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NUCLEAR
Hot uranium prices push Cameco shares past $100 mark
Nuclear shutdown leaves ratepayers on the hook
France pins huge hopes on China's ambitious nuclear energy plans
The war's littlest victim
Vietnam vets are owed an apology
Plutonium shipment reaches France
EU Clears Areva's Stake In Uranium JV With Conditions
Iran Readies Uranium for Enrichment, UN Watching
Iran Moves Toward Nuclear Production
Report Discounts Iraqi Arms Threat
U.S. Report Finds Iraq Was Minimal Weapons Threat in '03
Inspector: Iraq had no WMD before invasion
Iraq testimony seen confirming lack of WMDs
Nuclear fuel reprocessing too costly
IAEA Chief Says World Getting Impatient with N. Korea
Powell: Brazil Has No Nuclear Aspirations
Warming to Brazil, Powell Says Its Nuclear Program Isn't a Concern
Going Nuclear The Ghost of Edward Teller Lives
Top Nuclear Regulator Says Power Plants Better Guarded
NUCLEAR REPOSITORY: Yucca court challenge alive
Hanford: Transition of FFTF work halted
US nuclear shipment arrives in France
MILITARY
Afghan Race Shaping Up as Battle of the Modern and Traditional
Afghanistan's Drug Boom
NATO Expects Rush of Taliban Attacks in Afghanistan
Japan Plans to Press U.S. on Troops
U.S. to Slow Pullout of Troops From S. Korea
How bad is Iraq report for Blair?
Iran's Missiles Can Now Hit Europe, Ex-Official Says
Funds to Rebuild Iraq Are Drifting Away From Target
Raids Focus on Insurgents South of Baghdad
Car Bomb Kills 10 Iraqis Near Baghdad
Hundreds of Sunken Vessels Block Access
64 percent of Palestinians support resuming peace talks with Israel: poll
Israeli Aide Hints That Gaza Exit Would Freeze Peace Plan
Annan Reports Progress in Action to Combat Landmines
A New C.I.A. Report Casts Doubt on a Key Terrorist's Tie to Iraq
U.S. Vetoes U.N. Resolution
Bill to Restore the Draft Is Defeated in the House
House Moves to Protect G.I.'s on Finances
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Pit Stop on the Cocaine Highway
Controversy Over Fort Detrick Expansion
Election Day Anti-Terrorism Plans Draw Criticism
Intelligence Bills Lack Details
Senate Passes Intelligence Bill, but Tough Road Lies Ahead
Partisan Split in the House May Slow a Final 9/11 Bill
Mystery of the Islamic Scholar Who Was Barred by the U.S.
Prison without trial 'justified'
Most at Guantanamo to Be Freed or Sent Home, Officer Says
POLITICS
Ethics Panel Rebukes DeLay Twice in a Week
For the Record
The Web: Iraqi blogs building free speech
Statement by Ralph Nader before the Skull and Bones Headquarters
Indian Health Agency Barred New-Voter Drive
After Debate, Iraq and Weapons Fuel the Campaign Dialogue
Senate Examining (Again) Constitutional Ban on Foreign-Born Presidents
OTHER
Volcano Is Becoming More Active
Volcano Appears to Rest After Letting Off Steam
Wildlife Protection Standards Waived
Nerve Damage Seen from Industrial Solvent
U.S. Backs Off Mont. Gas Drilling
ACTIVISTS
Who are the real terrorists? Look around
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- canada
Hot uranium prices push Cameco shares past $100 mark
Improved prospects have also increased exploration spending in Saskatchewan
The Globe and Mail
By WENDY STUECK
October 6, 2004
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20041006/RCAMECO06/TPBusiness/TopStories
VANCOUVER -- After nearly 20 years in the doldrums, spot uranium prices are soaring, a trend that has seen enthused investors push Cameco Corp. shares over the $100 mark for the first time since they were listed in 1991.
Improved prospects for uranium have also lit a fire under the share prices of several junior resource companies with uranium projects in their portfolio and boosted exploration spending in Saskatchewan, where companies are scouring the Athabasca Basin for new deposits of the mineral.
While uranium prices are notoriously difficult to predict, analysts expect the upward trend to continue for at least the next few years.
"While the recent price move brings a variety of new projects into economic viability, we believe that the time lag necessary to review, permit and construct these projects will result in continued tightness in the market for the next several years," CIBC World Markets Inc. analyst Stephen Bonnyman said in a recent report.
Cameco shares fell 79 cents to close at $103.96 on the Toronto Stock Exchange yesterday. They have risen 39 per cent in the past 12 months.
Cameco, with uranium mines in Canada and the United States, is the world's largest uranium producer. It also provides refining and conversion services that process uranium for use in nuclear reactors, and owns 31.6 per cent of Bruce Power, which runs six nuclear plants in Ontario.
Cameco spokeswoman Alice Wong said current market conditions reflect shifting supply and demand trends. Over the past 20 years, uranium consumption has exceeded mined production, but the difference has been made up from stockpiles coming on the market, including uranium recovered from former nuclear weapons.
Currently, those supplies appear to be dwindling.
"The drawing down of the inventory, which we have been forecasting for many years now, is coming to fruition," Ms. Wong said.
Uranium prices spiked in the 1990s, only to fall back when new supplies came on the market, but analysts say they are not expecting similar surprises this time around.
"If there had been any excess inventories, we would have seen them by now," said Raymond Goldie, an analyst at Salman Partners Inc.
Prices are also being influenced by uncertainty over some sources of supply, Ms. Wong said, such as Rio Tinto PLC's Rossing mine in Namibia. Rossing produces about 6 per cent of the world's uranium.
Rio Tinto is currently assessing whether to keep the mine operating until 2017, or close it earlier.
Even though uranium prices soared in U.S. dollar terms in the past three years, Rossing has not enjoyed the full benefit of higher prices, because its costs are in Namibian dollars, which are pegged to the South African rand, which has appreciated against the U.S. dollar.
The improved outlook for uranium, now trading at about $20 (U.S.) a pound, has boosted exploration spending in the Athabasca Basin, home of the world's biggest and highest-grade uranium deposits.
Gary Delaney, director of the northern geological survey at Saskatchewan's Ministry of Industry and Resources, said companies are expected to spend about $25.9-million (Canadian) on uranium exploration this year, up from $13.3-million last year.
The total mineral exploration spending for the province is expected to exceed $50-million this year, up from $31.3-million last year.
-----
Nuclear shutdown leaves ratepayers on the hook
nb.cbc.ca
Oct 6 2004
http://nb.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=nb_nuclearshutdown20041005
SAINT JOHN - NB Power's nuclear power plant at Point Lepreau will remain closed at least until the weekend, costing ratepayers an estimated $5 million for replacement power.
The utility's vice-president of nuclear power says technicians discovered a new problem shortly after they fixed a piece of equipment that burned out when a circuit failed Saturday.
Rod White says the latest problem is a cracked steam pipe. "We know from other nuclear plants that they've experienced the occasional resistor failing. We did some checks on ours some years back, and at that point we didn't find any issues with these resistors."
White says the pipes in the non-nuclear part of the plant were last refurbished about 10 years ago. The cracked pipe has been fixed, but White says all the pipes in the same section will be checked just to make sure.
When Lepreau is down, NB Power buys power or burns more oil at a cost of up to $800,000 per day. That means by week's end, ratepayers could be on the hook for more than $5 million in extra costs.
-------- china
France pins huge hopes on China's ambitious nuclear energy plans
BEIJING (AFP)
Oct 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041006014247.434fk2d3.html
French companies are well positioned to benefit from China's hugely ambitious drive to boost its nuclear energy capacity, but will face tough competition from US rivals.
Currently, China has only nine nuclear reactors that fulfill less than two percent of the country's energy needs.
But policy makers in Beijing have vowed to increase that to four percent by 2020 to meet the voracious demands of an economy that becomes more industrialized and more urbanized by each passing year.
To this end, a total of 32 reactors with a capacity of at least 1,000 megawatts each will be installed over the next 15 years.
It is estimated that as a result of this vast expansion plan, 80 percent of all new nuclear power plants over the next two decades will be built in China.
While all of China's nuclear generating capacity is currently located in its prosperous coastal areas, more and more local governments in the nation's impoverished central regions are also trying to build their own reactors.
Southwestern Sichuan, which is China's second-most populous province with 87 million inhabitants, organized a seminar in mid-September to pick three sites for future nuclear plants.
In another indication of China's enthusiasm for nuclear power, companies in the French power sector like EDF, Framatome and Alstom have seen a steady flow of Chinese delegations since early this year.
They want to see first-hand "what the French nuclear program is like," said Didier Cordero, top China representative of EDF, France's state-owned power utility.
In Beijing, the level of activity has also picked up markedly, and observers have noticed a slew of important decisions emerging from the National Development and Reform Commission, the top planning body, since this summer.
In late July, China went public with a plan to add two new reactors to the southern site of Ling'ao, which already has two reactors, built in cooperation with Framatome, Alston and EDF.
And last week, the government invited bids for the construction of four third-generation reactors at the sites of Sanmen in eastern China and Yangjiang in the south.
These projects have a combined value of up to nine billion dollars, but winning them could have a much broader significance than that for foreign contractors.
They could set the industrial standard for future projects, determining which national technologies will be favored in the years ahead.
"We want to take part in as many projects as possible for the duration of the Chinese nuclear expansion program," said Herve de Preneuf, chief China representative for French power group Areva.
"But we're aware that the Chinese will strive to play a large role themselves," he said.
Unlike Finland, which recently bought a turn-key reactor from Areva, China is more interested in also acquiring the skills and technology to develop its own nuclear power industry, French insiders said.
"Since this is third-generation and thus very advanced technology, they hope to give overall responsibility to the foreign supplier," said Preneuf.
"But at the same time, they want to make sure that the foreign contractor works with Chinese enterprises to the greatest extent possible," he said.
While France benefits from the experiences of two decades of doing business in China's nuclear industry, Beijing could decide to lean more on American companies partly in order to reduce its trade surplus with the United States.
Paris-based Areva, the world's top maker of nuclear reactors, is competing with a consortium led by US-based Westinghouse, which could also see the participation of Japanese and South Korean companies.
Westinghouse has high-level backers, at it has been promoted by a series of ranking US guests visiting Beijing, including Vice President Dick Cheney during a trip to the Chinese capital in April.
-------- depleted uranium
The war's littlest victim
bellaciao.org
Juan Gonzalez
6th October 2004
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=3619
In early September 2003, Army National Guard Spec. Gerard Darren Matthew was sent home from Iraq, stricken by a sudden illness.
One side of Matthew's face would swell up each morning. He had constant migraine headaches, blurred vision, blackouts and a burning sensation whenever he urinated.
The Army transferred him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington for further tests, but doctors there could not explain what was wrong.
Shortly after his return, his wife, Janice, became pregnant. On June 29, she gave birth to a baby girl, Victoria Claudette.
The baby was missing three fingers and most of her right hand.
Matthew and his wife believe Victoria's shocking deformity has something to do with her father's illness and the war - especially since there is no history of birth defects in either of their families.
They have seen photos of Iraqi babies born with deformities that are eerily similar.
In June, Matthew contacted the Daily News and asked us to arrange independent laboratory screening for his urine. This was after The News had reported that four of seven soldiers from another National Guard unit, the 442nd Military Police, had tested positive for depleted uranium (DU).
The independent test of Matthew's urine found him positive for DU - low-level radioactive waste produced in nuclear plants during the enrichment of natural uranium.
Because it is twice as heavy as lead, DU has been used by the Pentagon since the Persian Gulf War in certain types of "tank-buster" shells, as well as for armor-plating in Abrams tanks.
Exposure to radioactivity has been associated in some studies with birth defects in the children of exposed parents.
"My husband went to Iraq to fight for his country," Janice Matthew said. "I feel the Army should take responsibility for what's happened."
The couple first learned of the baby's missing fingers during a routine sonogram of the fetus last April at Lenox Hill Hospital.
Matthew was a truck driver in Iraq with the 719th transport unit from Harlem. His unit moved supplies from Army bases in Kuwait to the front lines and as far as Baghdad. On several occasions, he says, he carried shot-up tanks and destroyed vehicle parts on his flat-bed back to Kuwait.
After he learned of his unborn child's deformity, Matthew immediately asked the Army to test his urine for DU. In April, he provided a 24-hour urine sample to doctors at Fort Dix, N.J., where he was waiting to be deactivated.
In May, the Army granted him a 40% disability pension for his migraine headaches and for a condition called idiopathic angioedema - unexplained chronic swelling.
But Matthew never got the results of his Army test for DU. When he called Fort Dix last week, five months after he was tested, he was told there was no record of any urine specimen from him.
Thankfully, Matthew did not rely solely on the Army bureaucracy - he went to The News.
Earlier this year, The News submitted urine samples from Guardsmen of the 442nd to former Army doctor Asaf Durakovic and Axel Gerdes, a geologist at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The German lab specializes in testing for minute quantities of uranium, a complicated procedure that costs up to $1,000 per test.
The lab is one of approximately 50 in the world that can detect quantities as tiny as fentograms - one part per quadrillionth.
A few months ago, The News submitted a 24-hour urine sample from Matthew to Gerdes. As a control, we also gave the lab 24-hour urine samples from two Daily News reporters.
The three specimens were marked only with the letters A, B and C, so the lab could not know which sample belonged to the soldier.
After analyzing all three, Gerdes reported that only sample A - Matthew's urine - showed clear signs of DU. It contained a total uranium concentration that was "4 to 8 times higher" than specimens B and C, Gerdes reported.
"Those levels indicate pretty definitively that he's been exposed to the DU," said Leonard Dietz, a retired scientist who invented one of the instruments for measuring uranium isotopes.
According to Army guidelines, the total uranium concentration Gerdes found in Matthew is within acceptable standards for most Americans.
But Gerdes questioned the Army's standards, noting that even minute levels of DU are cause for concern.
"While the levels of DU in Matthew's urine are low," Gerdes said, "the DU we see in his urine could be 1,000 times higher in concentration in the lungs."
DU is not like natural uranium, which occurs in the environment. Natural uranium can be ingested in food and drink but gets expelled from the body within 24 hours.
DU-contaminated dust, however, is typically breathed into the lungs and can remain there for years, emitting constant low-level radiation.
"I'm upset and confused," Matthew said. "I just want answers. Are they [the Army] going to take care of my baby?"
We track soldiers' sickness
For the last five months, Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez has chronicled the plight of soldiers who have returned from Iraq with mysterious illnesses.
His exclusive groundbreaking investigation began with a front-page story on April 4 that suggested depleted uranium contamination was far more widespread than the Pentagon would admit.
- At the request of The News, nine soldiers from a New York Army National Guard company serving in Iraq were tested for radiation from depleted uranium shells - and four of the ailing G.I.s tested positive.
- The day after Gonzalez's story appeared, Army officials rushed to test all returning members of the company, the 442nd Military Police, based in Rockland County.
- By week's end, the scandal had reverberated all the way to Albany, as Gov. Pataki joined the list of politicians calling for the Pentagon to do a better job of testing and treating sick soldiers returning from the war.
- Gonzalez's exposé sparked a huge demand for testing. By mid-April, 800 G.I.s had given the Army urine samples, and hundreds more were waiting for appointments.
- Two weeks later, the Pentagon claimed that none of the soldiers from the 442nd had tested positive for depleted uranium. But The News' experts found significant problems with the testing methods.
http://www.nydailynews.com/11-08-2002/news/col/jgonzalez/story/236841p-203326c.html
-----
Vietnam vets are owed an apology
Green Party
6 October 2004
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/PA0410/S00083.htm
Green MP Sue Kedgley today called on the Government to offer a full public apology to veterans of the Vietnam War for the refusal of successive administrations to accept their exposure to Agent Orange and to provide adequate treatment for the illness they and their children had suffered as a result.
"In the face of mounting evidence, successive governments downplayed and denied the health effects of exposure, and took no proactive steps to monitor the health of veterans," said Ms Kedgley, the Green Health spokesperson. "The Government now accepts that the vets were exposed to a toxic environment, and so it should apologise for thirty years of denial.
Ms Kedgley called on the Government to immediately set up a programme to monitor dioxin exposure for veterans and their children.
"Vietnam veterans should undergo genetic testing to assess whether there are inter-generational effects from dioxin contamination," said Ms Kedgley. "Professor Al Rowland is already studying nuclear test veterans, and his research should extend to Vietnam veterans.
"Even if there is only limited or suggestive evidence of an association between exposure to dioxin and a disorder, veterans and their children deserve the benefit of the doubt and should be offered full medical treatment."
Ms Kedgley said the lessons of Vietnam needed to be applied to all New Zealanders who had been exposed to cancer-causing substances like dioxin, particularly the victims of poisoning from the Dow plant in New Plymouth and also the soldiers and support staff who had been exposed to depleted uranium in Iraq.
Ms Kedgley said the Paritutu residents were the New Zealand equivalent of Vietnam veterans. "They too have been exposed to a toxic environment and have been subject to thirty years of denial and procrastination. They should be given the same free medical treatment and specialist assistance that veterans are entitled to.
"Depleted uranium is another ticking time-bomb," Ms Kedgley warned. "Even a tiny particle of uranium dust can have significant health effects.
"The New Zealand engineers who have just returned from Iraq served in an area that was exposed to the highest levels of depleted uranium in the region. This exposes them to the risks of serious long term health effects, including cancer and birth defects.
Ms Kedgley said the government should monitor and treat the engineers to ensure that they do not suffer some of the ongoing horrible effects of depleted uranium, which may take many years to surface.
-------- europe
Plutonium shipment reaches France
Marc Parrad
REUTERS FRANCE:
October 7, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/27557/story.htm
CHERBOURG, France - A shipment of 140 kg (308 lb) of U.S. weapons-grade plutonium has arrived in the French port of Cherbourg, despite protests by anti-nuclear campaigners who fear it is vulnerable to a terrorist attack.
Two boats sailed into the northwestern port with the plutonium at around dawn yesterday after a more than two-week journey from Charleston in the United States. The cargo was expected to be unloaded in the next few hours.
The plutonium shipment is part of a post-Cold War agreement between the United States and Russia to get rid of plutonium from excess nuclear warheads.
Protesters from the environmental group Greenpeace have been barred from going within 100 metres of the shipment, but they watched the vessels from a distance in several small boats. Any protester who goes nearer faces a 75,000-euro (51,720 pound) fine.
The plutonium will be taken under armed guard to a nearby reprocessing plant in the La Hague peninsula in northwestern France and will then be driven nearly 1,000 km (660 miles) to a factory in southeastern France for recycling.
Greenpeace says the transport could be attacked by nuclear terrorists. French state-owned nuclear energy firm Areva, which is being paid to reprocess the plutonium, says it is safe.
Cogema will recycle the plutonium into nuclear fuel at its Cadarache and Marcoule plants in southeastern France and ship it back to the United States which plans to use it in an electricity-generating reactor.
This is part of the U.S. Department of Energy's controversial programme to turn plutonium from the "excess" nuclear warheads into mixed-oxide (MOX) plutonium-uranium enriched fuel.
Greenpeace protesters bolted a heavy truck to the road leading to La Hague this week and chained themselves to the vehicle to try to stop the delivery of the plutonium.
Police used chain cutters to cut free the protesters and dragged them away. They later removed the truck.
----
EU Clears Areva's Stake In Uranium JV With Conditions
(Dow Jones)
October 6, 2004
http://money.iwon.com/jsp/nw/nwdt_rt.jsp?cat=USMARKET&src=704&feed=dji§ion=news&news_id=dji-00041320041006&date=20041006&alias=/alias/money/cm/nw
BRUSSELS -- The European Union Commission Wednesday cleared, with conditions, French state-owned nuclear energy company Areva's (4524.FR) stake in a joint-venture called Enrichment Technology Co. Ltd.
Enrichment Technology is owned by German-Dutch-U.K. nuclear power company Urenco, which in turn is an affiliate of RWE AG (RWE.XE), E.On AG (EON), Centrifuge Nederland Ltd. and British Nuclear Fuels PLC (BNF.YY).
Regulators approved the deal "after having received guarantees that Areva and Urenco would behave in an independent manner," the E.U. said in a statement.
The E.U. initially opposed the deal due to concerns it would foster a market- dominating position and hamper competition.
The E.U. said both companies agreed to give up their veto over each others' future output.
In addition, the companies agreed to give Euratom - an E.U. agency overseeing nuclear fuel and weapons - enough information to monitor the companies' supplies and prices of enriched uranium.
The probe focused on markets for enrichment equipment and low enriched uranium used in civilian reactors. Enrichment is the most expensive of four stages needed to produce nuclear fuel and represents about 25% of the cost of producing nuclear fuel.
During their investigation, E.U. officials found that Areva's current technology lags behind competitors including Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. (JNFL.YY) and Russia's Tenex.
The regulators said Areva's deal should allow the company to gain access to new, advanced methods for uranium enrichment involving centrifuge technologies.
-By James Kanter, james.kanter@dowjones.com
Dow Jones Newswires;
322-285-0136;
-------- iran
Iran Readies Uranium for Enrichment, UN Watching
By REUTERS
October 6, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - Iran said on Wednesday it had processed several tons of raw ``yellowcake'' uranium to prepare it for enrichment -- a process that can be used to make atomic weapons -- in defiance of the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Iran's president said Tehran would not give in to foreign pressure aimed at stopping what he said was a peaceful nuclear energy program, but which the United States says is a covert scheme aimed at building bombs.
A spokeswoman for the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the uranium processing was being closely monitored by the IAEA to ensure that nothing would be diverted for weapons purposes.
``The uranium conversion is being conducted under the supervision of the IAEA,'' spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.
It was unclear how much processed uranium had been produced so far, though Iran's chief delegate to the IAEA, Hossein Mousavian, indicated the amount was not large.
``It is an experimental process and we have not entered the industrial phase,'' Mousavian told Reuters in Tehran.
``A few tons of the 37 tons of yellowcake have been converted under the full supervision of the IAEA and completely within the framework of (IAEA) safeguards,'' he said.
Iran's uranium conversion plant at Isfahan intends to process a total of 37 tons of yellowcake, which experts say could be enriched into material for up to five atomic weapons.
The IAEA has installed monitoring cameras at Isfahan to oversee the production of uranium hexafluoride, the feed material for centrifuges used in enrichment.
``They (the IAEA) were aware that the production had begun,'' a diplomat close to the IAEA told Reuters. The diplomat said the production began around 10 days ago.
Mousavian said the oversight was intense, with the agency making certain that ``each milligram of the used yellowcakeunder the IAEA's watch and supervision.''
IRAN DEFIES RESOLUTION
The IAEA board of governors passed a resolution last month demanding Iran freeze all activities connected with uranium enrichment, including making feed material for centrifuges.
Tehran had originally promised France, Germany and Britain in October 2003 that it would suspend its entire enrichment program and all related activities. While it has yet to enrich any uranium, Iran never entirely froze the program and recently resumed key parts of it.
If Tehran fails to heed the demands, the board said it would consider possible ``further steps'' when it meets next month. Diplomats on the board said this included possibly referring Iran to the U.N. Security Council, which can impose sanctions.
Mousavian reiterated that Iran views enrichment as its ``legitimate right.'' On Tuesday, Iranian radio reported that Iran's conservative-dominated parliament has prepared a bill that would force the government to resume uranium enrichment.
President Mohammad Khatami made it clear that Iran had no intention of halting any nuclear activities.
``We will continue our cooperation with the IAEA but at the same time we will not subdue ourselves or our nuclear program because of foreign pressure,'' Khatami told reporters in Khartoum during an official visit to Sudan.
``It is our duty and right to use this nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and I'd like to assure the international community that we will not go to the extent of producing nuclear weapons.''
----
Iran Moves Toward Nuclear Production
October 6, 2004
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press Writer
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran has produced a few tons of the gas needed to enrich uranium, a top nuclear official indicated Wednesday, confirming the country has defied international demands and taken a necessary step toward producing nuclear fuel - or nuclear weapons.
The White House, which has been pressuring its allies to punish Iran for its nuclear ambitions, again accused Tehran of trying to build nuclear weapons and urged it Wednesday to suspend all enrichment activities.
Uranium hexafluoride gas is the material that, in the next stage, is fed into centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Uranium enriched to a low level is used to produce nuclear fuel to generate electricity; enriched further, it can be used to manufacture atomic bombs.
Iran said last month that it has started converting about 40 tons of raw uranium being mined for enrichment - plans the international community specifically said it found alarming. Iran maintains its intentions are peaceful energy purposes.
Hossein Mousavian, Iran's chief delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency, would not specify how much hexafluoride gas had been produced, but said a few tons of raw uranium - also known as yellowcake - had been converted. The conversion process yields nearly the same amount of hexafluoride gas.
"We have used part of the raw uranium we had. A few tons of yellowcake has been converted," Mousavian told The Associated Press in an interview.
"We are not in a hurry to do it," Mousavian said. "The amount we've produced is (for) an experimental process, not industrial production."
Iranian and Western nuclear experts agreed that a few tons of yellowcake would produce a few tons of the gas used for enrichment. "When you convert raw uranium, you get more or less the same amount of hexafluoride gas," said Hossein Afarideh, an Iranian lawmaker who holds a doctorate in nuclear energy.
However, hexafluoride gas repeatedly spun in centrifuges yields a far smaller amount of low-grade uranium that can be used for fuel - and even less weapons-grade uranium.
Although Iran says it has no plans to produce weapons-grade uranium and the IAEA has said there is no evidence it is trying to do so, countries that do make nuclear weapons begin with about eight tons of yellowcake to make a typical bomb.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan again accused Iran of trying to build a bomb.
"Iran needs to stop its pursuit of nuclear weapons," he said aboard Air Force One. "They agreed to suspend their enrichment and reprocessing and they need to abide by that."
"The international community is speaking very clearly to Iran: If they continue in the direction they are going we will have to look at what additional action may need to be taken, including looking to the U.N. Security Council," he added.
Mousavian, who also heads the Foreign Policy Committee at Iran's powerful Supreme National Security Council, said the process was fully under the supervision of the IAEA, the U.N. nuclear agency.
"The agency knows of every milligram of uranium converted," he said.
In Vienna, IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming agreed the process was "being done fully under IAEA's watch," but said she could not immediately confirm how far the Iranians had gotten.
"Inspectors are visiting that facility, and we have other verification tools that are providing us with constant information about the operation of that facility," Fleming said.
A diplomat close to the agency told the AP in Vienna that although the conversion does not contradict Iran's obligations, it will be viewed by some countries as a provocation.
Iran has thus far said it is honoring a pledge not to put uranium hexafluoride gas into centrifuges, spin it and make enriched uranium.
Last month, the IAEA's board of governors unanimously passed a resolution demanding that Iran freeze all work on uranium enrichment, including conversion. It specifically expressed alarm at Iran's plans to convert the more than 40 tons of raw uranium into uranium hexafluoride.
The board suggested Iran may have to answer to the U.N. Security Council if it defied the demands. The resolution said the next board meeting, scheduled for Nov. 25, would "decide whether or not further steps are appropriate" in ensuring Iran complies.
A diplomat familiar with Iran's conversion activities told the AP in Vienna last month that Iran had stopped at a precursor of uranium hexafluoride - apparently waiting for a decision from the leadership to finish the process.
Mousavian was clear Wednesday that Iran had produced the actual gas.
He said Iran was ready to guarantee that its nuclear program will not be diverted to a military use and take specific measures to eliminate concerns about Tehran's nuclear program.
"IAEA is the responsible body for nonproliferation. Iran is prepared to consider any IAEA proposal to take specific measures that its nuclear program will not be diverted toward weapons in the future. The specific measures should be defined by IAEA," he said.
Mousavian warned that the international community, not Iran, will suffer if his country is referred to the U.N. Security Council and sanctioned. He reiterated Iranian warnings that Tehran will stop implementing what is known as the additional protocol to Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which allows unfettered IAEA inspections of Iranian facilities.
"Referring Iran to U.N. will not change the nuclear capability we already possess. The victim will be the additional protocol and NPT (nonproliferation treaty), not Iran," he said.
Mousavian noted Iran has allowed international inspections of its facilities, including military sites.
"Up to now, Iran has not rejected a single IAEA request for inspections," he said. "This is the maximum of transparency and cooperation a member state can have with IAEA."
-------- iraq / inspections
Report Discounts Iraqi Arms Threat
U.S. Inspector Says Hussein Lacked Means
By Mike Allen and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9790-2004Oct5?language=printer
The government's most definitive account of Iraq's arms programs, to be released today, will show that Saddam Hussein posed a diminishing threat at the time the United States invaded and did not possess, or have concrete plans to develop, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, U.S. officials said yesterday.
The officials said that the 1,000-page report by Charles A. Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that Hussein had the desire but not the means to produce unconventional weapons that could threaten his neighbors or the West. President Bush has continued to assert in his campaign stump speech that Iraq had posed "a gathering threat."
The officials said Duelfer, an experienced former United Nations weapons inspector, found that the state of Hussein's weapons-development programs and knowledge base was less advanced in 2003, when the war began, than it was in 1998, when international inspectors left Iraq.
"They have not found anything yet," said one U.S. official who had been briefed on the report.
A senior U.S. government official said that the report includes comments Hussein made to debriefers after his capture that bolster administration assertions, including his statement that his past possession of weapons of mass destruction "was one of the reasons he had survived so long." He also maintained such weapons saved his government by halting Iranian ground offensives during the Iran-Iraq war and deterred coalition forces from pressing on to Baghdad during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the official said.
The official also said that Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group had uncovered Iraqi plans for ballistic missiles with ranges from 400 to 1,000 kilometers and for a 1,000-kilometer-range cruise missile, farther than the 150-kilometer range permitted by the United Nations, the senior official said.
The official said Duelfer will tell Congress in the report and in testimony today that Hussein intended to reconstitute weapons of mass destruction programs if he were freed of the U.N. sanctions that prevented him from getting needed materials.
Duelfer's report said Hussein was pursuing an aggressive effort to subvert the international sanctions through illegal financing and procurement efforts, officials said. The official said the report states that Hussein had the intent to resume full-scale weapons of mass destruction efforts after the sanctions were eliminated, and details Hussein's efforts to hinder international inspectors and preserve his weapons of mass destruction capabilities.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the House intelligence committee, said she had not read Duelfer's report but has been told that it thoroughly undercuts the administration's assertions that Iraq posed a serious threat.
"Intentions do not constitute a growing danger," Harman said. "It's hardly mushroom clouds, hardly stockpiles," she added, a reference to administration rhetoric used in the run-up to the war.
The report's release comes at a point in the presidential campaign when Democratic candidate John F. Kerry is aggressively challenging the Bush administration about its prewar justifications for invading Iraq, which centered largely on the contention that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. People familiar with the report said it is being released today because Duelfer was ready and his schedule permitted him to testify to Congress.
Yesterday, administration officials discussed some of the report's findings publicly, arguing that it showed Hussein was a long-term threat even though no weapons of mass destruction were found.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan called Hussein's effort to evade the U.N. sanctions "very revealing." "We all thought that we would find stockpiles, and that was not the case," McClellan said.
"The fact that he had the intent and capability, and that he was trying to undermine the sanctions that were in place is very disturbing. And I think the report will continue to show that he was a gathering threat that needed to be taken seriously, that it was a matter of time before he was going to begin pursuing those weapons of mass destruction."
The report includes page after page of names of individuals and companies -- many from China, Russia and France -- that had traded illegally with Iraq, the senior government official said. The State Department began briefing the named governments on the report yesterday, the official said.
Duelfer's findings follow reports by the Senate intelligence committee and his predecessor, David A. Kay, that criticized the prewar assessment that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Bush has pointed to the Duelfer report as the last word on the state of Iraq's weapons programs. Asked in June if he thought such weapons had existed in Iraq, Bush said he would "wait until Charlie gets back with the final report."
Another government official who was briefed on the report said that many U.S. officials had thought Hussein would "get down to business" in developing weapons when the U.N. inspectors left. "There's no evidence of that," the official said.
The official said that Iraq's nuclear-related activity in particular had been dormant for years before the invasion. "They probably didn't have a program for some period of time, well before we went in there," he said.
The Bush administration has held out the possibility that illicit weapons and their components were secreted by Hussein across the border into Syria. This may still be true, but Duelfer's team did not find any proof to support this notion, the official said. "They have no evidence of this," the official said. "It's an unresolved issue." Syria denies it aided the hiding of illicit materials.
Duelfer replaced Kay in January as the chief U.S. weapons hunter after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In title, he was the CIA's special adviser for strategy regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. As head of the Iraq Survey Group, he worked independent of the CIA and his report was not vetted or changed by the agency, said one U.S. government official familiar with Duelfer's work.
The president met with Duelfer at the White House on Feb. 6. Bush said during a prime-time news conference in April that during Duelfer's return to Iraq, he had been "amazed at how deceptive the Iraqis had been" toward U.N. inspectors, as well as "deceptive in hiding things."
The report also includes an investigation of a broad range of subjects that are either loosely or not at all connected to weapons of mass destruction, a foreign intelligence official said. These include Iraq's conventional weapons programs, evidence of corruption and abuse in the U.N.-monitored oil-for-food program, and dual-use equipment -- which could be used for either peaceful or military programs -- that U.N. inspectors may not have been aware of.
Staff writer Dafna Linzer contributed to this report.
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U.S. Report Finds Iraq Was Minimal Weapons Threat in '03
October 6, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/international/middleeast/06CND-INTE.html?hp=&oref=login&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - Iraq had essentially destroyed its illicit weapons capability within months after the Persian Gulf War ended in 1991, and its capacity to produce such weapons had eroded even further by the time of the American invasion in 2003, the top American inspector in Iraq said in a report made public today.
The report, by Charles A. Duelfer, said the last Iraqi factory capable of producing militarily significant quantities of unconventional weapons was destroyed in 1996. The findings amounted to the starkest portrayal yet of a vast gap between the Bush administration's prewar assertions about Iraqi weapons and what a 15-month postinvasion inquiry by American investigators concluded were the facts on the ground.
At the time of the American invasion, Mr. Duelfer concluded, Iraq had not possessed military-scale stockpiles of illicit weapons for a dozen years and was not actively seeking to produce them.
The White House portrayed the war as a bid to disarm Iraq of unconventional weapons, and had invoked images of mushroom clouds, deadly gases and fearsome poisons. But Mr. Duelfer concluded that even if Iraq had sought to restart its weapons programs in 2003, it could not have produced militarily significant quantities of chemical weapons for at least a year, and would have required years to produce a nuclear weapon.
"Saddam Hussein ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the gulf war," Mr. Duelfer said in his report, which added that American inspectors in Iraq had "found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program."
Hours before Mr. Duelfer's report was made public, President Bush appeared to try to deflate some the political impact of its core findings.
"After Sept. 11, America had to assess every potential threat in a new light," Mr. Bush said while campaigning in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. "Our nation awakened to an even greater danger: the prospect that terrorists who killed thousands with hijacked airplanes would kill many more with weapons of mass murder."
"We had to take a hard look at every place where terrorists might get those weapons, and one regime stood out," Mr. Bush said. "The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein."
Mr. Duelfer presented his conclusions to Congress beginning with testimony at a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But his findings were described to reporters in advance of the testimony, although only on condition that they not be published until his afternoon appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, when the report was made public.
The three-volume report, totaling more than 900 pages, is viewed as the first authoritative attempt to unravel the mystery posed by Iraq during the crucial years between the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and the American-led war that began in 2003. It adds new weight to what is already a widely accepted view that the most fundamental prewar assertions made by American intelligence agencies about Iraq - that it possessed chemical and biological weapons, and was reconstituting its nuclear program - bore no resemblance to the truth.
Mr. Duelfer concluded that Mr. Hussein had made fundamental decisions, beginning in 1991, to get rid of Iraq's illicit weapons and accept the destruction of its weapons-producing facilities as part of an effort to end United Nations sanctions. But Mr. Duelfer argued that Mr. Hussein was also exploiting avenues opened by the sanctions, including the oil-for-food program, to lay the groundwork for a long-term plan to resume weapons production if sanctions were lifted.
Mr. Hussein "wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted," the report said. But the conclusion that Mr. Hussein had intended to restart his programs, the report acknowledged, was based more on inference than solid evidence. "The regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of W.M.D. after sanctions," it said, using the common abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction.
The report was based in part on the interrogation of Mr. Hussein in his prison cell outside of Baghdad. Mr. Duelfer said he had concluded that Mr. Hussein deliberately sought to maintain an ambiguity about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons in a strategy aimed as much at Iran, with whom Iraq fought an eight-year war in the 1980's, as at the United States.
Mr. Duelfer's report said that American investigators had found clandestine laboratories in the Baghdad area used by the Iraqi Intelligence Service to conduct research and to test various chemicals and poisons, primarily for secret assassinations rather than to inflict mass casualties. It said those laboratories were active from 1991 to 2003.
Mr. Duelfer said in his report that Mr. Hussein never disclosed in the course of the interrogations what had become of Iraq's illicit weapons. He said that American investigators had appealed to the former Iraqi leader to be candid in order to shape his legacy, but that Mr. Hussein had not been forthcoming.
The report said that interviews with other former top Iraqi leaders had made clear that Mr. Hussein had left many of his top deputies uncertain until the eve of war about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons. It said that Mr. Hussein had seemed to be most concerned about a possible new attack by Iran, whose incursions into Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 were fended off by Baghdad only with the use of chemical munitions fired on ballistic missiles.
Mr. Duelfer said in the report that Iraq had made a conscious effort to maintain the knowledge base necessary to restart an illicit weapons program. He said that Iraq had essentially put its biological program "on the shelf" after its last production facility, Al Hakam, was destroyed by United Nations inspectors in 1996, and could have begun to produce biological questions in as little as a month if it had restarted its weapons program in 2003.
But the report said there were "no indications" that Iraq had been pursuing such a course, and it reported "a complete absence of discussion or even interest in biological weapons" at the level of Mr. Hussein and his aides after the mid-1990's.
The report will almost certainly be the last complete assessment by the team led by Mr. Duelfer, which is known as the Iraq Survey Group. But Mr. Duelfer said that he and the 1,200-member team would continue their work in Iraq for the time being. He said the team had not completely ruled out the possibility that some Iraqi weapons might have been smuggled out to a neighboring country, such as Syria.
The report did reverse an earlier judgment by the Central Intelligence Agency, saying the Mr. Duelfer's team had concluded that mysterious trailers found in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003 could not have been used as part of any biological warfare program. The trailers' manufacturers "almost certainly designed and built the equipment exclusively for the generation of hydrogen," upholding claims by Iraqi officials that linked the trailers to weather balloons used for artillery practice.
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Inspector: Iraq had no WMD before invasion
Final report says Saddam had ambitions but no chem or bio arms
Oct. 6, 2004
Associated Press and Reuters
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6190720/
WASHINGTON - Contradicting the main argument for a war that has cost more than 1,000 U.S. lives, the top U.S. arms inspector reported Wednesday that he had found no evidence that Iraq produced weapons of mass destruction after 1991. He also concluded that Saddam Hussein's weapons capability weakened, not grew, during a dozen years of U.N. sanctions before the U.S. invasion last year.
Contrary to prewar statements by President Bush and top administration officials, Saddam did not have chemical and biological stockpiles when the war began and his nuclear capabilities were deteriorating, not advancing, said Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group.
But Duelfer supported Bush's argument that Saddam remained a threat. Interviews with the toppled leader and other former Iraqi officials made it clear that Saddam had not lost his ambition to pursue weapons of mass destruction and hoped to revive his weapons program if U.N. sanctions were lifted, his report said.
"What is clear is that Saddam retained his notions of use of force and had experiences that demonstrated the utility of WMD," Duelfer told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Duelfer's findings, included in a report that runs more than 1,000 pages, come less than four weeks before an election in which Bush's handling of Iraq has become the central issue.
The Democratic candidate, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, has seized on comments this week by the former U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, that the United States did not have enough troops in Iraq to prevent a breakdown in security after Saddam was toppled.
Report could boost Kerry The report could boost Kerry's contentions that Bush rushed to war based on faulty intelligence and that sanctions and U.N. weapons inspectors should have been given more time.
"It is a very significant commentary on the mistaken case for war presented by this administration," Mike McCurry, a senior adviser to Kerry, told reporters in Colorado. "It is very troubling that they could have been so wrong on something as fundamental as taking America to war."
Duelfer said his report found that aluminum tubes suspected of being used for enriching uranium for use in a nuclear bomb were likely destined for conventional rockets and that there was no evidence that Iraq sought uranium abroad after 1991. Both findings contradict claims made by Bush and other top administration officials before the war.
Duelfer said he also found no evidence of trailers' being used to develop biological weapons, although he said he could not flatly declare that none existed.
Bush: Too big a risk But Bush cited Saddam's "history of using weapons of mass destruction, a long record of aggression and hatred for America" in calling the invasion the right thing to do.
"There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks," Bush said Wednesday in a campaign speech in Wilkes Barre, Pa. "In the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take."
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, traveling in Africa, said the report showed that U.N. sanctions were "not working," insisting that it backed the U.S.-British decision to go to war. Blair has been trying to defend his justification for joining the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in the face of heavy criticism from some in his own party.
Duelfer found that Saddam, hoping to end U.N. sanctions, gradually began ending prohibited weapons programs starting in 1991. But as Iraq started receiving money through the U.N. oil-for-food program in the late 1990s, and as enforcement of the sanctions weakened, Saddam was able to take steps to rebuild his military, such as acquiring parts for missile systems and restoring domestic chemical production.
However, the erosion of sanctions stopped after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Duelfer found, preventing Saddam from pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
"He was making progress in eroding sanctions - a lot of sanctions," Duelfer told Congress. "And had it not been for the events of 9-11-2001, things would have taken a very different course for the regime."
Fear of Iran Duelfer's team found no written plans by Saddam's regime to pursue banned weapons if U.N. sanctions were lifted. Instead, the inspectors based their findings that Saddam hoped to reconstitute his programs on interviews with Saddam after his capture, as well as talks with other top Iraqi officials.
The inspectors found that Saddam was particularly concerned about the threat posed by Iran, the country's enemy in a 1980-88 war. Saddam said he would meet Iran's threat by any means necessary, which Duelfer understood to mean weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam believed his use of chemical weapons against Iran prevented Iraq's defeat in that war. He also was prepared to use such weapons in 1991 if the U.S.-led coalition had tried to topple him in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
The report avoids direct comparisons with prewar claims by the Bush administration on Iraq's weapons systems. But Duelfer largely reinforced the conclusions of his predecessor, David Kay, who said in January that "we were almost all wrong" on Saddam's weapons programs. The White House did not endorse Kay's findings then, noting that Duelfer's team was continuing to search for weapons.
Bush made the case Saddam's government fell in early April 2003 after a lightning U.S.-led invasion in mid-March. He was captured in December. Bush administration officials asserted that Iraq had obtained weapons of mass destruction in the months before ordering the invasion.
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech Aug. 26, 2002, 61/2 months before the invasion. "There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us."
The president made similar charges, laying out what he described as Iraq's threat in a speech on Oct. 7, 2002:
- "It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."
- "We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas."
- "Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles - far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey and other nations - in a region where more than 135,000 American civilians and service members live and work. "
Instead, U.S. inspectors found only limited signs of the banned weapons after the active fighting ended. Among the findings:
- A single artillery shell from Saddam's pre-1991 stockpile was filled with two chemicals that, when mixed while the shell was in flight, would have created sarin. U.S. forces learned of it only when insurgents, apparently believing it was filled with conventional explosives, tried to detonate it as a roadside bomb in May in Baghdad. Two U.S. soldiers suffered from symptoms of low-level exposure to the nerve agent.
- Another old artillery shell, also rigged as a bomb and found in May, showed signs that it once contained mustard agent.
- Two small rocket warheads, turned over to Polish troops by an informer, showed signs that they once were filled with sarin.
- Centrifuge parts were found buried in a former nuclear scientist's garden in Baghdad. These were part of Saddam's pre-1991 nuclear program, which was dismantled after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The scientist also had centrifuge design documents.
- A vial of live botulinum toxin, which can be used as a biological weapon, was found in another scientist's refrigerator. The scientist said it had been there since 1993.
- Evidence emerged of advanced design work on a liquid-propellant missile with ranges of up to 620 miles. Since the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq had been prohibited from having missiles with ranges longer than 93 miles.
The Iraq Survey Group did not deal with whether Saddam's government had contacts with members of al-Qaida, a matter that remains subject to wide debate.
-----
Iraq testimony seen confirming lack of WMDs
October 06, 2004
By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041006-125549-3155r.htm
The Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to hear testimony today on another round of Iraq Survey Group findings, bolstering earlier reports that no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, a Bush administration official said.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to The Washington Times yesterday, said the findings "certainly will say they found no stockpiles" and will not clear up the mystery of what happened to the weapons touted by the Bush administration as a key reason for toppling Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
However, the official said the report will make clear that Saddam had "every intention" of restarting WMD programs in the event sanctions against Iraq were lifted.
The report was compiled by Charles A. Duelfer, special adviser to the director of central intelligence regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. He is expected to testify before the committee with U.S. Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Joseph J. McMenamin, who serves as commander to the Iraq Survey Group.
A spokesman for committee chairman Sen. John W. Warner said members were receiving the report late yesterday, but declined to comment on its contents.
Mr. Warner, Virginia Republican, is "looking forward" to receiving the testimony of Mr. Duelfer, who was named in January by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet to succeed David Kay as the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Warner spokesman John Ullyot said.
"This was the work of the Iraq Survey Group continued under Duelfer as the successor to Kay, and he has had additional time to reach conclusions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs," Mr. Ullyot said.
Mr. Kay made headlines upon the completion of an earlier interim report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction last year, when he said prewar assessments of Iraq having stockpiles of WMDs had been wrong.
The politically charged issue then became the center of a Bush administration decision to create a separate, bipartisan and independent commission to examine U.S. intelligence capabilities regarding weapons of mass destruction.
Headed by former Sen. Charles S. Robb, Virginia Democrat, and appeals court Judge Laurence Silberman, a Republican, the commission has been holding regular meetings since its February inception.
Mr. Bush gave the group until March 2005 to report its findings, and a spokesman has said early meetings included testimony from Mr. Kay and others with the Iraq Survey Group.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, meanwhile, addressed the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, or lack of them, during a question-and-answer session Monday at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
"Why the intelligence proved wrong, I'm not in a position to say," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "I simply don't know. But the world is a lot better off with Saddam Hussein in jail than they were with him in power."
Rowan Scarborough contributed to this report.
-------- japan
Nuclear fuel reprocessing too costly
October 06, 2004
(UPI)
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20041006-041809-9259r.htm
Tokyo, Japan, Oct. 6 -- The cost of reprocessing used nuclear fuel from power plants is up to 1.8 times higher than burying it, Japan's Atomic Energy Commission estimates.
According to the estimate, reprocessing spent nuclear fuel would cost 1.6 yen (1.4 cents) per kilowatt-hour of output, whereas it costs 0.9 yen (0.8 cents) per kilowatt-hour to dispose of the fuel without reprocessing, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported Wednesday.
But the commission observed that if the government did not reprocess the fuel, it would still incur costs from dismantling a reprocessing plant in Rokkashomura, Aomori prefecture, which is scheduled to start operations soon.
The commission will submit its report Thursday to a panel, which will discuss the future direction of the government's nuclear energy policy.
-------- korea
IAEA Chief Says World Getting Impatient with N. Korea
Reuters
Oct 6, 2004
By Paul Eckert
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6428524
SEOUL - North Korea's two-year-old nuclear crisis has taxed the world's patience, the chief United Nations nuclear regulator said on Wednesday, urging communist Pyongyang to return to its disarmament treaty obligations.
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), also said there was no comparison between South Korea's recently reported atomic experiments and North Korea's full-fledged reprocessing program and weapons assertions.
"The six-party talks have been going on for quite awhile and the international community is getting impatient to see quick results and to see North Korea turning back to the non-proliferation regime," ElBaradei told reporters.
North Korea has said it would not rejoin six-party nuclear disarmament talks with South Korea, the United States, Japan, China and Russia until the South's recently disclosed atomic experiments were fully dealt with.
South Korea revealed last month that its scientists conducted without government approval or knowledge tests to enrich uranium four years ago and to separate plutonium in 1982.
ElBaradei said South Korean "experiments at laboratory-level" were very different from North Korea's "fully operating reprocessing plant" and Pyongyang's repeated claims to have turned some plutonium into a nuclear deterrent force.
"These are not two situations to be compared," ElBaradei told a news conference on the sidelines of the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, a private group of experts and officials discussing disarmament.
"The Republic of Korea has been continuously under verification, under safeguards, while North Korea has moved out of the non-proliferation regime for over two years now," he said.
But Pyongyang's foreign ministry spokesman said on Wednesday that IAEA officials were "downplaying the gravity of the (South Korea's) case," suspecting U.S. influences behind its stance.
"The DPRK cannot but remain vigilant against this, given the precedent in which IAEA had applied double-dealing standards when dealing with the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula in the past, away from the principle of impartiality," the spokesman told the North's official KCNA agency.
It said Seoul now has full access to the nuclear weapons development technology. DPRK is the official name of North Korea.
North Korea expelled IAEA monitors in late 2002 and quit the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in early 2003. The moves followed U.S. statements that North Korean officials had admitted to pursuing a secret uranium enrichment program.
North Korea denies having a uranium-based nuclear program, but has repeated its assertion that it has made weapons-grade plutonium reprocessed from spent fuel rods to deter a U.S. attack.
ElBaradei said the IAEA supported the six-party process and was keen to see diplomacy succeed to enable the U.N. nuclear watchdog to resume work in secretive North Korea.
"If and when we go back to North Korea, we would like to have full-fledged verification to ensure that we are able to see all nuclear and nuclear-relevant activities to assure ourselves that North Korea's nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes," he said.
The North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said any discussion on the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula must cover the South's nuclear issue.
"It would not be possible for (North Korea) to take part in any effort for a solution to the nuclear issue with confidence unless the nuclear issue of South Korea is settled understandably," the spokesman said.
IAEA inspectors would conduct more tours of South Korean nuclear facilities this month for additional work before the agency reports to its board of governors in November, he said. (Additional reporting by Rhee So-eui)
-------- latinamerica
Powell: Brazil Has No Nuclear Aspirations
By Stan Lehman
Associated Press
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9632-2004Oct5.html
SAO PAULO, Brazil, Oct. 5 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Tuesday he was confident Brazil had no intention of becoming a nuclear power, but he called on the country to work out differences with the U.N. atomic agency over inspections.
"We know for sure that Brazil is not thinking about nuclear weapons in any sense," Powell told a breakfast meeting sponsored by the American Chamber of Commerce at the start of a two-day visit, his first to the country as secretary of state.
Powell arrived less than two weeks before a team of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors is scheduled to visit Brazil. The IAEA wants unimpeded access to a factory that produces nuclear fuel. Brazil has indicated that it wants less-stringent standards of inspection than the IAEA is seeking.
Brazil claims that centrifuges at its plant in Resende, about 80 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro, use advanced technology that could be pirated by other countries if the inspectors are allowed to view it.
But analysts say Brazil has probably not developed technology that is radically different from what is used at uranium enrichment plants in other countries and point out that technological advances are traditionally protected with patents.
"The IAEA has worked out these kinds of differences in the past; I expect they will work it out this time with Brazil," Powell told reporters while en route Monday night.
Powell earlier praised the cooperative efforts Brazil is making internationally in a number of areas. He offered no hint of concern about policies under President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. Lula has been seeking greater power and influence for Brazil on the world stage but he is no longer using the harsh rhetoric of two years ago when he was running for office.
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Warming to Brazil, Powell Says Its Nuclear Program Isn't a Concern
October 6, 2004
New York Times
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/international/americas/06diplo.html?pagewanted=all
BRASÍLIA, Oct. 5 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, stepping up the American courtship of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said Tuesday that the United States had no concerns that Brazil was planning to develop nuclear weapons despite the country's resistance to allowing international inspectors greater access to one of its nuclear reactors.
After meeting with President da Silva and other Brazilian leaders, Mr. Powell also offered another gesture to Brazilian aspirations, saying that Brazil's contributions to peacekeeping in Haiti and other actions made it was worthy of consideration for permanent membership on the United Nations Security Council.
The United Nations is studying the possibility of increasing the number of permanent seats in response to demands for membership from several countries, including India, Brazil, Germany and Japan. At present, only the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia are permanent members, which carries the right to veto any resolution.
Mr. Powell was noncommittal as to whether the United States would endorse Brazil's addition, saying that Washington was awaiting results of a study by a panel appointed by Secretary General Kofi Annan. But he did say that Brazil would be a strong candidate.
On the nuclear issue, Mr. Powell addressed a question about concerns in many countries that Brazil's opposition to unlimited inspections, as sought by the International Atomic Energy Agency, might embolden other nations like Iran and North Korea to reject inspections of their suspected nuclear arms programs.
"I don't have those concerns," Mr. Powell said at a news conference after meeting with Foreign Minister Celso Amorim. "I don't think Brazil can be talked about in the same vein or put in the same category as Iran or North Korea."
He said that Iran and North Korea, for example, had either expelled international inspectors or refused to cooperate with them in disclosing nuclear facilities, and that many experts agreed that those countries were making nuclear weapons. North Korea, he noted, has announced its nuclear arms program as a matter of policy.
"The United States understands that Brazil has no interest in a nuclear weapon, no desire and no plans, no programs, no intention of moving toward a nuclear weapon," Mr. Powell said in an interview on TV Globo. "They have a nuclear power program. We understand that."
In a speech to business leaders, talks with President da Silva and in interviews with local news media, Mr. Powell used his day-and-a-half visit to push the idea that Brazil was emerging as a dominant power in the region and one that the United States - perhaps to its surprise - could do business with on a number of fronts.
Since his election in 2002 as the first president from the leftist Workers Party, Mr. da Silva has been cultivated by the Bush administration in the hope that he would soften his economic policies and serve as a moderating influence in Latin America, despite his alliance with such leftist leaders as Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
American officials say that strategy has worked, and that under Mr. da Silva Brazil has hewed to a pro-capitalist, pro-investment and fiscally conservative line. This year, Mr. da Silva sent Brazilian forces as peacekeepers to Haiti under the aegis of the United Nations to keep order after the forced resignation of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Foreign Minister Amorim said that he expected the dispute with the International Atomic Energy Agency over inspectors' access to Brazil's enriched-uranium facilities would be resolved soon by technical experts.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Going Nuclear The Ghost of Edward Teller Lives
Counterpunch
By RON JACOBS,
October 6, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs10062004.html
According to John Kerry, the biggest danger that the US faces is nuclear proliferation. His fellow Democrat and media star, Barack Obama, agrees. In fact, Mr. Obama went on record saying he would support surgical missile strikes on Iran if it refused to concede to Washington's demands that it end its nuclear project. As has been made plain in newspaper pages around the world (except for here in the United States), Iran has been cleared time and time again by the IAEA of any plans to use that program to build nuclear weapons. Obama went even further in his interview with the Chicago Tribune, stating that the US should take out Pakistan's nuclear arsenal if and when the current president was removed.
Now, I am near the front of the line when it comes to opposing the proliferation of weapons, nuclear and otherwise, but there's some pretty obvious hypocrisy going on here. The US government is not opposed to nuclear weapons. It is opposed to regimes other than its friends having nuclear weapons. Indeed, Congress recently approved a program that would develop new nuclear weapons for use by the US military. These weapons are known as tactical nuclear weapons, although they have been given new, cuter names today-mini-nukes being the most popular. Fitting these weapons into the US arsenal and, more importantly, making their use acceptable to the US public, has been part of the Pentagon's agenda since the 1950s.
Thanks to widespread opposition, however, they have never been built, except perhaps in the prototype phase. George Bush and company hope to change that. Although research has been ongoing for a few decades on this weaponry, it wasn't until the summer of 2003 that serious discussions at a policymaking level began taking place. According to the BBC and other news sources, these mini-nukes (or "small build" weapons) were a primary topic of discussion at the so-called Stockpile Stewardship Conference that took place in mid-August of 2003. The conference, which took place at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska, featured more than 100 scientists along with top military and other government officials. The intention of the meeting was how to upgrade the already deadly nuclear arsenal of the United States. Primary among the topics discussed were the Star Wars missile shield and these mini-nukes.
Don't let the names fool you. Both of these weapons systems are not only deadly and, to most humans, immoral; they are also ridiculously expensive and unnecessary. The missile-defense shield's fallibilities have been proven again and again. Indeed, various scientists testified to its uselessness and pointlessness this past weekend (October 2-3, 2004) at various conferences across Canada that coincided with nationwide protests against the system and Canada's potential cooperation with its construction. Protestors and scientists alike pointed out the consistent test failures of the missile-defense shield and the fact that this system would, at best, provide minimal security. Most opponents also point to the high cost of the project and to the corporations who stand to profit from it. Of course, it is these same corporations who are taking advantage of US citizens' fears to push this boondoggle through.
What about the mini-nukes? Also known as low-yield weapons, EPW's, enhanced radiation weapons, and agent defeat weapons, their primary use would be on the battlefield and, even more ominously, in fortified areas of cities where military bunkers and other high-profile targets might be. Despite their name of "mini-nukes," these weapons would not be mini by any stretch cc52ee.jpgof the word. They would pack five kilotons of power. According to the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance and many other anti-nuclear groups, the blast created by the largest of these weapons would be equivalent to the 15 kiloton bomb dropped over Hiroshima. Because the earth-penetrating version of the mini-nuke would not explode until it was underground, its blast radius would be 1-2 miles wide. Other weapons, depending on their construction, would be even more destructive.
Both Kerry and Bush spoke about preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons during their debate on September 30, 2004. John Kerry even called it the most serious threat facing the United States. Imagine what the rest of the world thinks when it hears that the United States is seriously considering the manufacture of a new generation of nuclear weapons. After all, not only does the US have the world's largest existing nuclear arsenal, it has never stopped building them since it began this deadly dance with the atom. Furthermore, if one looks at the current Department of Energy budget, they will see that the dance is better funded than it has been in years. One item alone-the uranium enrichment fund-has increased from around $320,000,000 to over $500,000,000 just since 2003. Now, if one recalls Washington's objections to Iran's nuclear program, it centers on their uranium enrichment process, since it is this process that is required for nuclear weapons development.
So, why should Washington's current enemies (and possible future enemies) stop their pursuit of nuclear weapons (if, indeed, they have such programs)? After all, if those US policymakers involved in this area are expanding their enrichment program and making statements like the following (found in the foreword to a policy statement entitled "Nuclear Weapons in the Twenty-First Century" that is authored by the Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear Weapons at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Stephen M. Younger), doesn't it make sense for them to develop their defenses as well?
The time is right for a fundamental rethinking of the role of nuclear weapons in national defense and of the composition of our nuclear forces. The Cold War is over, but it has been replaced by new threats to our national security. The nuclear age is far from over.
Like most documents of this type, the paper goes on to list potential threats to the US, Russia and China being foremost among them, and then attempts to explain how new nuclear technology could be used to thwart those threats. Deterrence is the primary strategy, with actual deployment of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction explained as a secondary potential. Of course, with or without their actual use, this type of thinking demands that the weapons be built, since their mere existence can be used as a deterrent to attack. So, either way, Lockheed Martin, General Electric and the rest of the merchants of death make their obscene profits from taxpayers' money.
In one of his all-too-few moments of clear thought, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware made the following statement opposing the passage of a bill that allotted $9 billion for developing mini-nuke "bunker busters," or Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator as the spiritual progeny of H-Bomb creator Edward Teller like to call these bombs.
These nuclear weapons blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war. They begin to make nuclear war more "thinkable" as Herman Kahn might have said. But Herman Kahn's book was "Thinking About the Unthinkable." He understood that nuclear war was unthinkable, even as he demanded that we think about how to fight one if we had to. Looking at the foreign and defense policies of the current administration, I fear that they have failed to understand that vital point. They want to make nuclear war "thinkable."
Building bunker busters and low-yield nuclear weapons is not a path to non-proliferation. Neither is a program to do R&D on such weapons, while Defense Department officials press our scientists to come up with reasons to build them.
Unfortunately, Mr. Biden's sentiments seem to be in short supply in Washington, DC. The men and women running the country speak of collateral damage and war as casually as the Third Reich's inner circle; nuclear weapons development has cost the nation's people more than $6 trillion since 1946 (and that doesn't include the cost to our health and other intangibles); and the current leadership on both sides of the aisle pursue a course of confrontation and conflict as if that will prevent nations that it opposes to give up their nuclear plans when virtually everyone in the world (who isn't a US resident) understands that it is the possibility that those nations have nuclear capability that prevents the US from attacking them now.
In the early 1980s there was a worldwide movement opposed to nuclear proliferation, specifically, the deployment of US nuclear-equipped cruise missiles in Europe. This movement mobilized millions of people around the planet in opposition to nuclear weapons development and the cruise missile deployment. Unfortunately, the movement did not achieve all of its goals and we find ourselves once again at a crossroads. There is an incredibly hawkish mentality in DC now as there was then, and the government is controlled by men and women who profit from war and its tools, yet there is a movement opposed to these designs, too. The antinuclear movement in the 1980s was diverted by well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) activists connected to the Democratic Party-a turn of events that limited its success. The current movement against war and militarism faces a similar fate, as evidenced by the Anybody But Bush phenomenon that personalizes a policy of war and empire that has little to do with personalities and much to do with the needs and desires of the US economic and political system. It is up to that element of the current movement who understands this to get its message out there. The future turns on that ability.
(Thanks to the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) website for links to documents and info. http://www.stopthebombs.org/)
Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859841678/counterpunchmaga , which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's new collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden http://www.easycarts.net/ecarts/CounterPunch/CP_Books.html . He can be reached at: rjacobs@z... http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs10062004.html
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Top Nuclear Regulator Says Power Plants Better Guarded
October 6, 2004
MIAMI, Florida, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-06-09.asp#anchor5
Security at the 103 nuclear power plants operating in the United States today is better than it was before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Nils Diaz said Tuesday.
Diaz addressed his remarks to industry and government delegates at the Americas Nuclear Energy Symposium, jointly sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and the American Nuclear Society.
The chairman of the nation's top nuclear regulatory body said higher federal requirements have been placed on utilities that operate nuclear facilities.
"The NRC has further strengthened security requirements at nuclear power plants and enhanced our coordination with federal, state and local organizations since Sept. 11," Diaz said.
A significant radiological release affecting public health and safety is "unlikely from a terrorist attack, including a large commercial aircraft," he said. "And time is available to protect the public in the unlikely event of a radiation release."
Diaz also said the NRC has a new reactor oversight program that provides a better inspection regime for plants.
He said the NRC objective is to "provide the tools for inspecting and assessing licensee performance in a manner that was more risk-informed, objective, predictable and understandable than the previous oversight processes, and that ensures the agency's performance goals are being met."
The NRC is now providing oversight "in a way that corresponds to the actual, real world risk presented, rather than a theoretical worst case scenario," he said.
Diaz said the NRC has ordered nuclear plant operators to take into account "a more challenging adversarial threat."
There are "tighter access controls and vehicle checks at greater stand-off distances; significantly improved force-on-force exercises to test the capabilities of plant defenders; better readiness by plant security forces; and enhanced liaison with the intelligence community, and federal, state and local authorities responsible for protecting the national critical infrastructure through integrated response training," Diaz claimed.
-------- nevada
NUCLEAR REPOSITORY: Yucca court challenge alive
Justice Department still may ask court to keep disputed radiation rules intact
October 06, 2004
By STEVE TETREAULT
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Oct-06-Wed-2004/news/24927454.html
WASHINGTON -- The White House on Tuesday distanced itself from a Justice Department document suggesting the Bush administration might ask the Supreme Court to keep intact disputed radiation rules for the Yucca Mountain Project.
Despite previous statements from Bush administration officials that there would be no appeal of a July court ruling that set back the nuclear waste project, Justice Department attorneys on Sept. 23 filed a document in federal court stating the U.S. solicitor general has final say over Supreme Court actions.
"At this writing, the solicitor general has not yet made any decision regarding Supreme Court review in this case," the department said.
The document's disclosure aroused Democrats and critics of the Yucca project. They charged President Bush, who appoints the solicitor general, may be angling to prolong legal fights over Yucca Mountain if he is re-elected.
The deadline for filing a Supreme Court appeal in the matter is Nov. 30, according to attorneys for the Nuclear Energy Institute, which already has indicated it will seek court review.
A Justice Department source said it is unlikely that acting solicitor general Paul D. Clement will take Yucca Mountain to the Supreme Court, consistent with the views expressed by the Bush administration.
But with Justice Department officials claiming they have an option, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., charged Bush was violating a statement he made in Nevada on Aug. 12 that he would let the courts rule on the nuclear waste repository.
"My concern once again is that the president on Yucca Mountain is talking out of both sides of his mouth," Reid said.
"This sounds like George Bush wasn't exactly honest when he was out here last time," said Sean Smith, Nevada spokesman for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. "He's giving himself the option to push forward. It fits the pattern of him not leveling with the people of Nevada on this issue and other issues."
Attorney General Brian Sandoval, who also is co-chairman of the Bush campaign in Nevada, disagreed. He said federal agencies appear to be in a turf battle over who calls the shots on Supreme Court appeals, and Justice Department officials were claiming their turf.
"I don't think politics has anything to do with this," Sandoval said. "The solicitor is viewing this purely from a legal perspective."
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said Democrats "are trying to take a cheap shot here." He said the Justice Department document was not inconsistent with what Bush told Nevadans in August.
But, Ensign said, "I would love to drive a stake through Yucca Mountain and be done with it."
Tracey Schmitt, a spokeswoman for the Bush campaign in Nevada, said the criticism of Bush is "disingenuous when Kerry misled the state on his record for months."
Republicans have criticized Kerry on seven specific votes he cast on the project over the course of two decades, including his vote for the "Screw Nevada" bill that singled out Yucca Mountain for study in 1987. Democrats note Kerry opposed the project in key votes in recent years and has promised to kill the program if elected.
The exchange marked a new skirmish over the Yucca Mountain Project, seen as a key wedge issue for the presidential campaigns in Nevada, a battleground state.
It stems from a July 9 ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that ruled in favor of the government on a number of issues but threw the proposed nuclear waste repository into uncertainty by voiding a 10,000 year radiation standard written by the Environmental Protection Agency.
White House spokesman Ken Lisaius said the president's position has been expressed by Energy Department and EPA officials who have said they see little value in prolonging a court case in which the government won most of the arguments.
"My understanding is that the circumstances have not changed," Lisaius said, adding he could not explain the Justice Department court filing.
Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said: "We believe that the framework the Court decision requires is workable and that therefore the best way to proceed is not to engage in further litigation but to allow EPA to work to develop an appropriate regulatory response to address the issued raised by the Court."
Justice Department spokesman Blain Rethmeier would not comment on the court filing. He said the department's stance "is in line with the White House."
A Justice Department source indicated that Sandoval's reading of the matter may be closest to correct.
-------- washington
Hanford: Transition of FFTF work halted
Tri-cityherald.com
By Annette Cary
October 6th, 2004
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5638432p-5569566c.html
A protest of the contract award for permanently shutting down Hanford's Fast Flux Test Facility has stopped the transition of work from current contractor Fluor Hanford to winning bidder SEC Closure Alliance.
Protests have been filed with the Government Accountability Office, which led to a halt to the transition, and the Small Business Administration.
The two teams of small businesses that were finalists for the contract with winner SEC Closure Alliance are accusing Safety and Ecology Corp. of Knoxville, Tenn., of not qualifying as a small business.
The $235 million contract to shut down, then dismantle, Hanford's research reactor was set aside by DOE as an award to a small business. To qualify, the contract must have at least 51 percent of the work done by companies with no more than 500 employees.
Neither of the contracting teams filing a protest based on small-business qualifications would discuss details of why they believed SEC did not qualify as a small business Tuesday. The FFTF Restoration Co. is headed by Federal Engineers and Constructors and Nuvotec, both of Richland, and the other team is led by Environmental Chemical Corp. of Burlingame, Calif.
The FFTF Restoration Co. also filed a GAO protest related to procedural issues, said Lori Ramonas, vice president of strategic communication for Nuvotec. The protest is related to cost and to environmental safety and health, she said.
DOE announced Sept. 24 that SEC Closure Alliance had won the contract to shut down and dismantle FFTF because its proposal provided the best value to the taxpayer. It was to begin work at Hanford in early January.
The contract awarded was for less than half the amount DOE listed as the upper limit for the contract, $500 million. It also had projected at one time that the work would take until 2018 and cost $600 million. SEC Closure Alliance would complete the work by 2011 under the terms of the contract.
However, the scope of the contract is uncertain because DOE has yet to do an environmental study on the extent of work to dismantle FFTF. It could be entombed or the underground components could be removed to leave a cleaner site.
SEC has been barred from bidding on environmental cleanup work at DOE's Oak Ridge, Tenn., nuclear reservation after it dripped radioactive waste along a state highway in May. SEC expects soon to have issues resolved so it can again bid on work subcontracted by Bechtel Jacobs, which holds the environmental remediation contract at Oak Ridge, SEC said last week.
SEC well understands the requirements for qualifying as a small business and meets those requirements, said Anne Smith, spokeswoman for SEC.
"Because this is the largest of the small-business set-asides, we made sure all were aware of the rules," said Colleen French, spokeswoman for the Richland DOE office. Representatives of the Small Business Administration were available to discuss requirements with bidders, she said.
SEC Closure Alliance is headed by SEC and also includes Los Alamos Technical Associates, Hart Crowser, Parallax, Areva and Resource Consultants.
"We hope the protest does not jeopardize the future of small business procurements," Smith said, quoting Chris Leichtweis, SEC chief executive.
The protests add more cost to the taxpayers for what Leichtweis believes was "a very comprehensive and fair process," she said.
-------- us nuc waste
US nuclear shipment arrives in France
(AFP)
Oct 6, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041006/sc_afp/france_us_nuclear_041006170800
CHERBOURG, France - Police threw a heavy escort around a shipment of plutonium from US weapons arsenals as it was offloaded from a ship and taken by military convoy to a nuclear recycling plant in western France despite protests from environmental activists.
The procession of trucks, accompanied by police vans and motorbike outriders, took the 140 kilogrammes (300 pounds) of radioactive material to the plant in La Hague run by the French state company Areva.
The plutonium was taken off a British vessel docked in the nearby port of Cherbourg earlier in the day without incident, Areva said.
Police said activists from the anti-nuclear group Greenpeace, who have been protesting the operation for days, did not make any effort to stop the offloading, which was carried out while military helicopters flew overhead.
A French court on Tuesday issued an injunction banning the activists from approaching to within less than 100 metres (yards) from the cargo on land, and 300 metres at sea.
The transport vessel left North Carolina, on the eastern seaboard of the United States, on September 20, with another British vessel as escort.
After initial treatment at the plant in La Hague, the plutonium is to be taken by road 1,200 kilometres (720 miles) across France to a reprocessing factory in the southeastern town of Cadarache.
There, it will be transformed into two tonnes of fuel used in civilian power plants known as mixed oxide, or Mox, and returned to the United States.
Authorities had kept the docking date and hour a strict secret, citing security reasons, and forcing protesters to hold all-night vigils at the port.
Greenpeace activists, who have denounced the long transport route as particularly dangerous for such a deadly cargo, on Tuesday blocked for several hours a road along which the nuclear cargo was due to be taken to La Hague.
The two European companies involved in the operation, France's Areva and British Nuclear Fuel Limited, on Tuesday successfully applied to a Cherbourg court for an order preventing Greenpeace activists from approaching the cargo.
The court fined Greenpeace 75,000 euros for blocking the road.
One Greenpeace militant at Tuesday's protest, a German named Thomas Breuer, said the organisation wanted "to focus attention on this very dangerous and completely unnecessary transport."
Greenpeace has said the long distances of road transport involved constituted "considerable" risk, not least because the cargo's containers could easily be cracked open by terrorists using shoulder-launched rockets.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Race Shaping Up as Battle of the Modern and Traditional
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9631-2004Oct5?language=printer
SINZARI, Afghanistan -- More than 1,000 leathery, turbaned men gathered in a cavernous village mosque Friday for a presidential campaign rally. They no longer carried rifles, and some had even brought their small sons. But the assembly of mujaheddin, or former anti-Soviet fighters, crackled with esprit de corps.
The veterans were all ethnic Pashtuns, and the rally was held in Kandahar province, the heartland of Afghan Pashtun culture and the birthplace of President Hamid Karzai, who comes from a prominent Pashtun tribe and has courted Pashtun votes in his bid to be elected president this Saturday.
But these tough ex-fighters had come to show their support for someone else: Yonus Qanooni, the former interior and education minister and an ethnic Tajik, who is Karzai's major challenger. To them, the candidate's ethnicity mattered far less than his credentials as a fellow mujahid and defender of Islam.
"We have all sacrificed a great deal, and we all lost brothers and fathers in the fight for our country," said Asadullah, a farmer in the crowd. "We want a leader who is a true mujahid, so our rights will be protected. We are all one tribe and one nation. We don't like Karzai. We want Qanooni."
With Afghanistan's first-ever presidential election just days away, analysts here predict that Karzai, 47, will garner the most votes. He remains by far the best known of the 18 candidates in the race, he is widely regarded as the American choice, and he has the power and perquisites of incumbency.
But the unexpected inroads made by Qanooni, even on Karzai's home turf in southern Afghanistan, make it increasingly likely that Karzai will not win more than 50 percent of the vote. This would require an expensive runoff election that could take several months to arrange, leaving the country in a state of anxiety and political drift.
The popularity of Qanooni among some Pashtun mujaheddin, moreover, suggests that the race may not break down along ethnic lines, as has been widely predicted, but instead become a contest between two clashing visions of Afghan society: one that is modern and Western-leaning and one that is protective of traditional Islamic values.
In Kandahar city, Karzai's campaign aides seemed confident of his success at the polls. Ahmad Wali Karzai, one of the president's brothers and a wealthy Kandahar resident, has been receiving a steady stream of Pashtun tribal leaders from across the south pledging the support of their communities at the polls.
"Ninety-nine percent of the provincial elders have guaranteed us they will vote for the president," Karzai said. "We don't see any strong challenger in any of the six southern provinces. From every district, they keep coming to volunteer. And the local cable channel has given us two channels free to use 24 hours for campaign messages."
Karzai suggested that any local support for Qanooni was limited to a small number of former militia commanders -- principally from one Pashtun tribe, the Alokozai -- who he said oppose the government program to disarm and demobilize militias nationwide.
"They are against the program, because they want to stay in business with their weapons and troops," he said. He complained that officers under the city police chief, a Qanooni supporter, had taken down thousands of Karzai campaign posters in the city.
There were also reports that militia commanders had removed some heavy weapons from Kandahar last week to avoid turning them over to the authorities. And two new election surveys by international groups found that most Afghans responding, including those in Kandahar, were far more concerned about pressure or abuse from military commanders than about terrorist violence on election day.
But critics of the government, including campaign aides for several other candidates and the local representative of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, complained that regional officials had been actively working for President Karzai's election and pressuring people to vote for him.
In Kandahar city and the surrounding areas, many residents said they supported Karzai, describing him as a fair and honest man and adding that he is a son of the region. Many seemed to know little about the other candidates, including Qanooni, suggesting that Karzai could win merely by being the only familiar name and face on the lengthy ballot.
But familiarity does not necessarily translate into enthusiasm. Last weekend, a rally organized by Ahmad Wali Karzai for students at a park pavilion in Kandahar was a decidedly anemic affair, attended by about 200 young people who listened politely to a series of speeches but rarely bothered to applaud.
At a tiny market on the city outskirts, a baker said he would vote for Karzai because "when he came, war stopped." But a customer who works as a government clerk interrupted eagerly, saying, "I'm for Qanooni. We need a strong leader and a mujahid. Karzai has just been sitting home and doing nothing."
Indeed, while Qanooni, 43, whose home base is the Panjshir Valley in northern Afghanistan, has made campaign trips to Kandahar and the western city of Herat, Karzai remains a prisoner of his tight security bubble. Since the campaign began, he has taken more trips overseas than within Afghanistan, and he meets citizens only under the most restricted conditions.
The president's first campaign trip was aborted when a rocket was fired near his helicopter. A trip to northern Afghanistan, where he inaugurated a new highway, was a public relations disaster.
The visit was tightly controlled by the U.S. military and Karzai's U.S.-contracted bodyguards. When a crowd of invited guests surged forward, the guards shoved them back and slapped one, who turned out to be the minister of transportation.
On Tuesday, Karzai made a brief campaign visit to the town of Ghazni, about 75 miles south of Kabul, the capital. He arrived and departed by helicopter, and he was guarded on the ground by several hundred rifle-armed security men.
The president, who called on the crowd of several thousand to "vote for peace and stability," reportedly rebuked his guards for trying to push well-wishers away.
"Ideally, Mr. Karzai should be able to campaign in Bamiyan" in the north "and Mr. Qanooni should be able to campaign in Kandahar," said Fida Mahmad, Qanooni's campaign chief in Kandahar. "All candidates should be able to travel everywhere. We do not want the country to be divided again by tribalism and war. People are tired of dictatorships. We have a new thing called democracy, and within the framework of Islam, that is what we want."
In Sinzari, a dusty town 15 miles west of Kandahar, soldiers were busy putting up Qanooni posters for the rally last Friday, and convoys of four-wheel-drive vehicles disgorged hundreds of mujaheddin. They proudly recounted the history of that spot on the highway, where Afghan guerrillas blocked and destroyed hundreds of Soviet tanks in the 1980s, then chopped them up to be sold as scrap.
The local military commander, who goes by the single name Habibullah, was busy preparing the rally and ticking off lists of tribes that had sent representatives. He said he had a good official relationship with the central government, but his Pashtun heart was clearly with Qanooni, the Tajik mujahid from Panjshir.
"When I was a boy, I carried a Kalashnikov on my shoulder. I do not want my children to carry a gun," he said, adding that he supported militia disarmament. But he complained that Karzai and many of his aides had lived in exile during the country's most bitter years and still keep foreign passports. "I am a citizen and I have the right to one vote," he said, "and it will not be for Karzai."
--------
Afghanistan's Drug Boom
The opium problem could undo everything that's being done to help the Afghan people.
By Michhle Alliot-Marie
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10000-2004Oct5.html
Afghanistan's presidential election this Saturday will be a key moment in that country's history. For three years the international community has been doing an outstanding job of stabilizing Afghanistan and building a future for its people. During my recent trip there, I had an opportunity to appreciate the essential role played by NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), currently under the command of French Lt. Gen. Jean-Louis Py.
Yet despite the efforts of other nations and the reinforcement of deployed forces as the election approaches, one issue is particularly worthy of attention: the noticeable increase of narcotics production since 2002 and its geographical expansion in Afghanistan. Altogether, 28 of the country's 32 provinces are apparently producing opium, and employing more than 1.7 million people at this work. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, opium production in Afghanistan in 2003 amounted to about 3,600 tons -- that is to say, three-quarters of world production -- over 200,000 acres of cultivated land. More then 90 percent of the heroin arriving in France comes from Afghanistan. An even larger harvest is expected for this year as traffickers stock up to protect themselves against a reaction from the international community. Not only do these narcotics flood the global drug market, with serious consequences for public health, particularly in Europe, but their production is impeding Afghanistan's stabilization. Warlords are taking advantage of trafficking, and they are protecting it. The narcotics-related financial networks are fed by particularly powerful underworld groups that undermine authority and the rule of law.
"No-go" areas that foster crime are developing. At the same time, the money generated by trafficking makes it possible to fund attacks by the Taliban fighters still in the area. In fact, there is little doubt that drug money is funding terrorist activities. And 10 percent of the heroin produced in Central Asia is consumed locally, creating a public health problem for Afghanistan that must be confronted rapidly.
The farming of poppies and drug trafficking in general are damaging the area's economic development. And economic progress is a prerequisite for reestablishing stability in the country. Confronted with this situation, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has made drug production and trafficking illegal. Last January his government created a special force for counternarcotics efforts. Nonetheless, the scale of the problem demands a sizable response that goes beyond local resources and capabilities.
Like the international community, France is concerned about narcotics and is willing to help. We will need to take advantage of the post-election dynamics to act quickly and help Afghanistan combat this problem. A first step will be to reinforce the training programs of the Afghan police, to improve the judiciary system and to strengthen the disarming, demobilizing and reintegrating process. A second will be to encourage measures aimed at closing down and prohibiting poppy-processing laboratories.
But this will not be enough. It will be necessary to establish an international force, other than the ISAF, specifically tasked with counternarcotics operations. And a third axis is necessary, one which would support the development of substitute crops on a local basis. There are many signs that production can be controlled if there is efficient action on the main issue: the poverty of small farmers. Traditional food crops (wheat, corn, etc.) can offer a viable alternative. The U.N. World Food Program has offered to help Afghanistan investigate new markets, such as nuts and grapes. Along with new irrigation systems, several tree nurseries should be renovated to meet the increasing demand for plants. All these initiatives must be encouraged. Moreover, the international community must promise that its members will purchase the crops.
At the same time, we must involve neighboring countries, taking into account the cross-border aspect of the drug scourge.
The international community needs to operate cohesively and to display a fierce determination to succeed. France is committed to help Afghanistan in this political transition phase, beyond the election. The involvement of our forces not only in the ISAF but also in counterterrorism through Operation Enduring Freedom and in the training of Afghan troops remains highly beneficial.
But I also believe that, in Afghanistan as elsewhere, counterterrorism must be global, and this encompasses the links between narcotics, money and terrorism. This is a war that must be fought on all fronts, a war in which France will be involved without reservation.
The writer is France's minister of defense.
--------
NATO Expects Rush of Taliban Attacks in Afghanistan
October 6, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/politics/06nato.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 - NATO's top general said Tuesday that allied forces were girding for a surge of attacks by Taliban fighters and others in the last days before Afghanistan's presidential elections on Saturday.
"We assume that there will be some attempts to disrupt the elections," the commander, Gen. James L. Jones of the Marine Corps, said in an interview. "We're doing everything we can to find out what that is." He declined to discuss intelligence about specific possible attacks.
To help counter the violence, NATO has nearly doubled its security force in the north in recent weeks, to nearly 10,000 troops, sending a fresh battalion of Italian troops to the area around Kabul, the capital, and a battalion of Spanish forces to Mazar-i-Sharif. Many are patrolling alongside Afghan troops and police officers, General Jones said.
In addition, the Air Force flies about two dozen combat missions a day in case forces on the ground come under attack or need to call in airstrikes. The United States is also flying about a dozen surveillance missions a day, using U-2 spy planes and Global Hawk and Predator remote-controlled aircraft, watching for insurgent activity along the rugged border with Pakistan. There are also more than 17,000 American soldiers and marines throughout the country.
"The more you see international forces, the more stability you'll have, and the more confidence that people will put in the election process," General Jones said. "Right now, things seem to be going pretty much as planned."
But the NATO forces are positioned in the more stable north, and most of the attacks against Afghan soldiers and security forces have come in the south and southeast, the Taliban's traditional base of support. Last week, for instance, 10 Afghan soldiers were killed in two attacks in Zabul Province, in the southeast.
General Jones, who said he visited Afghanistan every five to six weeks, said the expanded forces would stay for an undetermined time after the elections to help maintain order. He said NATO would assess whether to send more troops before parliamentary elections scheduled for next spring.
He added that he had no new information about the location of Al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, who intelligence analysts believe is still in the Afghan-Pakistani border region.
-------- asia
Japan Plans to Press U.S. on Troops
Foreign Minister Seeking Reduction of 'Burden' on Okinawa
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9634-2004Oct5.html
TOKYO, Oct. 5 -- Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura said Tuesday he would press his country's case in Washington this week for reducing what he called "the excessive burden" placed on Okinawa by the presence of U.S. troops. But he said he would urge the Americans to leave adequate forces in Japan to promote security in the region.
"The U.S. is trying to rationally realign its military to respond to the new era," Machimura said in an interview. "As for Japan, we are requesting that the U.S. retain its role of maintaining the security and peace of Japan, the Far East and its surrounding areas."
Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura.
The United States is seeking to redefine the role of its troops in Japan, now numbering about 47,000, as part of a broader strategy to make American forces around the world more geared to small conflicts and more readily deployable .
Machimura will meet with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Thursday afternoon to follow up on discussions between President Bush and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi two weeks ago in New York, where the leaders promised to "make efforts" to reduce the burden of U.S. troops in Japan while maintaining security.
The realignment, sources close to the talks say, is envisioned as far smaller in scope than those planned in South Korea and Germany, where the United States is scheduled to pull out thousands of troops over the next several years. It remains unclear whether Japan would experience a net reduction in forces or merely a shift in personnel and equipment among different bases in the country.
Japan has relied on the United States for security since the end of World War II, but no place in the country has been affected more than Okinawa, where more than half of the U.S. forces in Japan are based.
Sources familiar with the talks say the United States is offering a 10 percent reduction in the 25,500 troops now stationed on Okinawa, where many residents strongly oppose the American presence. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity.
At the same time, U.S. officials may seek the relocation of the headquarters of the 1st Army from Fort Gillem, Ga., to Camp Zama on the outskirts of Tokyo. Some U.S. units could also be consolidated on Japanese bases.
The United States is also reportedly seeking to expand the mission of its troops stationed in Japan beyond their traditional emphasis on defending the Japanese islands, so they would be on call for deployment to the Middle East and Africa.
But there is staunch opposition among some Japanese to that idea. While the United States is pushing for quick agreement, analysts here said the talks could last months.
Machimura, a former education minister named to his new post by Koizumi last week, declined to discuss numbers or other specifics of the realignment. "Right now, we are at the stage of discussing the issues freely and actively, so naturally, there are disagreements as well as agreements," he said in the interview.
One of the most complicated issues is whether U.S. troops leaving Okinawa would be restationed elsewhere in Japan. Machimura did not rule that out, but said opposition in other parts of country might make such a move difficult. One solution, he said, could be rebasing those troops in the United States or elsewhere in the region.
Machimura's topics in Washington are also likely to include North Korea and the stalled international talks aimed at dismantling the communist state's nuclear weapons programs.
In addition, Machimura said his agenda with Powell would include U.S. insistence that Japan lift a ban it imposed on U.S. beef last December after the first case of mad cow disease was discovered in the United States.
Japan was the world's largest foreign market for U.S. beef before a Canadian-bred cow in the state of Washington was found to have the disease.
Machimura said a decision on resuming imports would have to wait until after a domestic panel studying the issue deemed a resumption to be safe. [News reports in Tokyo Wednesday morning, however, indicated that the panel may relax guidelines for domestic testing of young cows -- a move that could soon open the way for imports of at least some U.S. beef.]
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U.S. to Slow Pullout of Troops From S. Korea
By Anthony Faiola
The Washington Post
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10249-2004Oct5.html
TOKYO, Oct. 6 -- The United States has agreed to withdraw 12,500 troops from South Korea over several years rather than pulling them all out by the end of next year, as was initially planned, the Pentagon and South Korean officials said Wednesday.
The pullout -- unveiled earlier this year as part of the Pentagon's plan to make U.S. troops stationed abroad more mobile for deployment to global hot spots -- marks one of the most significant reductions in U.S. troops on the Korean Peninsula in decades. However, South Korean officials, whose military was scheduled to pick up the slack, complained that the massive withdrawal was being planned too quickly and that they needed more time to take over the missions now run by U.S. forces. They also said a rapid withdrawal could generate a "security gap" with North Korea.
After months of negotiations, U.S. and South Korean officials decided to conduct the first phase of the withdrawal this year, with 5,000 U.S. troops leaving South Korea, including the 2nd Brigade Combat Team and associated units, some of which have already been dispatched to Iraq.
During 2005 and 2006, the United States will redeploy a total of 5,000 troops, according to a Pentagon statement. From 2007 to 2008, the redeployment will be completed with the withdrawal of 2,500 troops, primarily support units and personnel.
Under the agreement, South Korean forces will take over security from U.S. troops at the joint security area in the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Korea -- the world's most heavily militarized border.
"The United States and South Korea fully considered the combined requirement to maintain a robust deterrent and defense capability while increasing combat capacity," the Pentagon said in the statement. "Additionally, consultations considered the Korean public's perceptions regarding a potential security gap."
-------- britain
How bad is Iraq report for Blair?
BBC
By Nick Assinder
6 October, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3719468.stm
The fact that the Iraq Survey Group has found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is unlikely to provoke gasps of surprise in Britain.
This is, after all, the moment the prime minister has carefully been preparing voters for over the past few months.
His original line had been to urge his critics to let the ISG complete its work before jumping to conclusions.
By last July, however, he had changed tack and told the MPs on the Commons liaison committee that he had to accept the ISG had not found WMD "and may never find them".
By the time of his party conference speech last week, he had gone so far as to accept that the original intelligence on Saddam's supposed WMD had been wrong.
Most importantly, however, he also completed the process of appearing to shift his justification for the war away from WMD to the removal of Saddam Hussein.
UN resolutions
"I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam.
"The world is a better place with Saddam in prison not in power," he told the conference.
What Mr Blair cannot do, however, is suggest regime change was his real motive for the war - that may well have been illegal and, in any case, was not cited at the time.
So he has chosen instead to remind people the precise justification was to uphold UN resolutions which Saddam had defied for 12 years.
He will also now take much comfort from the suggestion by the inspectors that Saddam was certainly attempting to produce a WMD programme and was potentially even more of a threat than had originally been suggested before the war.
None of this, however, will alter the stark fact that claims used by the prime minister to back the war at the time - including the infamous 45 minute from attack suggestion - were wrong.
Not responsible
But that is now almost universally accepted, and any damage to the prime minister as a result has probably already been caused.
Indeed it is even possible that the ISG report's findings on the level of the potential threat posed by Saddam - because it is relatively new - will offer Mr Blair some ammunition to hurl back at his critics.
Critics are unlikely to accept that though. Former foreign secretary Robin Cook, who quit the cabinet over the decision to go to war, said the international community had always known Saddam Hussein had ambitions to have such weapons.
This was why there had been a policy of containment, says Mr Cook.
Indeed, he says, the report's findings that Saddam wanted WMD, but had none, suggested containment was a remarkably successful policy and the war was unnecessary.
Democrats
The most troublesome aspect of the report for Tony Blair could be from its impact in the US.
President Bush or his officials have now accepted that Saddam was not responsible for 11 September (as many Americans had once believed), that there was no link between Baghdad and al-Qaeda before the war and, now, that there were no stockpiles of WMD.
These revelations are bound to be a factor the Presidential election campaign and if Democrat John Kerry defies the odds and wins as a result, that could spell trouble for Tony Blair.
Government advisers who attended the Democrat convention returned in no doubt about the level of anger felt by Kerry - and even President Clinton - at Tony Blair's stance on the war and continuing closeness to George Bush.
President Kerry would, of course, have to put much of that anger to one side in the interests of good diplomatic relations with Britain.
But many believe there would still be a significant cooling in trans-Atlantic relations.
-------- iran
Iran's Missiles Can Now Hit Europe, Ex-Official Says
Reuters
Wednesday, October 6, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9630-2004Oct5.html
TEHRAN, Oct. 5 -- Iran has increased the range of its missiles to 1,250 miles, a senior Iranian official was quoted as saying on Tuesday, putting parts of Europe within reach for the first time.
Military analysts had estimated Iran's missile range at 810 miles, which would allow it to strike anywhere in Israel. But Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the country's influential former president and the head of a government oversight body, as saying: "Now we have the power to launch a missile with a 2,000-kilometer range. Iran is determined to improve its military capabilities."
"If the Americans attack Iran, the world will change. . . . They will not dare to make such a mistake," Rafsanjani was quoted as saying in a speech at a national security exhibition.
The United States, which has accused Iran of secretly developing nuclear weapons, expressed "serious concerns about Iran's missile programs."
"We view Iran's efforts to further develop its missile capabilities as a threat to the region and to the United States interests, and all the more so in light of its ongoing nuclear program," a State Department spokesman, J. Adam Ereli, said in Washington.
Ereli declined to say whether the United States believed Rafsanjani's claim, saying he could not discuss intelligence matters.
Iran insists its nuclear program is aimed at generating electricity. It says its missiles are for defensive purposes and would be used to counter a possible Israeli or U.S. strike against its nuclear facilities.
In recent months, Iranian officials have frequently trumpeted their ability to strike back at any aggressor, and in August they announced they had successfully tested an upgraded version of the medium-range Shahab-3 missile. Analysts say the unmodified Shahab-3 had a range of 810 miles.
Israel has long accused Iran of working on a long-range missile, the Shahab-4, which would be able to reach Europe. Iran denies plans to build a Shahab-4 missile.
While Iran has had Israel in missile range for some time, Israeli officials said the range described by Rafsanjani was more significant for Europe than for Israel.
"We are well prepared to defend the state of Israel. . . . The Iranians will have to think twice before using these kinds of weapons," a senior Israeli official said.
-------- iraq
Funds to Rebuild Iraq Are Drifting Away From Target
State Department to Rethink U.S. Effort
By Jonathan Weisman and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9627-2004Oct5?language=printer
As little as 27 cents of every dollar spent on Iraq's reconstruction has actually filtered down to projects benefiting Iraqis, a statistic that is prompting the State Department to fundamentally rethink the Bush administration's troubled reconstruction effort.
Between soaring security costs, corruption and mismanagement, contractors' profits, and U.S. governmental costs, reconstruction funding is being drained away, leaving little left to improve the lives of Iraqis, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies. Senior administration officials and congressional experts on the reconstruction effort called the analysis credible. One senior U.S. official familiar with reconstruction suggested as little as a quarter of the funding is reaching its intended projects.
The State Department will acknowledge the problem in a quarterly report to Congress today and say that the United States is trying to accelerate aid and redirect how it is spent, U.S. officials said yesterday. But the Bush administration is still not meeting the goal it set this summer to inject $300 million to $400 million monthly into Iraq's economy by Sept. 1, the officials said.
"We're moving funds faster, but not at the rate we set for ourselves," a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy said.
With little fanfare, Congress last week approved the Bush administration's request to reallocate $3.46 billion from long-term infrastructure projects to more pressing security and job-creation programs. The transfer marks a significant refocusing of the year-old, $18.4 billion effort to rebuild Iraq.
But administration officials, lawmakers and think tanks say major changes are needed not only in what the reconstruction money is spent on but also how it is spent. Too much money has been filtered through major American businesses such as Halliburton Co. and Bechtel Corp. on large-scale electricity, water and oil infrastructure projects, and not nearly enough has gone to smaller, more decentralized reconstruction efforts that could be handled by Iraqis, they say.
"When you're doing these large-scale programs, these design-and-build contracts and mega-program projects, you eat up a lot of money in administration and management costs," said a senior U.S. official familiar with the reconstruction effort. "What we've learned is that we have to use Iraqis, provide more employment, lower our costs and deliver a project that would be close enough to what they want, even if it's not perfect by American standards. We're moving in that direction -- finally."
Politically unpopular foreign aid programs have traditionally been sold to taxpayers as ultimately benefiting them because most of the money goes to U.S. companies, said Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on foreign operations, which is responsible for the reconstruction funding. Iraq has been no different.
"We have to have a complete change of mind-set," Kolbe said.
In a report released a week ago, Iraq Revenue Watch, a watchdog group funded by liberal philanthropist George Soros, analyzed contracts worth more than $5 million that have been funded with Iraqi oil revenue over the past year. Of the 39 contracts so far, U.S. and British firms have received 85 percent of the value, the group said. Iraqi firms have received 2 percent.
Of the $7.1 billion so far obligated to reconstruction projects, nearly a third will be spent on security, according to the CSIS. Roughly 6 percent will be taken as contractor profit, 10 percent finances U.S. government overhead, and more than a quarter will be lost to mismanagement, corruption, insurance costs and the soaring salaries of non-Iraqi workers.
Mounting violence has sent the cost of security skyrocketing. Routine supply convoys now need constant security surveillance. And increasing demand has more than doubled the salaries of security guards, said Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, a trade group representing private security contractors. A year ago, a U.S. security firm could hire a Nepalese Gurkha soldier for $1,000 a month. Now the cost is more than $2,000. Former U.S. Special Forces soldiers can command $700 a day to protect "high-value" targets.
"When you have risks this high, the profits are going to be high," Brooks said. "That's inevitable."
On top of that, bribery has become "just the reality of doing business," said Jim Mitchell, a spokesman for the inspector general of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
What is left is 27 cents on each dollar to build roads and schools, prepare for elections, and repair decrepit water and electricity systems, the CSIS analysis concluded.
Administration officials called that breakdown "credible." Kolbe suggested that overhead and security costs swallowed half the $1.1 billion spent so far on reconstruction. As violence escalates, that percentage could get worse before it gets better.
"Little is being accomplished," said Rep. Nita M. Lowey (N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee. "The Iraqi people are not seeing much benefit."
Senior State Department officials are beginning to change course, Lowey acknowledged. Most of the $3.46 billion being shifted from large infrastructure programs will go toward training Iraqi security forces. But $380 million will be earmarked for economic reforms, private-sector development and agriculture programs. And $286 million will go to short-term "make-work" projects, enough to employ 800,000 Iraqis in short order, State Department officials say.
That would be a dramatic increase from the 74,770 Iraqis currently employed by the reconstruction effort, Mitchell said.
In the run-up to January's scheduled election in Iraq, U.S. authorities hope to inject $300 million to $400 million a month into Iraqi-identified projects and job-creation efforts. The success of that effort could have enormous consequences for pro-Western candidates as Iraqis go to the polls to elect the country's first democratic government.
But administration and congressional sources cautioned the shift may not work. A high-ranking official in the now-disbanded provisional government said occupation authorities set up a make-work program early on, aiming to hire 100,000 Iraqis to clean up canals, dig ditches and do other "messy, dirty" jobs as day laborers. At its height, 60,000 workers signed up.
"It's not like somebody slapped his forehead and said, 'Oh, short-term work creation is the way to do it,' " said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity at the request of his current employer. "We didn't do it as well as we wanted, but we did try."
In some cases, large U.S. contractors are employing Americans to do work that Iraqis could handle for a fraction of the cost, such as driving buses, the former occupation official said. But some reconstruction efforts will still have to stay in the hands of Western contractors, Kolbe said. "You can't do electrical distribution in little, decentralized projects," he said.
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Raids Focus on Insurgents South of Baghdad
U.S. Forces Take Strategic Bridge as Major Operation With Iraqi Troops Begins
By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7898-2004Oct5?language=printer
MUSAYYIB, Iraq, Oct. 5 -- U.S. and Iraqi forces fanned out across a vast region south of Baghdad early Tuesday in what U.S. commanders described as a major operation to regain control of lawless areas where insurgents routinely use supply routes to bring weapons and fighters into the capital.
More than 3,000 troops will target dozens of insurgents in raids extending west of the Euphrates River, military officers said. On Tuesday, U.S. troops took control of a bridge that insurgents had used to move bombs, money and people into Baghdad, sowing the growing disorder there, U.S. military officials said.
Three U.S. Marines were wounded in an ambush near the marketplace in the city of Haswah, about 50 miles south of Baghdad, just before the operation began. Another Marine and two Iraqi National Guardsmen were injured by a car bombing Monday morning about 20 miles away near the city of Latifiyah, U.S. military officials said.
The operation here is part of a U.S. strategy to reclaim regions in Iraq that have fallen into the hands of insurgents. Last week, U.S. and Iraqi forces regained control over Samarra, north of Baghdad, in what U.S. officials described as a template for dealing with problem areas before planned nationwide elections in January. Fallujah, Ramadi and Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood are among the key areas still effectively controlled by the insurgency.
"Right now, time is not on their side," said Col. Ron Johnson, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is conducting much of the operation here. "If we can get to the elections, they know we'll get the upper hand. The next three or four months are going to be the high-water mark" for military activity.
Iraq's interim president, Ghazi Yawar, said Tuesday that his government was trying to avoid storming Fallujah, which has been controlled by insurgents since April, when the Marines pulled out.
"We are trying to work out a way for Iraqi forces to enter the city peacefully and take control. We are trying to have coalition forces remain outside the city as support forces," Yawar told al-Arabiya television.
"I told people in Fallujah that this will not be a picnic, this will be very hard and decisive. We do not want our people to be hurt," Yawar said.
In scattered violence Tuesday, a car bomb exploded near a U.S. convoy in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, killing four Iraqis and wounding two, according to hospital officials. The U.S. military said in a statement that another car bomb, in the northern city of Mosul, killed three civilians and wounded four foreign troops, and mortar fire killed one civilian and wounded another in Baghdad. Meanwhile, five decapitated bodies, all believed to be Iraqis, have been found in northern towns, local officials said.
In the military operation unfolding south of Baghdad, U.S. commanders said they were seeking to gain some measure of control over an area encompassing roughly 600 square miles, stretching southwest to Karbala and due south to Hilla. Although not as notorious as some other insurgent strongholds, the region is hostile and dangerous, U.S. Marines say. The 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment has suffered two deaths and 100 wounded since its arrival July 18 at Camp Iskandariyah, a forward operating base on the Euphrates River.
About 40 mortar rounds were fired into the base the day the battalion arrived, according to its operations officer, Maj. Matt Sasse, who said he was nearly hit. Sasse said the battalion is routinely pummeled by roadside bombs and small-arms fire.
"There's so much going on here," he said. "It makes my head hurt."
Operation Phantom Fury, which began with two pre-dawn raids against suspected insurgents in the city of Musayyib, is designed "to kill the enemy and disrupt his activities" and "show him that he can't do whatever he wants," Sasse said.
The operation's centerpiece is the seizure of the Jurf al-Sakhr Bridge, which connects the towns of Latifiyah -- where two senior Iraqi customs officials were assassinated Monday -- and Nayif al-Ajil. The bridge is a key crossing point on the Euphrates south of Baghdad, and U.S. officials say they believe followers of the Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi use it to supply the insurgency in the capital. Zarqawi and other insurgent leaders have operated with impunity west of the Euphrates, according to military sources.
About 600 U.S. soldiers, transported by Stryker armored assault vehicles, took the bridge Tuesday morning without resistance, according to U.S. officials. They declined to comment on how long U.S. forces would maintain control over the bridge.
In Musayyib, Marines, accompanied by dozens of Iraqi Special Forces troops who rode on a flatbed truck, executed what U.S. commanders described as the first of what will be dozens of targeted raids across the region.
A Muslim cleric, suspected of giving haven to insurgents and inciting violence against the American presence, was detained, and dozens of cassette tapes and literature were confiscated.
But the second raid appeared to show the challenges of searching for suspects who can easily melt into their communities. At approximately 3 a.m., Marines provided support for dozens of Iraqi Special Forces troops who used a battering ram to storm a three-story house in Musayyib in search of a man described as an insurgent leader.
Inside, they found the man's sister and his 18-year-old nephew, who identified himself as Abdullah. U.S. and Iraqi forces ransacked the house but found no weapons. Abdullah, blindfolded and bound, was taken away in the truck while his mother's piercing cries echoed down the empty street at 4 a.m.
"He's not in trouble. It's okay -- we just want to ask him a few questions," said one Marine, trying to console the woman. After accusing the Iraqis of stealing her money during the search, she slumped against a wall, sobbing, as the vehicles drove away with her son, who said he was a high school student.
Abdullah told a U.S. interrogator that his uncle had a house on the other side of the river and offered to take the U.S. and Iraqi forces there. The convoy wound past a market that was just opening and came to a quiet neighborhood overrun by stray dogs.
Again the U.S.-supported Iraqi forces bashed in the door, but they found this house empty except for random items: boxes for radios and bug zappers and a clock that had not been reset since daylight saving time in Iraq ended Friday.
"Did you know this house was vacant?" a Marine asked Abdullah.
"He was here three days ago," the teenager replied.
"That's a lie," the Marine muttered.
The raid ended at 4:30 a.m., as the muezzin's call to prayer echoed through the streets.
"You look disappointed," one officer said to another.
"I am," said the other officer.
"At least you're going back alive," said the first.
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Car Bomb Kills 10 Iraqis Near Baghdad
October 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A suicide car bomber plowed into an Iraqi military checkpoint northwest of Baghdad on Wednesday, killing 16 Iraqis and wounding about 30, as U.S. and Iraqi forces sealed off roads south of the capital in a campaign to curb the insurgency before January's elections.
There were hopeful signs, meanwhile, that talks may produce a cease-fire agreement with a Shiite militia headed by radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr -- although residents of his stronghold Sadr City reported explosions in the area late Wednesday. A negotiator also claimed progress in talks to end the military standoff in Fallujah -- the country's toughest insurgent stronghold and suspected base of Iraq's most feared terrorist group.
The car bomb attack occurred about 11:15 a.m. at an Iraqi National Guard encampment near Anah, 160 miles northwest of Baghdad on the main highway to Syria. According to the U.S. military, the camp came under fire, and a few minutes later a vehicle sped to a nearby National Guard checkpoint and exploded.
Dr. Waleed Jawad Qamar of the Anah health clinic said his facility recorded 13 dead and 25 injured. Another hospital in nearby Hadithah reported three dead and five injured. U.S. officials said no Americans were killed or wounded but had no report of Iraqi casualties.
Car bombs -- some piloted by suicide drivers and others detonated remotely -- have become an increasing threat to multinational and Iraqi forces because insurgents find them safer than other forms of attack that can draw devastating American return fire. In September, 29 Iraqi and multinational troops were killed by car bombs, according to the U.S. command, which did not break down the figure by nationality.
U.S. and Iraqi forces are trying to restore enough control of this turbulent country so that national elections can be held in January. President Bush and Prime Minister Ayad Allawi have insisted the elections -- considered a vital step toward building Iraqi democracy -- must take place throughout the country, despite warnings by some U.S. military officials that balloting may not be possible in certain areas.
More than 3,000 U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a major operation Tuesday to retake control of insurgent-held parts of Babil province south of Baghdad. The operation in Babil -- notorious for kidnappings and ambushes and home to ancient Babylon -- followed last week's ouster of insurgent forces from Samarra, 60 miles north of the capital.
As part of the Babil operation, American troops and Iraqi National Guardsmen on Wednesday blocked the roads leading to Qasir town in the Youssifiyah area, about 12 miles south of Baghdad. Residents said two explosions -- a car bomb and a roadside bomb -- hit two bridges in the area Wednesday, an apparent attempt by insurgents to bar the movement of Iraqi and U.S. forces.
Residents were divided over whether the U.S.-led operation was justified.
``The Americans want to stop the resistance, which they call terrorism, and this is wrong,'' said Mohammed Fadhil, 20, of Youssifiyah. ``In fact, it is a legitimate reaction to the occupation.''
But others felt the raids were needed to restore order in the region.
``I support the military operation. We should get rid of the armed groups in our area because their (the insurgents) only goal is to kill more Iraqis and to ignite civil war,'' said Mohammed Hussein, 29, a farmer.
As military operations increase, Allawi's government is accelerating moves to peacefully restore control of insurgent strongholds. Iraqi mediators said the government and followers of al-Sadr were near agreement on a deal to end weeks of clashes between American soldiers and the cleric's militia in the Sadr City district of the capital.
Allawi told reporters there was no cease-fire so far but that a committee was being formed to discuss what he termed an ``initiative'' to end the conflict.
Kareem al-Bakhatti, a pro-al-Sadr tribal elder, said the framework agreement calls for al-Sadr's militiamen to turn in their weapons in exchange for cash payments and immunity from prosecution for most of them. Iraqi police would take over security responsibilities in Sadr City and American forces would enter the district only with the approval of Iraqi authorities, he said.
Some al-Sadr aides expressed reservations about some of the conditions, and the fiery cleric, whose Mahdi Army launched bloody uprisings in April and August, has frequently zigzagged in negotiations. A senior al-Sadr follower, speaking on condition of anonymity, said his side rejected a proposal this week because it did not include a halt to arrests, the release of prisoners or an end to house raids.
The Iraqi government is eager to pacify his movement and end the major source of militancy among the majority Shiite community as the country struggles against the increasing Sunni Muslim insurgency.
Talks were held Wednesday in Baghdad between the government and representatives from Fallujah, a Sunni-majority city west of the capital that fell under insurgent control after the Marines abandoned a three-week siege last April. Fallujah is believed a center of the Tawhid and Jihad movement of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, responsible for numerous beheadings of foreign hostages.
After the talks, Fallujah representative Khaled Hammoud al-Jumeili said the meeting produced agreement on several points, including a deal to allow Iraqi forces into the city but without sweeping powers of search or arrest.
However, there was no confirmation from government negotiators, and claims of breakthroughs in the past have proved premature.
During the fighting in Samarra, which U.S. forces restored to government control last weekend, 127 insurgents were killed and 128 captured, including 21 foreign fighters, a senior U.S. officer said Wednesday.
Maj. Gen. John Batiste, commander of the 1st Infantry Division, told reporters in Tikrit that the insurgents included some supporters of Saddam Hussein as well as ordinary criminals.
Batiste also disputed civilian casualty claims from Iraqi medical personnel in Samarra. He said the final count from hospitals in Samarra and Tikrit showed 20 civilians killed and 61 wounded. He said there could have been others killed or wounded who were never brought to a hospital.
Samarra General Hospital reported receiving 70 bodies during the fighting, including 23 children and 18 women. An additional 160 people were treated for injuries, it said Sunday.
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Hundreds of Sunken Vessels Block Access to Iraq's Seaports, Pollute Waters
October 06, 2004
By Diana Elias,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=137
KUWAIT CITY, Kuwait - The routes into Iraq's two deep water ports are lined with more than 300 sunken ships, blocking the channel and polluting the waters, the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) said Tuesday.
It will cost US$34 million to remove the wrecks - which range from freighters and tankers to tugs and wooden dhows - and restore the channels leading to Umm Qasr and al-Zubair to their original depths, according to a statement from the agency.
"Until most of these vessels are removed, Iraq will not be able to rehabilitate the Persian Gulf seaports that once handled the bulk of its commerce," the statement quoted U.N. experts as saying. Umm Qasr and al-Zubair are Iraq's only deep water ports.
The ships sank during the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war, the 1991 Gulf War, and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last year. Some of their cargo, including munitions, pesticides, and refined oil products, is already leaking into the Gulf and spreading with very strong currents.
The pollutants may also pose hazards to Kuwait, which has almost no ground fresh water and depends largely on desalinating water from the Gulf.
The UNDP said that restoring port access for deep-draught ships would bring in revenues to Iraq that would pay for the channel-clearing in less than a year.
It also said the United Nations estimates that Iraq is spending an extra $190 million a year to import goods overland that could be imported "much more cheaply and efficiently" by sea.
The two ports "have the potential to become major cargo and container-handling facilities and are vital for receiving reconstruction supplies," the UNDP said. As they are now, they are "a major obstacle to Iraq's economic recovery."
Umm Qasr and al-Zubair are commercial ports; oil is loaded at the ports of Basra and Khor al-Amya.
UNDP experts were meeting in Kuwait on Tuesday and Wednesday to share their findings with potential donors, according to Paul Clifford, a technical adviser for the agency.
The UNDP has already been dredging and removing wrecks from the channels, largely funded by the Japanese government.
-------- israel / palestine
64 percent of Palestinians support resuming peace talks with Israel: poll
(Xinhuanet)
2004-10-06
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-10/06/content_2058637.htm
RAMALLAH, Oct. 6 -- A recent poll published in the West Bank on Wednesday showed that 64 percent of the Palestinians in the West Bank supported the resumption of peace negotiations with Israel.
According to the poll, the percentage of the Palestinians who are in support of resuming peace talks with Israel has grown up considerably, compared with the same poll conducted in June when only 45 percent supported the resumption.
The poll, published in the Palestinian dailies, was carried out by the development studies program of Beir Zeit University in the West Bank.
The poll was done before Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon'ssenior adviser Dov Weisglass said the aim of the disengagement plan was to freeze the peace process.
"The significance of the disengagement plan (with the Palestinians) is to freeze the peace process," Weisglass told Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz in an interview set to be published on Friday.
The peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians stopped completely after the resignation of the first ever Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and his cabinet in October 2003.
The poll also showed 71 percent of those surveyed called for anurgent cabinet reshuffle, while 68 percent believed that the Palestinian National Authority didn't do its best to fight corruption.
----
Israeli Aide Hints That Gaza Exit Would Freeze Peace Plan
October 7, 2004
New York Times
By GREG MYRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/international/middleeast/07mideast.html
GAZA, Oct. 6 - Israel's proposed withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is intended to put the issue of Palestinian statehood on indefinite hold, a close aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in an interview that was published Wednesday and immediately stirred controversy.
The comments by the aide, Dov Weisglass, who frequently handles delicate diplomatic contacts with the Bush administration, drew sharp criticism from the Palestinians. Mr. Sharon's office quickly put out a statement saying the prime minister was committed to the Middle East peace plan, known as the road map, which envisions Palestinian statehood sooner rather than later.
The State Department said it had sought clarification from the Israeli government and accepted Mr. Sharon's statement that he was supportive of the road map.
Mr. Sharon has himself dropped many hints that he is less than enthusiastic about the road map, which would require many concessions from Israel. In a recent newspaper interview, Mr. Sharon said Israel was not following the peace plan, which stalled amid violence shortly after it was introduced in June 2003.
Still, Mr. Weisglass's published remarks were unusually blunt. He described the planned withdrawal of Israeli settlers from Gaza and a part of the West Bank as a substitute for the road map, not a means of reviving the moribund peace process, as the Bush administration has stated.
"The significance of our disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process," Mr. Weisglass was quoted as saying in Haaretz, a liberal daily often critical of Mr. Sharon's government. "It supplies the formaldehyde necessary so there is no political process with Palestinians."
"When you freeze the process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state," Mr. Weisglass added. "Effectively, this whole package called a Palestinian state, with all it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda."
In the interview, Mr. Weisglass also said the Israeli position had the "authority and permission" of the White House and Congress.
Until recently, Mr. Weisglass had been the prime minister's chief of staff and continues to serve as a senior adviser.
In Washington, Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman, said, "Our understanding is that Israel is committed to the road map and to the president's two-state vision."
"Based on Israel's declared policy, we see no cause to doubt it," he said.
Palestinians contend that Mr. Sharon is not serious about holding negotiations, and they seized on Mr. Weisglass' remarks.
"I believe he has revealed the true intentions of Sharon," Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, told Reuters.
The Palestinians are demanding that the Gaza withdrawal be part of a comprehensive peace effort. But they say that Mr. Sharon is using it in a bid to consolidate Israel's control on the much larger settlements in the West Bank.
The statement from Mr. Sharon's office said the prime minister "supports the road map, which is the only plan that will enable progress toward a lasting political settlement."
Meanwhile, six Palestinians and a farm worker from Thailand were killed in violence throughout Gaza on Wednesday, Palestinian hospitals and the Israeli military said.
Israeli forces shot dead two gunmen from the militant group Hamas who infiltrated the greenhouses at the Kfar Darom settlement in southern Gaza, the military said. A third attacker died when his explosive went off, and the Thai worker was killed during the gun battle. In northern Gaza, Israeli tank fire killed a father and son in their hometown, Beit Lahiya, and a 15-year old boy died from gunshot wounds in another Israeli shooting, Palestinian medical officials and doctors said.
For more than three years, Hamas has been shooting crude rockets from northern Gaza, with most directed at the Israeli town of Sederot, just outside Gaza.
Israeli forces charged into northern Gaza on Sept. 28 after the latest upsurge in rocket fire. More than 70 Palestinians and 5 Israelis have been killed in the operation.
-------- landmines
Annan Reports Progress in Action to Combat Landmines
October 6, 2004
NEW YORK, New York, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-06-02.asp
Countries strewn with deadly landmines are becoming better at planning and implementing programs to reduce or eliminate them, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan says in a new report to the General Assembly.
Landmines, the ultimate environmental hazard, kill or injure between 15,000 and 20,000 new victims yearly, compared to an average of 26,000 victims seven years ago. Nobody knows how many mines are still out in the environment, but estimates suggest that over 110 million landmines are still in place.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan (Photo courtesy UN) Tuesday Annan told the General Assembly the work of United Nations agencies has helped many mine affected countries to respond more effectively and quickly to the problem.
The Mine Action Service, a part of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, is responsible for the overall coordination of United Nations action on mines and and explosive remnants of war. It coordinates the activities of 13 UN departments, programs, funds and agencies.
In Afghanistan, for example, the UN Mine Action Service managed the center that runs the country's anti-mine program. Last year about 78 square kilometers of land were cleared, more than 22 square kilometers returned to local communities for their use and another 160 square kilometers were surveyed, Annan reported. Mine risk education reached nearly 800,000 of the Afghani people.
Deminers from the nongovernmental organization International Mine Initiative clear a minefield in Iraq. (Photo courtesy IMI) There is an improvement in the capacity to respond to emergencies, Annan said in his report, which covers the period from August 2003 to August 2004. The UN rapid response plan was tested in Iraq, reviewed through a formal evaluation, and a revision is in progress.
The situation that unfolded in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad was unprecedented, said Jean-Marie Guéhenno, under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations in his annual reportto the General Assembly. "Probably never before has so much explosive ordnance simply been abandoned at the end of a conflict," he said.
UN officials were deployed to Iraq in April 2003 and established a mine action coordination team in Baghdad and an area mine action coordination team in Basrah to oversee, prioritize and assign tasks. Acting on a Security Council resolution, the two teams also began advising the National Mine Action Authority of Iraq.
An emergency survey was conducted - a total of 2,499 Iraqi communities were surveyed and 739 dangerous areas were identified.
The next step was clearance. A mine and unexploded ordnance clearance company in southern Iraq has destroyed than 500,000 items of unexploded or abandoned ordnance under contract to the Mine Action Service, Annan reported.
Anti-tank mines designed to detonate at pressure of about 350 pounds. (Photo courtesy U.S. Defense Department) Then the UN agencies worked to educate people about mines to prevent further injuries and deaths. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) funded two nongovernmental organizations to take the lead for mine risk education - the Mines Advisory Group in the south and Handicap International around Baghdad.
At the same time, assessments of situations in mine affected countries Liberia, Malawi, Senegal and Uganda have been carried out, Annan reported.
New capacity building programs were established in Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Jordan and the Sudan. National programs have benefited from a range of training opportunities and have strengthened field level planning and coordination, the report states.
This woman lost her hand to a land mine in Afghanistan. (Photo by Luke Powell courtesy UN ) Annan says countries are now more willing to work collaboratively against landmines, consulting and sharing information not just with nongovernmental organizations and civil society groups but other nations as well.
International mine action standards for mine risk education were approved and disseminated this year, Annan reports, and he said that countries are becoming more pro-active about educating their citizens to avoid these explosive devices.
The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) implements and supports mine risk education and mine accident prevention programs and provides advocacy and survivor assistance in 35 countries and territories.
UNICEF assigned mine risk education officers to work in mine action centres in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Sudan. In April and May UNICEF ran a project in eastern Chad that taught some 100,000 displaced people from Darfur about the risks.
UNICEF is the only United Nations mine action entity working in Georgia, Guatemala, Mauritania, Nicaragua, the occupied Palestinian territories, Panama, Chechnya in the the Russian Federation, the Golan Heights in the Syrian Arab Republic, and Vietnam.
Sophisticated mine detection systems are in development. Phil Rodacy of the U.S. Sandia National Lab demonstrates a mock chemical-sensing detector on an antitank mine. (Photo by Randy Montoya courtesy Sandia) The UN Development Programme has helped many governments, including those of Iraq, Mozambique and Yemen, construct their national strategies, including details about mine clearance and survivor assistance, Annan reported.
During the reporting period, UNDP raised more than $70 million for mine action, including more than $30 million through the Thematic Trust Fund for Crisis Prevention and Recovery.
Increased financial resources were made available and initiatives were taken to encourage participation in mine action by international financial institutions, Annan reports. But funding for mine action projects still falls far short of the need.
Between the launch of the 2004 consolidated appeals process in November 2003 and the mid-year review in June 2004, the secretary-general reports that only $12,708,230 was raised for mine action projects, out of total revised requirement of $40,256,180.
The Mine Action Service continued development of the Electronic Mine Information Network (e-Mine) online at: http://www.mineaction.org. Among the estimated 800 new documents uploaded to e-Mine were texts of national mine action legislation, United Nations reports and resolutions, international agreements relating to landmines, and reports from national mine action programs.
Army Spc. Sean Hogan uses a mine detector to search for improvised explosive devices near Baqubah, Iraq, on September 24, 2004 (Photo by Spc. James B. Smith Jr. courtesy U.S. Army) Mines and unexploded ordnance are destructive to the environment as well as to human beings. Wherever they are deployed, mines outlast their military objectives. For decades, waterways, beaches, forests, mountains, deserts and fields remain covered with unmarked mine fields.
The environmental impact of landmines can be devastating, as Abdhesh Gangwar, coordinator of the Centre for Environment Education, Himalaya, told a forum on the issue in April 2003 organized by the Indian Institute of Peace, Disarmament and Environmental Protection and Global Green Peace.
"Anti-personnel landmines pose a serious threat to environment, livelihood and process of sustainable development, affecting not only present but also future generations," Gangwar said. "They prejudice economic development by disrupting the biosphere's life support systems and diminishing the capacity of the environment to supply the raw materials and natural resources."
"Mines deny access to natural resources, promote the rapid and unsustainable exploitation of marginal and ecologically fragile environments, deplete biological diversity by destroying flora and fauna, contaminate the surrounding soil and water with highly toxic substances, and destroy the ecosystem itself by disrupting soil and water processes," Gangwar told forum delegates.
The Summit for a Mine-Free World, the first review conference of Parties to the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction, will convene in Nairobi, Kenya, from November 20 to December 3. The Convention, known as the Ottawa Convention, has been ratified by 143 countries. A total of 42 countries remain outside the Mine Ban Treaty, including the United States.
View the secretary-general's report by clicking here.
http://www.mineaction.org/pdf%20file/A%2059%20284%20Add%201%20UN%20Advocacy%20Strategy%202004-2005.pdf
The Mine Action Service annual report is found here. http://mineaction.org/pdf%20file/UNMAS%20Annual%20Report%2003.pdf
-------- spies
A New C.I.A. Report Casts Doubt on a Key Terrorist's Tie to Iraq
October 6, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/politics/06intel.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 - A reassessment by the Central Intelligence Agency has cast doubt on a central piece of evidence used by the Bush administration before the invasion of Iraq to draw links between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda's terrorist network, government officials said Tuesday.
The C.I.A. report, sent to policy makers in August, says it is now not clear whether Mr. Hussein's government harbored members of a group led by the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the officials said. The assertion that Iraq provided refuge to Mr. Zarqawi was the primary basis for the administration's prewar assertions connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda.
The new C.I.A. assessment, based largely on information gathered after the American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, is the latest to revise a prewar intelligence report used by the administration as a central rationale for war.
Other reports have cast doubt on the idea that Iraq provided chemical and biological weapons training to Al Qaeda, and the report of the Sept. 11 commission found no "collaborative relationship" between the former Iraqi government and Al Qaeda.
In the months before the war, George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell were among administration officials who asserted without qualification that Iraq had harbored Mr. Zarqawi and members of his terror group.
In June of this year, President Bush described Mr. Zarqawi as "the best evidence of connection to Al Qaeda affiliates and Al Qaeda." But while Mr. Zarqawi was once thought to be closely linked to Al Qaeda, his affiliations are now less certain.
Some American and European officials have said there is no clear coordination between Mr. Zarqawi and Al Qaeda, though their aims are similar. In the meantime, Mr. Zarqawi has emerged as an architect of repeated car bomb attacks and as the most active and deadly foreign terrorist operating in Iraq as part of the anti-American insurgency.
The C.I.A.'s new assessment states that it could not be conclusive even about his relationship with Mr. Hussein's government. The C.I.A. review, first reported by Knight Ridder newspapers, did not say on what basis the earlier assessment was being softened, and government officials declined to explain on Tuesday.
On Monday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld appeared to back away from earlier claims about the close relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
"I just read an intelligence report recently about one person who's connected to Al Qaeda who was in and out of Iraq, and there's the most tortured description of why he might have had a relationship and why he might not have had a relationship," Mr. Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Mr. Rumsfeld later issued a statement saying that he continued to believe that there had been "solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members" before the 2003 war and that "we have what we believe to be credible information that Iraq and Al Qaeda have discussed safe haven opportunities in Iraq."
A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment about any new intelligence assessment. The government officials who outlined its findings represented several different agencies, but all were guarded in discussing it, saying they did not want to add to tensions between the C.I.A. and the White House.
One government official said the new report "doesn't make clear-cut assertions one way or another" about whether Iraq harbored Mr. Zarqawi. But officials said that it had established beyond doubt that Mr. Zarqawi spent time in Baghdad in 2002, that from there he ordered the assassination of an American diplomat in Jordan and that he was in contact with members of the insurgent group Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq, the government officials said.
-------- un
U.S. Vetoes U.N. Resolution
Condemnation of Israel's Gaza Incursion Called 'Lopsided'
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9628-2004Oct5.html
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 5 -- The United States vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning Israel for its incursion into the Gaza Strip, calling the resolution "lopsided and unbalanced" because it failed to mention Palestinian rocket attacks against Israeli civilians that triggered the action.
The resolution, which was co-sponsored by Pakistan and Algeria, obtained 11 votes in favor Tuesday. Britain, Germany and Romania abstained, citing concern that the text did not fault Palestinian attacks. But the U.S. veto, the seventh cast by the Bush administration on a resolution that condemned Israeli actions, blocked its adoption.
John C. Danforth, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the resolution would undermine efforts to restore peace in the Middle East. "The resolution today encourages the terrorists; it will not do anything to prevent a predictable response," he said.
The Palestinian representative, Nasser Kidwa, said after the vote that "this is another sad day for the Security Council" for not calling for "cessation of the bloodshed of the Palestinian people in northern Gaza." He said he is considering calling for an emergency session of the U.N. General Assembly to press for Israel's condemnation.
Israeli forces launched an offensive in northern Gaza late last month to stop Palestinian rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. Five Israelis were killed in Palestinian mortar and rocket attacks in the past three months. On Sept. 28, Palestinians killed two children and wounded 10. Since then, Israeli forces have killed 82 Palestinians, the United Nations said.
The failed resolution condemned Israel's "military incursion" into northern Gaza, citing "extensive human casualties and destruction." It also demanded "the immediate cessation of all military operations in the area of northern Gaza and the withdrawal of the Israeli occupying forces from that area."
The latest Middle East dispute came on a day that the United Nations continued to address a worsening crisis in Darfur, Sudan. A government-backed Arab militia has killed tens of thousands of black Africans and driven more than 1 million from their homes.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan told the Security Council in a report that Sudan has not demonstrated its capacity to protect black African villagers from violence. He pressed for the deployment of African peacekeepers in Darfur in the coming weeks.
The report said a security breakdown has spread in Darfur as fighting between government troops and rebel fighters increased over the past month. Annan cited several attacks by government troops and allied militia members against civilians, including an attack by uniformed men and militia that killed about 100 people near Greda, South Darfur, and drove the survivors from their homes. The region's rebel Sudanese Liberation Army, meanwhile, carried out attacks against police installations.
-------- us
Bill to Restore the Draft Is Defeated in the House
October 6, 2004
By CARL HULSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/politics/06draft.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 - Trying to quiet fears of a return of the draft, the House Republican leadership engaged in a hasty call-up of its own on Tuesday. The Republicans brought to the floor a Democratic-sponsored proposal to reinstate mandatory military service and presided over its overwhelming defeat on a vote of 402 to 2.
"We're going to put a nail in that coffin," said the House majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay of Texas. He accused Democrats of generating opposition to President Bush - especially on college campuses - by raising the idea that the draft might be re-established after the November election to provide troops for service in Iraq.
Democrats were outraged at the tactic, charging Republicans with a cynical political ploy on a matter that merited more thoughtful hearings and debate. The Democrats originally introduced the measure early last year as a way to protest the war, even before it began, and to spotlight how low- and middle-income Americans shoulder much of the burden of serving in the military.
"It is a prostitution of the legislative process to take a serious issue and use it for political purposes on the eve of the election just to say they are against the draft," said Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, the author of the bill, who ended up voting against it.
With the military strained by its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, talk of a return of the draft - discontinued in 1973 during the Vietnam War - has persisted, fueled by e-mail and Internet chatter warning of a new draft once the election is concluded. The activist group Rock the Vote, which seeks to register young Americans to vote, has also broadcast public service announcements pointing to the draft as an important campaign issue.
Members of Congress are regularly asked about the idea as well, often by worried parents.
"This is the issue that will not go away," said Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington. He and other Democrats suggested again on Tuesday that Mr. Bush's re-election could mean a return of the draft, because the administration is already calling back reservists and halting the discharge of military personnel. Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, has referred to such moves as a backdoor draft.
"How big a step is it from where we are right now to the president saying it is the national interest that everyone serve?" asked Mr. McDermott.
Republicans portrayed such claims as part of a pre-election fraud. "The reason we are doing this is to expose the hoax of the year, which has been needlessly scaring young people," said Representative Duncan Hunter of California, chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
Administration officials including Mr. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have said they have absolutely no plans to restore the draft and believe that the all-volunteer military is the proper way to field troops. Both of them have reiterated that position in recent days.
"We will not have a draft so long as I'm the president of the United States," Mr. Bush said to applause from a crowd in Iowa on Monday.
"We do not need a draft," Mr. Rumsfeld said during a radio interview with Sean Hannity. "We've got, you know, 295 million people in this country and we have an active force of about 1.4 million and we are having no trouble at all attracting and retaining the people that we need to serve in the Armed Forces."
Some Democrats said it was the administration's loss of credibility due to the failure to find chemical and biological weapons in Iraq and its mishandling of the aftermath that was to blame for worry about the draft. "The president's foreign policy is scaring the kids of this country," said Representative Tim Ryan, Democrat of Ohio.
The Internet traffic on the draft often cites as evidence of a future draft the measure sponsored by Mr. Rangel, which would require two years of military service or the alternative of national service, as well as its companion in the Senate sponsored by Senator Ernest F. Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina.
The issue has also gotten an airing from Rock the Vote. Officials of the group have said the draft is a subject that should be addressed in detail by the presidential contenders. "We are not saying there is going to be a draft," said Jay Strell, a spokesman for the group. "What we are saying is we need to have an open an honest dialogue about this based on the facts."
With lawmakers acutely aware of the potential political ramifications of backing a draft, the Rangel measure languished without much attention until the Republican leadership decided to force it to the floor to make a political point.
One lawmaker spoke in favor of the bill, saying it was time Congress gave some thought to future military manpower needs.
"I believe we have to start looking at this right now," said Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a leading Democrat on military issues. He was joined in backing the bill by Representative Fortney Stark, Democrat of California.
Senate officials said they had no intention of acting on a similar proposal, but the Democratic leader, Senator Tom Daschle, said he doubted the House vote would put the matter to rest.
"I would expect you're going to continue to see debates about the viability of a draft as we move forward," Mr. Daschle said.
--------
House Moves to Protect G.I.'s on Finances
October 6, 2004
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/business/06military.html
In a broadly bipartisan vote, the House of Representatives approved a measure yesterday aimed at preventing marketing practices that have exposed military personnel, especially young recruits and junior officers, to high-pressure or misleading sales pitches for financial products that may not fit their financial needs.
The bill, which easily passed the House, would abolish an archaic form of mutual funds sold almost exclusively to military personnel. The funds, known as contractual plans, impose sales fees that eat up half of an investor's contributions in the first year.
The measure would also give state insurance regulators clearer jurisdiction over sales on military bases, and would require the Defense Department to establish a central registry for tracking insurance agents who violate military rules and to report the agents to state licensing agencies.
As the bill was being approved in the House, matching legislation was being prepared for introduction in the Senate by Michael B. Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York. Other influential senators who have expressed interest in the issue include the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Richard C. Shelby, an Alabama Republican, and the committee's ranking Democrat, Paul S. Sarbanes of Maryland.
Approval of the bill, on a vote of 396 to 2, came less than a month after it was introduced by Representative Max Burns, a Republican of Georgia, who said his initiative was largely prompted by a series that began in July in The New York Times documenting abusive sales practices and unsuitable financial products on several military bases, including Fort Benning in Georgia.
The bill's pace reflected the support of Representative Michael G. Oxley, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who arranged a hearing on it within two days of its introduction. Mr. Oxley said yesterday that the measure would help "put an end to the longstanding problem of unscrupulous securities and life insurance firms who have been taking financial advantage of the men and women in our armed forces."
Representative Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat who had first requested hearings on the issues raised by the series in The Times, had proposed a broader bill that would have doubled, from $250,000 to $500,000, the amount of low-cost life insurance available to service members through the military. But Mr. Emanuel acknowledged that his proposal would have faced more legislative hurdles than the Burns bill.
"We made choices so that this bill wouldn't get bogged down," he said of the committee's deliberations. "These were really parliamentary differences, not policy differences."
The measure has the support of state insurance regulators. "This is definitely something that needs to happen, and the House has shown real leadership in moving it as quickly as it did," said Gregory V. Serio, the superintendent of insurance for New York State and the chairman of the governmental affairs task force of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. "I am hoping the same thing will happen in the Senate."
From a financial perspective, the most interesting feature of the Burns measure is its abolition of the high-fee mutual funds known as contractual plans, under which investors sign up to make small, monthly contributions to a mutual fund over a decade or more but pay their sales fees upfront.
The plans have been prone to sales abuses since their introduction in the 1930's. In 1966, after a string of scandals, federal securities regulators unsuccessfully urged Congress to abolish the plans. Instead, Congress imposed a grace period during which investors could cancel the plans and recover at least some of their sales charges, making the plans less attractive to brokers.
By the mid-1980's, contractual plans had virtually disappeared from the civilian market. But they continued to be promoted in the military market, most prominently by First Command Financial Planning of Fort Worth, which has sold hundreds of thousands of the plans to young servicemen and women.
The company has urged Congress to extend the grace period for investors, rather than ban the plan, said Paul Cozby, director of corporate communications for First Command. But it strongly supports the creation of a central registry to track predatory agents. And it has proposed as well that all junior enlisted personnel meet with a trained independent counselor on base before signing up for any financial products that would affect their take-home pay. It also favors a requirement that companies provide information on the rate at which their products lapse or are canceled as a condition of being allowed to sell those products on military bases.
The American Council of Life Insurers, which supported the Burns bill, has also urged that insurers that sell on military bases be required to join the Insurance Marketplace Standards Association, a voluntary industry organization that sets admission standards for its members and monitors their sales practices.
The Pentagon's own proposals for revising its rules for on-base insurance sales are expected to become public soon, Pentagon officials said. Congress, however, has blocked their implementation until the completion of a broad study of the military financial marketplace by the Government Accountability Office.
John M. Molino, the deputy under secretary of defense for military community and family policy, said there was "some dovetailing" between the bill and proposals he wants to implement, particularly in tracking rogue agents. "This will provide greater awareness across the department and among the services, and that is good news for service members and their families," he said yesterday.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- drug war
Pit Stop on the Cocaine Highway
Guatemala Becomes Favored Link for U.S.-Bound Drugs
By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9499-2004Oct5?language=printer
GUATEMALA CITY -- They call it the airplane graveyard. Scores of torched planes sit in the Laguna del Tigre rain forest, an ecological gem teeming with jaguars and toucans. The planes carried cocaine from Colombia and then were discarded like old soft drink cans, an incidental cost of the multibillion-dollar drug business that is overrunning Guatemala.
In the 1990s, tons of Colombian cocaine were flown to northern Mexico and then driven across the border into the United States. But now better-equipped Mexican military pilots scramble to intercept suspicious planes. So traffickers prefer Guatemala, where the radar is spotty and the government is largely unable to stop the flights, according to Guatemalan and U.S. law enforcement officials.
As a result, Guatemala is now the hottest destination in Central America for Colombian cocaine on its way to the United States. Officials say tons are being flown to hastily carved landing strips in remote places such as Laguna del Tigre or shipped here in fishing vessels or freighters, then loaded onto trucks for a journey across this Tennessee-size country. The drugs are then driven across Mexico and into the United States, hidden in almost anything from cans of house paint to crates of fresh cheese.
"Every day it is a bigger and bigger problem," said Juan Luis Florido, Guatemala's attorney general. "It is a matter of national security for us and for the United States."
The increased cocaine trafficking has left an ugly mark: sensational mob-style killings that U.S. Ambassador John Hamilton has described as "like something out of 'The Godfather.' " He recalled how hit men recently walked into a hospital and killed nurses as well as a suspected drug trafficker lying in a bed. There also has been an alarming rise in the local use of crack cocaine.
The problems have become so severe that some citizens lament that former military governments knew how to control the problem better than the current democratic leaders.
U.S. officials here say they are increasingly concerned about the drug activity. Guatemala, still recovering from decades of civil war, has the largest economy in Central America. The officials say the traffic in cocaine -- and, increasingly, heroin -- is bringing more violence and instability, which have driven hundreds of thousands of citizens to migrate illegally to the United States in recent years.
Guatemalan officials say about 10 percent of the estimated 150 to 200 tons of cocaine a year passing through Guatemala is sold to users here, much of it distributed by street gangs known as maras. Tens of thousands of tattooed gang members who control many poor neighborhoods are Central America's biggest security concern. Their counterparts in the United States, from Los Angeles to Northern Virginia, are alarming U.S. law enforcement officials.
Guatemalan police say that crack cocaine has become a major source of income for gang members here and that because so many of them are now smoking it, violence has become more brutal.
"The drug traffickers use the maras as assassins and as their local salesmen," said Fernando Mendizabal, Guatemala's lead prosecutor for drug-related crimes. "They are used as a tool by organized crime."
Florido, the attorney general, said the problem increased dramatically during the administration of President Alfonso Portillo, whose four-year term ended in January. Portillo is now being investigated for alleged money laundering in the United States and Guatemala. Portillo's vice president, Juan Francisco Reyes Lopez, is in prison on various charges related to fraud; at least two dozen other top members of that administration are imprisoned or under criminal investigation.
Florido said the new government of President Oscar Berger inherited a huge drug trafficking problem and almost no resources to fight it. He said that if Guatemalan anti-drug police happen to spot a drug plane now, they have to ask the army for a helicopter to chase it. There is only one army helicopter available to the police, he said, and it is in poor shape. A second helicopter recently crashed, injuring several anti-drug officers, and has not been replaced.
Florido said it has been nearly impossible to catch the traffickers, who unload their cocaine in minutes and then burn or abandon their planes. He said traffickers with sophisticated boats also usually outrun Guatemalan naval forces, which have limited navigation and communications equipment.
U.S. officials say their ability to help is limited by a congressional ban, passed in 1990, on many types of aid to the Guatemalan military. The ban was imposed in response to a decades-long record of human rights violations during the country's civil war, when the military engaged in widespread torture and summary executions. Human rights groups remain leery of U.S. aid to Guatemalan security services, citing past CIA support for human rights violators.
No U.S. government aircraft are based permanently in Guatemala, though U.S. anti-drug officials said they were occasionally able to borrow a U.S. military plane or helicopter from a base in neighboring Honduras.
Hamilton, the ambassador, said a sign of the limitations facing Guatemala's anti-drug force is aircraft with such old windshields that they are difficult to see out of. "I think it would make sense for us to put a modest amount of money into spare parts and into enhancing their maintenance capabilities for their intercept aircraft," he said.
"I think that Washington is taking a fresh look at the possibility," Hamilton added. "It's a combination of our own interest and a feeling that we have a moral obligation to help a government that is really trying hard."
Florido said Guatemala needs far more from the United States than spare parts.
A case that has focused attention on the trafficking problem here is that of Otto Herrera, a Guatemalan citizen who is accused of being a key Central American connection between Colombian drug cartels and distributors in the United States. Herrera, 39, who is married to a woman from the United States, was arrested at the Mexico City airport in April, a year after officials raided his house in an affluent Guatemala City neighborhood and found $14 million in cash and two grenade launchers. He currently is in jail in Mexico on drug trafficking charges. The United States had offered a $2 million reward for his arrest, and the Mexican attorney general called his apprehension "great news for the hemisphere."
Social conditions here have also aided the drug traffickers. The overwhelming majority of Guatemala's 12 million people live in poverty, and 30 percent cannot read or write. Hugo Beteta, an academic who is now a top government planning official, said that half of Guatemala's population is younger than 18 and that most of those people have no hope of getting a job. He said poor, idle youths see two choices: migrate to the United States or get involved in the drug trade.
"And if you get tough on migration, what is left for them?" he said.
Officials here say Guatemala's weak judicial system is another attraction for international drug traffickers. In the rare instance that traffickers are caught in Guatemala, they have been known to bribe their way out of jail. U.S. officials were outraged and suspected corruption recently when a known associate of Herrera's was suddenly freed.
Drug trafficking experts say Colombian cartels appear to have found the same fertile ground in Guatemala that they found a decade ago in Mexico. Before he died in 1997, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, one of Mexico's most notorious traffickers, pioneered the use of Boeing 727 jets to fly huge shipments of cocaine from Colombia to Mexico. Now it is Guatemala's turn, the experts say.
"They have changed their strategy, and it's bad news for everyone," Florido said.
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Controversy Over Fort Detrick Expansion
Oct 6, 2004
CBS Broadcasting Inc
http://wjz.com/localstories/local_story_280182133.html
Some residents in Frederick are concerned about a plan to build a federal Department of Homeland Security biodefense center at Fort Detrick in Federick.
Attorney and peace activist Barry Kissin is one of dozens of Frederick residents that are concerns about the impact a biodefense center would have on their hometown. One of the concern is safety.
Frederick's Mayor Jennifer Dougherty tells Eyewitness News "We still have fresh in our minds the issues of the anthrax attacks where people actually did die. And it's mostly like that the anthrax actually did come from Fort Detrick, so without being alarmist, residents do have a right to be concerned about their safety."
Other concerns include the impact the center would have on traffic and concerns about air and water pollution.
Residents will have an opportunity to express their concerns when Homeland Security Officials hold a meeting on October 26th.
Officials at Fort Detrick declined to be interview, but last year Congress set aside $128 million to build the new biodefense center as an important expansion for homeland security at Fort Detrick. The project is expected to be completed in 2008.
Homeland Officials are accepting comments from the public about the proposed center through November 1st.
By mail: Department of Homeland Security c/o Kevin Anderson 7435 New Technology Way, Suite A Frederick, MD 21703 301-846-2156 Kevin Anderson can also be reached via e-mail kevin.anderson@dhs.gov
-----
Election Day Anti-Terrorism Plans Draw Criticism
Democrats Fear Efforts Could Keep Minority Voters Away
By Spencer S. Hsu and Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10108-2004Oct5?language=printer
A push by the 50 states to coordinate anti-terrorism activities before Election Day is drawing warnings from Democrats, civil rights groups and election officials, who say excessive measures could suppress turnout among urban and minority voters.
They contend that an elevated national threat warning -- and any actions in response -- could scare away voters, intentionally or not, especially in cities, which tend to vote Democratic. Voting rights advocates worry that fear of terrorism could lead to federal agents and local police being posted at polling places, a tactic that has historically been used in some places to intimidate minority citizens.
Such generalized threats "could have the consequence of discouraging people that may otherwise be motivated to vote," said Jeff Fischer, senior adviser to IFES, a Washington-based organization that promotes democratic elections.
"There is a fine line that public officials must walk," weighing the specifics of the threat, communicating openly with voters and reacting judiciously, he said.
Citing the March 11 bombings in Madrid before elections in Spain, Department of Homeland Security officials have warned that terrorists might try a similar assault here before the Nov. 2 elections. In recent weeks there has been a focus on Election Day, although the government has said it has no intelligence about the timing, status or target of a possible attack.
State and federal officials issued a security planning bulletin last week urging governors, state homeland security advisers and election officials to coordinate preparations and contingency plans. The document advised officials to think through how they would handle threat information, secure or change polling places and ballot-counting centers, guard members of the electoral college, and communicate to the public.
In interviews, the bulletin's authors said they were aware of the political minefield surrounding the issue. But they said that if there were an attack and elections and homeland security officials were unprepared, the consequences could be more disruptive.
"There is no doubt that the threat that is posed nationwide prior to the election here in this country is very real," said Bryan Sierra, spokesman for the Justice Department. "We have an absolute responsibility to provide that information to state and local governments, who are charged with protecting their citizens."
Sensitivity over the political fallout of the warnings is especially high because of the narrow partisan divide in the country and bitter memories of the 2000 presidential race, which turned on tiny vote margins in some states and partly on decisions made by Florida election officials.
Analysts say that regardless of intent, terrorism warnings have shaped voter attitudes, an influence that could grow if the warnings are extended to polling sites. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said people who oppose President Bush "see a clear pattern to scare the electorate," while his supporters see "an administration vigilantly protecting the country." As for undecided or swing voters, "raising the public's anxiety level helps the candidacy of George Bush, because at the moment the polls suggest the public feels it's safer to have George Bush as president," she said.
Critics of the warnings point to Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer's effort to raise terrorism awareness as an example of how election security measures could chill turnout. Kiffmeyer (R) gave local election officials fliers that warned voters to watch for unattended packages, vehicles "riding low on springs" and "homicide bombers."
Bombers may have a "shaved head or short hair," "smell of unusual herbal/flower water or perfume," wear baggy clothes or appear to be whispering to themselves, the flier warned.
Several local election officials were outraged over what they saw as an attempt to discourage voting with excessively dire warnings and stereotyping descriptions that could single out voters from specific religious, racial or ethnic groups for harassment. They refused to distribute the fliers.
Kiffmeyer said the language of the bulletin was taken from Minnesota's homeland security agency, which developed it with federal guidance. "What if something happens? I don't want to say, 'I didn't want to scare people, so I didn't pass out this information,' " Kiffmeyer said. "And do people really think this isn't on the minds of the public when they saw what happened in Madrid and in Russia?"
But Oregon Deputy Secretary of State Paddy J. McGuire (D) said he believes the intent of such a message is not to protect the homeland but to "scare people away from the polls."
Some Democrats are suspicious of the timing of the announcements, noting that warnings about an election-season threat came on April 19, when Bush was close to his low in the polls; on Aug. 1, right after the Democratic National Convention; and last week, as the president's post-National Republican Convention bounce ebbed.
In a statement last week, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned that it is possible for terrorism response plans created in the name of election security to discourage voting and "become a thinly veiled partisan tactic to tilt the elections."
Spokesmen for Ashcroft and Ridge emphasized that the effort to secure the election was initiated and led by the states, which administer elections. Federal law normally prohibits the presence of armed federal agents near polling sites. They also noted that the effort is supported by the National Governors Association, chaired by Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner (D), whose aides have said it is vital to address the issue of election security in a post-Sept. 11, 2001, era.
"We do not do politics at Homeland Security," Ridge spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said.
Nevertheless, partisan tensions were apparent as officials of the NGA and the National Association of Secretaries of State and homeland security experts sparred last week over the timing and content of a public announcement.
Rebecca Vigil-Giron (D), New Mexico secretary of state and president of the secretaries of state association, said the directive sent out by her organization to the states to step up preparations to safeguard national balloting has been "blown way out of proportion." She said election officials must plan a coordinated response to an election disrupted by a terrorist attack, but she said, "I want to make very sure that these plans don't look anything like voter suppression."
Still, civil rights organizations are worried. People for the American Way Foundation issued a report concluding that various efforts in the name of combating voter fraud have replaced Jim Crow-era laws restricting ballot access as a way to hold down minority voting.
Elliott Mincberg, the foundation's legal director, said he suspected that efforts to protect against terrorism could have the same effect. "The devil is in the details," he said, "and I want to be sure that this is not done in a way that scares people away from the polls."
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Intelligence Bills Lack Details
Congress Leaves Practical Matters Aside
By Walter Pincus and Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9947-2004Oct5.html
While the House and Senate yesterday pushed forward with their differing approaches to restructure the U.S. intelligence community and put it under a new national intelligence director, their proposals do not deal with more practical issues, such as who will brief the president each morning about current foreign and domestic intelligence analyses and clandestine operations.
Most public debate up to now has focused on whether the new director's authority would cover all or only part of the approximately $40 billion being spent yearly on intelligence, although control of spending was not found by the 9/11 commission or congressional investigators to have been an issue in the failure to predict or prevent attacks in 2001 or the overstated findings about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
But there has been little public discussion over what the actual daily role would be for the new national intelligence director (NID), including what size staff the NID would have and how it would keep track of the intelligence agencies that are carrying out operations and providing analyses.
The Senate and House bills and President Bush's own proposal make the NID the principal intelligence adviser to the president and place that person and staff as an independent agency within the executive branch. But the House and Senate require the NID to be housed separately from the CIA and other intelligence agencies, while the White House would apparently permit it to be at the George H.W. Bush Intelligence Center in Langley, Va., the CIA's headquarters.
Location is important, senior active and retired intelligence officials said. Privately they say that unless the NID has a large, separate analytical staff, he or she will have to depend primarily on CIA analysts who prepare the President's Daily Brief (PDB), the highly classified 28-page collection of short reports given to Bush and top national security officials each morning. CIA personnel collect the material, primarily from CIA analysts but also from the Pentagon and other agencies.
"I haven't heard anyone say who will brief the president, but more important where the PDB will come from," said a former senior CIA official who was once responsible for the process. "Preparing the PDB is a draining responsibility," he said, asking for anonymity because he still works in government.
The president's responses to the morning briefing and the PDB and the questions asked by other senior administration officials who receive the same materials each morning provide the basis for future analytical work done by the CIA and, where necessary, other intelligence agencies.
If the CIA director, who sits in on the president's briefing, is no longer there, the NID will "just be another layer in the community," the former senior official said. The NID would not have the intimate knowledge of the human intelligence operations and the daily analyses that the CIA director has because the analysts work directly for him.
The legislative measures also transfer the National Intelligence Council (NIC) to the NID. But the NIC prepares longer estimates and is basically little more than a dozen highly specialized national intelligence officers. "They essentially have links to other agencies like State, Defense, Treasury, and Energy, but more than two-thirds of their studies are done by CIA," a former NIC chairman said.
Both chambers of Congress yesterday continued to work toward passing their differing measures by the end of the week.
House Republican leaders virtually dared Democrats to try to change any provision in their 335-page bill, while the Senate moved toward final passage possibly by tonight, after easily fending off an effort by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, to delay consideration of the bill.
At a news conference with no Democrats, the GOP-drafted House bill was endorsed by eight people whose relatives died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The event was a response to recent endorsements of the Senate bill -- which most House Democrats support -- by the best-known group of family members of 9/11 victims.
A bill that omits the House provisions on deportation and border control "is nothing other than some kind of show . . . maybe for the election," Colette Lafuente, whose husband, Juan, died in the World Trade Center, said at the Republican news conference.
Later in the day, House Democrats held a news conference that criticized the GOP version and included members of the Family Steering Committee, the widely known group representing victims' families.
The House plans to start debate today on the GOP-drafted bill. Democrats demanded a chance to offer the Senate bill as an alternative, but Republicans said that was unlikely.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) told reporters: "Every single provision of this [House] bill will make the American people safer. In order for anything to be added, or anything to be taken out, it must be shown to meet that standard. If the Democrats don't like a certain provision, or want to change certain language, they have to show us how does it make us safer."
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Senate Passes Intelligence Bill, but Tough Road Lies Ahead
October 6, 2004
New York Times
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/politics/06CND-PANEL.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - The Senate voted overwhelmingly this afternoon to revamp the government's intelligence bureaucracy in line with recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission. But passage by the full Congress still seems distant because of differences between the Senate and House.
The Senate measure, approved 96 to 2, would create the post of national intelligence director. The director would have sweeping budgetary and hiring-and-firing authority over the intelligence network, which now includes more than a dozen agencies.
This afternoon's vote had been expected in view of the 85-to-10 vote on Tuesday to limit further debate and end consideration of amendments. The Senate bill, written by Senators Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Joseph I. Lieberman, Democratic of Connecticut, had the enthusiastic support of the bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Senators Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, both Democrats, voted against the measure. Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina, who were campaigning, did not vote.
Ms. Collins and Mr. Lieberman, the chairwoman and ranking minority member, respectively, on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, had praised each other and their colleagues on both sides of the aisle for their cooperation in getting the bill through. "I'm just delighted with how this has gone," Ms. Collins said on Tuesday when it was clear that the measure had irresistible momentum.
But a partisan split in the House has made it likely that final passage of a bill will not come before the Nov. 2 election, and possibly not before next year.
The House bill, put together by the Republican leadership in that chamber over the opposition of Democrats, would also create a new national intelligence director - but give him or her much less power than the Sept. 11 commission has urged. The House bill would also includes several provisions not sought by the commission, including an expansion of anti-terrorism powers for law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
The House is expected to vote on its bill soon. Then, a Senate and House conference will have to work out the differences in the versions. This is a common procedure, but when the differences are deep and the issue highly charged - as in this instance - the back and forth can be long and bitter.
The Senate bill also has its critics within that chamber. Some senators who head committees that would lose power under the measure have voiced objections to it.
Some people in favor of the Senate version have accused opponents of jealously guarding their turf. But several former senators with acknowledged expertise in intelligence issues have also counseled a "go slow" approach, warning that legislation passed in haste, especially with emotional overtones, can turn out to be wrong in retrospect.
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Partisan Split in the House May Slow a Final 9/11 Bill
October 6, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/politics/06panel.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 - Even as the Senate neared approval of a bipartisan bill to enact major recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, chances of any sort of bipartisan agreement in the House faded Tuesday, with Democrats joining with members of the commission to denounce a version of the bill being championed by the House Republican leadership.
The growing partisan split in the House suggested that it might be impossible for Congress to send a final bill to President Bush before next month's elections, most likely extinguishing any hope of Congressional action until next year.
"House Republicans stand alone as the only obstacle in the way of passing a 9/11 bill that will make America safer," said Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader. Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate Democratic leader, said that while "everybody's been on their best behavior" in the Senate, provisions in the House bill could turn the intelligence debate "into a political football again" and then "all bets are off."
Both the House and Senate are on schedule to pass sweeping bills within days in response to the findings of the Sept. 11 commission - the Senate is expected to vote Wednesday - but there are major differences between the bills that would need to be resolved in a conference committee.
The House bill, which was drafted without the involvement of Democrat leaders, includes a variety of provisions not sought by the Sept. 11 commission that would expand the antiterrorism powers of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Among the most contentious is a provision that would relax restrictions on deporting foreign citizens to countries where they may face torture.
Both bills would create a national intelligence director, the central recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission. But the Senate version, which has the enthusiastic support of the commission's leaders and of victims' family groups, would grant far greater powers to the director.
At a news conference on Tuesday, the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, defended the House bill against its critics among Democratic lawmakers and members of the Sept. 11 commission. Several members of the commission have been on Capitol Hill in recent days, lobbying on behalf of the Senate bill and against the House version.
"This bill isn't going to do everything the 9/11 commission wanted," Mr. Hastert said, standing alongside a group of relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks who support the House bill. But he said that the bill still "reflects the will of the 9/11 commission" and described the House legislation as "a compromise bill that reforms our nation's intelligence gathering agencies."
House Democrats have accused the Republicans of adding objectionable law enforcement provisions to the legislation as an election-year gambit to force Democrats to vote against the overall bill, creating the appearance that they are weak on terrorism.
"You're hearing a lot of House members grumbling that some of these extraneous provisions are really poison pills, that this is election-year politics being played," said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the Sept. 11 commission and a former House member from Indiana. The rancor in the House over the bill was in sharp contrast to the scene over the past week on the Senate floor, where Republican and Democratic leaders have worked with what they describe as surprising and admirable harmony in creating a bipartisan bill to enact the commission's recommendations. In a demonstration of support for the bill, the Senate voted 85 to 10 on Tuesday to limit further debate and amendments, moving it to a final vote.
"I'm just delighted with how this debate has gone, and I can see a light at the end of the tunnel," said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, who is directing the floor debate.
-------- immigration / refugees
Mystery of the Islamic Scholar Who Was Barred by the U.S.
October 6, 2004
By DEBORAH SONTAG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/international/europe/06ramadan.html?pagewanted=all&position=
GENEVA - In a nearly barren apartment here, Najma Ramadan, 3, a curly-haired blonde wearing tiny bear-shaped earrings, climbed the walls one recent evening, from pipe to pipe. The little girl's toys sat far away, in boxes in South Bend, Ind., where her father, Tariq Ramadan, was to have taken up residence in August as the Henry Luce professor of religion, conflict and peace building at the University of Notre Dame.
Nine days before his family's scheduled departure for the United States, Mr. Ramadan, 42, a Swiss theologian of Egyptian descent who is probably Europe's best-known Muslim intellectual, received an urgent message from the American consul in Switzerland: Washington had just revoked the visa granted him after a security review last spring.
Neither Mr. Ramadan, a preacher of self-empowerment to European Muslims, nor Notre Dame was offered any explanation. They have since learned that the government received some information that caused it to "prudentially revoke" the visa pending an investigation, which has yet to occur.
But the nature of that information - is Mr. Ramadan accused of a link to terrorism, of espousing terrorism, of terrorism itself? - has not been revealed.
"It's still not clear to him or us who turned him down and on what grounds," said the Rev. Edward A. Malloy, president of Notre Dame. "We have no reason to think that he's a mole or an underground instigator. He seems to be an above ground, forthright advocate of what some refer to as moderate Islam and we see him as a really good fit for our peace institute," the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, where Mr. Ramadan was to have held a joint tenured appointment with the classics department.
For years Mr. Ramadan, a trim, telegenic man with a soft, measured voice who condemns the use of violence in the name of Islam, has been chased by allegations that his public face of moderation conceals an extremist core.
Mr. Ramadan is the grandson of Hasan al-Banna, one of the most important Islamist figures of the 20th century, and for many of his detractors that alone makes him suspect.
It also gives him a considerable platform, and in Europe, Mr. Ramadan is not just a professor but a high-profile intellectual who has produced 20 books, hundreds of articles and scores of lecture tapes that are hot sellers in Muslim immigrant communities.
In much of his work, Mr. Ramadan tries to define a blended identity for Muslims in the West, arguing that one can be both fully Muslim and fully Western. His message to European Muslims is: reject your feelings of victimization, take part more fully in your countries of residence and demand your rights.
That message has been perceived as threatening by some Europeans who fear that a growing Muslim population will lead to the dilution of national identities or the Islamization of Europe.
Further, Mr. Ramadan's pungent political views have antagonized a diverse lot, from French intellectuals to Egyptian government officials, from supporters of Israel to Saudi clerics.
"When you are trying to create bridges, you are in the middle," Mr. Ramadan said. "You are too Western for the Muslims, and too Muslim for the Westerners. Controversy is natural. But this particular controversy about whether I have a secret life as a terrorist or extremist is so old that, frankly, it's - what's the word? - boring."
Notre Dame aggressively scrutinized Mr. Ramadan's résumé and body of work before hiring him, and Father Malloy, who interviewed Mr. Ramadan, said he hoped Washington would reconsider its decision to bar him.
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, Russ Knocke, declined to offer any reason for the revocation of Mr. Ramadan's visa. Another government official, who requested anonymity because he was consulting classified information, said the revocation was based not on Mr. Ramadan's beliefs but on "his actions." The official would not elaborate.
Mr. Ramadan, expressing frustration with the vagueness of such an accusation, said, "My conscience is clean, my activities are transparent and my file is empty."
A senior European counterterrorism official who has investigated Mr. Ramadan said European intelligence services had never turned up proof of wrongdoing on his part.
The official added, however, that he thought the United States was wise to keep him out because of what he referred to as the professor's "dangerous" ideas.
Courted by U.S. Universities
Sitting in stockinged feet before the computer in his otherwise empty home office, nibbling on Swiss chocolate, Mr. Ramadan said news of the last-minute visa revocation upset and confounded him. He has traveled to America without problems more than 30 times in the last five years, he said.
These travels included a visit last fall to the State Department, where he delivered a lecture on European Muslims to diplomats and officials from the F.B.I. and C.I.A., he said. Mr. Ramadan has lectured Scotland Yard officers on European Muslim communities, too.
Mr. Ramadan said he had received offers for a tenured faculty position not only from Notre Dame but also from an Ivy League university and, at a time when American students were hungering for greater understanding of Islam, he was courted by other top-tier schools, too.
"A scholar like him, who's thoroughly Islamic but has his feet firmly planted in the modern world, is - I won't say a pearl beyond price, but certainly a pearl," said Thomas W. Simons Jr., a former ambassador to Pakistan and author of "Islam in a Globalizing World" (Stanford University Press, 2003).
Others sharply disagree.
Lee Smith, who writes about Arab culture, pronounced Mr. Ramadan a "quieter and gentler" jihadist in The American Prospect last March.
And earlier this fall, two Middle East scholars, Daniel Pipes and Fouad Ajami, portrayed the Swiss intellectual in op-ed articles as a dissembler and a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Several academic groups, however, from the American Association of University Professors to the American Academy of Religion, protested the government's action as an effort to infringe on the free exchange of ideas.
American Muslim groups questioned the government's ability or willingness to distinguish between what they see as Muslim moderates like Mr. Ramadan and extremists.
And the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs in Chicago expressed "deep concern" that the unexplained visa revocation was "one more horrific example of government suspicion, intimidation and exaggerated allegations against Muslims and Muslim communities."
Good Match Seemed Likely
After several visits to Indiana, Mr. Ramadan accepted the offer from Notre Dame because he found there people "of faith and principle who wanted to build a space of mutual trust," he said.
Notre Dame, in turn, liked the fact that Mr. Ramadan is a practicing Muslim and not a detached scholar, giving him greater authority when he talks about the Koran as a "living text" open to contemporary interpretations.
Still, several professors expressed reservations about Mr. Ramadan's hiring because of his reputation in some corners of Europe as a militant disguised as a moderate, according to the Rev. Richard McBrien, a professor of theology.
In his campus visits, however, Mr. Ramadan's dynamic teaching style made a powerful impression, said R. Scott Appleby, director of the Kroc institute.
Notre Dame was looking for a scholar who could "lead us into interreligious dialogue and intrareligious dialogue and religious-secular dialogue," Dr. Appleby said. Mr. Ramadan's approach "was rooted in a kind of spirituality and a scholarly method that was innovative and original and very fruitful.
"He has developed his own philosophy, his own synthesis of the West and Islam," Dr. Appleby continued, "drawing from Nietzsche on the one hand and Islamic philosophers on the other. He has critiques of capitalism and globalization, integrated into Islamic ideas. At the same time, he is challenging Islam to become more universalist, to embrace democracy, to help shape democracy. "
A Troublesome Grandfather
In 1928, Hasan al-Banna, Mr. Ramadan's maternal grandfather, founded the Muslim Brotherhood, a revivalist movement that advocated a return to Islam as a defense against Western colonialism and decadence. In 1949, Mr. Banna was assassinated at the age of 42. Mr. Ramadan never knew his grandfather; he studied him.
He is critical of his grandfather's sloganeering - "The Koran is our constitution" was one motto - disagrees with him about "many things about the West," and scoffs at the idea of an Islamic state.
But he says his grandfather is misremembered in several ways.
For instance, although the history of the Muslim Brotherhood is dotted with violence, and the group gave rise to more militant organizations, Mr. Banna himself was not personally violent, nor did he legitimize violence, Mr. Ramadan said. His empathy for the poor was admirable, Mr. Ramadan said, and his thinking was more nuanced than many followers and critics understand.
Mr. Ramadan has said repeatedly that he is not affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, which renounced violence in the 1970's but has been periodically banned in Egypt, as it is now. He has relatives who are members but, he said, "they are not happy with me."
Still, Mr. Ramadan's genealogy is a big part of what makes him suspect to European intelligence services, just as it is what affords him a platform from which to preach about making Islam more modern.
"People make a big issue about his lineage," said Ingrid Mattson, a professor of Islamic studies and Muslim-Christian relations at the Hartford Seminary. "But there are millions of Muslims who will listen to him precisely because of it. That's why it's crazy, keeping him out. "
In the late 1950's, Mr. Ramadan's father, Said, settled in Geneva after fleeing Egypt during a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. Said Ramadan set up an Islamic center that became a European outpost of the Brotherhood, drawing visitors like Malcolm X.
As a youth, Mr. Ramadan said, he was not particularly committed to Islam. He was athletic, playing soccer with a semiprofessional team, studious, and, it seemed, a born teacher.
In 1986, at 24, he became the very young dean of a Swiss high school. That year, he also married Iman, a fair-haired Swiss woman who converted to Islam. Mr. Ramadan had known Iman since he played sports with her brother as a child.
In the late 1980's, Mr. Ramadan, who by then had advanced degrees in philosophy and French literature, founded the Helping Hand Cooperative, taking students to developing countries to do volunteer work and meet such humanitarian luminaries as Mother Teresa.
His commitment to Islam grew slowly, he said, starting after the Iranian revolution in 1979, when the image of Islam began to be "tarnished" by association with fundamentalism. Years later, it hit him that he was transporting young Swiss to open their minds to other cultures while at the same time hiding his own identity. He decided to go public as a Muslim and to further his Islamic studies.
In 1991, Mr. Ramadan spent a year and a half in Egypt studying Islamic sciences and, on his return to Switzerland, pursued a doctorate in Islamic studies and began lecturing immigrant audiences.
When Mr. Ramadan's father died in 1995, the Swiss government warned him that the Egyptians would arrest him if he accompanied the body home for burial, Mr. Ramadan said. He believes that it is because he provoked the Egyptian ambassador to France during a television talk show by attacking Egypt's human rights record.
Late that same year, France barred Mr. Ramadan. Although rumors circulated that he was kept out because of ties to an Algerian terrorist, Mr. Ramadan said he believed that it was due to pressure from the Egyptians. He challenged the ban and it was lifted, but it lingered as a stain on his reputation, which, he said, is why he finds the American ban so troubling.
"The assumption of guilt does not get put to rest easily," he said.
The Proper Place of Muslims
In 1996, while spending a year in the Britain, Mr. Ramadan started to define in writing his ideas about Western Muslim identity.
Some Western Muslims identify themselves as a people apart, he writes in his latest book, stewing in an "unhealthy victim mentality" and an "us against them" mind-set. Instead, they should liberate themselves by developing a "rich, positive and participatory presence in the West," which would include sending their children to public schools, getting involved in community politics and taking part in interfaith dialogues.
In the last year, Mr. Ramadan became the de facto representative of the French Muslim community in confronting the government's ban on Islamic head scarves in the schools.
Recently, he appeared on a televised French debate during which he was badgered about his support for what other guests kept calling "the veil." How could he favor forcing women to cover themselves? they asked.
In a calm voice, Mr. Ramadan responded that he would neither force a woman to wear a head scarf nor force her to remove one. It was a human rights issue, he said, and yet once the ban became law and the choice for French Muslim girls was between going to school and wearing their head scarves, his advice was to attend school.
Last fall, also on television, Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French interior minister, challenged Mr. Ramadan to prove he was a moderate by telling Muslim women to "take off their veils." Mr. Ramadan refused.
Mr. Sarkozy also challenged him to call for the abolition of the stoning of adulterous women, which is mandated by a strict reading of Islamic law. Mr. Ramadan called instead for a moratorium on stoning.
"That way, you start a dialogue," he said. "I won't change any thinking in the Muslim world if I issue a blanket condemnation of stoning to please the French interior minister."
But Mr. Ramadan was attacked fiercely for refusing to take an absolutist stance. He was also, to his regret, lumped together with his older brother Hani, whom he calls a "literalist" Muslim. Hani Ramadan lost his job in Swiss education after publishing an essay justifying the stoning of adulterous women.
Mr. Ramadan himself set off a storm in France last fall when he wrote an online essay criticizing several French Jewish intellectuals for being "biased toward the concerns of their community" by defending Israel - in its construction of a barrier in the West Bank, for instance - and supporting, to varying degrees, the Iraq war.
These positions, he wrote, betrayed the intellectuals' commitment to universal values. If Muslim intellectuals, he wrote, were expected to denounce anti-Semitism and terrorism committed in the name of Islam - which he does repeatedly, he said in an interview - why didn't Jewish intellectuals bear a similar responsibility to condemn "the repressive policies of the state of Israel" and to oppose discrimination against Muslims in Europe, he asked.
Bernard-Henri Lévy, a prominent European intellectual, promptly labeled Mr. Ramadan a champion of double talk and said he had written an "anti-Semitic text." The label of anti-Semite stuck to him even though, Mr. Ramadan said, he has been decrying anti-Semitism in the Muslim world for years.
Mr. Ramadan's notoriety in France is now such that his publisher decided his next book will be called, "Should We Make Tariq Ramadan Shut Up?"
The Road to Notre Dame
After receiving an American visa last spring, Mr. Ramadan rented a spacious house near Notre Dame, shipped his family's belongings there and enrolled his four children in school.
Mrs. Ramadan lined up a position as a consultant to an interfaith dialogue at the Center for Women's Intercultural Leadership at St. Mary's College in South Bend. She was looking forward to working outside the home, and to enjoying "America's famous openness" to cultural and religious differences, she said.
Now they are in limbo.
One recent evening, at about 9 p.m., Mr. Ramadan's phone rang and he pounced on it. Finally, it was the lawyer from Notre Dame with news. The State Department, she said, had alerted the American consulate in Switzerland to schedule an appointment for Mr. Ramadan to reapply for a visa. A fair and thorough review was promised.
"I will call first thing tomorrow," he told his wife when he hung up. "There are no guarantees, and, she says, nothing is likely to be decided before Nov. 2. But at least we can take action."
Eric Lichtblau contributed reporting from Washington for this article and Don Van Natta from London.
-------- justice
Prison without trial 'justified'
BBC
6 October, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3718942.stm
Jailing suspected terrorists without trial is an "appropriate response" to the post-11 September terrorist threat, the House of Lords has heard.
Attorney General Lord Goldsmith QC, representing the Home Office, said the measures are justifed and protect the rights of suspects and UK residents.
Nine Law Lords are hearing a challenge to the government's right to detain foreign terror suspects without trial.
Nine men held without charge argue their human rights have been infringed.
Lord Goldsmith said the decision to abandon the right to a fair trial was "not a step taken lightly".
He told the House of Lords: "The government believes it was a legitimate and appropriate response to protect the human rights of the suspected international terrorists by not exporting them to death and torture, and to protect the human rights of citizens here."
He added: "We took the view that, if these people cannot be deported, they should not be allowed to roam free on the streets and so they had to be detained."
The House of Lords - which has 12 full-time Law Lords, or senior judges - is the final court of appeal in the UK.
Nine Law Lords, rather than the usual five, are sitting because of the constitutional importance of the legal challenge.
Terrorist threat
The case focuses on nine men, some of whom have been held for up to three years.
Their legal team argues it is wrong for them to be held without charge indefinitely and wrong to single out foreign nationals.
The government believes the measure is justified because of the scale of the terrorist threat after 11 September.
"These events required the government of this country to assess the threat to the UK and what measures it was necessary to take to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks of unparalleled magnitude," said Lord Goldsmith.
He argued the 11 September attacks are "a new sort of terrorism" which represent "an emergency threatening the life of the nation".
Legal challenge
The Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act allows the imprisonment without trial of foreign nationals certified by the home secretary as a threat to national security, but who cannot be sent home because they might face death or torture.
The government opted out of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the right to liberty and security of person, in order to introduce the new anti-terrorism laws.
A legal challenge was mounted but in August, three Court of Appeal judges decided by a two-to-one majority that the government was legally entitled to hold the men.
The nine suspects are challenging that decision.
Eight of the appellants are currently in custody. The ninth, an Algerian man known as "D", was released in September.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Most at Guantanamo to Be Freed or Sent Home, Officer Says
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9626-2004Oct5.html
Most of the alleged al Qaeda and Taliban inmates at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are likely to be freed or sent to their home countries for further investigation because many pose little threat and are not providing much valuable intelligence, the facility's deputy commander has said.
The remarks by Army Brig. Gen. Martin Lucenti in yesterday's edition of London's Financial Times appeared to conflict with past comments by U.S. military commanders who have stressed the value of the information obtained from the detainees and the danger many would pose if released.
"Of the 550 [detainees] that we have, I would say most of them, the majority of them, will either be released or transferred to their own countries," Lucenti was quoted as saying in the British newspaper. "Most of these guys weren't fighting. They were running. Even if somebody has been found to be an enemy combatant, many of them will be released because they will be of low intelligence value and low threat status.
"We don't have a level of evidence to feel that we can be confident to prosecute them" all, he added, according to the newspaper. "We have guys here who have never told us anything, except to say that they want to cut off the heads of the infidels if they get a chance."
Asked for comment about the remarks, military officials referred inquiries to the joint task force that runs the Guantanamo Bay prison. Army Maj. Hank McIntire, a spokesman, said yesterday that officials there would have no immediate comment while they work on a statement about the matter.
Lucenti's superior, Army Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, disagreed with Lucenti's assessment, telling the Financial Times that some detainees "are of tremendous intelligence value" and still reveal significant information. McIntire confirmed Hood's remarks yesterday.
Hood's predecessor, Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, has said frequently that most of the Guantanamo Bay detainees were providing useful intelligence.
"We're learning about the inter-connection of terrorism on a global scale," Miller told The Washington Post earlier this year. "Golden threads, I call them . . . I have found no innocent people in Camp Delta."
The U.S. military has stepped up the pace of releases from Guantanamo Bay in the last several months, particularly after a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June that said the government does not have the authority to deprive alleged members of al Qaeda or the Taliban of their freedom without giving them access to federal courts.
As of Sept. 22, the prison had released 146 detainees to freedom, and in 56 cases transferred them to the custody of their home governments, the Pentagon said. Some in the latter category were later freed.
Of the 202 men who have left Guantanamo Bay, only one was repatriated because a special board of U.S. military officers at the prison ruled that he was not an "enemy combatant." He was returned to Pakistan on Sept. 18.
After the Supreme Court decision, the military began to hold special reviews called Combatant Status Review Tribunals to determine whether the detainees ever were actually enemy combatants; 115 such cases have been heard so far.
Four other men have been brought before special military commissions for trial.
Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
-------- POLITICS
-------- corruption
Ethics Panel Rebukes DeLay Twice in a Week
October 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-DeLay-Ethics.html?hp
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House ethics committee Wednesday criticized House Majority Leader Tom DeLay for conduct that appeared to link political donations to legislation and for improperly contacting U.S. aviation authorities for political purposes, House sources said Wednesday.
The committee's findings were an extraordinary second rebuke of the Texas Republican's ethical conduct in just six days.
The committee of five Democrats and five Republicans deferred to Texas authorities allegations that DeLay violated state campaign finance rules.
The committee's findings -- a letter admonishing his conduct -- nonetheless spared him a lengthy investigation by the ethics panel.
Last Thursday the same committee, in an investigative report, admonished DeLay for offering to support the House candidacy of a Michigan lawmaker's son, in return for the lawmaker's vote for a Medicare prescription drug benefit.
The committee acted on a three-part complaint from Rep. Chris Bell, D-Texas. The allegations accused DeLay of soliciting political contributions from Westar Energy, a Kansas company, in return for legislative favors; violating Texas laws prohibiting corporate political donations; and improperly contacting aviation authorities to track down a plane carrying Texas Democratic legislators who were trying to defeat a DeLay-engineered congressional redistricting plan.
The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the report had not yet been released.
Westar executives made a $25,000 donation to an organization affiliated with DeLay just before attending a two-day get-together at a Virginia resort with the House GOP leader.
Described by a DeLay spokesman as ``a golf fund-raising event,'' several executives from the Topeka-based company went to the 15,000-acre Homestead resort in early June 2002 for what participants said was an energy issues roundtable.
-------- propaganda wars
For the Record
Misleading Assertions Cover Iraq War and Voting Records
By Glenn Kessler and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10244-2004Oct5.html
Sen. John Edwards and Vice President Cheney clashed repeatedly in their debate last night, making impressive-sounding but misleading statements on issues including the war in Iraq, tax cuts and each other's records, often omitting key facts along the way.
Early in the debate, Cheney snapped at Edwards, "The senator has got his facts wrong. I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11." But in numerous interviews, Cheney has skated close to the line in ways that may have certainly left that impression on viewers, usually when he cited the possibility that Mohamed Atta, one of the hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001, met with an Iraqi official -- even after that theory was largely discredited.
On Dec. 9, 2001, Cheney said on NBC's "Meet The Press" that "it's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack." On March 24, 2002, Cheney again told NBC, "We discovered . . . the allegation that one of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague."
On Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney, again on "Meet the Press," said that Atta "did apparently travel to Prague. . . . We have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center." And a year ago, also on "Meet the Press," Cheney described Iraq as part of "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
In the debate, Cheney referred to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as having "an established relationship with al Qaeda" and said then-CIA Director George J. Tenet talked about "a 10-year relationship" in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. What Tenet cited were several "high-level contacts" over a 10-year period, but he also said the agency reported they never led to any cooperative activity.
Edwards, for his part, asserted that the war in Iraq has cost $200 billion "and counting," an assertion that Cheney called him on. Cheney said the government has "allocated" $120 billion. As of Sept. 30, the government has spent about $120 billion, and it has allocated -- or plans to spend -- $174 billion. The tab should run as high as $200 billion in the next year once other expected supplemental spending is added.
Cheney suggested that an agreement had been reached on debt relief for Iraq, saying that "the allies have stepped forward and agreed to reduce and forgive Iraqi debt to the tune of nearly $80 billion, by one estimate." While there are reports of some sort of agreement, no plan has been made public. Cheney also said that allies had contributed $14 billion in "direct aid." Actually, $13 billion was pledged, but only $1 billion has arrived.
Cheney also said Iraqi security forces have "taken almost 50 percent of the casualties in operations in Iraq, which leaves the U.S. with 50 percent, not 90 percent." The United States does not keep track of Iraqi casualties, either civilian or in the security services. Recently, a senior U.S. official in Baghdad estimated that 750 Iraqi policemen have been killed but has no estimate of those wounded. The United States as of yesterday has had 1,061 deaths and 7,730 wounded.
Cheney and Edwards tangled repeatedly over each other's voting records, or the record of presidential challenger John F. Kerry. But many of these votes took place long ago and appear to have little relevance to current issues. Edwards cited a long list of conservative votes by Cheney, made decades ago when he was a House member from Wyoming.
Cheney said Kerry once vowed to allow a veto by the United Nations over U.S. troops. This refers to a statement made nearly 35 years ago, when Kerry gave an interview to the Harvard Crimson, 10 months after he had returned from the Vietnam War angry and disillusioned by his experiences there.
Cheney said Kerry's tax-cut rollback would hit 900,000 small businesses. This is misleading. Under Cheney's definition, a small business is any taxpayer who includes some income from a small business investment, partnership, limited liability corporation or trust. By that definition, every partner at a huge accounting firm or at the largest law firm would represent small businesses. According to IRS data, a tiny fraction of small business "S-corporations" earn enough profits to be in the top two tax brackets. Most are in the bottom two brackets.
Edwards asserted that "millionaires sitting by their swimming pool . . . pay a lower tax rate than the men and women who are receiving paychecks for serving" in Iraq. President Bush last year cut the tax rate on dividends to 15 percent, whereas most soldiers would be in a 15 percent tax bracket -- and pay an effective rate much less after taking deductions for children and mortgages.
Edwards also asserted that "the president is proposing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage that is completely unnecessary." But Bush simply endorsed such an amendment that had already been introduced on Capitol Hill.
Cheney continued to charge that Kerry voted 98 times to raise taxes. But FactCheck.org -- a nonpartisan group Cheney cited during the debate as a fair data checker -- says nearly half were not for tax increases per se and many others were on procedural motions.
Both candidates promised to cut the deficit in half in four years. Independent budget experts say neither the Republican nor the Democratic ticket can make good on that promise unless it scales back funding promises made during the campaign. The Kerry health care plan, for instance, could cost as much as $1 trillion, experts say, which would eat up most if not all of the revenue generated by raising taxes on those making more than $200,000 a year. Edwards said the Democratic ticket is willing to scale back programs to make the numbers work.
Bush is digging an even deeper hole, experts say, because he has promised to partially privatize Social Security, which carries a transition cost likely to be much bigger than that of Kerry's health care plan.
Edwards asserted that "in the last four years, 1.6 million private-sector jobs have been lost." The actual number is close to 900,000 and will likely shrink further when Friday's jobs reports is released, though Bush is the first president in 72 years to preside over an overall job loss.
Edwards also misleadingly charged that the Bush administration is "for outsourcing of jobs." The Bush-Cheney ticket has not advocated sending jobs overseas, though administration officials have talked about how outsourcing can be good for the U.S. economy, a position many private economists echo.
Cheney charged that Kerry and Edwards oppose the No Child Left Behind education law, which imposes new accountability standards on public schools. Both senators voted for the law and support some modifications and billions of dollars to fully fund the education program.
Edwards claimed that part of Halliburton Corp.'s money in Iraqi contracts should have been withheld because the company is under investigation. Some funds were withheld but then paid out after an Army audit studied the matter.
Staff writers Mike Allen, Jonathan Weisman and Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
------
The Web: Iraqi blogs building free speech
By Gene Koprowski
October 06, 2004
United Press International
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20041005-050048-8337r.htm
Chicago, IL, Oct. 6 (UPI) -- Iraqi citizens in al-'Amil district west of Baghdad lit candles after sunset last evening, said prayers and, for the second consecutive night, quietly protested against terrorism in Iraq, an online dispatch bravely reported Oct. 5.
An English-language report from a courageous American journalist in the field, where children were killed earlier by terrorist thugs at a celebration for the opening of a water plant? No. It is commentary and news reported by a trio of Iraqi brothers -- a doctor and two dentists living in Basra, Baghdad and Samawa City, in southwestern Iraq -- on their famed blog, Iraqthemodel.blogspot.com.
That Web log and reportedly 60 others are bringing to light events and public opinion in Iraq that are not commonly being aired in the conventional media in the United States and elsewhere.
While American bloggers have challenged the veracity of major media reports, their Iraqi counterparts are creating a true, free press, online, in their homeland, for the first time in that country's modern history, using Internet technology. The blogs are getting 3,000 to 6,000 visits per day -- up to 200,000 visitors per month -- their producers told United Press International.
"This media technology is being used as outreach to tell the world their story," said David Abel, editor and general manager of PoliticsOnline, and publisher of NetPulse and PoliTicker reports, which tracks online political campaigns.
The Iraqi efforts appear to be self-funded, as sites like Iraqthemodel are selling "T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers and more" online, according to an ad on the site.
A number of Iraqi blogs are making a name for themselves -- The Messopotamian.blogspot.com, HealingIraq.blogspot.com and Hammorabi.blogspot.com, along with Iraqthemodel. They are published by professionals, who identify themselves only by their first names on the sites, for fear of reprisals by terrorists or Baathist remnants.
"They are educated and they speak and write in English -- the language of the Internet," Abel told UPI.
One blogger, who goes by the pen name of Ali, told UPI he launched Iraqthemodel on Nov. 14, 2003, along with his brothers.
"Our main motive was that we saw that media coverage of the Iraqi issue was biased and sometimes full of lies," said Ali, a 34-year-old medical resident in pediatrics, who is married and a 1995 graduate of Baghdad University. "We wanted to reach as many people as possible and try to correct their information, as this is a media war too, not just a gun battle," he told UPI.
Ali said the number of readers of his site is steadily rising and has held the 200,000 monthly average since last June. The scope of the blog has changed somewhat during its first year in existence.
"We started by posting our thoughts and comments on the news, but a good amount of our writing is reporting about events on the ground and personal experiences," Ali said.
Though many in the U.S. media are skeptical that elections can be held next January in some parts of Iraq, as planned by the Bush administration, Ali reported Oct. 2 that "many citizens in Fallujah stated that they would be willing to participate in the upcoming elections."
Another blogger, Zeyad, founder of HealingIraq.blogspot.com, told UPI he launched his project Oct. 18, 2003, "because there were very few Iraqi blogs back then -- now there are more than 60."
He said freedom of thought was not something he was used to under Saddam Hussein.
"It was a strange experience to be able to express one's views without the fear of censorship or retribution," Zeyad said.
He said, like Iraqthemodel, his site receives from 3,000 to 6,000 hits per day and he frequently reports news that no one else -- particularly in the West -- reports about Iraq.
"I did reporting, for instance, on the large demonstrations against terrorism last December, which went unreported by the international and local media," Zeyad said.
He also provides insightful analysis not found in the international media -- given from the perspective of someone on the ground in Iraq.
"I have to shed light on something that has been bothering me for quite some time," Zeyad wrote in a blog comment, posted Sept. 16. "Events over the last six months or so seem to indicate a developing pattern of violence in Iraq. Simply put, when there is a surge of violence in the south, it completely ceases in other areas of Iraq, and vice versa. In other words, whenever Sadr takes a rest, Zarqawi comes into action again."
HealingIraq also has published photos that have not appeared elsewhere, he said. Nevertheless, the bloggers seem to have a sense of accomplishment that their writing and reporting are being heard in the United States.
"It is good to make a wave which can be visible from far away," Sam, a blogger who runs Hammorabi, told UPI.
A report on his site Oct. 4 indicated that Dutch troops, who are participating in the coalition -- led by the United States and the United Kingdom in Iraq -- "have received many threats to kill them, up to the top level. ... Some of these threats came as telephone calls to their private phones or as messages inside their mobile phones or to their e-mails."
The site reported that these threats were coming not only from Iraq, but from Germany and the Netherlands, too, from sources who are promising to kill the relatives of Dutch troops.
"The nature of the recent attacks in Iraq point to the same thing about the existence of strong intelligence and spies for the terrorists" inside the Iraqi government, and perhaps the coalition forces, per the report on Hammorabi.
One of the technology tools that has made blogging so popular is called Really Simple Syndication, or RSS. The technology is based on Extensible Markup Language, or XML, originally developed for e-commerce applications. RSS is used to describe data about Web sites -- titles, links and a description of the contents. That is what enables Yahoo.com, the search directory, to provide links to the blogs easily.
In addition to providing accurate news about the situation on the ground in Iraq, the blogs also provide a way for Americans to e-mail the Iraqis and talk about the war.
"Remember when you were in grade school and had your first pen pal?" asked Ross Mayfield, chief executive officer of Socialtext Inc., a developer of enterprise social software in Silicon Valley. "It probably showed you that you can communicate, the world is bigger than your neighborhood, and that there were real people, like you, living in different worlds," he told UPI. "International blogs are like that -- they foster a deeper understanding between people than the media alone. Content can turn into conversation and even relationships."
----
Statement by Ralph Nader before the Skull and Bones Headquarters
October 6, 2004
High Street, New Haven, CT
http://www.votenader.org/media_press/index.php?cid=244
New Haven, CT: George W. Bush and John Kerry have been members of the Yale secret society - Skull and Bones - since the late 60s. Hundreds of Bonesmen are in powerful positions at the top echelons of government and business. They are sworn to secrecy throughout their lives, bound together for life, says Yale's William Sloane Coffin. Skull and Bones alumni have a common drive to get their members into "positions of power" and to have those members hire other members into similar positions of power, says Alexandra Robbins, author of the book, Secrets of the Tomb, and herself a member of another secret society at Yale.
Initiation rituals involve morbid admission of personal sexual experiences and coerced displays of sophomoric masochism and mystical mumbo jumbo, hooded robes and members carrying skulls and bombs according to a remote video of one recent ceremony.
All this might appear like a more extreme version of fraternity capers, but Skull and Bones is far more rigorous, enduring and embracing. Bones' patriarchs converge on Deer Island, a forty acre "resort" on the St. Lawrence River. This secret society has revealed no limitations on its code of silence.
When asked about their membership in Skull and Bones, George W. Bush only said "it's so secret I can't talk about it." Kerry was asked what it meant that both he and Bush are Bonesmen, he responded, "Not much because it's a secret."
When it comes to election campaigns and elected offices, principles of openness are supposed to operate in a democratic society. A secret society of powerful personages running for office or holding office raises several important questions:
1. How inclusive is this oath of secrecy?
2. Does this oath extend to member's political and business careers?
3. What are the sanctions for breeching the secrecy? Do they extend to members political and business responsibilities?
4. Are Bonesmen expected to preferentially advance or select people for responsible positions who are Skull and Bones Patriarchs rather than base their choices on the merits of the various applicants for positions?
5. What general subject matters and roles of Bonesmen are outside the oath of secrecy or code of silence?
6. How do Bonesmen rank the oath to Skull and Bones when they have to take oaths to public office?
7. When oaths conflict, which takes precedence? Which takes their allegiance?
These are questions that cannot be cavalierly dismissed by Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry; if they cannot or will not answer them they should resign their membership in Skull and Bones publicly and immediately.
-------- us politics
Indian Health Agency Barred New-Voter Drive
Democrats Question Motive of Decision to Ban Registration on Federal Property
By Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9946-2004Oct5.html
Officials at a federal program that runs hospitals and clinics serving Native Americans this summer prohibited employees from using those facilities to sign up new voters, saying that even nonpartisan voter registration was prohibited on federal property.
Staff members at several Indian Health Service hospitals and clinics in New Mexico, a presidential battleground state where about one-tenth of the population is Native American, were trying to register employees, patients and family members who use the facilities.
In a July e-mail, Ronald C. Wood, executive officer of the program's regional Navajo office, told his hospital and clinic directors that "we are in a very sensitive political season" and outlined a policy that he said came from Indian Health Service headquarters.
"There have been recent questions about whether we can do nonpartisan voter registration drives in our IHS facilities during non-duty hours," Wood wrote. "The guidance from HQs staff is that we should not allow voter registration in our facilities or on federal property."
Several of those involved in the registration effort questioned what they saw as a double standard, given that the federal government encourages registration on military bases, where voters traditionally have favored Republicans.
Democrats and civil rights groups yesterday said they had been unaware of the directive and were concerned that the motive was partisan. Native Americans have become an important constituency for Democrats.
"Why should it be permissible to conduct voter registration on one type of federal facility -- military bases -- but not on another?" asked Elliott Mincberg, legal director at the People for the American Way Foundation.
The Indian Health Service, a program under the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement yesterday that outside groups are not prohibited to register voters at IHS facilities. As to Wood's instruction to the program's employees, the statement said: "No IHS employee will be registering voters as part of his or her official duties."
Wood did not return phone calls, but in his e-mail he referred employees' questions to Jeanelle Raybon, director of the IHS office on integrity and ethics. Raybon declined to clarify the agency's statement or answer questions about whether Wood's instructions reflected IHS policy.
She would say only that employees are expected to follow the Hatch Act. That law restricts partisan activity by federal workers but does not speak to nonpartisan registration drives. A 1992 memo by the General Services Administration, which controls federal buildings, authorizes voter registration on federal property.
Defense Department spokesman Glenn Flood said that service members must comply with the Hatch Act but that the military encourages them to take part in registering others "on or off-base," so long as the activity is nonpartisan and does not interfere with official duties.
Joseph E. Sandler, general counsel for the Democratic National Committee, said that the Hatch Act does not apply in this case and that he plans to investigate the matter.
Also yesterday, the DNC outlined an aggressive legal strategy it says is needed to protect minority voters from intimidation at the polls.
It unveiled an ad to air on African American radio stations implying that President Bush cares only about getting white voters to the polls. Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele, the first black Republican elected statewide in Maryland, rebutted that charge. Both the GOP and the administration want to get out the vote, he said, "black or white."
Several Bush administration agencies have been criticized after taking steps to block or question other registration efforts.
The Homeland Security Department sought to block a nonpartisan group from registering new citizens outside a Miami naturalization ceremony in August.
The Justice Department has launched inquiries into new registrations submitted by Democratic-leaning groups in several key states. Democrats say the probes are politically motivated.
--------
After Debate, Iraq and Weapons Fuel the Campaign Dialogue
October 6, 2004
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and MARIA NEWMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/politics/campaign/06CND-CAMP.html?hp
A day after a contentious vice presidential debate, Iraq continued to dominate the campaign appearances for both parties, as well as the headlines, as the candidates went out on the hustings with 27 days left before the election.
In the morning, President Bush told an audience in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., that his opponent, John Kerry, "has a strategy of retreat, and I have a strategy of victory" when it comes to Iraq.
In Tallahasse, Vice President Dick Cheney told a town-hall style meeting that for the last 30 years, Mr. Kerry was "on the wrong side of virtually every issue that dealt with national security."
And John Edwards, Mr. Kerry's running mate, also in Florida, told a crowd in West Palm Beach that the Bush administration was "in a complete state of denial" over the course of the Iraq war and the economy.
With Mr. Kerry in Englewood, Colo., to prepare for his second debate with Mr. Bush on Friday in St. Louis, it fell to Mr. Edwards to carry the campaign's message in the continuing dialogue over the administration's effort to bring peace to Iraq.
The day began with Mr. Bush delivering an hour-long address that was billed as a major policy speech on terror and the economy. But with few new policy points to make, Mr. Bush instead used the occasion to try to blunt the impact of a report by weapons inspectors in Iraq that was released later in the day; the report said Iraq did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons at the time of the American invasion in the spring of 2003, undercutting some of the administration's rationale for going to war in Iraq.
"After Sept. 11, America had to assess every potential threat in a new light," Mr. Bush told an invited audience. "Our nation awakened to an even greater danger: the prospect that terrorists who killed thousands with hijacked airplanes would kill many more with weapons of mass murder."
"We had to take a hard look at every place where terrorists might get those weapons, and one regime stood out," Mr. Bush said. "The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein."
Mr. Bush also took the opportunity to fault criticism by Mr. Kerry that the campaign in Iraq is "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"You can't win a war you don't believe in fighting," Mr. Bush said in a so-called battleground state that he has now visited 38 times. "There was a risk - a real risk - that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks."
At his rally, Mr. Edwards responded to the president's remarks by saying it was "the same old tired rhetoric" that offered "no new plans," particularly on speeding the end of the occupation in Iraq.
"They can't fix the mess if they don't recognize there is a mess," Mr. Edwards said told the crowd.
Afterward, he gave a brief news conference to re-emphasize the points he made in the rally.
"I sat a few feet from Vice President Cheney and he continues to be unwilling to level with the American people," said Mr. Edwards. He was alluding to an array of topics, including the war, the lack of a direct connection between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 attacks and the growing nuclear threat posed by North Korea and Iran.
"So the American people are seeing there is a real difference between George Bush and Dick Cheney and John Kerry and John Edwards," Mr. Edwards said. "We are going to be straight with people, we are going to tell the American people the truth."
Mr. Edwards found fault with Mr. Cheney on matters large and small.
During their encounter Tuesday night, Mr. Cheney said he had never met Mr. Edwards, a Senator from North Carolina, until the two shook hands on stage in Cleveland.
But Mr. Edwards said the two had met at least twice before, at a National Prayer Breakfast in 2001 and at the swearing in of Senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina in 2003.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney said he still does not recall the encounters, but Mr. Edwards said Mr. Cheney's statement was typical of the administration's "struggles with the truth." He said Mr. Cheney would remember their debate.
"I tell you one thing, this is something he surely will not forget," Mr. Edwards said .
At his rally in Tallahassee, Mr. Cheney's wife, Lynn, listed for the crowd her favorite moments in the debate, and repeated her husband's charge that Mr. Edwards was often a no-show in the senate.
"It's a really good thing to go to prayer breakfasts," Mrs. Cheney asked, according to The Associated Press. "But don't you think the senator ought to go to the Senate once in a while?"
Randal C. Archibald reported from Florida for this article, and Maria Newman reported from New York.
David Stout reported from Washington, and Maria Newman contributed reporting from New York.
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Senate Examining (Again) Constitutional Ban on Foreign-Born Presidents
October 6, 2004
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/politics/06presidency.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 - Is America ready for President Schwarzenegger?
It was not so long ago that even the concept of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a governor seemed improbable. A recall effort took care of that, and now Congress is examining in earnest how Mr. Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor of California, who was born in Austria, or any other naturalized American could rise to the highest office in the land.
More than a year after lawmakers in the House and Senate proposed a constitutional amendment to allow citizens born elsewhere to be president, the Senate Judiciary Committee gave the issue new momentum on Tuesday with a hearing that let proponents argue why the constitutional restriction should be eliminated.
"It is time for us, the elected representatives of this nation of immigrants, to begin the process that can result in removing this artificial, outdated, unnecessary and unfair barrier," Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the committee chairman, said of Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution, which sets forth the eligibility requirements for president.
Mr. Hatch, a Utah Republican, presided over a lively but mostly one-sided discussion that included testimony from five lawmakers who have sponsored measures proposing a constitutional amendment and two academics who favor the concept.
A sixth lawmaker, Senator Don Nickles, Republican of Oklahoma, said he preferred expanding presidential eligibility through legislation. That idea appealed to another witness, Matthew Spalding of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative organization, who said any change should not take effect "for 10 years or so, when the current candidates are not on the scene."
By design, constitutional amendments face enormous hurdles, needing approval by two-thirds vote in the House and Senate and three-quarters of the states. Just 27 have passed since 1787, and 12 previous efforts since 1868 to remove the restriction on foreign-born presidents have failed.
Much of the discussion at the hearing sought to figure out the motives of the founding fathers to limit the presidency to people who were citizens at the time of the adoption of the Constitution and then to native-born people.
Alexander Hamilton's name came up more often than Mr. Schwarzenegger's, but unlike Hamilton, who was born on Nevis in the British West Indies, Mr. Schwarzenegger had a backer in the audience, a woman who gave out buttons, T-shirts and bumper stickers that said "Amend for Arnold."
Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm of Michigan, a Democrat, whose family moved to California from Canada in 1963, when she was 4, had no such material support at the hearing. But Ms. Granholm and Mr. Schwarzenegger, who emigrated in 1968 as a 21-year-old bodybuilder, agree that people like them should be afforded the same constitutional rights as native Americans.
"You can't choose where you are born, but you can choose where you live and where you swear your allegiance," Ms. Granholm said through a press aide. "If the concern is about loyalty to America, which it is, then a requirement that a naturalized citizen has lived in this country for 25 or more years should alleviate that concern."
Ms. Granholm said, "This is not about me; I have no interest, not a whit, in running from president."
That is not necessarily true of Mr. Schwarzenegger. Last February on "Meet the Press" on NBC, he said a constitutional amendment clearing the way for naturalized citizens to be president would be "really good."
"I think that, you know, times have changed," he said. "I think this is now a much more global economy. I think there's so many people here in this country that are now from overseas, that are immigrants, that are doing such a terrific job with the work, bringing businesses here and all this, that there's no reason why not."
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Volcano Is Becoming More Active
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8395-2004Oct5.html
SEATTLE, Oct. 5 -- As if on cue, Mount St. Helens on Tuesday morning spat up another towering cloud of steam and ash, just as it had the previous morning during a government news briefing about the volcano.
As the volcano spewed and a U.S. Geological Survey scientist spoke -- both of them live on split-screen television for the second day running -- it became clear that the Pacific Northwest was in for an anxious season of intermittent small eruptions, ash alerts and a wait of unpredictable length for something more spectacular.
"People need to get used to the concept" of the mountain erupting, Jacob B. Lowenstern, vulcanologist for the USGS, said at the briefing. "Mount St. Helens has started into a period of activity, and that period may last weeks; it may last months."
He said that there probably will be a significantly larger eruption than has occurred since Mount St. Helens woke up 11 days ago, after nearly six years of quiescence. Since last Friday, there have been several steam and ash eruptions, the largest of which occurred Tuesday.
Scientists continue to assure the public that it is highly unlikely that the mountain, the most active volcano on the West Coast, could again explode with the cataclysmic force that in 1980 killed 57 people and sprayed ash across much of the United States. Such an explosion is all but impossible, since much of the mountain has been blown away.
Instead, Lowenstern spoke Tuesday of lesser consequences: a narrow column of rising magma, or molten rock, that seems to be moving toward the volcano's dome and is creating steam when it encounters water, snow and ice.
Pressure from the rising magma has deformed about 20 percent of the volcano's dome, he said, adding that "it is very possible that things are breaking up" in the 1,000-foot-deep dome. That dome was formed by about six years' worth of relatively small eruptions of magma that occurred inside the mountain's mile-wide crater after the 1980 explosion.
"We may be in for a period of dome-building," Lowenstern said, explaining that at some point, the rising magma may extrude through the existing dome, cool and turn to rock.
That would take time.
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Volcano Appears to Rest After Letting Off Steam
October 6, 2004
By KENNETH CHANG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/national/06volcano.html
For the fifth straight day, Mount St. Helens let out a burst of steam and ash yesterday, similar to the earlier bursts that have risen out of the crater and perhaps larger.
But with that exhalation, the volcano dozed off, and the earthquakes that have shaken the area in Washington State almost continually for two weeks stopped almost entirely.
"The seismicity dropped off quite dramatically," said Dr. Steve Malone, the director of the seismology lab at the University of Washington.
The earthquakes began Sept. 23, when Mount St. Helens began to revive, and gradually increased in intensity and pace, culminating in an eruption of steam and ash on Friday, the first eruption since 1986.
The earthquakes tailed off briefly but returned in an hour or two and became stronger. On Saturday, at the peak of seismic unrest, three to four quakes a minute shook St. Helens, with the larger ones, between magnitude 2 and magnitude 3, occurring every couple of minutes.
After yesterday's steam burst, the larger earthquakes ceased completely, and the pace of the smaller ones, almost all below magnitude 1, slowed to one or two per minute.
"That is an indication perhaps that it's running out of energy,'' William Steele, another seismologist at the University of Washington, said. "Maybe it's accomplished what it's going to do."
So far, Mount St. Helens has done relatively little compared with the months leading up to its cataclysmic 1980 eruption. Then, a large bulge formed on the volcano's northern flank, rising five feet a day. By May 18, 1980, the bulge had been pushed upward and outward by more than 450 feet when a magnitude-5.1 earthquake hit, and the bulge collapsed in a landslide. That, in effect, took the lid off the magma underground, and later that day, Mount St. Helens explosively erupted, killing 57 people.
This time, global positioning system sensors detect no movement on the volcano's outer flanks. The only deformation is within St. Helens' mile-wide crater, on the southern side of a lava dome that built up during smaller eruptions from 1980 to 1986. Over the last two weeks, that part of the dome has cracked as it has been lifted about 100 feet.
Infrared images have detected spots on the dome 35 to 70 degrees warmer than the surrounding rock, said Dr. Jacob B. Lowenstern of the United States Geological Survey. The steam eruptions have emanated from beneath a horseshoe-shaped glacier that wraps around the lava dome. The steam has melted a pond about 100 feet wide, the waters roiling with bubbles of hot volcanic gases rising from the magma.
Dr. Lowenstern said he doubted that the lull in earthquakes signaled the end of the current episode.
"The magma is still coming up," he said. "I think we expect more of the kinds of explosions that we've seen over the last few days, and it wouldn't be surprising to see more evidence of magma reaching the surface."
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Wildlife Protection Standards Waived
Move May Allow More Logging In U.S. Forests
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9948-2004Oct5.html
The Bush administration has set aside Reagan-era rules aimed at protecting wildlife in national forests, rules that environmentalists had used to block logging projects in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere.
Under a temporary regulation published last week, U.S. Forest Service managers reviewing road-building, logging or other proposals are allowed to waive the 22-year-old requirement that the forests maintain "viable populations" of fish and wildlife. Instead of having to conduct population counts of representative species, for example, officials now can rely on "best available science," a less specific standard, to guide their decisions.
The change, which is not subject to public comment, is the latest move in an ongoing battle over how to protect vulnerable species in national forests. The forests cover 191 million acres, or roughly 8 percent of the national landscape, and are home to one-quarter of the U.S. species at risk of extinction.
In the last year of the Clinton administration, officials issued stricter regulations requiring forest managers to maintain conditions that provide a "high likelihood" of maintaining the viability of native and desired plants and animals. The Bush administration suspended the Clinton rules in May 2001, and the Forest Service has been drafting a replacement regulation since then. In the meantime, forest managers have been relying on the 1982 standards.
The regulation issued last week declared that "the 1982 rule is not in effect" but gave managers the option of applying the older standard voluntarily when revising forest-management plans.
Forest Service spokesman Dan Jiron initially said in an interview that there was "zero difference" between the new rules and what the administration had put in place in 2001, but he later said evaluations of specific projects will now be conducted differently.
Environmentalists and some academics blasted the switch, saying it would undermine protections for animals including moose and the Appalachian brook trout.
"For the first time since 1982, the government is saying we no longer have any legal obligation to maintain wildlife populations on national forests," said Mike Leahy, natural resources counsel for Defenders of Wildlife.
Timber industry officials, however, said they do not believe the move would ease restrictions on logging. Christopher West, who represents makers of forest products in 12 western states as vice president of the American Forest Resource Council, said that the new distinction "to us is meaningless" and that "people are crying wolf for election-year politics."
Jiron also dismissed the criticism as unfounded, saying the administration will use other scientific methods to assess how animals are faring. He said managers will focus on gauging habitat conditions "to ensure you have a dense habitat for wildlife."
Environmental groups have repeatedly charged that the administration was not conducting adequate population counts of "indicator species," which give a sense of how other plants and animals are doing in the forest. In June, for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver ruled that federal officials did not do a sufficient population count of several Utah forest species; the new rule may bolster the administration's case that such surveys are not critical.
The rule issued last week noted that courts have required population counts for years but asserted that "other tools often can be useful and more appropriate in predicting the effects of implementing a land management plan, such as examining the effect of proposed activities on the habitat of specific species."
But Leahy at Defenders of Wildlife questioned this approach, noting that in Wyoming's Teton Mountains the Forest Service has accelerated the issuance of permits allowing helicopters to fly skiers to mountaintops. He said the flights may not harm habitat but they disturb wolverines in the area.
The rules issued last week went into effect immediately without a public comment period, Jiron said, because "it's an interpretation of an existing rule."
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Nerve Damage Seen from Industrial Solvent
REUTERS CANADA:
October 7, 2004
Story by Megan Rauscher
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/27556/story.htm
TORONTO - Chronic exposure to high concentrations of 1-bromopropane (1-BP) vapor is highly toxic to nerves, according to data presented here during the annual meeting of the American Neurological Association.
1-BP is an industrial solvent widely used in the US and Japan and introduced to replace ozone-depleting chemicals. Dr. Jennifer J. Majersik of the University of Utah described six individuals who worked in a factory gluing foam cushions together who were exposed to 1-BP vapors from spray adhesives over several months.
All six developed severe symptoms of nerve damage, including leg or foot pain and muscle weakness and spasms.
Five had difficulty walking and two of the most severely affected individuals regained only minimal function 15 months after exposure and still require assistance walking. Three others continue to complain of chronic nerve pain.
Air samples taken at the factory one day after use of the solvent was halted showed 1-BP air concentration of 130 parts per million (ppm), well above the safety level of 25 ppm currently set by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Poor ventilation in the factory led to the high 1-BP levels. "It was winter, the heater in the factory was broken so the employees turned off the fan because it was cold," Majersik explained.
"1-BP is highly volatile so it is easily breathed in and it is probably also absorbed in the skin so it requires a lot of ventilation," she said.
There have been a few "red flags" regarding the neurotoxic effects of 1-BP, Majersik said.
Just recently, several factory workers in North Carolina who were also using 1-BP-containing glue to assemble foam cushions reported neurological symptoms after exposure. Factory workers in China have reported numbness in their toes and mental deficits following 1-BP exposure.
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U.S. Backs Off Mont. Gas Drilling
Conservation Groups, Others Fought Plans for Rocky Mountain Front
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9497-2004Oct5.html
SEATTLE, Oct. 5 -- Reacting to months of grumbling from hunting, fishing and conservation groups, the Bush administration announced Tuesday that it is backing away from plans for gas drilling in Montana's Rocky Mountain Front, the only place in the West where grizzlies and bighorn sheep still come out of the mountains to wander on the Great Plains.
"We decided it would be inappropriate given the values that exist in the area," Rebecca W. Watson, assistant interior secretary for land and minerals management, said in an announcement made in Billings, Mont., not far from the Rocky Mountain Front -- a stunning landscape where the plains collide with steep mountains and where private, federal and state land abuts the largest cluster of wilderness in the Lower 48.
With the exception of buffalo, the Front remains prime habitat for all the big game that wowed the Lewis and Clark expedition as it passed through the region two centuries ago. The region has often been described as "America's Serengeti."
Watson acknowledged that the Bush administration had heard complaints about gas drilling in the Front from the "the hook and bullet crowd," a cluster of conservation groups, many of which represent wealthy sportsmen who often vote Republican. The Boone and Crockett Club, whose members include a number of wealthy Texas oilmen, owns a large ranch on the Front. "We listen when they talk to us," Watson said, adding that a final decision on drilling in the area will be put off until 2007.
The courting of hunters and anglers, whose numbers are huge in swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, has become a significant part of the campaigns of President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.).
There are an estimated 50 million hunters and anglers, and their vote went mostly to Bush in the 2000 election, with gun rights as the decisive issue. But hunting and fishing groups became concerned last year that Bush administration policies on energy exploration and wetlands development were damaging prime hunting and fishing habitat.
Their concern registered with Bush, who in the past year has invited leaders of these groups to meet with him at the White House and at his ranch in Crawford, Tex.
"At our meeting in Crawford in April, the president said specifically that there are places where you ought not to drill," said James D. Range, chairman of the board of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, an umbrella organization for hunting and fishing groups. It has been hearing angry questions about Bush policies from sportsmen across the country.
In December, Bush met with Range and leaders of about 20 other conservation groups at the White House. They complained then about the Front and about a proposed plan to rewrite the Clean Water Act of 1972 in a way that could harm western wetlands and streams. Four days after that meeting, the wetlands plan was dropped.
"It seems the new constituency to court in this election season is the gun-rack pack," said Chris Wood, vice president for conservation at Trout Unlimited, a conservation group. "This decision on the Front demonstrates that Bush is listening. Let's hope it continues after November 2nd, whoever is in the White House."
Drilling on the Front was also immensely unpopular in Montana and across the Rocky Mountain West. The Wilderness Society recently released a report showing that of those who commented as part of a federal environmental impact statement on proposed drilling in the Front, 99 percent opposed it.
"I think the administration realized how important the Front is to Montanans and Americans," said Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who for years has fought energy exploration there.
According to federal figures, the amount of recoverable gas in the Front represents no more than a few days' worth of national gas consumption.
The administration also announced Tuesday that it plans to protect land in the Front by working with private groups to purchase conservation easements on 170,000 acres of ranchland.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Who are the real terrorists? Look around
October 6, 2004
Charles King,
Springfield MO News-Leader
http://springfield.news-leader.com/opinions/ozarksvoices/1006-Whoarether-194960.html
President Bush tells us he is fighting a war against terrorism so I looked it up in Webster's. Terrorism: the systematic use of terror as a means to coerce.
I spent a while thinking about terrorists and terrorism and it caused me to ponder. Who are the real terrorists?
I suppose it depends on who you are and where you live but I'm speaking of average Americans, a category into which I suppose 90 percent of us would fall.
In spite of the 9/11 disaster I seriously doubt that average Americans are in very much danger of ever being directly injured by an Islamic extremist. I could possibly be the victim of a terrorist bomber sometime in the future in a big city on vacation or at a huge sporting event, but actually my chances of dying from too much fast food and lack of exercise is greater.
It is my understanding that the real goal of terrorism is not the physical damage inflicted but the paranoia and fear instilled in the general population.
Since I am not afraid of being personally targeted by some al-Qaida member, I am led to ask another question: What really terrorizes me?
Other than my in-laws, high gasoline prices and Campbell Avenue rush-hour traffic I do have some real fears.
I'm terrified that Social Security will be bankrupt in a few years.
I'm terrified of the escalating cost of medical care and prescription medication.
I'm terrified at the possibility that one of my grandchildren may someday die in a senseless war, a war that has already taken the lives of over a thousand fine young Americans, a war that costs us billions and does little but give us control of a country with the world's second-largest oil reserves.
I'm terrified of something called the Patriot Act, and a color-coded Trojan Horse designed to manipulate, distract and confuse under the guise of national security.
I'm terrified of a national debt that is growing by leaps and bounds and will someday be dumped on the backs of our children and grandchildren.
I'm terrified because while our teachers are being underpaid and our schools are falling down, the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans received a tax cut.
I could go on and on but you get the picture. Now again I ask, who are the real terrorists? You figure it out.
Charles King is a retired truck driver.
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