on a radiation-accident scenario. These drills, however, are carried out with almost no participation of the population as they only involve those who work in the fire-fighting, medical emergency and other similar services.
The residents of the city are not familiar with any means of individual protection, and it is unknown if the city has any at all at its disposal. No one makes any information available about what to do and what means of protection to use in a nuclear emergency through lectures, instructions or other educational aids. No memos or leaflets were ever published for mass distribution in the city. In fact, the issue of possible evacuation scenario in case of a nuclear accident has never even been taken into consideration because, again, in the words of the nuclear plant's director, even beyond-design-basis accidents will not lead to a contamination of the region on a level that could be deemed dangerous.
The situation described applies to practically the whole Russian population, including the country's major cities. Hardly can a citizen be found in Russia who can readily and clearly describe how to get to the nearest bomb shelter or explain how to take potassium iodide in case a cloud carrying radioactive fallout from the Kalinin Nuclear Power Plant, North of Moscow, for instance, or from the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant, west of St. Petersburg, should cover the skies over either city.
Such a careless approach to the probability of a catastrophic accident has its predictable impact on the measures taken to prepare the citizens to respond properly, train them to use ways of protection, and follow necessary steps in the conditions of a radiation accident, as well as on the maintenance necessary to keep available the necessary means of protection of the population and the territories.
Who will pay for damages?
Even more problematic is Russian legislation's codes on liability issues on paying for nuclear-related damages inflicted on the environment and issues on the health and property of citizens, as well as of responsibility to compensate families for deaths caused by a radiation accident. On the one hand, all responsibility for the compensation of nuclear-related damages lies only with the operator organisation (Article 53 of FL-170). In accordance with this clause, the operator of a nuclear installation is prohibited from obtaining an operating license if the operator organisation does not provide financial guarantees of being capable to pay damages inflicted on third persons.
On the other hand, such guarantees may both follow from the operator organisation itself-which proves the capability of the enterprise to pay for all possible consequences out of its own financial reserves-and be vouched for by the state or by other organisations that have taken on the payment obligations, for instance, by a bank or by an insurance company.
The operator organisation, in particular, must have the financial provisions for the minimum payout. Accordingly, compensation for damages inflicted by radiation impact where such damages exceed the limit set for the operator organisation is provided for by the Government of the Russian Federation.
Because no lower limits are established by the legislation for the operator organisations as a ceiling of payments for damages and harm incurred by radiation impact, the result is significant leeway that can be used by the operator organisation to manoeuvre and avoid liability-obviously, to the detriment of the public interest. Due to the specifics of nuclear accidents, damages resulting from such accidents may only reveal themselves after a long period of time, thus estimations of the payment ceilings are of a quite approximate nature as they are based only on the experience gained from similar catastrophes in the past. At the moment, such issues are, again, only regulated by departmental rules applicable within particular ministries or governmental bodies that estimate and calculate possible damages and lower limits at their own discretion.
The weak normative base in this sphere renders purely nominal quite a number of provisions regarding the civil and legal nuclear-related liability. The mechanism of realizing one's rights in this field is unclear. All known cases of lawsuits filed by third persons demanding compensation for damages inflicted on them as a result of the activities of nuclear sites are only precedential, and the amounts ruled in favour of the plaintiffs are clearly depreciated. An example of such disparagement is the case decided for the plaintiffs regarding compensation of damages suffered as a result of a 1993 explosion at the Siberian Chemical Combine near Tomsk.
Experts have noted that preventing arbitrary treatment of legislation and norms in the sphere of nuclear-related liability requires a separate law-a law that would be comparable with the international provisions like the 1957 Paris Convention and the 1963 Vienna Convention. First of all, such legislation would significantly increase the amounts of compensatory payments to victims of nuclear and radiation accidents. Secondly-and most importantly-this would give one to hope that the state has finally decided to put some serious thought into such liability issues. As it now stands, Russian citizens cannot count on real compensations in case of a radiation accident.
Conclusions
1. All provisions regarding the preparation of the population for actions in case of a nuclear accident and issues of civil and legal responsibility for compensation of nuclear-related damages and its financial security are not sufficiently clear or detailed, their language is frequently chaotic or moot, thus they are mainly of a nominal nature.
2. There exists no mechanism for the realization of the norms of protection of the population in case of a nuclear accident.
3. Many articles in existing laws are merely references to other laws, creating confusing legislative redundancies and giving the nuclear industry loopholes to avoid responsibility as in the above mentioned 1993 explosion at the Siberian Chemical Combine.
4. The financial security backing adopted liability laws is insufficient or simply non-existent, as is clearly demonstrated, in particular, by the unsolved issues of funding needed for the programmes and measures aimed at the protection of the population from nuclear accidents and for the insurance of both civil and legal responsibility of operator organisations and obligatory gratis insurance of a person from the risks of radiation impact.
Recommendations
Practice shows that while the citizens remain inactive and offer no real impact on the situation at hand it is hard to expect the powers that be to show any awareness regarding the issues of providing safety to the population and protection from potential radiation-related harm.
The only way to reach any breakthrough in the existing quandary is by consistently prompting to the relevant structures to remember their responsibilities to the population-who they supposedly serve-and to public organisations. This could be done on the basis of the existing legislation and without waiting for new laws to be adopted. According to Article 18 of FL-68, citizens of the Russian Federation have the right to "appeal in person, as well as extend to state bodies and bodies of local authority individual and collective statements pertinent to the issues of protection of the population and territories from emergency situations."
Furthermore, according to Article 61 of FL-170, "a refusal to provide information, intentional distortion or concealment of information pertinent to the issues of safety in the application of atomic energy" classifies as a violation of the given law and incurs "disciplinary, administrative or criminal punitive measures."
Based on the mentioned laws, it would be advisable for organisations and citizens-particularly the population residing near radioactively hazardous sites-to request information on the following issues:
1. From the management of the nearby nuclear power plant or other radioactively hazardous site:
-What is the worst-case scenario of a nuclear accident with a release of radiation and a radioactive fallout in the area of your place of residence?
-Does the enterprise have a plan of measures for protection of the population for a worst-case-scenario radioactive accident that includes a radioactive fallout, a plan of evacuation of the population?
-Has this plan been agreed upon and approved by the bodies of local authority?
-What are the financial guarantees of compensation of potential damages and harm inflicted by radiation impact?
-From what sources will the nuclear-related damages be compensated?
-What are the estimated amounts of damage compensations-depending on the scope of damage?
2. From the bodies of local authority:
-What plan of measures do you have to protect the population from a nuclear accident and its consequences?
-Has this plan been agreed upon and approved by the management of the nuclear site in question?
-What actions do I personally take in case of a nuclear accident, including where and how do I obtain means of individual protection?
-Do the local authorities have financial and material reserves to protect the population from a nuclear accident, including what is the current situation with these reserves?
-What are the sources of accumulating the reserves needed to finance the plan of protection of the population from nuclear accidents?
-Is the existing infrastructure of the area where I live ready to provide the protection and/or evacuation of the population in case of a nuclear accident?
-What measures do the local authorities undertake to improve this infrastructure?
-How often, where and using what methods are the educational measures carried out to train the population in ways of protection and proper response in case of an accident at a radioactively hazardous site?
-Where and how can I obtain special literature or various instructions aimed to help me find out about: actions to take in an emergency situation; main ways of protection during a nuclear accident; performing first aid on those who suffered in an emergency situation or a nuclear accident; rules of using collective and individual means of protection.
Finally, the Government of the Russian Federation and the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation have to be prompted to action by appeals and proposals to improve and systemise the nuclear-related legislation in the interests of safety of the population, as well as by public demands to bring such legislation as close as possible to international standards.
Vera Pisareva and Vladimir Chuprov work in the Moscow branch of Greenpeace-Russia. The authors would like to express their appreciation to Anna Vinogradova and Anatoly Mamayev for their help in the preparation of this article. The present article was published in Bellona's Russian-language Ecology and Rights magazine (see www.ecopravo.info). English summaries for the articles published in this magazine can be found here.
-------- terrorism
Washington accused of ignoring nuclear terror threat
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
22 August 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=553841
The Bush administration insists that its top priority is keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. But in a withering new book, one of America's foremost nuclear weapons experts argues that the White House has been so heedless of the threat that nuclear armageddon in one or more US cities is now "more likely than not" over the next decade.
Graham Allison, a former defence official under both Republican and Democratic administrations and now a leading researcher at Harvard, describes the Bush administration as "reckless" for its failure to secure fissile materials around the world and its apparent lack of interest in preventing North Korea and Iran from becoming nuclear powers. In his book Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, Mr Allison lays out a series of measures to minimise the risk that al-Qa'ida or another group could either build or buy a nuclear weapon and then smuggle it into the United States.
He demonstrates that the Bush White House, for all its bullish rhetoric, has taken none of them.
"No one observing the behaviour of the US government after 9/11 would note any significant changes in activity aimed at preventing terrorists from acquiring the world's most destructive technologies," he writes. At the same time, al-Qa'ida is known to have taken steps to obtain nuclear weaponry since 1992, and has publicly stated its ambition to kill four million Americans.
"On the current course," Mr Allison concludes, "nuclear terrorism is inevitable." The most likely scenario, according to security experts, is that al-Qa'ida or another group would buy or steal fissile material and then construct its own bomb, using science that has been in the public domain for 30 years. Hence the urgent need to secure the world's relatively restricted stockpiles of that fissile material - either highly enriched uranium or plutonium. However, a programme for securing nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, pioneered by US Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, has been so poorly funded that it will take another 13 years to finish at the current pace. "The incandescent and incontestable fact is that in the two years after 9/11, fewer potential nuclear weapons' worth of highly enriched uranium and plutonium were secured than in the two years before 9/11," Mr Allison told The Independent on Sunday.
A further 43 countries have varying amounts of fissile material as by-products of their civilian nuclear power industries, but as things stand the US is only willing to take this off their hands if they pay for the privilege.
Mr Allison described the Bush administration's approach to North Korea and Iran as "paralysis" - offering neither carrots nor sticks to prevent those countries becoming full nuclear weapons states. If North Korea developed a full nuclear production line - carrying with it the distinct possibility of selling parts or technology to the highest bidder - it would be "the greatest failure of American diplomacy in all our history".
A nuclear North Korea would almost certainly induce Japan and South Korea to develop their own programmes. And the Bush administration is talking about new nuclear tests and the development of so-called "mini-nukes" and atomic bunker-buster bombs.
Mr Allison ascribed many of the White House's failures to the war in Iraq, which, he says, has diverted attention and eaten up resources in a country that had neither nuclear weapons nor a nuclear weapons programme.
But he also accused the White House of a failure of imagination, an odd combination of denial and fatalism."They don't get that this is a preventable catastrophe," he said. An effective "war on nuclear terrorism", Mr Allison argued, would cost around $5bn (£2.75bn) per year. "In a current budget that devotes more than $500bn to defence and the war in Iraq," he suggested, "a penny of every dollar for what Bush calls 'our highest priority' would not be excessive."
----
Fire Hazard - Bush Leaves Nuclear Plants at Risk
8/21/04
August 2004 issue,
The Progressive
by Anne-Marie Cusac
http://www.progressive.org/august04/cusac0804.html
On June 16, the commission charged with investigating the events of September 11 announced that Al Qaeda's early attack plans had included "unidentified nuclear power plants." You might think the Bush Administration would respond by doing all it could to prevent a terrorist-triggered disaster at these plants.
Think again.
The Bush Administration is actually relaxing the fire safeguards there.
Instead of insisting that the plants have heat-protected mechanical systems in place that will shut down reactors automatically in case of fire, which is the current standard, the Bush Administration would actually let the power companies rely on workers to run through the plants and try to turn off the reactors by hand while parts of the facilities are engulfed in flames.
"The result could be catastrophic," says a March 3 letter from Representative Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Representative John Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, to Nils J. Diaz, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). "This would assign reactor personnel the duty of rushing directly to the shutdown equipment located throughout the reactor complex to shut down the reactors manually, and would potentially take place in station areas affected by smoke, fire, and radiation and possibly under attack by terrorists."
Inside the NRC, the idea of people dodging flames and possibly high radiation areas to try to avert a meltown has raised some eyebrows. In a September 2003 meeting, one member of a panel on reactor fire safety repeatedly pointed out that relying on humans to do work in dangerous conditions and under stress was asking for trouble. It's difficult to prepare operators, said Dana Powers, a member of the Fire Protection Subcommittee of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards. "How do you do that?" he asked. "How do you simulate smoke, light, fire, ringing bells, fire engines, crazy people running around?"
So why is the NRC proposing to relax the fire safety standard? Amazingly, because many nuclear power plants have not been abiding by current regulations to put up proven fire barriers. Rather than demanding better fire safeguards or insisting that nuclear power companies at least abide by the current ones, the NRC wants to let them off the hook. It's as if car drivers were regularly going 90 mph, so the government raised the speed limit to 90.
"It appears that after discovering that many reactor licensees were out of compliance with the automatic safe-shutdown fire regulations, the commission has decided to gut these regulations rather than force nuclear power plant operators to comply with them," says the Markey and Dingell letter. The NRC made its decision, according to Markey, "at the behest of the nuclear industry."
Current regulations require plants to maintain two sets of electrical circuitry that enable the reactor to shut down automatically in an emergency. These cables either must be encased in proven fire-retardant materials or must be separated by a distance of twenty feet with no combustible materials in between. That way, if one electrical system burns up, the plant can turn itself off, even if the fire is so destructive that no staff members are left to do that work.
The NRC introduced a proposed rule change on November 26, 2003, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It said that, instead of putting in fire barriers, nuclear plants could rely on personnel to turn the plant off by hand in the event of a fire that threatens the reactor. The rule change may go into effect as early as next spring. The rulemaking started after the NRC met with the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), an industry group, which admitted that many of its members did not have the required safeguards in place. "NEI indicated that the use of unapproved operator manual actions in the event of a fire is pervasive throughout the industry," noted William D. Travers, then the NRC's executive director for operations, in describing the proposed rule to the commissioners. (Procedures for shutting down a reactor by hand are called "operator manual actions.")
Faced with resistance from industry, the NRC found itself in a predicament. "A concerted enforcement effort," wrote Travers, "creates a prospect of significant resource expenditure without clear safety benefits." He warned that the NRC could be flooded with requests for exemptions from the rules.
Fires are not uncommon at nuclear power plants. "Typical nuclear power plants will have three to four significant fires over their operating lifetime," says a 1990 NRC document. "Fires are a significant contributor to the overall core damage frequency."
Fire itself will not blow up a reactor, say critics and industry representatives alike. But if the electrical cabling burns and the pumps that cool the reactor core become disabled, the core could begin to overheat, and the reactor could melt down. Millions of people could then be exposed to radiation.
Shearon Harris nuclear power plant sits about twenty-two miles south of Raleigh, North Carolina, in one of the fastest growing population centers in the United States. So I give Progress Energy, the company that runs the plant, a call. "Fire protection is such a mundane issue," says Rick Kimble, manager of general communications for the company. And he suggests that I shouldn't worry about fires at nuclear reactors because the facilities, built of concrete and rebar, are unlikely to burn and are designed to shut down automatically. Nevertheless, he sets up a meeting with me at the plant's visitors center, a common field-trip destination for local school groups. He says I'll be able to see "images of the plant, basics of how the plant works, cutouts showing the amount of concrete and steel rebar." He even recommends a hotel. I tell him I will make a plane reservation now that I have a confirmed meeting with him.
But the following week, several days before I am scheduled to fly out, Kimble calls me to say that our meeting is cancelled. No one from the plant will meet with me. And, unlike the school kids, I am not welcome at the Shearon Harris visitors center.
Fire prevention, says Kimble, is an industry-wide issue. "We don't think we should be singled out," Kimble explains. Anyhow, he says, "there would not be a catastrophic fire in a nuclear plant." That's because nuclear fuel is not flammable. Even if there was a meltdown, it would be contained, says Kimble.
"That's a ludicrous statement," replies David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, when I ask him whether it's true that a catastrophic fire can't happen at a nuclear plant. "Browns Ferry was also made out of concrete and steel."
One day in 1975, some workers were checking a seal on the secondary containment building at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama. They accidentally started a fire. The fire "was in the insulating material around the cables. It was in a cable tray," says Craig Beasely, a communications specialist at the plant. The fire began in a part of the plant Beasely calls "the cable spreader room," which he defines as "the place where the cables come together."
The fire lasted "about seven hours," says Beasely. Some of the cables that caught fire, he confirms, "did control some cooling" to the reactor core.
"Temperatures as high as 1500°F caused damage to more than 1600 cables routed in 117 conduits and twenty-six cable trays," says a draft report by the Sandia and Brookhaven Laboratories. "Of those, 628 cables were safety related, and their damage caused the loss of a significant number of plant safety systems."
A 1976 paper by the Union of Concerned Scientists was entitled "Browns Ferry: The Regulatory Failure." Observing that the fire rendered all safety equipment inoperative and that thick smoke, loss of control over the reactor, and "inadequate breathing apparatuses" interfered with the operators' attempts to save the plant, the paper sums up the event in these words: "TVA nuclear engineers stated privately to the authors that a potentially catastrophic radiation release from Browns Ferry was avoided by 'sheer luck.' "
Company protests to the contrary, Shearon Harris merits attention. The most recent NRC fire inspection describes more than 100 manual action shutdown procedures that, in case of fire, would send personnel out to turn off the plant and prevent a meltdown. "We've not seen any numbers higher than that," says Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Watchdog Project for the D.C.-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service.
The NRC's 2002 Triennial Fire Inspection of Shearon Harris describes some of these operator manual actions. One, the NRC says, involves "excessive challenges to operators," including "exposure to smoke that would leak past the door and to the fire brigade who would be opening the door, entering the narrow [15 inches wide] energized electrical cabinet, and using a metal screwdriver inside the cabinet and seven feet above the floor with poor visibility and poor labeling. . . . Operators may not be able to start the auxiliary feedwater pump."
Jim Warren, executive director of the Durham-based NC WARN (North Carolina Waste Awareness Reduction Network), characterizes the procedure this way: "Get the step ladder and go up in the closet in the darkness, and hope you don't fry yourself."
The inspection noted that one operator "may be required to complete as many as thirty-nine manual actions."
The inspection found nine fire safety violations altogether. In a March 2004 presentation the government made at an annual assessment meeting on the Shearon Harris reactor, the NRC described these "fire protection issues" as "potential significant findings."
Nevertheless, the NRC inspection did not come down hard on Shearon Harris. "The finding was of very low safety significance because of the low fire initiation frequency," it said. That is, the NRC doesn't think a fire is likely.
Kimble says the reactor has dealt with the violations. "We have made corrections, done everything that has been suggested by the NRC," he says. But Warren is not so sure. "Absent any evidence from Progress [Energy], either in person or documented, that they have corrected those problems, I'm left to assume that they're still there," he says.
Papers released as part of a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that some fire violations at Shearon Harris have gone on for years, either without correction or with corrections that the NRC later determined were inappropriate.
In April, the plant informed the NRC that the fire barriers were missing entirely from cables that power twenty-one valves used to control the flow of cooling water to the reactor core. The plant informed the NRC that it would take two years to fix the problem. The violations date back to 2002.
So I keep my plane ticket. I decide to get a look at the cooling tower and a feel for the evacuation zone, the ten-mile radius surrounding Shearon Harris.
I drive in a downpour, on an afternoon when tornadoes lift the roofs in nearby towns, to the hotel Kimble suggested.
The hotel sits in Apex, a town with the slogan "the peak of good living," though there are no mountains, or even hills, in sight.
Warren and I drive around the zone, seeking a view of the reactor. We pull over at Jordan Lake, where we get a glimpse of the tower, its feet in the trees and its head in the clouds. Aesthetically, it's a graceful structure, a triumph of modern design out in the woods. "That cooling tower is over 600-feet tall," says Warren.
Jordan Lake is a popular weekend destination for people in the Triangle region. Below the parking lot where we stand is a dam. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers controls the inflow and outflow of water, says Francis Ferrell, a Corps engineer who wanders out to the parking lot to meet us. "We actually have a contingency plan" in case of a nuclear emergency, he says. "We're supposed to go out on the lake and tell people," obtain geiger counters after a rendezvous on Highway 64, and report back measurements. "I think our boss is trying to get that taken out of our job descriptions," he says. "That would be fine with me."
We drive to the other side of Shearon Harris to the front entrance, where we get out and walk on the road, stopping short of the "Private Property" signs. But the guards notice us, jump into their truck, and drive up to inform us that we can't stand there, that we need to cross the highway. The guards are armed. When Warren tells them I am a reporter, they tell me to call the PR office. Then they sit in their truck, watching, until we turn the car around and leave. "At least we know they're paying attention," says Warren.
A 2003 study put out by Orange County, North Carolina, which is near Shearon Harris, determined that "total evacuation [of the six-county region along the Interstate 40/85 corridor] would take 5.8 days, assuming that all interstate lanes would be directed for outbound traffic."
"I reconcile myself that I may lose everything," says Judy Hogan, a writer, teacher, and activist who lives in Moncure, just a few miles from the plant. "For a while, I was keeping my unpublished books on disks in the trunk of my car because that would be my biggest loss." Now that she owns a truck, she keeps the disks in a briefcase in her bedroom. In that room, Hogan also has a tone alert radio, which she says Progress Energy gave to her because she lives within five miles of the plant. The radio, she says, will sound an alarm for bad weather, as well as for nuclear emergencies.
In 2003, partly in response to anxieties about terrorism at nuclear power plants, the state of North Carolina made potassium iodide (KI) available to people living near nuclear reactors. Hogan went to the local school to get them. She digs out her foil-wrapped pills (each person gets two) from her purse.
Two information sheets accompany the pills. One of these describes potassium iodide as "an over-the-counter medication that can protect one part of the body--the thyroid--if a person is exposed to radioactive iodine released during a nuclear power plant emergency." The sheet says to take one tablet per twenty-four hour period, and it adds an admonitory note: "Remember . . . taking KI is not a substitute for evacuation. Leave the area immediately if you are instructed to do so. Do not take KI unless public health officials tell you to take it."
The other sheet is entitled, "Frequently Asked Questions About a Radioactive Emergency." It begins, "Radiation is a form of energy that is present all around us. Different types of radiation exist, some of which have more energy than others."
Kimble is right. Fire safety is an industry-wide issue. And Shearon Harris is not the only plant with a long list of violations.
For instance, in Hutchinson Island in Florida, a March 2003 Fire Protection Baseline Inspection of the St. Lucie Power Station found that "many local manual operator actions were used in place of the required physical protection of cables for equipment relied on for SSD [safe shutdown] during a fire, without obtaining NRC approval for these deviations from the approved fire protection program. This condition applied to all areas that were inspected."
Rachel Scott, nuclear communications manager for Florida Power and Light, says that this inspection "pointed up an industry-wide" practice, where reactors "have been implementing manual actions" against NRC regulations. So, says Scott, the NRC decided "to allow the licensees to substitute manual actions, as long as the manual actions were feasible." The NRC, says Scott, "did determine that the manual actions" at St. Lucie Station "were feasible," meaning "that they could serve safe shutdown." Scott says the plant has not put in fire barriers or separated the cables, but is instead waiting for the new regulation to take effect.
At another Florida reactor, this one in Citrus County, a Triennial Fire Protection Baseline Inspection in July 2002 discovered, according to a "Briefing Summary," that not only did the Crystal River plant use "a significant number of local manual actions" instead of automatic shutdown, but that the plant's fire plan neglected to give adequate consideration to some of the practical difficulties of shutting a nuclear power plant down by hand. The omissions included, in the NRC's words:
- Complexity of the new local manual actions.
- The number of manual actions and time available for completion.
- Availability of instruments to detect system/component mal-operations.
- Human performance under high stress.
- Effects of products of combustion on operator performance.
- Available manpower, timing, and feasibility of local manual actions.
Mac Harris, communications supervisor for the Crystal River site, which is run by Progress Energy, says that the above problems eventually received a green, non-cited violation. "Green is considered very low safety significance," he says. The Crystal River Plant, he says, "dealt with the identified issues" by making "some revisions in the fire protection plan," a process it completed in May.
The Nuclear Information and Resource Service obtained these records, and those from Shearon Harris, through a Freedom of Information Act request. The records of fire safety violations are still coming in, says Gunter. "I'm told that when we're done, the stack will be ten feet tall," he says. "That's how widespread the noncompliances are."
A March press release by Markey's office provided "a partial list of reactors that are out of compliance with NRC fire protection regulations." Here are the reactors:
Arizona: Palo Verde Units 1,2,3
Arkansas: Arkansas Nuclear One Units 1,2
California: Diablo Canyon Units 1,2
Florida: Crystal River, St. Lucie, Turkey Point 3,4
Louisiana: River Bend
Mississippi: Grand Gulf
Nebraska: Fort Calhoun
New Jersey: Oyster Creek
North Carolina: Shearon Harris 1, McGuire Units 1,2
Ohio: Davis-Besse
Pennsylvania: Beaver Valley 2
Tennessee: Sequoyah Units 1,2, Watts Bar
Texas: Comanche Peak 1,2
At Davis-Besse, the Ohio nuclear reactor with a history of safety troubles that sits twenty-five miles from Toledo, fire protection is a problem.
Phil Qualls, an NRC senior fire protection engineer, sent an e-mail to Dennis Kubicki, a former colleague who had worked on a report on safety at Davis-Besse. Qualls said he went over that 1991 report, and that it contains "some pretty outrageous stuff. Things like . . . complete manual actions" instead of the fire barriers required by law, "and a variety of fire protection issues." He warns Kubicki, "your name is on this document. The s___could hit the fan hard and you may hear questions about it (or the s___ may be soft and you never hear about it, too)."
The report, which identifies Kubicki as a "principal contributor," declares numerous fire issues at Davis-Besse "acceptable." For instance, previous safety inspectors had expressed concern that a manual action might cause reactor cooling problems because of delays in getting the equipment to work. The report determines that these problems "are not safety significant as long as no unrecoverable plant condition will occur." It defines "unrecoverable plant condition" as "the loss of any shutdown function(s) for such a duration as to ultimately cause the reactor coolant level to fall below the top of the reactor core and lead to a subsequent breach of the fuel cladding." In other words, as long as the reactor does not reach a point where it threatens to melt down, no problem.
"It's a big caveat to say, 'as long as no unrecoverable plant condition will occur,' " says Gunter of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. "How do they know?"
Gunter blames the NRC for what he says is a dangerous regulatory change. The government agency, he says, is "more interested in protecting the financial interest of the industry than in protecting those electrical cables."
For its part, the NRC says it is doing all it can to keep the reactors safe. "The prescriptive rules" requiring physical fire barriers "didn't allow for flexibility," says John Hannon, NRC branch chief in the office of nuclear reactor regulation--the part of the NRC that is responsible for fire protection programs. "The rules were so inflexible they [the plants] sometimes had trouble meeting them." So, he says, even from the day the rules were written, the NRC gave out exemptions "for alternative means of shutting the plant down that were safe and reliable. Many of these were operator manual actions."
Then, in the 1990s, as the NRC inspected plants to make sure they had adequate fire protections, the commission discovered "a lot of plants were using manual actions and had not come to us for exemptions," Hannon says. So the NRC decided it was "prudent for us to initiate a rule making for that, to codify acceptance criteria to make it clear" what is acceptable.
The NRC claims that all of this can be done safely. "We're seeking the health and safety of the public," says Hannon. "We don't want a plant damage event to occur that would cause a radioactive release." The NRC, he says, takes "fires very seriously." And he says the new rule will be an improvement on the status quo. "If we leave it the way it is now, we have plants out there that wouldn't meet the criteria," he says.
"Rather than bring the industry into conformance with the code, the NRC brought the code into conformance with the industry," says Gunter.
Jerry Brown worked as a consultant to the nuclear industry for twenty-two years, until 1998. .....His specialty was fire and radiation penetration seals, critical safety components to nuclear reactors.
To exchange old rules "for new regulations to say that we don't need these redundant shutdown systems is criminal," he says. "You could have a runaway reactor with no ability to shut it down." Brown blames the NRC, which he says has a history of treating "fire safety in such a negligent way."
Brown, who says he is "absolutely" concerned about terrorism in connection with fires at a nuclear plant, gives a grim warning. "A nuclear power plant can kill a million people," he says. "There are more fire barriers in a nursing home than in a nuclear power plant. That doesn't make sense to me." Anne-Marie Cusac is Investigative Reporter of The Progressive.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new mexico
LANL said late on clean-up
ROGER SNODGRASS, roger@lamonitor.com,
Los Alamos Monitor Assistant Editor
Saturday, August 21, 2004
http://www.lamonitor.com/articles/2004/08/20/headline_news/news03.txt
Los Alamos National Laboratory is running years behind a decade-old commitment to stabilize nuclear materials at the facility, according to an IG report. The problem is said due largely to the lack of funds from the Department of Energy.
A new report by the DOE Office of Inspector General said the department promised a national safety board in 1995 it would get the materials under control by 2002, but according to the lab's most recent execution plan, the materials will not be stabilized until 2010.
In 1994, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, an independent federal agency that makes recommendations to the Secretaries of Energy and Defense on issues of health and safety at the nation's nuclear facilities, called attention to the problem of nuclear materials left in the weapons manufacturing pipeline several years after nuclear pit production ceased in 1988.
"There are thousands of containers of plutonium-bearing liquids and solids at the Rocky Flats Plant, the Hanford Site, the Savannah River Site and the Los Alamos National Laboratory," DNFSB observed in its1994 recommendation.
Having seen little progress at Los Alamos by 2000, the Board issued a reminder on tasks that remained throughout the nuclear complex.
"More than one tonne (1,000 kilograms, or 2,200 pounds) of plutonium metal and oxide at the Los Alamos National laboratory was recently declared in excess to the needs to the defense program," DNFSB stated.
The board also called attention to another tonne of plutonium in the form of residues
Saying that high risks items had been processed and newly created residues were being properly handled, the board wrote, "little work is being done at this time to take care of legacy residues."
Only Los Alamos, in the entire nuclear weapons complex, has failed to reach an agreement with the DNSFB on an appropriate clean-up plan, the IG audit said.
The Inspector General notes that budget shortfalls have affected LANL's clean-up schedules for fissionable materials, but also says the laboratory did not make "full use of available tools to effectively manage the project." Notably, getting the job done was not included in the laboratory's contract with DOE.
Los Alamos received only 58 percent of the funding it requested for the stabilization project during Fiscal Years 1997 through 2000, and 78 percent of its request in 2001 and 2002.
By extending the schedule until 2010, the audit report said, the job will cost an extra $78 million, and even that date is not certain because interim milestones and project tasks have been missed in the mean time.
In DNFSB's formal recommendation on the subject in 2000, the board made clear that lack of funding was not an excuse, because the Atomic Energy Act specifically calls for the Secretary of Energy to advise the President and Congress of financial needs to satisfy safety enhancements recommended by the board.
As customary in the Inspector General reports, blameworthy individuals at LANL or DOE were not identified.
The laboratory declined to comment, referring questions to the National Nuclear Security Administration which overseas the nuclear complex for DOE.
A top management official of the National Nuclear Security Administration commented formally in the report that significantly more items had been stabilized by December 2003 than were indicated.
The comment was incorporated into the report, which explained the difficulty encountered by the auditors: "Los Alamos' project documents were incomplete and could not be reconciled."
-------- south carolina
S.C. State's partnership with national laboratory grows to 'another level'
By LEE HENDREN,
SC Times & Democrat Staff Writer,
Saturday, August 21, 2004
http://www.thetandd.com/articles/2004/08/21/news/news1.txt
South Carolina State University on Friday strengthened its 15-year partnership with the newly designated Savannah River National Laboratory.
A Memorandum of Understanding, signed with fanfare and ceremony, "takes the tradition of collaboration and cooperation ... to another level," said SCSU President Dr. Andrew Hugine Jr.
The pact is intended to stimulate joint efforts between the historically black university in Orangeburg and the applied research and development laboratory at the U.S. Department of Energy's Savannah River Site.
"The agreement is significant because it provides outstanding opportunities for enhancement of the academic programs at South Carolina State University," Hugine said.
"It also provides the opportunity for research training programs and mentoring programs, for faculty loan programs and for shared equipment and facilities," he added.
"It also provides for diversity in the workplace and significant economic development activities for the state of South Carolina, particularly those regions of greatest need," Hugine continued.
The pact is intended to stimulate joint efforts to improve science and technology education and research in the areas of nuclear engineering, machine tooling, fabrication techniques, measurement techniques, mechanical and robotics design, environmental sciences, hydrogen fuel-cell technologies for transportation, and transportation delivery systems for nuclear materials throughout South Carolina.
The research center's designation as a national laboratory will increase its prestige and allow its scientists to team up more easily with scientists at other national laboratories in research projects.
"This designation is long overdue and is well-deserved," Hugine said. "The cutting-edge research and development initiatives that will emanate from this laboratory will have a significant impact on our state and our nation. Now we can compete equally with the Los Alamos and Oak Ridges of this country and the (10) other national laboratories."
The research center is part of the Energy Department's Savannah River Site, a key part of the government nuclear weapons complex, situated along the Savannah River that separates South Carolina and Georgia.
The Savannah River Plant was created in the 1950s as a research facility for producing plutonium and tritium for nuclear warheads.
More recently it has focused on a wide range of applied research from environmental remediation, hydrogen energy technology to counterintelligence and security systems and robotics.
S.C. State has been collaborating with Westinghouse since it took over the operation of the Savannah River Plant a decade and a half ago, Hugine said.
"A lot has happened in those 15 years," he said. Now "the players are all different, but the commitment of South Carolina State and the commitment of SRS has ... expanded and grown."
"Truly if South Carolina State University is to reach unparalleled heights, we must embrace the building blocks ... (of) self-help and partnerships," Hugine said.
"Great universities are known by the company they keep. We are on the road to becoming a great university, and this partnership will help us get there," he said.
"We're really excited and willing to work to make this journey successful," Hugine said. "The past accomplishments will be pale in comparison to what the future holds. We've only just begun."
Sixth District U.S. Rep. James E. Clyburn praised Hugine for his leadership of "an institution I love dearly" and think about daily.
"I came to this campus not really knowing what college was all about," Clyburn said. He credits instructors like Ernestine Walker for teaching him "there was a world out there I needed to be in touch with."
Clyburn said he had listened for several hours Thursday as Pee Dee leaders talked about the future, without one mention of tobacco, the staple that had driven the region's economy for a century or more.
SCSU, too, is not dwelling on the past but is "positioning itself for the future," focusing on technology, education, transportation and energy. "It makes me proud. I know that the future of this state, this institution and this nation is on solid ground."
As a congressman and a member of the powerful Appropriations Committee, Clyburn said he tries "to show my appreciation for this institution ... every opportunity I get," and is pleased when he finds someone "who will listen and respond."
Dr. G. Todd Wright is responding. The Savannah River National Laboratory's director says the university and the lab are "a natural match."
Robert A. Pedde is responding. The Westinghouse Savannah River Company president and SCSU Board of Visitors member said SCSU has shown "innovation and true leadership."
Pres Rahe is responding. The president of Washington Group International's Energy and Environment Business Unit said he was "impressed by (SCSU's) commitment" to "engineering technology excellence."
He presented a $10,000 check for the James E. Clyburn Endowment Fund for scholarships to SCSU students.
"We value your talented students and staff," Rahe said. "We need the best and the brightest, and you've got them."
# T&D Staff Writer Lee Hendren can be reached by e-mail at lhendren@timesanddemocrat.com or by phone at 803-533-5552.
-------- us nuc waste
State gets veto power over shipments
Aug 21, 2004,
By The Associated Press
http://www.currentargus.com/artman/publish/article_8463.shtml
SANTA FE - The U.S. Department of Energy has agreed to the demand by New Mexico's environmental secretary to veto the resumption of shipments from Idaho to a federal nuclear waste repository near Carlsbad until the state is satisfied that problems with shipments from Idaho are fixed.
The DOE suspended shipments from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory in mid-July after workers at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico discovered drums of
waste that should have not been in the shipment. The drums had been added after a batch readied for shipment had been tested.
State officials said suspect drums had been sent from Idaho since March, and 108 might be already disposed in WIPP.
"Until the state is satisfied that all the proper actions have been taken to investigate and correct the recent waste analysis failure at INEEL, we cannot allow more waste to be shipped," Environment Secretary Ron Curry said Thursday.
The DOE agreed to comply with the state's request, although it's not clear New Mexico has the authority to block the shipments.
"We will not ship from Idaho until we satisfy NMED's concerns and get their approval," Lloyd Piper, deputy director of the DOE's Carlsbad office, said Thursday. "We stand by that agreement and that is our priority."
DOE Carlsbad manager Paul Detwiler, in an Aug. 10 letter to the state, said other testing of the suspect drums showed they did not pose any danger.
Drums destined for WIPP are tested to ensure that radioactive waste buried there does not contain chemicals that could pose a hazard.
WIPP, excavated from vast ancient salt beds 2,150 below ground, opened in 1999. It buries plutonium-contaminated waste from the nation's defense work.
-------- MILITARY
-------- iran
Iran Disquieted by Nearby U.S. Presence
August 21, 2004
Associated Press Writer
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_US?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's defense minister expressed his government's disquiet about the U.S. troop presence in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, and hinted that some Iranian generals believe they should strike first if they sense an imminent U.S. threat.
In an interview with pan-Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera, Ali Shamkhani was asked how Iran would respond if America were to attack its nuclear facilities.
"We will not sit to wait for what others will do to us," he said. "There are differences of opinion among military commanders (in Iran). Some commanders believe preventive operations is not a model created by Americans ... or is not limited to Americans. Any nation, if it feels threatened, can resort to that."
President Bush has labeled Iran part of an "axis of evil" along with North Korea and prewar Iraq, but U.S. officials have said recently they are sticking to diplomacy, not force, to try to end what they call Iran's drive for nuclear weapons. Iran, which says its nuclear ambitions are peaceful, has become more defensive about a U.S. campaign to get U.N. Security Council sanctions on Iran for its nuclear activities.
"The moment the great Satan (America) decides to take military action against us, that moment will be the end of all our nuclear obligations," Shamkhani said, referring to Iran's cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Earlier this month, Iran confirmed it had resumed building nuclear centrifuges, which can be used to enrich uranium to weapons grade, and declared it should have the right to nuclear technology that has both peaceful and weapons uses.
On Tuesday, the deputy chief of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard said Iran would destroy Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor if the Jewish state were to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. Israel has not threatened to attack, but it has said it will not allow Iran to build a nuclear bomb. In 1981 Israeli fighters destroyed a nuclear reactor under construction outside Baghdad because it feared Iraq would acquire a nuclear weapon.
In his interview with Al-Jazeera, Shamkhani also spoke of Israel. "It's certain to us that Israel won't carry out any military action without a green light from America," he said. "So, you can't separate the two."
The nuclear issue is only one of many on which Iran and the United States are at odds. The two countries have not had diplomatic relations since the 1979 Islamic revolution toppled the U.S.-backed shah of Iran.
Iran opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq and now fears the United States is cementing its influence in Iraq. It also fears U.S. influence in Afghanistan, where another U.S.-led campaign ousted the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks.
"I say the presence of Americans is not a sign of strength. Americans are a hostage to their own presence," Defense Minister Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera.
The United States fears Iran wants to establish a fundamentalist Shiite regime in its own image in Iraq. U.S. and Iraqi officials have accused Iran of fomenting violence and instability in Iraq, charges Iran denies.
"The Iranian government will never pursue turmoil and unrest in Iraq," Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera.
-------- iraq
Militants Leaving Shrine In Najaf
Fighters Remain In Walled Plaza
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 21, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20241-2004Aug20?language=printer
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 20 -- Militia fighters began to leave the shrine of Imam Ali on Friday, taking up positions outside the sacred site or fleeing the city, after rebellious Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr offered to return custody of the complex to moderate clerics.
U.S. forces largely held their fire Friday after pummeling militia mortar positions away from the shrine with a barrage of AC-130 gunship fire overnight. Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi publicly withdrew a threat to evict the militia with a direct assault on the complex, one of the holiest sites in Iraq's majority Shiite Muslim faith.
On Thursday night, Sadr's office issued an unsigned letter calling on his followers "to hand over the keys of the shrine" to Shiite religious leaders "as fast as possible so we will prevent infidels from entering this holy place." But at day's end Friday, there was no word that such a transfer appeared to have taken place.
With destruction of the 1,000-year-old shrine a serious risk, the Najaf confrontation is among the most potentially destabilizing of the Iraq conflict and a test for the eight-week-old interim government. U.S. commanders and government leaders expressed hope that a full rout had begun, but the situation remained uncertain Friday night and Sadr's whereabouts were unknown.
U.S. units that had been pushing steadily closer to the complex abruptly suspended combat operations in late afternoon, while commanders sorted through a cascade of conflicting reports about the situation inside the complex, whose centerpiece is the gold-domed shrine.
After several confusing hours, witnesses established that the interior of the main shrine building had been cleared of arms but that militia fighters continued to use the large walled plaza around it as a firebase. Militia members complained of falling short of weapons and ammunition as the armored cordon tightened, according to reports from the city. Their numbers on the streets were visibly reduced. U.S. commanders said fighting was likely to resume against a guerrilla force showing signs of strain. "I think it's a signal that they're breaking," one military official said of the day's events. "There's a fissure."
Adnan Zufuri, governor of Najaf province, said more than 50 militia members had been arrested at checkpoints while trying to leave the city. Most of the fighters in Sadr's Mahdi Army militia came to Najaf from elsewhere, including Baghdad. The shrine "is still controlled by them, but they're fleeing the city," Zufuri said. "We caught many of them today."
Officials in Iraq's interim government grappled through much of the day with conflicting reports about what was unfolding inside the shrine. At midafternoon, a senior Interior Ministry spokesman announced on CNN that Iraqi police had taken control of the shrine without firing a shot. At dusk, Gov. Zufuri waited at a helipad on a Marine base in Najaf to receive Prime Minister Allawi, who the governor said might proceed to the shrine and even meet with Sadr.
But after 20 minutes, Zufuri climbed back into his vehicle to return to his heavily reinforced office near the police headquarters, which had been hit by fatal mortar fire a day earlier.
"Allawi's not coming," a commander said. "Nothing's changed."
Elsewhere in Iraq, one U.S. soldier was reported killed and four were wounded by an improvised bomb in Samarra, north of Baghdad. The Marines announced the deaths of two members of their force in Anbar province, west of the capital, in separate incidents.
The partial evacuation of arms from the shrine appeared to mark a significant tactical shift in the confrontation, in which U.S. forces have operated under major firepower constraints while trying to defeat a well-trained guerrilla force. To avoid any damage to the shrine complex, U.S. and Iraqi planners had laid down strict rules on where forces could fire and with what ammunition.
So far, the complex has sustained only minor damage. U.S. commanders are desperate to avoid a direct attack on it, even if it is carried out by Iraqi commandos. The shrine is said to hold the remains of Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and revered by Shiites as his only true successor. The city of Najaf is built around the complex, and the local economy depends on the tens of thousands of religious pilgrims who in normal times visit each day.
If Sadr follows through on his promise to vacate the shrine, the building will return to the custody of senior clerics led by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a Sadr critic whose departure to London for medical treatment at the start of the current crisis was taken by U.S. commanders as a green light to move against the bellicose younger cleric.
"We are still in the shrine," Sadr aide Ahmed Shaibani said in a telephone interview. "We offered Sistani's office to receive the keys of the holy shrine, and we are waiting for them to receive it."
A Sistani aide replied that he was waiting, too. "If they want to vacate the holy shrine compound and close the doors, then the office of the religious authority in holy Najaf will take these keys," Sheik Hamed Khafaf was quoted as telling the Associated Press in a telephone interview from London. "Until now, this hasn't happened."
What would happen to the militia if it carries out a full evacuation remained unclear. In his letter, Sadr called his Mahdi Army the "base" of its namesake, a messianic imam who disappeared a millennium ago and who Shiites believe will return. In a sermon delivered on Sadr's behalf at the shrine, the cleric continued to challenge the legitimacy of the interim government, installed in June by the United States and United Nations.
It was uncertain as well whether he continued to call for attacks on U.S. forces, whom he had condemned as occupiers. One U.S. commander said intelligence units had monitored militia members setting up new attacks even as they moved weapons out of the shrine. "We're hearing them planning what they're going to do to us tonight," the commander said.
Despite those concerns, after the aerial barrage, clashes between militia and American forces were unusually light most of the day. In one exception, gunfire in the area of the shrine prevented reporters from approaching it for more than an hour after the Interior Ministry mistakenly announced that it was held by Iraqi police.
Commanders said the barrage that may have nudged Sadr out of the shrine was intended to defend exposed U.S. forces, rather than as a major offensive strike against the militia.
On Thursday afternoon a small convoy became stuck in the muck of a supposedly dry lake bed to the west of the shrine. While the vehicles were immobilized, militiamen rained mortar shells and gunfire down on the exposed troops, and the A-130 gunships were called in to protect them.
"It worked out to our advantage," said Lt. Col. Myles Miyamasu, who commands the 1st Battalion of the 1st Cavalry's Division 5th Regiment. "We had clear fields of fire and killed maybe 17 of them: three snipers, five machine gunners and two or three mortar crews. You just couldn't ask to be stuck in a better place."
Meanwhile, Sadr representatives said they were trying to win the release of Micah Garen, an American freelance journalist abducted a week ago and shown speaking in a video on Friday. The Italian Foreign Ministry reported that an Italian freelancer, Enzo Baldoni, was missing and last believed to be in Najaf.
A dozen Nepali contract workers were reported kidnapped by the Army of the Ansar al-Sunna, a group associated with the radical army Ansar al-Islam. A statement from the group called the Nepalis "infidels who had contracted with the crusading U.S. forces."
Three Iraqi policemen were killed by an explosion at a police station in the southern city of Nasiriyah. And police blamed Sadr's militia for blowing up a pipeline between the southern Bezergan oil field and a refinery in Amarah.
--------
STANDOFF IN NAJAF
Clashes Slow as Cleric's Grip on Mosque Seems to Slip
August 21, 2004
By ALEX BERENSON and SABRINA TAVERNISE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/international/middleeast/21iraq.html?pagewanted=all
NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 20 - Moktada al-Sadr, the rebel Shiite cleric, still seemed to retain control of the shrine of Imam Ali here late on Friday, though there were signs his grip might be weakening as the number of fighters loyal to him in the mosque dwindled to a few hundred.
Earlier in the day, forces loyal to Mr. Sadr said he had promised to "turn over the keys" of the sacred mosque to aides to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, building optimism about an imminent end to the two-week standoff between Mr. Sadr's guerrillas, American forces and the interim Iraqi government.
Ayad Allawi, the interim Iraqi prime minister, who on Thursday issued a "final call" to Mr. Sadr to quit the mosque, quickly hailed the cleric's offer to cede control of the shrine and again called on him to disband his militia and form a political party. Yet, a few hours later, at about 10:30 p.m., Mr. Sadr broadcast a new statement from the shrine's loudspeakers calling on his followers to gather and fight American forces.
But skirmishes between American forces and Mr. Sadr's guerrillas slowed Friday after exploding Thursday night, and American troops said they would refrain from offensive operations for the immediate future. For their part, Mr. Sadr's fighters reportedly said they would stop carrying weapons inside the shrine, where hundreds of them have been holed up since the fighting began two weeks ago.
During the day, the fighters who make up Mr. Sadr's militia, called the Mahdi Army, slowly trickled out of the shrine, as American tanks and Humvees exchanged fire with enemy snipers less than half a mile from the entrance. "Many people have left," said a man who identified himself as Abu Mustafa, a Mahdi Army fighter. "The shrine is emptying."
The Iraqi Interior Ministry said Friday evening that Iraqi security forces controlled the shrine, a claim disputed both by witnesses and the Iraqi police.
In Washington, a senior administration official monitoring the situation in Najaf said Friday that Mr. Sadr's fighters had vacated the shrine. "We believe the Imam Ali mosque is now free of his fighters," the official said, "but the Iraqi police are not in there. We're getting a variety of reports from people on the ground."
Dr. Allawi said he was heartened by the day's developments. "There has been an improvement in the security situation in Iraq and especially in holy Najaf," he said in a statement. "Let this be the start of a new era and a free Iraq without armed militias." Late on Friday night, CNN reported that an Iraqi government delegation was scheduled to travel to Najaf to negotiate with Mr. Sadr. The report could not be immediately confirmed.
There were promising developments as well in the case of Micah Garen, the American freelance journalist seized Wednesday. Mr. Garen appeared in a video on Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite network, saying he was being well treated and calling on the American military to stop the fighting in Najaf. On Thursday, a top aide to Mr. Sadr had urged Mr. Garen's captors to let him go.
All sides have treaded carefully over the treacherous political ground surrounding the shrine. They know they all have much to lose, should the current stalemate descend into all-out war.
Mr. Sadr's guerrillas are no match for American forces and face destruction in a pitched battle. But any attack on the inner ring of Najaf's Old City, which surrounds the shrine, would inflame Shiite Muslims worldwide. And severe damage to the shrine, whether caused by American troops or Mr. Sadr's guerrillas, could provoke rebellion among Iraq's Shiites, who are a majority of the population.
So both the government and Mr. Sadr have alternated hawkish statements and peace overtures, playing a tricky game of bluffs and counter-bluffs as each tries to ascertain the other's breaking point. Meanwhile, American commanders here continue to plan for an attack on the Old City, while acknowledging they were not sure they would ever be told to carry out the assault.
The tightrope that the two sides are walking was clearly visible in the cemetery on Thursday and Friday. Late on Thursday night, American soldiers in tanks and armored vehicles pushed to its southern edge, just a few hundred yards from the mosque, where they fired tanks and heavy machine guns at buildings in the Old City.
But on Friday morning, American commanders at the Marine base on the northern edge of Najaf pulled their front line more than a mile back, supposedly to respect the fact that Friday is the Muslim holy day. The commanders then planned a mission for Friday night even more aggressive than the one they had Thursday, before abruptly scuttling it after it had already begun. That left the informal cease-fire in place and soldiers in the cemetery wondering whether they should plan for a night of violence or peace.
The quiet in the mosque on Friday was broken by occasional gunfire outside. Small groups of barefoot men lounged on carpets spread in the shade on the shrine's polished white marble floor. They appeared to be fewer than 300, far less than the 1,000 said to be in the shrine at the start of the fighting.
Small rooms behind wooden doors also contained men, though their numbers were not known. One such room contained a makeshift hospital where injured Mahdi militiamen were treated. On Friday, doctors had five injured men including one civilian - a teenage boy who had been selling ice cream when he was struck in the chest by a sniper's bullet.
"The danger is less," said a doctor dressed in blue hospital scrubs who identified himself as Dr. Amil. Still, large explosions could be heard in the city just after 1:30 a.m. Saturday morning.
On Friday, one of Mr. Sadr's spokesmen scurried in and out of the shrine bearing messages from Mr. Sadr, who was in an undisclosed location that many said was thought to be outside the Old City. The aide, Sheik Ahmed al-Sheibani, announced that Mr. Sadr had agreed to turn over control of the shrine to Ayatollah Sistani. He said Mr. Sadr's group had contacted Ayatollah Sistani, who is in London recovering from heart surgery. Ayatollah Sistani agreed to accept the keys, The Associated Press reported from London on Friday, as long as Mr. Sadr's militiamen left altogether. "If the people inside the holy shrine leave it altogether, lock the doors and place the key in an envelope and take it to Sistani's office in Najaf, then he has told his people there to receive the key," a spokesman for Mr. Sistani said.
Mr. Sheibani, eager to portray the apparent plans for withdrawal to Mr. Sadr's advantage, cast the proposed handover as a victory of Shiites over the government. "The agreement of Sistani is a hit to the government," he said Friday. "We cannot hand over this holy shrine to the government because the government is under the authority of occupation.''
The government for its part also claimed victory when a spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry, Sabah Kadhim, made a surprise announcement earlier Friday that the Iraqi police had taken the shrine without firing a shot. But as late as 7 p.m. on Friday night, Mr. Sadr's militia still controlled its main entrance.
Though the shrine itself was relatively quiet, streets immediately to the south and east crackled with gunfire in a zone where Mahdi snipers fought with Americans. Passers-by waved white fabric and held their hands in the air while walking close to walls to avoid sniper fire.
Many of the Mahdi militia members in the shrine on Friday said they were not from Najaf. Some had come from Baghdad, others from Shiite towns farther south. They said they were drawn to calls by Mr. Sadr to defend Islam against an invading power. Imad Hussein said he left his rug business and three young children at home in Baghdad to join Mr. Sadr's followers here. "I'm defending our country, our holy places," he said. "What is making America so crazy is that we are fighting for our religion."
In Friday Prayer in the neighboring town of Kufa, a small aid operation for Najaf was taking place. Men were loading plastic bags of drinking water into wheelbarrows, and large sacks of flour were stacked high against the mosque's walls.
Another of Mr. Sadr's aides, Sheik Jabbar al-Hafaji, delivered the prayer on Friday. Mr. Hafaji said Mr. Sadr had asked Shiite elders to take over the shrine. "Even if it's not under the Mahdi Army, that's best for the Shiite leadership," he said. Mr. Sadr, he said, was on his way to martyrdom as American troops advanced in Najaf.
A woman with a 7-month-old baby knelt on a prayer rug. She said her 20-year-old son, Ali, was killed in April during Mr. Sadr's first uprising against the Americans. "I'm happy," she said, her face expressionless. "This is for religion."
Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting from Washingtonfor this article.
--------
Iraqi captors to 'free US journalist'
Iraq has seen a spate of abductions in recent months
Saturday 21 August 2004,
Aljazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/683B9F33-0CFB-41EA-9B5F-F7BBDEE3F7A9.htm
The captors of an American journalist being held in Iraq have announced he will be released.
In a statement signed by the Secret Action Group of al-Mahdi Army and posted on the internet on Friday, the captors said the journalist would be released on Saturday since he opposed the policies of the US administration.
"As for the American journalist we have, we will release him tomorrow, Saturday, in the afternoon, because he disagrees very much with the American administration," the statement said.
The captive was not named in the statement, but all indications are that it referred to the US journalist Micah Garen.
Threat to oil
An archaeological reporter and manager of New York-based Four Corners Media, Garen was seized last week in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriya.
As well as covering thefts of archaeological artefacts in Iraq the documentary organisation's website says it is working on "documenting the life and experiences of American soldiers on the front lines in Iraq".
The captors' internet statement also threatened to destroy oil facilities in southern Iraq if US troops and Iraqi government forces did not leave Najaf.
"If you do not withdraw from Najaf by 11pm on Saturday, Baghdad time, we will set alight and explode at least 75% of pipelines and wells in south Iraq," it said.
Iraqi fighters have in recent months waged a campaign of kidnapping aimed at driving out individuals, companies and troops supporting US-led occupation forces and the new Iraqi interim administration. Agencies
-------- israel / palestine
Arafat Pledges to Curb Corruption, Lawmakers Demand Action
Saturday, August 21 2004
Palestine Media Center (PMC)
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story.php?sid=20040821043249345
"A new public opinion poll showed that a vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are convinced that the PA is very corrupt.."
RAMALLAH, West Bank - President Yaser Arafat, in a long-awaited speech at the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) in the West Bank city of Ramallah Wednesday, hailed thousands of detainees who launched Sunday an open-ended hunger strike in the jails of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), admitted of "mistakes" and pledged to "correct" corruption practices, and gave his "full support" to the government of Prime Minister Ahmad Qurei to carry out security reforms.
However lawmakers were not satisfied and demanded action and decisions.
Arafat announced a day of fasting Wednesday in solidarity with the striking detainees, said that a leading committee has been set up to follow up their cause at the international level, and a one-day salary will be deducted from all Palestinian employees for their benefit.
"It was agreed that all of us including all (anti-occupation) factions to go for a one-day fasting (Wednesday) in solidarity with prisoners until their demands of freedom are achieved," said Arafat.
Qurei' on Tuesday said that the Palestine National Authority (PNA) will take the detainees case to the United Nations.
"We will take the case to the UN and ask, in accordance with international law, that Palestinian prisoners be treated as prisoners of war," he said.
The Arab League called in a statement Wednesday for the creation of a UN commission to investigate the detention conditions of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.
Secretary General Amre Mussa called for "the creation of international commissions, under the auspices of the United Nations, to investigate the predicament of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons and detention centers," according to the statement.
Arafat Outlines Two National Missions
Arafat in his speech gave "full support" to Qurei's government to carry out security reforms according to the security plan approved by the Cabinet and urged respect to the related recommendations of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC).
Arafat called for a Palestinian "national platform" to achieve two missions: Ending the Israeli occupation and building the national authority as the base for an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
"The goals of the Palestinian people are to end the occupation on all the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967," Arafat said, adding, "Jerusalem and rights of return of Palestinian refugees are also goals for our people."
However Arafat reconfirmed Palestinian commitment to the "option of negotiations" and that "the road of peace is our strategic option."
Israel Blocking Peace Process, Says Arafat
The veteran Palestinian leader blamed Israel for blocking the peace process.
"We have not missed any opportunity to make peace" while the Israeli government's policy of continued settlement activity and the ongoing building of the Apartheid Wall on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank are blocking any opportunity for peace, he said.
Arafat reconfirmed Palestinian condemnation of all operations that target Palestinian or Israeli civilians because they are against the higher interests of the Palestinian people and give Israel a pretext to escalate its aggression.
"Israel has not stopped for a minute its campaign to end our Palestinian National Authority but this will all be in vain," Arafat said.
He also savaged the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon over its continued settlement activity "in our land."
Describing the separation and annexation wall Israel is building in the West Bank as "an apartheid wall," Arafat said that it was "destroying the potential of creating a Palestinian state."
He noted that the wall when completed will confiscate 58 percent of the area of the West Bank.
He also lashed out at the Israeli government's latest decision to build more than 1,000 settlers' housing units in six illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
"I myself had an agreement with late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, my peace partner, not to build one single housing unit into any settlement in the West Bank and Gaza," said Arafat.
"Israel decided to carry out this war against the Palestinian people in order to destroy our Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and then implement its policy and plans," he added.
Arafat said that Israel refuses to release NIS 3.200 billion of Palestinian funds.
Moreover he announced that two European and American missions commissioned by the Quartet of the UN, US, EU and Russia had discovered the Israeli use of depleted uranium against the Palestinian people.
Referring to Sharon's unilateral plan to disengage from the Gaza Strip, Arafat laid out his conditions to deal with the plan that has yet to be approved and become official.
Arafat said that any Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip should be complete, part of the "roadmap" peace plan and conducive to pullout from the Palestinian land occupied by Israel in 1967.
Sharon on Wednesday failed again in extracting the support of his ruling Likud party's central committee to form a coalition government with the opposition Labor party.
Egypt is seeking a new Middle East peace conference in Washington, probably in November, to seal a final agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Egyptian daily al-Akhbar reported Tuesday.
Qurei's Government Won't Collapse
Internally Arafat called for an end to "the anarchy of arms" in the PNA, for a halt to armed demonstrations in the streets and for an end to vandalism against public property and institutions, including encroachment on state land.
Urging more security efforts, he said: "No real efforts have been made to enforce law and order."
"More efforts and support should be made for the security of the people and this is the responsibility of the security organizations," he added.
Arafat however placed blame for the chaos in occupied Palestinian territories squarely on Israel, saying the Jewish state had created a security vacuum.
"This vacuum, which was made by the occupiers, aimed at creating a state of security chaos and unrest in the absence of the rule of law," he said.
"The occupation is mainly responsible for this situation. It should not drag us away from doing what we can to end it."
"I support my brother Abu Alaa (Qurei) and I give him my full support to implement this," he added.
The 75-year-old said that anyone who failed to accept that his government would not collapse "can drink the waters of the Dead Sea."
Proudly Arafat said that for the first time ever the Palestinian authority succeeded in gathering 13 Christian churches in Bethlehem. He also cited the Europeans, the IMF and the World Bank as witnesses to the financial integrity and transparency of the PNA.
National Consensus Is Basis of PLO Sole Authority
Also internally Arafat urged commitment to national dialogue and to the Palestinian higher interests as outlined by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and PNA.
He highlighted national consensus as the basis of the sole authority of the PLO and the PNA.
Arafat also confirmed that elections are the corner stone of a Palestinian pluralistic democracy with a prominent role for women.
He also confirmed the leading role of the private sector in building Palestinian economy.
He called for an objective and comprehensive evaluation of the 10-year performance of the PNA since the Oslo accords in 1993 and admitted that, "no one is without mistakes"
Arafat admitted that some officials had misused their posts and urged efforts to correct "all the mistakes."
"There were wrong actions ... by some institutions, and some were irresponsible and misused their positions," Arafat told the lawmakers. "There is nobody immune from mistakes, starting from me on down. Even prophets committed mistakes."
"We need to move together to correct and reform all the mistakes," he added.
Lawmakers Seek Formal Decisions, Action
Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) Rawhi Fattuh hailed "very important headlines" in Arafat's speech, but said the Palestinian leader has to translate them into decisions.
"This speech has very important headlines and we thank Arafat for it, but all the Palestinian institutions could not implement anything without Arafat's signature," said the parliament speaker.
"For that," he said, addressing Arafat directly, "we need from you some formal decisions with your signature about issues you raised in the speech."
Hassan Khreishe, deputy speaker of the PLC, was more blunt.
"The speech is just talk," he told AFP. "Now the issue has to be proper implementation and without any formal decision (from Arafat), nothing will change," he said, expressing doubt that anything concrete would be achieved at the evening meeting.
"There will not be any decisions signed off tonight."
A 14-member PLC committee, which has been pushing Arafat to crackdown on corruption and implement reforms in the security services, met with the Palestinian leader later Wednesday.
"The meeting has failed and Arafat refused to publish any presidential decisions," one of the MPs, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP after the late night meeting at Arafat's West Bank headquarters broke up in the early hours.
"President Arafat did not feel the need to make any further declarations as he believed that what he said in his speech was enough," MP Dalal Salamah told AFP.
"The results (of Arafat's speech) have to be translated into action," lawmaker Hannan Ashrawi told Reuters.
Azmi Al-Shouaibi, an independent member of parliament and a member of the parliamentary committee, said it was vital that Arafat hand Qurei real power in the security realm for there to be improvements on the ground.
"It is not enough for Arafat to support Ahmed Qurei's cabinet -- he must give him all the authority according to the law," he told AFP.
PNA Very Corrupt, Poll Shows
A new public opinion poll published on Tuesday showed that a vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are convinced that the PNA is very corrupt.
The poll, conducted by the Al-Mustakbal Research Center in the Gaza Strip, also showed that a majority of Palestinians see the recent crisis in the PNA as a power struggle and not an anti-corruption campaign.
According to the poll, 97% of Palestinians believe that corruption exists in the PNA, with 77.4% describing it as "very widespread." In response to a question about the crisis in the PNA, 75.6% said Israel was the biggest benefactor from the internal strife. More than 70% of those surveyed believe the violence was planned in advance, while only 7.5% said it was spontaneous.
As to the identity of those behind the turmoil, 61.1% blamed elements inside Fatah, while the rest are convinced that regional and international parties were involved.
The poll showed that over 60% of Palestinians believe the in-fighting as a power struggle between senior officials jockeying for position. Only 20.6% said they saw the unrest as an attempt to undermine Arafat. However, 74.4% believe that the latest crisis will definitely weaken Arafat's stature. Over 90% said the internecine fighting will also weaken the PNA.
A majority of those polled, 68.3%, said the timing of the crisis was not suitable, while 67.9% said they disagreed with the methods - such as abductions and arson attacks - used by the protesters.
The poll found that 79.7% of Palestinians do not believe that the PNA cabinet is capable of tackling the issue of corruption. Over 80% called for replacing the cabinet with a national salvation coalition and for holding free and democratic elections as soon as possible.
--------
U.S. Now Said to Support Growth for Some West Bank Settlements
August 21, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/politics/21diplo.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Aug. 20 - The Bush administration, moving to lend political support to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at a time of political turmoil, has modified its policy and signaled approval of growth in at least some Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, American and Israeli officials say.
In the latest modification of American policy, the administration now supports construction of new apartments in areas already built up in some settlements, as long as the expansion does not extend outward to undeveloped parts of the West Bank, according to the officials.
The new policy has not been enunciated publicly. It came to light this week when Mr. Sharon's government announced that 1,001 new bids for construction would be issued for subsidized apartments for settlers in the occupied territories.
For the last three years, American policy has called for a freeze of "all settlement activity," including "natural growth" brought about by an increase in the birthrate and other factors. As a result, when settlement expansions have been announced, American officials have called them violations.
After the latest Israeli announcement, however, administration spokesmen said they were withholding judgment.
"What we have asked of the Israeli government is to let us know what it is that they are doing," Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said Thursday in answer to a question at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington.
But she added later that "settlement expansion is not consistent with our understanding under the road map,'' the three-year peace plan adopted by the United States, Russia, Europe and the United Nations.
Administration officials said Ms. Rice was alluding to a team of technical advisers, led by a top official in the State Department's intelligence bureau, who are to travel to Israel next month and examine the boundary lines of construction sites in settlements, as well as the location of tiny settlement "outposts" that Mr. Sharon has promised to take down.
An administration official, amplifying Ms. Rice's comment, said a decision had been made this week not to compound Mr. Sharon's political troubles at a time when he was battling hard-liners in his Likud coalition who were revolting against his proposal to pull all settlements out of the occupied Gaza Strip.
The new American statements this week reflected "a covert policy decision toward accepting natural growth" of some settlements, despite repeated past statements, according to the official.
Some American officials acknowledged, in addition, that President Bush was reluctant to criticize Israel during his re-election campaign, which is counting on support from conservative supporters of Israel.
There are pressures on the administration from the other side, however, which officials said helped explain its ambiguous public stance. The road map bans "natural growth" of settlements.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell will be meeting with the road map partners, known as the quartet, next month at the United Nations, and they are expected to repeat their demands that Israel cease all construction of new units in the settlements.
Israel maintains that its acceptance of the road map did not include agreeing to a freeze on "natural growth" of settlements and that it got a green light for the policy of "thickening" settlements - that is, building new units within areas already built up - in 2002 from Mr. Powell. His aides dispute that view.
There have been hints in some less noticed public statements by Israeli and American officials that the United States did not object to some settlement expansion, despite its public policy, for many months.
Indeed, an Israeli official asserted that for some time, it was understood in Israel and in Washington that settlements could in effect expand vertically, within already dense construction areas, but not in an outer direction, and that the Americans understood this.
He acknowledged that no American official had enunciated such a policy in public, but noted that in April Mr. Sharon's chief of staff, Dov Weissglas, wrote a note, made public then, that in carrying out "restrictions" on the growth of settlements, Israel would try to produce "a better definition of the construction line of settlements" in the West Bank.
Mr. Weissglas's letter said an Israeli team would work with Ambassador Daniel C. Kurtzer to review aerial photos of settlements and "jointly define the construction line" in each one.
The technical team to visit Israel next month is to continue this process, administration and Israeli officials said, clearing the way for agreed-upon areas where settlements may be expanded.
Israel has also argued that the plans for the 1,000 new housing units are in areas that Mr. Bush referred to implicitly in April as land that would be recognized as part of Israel in any future peace accord with the Palestinians.
On April 14, Mr. Bush said "new realities on the ground,'' made it "unrealistic" for Israel give up settlements in major population centers.
American and Israeli officials said the latest iteration of American policy was pressed in internal discussions by Elliott Abrams, director of Middle East affairs on the National Security Council staff, who recently returned from a vacation in Israel, where he met with top Israeli leaders, including Mr. Weissglas.
Critics of Israel's policy of "natural growth" in settlements, including Israel's left and Palestinian leaders, argue that it is a subterfuge for wholesale outward expansion of settlements. Many consider all Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to be illegal because they violate Israel's role as an occupying power. Israel captured those lands in the 1967 Middle East war.
The critics assert that Israel set construction boundaries that extend miles into empty West Bank territory, and then permitted housing to go up in those areas by saying the new construction falls within the settlement boundaries. The administration's technical team has accordingly been asked to examine whether these claims are true or false in each settlement.
In addition, the team is to look at those settlement outposts that Mr. Sharon's government has acknowledged are illegal and unauthorized and has promised to remove, but has taken no action on. There are about 80 such outposts, which some Israeli officials say consist of little more than a trailer or makeshift building.
--------
US Signals Flexibility on Israeli Settlement Growth
August 21, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-israel-usa-settlements.html
CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - The Bush administration signaled on Saturday that it may accept limited growth within existing Israeli settlements in the West Bank in a shift that could help embattled Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
``There is some flexibility there,'' a senior administration official said of Washington's position on Israel's plans to build 1,000 more settler homes in the West Bank.
While the White House denied any official change in the U.S. stance that all settlement activity should be frozen, an official said efforts were underway ``to clarify with the Israelis a common understanding of what 'settlement activity' means.''
Based on this new understanding, officials said Washington could accede to the new construction if it does not take place outside the boundaries of existing settlements into undeveloped parts of the West Bank.
``I'm not suggesting it is (acceptable). The Israelis make the point that (in their view) settlement activity does not necessarily include building within existing settlements. That is a subject of debate,'' one official said.
White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said earlier this week that ``we've been very clear so that settlement expansion is not consistent with our understanding under the 'road map''' peace plan, which prescribes a freeze on settlement building.
A shift in Washington's position to accept ``natural growth'' of some settlements, first reported by the New York Times, could give a boost to Sharon, who has vowed to press ahead with a U.S.-backed withdrawal from the Gaza Strip despite a humiliating rebuff from his own party.
Sharon wants to evacuate 8,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza next year under his plan to ``disengage'' from Palestinians in revolt since 2000. But that timetable is now in jeopardy.
Acceding to limited construction within existing settlements could also benefit President Bush, who is loathe to cross Jewish-American voters and other conservative supporters of Israel in the run-up to the November election.
Prominent Israeli left-wing legislator Yossi Sarid said Sharon was taking advantage of the U.S. campaign.
A settlement monitoring group warned that U.S. approval for new construction on settlements would undermine the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Peace Now said it ``creates an opening for a new wave of construction in all the settlements and distances Israel from resolving the conflict with the Palestinians.''
But Israeli officials have privately written off the violence-torn road map, which envisages a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Sharon's building announcement appeared to be an attempt to defuse resistance from rebels in his Likud party angered by a bid to bring the center-left opposition Labor party into government to boost the prime minister's Gaza pullout plan.
But it failed, and the party dealt Sharon a humiliating rebuff Wednesday.
The plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and uproot 21 Jewish settlements there, along with four others in the West Bank, is strongly opposed by the Likud settler lobby that says the withdrawal is tantamount to ``rewarding Palestinian terrorism.''
The White House is pushing Israel to proceed despite the opposition. ``We are very engaged with the Israelis on how they begin the disengagement from the Gaza, the dismantlement of settlements there, the dismantlement of settlements in parts of the West Bank,'' Rice said.
-------- mideast
TEHRAN
Muslim Nations Urged to Meet About Najaf by Iran Leader
August 21, 2004
By NAZILA FATHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/international/middleeast/21iran.html?pagewanted=all
TEHRAN, Aug. 20 -President Mohammad Khatami has called on Muslim countries to hold an emergency summit meeting to help stop the violence between American forces and Shiite militiamen in Najaf, the official news agency, IRNA, reported Friday.
Mr. Khatami called the situation in Iraq a catastrophe in a telephone conversation with the Malaysian prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who is the head of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference.
"What is happening in Iraq is a human and spiritual catastrophe, and immediate action must be taken to stop the spread of catastrophe, particularly in the city of Najaf," he said. "If we remain silent towards the current situation, the problems ahead of us will intensify."
Mr. Khatami said Iraq's interim government was caught in a difficult stage after the standoff with Moktada al-Sadr's Shiite militia was not resolved peacefully. He added that Iran had always sought security and stability in Iraq.
Iran is a predominantly Shiite country and considers the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf as one of its holiest sites. Shiites believe that Imam Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law, was his legitimate successor.
Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi also suggested holding a summit meeting in a telephone conversation with his Jordanian counterpart, Marwan Muasher, on Wednesday.
Syria's official news agency quoted an unnamed Foreign Ministry official on Thursday as saying Damascus supported Mr. Kharrazi's call and expressed grief over events in Najaf. Syria has been one of the loudest opponents of the American-led war in Iraq.
In Tehran, a group of demonstrators marched toward the British Embassy after Friday Prayer, denouncing the United States for the violence in Iraq and calling for an international Muslim military force to defend the shrine in Najaf. They were stopped and dispersed by the riot police a few blocks before the embassy, IRNA reported.
-------- philippines
Philippines could lose out on 3,000 jobs with ban on workers in Iraq
AFP
Saturday August 21, 2004
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/040821/1/3ml0y.html
The Philippines will lose out on some 3,000 jobs in Iraq unless it lifts a ban on its nationals working there, a recruitment agency said amid protests by Filipinos desperate to work in the troubled country.
A Dubai-based firm that had offered 3,000 jobs to Filipinos had written to the main recruitment agencies here warning it would have to fill them elsewhere unless the ban was cancelled by the end of the month, said an official at one firm who asked to not be identified.
On Friday hundreds of Filipinos held the latest in a series of vocal protests in Manila demanding President Gloria Arroyo lift the ban, which was imposed in July after a Filipino truck driver was kidnapped in Iraq. The demonstrators reiterated they were willing to take their chances in strife-torn Iraq rather than endure unemployment and poverty at home, where wages are low and the unemployment rate is around 14 percent.
"Madam President, please allow us to work in Iraq. This is for our family's future," said a placard held by one protester.
Arroyo's spokesman Ignacio Bunye said the government was monitoring the situation to determine when it would be safe to send workers back but the latest assessment found Iraq was still "really dangerous".
Filipinos clamoring to work in Iraq should take into account the government's concern for their safety, Bunye said in a radio interview.
Truck driver Angelo de la Cruz was kidnapped by Iraqi militants who threatened to behead him unless the Philippines withdrew its 51-person security contingent there.
Arroyo recalled the force and the hostage was freed. Her action was harshly criticized by close allies, the United States and Australia, who said she was encouraging kidnappers.
There are as many as 4,000 Filipinos still working in Iraq despite the ban, which labor officials have warned could cost the Philippines as much as 100 million dollars in remittances.
Workers are lured by the promise of monthly wages of up to 1,000 dollars, compared to an average wage back home of less than one-tenth of that.
There are about eight million Filipinos working overseas, more than a million of them in the volatile Middle East, and their remittances to this country are a major source of foreign exchange.
Dubai-based Prime Projects, which hires foreign labor for Iraq, had initially offered the Philippines 6,000 jobs. It cut this to 3,000 after hiring many Nepalese and Indian workers instead.
"What was left now for the Filipinos are 3,000 (job orders) because the principals hired Indians and Nepalese," the recruitment agency official said.
-------- prisoners of war
US doctors 'aided' Abu Ghraib abuses
Army doctors 'falsified records and allowed abuses to occur'
Saturday 21 August 2004
AFP / Aljazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/6F6BDF4F-AFDE-4476-A1DB-A5198D041AB3.htm
US army doctors working at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq helped design abusive interrogations and failed to report homicides, says a British medical journal.
Citing government documents including sworn testimony of detainees and troops, the respected Lancet weekly in its latest issue published on Saturday, outlined a disturbing litany of failures to safeguard detainees' human rights at the prison.
It said that the failures in some instances constitute serious breaches of international law, providing a further embarrassment for the military, which has already been rocked by documented abuses of Iraqi prisoners by its troops.
"Medical personnel evaluated detainees for interrogation, and monitored coercive interrogation, allowed interrogators to use medical records to develop interrogation approaches, falsified medical records and death certificates, and failed to provide basic healthcare," it said.
One of the most startling charges in the article by Steven Miles of the University of Minnesota was that medical personnel collaborated with the military in "designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations".
It also gave an example where a detainee collapsed and was apparently unconscious after a beating. Medical staff then revived the detainee and left, and the abuse continued.
Faking death certificates
Miles said that the medical system failed to report illnesses and injuries accurately at the prison, where US soldiers were photographed abusing and sexually humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners.
Medics failed to report inmates' illnesses and injuries accurately
Death certificates of prisoners held in US custody in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been falsified or their completion delayed for months, he said.
In one case "a medic inserted a intravenous catheter into the corpse of a detainee who died under torture in order to create evidence that he was alive at the hospital".
A surgeon stated that the death of Iraqi Major-General Muhush was of natural causes after his head was pushed into a sleeping bag while interrogators sat on his chest.
"Six months later, the Pentagon released a death certificate calling the death a homicide by asphyxia."
Untreated torture victims
According to a prisoner's sworn testimony, a festering hand wound caused by torture went untreated.
"The described offences do not merely fall short of medical ideals; some constitute grave breaches of international or US law" - Steven Miles, University of Minnesota
The study concluded that although the US army's medical services are mainly staffed by humane personnel, "the described offences do not merely fall short of medical ideals; some constitute grave breaches of international or US law".
By the standards of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, "the moral advocacy of military medicine for the detainees of the war on terror broke down".
It also laments that army medics failed to report abuses at Abu Ghraib even though knowledge of torture and degrading treatment was widespread within the system there.
It also cited isolated reports that medical personnel directly abused detainees.
"Two detainees' depositions describe an incident where a doctor allowed a medically untrained guard to suture a prisoner's laceration from being beaten," it said.
Image courtesy of the Washington Post http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/rdonlyres/6F6BDF4F-AFDE-4476-A1DB-A5198D041AB3/46104/DCDB04C226AA4E6DB96DB2D42A665F65.jpg
----
Pentagon says no evidence of medical collaboration with abusive behavior
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Aug 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040820141836.vx7di3n7.html
The Pentagon, responding to an article in the British medical journal Lancet, said Friday it had no evidence that US military medical personnel collaborated with abusive behavior by interrogators or guards in Iraq or condoned abusive behavior.
In an article to be published Saturday, Steven Miles of the University of Minnesota charged that medical personnel collaborated with the military "in designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations."
"Medical personnel evaluated detainees for interrogation, and monitored coercive interrogation, allowed interrogators to use medical records to develop interrogation approaches, falsified medical records and death certificates, and failed to provide basic health care," the Lancet article said.
The Pentagon said the charges were "serious and far-reaching" but said the article painted "an inaccurate picture of how medical personnel performed their duties and upheld their obligations."
"The Department of Defense takes strong exception to these allegations and (Miles's) wholesale indictment of the medical care rendered by US personnel to prisoners and detainees," said Lieutenant Colonel Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
"Although investigations have not been completed, we have no evidence that military medical personnel collaborated with abusive behavior by interrogators or guards, or condoned any abusive behaviors," she said.
"There is no evidence that final death certificates were falsified," she said.
The Pentagon promised a "full and fair review" of the matters raised by the article, noting that investigations were underway into all aspects of prison and detainee operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Thursday that an investigation into the role of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib prison cited some medical personnel for failing to report evidence of abuse among prisoners they had treated.
The prison is at the center of an abuse scandal that erupted earlier this year with the disclosure of hundreds of photographs of guards abusing and sexually humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners.
-------- un
U.N. Bombing Anniversary Highlights Safety
Associated Press
By EDITH M. LEDERER
August 21, 2004
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/U/UN_IRAQ_SECURITY?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- A year after the bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad killed 22 people, the United Nations remains a target for attacks in Iraq and U.N. staff are angry that major security problems have not been fully addressed.
Thursday's anniversary was a grim reminder of the U.N.'s vulnerability, not just in Iraq but in Afghanistan and other countries.
It also highlights the difficulty the world body faces in trying to provide humanitarian relief, and help devastated countries rebuild and conduct elections under fear of terrorist attacks.
Speaking at a ceremony in Geneva marking the first anniversary, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the world body is wrestling with these "wrenching, fundamental questions."
"How do we improve security without unduly impeding our work and effectiveness?" he asked. "Our work is with people. We must be able to get to them, and they must be able to get to us."
"How do we balance this need for openness with security in today's world?" he asked. "How do we operate in places like Iraq and some parts of Afghanistan, where many people want and expect us to help - and this includes the Security Council - but some are determined to block our work at any price?"
The council wants the United Nations to play a leading role in Iraq's political transition to democracy and in June it authorized a separate force to protect U.N. staff and facilities in Iraq. But not a single country has offered soldiers, a reflection of the dilemma the world body faces.
Earlier this month, Annan said the United Nations remains "a high-value, high-impact target for attack in Iraq" and therefore he is limiting the number of U.N. staff allowed to return to the country. Because there is no U.N. protection force, the new U.N. envoy, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, and his small team who arrived last Friday, must be protected by the U.S.-led multinational force.
But the United Nations Staff Union, which represents over 5,000 staffers worldwide, maintains it is still too risky for any staff to go back to Iraq.
A resolution the union's executive body adopted last week says Annan has failed to keep the promise he made last October, when all U.N. international staff were ordered out of Iraq, to do his utmost to ensure that security and other U.N. management failures were not repeated in Iraq or elsewhere.
"It's been a year and we're still saying, where is it?" the union's vice president, Guy Candusso, said Wednesday. "They haven't implemented the necessary security reform measures to gain the trust of the staff."
The Staff Council called on Annan to appoint a new full-time professional security coordinator, reform security management and provide staff with a detailed explanation of measures taken to address serious security shortcomings.
"We've been workin hard ... to correct our systemic weaknesses," Annan said in his speech. "Much has been done, but much more is still to be done."
U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said the new security coordinator will be "one of the most important appointments" made by Annan during his two terms. "The search for the right candidate has been thorough, and we expect to make an announcement soon," he said.
Annan's speech at the U.N. offices in Geneva was carried by live video-link to a ceremony at U.N. headquarters in New York, where a candle was lit for each of the 22 victims by family, friends or colleagues.
The union planned a silent march outside later in the day. It said the march would commemorate colleagues who died and demonstrate that security reform is needed without delay.
A U.N.-appointed panel led by former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari cited extensive U.N. security failures and a "dysfunctional" security management system before the bombing last Aug. 19.
Eckhard said Annan received a study of the U.N.'s security system by Britain's Scotland Yard just 15 days before the Baghdad bombing. After receiving Ahtisaari's report, Annan commissioned "a fresh study taking into account our changed perception of the threat to our security that the bombing in Baghdad generated," Eckhard said.
"That report will be submitted to the General Assembly in the next month or two," he said.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- death penalty
Across New York, a Death Penalty Stuck in Limbo
August 21, 2004
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/nyregion/21death.html?pagewanted=all
In Albany, a 27-year-old former convict who shot a police officer to death in December is no longer facing the death penalty prosecutors had been seeking for months. He was sentenced on Wednesday to life in prison after pleading guilty with the understanding that his execution was no longer possible. New York's highest court had seemingly suspended capital punishment in June, finding a central provision of the state's death penalty law unconstitutional.
Across the river in Troy this summer, though, the district attorney was not about to give up the death penalty. While aware of the June 24 ruling on capital punishment, she announced that she was seeking the execution of two men charged with killing a witness who had been scheduled to testify in a drug trial.
The confusion and contradictions over the New York death penalty extend beyond the Albany area. In Binghamton, for instance, where prosecutors spent 19 days picking a jury that was to consider capital punishment for a man accused of killing a woman and her 14-year-old daughter, the case was immediately suspended after the June decision.
Now, another jury will be picked, and this time the maximum sentence for the 34-year-old accused killer is to be life without parole.
Meanwhile, the district attorney in Brooklyn has chosen to try to delay all of his four death penalty cases, waiting to see if the State Legislature will adopt a new law that would permit him to pursue capital punishment in those cases.
Such is the uncertain state of the New York death penalty nearly two months after the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals, said there was a flaw in the capital punishment law. It is a jumble of differing interpretations and conflicting consequences. The law, prosecutors and defense lawyers say, is basically in a confounding legal limbo, neither completely in force nor convincingly defunct.
"We're left hanging in this gray area, not knowing what's going to happen and forced to make decisions on very speculative possibilities," said Mike Green, the Monroe County district attorney.
In its June ruling, the court's 4-to-3 majority said the state's 1995 death penalty law unconstitutionally coerced jurors to vote for execution by requiring judges to tell them that if they deadlocked in a trial's penalty phase, the judge would impose a sentence that would leave the convicted killer eligible for parole after 20 to 25 years.
The decision left the rest of the law in place, but it said that "under the present statute, the death penalty may not be imposed."
After the ruling, there were predictions that the law would be quickly repaired in Albany, where the Republican governor and leaders of both the State Senate and Assembly favor capital punishment. But now, with no legislative fix enacted and none appearing likely for several months at least, the differing approaches across the state are creating a legal morass that could take the courts years to sort out.
Some prosecutors are arguing that the nine capital cases that were already moving toward trial when the Court of Appeals ruled could be turned back into death penalty cases if the Legislature acts. But some prosecutors say it is clear from the court's ruling that those cases cannot be handled as capital cases because they were begun under a defective law.
Some prosecutors say they will continue to demand execution in new cases as they arise in the belief that new legislation would apply retroactively. Jerry Schmetterer, the spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, said prosecutors in Mr. Hynes's office would "proceed as usual with new cases, which could result in seeking the death penalty."
There are now more than 30 such cases around the state that could otherwise qualify as death penalty cases, according to the state's Capital Defender Office.
"There is no impediment to seeking the death penalty in New York," said Sean M. Byrne, executive director of the New York Prosecutors Training Institute, which coordinates death penalty issues for the state's district attorneys. "There is a defect in a procedural provision that could be repaired."
But defense lawyers argue that basic guarantees of fairness bar prosecutors from seeking the execution of anyone charged with a crime before the Legislature enacts a repaired death penalty law, if it ever does. They say the concept known to generations of civics-class students, the prohibition against so-called ex post facto laws, should stall all prosecution efforts at capital punishment until a new law is enacted.
"Our position," said the state's chief capital defender, Kevin M. Doyle, "is that a person may not be capitally prosecuted under a statute that wasn't in effect when he was alleged to have committed his crime."
Raymond A. Kelly Jr., a defense lawyer in the Troy witness-killing case, said it was a violation of basic rules of fair play for prosecutors to begin pressing for execution on the heels of a high court ruling declaring that there was an important flaw in the death penalty law. In his case, the Rensselaer County district attorney, Patricia A. DeAngelis, filed a notice of intention to seek the death penalty four days after the Court of Appeals handed down its decision, which overturned the death sentence of a Long Island killer. Insisting that he was speaking generally, not about Ms. DeAngelis, Mr. Kelly said death penalty decisions were often political and that "it is a vehicle for some prosecutors to ride the execution gurney as a vehicle to higher office."
In a terse one-paragraph letter to another defense lawyer in the Troy case that left many questions unanswered, the county judge, Patrick J. McGrath, said that "even though the People have filed a death notice the case must be considered a noncapital" case because of the Court of Appeals decision. But Mr. Kelly said that the letter was not a formal rejection of Ms. DeAngelis's assertion that she was seeking execution and that the status of the case was now remarkably murky.
Ms. DeAngelis did not respond to many requests for comment.
But in the current environment, even the fate of the four men on death row - having been sent there under what has been held to be a law with a defective provision - has not been smoothly settled. Many had thought just after the top state court's ruling that their lives would be spared without much debate.
The Long Island killer in whose case the Court of Appeals judges made their ruling, Stephen LaValle, was resentenced earlier this month to life without parole. And court filings show that the Suffolk County district attorney, Thomas J. Spota, has reached an agreement with defense lawyers that will bring a similar sentence for a second death-row inmate, Nicholson McCoy, convicted of sodomizing and murdering a fellow supermarket employee.
But lawyers say a third death-row inmate, Robert Shulman, convicted of dismembering three prostitutes on Long Island, has not permitted his lawyers to try to negotiate with prosecutors, arguing that he deserves a new trial, not a life sentence.
In the fourth death-row case, the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, has said he will fight to preserve the death sentence of John B. Taylor, who was convicted of murder in a massacre at a Wendy's restaurant in Flushing in 2000. Mr. Brown argues that the instructions the trial judge gave jurors in Mr. Taylor's case would have satisfied the Court of Appeals judges because the judge indicated Mr. Taylor would never go free, even if the jury deadlocked.
The death penalty battles around the state are far from just arguments among lawyers. Claudia C. Conway, a Legal Aid lawyer in Brooklyn, said there was a cruelty surrounding the uncertainty that has followed the Court of Appeals decision. Ms. Conway is one of the lawyers for Arthur Kelly, a 65-year-old man charged with killing three people in a dispute that prosecutors say careened out of control over noise from a neighbor's apartment in the Sheepshead Bay area of Brooklyn.
"He never really knows from day to day," she said, "what his fate is going to be."
-------- homeland security
Homeland Security Monitors Canada Border
Aug 21, 2004
(AP)
By GENE JOHNSON
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040821/D84JKP2G0.html
BELLINGHAM, Wash. (AP) - As part of a dramatic boost in surveillance of the Canadian border, federal officials Friday dedicated the first of five planned bases for regular flights to look for drug runners and others crossing illegally by air or land.
The Bellingham Air Marine Branch is to have a staff of nearly 70, two helicopters, an airplane and a high-speed boat by year's end. Similar bases have policed the Mexican border for three decades, but the new facility is the first on the Canadian border.
The five new bases, which will dot the border from Washington state to upstate New York, are a response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as well as smuggling of illegal aliens and drugs, including British Columbia's potent strains of marijuana. Similar bases have policed the Mexican border for three decades.
"Smuggling is a two-way street," said Michael Milne, spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security. "We've got cocaine and money going north, B.C. bud and human smuggling coming south."
A second station in Plattsburgh, N.Y., is scheduled by the end of the year, Milne said, followed by bases near Detroit; Grand Forks, N.D.; and Great Falls, Mont.
The Bellingham base initially have only enough money to operate flights about eight hours a day.
"Our greatest asset right now is they don't know when we're going to be operating," said Mitch Pribble, a pilot and associate field director for the office.
The aircraft will allow agents to track suspicious flights where the pilot doesn't report to customs or talk on the radio. Federal pilots will follow such aircraft or direct agents on the ground.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said Congress earmarked $35.2 million in the current fiscal year to get the Bellingham station up and running.
"I feel like the northern border is finally getting its due," Murray said.
----
Homeland Security Talks Criticized
Negotiations Affecting 110,000 at a Standstill, Unions Say
By Stephen Barr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 21, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20322-2004Aug20.html
Two union leaders told their members yesterday that the Department of Homeland Security walked out of talks on new rules that will change how 110,000 of the department's employees are paid, promoted and disciplined.
The department disputed that characterization and said the talks will soon move to the next level -- a meeting at which Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and Kay Coles James, director of the Office of Personnel Management, will be present.
The apparent breakdown between the unions and the Bush administration underscores the tensions in play as the department prepares for one of the largest changes to the civil service system in recent decades. Civil service experts say it could be a model for remaking rules at the Defense Department and other agencies.
Both sides agreed yesterday that they have made some progress in their talks.
Union representatives said they wanted to keep talking and get agreements in writing but the department did not get back to them after the last session ended Aug. 6. The unions said administration officials have signaled they want to publish final regulations in September so that they can launch the new system next year.
"Do they want to do it right, or do they want to do it fast?" asked Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union.
Brian DeWyngaert, executive assistant to the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said: "It is pretty clear that they had a schedule that they intended to keep. In our minds, that is an arbitrary schedule."
He added: "Clearly, the work was not finished. This is a massive undertaking. The regulations are extremely long, covering a huge area of topics. Very complex. And to try and rush through those and leave a lot of things undone . . . is not the way to do business."
In a letter to union members, Kelley and John Gage, the AFGE president, wrote: "Progress was being made in these talks until DHS management unexpectedly and inexplicably walked out. DHS management is refusing to come back to the table and finish the discussions."
Melissa Allen, senior human resources adviser at the department, said, "When we concluded discussions in early August after 40 days, DHS and OPM suggested that those discussions should move to the next level -- a meeting between the secretary, the director of OPM and union leadership."
Allen said agreement had been reached in the staff-level talks "on concepts and principles which responded to concerns raised by DHS employees and their representatives."
But Kelley said she found out the current round of talks had been suspended only after making a telephone call to a senior Homeland Security official and to a mediator who was serving as a referee. She was left with the impression, she said, that "there is nothing more to talk about."
Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the Government Reform Committee, thinks it would not hurt to extend the staff-level talks, his spokesman, David Marin, said.
"He's urging all of the parties to return to the table and finish this important work," Marin said. The credibility of the new workplace rules hinge, in part, on assuring Homeland Security workers that they were developed through a collaborative process, he said.
"At the very least, employees need to know their representatives had ample opportunity to voice their concerns," he said. "Premature cessation of negotiations threatens employee buy-in down the road."
--------
Hundreds Report Watch-List Trials
Some Ended Hassles at Airports by Making Slight Change to Name
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 21, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20199-2004Aug20?language=printer
For more than a year and a half, Rep. John Lewis has endured lengthy delays at the ticket counter, intense questioning by airline employees and suspicious glances by fellow passengers.
Airport security guards have combed through his luggage as he stood in front of his constituents at the Atlanta airport. An airline employee has paged him on board a flight for further questioning, he said. On at least 35 occasions, the Georgia Democrat said, he was treated like a criminal because his name, like that of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), appeared on a government terrorist watch list.
While Kennedy managed to get security officials to end his airlines hassles after three weeks of trying, Lewis had no luck for months. Then he found his own way around the security mess.
Lewis added his middle initial to his name when making his airline reservations. The computer system apparently didn't flag tickets for "Rep. John R. Lewis," and the hassles suddenly ended.
"The 'R' is the only thing that has been saving me," Lewis said from Atlanta yesterday.
Hundreds of passengers -- possibly thousands -- have contacted the Transportation Security Administration complaining that the government's secret watch lists are unfairly targeting innocent travelers and causing travel headaches. Just last month, more than 250 passengers sought to be removed from the list.
But even more disconcerting, some of these travelers and security experts say, is that the system can be easily circumvented by a simple adjustment to one's name. "The no-fly list assumes that dangerous people are going to use the same name the government thinks they use. If I'm Osama bin Laden, I'm going to use a fake ID when I go on an airline and hijack it," said Aaron H. Caplan, attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. "The whole notion that keeping a list of names contributes to safety is kind of questionable, especially when terrorists use aliases all the time."
Some passengers who were told that their names matched others on the watch lists said they have been tipped off by airline employees who were embarrassed and apologetic about having to delay them when the passengers were known to the employees.
John W. Lewis, a 76-year-old doctor who lives in Camden, Maine, said he was stopped and questioned before several Continental Airlines flights to Houston, where he teaches a course. When he arrived for his usual flight in June, airline agents had some advice for him. "They said, 'You're not on the list, but your name is, and if you change your name, it will be okay,' " Lewis said.
So he changed the name on his credit card and his airline tickets to "Dr. John W. Lewis," but it has not eliminated the problem entirely, he said. Airline agents still stop him when he checks in at the ticket counter, he said. But no one raises any questions on the return trip. He said he has contacted Maine Sen. Susan Collins (R) and Rep. Lewis to try to fix the problem permanently. "I can't believe we are all on the hit list," he said, referring to people named John Lewis.
The no-fly list is a collection of names from the FBI and intelligence agencies that is managed by the TSA and delivered to airlines. Each airline has its own system for matching the names. A Department of Homeland Security official said that Kennedy and Rep. Lewis were not on the no-fly list but that similar names had popped up on another, more extensive airline terrorist watch list.
Security experts said the government's no-fly list and other watch lists of known terrorists come up with false matches because they are based on antiquated technologies and are unevenly administered by airline employees instead of security personnel.
"What is flawed in the identification system is the administration of this list," said TSA spokeswoman Yolanda Clark. The agency is working to replace the existing system with one that is more ambitious, but it is not clear when it will be ready. "Airlines have different policies and procedures," she said.
Several airlines said privately yesterday that they find it uncomfortable enforcing a security policy created by the government, especially when they have to tell some of their best customers -- frequent fliers -- that they are on a watch list. Several carriers declined to comment on experiences by passengers.
Douglas R. Laird, an aviation security consultant who helped develop another government computer screening system, said the no-fly list is "pretty much worthless."
"Name search [systems] were relatively unimportant for the simple reason that you don't have to do much to throw the computer off," Laird said.
But other security experts disagree and say that even though it is impossible to eliminate false positives -- that is, cases like that of John Lewis -- watch lists can potentially stop a terrorist if they are handled correctly. Billie Vincent, a former Federal Aviation Administration official, said the government needs to simplify and streamline its lists and address tricky problems such as how to handle Arabic names, which can be spelled a number of different ways. "We do need to compile and use the lists in addition to other layers of security," Vincent said in an e-mail.
The TSA said that last month, 258 passengers filled out forms requesting to be removed from the government's watch lists. It said it could not say how many to date have made similar requests or actually ended list-related hassles. Once a passenger submits additional identification such as a birth certificate or passport to the agency, the TSA sends updated information to the airline and a verification letter to the passenger. The TSA warns, however, that even when a traveler arrives at the airport with the letter, delays may still occur.
Rep. Lewis said that he filled out the form and received a letter from TSA that verifies his identity but that he doesn't want to use it. "I'm not sure why I would have to go around carrying something like a pass," said the congressman, who is known for his civil rights record. "It reminds me of South Africa."
--------
U.S. Increasing Surveillance of Canadian Border
August 21, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/national/21border.html?pagewanted=all
BELLINGHAM, Wash., Aug. 20 (AP) - As part of a plan to increase surveillance of the Canadian border, federal officials on Friday opened the first of five planned bases for regular flights to look for drug runners and others crossing illegally by air or land.
The base of operations, called the Bellingham Air Marine Branch, is to have a staff of nearly 70, two helicopters, an airplane and a high-speed boat by year's end. Similar bases have policed the Mexican border for three decades, but the facility here is the first on the Canadian border.
The five new bases, which will dot the border from Washington to upstate New York, are a response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as well as smuggling of illegal immigrants and drugs, including British Columbia's potent strains of marijuana.
"Smuggling is a two-way street," said Michael Milne, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security. "We've got cocaine and money going north,'' and marijuana and people coming south.
A station in Plattsburgh, N.Y., is scheduled by the end of the year, Mr. Milne said, followed by ones near Detroit; Grand Forks, N.D.; and Great Falls, Mont.
The Bellingham base will initially operate flights only about eight hours a day.
"Our greatest asset right now is they don't know when we're going to be operating," said Mitch Pribble, a pilot and associate field director for the office.
The aircraft will allow agents to track suspicious flights in which the pilot does not report to customs or talk on the radio. Federal pilots will follow such aircraft or direct agents on the ground.
--------
Homeland Security officer charged in border incident
Associated Press
August 21, 2004
http://www.wstm.com/Global/story.asp?s=2161139
BUFFALO, N.Y. A Homeland Security officer has been indicted on charges that he violated a Chinese tourist's civil rights when he subdued her during an incident at a western New York border crossing last month.
The U-S Attorney's office in Buffalo says a federal grand jury today indicted 43-year-old Robert Rhodes of Niagara Falls on a charge of causing bodily injury to the Chinese businesswoman (Zhao Yan).
The case stems from an incident on July 21st at the Rainbow Bridge on the U-S of Niagara Falls.
Rhodes said in a statement that the woman and two other women ran when he asked them to come into the inspection station at the bridge.
An affidavit by a senior Homeland Security agent cited witness accounts of Rhodes spraying Zhao's face, throwing her against a wall, kneeing her in the head and striking her head on the ground.
-------- terrorism
U.S. Indicts 3 on Charges of Helping Militant Group
August 21, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/international/middleeast/21hamas.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Aug. 20 - In its second major move in a month to stem the flow of money from the United States to the militant group Hamas, the Justice Department on Friday announced the indictments of two American residents and a third man in the Middle East who officials said worked for years to finance Hamas's attacks against Israel.
The two men in the United States - Muhammad Hamid Khalil Salah, 51, of suburban Chicago and Abdelhaleem Hasan Abdelraziq Ashqar, 46, of suburban Washington - were arrested late Thursday. Officials accused them of helping to lead Hamas recruitment and fund-raising efforts in the country for the past 15 years.
Also indicted was Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, 53, a top political leader for Hamas who is believed to be in Syria. An arrest warrant was issued for Mr. Marzook, who was educated in the United States.
All three men were indicted on racketeering conspiracy and other charges, and they could receive life in prison if found guilty. The Justice Department is also seeking to have them forfeit $2.7 million and other assets as compensation for the money that prosecutors say was illegally funneled to Hamas to finance attacks in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and elsewhere in Israel over the years.
The men's defense lawyers vowed to fight the charges, calling them politically motivated. There was no immediate reaction from Hamas.
The move is part of a broader effort by the Bush administration to cut off the supply of American money to militant groups like Hamas, which was designated as a terrorist group by the United States in 1995.
The indictments follow the arrests last year of five former leaders of the Holy Land Foundation in Texas, once the biggest Islamic charity in the United States, on charges that it funneled millions of dollars in illicit money to Hamas. The former charity leaders have denied the charges.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said Mr. Marzook, Mr. Salah and Mr. Ashqar were part of a cell that "allegedly financed the activities of a terrorist organization that was murdering innocent victims abroad, including American citizens."
The lawyer for the family of one American citizen killed in a 1996 attack, 16-year-old David Boim, said the indictments were gratifying. "This is one step closer to justice for the Boim family," said the lawyer, Stephen J. Landes of Chicago.
Jewish groups praised the indictments as well, with Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, calling the prosecution "a significant step in the war against terrorism."
But Thomas A. Durkin, a lawyer for Mr. Ashqar, denied the charges and said the indictment amounted to a "political cheap shot" against the defendants and Hamas, which maintains a vocal political wing and has strong support in many parts of the Arab world despite its history of violence.
"This is a blatant attempt by the Bush-Ashcroft Justice Department to cater to the Jewish vote, and it's a foolish attempt to criminalize one side of an international political issue that no U.S. administration has had the courage to resolve," he said.
Mr. Durkin and other defense lawyers in the case noted that many of the specific fund-raising and recruitment allegations against the three men date to the early 1990's, before the designation that made it illegal for Americans to support Hamas.
Federal officials had already brought criminal contempt charges against Mr. Ashqar last year because of his refusal to testify before a grand jury in Chicago that was investigating the case, and he and the other defendants had faced scrutiny by American investigators for years.
"The fact that this indictment was brought was no surprise," Mr. Durkin said, "but the breadth and scope of it is startling. It's just preposterous to allege Hamas to be a criminal enterprise since its inception in 1988."
Mr. Ashqar came to the United States from the Middle East as a young man to do graduate work at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, then moved to the Washington area where he ran an educational foundation and taught at Howard University. Prosecutors accused him of being a conduit for money, documents and information flowing from the United States to Hamas.
-------- POLITICS
-------- corruption
Convention Boss's Other Hat: Lobbying G.O.P. for Defense Clients
August 21, 2004
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/nyregion/21convention.html?pagewanted=all
For more than a year David Norcross has been a key player for the Bush-Cheney campaign in organizing the Republican National Convention. Mr. Norcross has hired the convention's chief executive, headed the committee responsible for guiding decisions on everything from transportation to entertainment and helped make arrangements for the delegations coming to New York.
But Mr. Norcross wears more than one hat.
At the same time that he has held this inside-the-party position with access to top government officials, he has also been lobbying the Bush administration on behalf of clients like Raytheon, the defense contractor. Mr. Norcross lobbied the Department of Defense, the Department of the Treasury, the Senate and the House, all on behalf of Raytheon, while he has been the chairman of the convention, according to records on file with the secretary of the Senate.
There is nothing illegal about Mr. Norcross taking on both jobs at the same time, especially since his role at the convention is a party position, not a government one. In the past, party chairmen with far greater access to the White House than Mr. Norcross, including the former Republican National Committee chairman, Haley Barbour, and the onetime Democratic National Committee chairman, Ron Brown, have also simultaneously been affiliated with lobbying firms.
But Mr. Norcross's dual roles come after Congress has sought to limit corporate influence in politics with stiffer campaign finance laws. But those laws have had the unintended effect of exaggerating the already considerable influence of corporate interests in the Democratic and Republican conventions.
"Look, this is how this system works," said Fred Wertheimer, executive director of Democracy 21, a Washington-based group that helped push through changes to the campaign finance laws. "These conventions are the oasis, the last remaining watering hole. They are the ultimate mixer for office holders, lobbyists, corporate and other special interests and big money guys."
And within that environment, Mr. Norcross works at the highest level as a lobbyist representing companies like Boeing and the biotechnology company 20/20 GeneSystems Inc., which is based in Rockville, Md. Mr. Norcross's employer, the Washington-based law firm Blank Rome and its lobbying subsidiary, highlights his party credential in Mr. Norcross's official biography posted on its Web site.
"Mr. Norcross is a member of the board of directors of Blank Rome Government Relations L.L.C., and was recently appointed chairman of the Republican National Convention's Committee on Arrangements for the 2004 Republican National Convention, to be held in New York City,'' the company Web site says. "His practice focuses on legislative affairs, legislative and executive department liaison, lobbying, advocacy programs and public affairs."
While such mingling of politics and lobbying has been de rigueur, in recent years some have tried to avoid even the suggestion of any kind of conflict. Ed Gillespie, for example, the chairman of the R.N.C., said he would stop working with his Washington lobbying firm when he took over the party. And William Harris, the man Mr. Norcross hired as chief executive of the convention, also stopped lobbying while working on the convention, a spokesman said.
"The mores have progressed to the point where it makes people uncomfortable," said Stanley Brand, a Washington-based lawyer who has counseled lawmakers on ethics. "It's not against the law but it brings criticism to people."
Mr. Norcross is a longtime political insider who ran unsuccessfully in New Jersey for the United States Senate, has been counsel to the Republican National Committee and is a national committeeman from New Jersey. He refused repeated requests to be interviewed. Leonardo Alcivar, a spokesman for the convention, said Mr. Norcross was too busy with the convention to speak about his job. Mr. Alcivar also said Mr. Norcross was working only part-time on the convention, and was spending the rest of his days in his lobbying firm's New York office.
"The chairman serves as a part-time volunteer to the convention without pay," Mr. Alcivar said. "His private sector work is fully disclosed. He is working hard on behalf of the Republican Party and our convention is lucky to have him."
Mr. Norcross has not been shy about speaking about his dual roles in the past.
"Through it all, I will have some involvement with some of my clients," Mr. Norcross was quoted as saying in a recent issue of Influence Magazine, an independent nonpartisan publication that focuses on lobbying and recently described him as a lobbyist working the convention. "A lot of what I do, I can do on the telephone."
In his convention role, Mr. Norcross is chairman of the Committee on Arrangements, effectively a subsidiary of the Republican National Committee. This committee receives the $15 million federal grant that is used to help pay for the convention and it spends whatever the local host committee for the convention raises - which in this case is expected to exceed $65 million.
Since his appointment in the spring of 2003, Mr. Norcross has overseen the 14 subcommittees set up to help set the tone and direction of the convention, and, records show, Mr. Norcross has spent thousands of tax dollars to cover his own expenses working on the convention, including spending listed on federal disclosure forms as transportation and "meetings and events."
The Democratic National Committee did not create a separate committee for its convention last month in Boston. It hired a staff to work in Boston, and the national committee accepted the $15 million itself. The Democrats appointed as their chairwoman Alice Huffman, president of the California State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She received a salary for her work, convention officials said.
Steven Leventhal, a lawyer from Long Island and an expert in government ethics, said that generally speaking the nature of Mr. Norcross's two jobs do not necessarily present him with a conflict of interest but could present the government officials he is serving politically - and then lobbying - with a potential conflict.
"Of course," Mr. Leventhal said, "it is improper for a government official to take official action based upon the official's personal interests rather than the public interest. And so the question arises here, whether these relationships raise that specter."
-------- investigations
9/11 Panel to Wrap Up Its 20-Month Inquiry
August 21, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/politics/21panel.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Aug. 20 - The independent federal commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is scheduled to shut its doors on Saturday, ending a 20-month investigation that rewrote the history of the attacks and that has pushed President Bush and Congress this summer to weigh an overhaul of the nation's intelligence agencies.
On Friday, the commission's last full day of operations, commission officials said the panel's 10 members would soon open a small, privately financed office in Washington that would continue to lobby on behalf of the group's recommendations. Commission members have testified almost daily this month before Congressional committees, which have held unusual midsummer hearings to debate legislation to respond to the panel's final report.
"Through the commission's public hearings, staff statements and final report, we believe we have fulfilled our mandate," the commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, and vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, said in a statement issued Friday.
"Success will be measured by the implementation of our recommendations," they said. "While the commission will cease to exist as a government entity, we and the other eight former commissioners will continue to work as an independent, bipartisan group to educate the country about our report and monitor its implementation."
The final report, released in late July, catalogued intelligence and law-enforcement failures in the months and years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and called for revamping the government's m gathering and sharing intelligence, with a national intelligence director appointed to oversee the nation's 15 spy agencies.
President Bush and Congressional leaders have embraced some of the central recommendations of the bipartisan panel, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
But debate continues over whether to create the post of national intelligence director and whether to provide the job with the full budgetary and personnel authority that the commission recommended. Mr. Bush has suggested that he wants a national intelligence director with some, but not full, authority over budgets and the hiring and firing of the intelligence agency managers.
Members of the commission have credited much of the success of the panel, which is likely to be remembered for having conducted one of the most productive investigations in the annals of federal blue-ribbon commissions, to the bipartisan spirit of Mr. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, and Mr. Hamilton, the veteran House Democrat and former chairman of the House intelligence committee.
In their statement on Friday, both men referred to the need for bipartisanship in dealing with terrorists.
"We believe terrorism is the national security challenge of our generation," they said, "and now is the time to act, not as Republicans or Democrats, but together, united as Americans."
Since the release of the report, both men have been mentioned as potential candidates for the job of national intelligence director, and such speculation is likely to grow with Mr. Kean's announcement this week that he will step down next spring as president of Drew University in Madison, N.J., after 15 years there.
A spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, Al Felzenberg, said Mr. Kean had ruled out an immediate return to politics in New Jersey; he had been mentioned as a potential Republican candidate for governor if a special election was held in the wake of the resignation of Gov. James E. McGreevey last week.
But Mr. Felzenberg said Mr. Kean, whose resignation statement noted that he would turn 70 next year, "will find lots of great opportunities - I can't imagine him sitting in his den with a stamp collection."
The commission, which was created by Congress in late 2002 over the initial opposition of President Bush, was originally supposed to produce a final report last May. But the deadline was extended by Congress at the panel's request, with an agreement that the commission would produce a final report in late July and complete its administrative work a month later.
A commission spokesman said that over the last month staff members had been creating an inventory of, and boxing up, hundreds of thousands of documents gathered by investigators. They said the documents, many highly classified, would soon be moved from the commission's Washington and New York offices to the National Archives for storage.
Commission officials said that the newly created educational office, which will be known as the Public Discourse Project, was expected to open an office in Washington within weeks, and that it would have a small staff to organize the logistics of the lobbying efforts of the panel's 10 members, who are expected to continue to testify on Capitol Hill and to take on private speaking engagements elsewhere.
-------- propaganda wars
Bush Campaign Defends Its Use of Olympics in a Television Ad
August 21, 2004
New York Times
By MARK GLASSMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/politics/campaign/21spot.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Aug. 20 - The Bush-Cheney campaign defended on Friday its use of the Olympics in a televised political advertisement that began running this month on national cable stations that are broadcasting the games from Athens.
"We are on firm legal ground to mention the Olympics to make a factual point in a political advertisement," said Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the campaign.
The advertisement had come under fire from the United States Olympic Committee, which asked the campaign to stop running it. Federal copyright laws have granted the Olympic committee exclusive rights to the term "Olympics."
The campaign did not seek permission from the committee to use the word or the idea of the games, nor does it plan to respond to the committee's request to stop the advertisement, a campaign official said. The official also said the campaign took care to avoid using images of the Olympic logo, the sites in Athens and athletes from the 2004 Games.
The commercial begins with film of the 1972 Olympics. Then, a swimmer is shown in an Olympic-style pool as a narrator says: "Freedom is spreading throughout the world like a sunrise. And this Olympics, there will be two more free nations and two fewer terrorist regimes."
Susan Buckley, an expert in election and copyright law, said the Bush campaign had probably not violated the spirit of the law.
"Basically, this is political speech about the state of our world," Ms. Buckley said. "And they're drawing an Olympic analogy in order to make that point."
-------- OTHER
-------- health
Wide U.S. Inquiry Into Purchasing for Health Care
August 21, 2004
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/business/21buyer.html?pagewanted=all
The Justice Department has opened a broad criminal investigation of the medical-supply industry, apparently to determine whether hospitals and other medical care providers are fraudulently overcharging Medicare and other federal and state health programs for a wide array of goods - from rubber gloves to drugs to X-ray machines.
More than a dozen medical-supply companies recently received federal subpoenas in what appears to be a wide-ranging investigation into the way suppliers market products to clinics, hospitals and nursing homes that serve Medicare and Medicaid patients, and whether those institutions properly account for the purchases.
Industry executives expect many hospitals to receive similar requests in coming weeks.
The central issue, according to current and former industry executives, is whether the industry's use of rebates, discounts, barter arrangements and refunds to hospitals and other medical centers means that Medicare and Medicaid are being charged higher prices for products than the hospitals are actually spending.
The investigation appears to be centered on the medical-supply industry's dealings with Novation, a company in Irving, Tex., that is an industry leader in negotiating the contracts that thousands of hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and other facilities use to buy drugs and other supplies.
About $20 billion a year in medical products and services are sold under contracts arranged by Novation, which is owned by about 2,200 of the hospitals and care centers that use its services. They include well-known medical centers like New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Yale-New Haven Health Services and Baylor Health Care System in Dallas.
Because Novation is the link between thousands of health facilities on one side, and hundreds of medical goods and services companies on the other, the scope of the federal investigation appears to be broad.
A Novation official confirmed this week that the company was recently served with a federal subpoena demanding that it produce documents.
"This matter is in the very early stages," Novation's senior vice president, Jody Hatcher, said in an e-mail reply to a reporter's questions. "Novation will fully cooperate with the U.S. attorney's office to provide the requested documents." Mr. Hatcher did not characterize the type of documents sought.
Mr. Hatcher also cautioned against drawing any inferences from the subpoena's references to various sections of the United States Code that deal with health care offenses.
"These subpoenas can be issued without any finding of misconduct," he said. "It would be misleading to state or imply that Novation, or any of its constituents or vendors, has violated any of the statutes you referenced."
Hospitals and clinics are financed with public money to a great degree, through programs like Medicare that reimburse many of the costs they incur in treating patients. If a hospital submits an erroneous cost report to Medicare, it can receive a larger reimbursement than it is due. If this is done knowingly, it can constitute Medicare fraud, which can carry fines and a 10-year prison sentence. The federal investigation came to light after one medical products company, Becton, Dickinson, disclosed last week in its quarterly financial report that it had been served with a subpoena. Becton, Dickinson, the world's largest maker of medical needles and syringes, said in the report that it believed its transactions with Novation had "fully complied with the law," that it would cooperate and that it was not currently a target of the investigation.
Some of the other big companies to be served with subpoenas are the drug makers Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Genentech; the G.E. Healthcare medical equipment unit of General Electric, and Cardinal Health, a big manufacturer and distributor of drugs and medical supplies.
Based on the federal codes cited in a copy of one of the subpoenas, investigators are seeking evidence of health care fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States, theft or bribery involving programs receiving federal funds, obstruction of investigations and other possible violations. The subpoena was signed by Shannon Ross, criminal chief of the United States attorney's office in Dallas.
A spokeswoman for that office declined to discuss the subpoenas or to confirm that an investigation was in progress, citing longstanding policy. Most of the companies also declined to discuss the matter, other than to say that they would cooperate with investigators.
Novation's primary business is to pool the purchasing volume of about 2,200 hospitals, as well as thousands of nursing homes, clinics and physicians' practices, and to use their collective power to negotiate contracts with suppliers at a discount. In many cases, the contracts offer special rebates to hospitals that meet certain purchasing targets. Although Novation is not well known outside the industry, it wields formidable power because it can open, or impede, access to a vast institutional market for health products.
Novation's business practices, which were the subject of an investigation in 2002 by The New York Times, have drawn criticism from several parties , including the antitrust subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The practices under scrutiny include questionable payments in the awarding of contracts and incomplete accounting of the rebates paid to hospitals and other medical centers.
The chairman and ranking member of the subcommittee, Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, and Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat, have been monitoring Novation and other companies involved in the group purchasing of health products. In hearings, they have expressed concerns about possible abuses and have publicly called on companies in the industry to adopt heightened ethics policies or risk tighter regulation. The subcommittee is expected to hold another hearing on the issue next month.
Novation has also been attacked by other companies, in past testimony to the subcommittee and through civil suits brought by small medical suppliers that accused it of freezing them out of a big share of the market for medical products. But until now, Novation was not known to have been named in a criminal investigation.
In July, Becton, Dickinson, paid $100 million to settle a lawsuit in which a smaller needle manufacturer accused it of working with Novation and other purchasing companies to freeze competitors out of the institutional market. Becton, Dickinson denied any improper behavior in that case, saying it settled to avoid protracted and costly litigation.
A spokesman for Premier Inc. of San Diego, the nation's second-largest hospital purchasing company, said that Premier had not received a subpoena.
Novation was created in 1998 as a joint venture of two networks of nonprofit hospitals, VHA Inc. of Irving, Tex., and University HealthSystem Consortium of Oak Brook, Ill. The two networks are cooperatives that also provide services like consulting and data analysis for their members.
VHA, the larger of the two networks, holds the larger stake in Novation. It is composed of about 1,400 nonprofit hospitals - about one-fourth of the nation's total - and 800 other health facilities. Many of its members are small and relatively obscure, but some are large and well known. Besides New York-Presbyterian, Yale-New Haven and Baylor, they include Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and the University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia. A spokesman for VHA referred questions about the investigation to Novation.
University HealthSystem Consortium is much smaller than VHA but consists of many prestigious teaching and research hospitals, including Johns Hopkins Hospital, N.Y.U. Medical Center, Mount Sinai Medical Center and various facilities of the State University of New York. Its hospitals are considered an extremely attractive market by suppliers, because they tend to perform unusual procedures and buy more high-end devices.
An official of University HealthSystem Consortium said that the organization had not been subpoenaed but that the consortium "would assist Novation in responding to the subpoena that they have received."
People in the medical-supply business who were aware of the subpoenas said the investigators wanted records of payments made by suppliers to Novation and to the hospitals and other facilities that use its contracts.
"It's about the money, and you've got to be able to track where the money goes," said a former Novation executive, who would discuss Novation's operations only anonymously because he was "concerned about being completely blackballed" in the industry.
The executive said he had been contacted by an investigator from the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Inspector General, who asked for the same type of information the Justice Department is seeking: the nature of the payments that suppliers make to Novation, how Novation picks which companies will be awarded contracts and what Novation does with the payments it receives from suppliers.
In most cases, suppliers are not permitted to make gifts or payments to purchasing agents for health facilities that receive Medicare money, because of the risk that some might offer kickbacks in their efforts to win business. But Novation operates within a "safe harbor" of the anti-kickback law, created specially for hospital purchasing groups.
The provision allows Novation to accept payments from suppliers with no legal consequence, as long as those payments do not exceed the safe-harbor limit, which is 3 percent of the suppliers' sales through Novation's contracts.
Over the years, these payments have become customary in the business. They are called administrative fees, because they are supposed to cover the cost of administering the contracts.
But industry records show that some companies have made other types of payments to Novation as well, and the total payments have sometimes exceeded the safe-harbor limit, sometimes surpassing 10 percent. Companies also contribute seed money to various initiatives and programs conducted by Novation's parent, VHA, and to a related foundation, the VHA Health Foundation, which finances health-delivery projects undertaken in VHA hospitals.
Because businesses set up as cooperatives are barred from retaining capital, Novation and its two parent companies are required each year to distribute all of these payments to their member hospitals, after subtracting operating expenses. Those yearly distributions, as well as the rebates to hospitals that meet their purchasing contract targets and certain in-kind contributions, effectively lower the hospitals' purchasing costs.
But because Novation is not publicly traded, there is no public accounting of these distributions. Some of the distributions are not made in cash, meanwhile, but in coupons that hospitals can use to purchase consulting services from VHA.
Hospital officials say privately that the complexity of these flows of funds makes it next to impossible to state the true costs of the drugs and other supplies they purchase each year, when they report their expenses to Medicare.
The former Novation executive said he believed that the federal investigators might see similarities in those arrangements to payments that drug companies have made to doctors who prescribed their brands - payments that have led to multibillion-dollar settlements by some pharmaceutical companies.
"Pharmaceuticals are referred to in the press because the average reader can associate with them more," the former executive said. "Consumers don't buy operating-room tables or X-ray machines, or that kind of stuff, but you've got the same sort of thing going on. And it's huge, huge money."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protesters Greet U.S. Carrier in Japan
Aug 21, 2004
(AP)
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/J/JAPAN_US_MILITARY?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TOKYO -- Boatloads of Japanese protesters met the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis as it pulled into port in southern Japan on Saturday.
About a dozen boats were filled with demonstrators at Sasebo port, while others on the dock punched their fists into the air and chanted, "Keep out nuclear-powered aircraft carriers!"
Japan is the only country ever to have suffered an atomic attack - the World War II bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and there are strong concerns about the military use of atomic energy, and port calls by U.S. nuclear-powered vessels.
The 97,000-ton Stennis, based in San Diego, Calif., was stopping in Japan to participate in drills with the USS Kitty Hawk and Japan's Self-Defense Forces, said public broadcaster NHK.
Seven of the U.S. Navy's 12 carrier strike groups were deployed simultaneously around the globe this summer. The deployment to Japan was part of the first-of-its-kind "Summer Pulse" exercises, which the U.S. Navy launched to test the feasibility of having multiple detachments at sea, according to news reports.
U.S. military officials were unavailable for comment.
The Stennis, with its crew of 4,500, is expected to leave Sasebo Wednesday, NHK said.
Sasebo, on Japan's main southernmost island of Kyushu, is located 610 miles southwest of Tokyo.
On the Net:
U.S. Navy news: www.news.navy.mil
----
Peace activists reach out to students
By William Cooper Jr.
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 22, 2004
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2004/08/22/m3c_peace_0822.html
LAKE WORTH - With military service at the center of the presidential campaign, local antiwar activists met Saturday preparing to bring the peace movement to a new generation of teenagers.
Their target: Lake Worth High School.
About 13 people gathered at the Quaker Meetinghouse, 823 N. A St., to discuss ways to counterbalance the military's push to recruit high students.
The group, including veterans and those whose antiwar activism dates to the 1960s, said the United States isn't telling the truth about the ravages of war.
"What we need to show them is the reality of war," said Ray DelPapa, who traveled from Pembroke Pines to attend the meeting. "Give the shock and awe of what war really is."
The meeting, sponsored by the Palm Beach Area Draft Counseling and the Opt Out Project of Palm Beach County, was led by Javier del Sol, co-chairman and local peace activist. The group's first project is to provide alternatives to the information provided by military recruiters, he said.
They want the same access to students as military recruiters, del Sol said. He is slated to meet Monday with Ana Meehan, principal at Lake Worth High, which has a Junior ROTC program.
The group hopes to establish peace clubs and offer lectures on alternatives to violence, he said. Organizers also plan to provide brochures, videos and Internet sites to educate young people about the peace movement.
Ann Fonfa warned that the materials must be teen-friendly. If the material is heavy on ideology, the teens won't read it, she said.
"This is not going to get their attention," said Fonfa, who began her peace activism at age 12, when her mother took her to a peace rally in 1960.
Wil Vannatta of Riviera Beach said the group also must involve elementary school students in order for them to understand the merits of the peace movement. Today, too many youngsters have accepted the recruiters' rhetoric, he said.
"This is a life-and-death situation," Vannatta said.
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