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NUCLEAR
Nuclear power plant shuts down after lightning strikes
Bombing the Panhandle Fighting the Pentagon in Rural Florida
US nuclear reprocessing shipment heads through France by road
India won't sign NPT, at least for now
Pakistan's nuclear bona fides
Iran will keep nuclear technology
Nuclear quest said to be benign
Iran To Launch First Homemade Satellite
Iran to further improve Shahab-3 missile
U.S. 'Almost All Wrong' on Weapons
U.S. Report Finds Iraqis Eliminated Illicit Arms in 90's
Saddam worked secretly on WMDs
Only Hussein Had Full Picture
Japanese FM presses case for reducing US military presence
Russian Foreign Minister May Discuss Missiles with Iran
Russia, Iran to Continue Nuke Cooperation
Russia Rejects Nuclear Criticism
A Terror Attack, Coming Soon to a Plant Near You
Plutonium: rising terror threat
IAEA Chief ElBaradei Calls for Stronger Global Security Framework
NRC SETS SCHEDULE FOR REVIEW OF USEC APPLICATION;
TVA nuclear reactor needs $200 million repair
Agency hunts new site to store nuclear waste
MILITARY
Sailor dies as crippled Canadian submarine keeps drifting off Ireland
Blair: Sudan Agrees to Withdraw Troops, Militias in Darfur
France, Germany vie for Indian submarines deal: report
U.S. warns EU against arms trade with China
Northrop Grumman Conducts First Flight of First Navy Global Hawk
French anger at Duelfer report charges over Iraq corruption
Sadr militia offers arms-for-prisoners exchange with Iraqi government
Lies, Damned Lies, and Bush's Iraq Statistics
Fallujah Group Comes to Table Talks Also Underway in Sadr City
Rockets strike Baghdad hotel housing foreigners
Rockets Hit Hotel in Baghdad;
Sharon Aide Says Goal of Gaza Plan Is to Halt Road Map
Israeli Aide Hints That Gaza Exit Would Freeze Peace Plan
NATO Obstacles Delay Training of Iraqi Force
US to press allies for quicker action on meeting NATO mission requirements
Car Bomb Kills 39 in Pakistan
Separate Space Military Force Has Few Supporters at Pentagon
Brazil In Space: Gaudenzi Plots A Strategy
Israel Holding 25 U.N. Workers
CIA releases oil for food 'secret lists'
Pacific Command Nominee Withdraws; Army Pick Questioned
Water Probe Backs Marine Corps Defense
U.S. Extends Troops' Exit From South Korea
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Secret Rule Requiring ID for Flights at Center of Court Battle
Times Reporter Is Held in Contempt in Leak Inquiry
After Convictions, the Undoing of a U.S. Terror Prosecution
7 Dissenters on U.S. Court Cannot Stop an Execution
Conspiracy Theories Flourish on the Internet
Intelligence Bill Passed by Senate
Senate Approves 9/11 Bill at Odds With House Version
Army Denies Detainee-Release Remark
POLITICS
DeLay Draws Third Rebuke
Ethics Rebuke to DeLay Prompts Democratic Calls for Ouster
Pair Under Inquiry May Face Tribal Action
War's Rationales Are Undermined
Timing of Report Called Inspector's Decision
Bush's Case for War Crumbles
Urging Fact-Checking, Cheney Got Site Wrong
For the Record
Cheney Says Report Finding No Illicit Arms in Iraq Justifies War
Saddam Hussein Sowed Confusion About Iraq's Arsenal as a Tactic of War
FBI Seizes Indymedia Servers
2005: Annus Horribilis
Bush defends Iraq invasion in face of new weapons report
Lawmakers slam White House after long search yields no Iraqi WMD
Benefits and Costs of the U.S. Government's War Making
American Politician's Moral Blind Spot
ENERGY
Coalition Urges Doubled Federal Spending on Renewables
ACTIVISTS
Israel greater nuclear threat than Iran: Israeli whistleblower Vanunu
Reject Draft Slavery
Charges Dropped In Antiwar March
Prosecutors Won't Pursue Cases of 227 in Disputed Protest
Campaign Journal: Getting Out the Vote
DEBATES, DUELFER, & ALUMINUM TUBES
Charges Dropped In Antiwar March
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Nuclear power plant shuts down after lightning strikes
10/7/2004
(AP)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-10-07-kansas-zap_x.htm
BURLINGTON, Kan. - Wolf Creek Generating Station officials Thursday were investigating the cause of an emergency shutdown at the nuclear power plant.
A spokeswoman said the plant automatically shut down after a lightning storm moved through Coffey County, about 50 miles south of Topeka. Thunderstorms moved through much of eastern Kansas throughout the day.
Jeannene Ryan said workers were still investigating whether lighting was the cause of the outage, which occurbed shortly before noon. Ryan said there was no indication when the plant would resume generating electricity.
The nuclear reactor is jointly owned by Westar Energy and Kansas City Power & Light.
-------- depleted uranium
Bombing the Panhandle Fighting the Pentagon in Rural Florida
counterpunch.org
By BRUCE K. GAGNON
October 7, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/gagnon10072004.html
JI have just returned from a one-day trip to Perry, Florida to speak to a gathering of concerned citizens who are organizing to stop the placement of a new bombing range in their rural community. It was one of the most inspiring trips that I have ever made.
Perry is up in the Florida panhandle, just south of the capital city of Tallahassee. The region is called the nature coast as Taylor county touches the Gulf of Mexico and has several key rivers that run through its pine tree forests to the gulf. The county has a relatively small population as Florida goes and that is one reason the Pentagon sees it as a good place to put a bombing range.
There is a bombing range already in the region, just further west at Eglin AFB near Ft Walton Beach. I lived there while in high school when my father was stationed at Eglin and I hiked through the middle of the bombing range as an explorer scout. It is one of the largest military bases in the nation but population has grown near the base to the point where the noise from the bombing range has begun to draw complaints. Most recently the Mother of all Bombs (MOAB) was tested at Eglin. The MOAB is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever created that creates a mushroom cloud and shockwaves similar to a small nuclear explosion.
Rural Taylor County already has huge problems. The Buckeye paper mill has been contaminating the Fenholloway River that flows into the Gulf. Long ago classified as an industrial river, it is essentially dead and dumps toxic pollution into the Gulf. Groundwater contamination in Perry has long been a result and one local activist, Joy Towles Ezell, has been working to organize people in their company controlled town for years. Joy is a fifth generation Taylor County resident who has now taken on the military over the bombing range.
I met Joy years ago when I worked for the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice. We tried to support her work around the paper mill and she supported our efforts to alert people when cruise missiles were fired from Navy ships in the Gulf that flew over the panhandle and then crashed into the Eglin bombing range. Before the meeting Tuesday night Joy showed me a letter she wrote to then Gov. Lawton Chiles in 1991 on our behalf protesting the cruise missile tests. Years later when I organized a 700-mile Walk for the Earth from the Everglades to Tallahassee we camped on her land outside of Perry and held a rally at the paper mill. My son had a great time riding one of her prized mules while we were there.
Fifty local residents gathered Tuesday night in the back room at the Chaparral restaurant. The first thing Joy did when we arrived was make two of us go out front and put up on the portable advertising sign the words "Don't Bomb Nature Coast Meeting 7:00 pm" just below the words "Country Buffet."
The first speaker was Dr. Ronald Saff from Florida State University in Tallahassee who is an expert on coal fired power plant pollution. In addition to the paper mill and the bombing range, there are also plans to build a coal power plant in Taylor County. The decision has been made to turn the county into a wasteland, a sacrifice area.
Taylor County is your basic southern, rural, conservative place. People vote Republican and they don't take to outsiders very well. They don't do radical politics either. That is what made the meeting Tuesday night so special.
These 50 folks who gathered were retired school teachers, good church goers, the local industrial development officer, well dressed, quiet and concerned. One of them, a refined southern woman, Republican and Episcopalian, had been in the group that the Air Force recently flew to Eglin so they could see how nice the bombing range looked. The Taylor County delegation was promised that depleted uranium would not be used in their county. Joy was not invited to go along on the trip.
The Eglin AFB bombing range has been testing depleted Uranium (DU) and since 1973 over 220,000 pounds of DU penetrators were expended there. Cruise missiles that crashed on the Eglin range carried DU as ballast in the nose cones in place of a warhead. After so-called "clean-up" a public health assessment at Eglin estimates that 90-95% of the DU remains in the soil.
People in Taylor County have been told that cruise missiles will be tested over their heads and that the weapons will circle around in Alabama and come back to the proposed bombing range to crash land. The military "needs" the Taylor County range they say because they need to practice flying cruise missiles off ships in the Gulf of Mexico. The Pentagon has been telling the residents that the tests are practice for "missile defense" as part of homeland security. A pro-bombing range group called "Citizens for Homeland Security" has been set up but residents say it is just a couple of those who are involved in the money trail behind the bombing range and the coal plant.
I told the residents that it was time to redefine the term "homeland security." I asked how secure they were when their water, air and land was becoming so contaminated that they future generations could not live there? I also told them cruise missiles were first-strike, sneak attack weapons that have nothing to do with "defense." I told them cruise missiles are part of a preemptive military policy that violates international law. I asked them how they'd feel if another country launched sneak attack weapons onto the U.S.?
The local Rotary Club has been offered a gift of $10,000 if they will support the bombing range. The county government has been offered $40 million. Local hunters have been promised continued access to the range so they can hunt deer and wild boar on the land. In spite of all that the local residents are organizing and have forced a non-binding referendum on the question on the November ballot. They think they will win the vote but fear the county will agree to the range anyway.
The folks have yard signs, buttons, bumperstickers and will have a booth at the up-coming forest service "Forest Festival" and draws 20,000 from the region. They keep letters to the editor flowing into their local paper in order to combat new rumors put out by the military.
The meeting ended with Joy calling Vieques, Puerto Rico and getting one of the leaders of their long and successful campaign to close down the military bombing range on their beautiful island. I can't describe the feeling to listen to Robert Rabin as Joy held the microphone up to her cell phone. I looked around the room at the people as they deeply listened as Robert told the story how the Navy dropped a bomb on a Navy building killing one of their own security guards. A moan went through the room like a knife through the heart. The Taylor County community had been promised by the military that they never have accidents. It was incredible to hear Robert use the word love a dozen times to describe the core of their campaign against the Navy and how they used non-violent civil disobedience. The people just listened and after his 15 minute talk they applauded with great vigor.
There is nothing like life experience to change people. The folks in Taylor County are changing rapidly. One woman, a life long Christian and good Republican, told me she'd never vote for another Republican again. (I couldn't help but think how stupid the Bush administration is to bring this bombing range issue up right before the November election in a state where EVERY VOTE really counts.)
At the end of the meeting the people asked me two things. What more can we do and do you think we can win? I told them that the people in Vieques won because they became a "pain in the ass" and they had to do the same. I also told them they could not do this alone, that they needed to send folks out around the state to educate others about the issue. I acknowledged two people in the audience from the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice (John Linnehan from Jacksonville and Bob Tancig from Gainesville. Bob is the new director of the organization. John had picked me up at the Jacksonville airport and drove me to Perry.) They pledged the support of the Florida Coalition.
I urge others to send a message of solidarity to Joy and the folks in Taylor County. They could use some encouragement and some hope. I know they have just given me a bunch of it. You can reach Joy Towles Ezell at hope@gtcom.net
This is how America will change.
Bruce K. Gagnon is Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He can be reached at: globalnet@mindspring.com
-------- europe
US nuclear reprocessing shipment heads through France by road
CHERBOURG, France (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007031948.166j5r2v.html
A lorry suspected to be carrying a shipment of plutonium from US weapons arsenals, to be reprocessed in southeast France, left a retreatment plant in the country's north under heavy escort early Thursday, a French television journalist at the scene said.
The 140 kilogrammes (300 pounds) of radioactive material had arrived without incident in the northern port of Cherbourg early Wednesday aboard a British vessel .
Police threw a heavy escort around as it was offloaded from the ship adespite protests from environmental activists.
A procession of trucks, accompanied by police vans and motorbike outriders, then took the radioactive cargo to the nearby retreatment plant in La Hague, run by the French state company Areva.
A French court on Tuesday issued an injunction banning the activists from approaching within 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 La Hague, the plutonium was to be taken by road 1,200 kilometres (720 miles) across France to the reprocessing plant 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.
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.
-------- india / pakistan
India won't sign NPT, at least for now
NEW DELHI, (UPI)
Oct. 7, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/upi/2004/1007-130505-india-nuclear.html
India has once again ruled out signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, at least for now.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said India is a responsible nuclear power and the time may not be right for New Delhi to sign the NPT.
I don't know whether the circumstances are ripe right now for us to sign that (NPT). But we are voluntarily fulfilling all the commitments that go with being a responsible nuclear power acting with due restraint, Singh said at a joint news conference with visiting German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in the Indian capital.
We are a nuclear power. We are a responsible nuclear power, Singh said, adding, We have an impeccable record in export control, and we would like to work with like-minded countries on non-proliferation issues.
The premier said that India acted with self-restraint, and it was committed to no-first use. India in any case fulfilled the commitments of a responsible nuclear power, Singh said.
Earlier this week, Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee also said that India had a credible nuclear deterrence in place.
Whatever is needed to safeguard the country and to ensure effective deterrence, in line with our nuclear doctrine of 'no first use,' has been done, Mukherjee said.
Germany was one of the several nations across the world that was shocked by India's nuclear tests in 1998 that invited a series of economic sanctions against New Delhi.
While the United States lifted most of its sanctions when India sided with its war against terror in Afghanistan in 2001, other nations have been gradually removing trade embargoes on New Delhi.
With India emerging as an economic giant and one of world's largest market, many nations want to benefit the economic scenario by entering into bilateral trade with world's second-most populous nation.
Schroeder's two-day visit is also aimed at bolstering trade ties between India and Germany.
The chancellor sounded confident that last year's $6.16 billion record bilateral trade figures could be surpassed, saying the German industry is impatient to invest in India, and trade between the two countries could be doubled within five years.
We have to convince our entrepreneurs that it will be beneficial to invest in India, the world's largest democracy and a market of 1 billion people, the chancellor said.
I am sure the courageous reforms Prime Minister Manmohan Singh initiated a decade ago will attract more foreign direct investments, which is in our interest, Schroeder said.
Singh, who became prime minister in May, is regarded as the father of economic reforms that he launched in 1991 as finance minister.
New Delhi reciprocated Schroeder's gesture. India attaches special importance to its relations with Germany and is eager to expand and intensify bilateral relations to a level befitting the strategic relations between the two countries, a foreign ministry statement said.
Prime Minister Singh said his government would remove all hurdles to attract more foreign investments, including that from Germany.
In the months and years to come, we will work together with all like-minded countries to remove all the obstacles that come in the way of increased German investment and technology flows and in promoting a harmonious trading relationship, Singh said.
Both India and Germany support each other in their common objective of finding a permanent berth in the U.N. Security Council.
We are both champions of a multilateral approach in international politics and would work for a further strengthening of the United Nations, the visiting chancellor said.
We have promised each other that we will support each other for a possible candidacy on the Security Council, Deutsche Welle Radio quoted Schroeder as saying.
The current members of the Security Council's five permanent veto-wielding members are France, England, United States, China and Russia.
The chancellor will also visit Vietnam, Pakistan and Afghanistan as part of his Asia tour.
----
Pakistan's nuclear bona fides
October 07, 2004
Washington Times
Letters to the Editor
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20041006-101936-9013r.htm
The Op-Ed column "Iran, Pakistan and nukes," by Wilson John (Monday), is mischievous in its content and motivated by malice to malign the leadership in Pakistan over the mercenary activity of Abdul Qadeer Khan and his nuclear-technology black market.
No less than the president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, has publicly and vigorously condemned his behavior, and the United States and other powers have praised Pakistan for the transparency of the energetic investigation of Mr. Khan's illegal nuclear-technology-proliferation activity.
Mr. Khan is under house arrest as debriefing of his nuclear black market continues. The discovery process has to be thorough and time-consuming so that all those involved can be brought to justice in the interest of the safety of the world.
Already, Pakistan, to its credit, has shared initial investigative information and data with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has in turn praised Pakistan for its efforts.
One thing certainly is clear: No one should doubt Gen. Musharraf's bona fides on this issue, and until the investigation is concluded, allegations against any institution of Pakistan and speculation about the involvement of Pakistani officials remain just that.
Regurgitating allegations or innuendos is irresponsible and objectionable.
TALAT WASEEM Press counselor Embassy of Pakistan Washington
-------- iran
Iran will keep nuclear technology "at any cost": former president
TEHRAN (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007115423.y3zbjj68.html
Iran will hang on to its sensitive nuclear technology "at any cost" despite pressure from the United States and the Europeans, powerful former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said Thursday.
"The United States and Europe absolutely do not want us to possess nuclear technology but we are determined to keep this technology at any cost," he was quoted as saying by the official news agency IRNA.
He added that "giving up this legitimate right would bring an historical shame that our leadership would never be able to erase".
"A people that is ready for sacrifice cannot fail. We are fighters ready to fight," said Rafsanjani, who now heads Iran's top political arbitration body, the Expediency Council.
On September 18, the board of the International Atomic Energy Agencycalled on Iran to "immediately" widen a suspension of enrichment to include all uranium enrichment-related activities -- such as making centrifuges, converting yellowcake into UF6 feed gas, and constructing a heavy water reactor.
Iran, facing a November 25 deadline, risks being referred to the UN Security Council if it fails to comply.
In addition, the three main European powers -- Britian, France and Germany -- would like Iran to give up its work on the nuclear fuel cycle, a process that can be used to make fuel for atomic energy or nuclear weapons.
Fuel cycle work is permitted under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), of which Iran is a signatory, if for peaceful purposes. Iran insists it only wants to generate nuclear power to meet growing domestic energy demands and free up its huge oil and gas resources for export.
----
Nuclear quest said to be benign
October 07, 2004
By Sharon Behn
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041006-113608-8196r.htm
Iran's minister of finance said yesterday that his country's quest for nuclear energy is an integral part of its plan to become a regional economic powerhouse and has nothing to do with offensive weapons.
There is intense international debate about Iran's need for an indigenous nuclear-energy program, given its oil reserves, and observers say that unemployment is more likely driving the need to open the economy.
A top Iranian nuclear official said yesterday in Tehran that the country already had processed several tons of the gas needed to enrich uranium, a necessary step toward producing nuclear fuel, or weapons.
"We have used part of the raw uranium we had. A few tons of yellowcake has been converted ," Hossein Mousavian, Iran's top delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency told the Associated Press.
The United States repeatedly has accused Iran of trying to build a nuclear bomb and has tried to get the international community to bring Tehran before the United Nations for its nuclear activities.
Iran, a net oil producer, insists its nuclear efforts are peaceful.
"We are not interested in employing nuclear weapons," Iranian Minister of Finance Tahmasb Mazaheri said during an interview at the Iranian Interests Section in Washington. "We are just seeking the peaceful utilization of this energy [and] in fact, it has many economic impacts."
Mr. Mazaheri said that Iran was in line with the IAEA, and had opened its industry to IAEA inspectors and monitors. The U.N. nuclear watchdog has agreed that, so far, Iran does not appear to have produced any weapons-grade uranium.
Although Iran is among the world's top-10 oil producers, Mr. Mazaheri said the country wanted to diversify its energy base to support its growing economy.
"We should replace oil revenues with another source of energy, because it is a political commodity; so we should employ some other instruments to make the development of the country eaisier," the minister argued.
He said that despite U.S. sanctions, Iran's economy had grown over the past four years at a rate of 5.5 percent, creating roughly 550,000 jobs a year.
Standards of living had risen and women were participating in the economy to a greater degree than in neighboring countries, he said.
"The government policy is one of privatization, and to move to a competitive, market-oriented economy," said Mr. Mazaheri. "The engine of the economy will be the private sector in close interaction with the international markets."
"Our aim is to be the first-ranking economy in the region," Mr. Mazaheri said.
But Cliff Kupchan, vice president of the Nixon Center, said Iran was under tremendous pressure to provide jobs for its youth, and as yet there had been little actual movement away from the state-dominated economy.
"Sixty percent of the population is under 30 and unemployment is high," said Mr. Kupchan. "Their main Achilles heel is providing jobs."
He added that most observers of Iran say the country has yet to lay out a convincing plan to move from a state-dominated economy to a private-sector-led economy.
The United States applied sanctions in 1996 prohibiting American companies from investing in Iran in response to Tehran's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and missile delivery systems, as well as its support for terrorism.
But Mr. Mazaheri said foreign companies have filled the gap.
France, Germany and Italy are the leading foreign investors in Iran, pouring money into oil and gas as well as the food processsing, petrochemical and industrial sectors.
----
Iran To Launch First Homemade Satellite
Tehran, Iran (UPI)
Oct 7, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/microsat-04p.html
An Iranian military official said Thursday his country would launch its first homemade satellite into space during the next Persian year, which starts in March.
Deputy Defense Minister for Space Affairs Nasser Maliki was quoted by the Iranian News Agency as saying the satellite would orbit the earth at low altitudes varying between 100 and 400 kilometers (about 60 to 250 miles).
It is a small satellite which will prove the capacity of the Islamic Republic of Iran in space technology, Maliki said, noting that only 10 countries in the world possess satellites at present.
He said Iran also improved its missile production and technology in recent years and is manufacturing tens of surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles with longer ranges.
We are on the threshold of entering the international space club ... Until 1998 we were producing short-range missiles and today we are into the production of long-range surface-to-surface missiles like Shihab 1 and 2 which deter the enemy, he said.
----
Iran to further improve Shahab-3 missile
TEHRAN (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007101122.aynbft1t.html
Iran intends to further improve its Shahab-3 missiles, which already have a claimed range of 2,000 kilometresmiles), a senior official was quoted as saying Thursday.
"The Shahab-3 missile has a range of 2,000 kilometres," Nasser Maleki, deputy director of Iran's aerospace industry organisation, was quoted as saying.
"Very certainly we are going to improve our Shahab-3 missile and all of our other missiles."
When asked if Iran intended to produce longer-range ballistic missiles -- such as a Shahab-4 -- a device that would involve a two-stage propulsion system and possibly bring European capitals within range -- the official replied only that "we are at the level of the Shahab-3".
Steady progress made by Iran on its ballistic missile programme is a major cause for concern for the international community, already alarmed over the country's nuclear activities.
On August 11, Iran tested an upgraded version of its Shahab-3 missile, which is believed to be based on a North Korean design.
Previous figures had put the missile's range at between 1,300 and 1,700 kilometres, already bringing arch enemy Israel and US bases in the region well within range.
While the country has announced it has upgraded the Shahab-3, it has denied it is working on a Shahab-4.
-------- iraq / inspections
U.S. 'Almost All Wrong' on Weapons
Report on Iraq Contradicts Bush Administration Claims
By Dana Priest and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12115-2004Oct6?language=printer
The 1991 Persian Gulf War and subsequent U.N. inspections destroyed Iraq's illicit weapons capability and, for the most part, Saddam Hussein did not try to rebuild it, according to an extensive report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq that contradicts nearly every prewar assertion made by top administration officials about Iraq.
Charles A. Duelfer, whom the Bush administration chose to complete the U.S. investigation of Iraq's weapons programs, said Hussein's ability to produce nuclear weapons had "progressively decayed" since 1991. Inspectors, he said, found no evidence of "concerted efforts to restart the program."
The findings were similar on biological and chemical weapons. While Hussein had long dreamed of developing an arsenal of biological agents, his stockpiles had been destroyed and research stopped years before the United States led the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Duelfer said Hussein hoped someday to resume a chemical weapons effort after U.N. sanctions ended, but had no stocks and had not researched making the weapons for a dozen years.
Duelfer's report, delivered yesterday to two congressional committees, represents the government's most definitive accounting of Hussein's weapons programs, the assumed strength of which the Bush administration presented as a central reason for the war. While previous reports have drawn similar conclusions, Duelfer's assessment went beyond them in depth, detail and level of certainty.
"We were almost all wrong" on Iraq, Duelfer told a Senate panel yesterday.
President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons to use against the United States.
But after extensive interviews with Hussein and his key lieutenants, Duelfer concluded that Hussein was not motivated by a desire to strike the United States with banned weapons, but wanted them to enhance his image in the Middle East and to deter Iran, against which Iraq had fought a devastating eight-year war. Hussein believed that "WMD helped save the regime multiple times," the report said.
The report also provides a one-of-a-kind look at Hussein's personality. The former Iraqi leader participated in numerous interviews with one Arabic-speaking FBI interrogator. Hussein told his questioner he felt threatened by U.S. military power, but even then, he maintained a fondness for American movies and literature. One of his favorite books was Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." He hoped for improved relations with the United States and, over several years, sent proposals through intermediaries to open a dialogue with Washington.
Hussein, the report concluded, "aspired to develop a nuclear capability" and intended to work on rebuilding chemical and biological weapons after persuading the United Nations to lift sanctions. But the report also notes: "The former regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions. Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policy makers or planners separate from Saddam" tasked to take this up once sanctions ended.
Among the most diplomatically explosive revelations was that Hussein had established a worldwide network of companies and countries, most of them U.S. allies, that secretly helped Iraq generate $11 billion in illegal income and locate, finance and import banned services and technologies. Among those named are officials or companies from Belarus, China, Lebanon, France, Indonesia, Jordan, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
Duelfer said one of Hussein's main strategic goals was to persuade the United Nations to lift economic sanctions, which had devastated the country's economy and, along with U.N. inspections, had forced him to stop weapons programs. Even as Hussein became more adept at bypassing the sanctions, he worked to erode international support for them.
Democrats seized on the exhaustive report, which comes amid a presidential race dominated so far by the Iraq war, to argue that the administration misled the American public about the risk Hussein posed and then miscalculated the difficulties of securing postwar peace.
"Now we have a report today that there clearly were no weapons of mass destruction," Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), the Democratic vice presidential candidate, said in West Palm Beach, Fla. "All of that known, and Dick Cheney said again last night that he would have done everything the same. George Bush has said he would have done everything the same. . . . They are in a complete state of denial about what is happening in Iraq."
Neither Bush nor challenger John F. Kerry spoke directly about the report yesterday, though at a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania the president emphasized that Hussein was a threat to the United States.
"There was a risk -- a real risk -- that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks," Bush said. "In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take."
Supporters rallied around the administration, which has suffered a string of setbacks recently with revelations that the CIA had warned the White House about the strength of Iraqi insurgents, and from former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer, who said this week that the United States should have put more troops in Iraq during the invasion.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said: "We didn't have to find plans or weapons to see what happened when Saddam Hussein used chemical and biological weapons on his own people. So just because we can't find them and Saddam Hussein had 12 years to hide them doesn't mean he didn't have them and didn't use them."
But Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) said the report showed U.N. inspections and sanctions had worked in preventing Hussein from pursuing his weapons ambitions. "Despite the effort to focus on Saddam's desires and intentions, the bottom line is Iraq did not have either weapons stockpiles or active production capabilities at the time of the war."
Duelfer's report contradicted a number of specific claims administration officials made before the war.
It found, for example, that Iraq's "crash" program in 1991 to build a nuclear weapon before the Persian Gulf War was far from successful, and was nowhere near being months away from producing a weapon, as the administration asserted. Only micrograms of enriched uranium were produced and no weapon design was completed. The CIA and administration officials have said they were surprised by the advanced state of Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear program, which was discovered after the war, and therefore were more prone to overestimate Iraq's capability when solid proof was unavailable.
There also was no evidence that Iraq possessed or was developing a mobile biological weapons production system, an assertion Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others made before the invasion. The two trailers that were found in early 2003 were "almost certainly designed and built . . . exclusively for the generation of hydrogen" gas.
Duelfer also found no information to support allegations that Iraq sought uranium from Africa or any other country after 1991, as Bush once asserted in a major speech before the invasion. The only two contacts with Niger that were discovered were an invitation to the president of Niger to visit Baghdad, and a visit to Baghdad by a Niger minister in 2001 seeking petroleum products for cash. There was one offer to Iraq of "yellowcake" uranium, and that was from a Ugandan businessman offering uranium from Congo. The deal was turned down, and the Ugandan was told that Baghdad was not interested because of the sanctions.
Nuclear Weapons
Despite the U.S. intelligence judgment that Iraq in 2002 had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, Duelfer reported that after 1991, Baghdad's nuclear program had "progressively decayed." He added that the Iraq Survey Group investigators had found no evidence "to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program."
There was an attempt to keep nuclear scientists together and two scientists were discovered to have saved documents and technology related to the uranium enrichment program, but they appeared to be the exception.
Although some steps were taken that could have helped restart the nuclear program, using oil-for-food money, Duelfer concluded that his team "uncovered no indication that Iraq had resumed fissile material or nuclear weapons research and development activities since 1991."
Biological Weapons
Duelfer's report is the first U.S. intelligence assessment to state flatly that Iraq had secretly destroyed its biological weapons stocks in the early 1990s. By 1995, though, and under U.N. pressure, it abandoned its efforts.
The document rules out the possibility that biological weapons might have been hidden, or perhaps smuggled into another country, and it finds no evidence of secret biological laboratories or ongoing research that could be firmly linked to a weapons program.
Some biological "seed stocks" -- frozen samples of relatively common microbes such as bolutinum -- were found in the home of one Iraqi official last year. But the survey team said Iraq had "probably" destroyed any bulk quantities of germs it had at the height of the program in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The team also found no evidence of stocks of the smallpox virus, which the administration had claimed it had.
Chemical Weapons
Duelfer's report said that no chemical weapons existed and that there is no evidence of attempts to make such weapons over the past 12 years. Iraq retained dual-use equipment that could be used for such an effort.
"The issue is that he has chemical weapons, and he's used them," Cheney told CNN in March 2002. The National Intelligence Estimate said that "although we have little specific information on Iraq's CW stockpile, Saddam probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW agents -- much of it added in the last year."
One of the reasons the intelligence community feared a chemical weapons arsenal was that U.N. inspectors said Iraq had not fully explained missing chemical agents during the 1990s. The report determined that unanswered questions were almost certainly the result of poor accounting.
Iraq's responses to U.N. inspectors regarding chemical weapons appear to have been truthful, and where incomplete, with differing recollections among former top officials, mostly the result of fading memories of when or how stockpiles were destroyed. Those were the identical reasons Iraq offered to U.N. inspectors before the war.
One of the key findings of the report is that "Saddam never abandoned his intentions to resume a chemical weapons effort when sanctions were lifted."
The evidence included in the report to back up claims of Hussein's intent is described as "extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial." The report quotes a single scientist who reached that conclusion in hindsight and based on information he learned from the U.S. inspection team long after U.S. troops had captured Iraq.
After 17 months of investigation, the U.S. team was able to find only 30 of 130 scientists identified with Iraq's pre-1991 chemical weapons programs. "None of those interviewed had any knowledge of chemical weapons programs" or knew of anyone involved in such work, according to the report. There was one exception, the reported noted, from a scientist who maintained he was asked to make a chemical agent, but that story was uncorroborated and there was no follow-up.
Delivery Systems
Iraq's secret quest to develop a more powerful missile was discovered and disrupted by U.N. weapons inspectors in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion. In the 19 months since then, the survey team has uncovered more evidence suggesting that Hussein intended to use the Al Samoud 2 and other proposed missiles to extend the reach of his military beyond the country's borders.
Iraq was allowed to continue developing short-range missiles for self-defense under the terms of the U.N. agreement that ended the 1991 Gulf War. But the Al Samoud 2, which Iraq began building in 2001, was clearly designed for flights exceeding the U.N.-imposed 93-mile limit, the new report says. And Duelfer's team found blueprints for missiles with potential ranges up to 10 times as far.
The team "uncovered Iraqi plans or designs for three long-range ballistic missiles with ranges from 400 to 1,000 kilometers (250 to 621 miles), and for a 1,000-km-range (932-mile) cruise missile," the report says. It adds that none of the planned missiles was in production, and only one of them had progressed beyond the design phase.
The report concludes that Iraq "clearly intended to reconstitute long-range delivery systems," and maintains that the missiles, if built, could potentially have been combined with biological, chemical or nuclear warheads, if Hussein acquired them.
At the same time, the missile that U.S. military planners had most feared in the run-up to the invasion appears to have vanished. While Bush administration officials had asserted that Hussein had hidden a small arsenal of Scud missiles, Duelfer said interviews and documents suggest Iraq "did not retain such missiles after 1991."
Staff writers Dafna Linzer and Joby Warrick contributed to this report.
--------
INSPECTOR'S JUDGMENT
U.S. Report Finds Iraqis Eliminated Illicit Arms in 90's
October 7, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/politics/07intel.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - Iraq had destroyed its illicit weapons stockpiles within months after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and its ability to produce such weapons had significantly eroded by the time of the American invasion in 2003, the top American inspector for Iraq said in a report made public Wednesday.
The report by the inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, intended to offer a near-final judgment about Iraq and its weapons, said Iraq, while under pressure from the United Nations, had "essentially destroyed'' its illicit weapons ability by the end of 1991, with its last secret factory, a biological weapons plant, eliminated in 1996.
Mr. Duelfer said that even during those years, Saddam Hussein had aimed at "preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted.'' But he said he had found no evidence of any concerted effort by Iraq to restart the programs.
The findings uphold Iraq's prewar insistence that it did not possess chemical or biological weapons. They also show the enormous distance between the Bush administration's own prewar assertions, based on reports by American intelligence agencies, and what a 15-month inquiry by American investigators found since the war.
Mr. Duelfer said he had concluded that between 1991 and 2003, Mr. Hussein had in effect sacrificed Iraq's illicit weapons to the larger goal of winning an end to United Nations sanctions. But he also argued that Mr. Hussein had used the period to try to exploit avenues opened by the sanctions, especially the oil-for-food program, to lay the groundwork for a plan to resume weapons production if sanctions were lifted.
In addition, the report concluded that Mr. Hussein had deliberately sought to maintain ambiguity about whether it had illicit weapons, mainly as a deterrent to Iran, its rival.
The American inspector presented his conclusions to Congress on Wednesday, including highly charged public testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
With Iraq figuring prominently in the last dash toward the presidential election, Democrats argued that the report had undermined the administration's case for war, while the White House and its Republican allies called attention to elements in the report that highlighted potential dangers posed by Mr. Hussein's government.
"There is no doubt that Saddam was a threat to our nation, and there is no doubt that he had W.M.D. capability, and the Duelfer report is very clear on these points,'' said James Wilkinson, a White House deputy national security adviser, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction.
The three-volume report, totaling 918 pages, represented the most authoritative attempt so far to unravel the mystery posed by Iraq between 1991 and 2003, beginning with the point after the Persian Gulf war when Iraq still possessed chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear-weapons program. The conclusions suggest that the main war aim cited by the White House in March 2003 - to disarm Iraq, which American intelligence agencies said possessed chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program - was based on an outdated view of Iraq's weapons stockpiles.
At the time of the American invasion, Mr. Duelfer said in the report, Iraq did not possess chemical and biological weapons, was not seeking to reconstitute its nuclear program, and was not making any active effort to gain those abilities. Even if Iraq had sought to restart its weapons programs in 2003, the report said, it could not have produced militarily significant quantities of chemical weapons for at least a year, and it 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 the report. It said American inspectors in Iraq had "found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program.''
After a closed briefing by Mr. Duelfer to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the committee, described the report as "a devastating account.''
"The administration would like the American public to believe that Saddam's intention to build a weapons program, regardless of actual weapons or the capability to produce weapons, justified invading Iraq,'' Mr. Rockefeller said in a statement. "In fact, we invaded a country, thousands of people have died, and Iraq never posed a grave or growing danger.''
In accounting for what happened beginning in 1991, Mr. Duelfer said Mr. Hussein made a fundamental decision after the Persian Gulf war to get rid of Iraq's illicit weapons and accept the destruction of its weapons-producing facilities as part of an effort to win an end to sanctions imposed by the United Nations to achieve those ends.
Although Mr. Duelfer concluded that Mr. Hussein had intended to restart his programs, the report acknowledged that that conclusion 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.
The report notes that its conclusions were drawn in part from interrogation of Mr. Hussein in his prison cell outside Baghdad. Mr. Duelfer, a special adviser to the director of central intelligence, said he had concluded that Mr. Hussein had deliberately sought to maintain ambiguity about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons, primarily as a deterrent to Iran, Iraq's adversary in an eight-year war in the 1980's.
It was not until a series of meetings in late 2002, just months before the American invasion, that Mr. Hussein finally acknowledged to senior officers and officials of his government that Iraq did not possess illicit weapons, Mr. Duelfer said.
The report said American investigators had found clandestine laboratories in the Baghdad area used by the Iraqi Intelligence Service between 1991 and 2003 to conduct research and to test various chemicals and poisons, including ricin. As previously reported, it said those efforts appeared to be intended primarily for use in assassinations, not to inflict mass casualties.
Mr. Duelfer said in his report that Mr. Hussein never acknowledged 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 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 he 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 partly with the use of chemical munitions.
Mr. Duelfer said Iraq had tried to maintain the knowledge base necessary to restart an illicit weapons program. He said 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 was 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 he said 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 of Iraq to a neighboring country, like Syria.
The report did revise several earlier judgments, including a report by the Central Intelligence Agency in May 2003 that said mysterious trailers found in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003 were intended for use in a biological warfare program. Mr. Duelfer said that the trailers could not have been used for that purpose, and that their 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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Saddam worked secretly on WMDs
October 07, 2004
By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041007-014021-1051r.htm
Saddam Hussein's goal through the 1990s and until the 2003 U.S. invasion was to end U.N. sanctions on Iraq, while working covertly to restore the country's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction, a report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector says.
"Saddam wanted to re-create Iraq's WMD capability - which was essentially destroyed in 1991 - after sanctions were removed and Iraq's economy stabilized, but probably with a different mix of capabilities," the report said.
Charles A. Duelfer told the Senate Armed Services Committee in testimony yesterday that "Saddam sought to sustain the requisite knowledge base to restart the program eventually."
In the interim, Mr. Duelfer said, Saddam hoped to keep "the inherent capability to produce such weapons as circumstances permitted in the future."
Mr. Duelfer said that officials with the Iraq Survey Group continue to receive a "stream of reports about hidden WMD locations" and in one recent case turned up a "partially filled nerve agent container from a 122 mm rocket."
But, "like others recovered, [it] was from old pre-1991 stocks," he said, adding "despite these reports and finds, I still do not expect that militarily significant WMD stocks are cached in Iraq."
Mr. Duelfer was appointed chief weapons inspector in January after then-chief David Kay made headlines by asserting that prewar assessments of Iraq had been "almost all wrong."
The White House did not endorse Mr. Kay's findings at the time, saying the Iraq Survey Group had not completed its post-war search for weapons. Several senior Bush-administration officials, meanwhile, had touted Saddam's weapons "stockpiles" as a central reason for invading.
Mr. Duelfer yesterday said inspectors still cannot "definitively say whether or not WMD materials were transferred out of Iraq before the war," although he stressed how Iraq's ability to produce them weakened under the U.N. sanctions implemented after the 1991 Gulf war.
With Iraq's economy badly damaged and U.N. sanctions, Mr. Duelfer's report says, Saddam's plans for a skeletal weapons program that could be mobilized quickly led him to pursue the needed materials through illegal and indirect channels.
Starting in 1997 and peaking in 2001, he developed a giant smuggling operation that hinged on the establishment of "a network of Iraqi front companies, some with close relationships to high-ranking foreign-government officials," the report says.
Those officials, it says, "worked through their respective ministries, state-run companies and ministry-sponsored front companies to procure illicit goods, services and technologies for Iraq's WMD-related, conventional arms, and/or dual-use goods programs."
Syria was Iraq's "primary conduit for illicit imports" from late 2000 until the start of the U.S. invasion last year, according to the report, which also maintains that the Iraqi Intelligence Service set up front companies to buy prohibited arms from a Syrian totaling $1.2 billion.
"The central bank of Syria was the repository of funds used by Iraq to purchase goods and materials both prohibited and allowed under U.N. sanctions," the report says.
Totaling nearly 1,000-pages, the report includes a broad history of Saddam's regime, how he operated and held power through the Iran-Iraq war and the first war with the United States.
Mr. Duelfer noted that "given the nature of Iraqi governance, one should not look for much of an audit trail on WMD."
As a result, key findings on Iraq's efforts to finance and procure weapons and delivery systems, are based largely on interviews with senior Ba'ath Party officials detained in Iraq.
For example, former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and others "answered questions in writing several times, providing information on both the former regime and the mindset of those who ran it," according to the report.
Interviews with Saddam were conducted by a single "FBI person" and the "only thing" offered in exchange was a stake in shaping his legacy, according to an official familiar with the report.
Regarding nuclear weapons, Mr. Duelfer said that during the 12 years after the Persian Gulf war "Iraq's ability to produce a weapon decayed" and that "the time for Iraq to build a nuclear weapon tended to increase for the duration of the sanctions."
"Despite this decay," he said. "Saddam did not abandon his nuclear ambitions."
Regarding chemical weapons, the report outlines Saddam's belief that the extensive use of such weapons and of long-range ballistic missiles was key to Iraq's ability to avoid defeat in the eight-year war with Iran.
Mr. Duelfer also noted that Saddam "used chemical weapons for domestic purposes - in the late-80s against the Kurds and during the Shi'a uprisings after the 1991 war" - a point noted regularly by administration officials in justifying to critics the need to invade Iraq.
While Iraqi chemical-weapons activity "shifted from production to research and development of more potent and stabilized agents" after the Iran-Iraq war, Mr. Duelfer said that when U.N. sanctions were on Iraq, Saddam sought to sustain the knowledge base to restart the program eventually.
"With the infusion of funding and resources following acceptance of the oil-for-food program, Iraq effectively shortened the time that would be required to re-establish [chemical weapon] production capacity," Mr. Duelfer said. "By 2003, Iraq would have been able to produce mustard agent in a period of months and nerve agent in less than a year or two."
Mr. Duelfer said it is "still difficult to rule" on whether Iraq had a mobile biological-weapons production effort, but he noted that Iraq secretly destroyed stocks of biological weapons in 1991 and 1992, after having denied to weapons inspectors that it had such a program.
----
Only Hussein Had Full Picture
Thu Oct 7, 2004
By Bob Drogin and Mark Mazzetti,
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=2026&e=4&u=/latimests/20041007/ts_latimes/onlyhusseinhadfullpicture
WASHINGTON - Shortly before the U.S. bombing and invasion of Iraq last year, Saddam Hussein gathered his top generals together to share what came to them as astonishing news: The weapons that the United States was launching a war to remove did not exist.
"There was plenty of surprise when Saddam said, 'Sorry guys, we don't have any' " weapons of mass destruction to use against the invading forces, a senior U.S. intelligence official said.
The unexpected peek inside Hussein's inner circle in the days and weeks before the regime was toppled comes in a report by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group released Wednesday, as well as from Senate testimony Wednesday by Charles A. Duelfer, head of the survey group, and from a briefing for reporters by an official familiar with the interrogations of Hussein and his aides.
The new accounts contradict many U.S. assumptions about relations between Hussein and his senior aides, as well as American views on what Hussein was doing and how he saw the outside world before the invasion.
For example, many in the U.S. intelligence community had believed that Hussein's sycophantic generals kept him in the dark about the state of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs - that is, that the dictator was misled by associates who told him what he wanted to hear.
Far from being misinformed, the report says, Hussein was micromanaging Iraq's weapons policy himself and kept even his most loyal aides from gaining a clear picture of what was going on - and, more important, not going on - with the program.
"Saddam's centrality to the regime's political structure meant that he was the hub of Iraqi WMD policy and intent," the report concluded.
His paranoia and his fascination with science and technology "meant that control of WMD development and its deployment was never far from his touch," it said.
Although the interrogation reports may shed new light on Hussein's role, they also raise a question: If Hussein understood that he had no stockpiles of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, why did he limit the activities of the United Nations inside Iraq, violate U.N. Security Council resolutions and defy the outside world from the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 until his regime was toppled in 2003?
Hussein often denied U.S. assertions that he possessed banned weapons in defiance of U.N. resolutions, but for years he also persisted in making cryptic public statements to perpetuate the myth that he actually did have them. The Iraq Survey Group believes that he continued making those statements long after he had secretly ordered the destruction of his stockpiles.
Based on the interrogations, it appears that Hussein underestimated how seriously the United States took the weapons issue, and he believed it was vital to his own survival that the outside world - especially Iran - think he still had them.
It was a strategy, Hussein has told his FBI interrogators during the last 10 months, that was aimed primarily at bluffing Iraq's neighbor to the east.
"The Iranian threat was very, very, palpable to him, and he didn't want to be second to Iran, and he felt he had to deter them. So he wanted to create the impression that he had more than he did," Duelfer, the Iraq Survey Group head, told members of the Senate on Wednesday.
And, the man known for colossal miscalculations made perhaps his greatest strategic blunder by refusing to believe that President Bush would make good on threats to forcibly remove him from power.
"He kept trying to bargain or barter, and he had not realized the nature of the ground shift in the international community," Duelfer said. "That was Saddam's intelligence failure."
Captured in December hiding in a hole in northern Iraq, Hussein is imprisoned at Camp Cropper, a U.S.-run facility at Baghdad's fortified airport. He spends much of his days writing, reading and tending to a solitary tree inside a walled courtyard on the camp grounds.
Yet despite reports that Hussein is delusional and often engrossed in romance novels, the senior U.S. official said he had shown himself in recent interrogations by an FBI agent to be lucid and even capable of appearing charismatic.
Before the interrogations began, Duelfer tried to determine what incentive U.S. officials could offer the ex-dictator to get him to cooperate. In the end, they decided to appeal to Hussein's vanity.
"The only thing we could offer was an opportunity to help shape his legacy," the official recalled. They asked Hussein whether he wanted "to be remembered by what these characters are saying about you" - referring to other captured Baathist officials who were talking to U.S. interrogators.
According to the report, Hussein told interrogators that two experiences in particular convinced him that Iraq's possession - or at least perceived possession - of banned weapons assured his survival.
During the late 1980s, when Iraq appeared to be losing its war against Iran, Hussein's outnumbered army managed to stave off fast-moving Iranian forces by firing more than 100,000 munitions containing mustard gas and other lethal blister agents and nerve gases. The chemical attacks caused as many as 80,000 Iranian casualties, according to U.N. reports, and ultimately led to a cease-fire.
Second, Hussein and his aides were convinced that their chemical and biological weapons saved the Baath Party regime after a U.S.-led military coalition forced Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in 1991. U.S. and allied troops halted their advance deep in southern Iraq, and Hussein and his regime unexpectedly were allowed to remain in power.
At the time, aides to then-President George H.W. Bush thought the reason Hussein had not used illicit weapons against the coalition was that Washington had delivered a clear warning that it would respond with overwhelming force, implying a nuclear attack if necessary.
Yet Hussein and his aides apparently read U.S. thinking differently. As they described it to interrogators, they thought Washington left him in power because U.S. officials knew of his orders to load and disperse his nerve gases and germ agents, and his orders that the weapons were to be used if U.S. troops entered Baghdad.
In the years after the Gulf War, the senior official said, Hussein became convinced that Washington would decide it was in its interest to deal with his regime because Iraq was large, secular, educated and had oil. That view may have been reinforced by the fact that during much of the Reagan administration, Washington supported Hussein as a counterweight to Iran.
The alliance became strained, however, and was ruptured when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
"He believed that ultimately the U.S. would come to deal with Baghdad," the official said. "The mistake he made was thinking he would still be in Baghdad."
The official predicted that Hussein would be "very compelling" when he was finally brought to trial in Baghdad for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
"He's looking forward to the stage, the theater, that the trial will offer him," he said. "Don't expect someone bug-eyed ... or waving his arms."
The Iraq Survey Group report also reveals a passion that Hussein had for certain aspects of Western culture, and how he personally related to certain fictional characters, such as Santiago in Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea."
In the story, the fisherman Santiago hooks a marlin that drags his boat out to sea. When the marlin dies, Santiago fights an ultimately futile battle with sharks that tear into the fish and reduce it to a skeleton.
"Saddam tended to characterize, in a very Hemingway-esque way, his life as a relentless struggle against overwhelming odds, but carried out with courage, perseverance and dignity," the report concludes.
"Much like Santiago, ultimately left with only the marlin's skeleton as the trophy of his success, to Saddam even a hollow victory was by his reckoning a real one."
-------- japan
Japanese FM presses case for reducing US military presence
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007205315.ah1g8qnk.html
Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura pressed the United States Thursday to reduce its military presence in Japan, saying it was "very important" and that it expected a "reasonable solution."
Machimura said after talks on the issue with US Secretary of State Colin Powell that Japan wanted "to lessen the excessive burden on especially Okinawa," where there was increasing resentment against US bases.
"That point is very important for us, so that we will continue and we will reach some conclusions in order to have a reasonable solution between two countries," the newly appointed Machimura told reporters, with Powell by his side.
Okinawa, captured by US forces in 1945 and returned to Japan in 1972, accounts for less than one percent of Japan's land mass but hosts about 65 percent of the 40,500 American military personnel in the country.
A series of crimes committed by US soldiers, as well as disputes over the ownership and use of the land on which US military facilities sit, have made Okinawa residents reluctant hosts.
Most recently, the crash of a US military helicopter on an Okinawan university campus in August revived anti-American sentiment and drew 30,000 protesters.
It was the largest anti-US military rally in Japan in nearly a decade.
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is "considering all possibilities" in Tokyo's attempt to reduce the US military presence on Okinawa, a Japanese official said Thursday in Hanoi where Koizumi is attending an Asia-Europe Summit.
Powell said the United States would "certainly take into account anything" raised by Koizumi and Japanese ministers on the military reduction issue but added that Washington had a channel to deal with such issues.
Machimura also held talks with US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice Thursday.
Powell said Rumsfeld would consider Machimura's comments and "present our point of view."
He expressed confidence that a resolution on the issue would be found under the US Defense Policy Review Initiative, or DPRI, a forum for establishing policies between the two countries.
"Through the DPRI system and process, we will work out answers to these questions," he said.
Tokyo and Washington have agreed to reduce the US military presence on Okinawa but no concrete plans have been worked out, partly due to the reluctance of other regions of Japan to assume part of the burden.
The United States wants to relocate some of the Okinawa bases elsewhere in Japan.
-------- russia
Russian Foreign Minister May Discuss Missiles with Iran - Sources
MosNews
07.10.2004
http://www.mosnews.com/news/2004/10/07/iranmissiles.shtml
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov who visits Tehran next week may raise the issue of Iran's missile program which has alarmed the United States and Israel, the Reuters news agency quoted diplomats as saying on Thursday.
Iran, accused by Washington of seeking nuclear weapons, said this week its latest version of its medium-range Shahab-3 missile could hit targets up to 2,000 km (1,250 miles) away.
Moscow is a close nuclear and political partner and last year helped persuade Iran to temporarily halt its uranium enrichment program and allow tougher U.N. checks of its sites.
"Among his planned topics for discussion ... this issue (missiles) does not feature. But of course I cannot state for sure that it won't be discussed," a deputy foreign minister, Alexander Alexeyev, told a news conference.
"A lot of other questions usually arise during talks apart from the topics originally planned to be discussed."
Lavrov's Oct. 10-11 visit will follow Moscow's harsh criticism of Iran's nuclear policies which some diplomats say could lead to Russia backing U.S. efforts to take Iran to the U.N. Security Council for sanctions.
Moscow has made no comment on the missile program.
The Shahab-3 was based on the North Korean Nodong-1 missile and modified with Russian technology. Iran says its missiles would be used to counter a possible Israeli or U.S. strike against its nuclear facilities.
The United States has imposed sanctions on many Russian research labs it accuses of supplying sensitive technology -- including missile and nuclear know-how -- to Iran and other states Washington thinks want arms of mass destruction.
Russia says it knows nothing about such contacts and that the arms trade authority has never formally approved such ties.
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Russia, Iran to Continue Nuke Cooperation
AP
Oct 7, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=518&ncid=732&e=10&u=/ap/20041007/ap_on_re_eu/russia_iran
MOSCOW - Russia will continue its nuclear energy cooperation with Iran, a senior Russian official said Thursday, despite international concern that Tehran might be trying to develop atomic weapons.
"We have been cooperating and will continue to cooperate with Iran in the peaceful usage of nuclear energy," Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Alexeyev said, according to the Interfax news agency. "It does not matter if there is pressure or not, but it does matter that we will comply with all legal commitments in cooperation with Iran."
Russia is completing a $800 million deal to build a nuclear reactor at Bushehr in southern Iran, a project that has drawn concern from the United States.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the United Nations (news - web sites)' nuclear watchdog agency, is investigating nearly two decades of covert nuclear activity by Iran. Tehran maintains its program is meant to generate electricity, but Washington claims it is a weapons program.
Russia has repeatedly emphasized that Iran has the right to develop a peaceful nuclear energy program, but Moscow has urged Iran to voluntarily halt all efforts to enrich uranium as a sign of goodwill and to show greater openness to IAEA inspectors. The IAEA has also called on Iran to halt uranium enrichment - a technology that could be used to make weapons.
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Russia Rejects Nuclear Criticism
Associated Press
By MARA D. BELLABY
Oct 7, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/R/RUSSIA_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=518&ncid=732&e=10&u=/ap/20041007/ap_on_re_eu/russia_nuclear
MOSCOW - Russia shrugged off U.S. criticism over nuclear issues Thursday, saying it had made progress in reducing its tactical weapons in Europe and would continue cooperating with Iran's program despite concerns Tehran might be trying to develop atomic weapons.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said a 1991-1992 initiative to reduce tactical nuclear weapons and implement other disarmament measures was being "completely fulfilled."
"All of these weapons, unlike the situation in the United States, are exclusively located on our national territory," Yakovenko said in a statement. "They are located under strict control ... there is no reason to be concerned."
His remarks came a day after Stephen G. Rademaker, an assistant U.S. secretary of state for arms control, reportedly said the United States was concerned that Russia had not entirely fulfilled its post-Soviet commitment to reduce the battlefield weapons that would be used in a potential European war.
"First of all, the word 'commitment' in this context isn't correct," Yakovenko said. "We are talking about a unilateral initiative in 1991-1992 that was a goodwill gesture on the side of Russia."
Yakovenko noted that Russia announced in May it had eliminated more than 50 percent of nuclear ammunition for tactical sea and air-based rockets.
Rademaker also said former President Bush (news - web sites) made a similar commitment in 1991 to remove and dismantle tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, adding that the United States removed those warheads years ago and dismantled them last year, according to the Interfax news agency.
Separately, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Alexeyev said Russia "will continue to cooperate with Iran in the peaceful usage of nuclear energy," another project that has drawn concern from the United States.
Russia is completing a $800 million deal to build a nuclear reactor at Bushehr in southern Iran.
"It does not matter if there is pressure or not, but it does matter that we will comply with all legal commitments in cooperation with Iran," Alexeyev said, according to Interfax. "Russia has said more than once that cooperation with Iran will be developed in line with the well-known norms."
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, is investigating nearly two decades of covert nuclear activity by Iran. Tehran maintains its program is meant to generate electricity, but Washington claims it is a weapons program.
Russia says Iran has the right to develop a peaceful nuclear energy program but has urged Iran to voluntarily halt all efforts to enrich uranium as a sign of goodwill and to show greater openness to IAEA inspectors.
-------- terrorism
A Terror Attack, Coming Soon to a Plant Near You
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Thursday, October 7, 2004
by the Los Angeles Times
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1007-22.htm
George W. Bush likes to boast of his record on homeland security, but the truth is that corporate and political favoritism by the White House has badly compromised our capacity to defend ourselves against a terrorist attack.
For example, even as we searched, apparently fruitlessly, for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, thousands of potential WMD - our nation's chemical and nuclear energy facilities - have been left unguarded to please the president's corporate friends and funders.
Of the nation's 15,000 chemical plants, the Environmental Protection Agency has identified 123 where toxic gases released by a terrorist assault could kill or injure more than 1 million people, and 700 others where deaths and injuries would exceed 100,000. Yet a series of recent investigations by news organizations has found that most of these plants are effectively unguarded, even though the risks are beyond dispute and Al Qaeda's interest in these targets is generously documented.
Seven weeks after 9/11, a GOP-controlled Senate committee unanimously passed a bill to require chemical plants to take steps to protect the public from terrorist attacks. But the White House, at the chemical industry's behest, derailed the bill and then removed the EPA's existing regulatory authority to require improvements in chemical plant security. Why would the Bush administration do this? All we know for sure is that President Bush and his party have accepted more than $22 million from the chemical industry since 1998.
The nuclear power industry, which gave $15 million to Bush and the GOP, also falls under the White House umbrella. A 2003 General Accounting Office report faulted the administration for failing to bolster nuclear plant defenses and found faulty security the rule at nuclear plants nationwide, despite myriad evidence that U.S. commercial nuclear reactors are high-priority terrorist targets. Astonishingly, federal law absolves nuclear power operators from protecting themselves against attack by enemies of the United States.
In order to be licensed, operators are required to protect their facilities from vandals. But both the GAO and industry reports acknowledge that the industry's private security guards are undertrained, underequipped and demoralized. When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission stages mock assaults, the attackers are able to penetrate plant defenses in half their attempts and trigger simulated catastrophic radiation releases - even though the defenders have advance notice of the exact time of the exercise and reinforce their defenses in anticipation. According to the GAO, the federal government deliberately stages "softball" mock attacks to give the impression of plant security and routinely shields the industry by burying significant security breaches.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's top aide, Al Martinez-Fonts, a former executive of JPMorgan Chase, recently explained why his department was reluctant to force the industry to adopt security reforms beyond voluntary programs, which Ridge himself admits don't work.
"I was in the private sector all my life," explained Martinez-Fonts. "Did I like it when the government came in and stepped in and told [us] to do certain things? The answer's no.. I think we're trying to avoid that."
Applying this philosophy broadly, the White House, at the behest of the airline industry and air cargo carriers, has opposed a bill by Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) to require that all commercial cargo placed on passenger planes be physically screened, just like luggage. Only about 5% of air cargo is now screened. Airline passengers are often sitting only inches above cargo that has not been checked, despite a Transportation Security Administration estimate in 2002 that there is a 35% to 65% chance that terrorists are planning to place a bomb in the cargo of a U.S. passenger plane.
The administration's record on port security is equally dismal. Only 1% of the 10 million cargo containers entering American ports each year are ever checked, yet the administration has opposed bipartisan legislation creating a cargo-container profiling plan that focuses on inspections of high-risk cargo.
Tiptoeing around other big contributors, the White House has done nothing to secure railroad and transit networks or protect oil and gas pipelines. Two billion dollars in annual federal anti-terror grants to the states has been distributed more on the basis of pork than on need.
Martinez-Font's idea that industry will step up to the plate on its own is pure folly. In July 2003, the Conference Board, a business research group, found that American corporations had hiked security expenditures less than 4% on average since the Sept. 11 attacks.
While asking sacrifice of young soldiers and future generations who will pay his giant deficits, Bush has been reluctant to curtail corporate profits or prerogatives or to ask sacrifice of political pals or the large donors who helped put him in office.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the author of "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering Our Country and Hijacking Our Democracy" (HarperCollins, 2004).
-------
Plutonium: rising terror threat
The Christian Science Monitor
By Mark Clayton
October 07, 2004
http://csmonitor.com/2004/1007/p13s02-wogi.html
The biggest threat facing the United States - and the world - is the spread of nuclear material to rogue states and terrorists. So say terrorism experts. Both major American presidential candidates concurred in last week's televised debate.
So why is the US moving plutonium from military to less secure civilian control? And why, critics ask, is it embarking on research programs that teach other nations how to use plutonium in nuclear power plants after a quarter-century of opposing such moves? That's what Tom Clements wants to know. Lurking beside major highways that cut through the heart of France, Mr. Clements and other antinuclear activists from Greenpeace usually watch for unmarked white trucks carrying plutonium-based fuel to French nuclear power plants. Their aim is to dramatize how easily terrorists could spot the trucks and steal their contents. This week, however, they hope to track more dangerous quarry: a convoy laden with about 275 pounds of plutonium oxide shipped from the US. Unlike nuclear fuel for power plants, which terrorists would have to convert to make a bomb, this plutonium is weapons grade - enough dark, coarse-grained powder that could be used immediately to make 15 to 20 atom bombs the size of the one dropped on Nagasaki in World War II.
Knowing terrorists are seeking nuclear material, nations have made strides to secure bomb-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU). But they have paid far less attention to an alternative: plutonium.
The US shipment of weapons-grade plutonium to France, its first overseas, is not only a security threat but also clouds America's nonproliferation message, critics say. Moreover, it focuses attention on plutonium from another source - nuclear power plants. This "separated" plutonium can be converted into a weapon and poses a threat comparable to HEU, most experts say.
"The big risk we face with separated plutonium is from theft by terrorists at a factory making reactor fuel - maybe an inside job," says David Albright, a researcher at the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington think tank. "You always have to worry about the physical protection of plutonium. Nations always tell you their protection is good. But it may not be enough." Consider:
• The world is swimming in plutonium. Although military stockpiles have stabilized, the amount of civilian-held plutonium has doubled in the past 13 years, says a new ISIS report. At the end of 2003, 14 nations' civilian reactors held 235 metric tons of the most dangerous variety in terms of a terrorist threat - separated plutonium. That's enough material to fashion some 40,000 Nagasaki-sized weapons; the amount is growing by five to 10 tons a year.
• France annually converts tons of this plutonium to a mixed-oxide or MOX fuel, which is trucked to its nuclear power plants. Despite its "reactor grade" label, MOX could make an effective bomb - as a US test in 1962 revealed. Even if a weapon "fizzled" because its plutonium was only reactor-grade, it would still yield a one-kiloton explosion that would "rip the heart out of a city," says Leonard Spector, deputy director of the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
• While it's far simpler to make a bomb from HEU, it's conceivable that terrorists could build a plutonium-based device with expert help, observers say. Just 15 pounds of the material, a baseball-sized chunk, would be enough to wipe out a large portion of a major city. Last month, Kyrgyz security agents arrested a man trying to sell 60 small containers of plutonium.
The US has carefully protected the onetime shipment of plutonium to France, counters Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the Department of Energy. "There are efforts and procedures in place we're not going to discuss publicly."
By developing new technology to reprocess the plutonium in nuclear fuel, the US can boost its energy independence and reduce the volume of nuclear waste, the administration argues. It contends this could make unnecessary a second nuclear-waste repository beyond Yucca Mountain.
"It is our hope that this technology will ... provide the benefits of recycling spent fuel without increasing proliferation risks," Kyle McSlarrow, deputy secretary of Energy, told Congress in July.
Two forms, one menace
Plutonium is created when uranium fuel is irradiated within a nuclear reactor. Reprocessing extracts the plutonium from spent fuel, which may then be fabricated into more fuel for reactors. Civilian plutonium comes in two basic varieties: the separated plutonium and irradiated plutonium, which is embedded within spent nuclear fuel rods.
Ironically, irradiated plutonium is less worrisome because it is so radioactive. Terrorists typically wouldn't be able to handle spent rods without fatal consequences, though desperadoes could steal it for use in a dirty bomb. But separated plutonium could be diverted within a plant or stolen en route and readily transformed back into metal plutonium suitable for bombs, nonproliferation experts say.
The arrival in France Wednesday of US weapons-grade plutonium - destined for fabrication into commercial reactor fuel - highlights these concerns.
During the 1960s, it was thought that future shortages of uranium would make it economical to extract plutonium from reactor waste and use it for fuel. Some nations forged ahead, Britain, France, Japan, and the Soviet Union among them, despite the higher cost of reprocessing. So did the US - until India in 1974 conducted a "peaceful nuclear explosion" using a device created with plutonium culled from a research reactor.
Recognizing the danger of nuclear proliferation, presidents Ford and Carter discouraged the use of plutonium as a fuel in civilian reactors. The US government withdrew its support for a "plutonium economy," throttling back America's use of plutonium as reactor fuel.
So while the US military has plenty of weapons-grade plutonium, America has refused to reprocess spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium for civilian use. Therefore, the US does not have a growing stockpile of civilian plutonium - which some would say is a huge blessing, given the costs involved in disposing of it.
Even so, the idea of using plutonium for civilian use gained a toehold during the Clinton administration. The US and Russia in 2000 signed a disarmament treaty to dispose of "excess" military plutonium by following a dual-track approach. Some of the 34 metric tons of military plutonium from each country would be mixed with nuclear waste and put into canisters for burial - while the rest would be made into MOX for use in the US and Russia.
Russia had resisted the burial option, declaring plutonium a valuable resource. In January 2002, the Bush administration dropped the idea, too. Instead, Energy secretary Spencer Abraham announced all 34 tons of excess US weapons plutonium would be made into MOX for power plants.
"The US and Russia have agreed to dispose of 34 tons each of weapons plutonium through the Russians' preferred method of conversion to MOX," says Mr. Wilkes, whose agency oversees the joint weapons-to-MOX program. "We need the Russians on board."
The US plan calls for France to create a limited amount of reactor fuel from the weapons-grade plutonium and then ship it back to South Carolina's Catawba nuclear-power plant for a test next spring. After that, the plan is for MOX to be made on US soil at a new $2.2 billion fabrication plant in South Carolina. The facility is to be completed by 2008 by a US subsidiary of Areva, the French company that's supplying the MOX to Catawba.
The plan faces some obstacles. Environmentalists have filed suit in a bid to block the use of MOX fuel in the Catawba plant. A bigger obstacle is a dispute between Russia and the US over who would be liable in case of an accident or terrorist act involving US contractors working in Russia on the new MOX plant there. Absent an agreement, the whole plan will grind to a halt, analysts say.
Murky policy
Officially, the US still discourages other nations from using plutonium-based fuels in civilian reactors. But shipping plutonium to France to make MOX undercuts any US efforts to discourage the likes of Iran and North Korea from reprocessing spent reactor fuel, several experts say.
Even for disarmament purposes, the use of MOX in US power plants "sets a terrible example for the world" when burying the material is still an alternative, says Paul Leventhal, head of the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington. "You don't want to in any way legitimate the use of bomb-grade fuels to generate electricity - because you can do that with low-grade fuels. So why allow it?"
The US has in recent years begun promoting nuclear fuel-reprocessing technology for extracting plutonium, experts note. In May 2001, the Bush administration's new National Energy Policy emphasized the use of nuclear power to meet energy needs. At the same time, it also endorsed and promoted reconsideration of "advanced reprocessing" of spent reactor fuel. Despite the administration's hopes, this futuristic material would not significantly decrease terrorists' ability to use it to make a bomb, critics say.
"The Bush administration has explicitly changed its policies," says Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist in the global security program of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "It is actively promoting recycling spent fuel at home and abroad."
The US has spearheaded the Generation IV International Forum with some 10 nations to develop new generation nuclear power plants. At least three of the five reactor designs under consideration would use recycled plutonium, Dr. Lyman says.
The US has also contracted with South Korea and other nations to work on the International Nuclear Energy Research Initiative, which includes new technologies for recycling plutonium. South Korea revealed last month that in 1982 some of its civilian researchers, without permission, had separated plutonium.
From power to bombs?
The revelation caused an uproar among nonproliferation experts, who worry about civilian programs developing reprocessing expertise that can lead to weapons development. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei called the experiments "of serious concern."
Meanwhile, Japan has a new reprocessing plant seeking certification. India wants to expand its reprocessing capacity. China has said it, too, wants to reprocess for civilian purposes.
"Plutonium production is a machine that just won't stop," says Dr. Spector of the Monterey Institute. "The nuclear establishment is so powerful in some countries, it just drives forward by its own inertia."
The spread of reprocessing technology, combined with the move to use MOX fuel in US reactors, comes at a time when the world is desperate to corral loose nuclear material before terrorists can get it.
Plutonium is especially hard to track. When it's being reprocessed or fabricated, it sticks to nearly everything it comes in contact with. Last year, for example, international nuclear inspectors reported that the Tokaimura nuclear-fuel reprocessing plant north of Tokyo could not account for some of its plutonium - enough to make 25 nuclear weapons. Similarly, France's COGEMA Cadarache plant where the US is shipping its excess military plutonium, was found by EURATOM in 2002 to have "an unacceptable amount of material unaccounted for," according to a recent report in Nuclear Fuel, a trade publication.
"It's like seeing an accident in the future and pressing on the accelerator.," says Henry Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. "We're all human, and we make mistakes in government. But on this we should just cease and desist."
-------- u.n.
IAEA Chief ElBaradei Calls for Stronger Global Security Framework
7 October 2004
International Atomic Energy Agency
http://www.iaea.or.at/NewsCenter/News/2004/globalsecurity.html
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei spoke of the nuclear threat and the urgent need for countries to seize a window of opportunity for strengthening the world´s security, in an address 6 October 2004 to the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs in Seoul.
"The nuclear genie is out of the box - but it remains, at least at present, at the bidding of its human makers," Dr. ElBaradei said.
Addressing the conference of scientists working for nuclear disarmament, Dr. ElBaradei said it was clear that insecurity bred proliferation. "Nuclear weapons will not go away until a proved collective security framework exists to fill the vacuum."
The Director General outlined recent lessons learnt about nuclear verification. Among them, that verification and diplomacy, used in conjunction can be effective. "The Iraq experience has demonstrated that inspections - while requiring time and patience - can be effective even when the country under inspection is providing less than active cooperation."
A second lesson, Dr. ElBaradei said, was that "we cannot afford not to act in cases of non-compliance." The Director General cited the case of North Korea and the role of the UN Security Council in nuclear cases referred to it. "The Security Council must be able and ready to engage effectively in both preventive diplomacy and enforcement measures, with the tools and methods in place necessary to cope with existing and emerging threats to international peace and security," he said.
Pointing the way forward, Dr. ElBaradei spoke of measures to strengthen the existing non-proliferation regime. Among them:
- urging all States to bring the additional protocol into force;
- tightening and formalizing the controls over the export of nuclear materials and technology;
- working towards multilateral control over the sensitive parts of the nuclear fuel cycle - enrichment, reprocessing, and the management and disposal of spent fuel - while guaranteeing the reliability of supply to legitimate would-be users; and
- ensuring that States cannot withdraw from the global Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) without clear consequences, including prompt review and appropriate action by the Security Council.
"Each of these measures would be in keeping with a collective security framework that aims simultaneously to curb nuclear proliferation and to achieve nuclear disarmament," Dr. ElBaradei said. See the related links for the full speech.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- ohio
NRC SETS SCHEDULE FOR REVIEW OF USEC APPLICATION;
OFFERS OPPORTUNITY TO REQUEST PARTICIPATION IN HEARING
nrc.gov
October 7, 2004
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2004/04-129.html
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has established a 30-month schedule for reviewing an application from USEC Inc., to build a gas centrifuge uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio, to be known as the American Centrifuge Plant. The agency will hold a hearing on the application as part of its review and invites those who may be affected by the proceeding to seek permission to participate in the hearing.
The facility would be housed in buildings and areas leased from the Department of Energy (DOE) where DOE operated similar gas centrifuge machines in the 1980s. USEC's gas centrifuge technology is based on DOE's gas centrifuge technology, which USEC obtained by signing an agreement with DOE in June 2002.
The NRC has determined that the application, which was submitted on Aug. 23, contains sufficient information for the agency to begin its detailed review and has formally "docketed" the application. A copy will be available on the NRC's Agencywide Document Access and Management System (ADAMS) using accession number ML042800551 through http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/web-based.html. A copy will also be available at the NRC's Public Document Room at One White Flint North, 11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Md.
The NRC staff will conduct a comprehensive review of the USEC application and prepare a safety evaluation report and environmental impact statement before the hearing is completed. The applicant and the NRC staff will be parties to the hearing.
Any other person whose interest may be affected and who wishes to participate as a party in the hearing proceeding must file a petition to intervene within 60 days of publication of the Commission's notice and order in the Federal Register, expected shortly. The petition must be filed with the Secretary of the Commission, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555-0001, Attention: Rulemaking and Adjudications Staff, with copies by fax or e-mail and to the NRC staff and applicant attorney at the addresses listed in the Federal Register notice. The petition must include the particular interest of the petitioner in the proceeding and how that interest may be affected by the results of the proceeding; a specification of the contentions, or specific issues, that the petitioner seeks to have litigated in the hearing; and other information as set out in detail in the Federal Register notice.
Construction and operation of the American Centrifuge Plant, if authorized, will be preceded by a test and demonstration facility to be known as a "Lead Cascade." NRC issued a license for the Lead Cascade in February, and construction of the cascade is underway in one of the buildings to be used for the full-scale plant.
-------- tennessee
TVA nuclear reactor needs $200 million repair
October 7, 2004
WorldNow and WHNT TV 19
http://www.whnt19.com/Global/story.asp?S=2401749
SPRING CITY, Tenn. The Watts Bar Nuclear Plant needs a 200-(m)-millon-dollar repair.
The plant at Spring City, Tennessee, has been operating for only eight years and has an expected lifetime of five times that.
But T-V-A says it needs to replace four steam generators at the plant, about 40 miles south of Knoxville.
The plant began operation in 1996 after 23 years of interrupted construction and a price tag of seven (b) billion dollars.
T-V-A isn't alone. Utilities across the nation are having to replace these expensive pieces of equipment at pressurized water reactors like Watts Bar because of leaking tubes affecting power generation.
Water from the nuclear reactor goes through the generator and is turned into steam, which turns turbines that produce electricity.
-------- us nuc waste
Agency hunts new site to store nuclear waste
Energy Department tried to ship material to Nevada Test Site
By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Thursday, October 07, 2004
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Oct-07-Thu-2004/news/24935665.html
WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department has begun to look at new disposal choices for nuclear weapons waste it has been blocked from sending to the Nevada Test Site.
Department officials have told a cleanup contractor to identify other sites where special-category radioactive byproducts might be shipped out of three 20-foot-tall silos at the decommissioned Fernald uranium-processing plant 18 miles north of Cincinnati.
The government expects the contractor, Fluor Fernald, to submit a report by the end of the week with cost estimates and a timetable to conduct a search, said Johnny Reising, DOE associate director for environmental restoration at the plant.
In a Sept. 24 letter, a project director at Fluor Fernald was told: "Identify viable alternatives leading to either commercial interim storage or permanent commercial disposal of the silo materials. Permanent disposal is the preferred alternative."
Reising directed questions to headquarters as to whether the search means the department has abandoned plans to move the waste to the Nevada Test Site.
A DOE spokesman in Washington did not respond to a call and an e-mailed query.
Nevada has not received any notification from the Energy Department, said Marta Adams, an assistant attorney general. But Adams said state officials are taking the department's directive to Fluor Fernald as a sign the department might be moving on.
"That says to me they really are trying to find another site rather than the test site, which is quite delightful," Adams said. "We were on pretty solid legal footing."
Attorney General Brian Sandoval threatened to sue the government after the Energy Department in February announced plans to move 3,750 truckloads of the special type of radioactive waste to its low-level nuclear waste dump at the test site.
Sandoval said the Fernald material contained more potent levels of waste than what the test site is licensed to store safely.
The department has shipped 6.4 million cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste from the Fernald site to Nevada since the early 1980s.
Energy Department lawyers said the waste could be buried at the test site but delayed shipments to Nevada after Sandoval's legal threat and said the state would be given 45-days notice before the department began any shipping.
Two of the silos contain 240,000 cubic feet of slurry tainted with byproducts of high-grade uranium that was used at the Fernald plant for 37 years until it was shut down in 1989. The third silo contains 137,000 cubic feet of powdery thorium waste.
-------- MILITARY
Sailor dies as crippled Canadian submarine keeps drifting off Ireland
DUBLIN (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041006233332.4ko97w9t.html
One of nine Canadian sailors injured when their newly-delivered, British-built submarine caught fire in the North Atlantic has died, the Canadian government said Wednesday.
Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin announced the death of Lieutenant Chris Saunders in parliament in Ottawa just hours after three of the injured were admitted to hospital in Ireland, one in critical condition.
The trio had been airlifted Wednesday evening in a British Sea King helicopter to the general hospital in Sligo, northwest Ireland.
A British frigate reached the crippled HMCS Chicoutimi earlier Wednesday after the sub and its 57 crew endured a terrifying night adrift in gale-force conditions off northwest Ireland following an electrical fire.
The submarine was on its way to Halifax, Nova Scotia, home of Canada's naval fleet in the North Atlantic, less than a week after it was commissioned in Scotland following a thorough refit.
Irish officials told AFP that the diesel electric submarine -- one of four built in the 1980s that Canada has bought from Britain -- was off County Mayo late Wednesday, drifting southwards at three miles (five kilometres) an hour.
Informed sources in Dublin said they expected Ottawa to ask for permission for the submarine to be towed into Irish waters, probably Blacksod Bay on the western coast of County Mayo.
If such a request is made, "we will deal with it expeditiously," Irish Marine Minister Pat the Cope Gallagher said.
The British frigate HMS Montrose reached the Chicoutimi at around 1:30 pm (1230 GMT) Wednesday to coordinate rescue and salvage efforts, a Ministry of Defence spokeswoman in London said.
"HMS Montrose will be establishing communications with the submarine and assessing the situation to decide what the next step will be," she said.
Photographs from a Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft loitering over the Chicoutimi showed several red-suited Canadian sailors on its bridge, with white froth lapping at the black-hulled vessel in a dark swelling sea.
Commodore Tyrone Pyle, commander of Canada's Atlantic fleet, said earlier Wednesday any towing of the powerless sub would likely not take place before Friday and would last several days.
The submarine made a distress call at around 1415 GMT Tuesday from 100 nautical miles (180 kilometers) off the northwest coast of Ireland after a fire broke out behind an electrical panel, the Canadian navy said.
It took 15 minutes to put out the fire, but the blaze was enough to leave the Chicoutimi without power. Officials said all nine injured had been victims of smoke inhalation.
"They will have a certain amount of battery-powered emergency lighting, but they will be trying to conserve whatever power they have," a Royal Navy spokesman told Britain's domestic Press Association news agency.
"It's going to be extremely dangerous for someone to be on board that frigate throwing a line, and even more dangerous for someone from the submarine crew to be outside trying to tie that up."
Two tugs -- one from the British naval base at Faslane, Scotland and the second a coastguard vessel from Shetland -- were among several vessels trying to reach the submarine, as investigation teams prepared to probe the cause of the accident.
Last week the Times newspaper in London said Canada might sue Britain over all four second-hand submarines -- including the Chicoutimi -- after they had been plagued by "serious malfunctions and corrosion" including leaks and dents.
-------- africa
Blair: Sudan Agrees to Withdraw Troops, Militias in Darfur
By Mohamed Osman
Associated Press
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13157-2004Oct6.html
KHARTOUM, Sudan, Oct. 6 -- Sudan has agreed to a joint withdrawal of government and rebel forces in the strife-torn region of Darfur and will accept a large increase in international cease-fire monitors, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said Wednesday after talks with Sudan's president.
Blair said Sudan also committed to identifying the location of its troops and weapons in Darfur and to working toward comprehensive peace agreements by the end of the year with rebels there and in southern Sudan.
More than 50,000 people have been killed in Darfur and 1.5 million have been driven from their homes since February 2003. The conflict, rooted in tensions between African farmers and Arab nomads, has grown into a counterinsurgency in which pro-government Arab militiamen have raped, killed and burned the homes of African villagers.
The government denies allegations that it supports the Arab militia, known as the Janjaweed.
Blair, on the first stop of a three-day visit to Africa, said President Omar Hassan Bashir had agreed to all of the suggestions he offered. They included a significant expansion of troops from the African Union in Darfur, where a few hundred of the group's soldiers have been monitoring a shaky cease-fire among two rebel groups, government troops and allied militiamen.
"We need several thousand people there in order to monitor any cease-fire," Blair told reporters at the British ambassador's residence in Khartoum, the capital.
Other proposals called for the government to identify the location of its troops and munitions in Darfur, return its troops to barracks in conjunction with a similar withdrawal by rebel forces, commit itself to reaching a comprehensive peace agreement with the rebels in Darfur and in southern Sudan by Dec. 31 and abide by the humanitarian accords signed with the United Nations on Darfur.
Blair said Britain would ensure that Sudan implemented all the pledges.
Hilary Benn, Britain's international development secretary, who is traveling with Blair, said Britain would also try to push the two rebel groups back to the negotiating table. Peace talks held in Nigeria collapsed last month.
"There is also a message for the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudanese Liberation Army," Benn told BBC radio. "They, too, have to be part of the solution, and they must enter negotiations in good faith with the government of Sudan, because it is only a political agreement that, in the end, will bring this to a halt."
The Sudanese Foreign Ministry later issued a statement saying Sudan was committed to "the leadership role and engagement of the African Union in addressing the situation in Darfur."
The Foreign Ministry said Blair and Bashir also discussed the "finalization" of the peace process in southern Sudan, where the government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army are in the final stages of a deal to end a war that began in 1983.
-------- arms
France, Germany vie for Indian submarines deal: report
BERLIN (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007195218.bu4b7xb1.html
France and Germany are locked in a battle to win a contract to sell six submarines to India, the German financial newspaper Handelsblatt said Friday, citing German political and industrial sources.
Berlin is backing the HDW consortium's bid, though its French rival DCN was a hot favourite, according to the newspaper in its Friday edition, which says Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder wanted to raise the deal with the Indian government.
After a meeting in New Delhi with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Schroeder said Thursday the two countries aimed to double trade over a five-year period from the current annual level of five billion euros (some 6.15 billion dollars).
They said science and technology would be the new focus of their strategic partnership.
The two countries also agreed on annual high-level exchanges and said they would continue to support each other's campaigns for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
Schroeder, accompanied by a business and political delegation, arrived in India Wednesday on the first leg of a four-nation tour aimed at bolstering ties with Asia.
--------
U.S. warns EU against arms trade with China
The Associated Press
October 07, 2004
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=542527.html
BRUSSELS The United States could restrict transfers of sensitive defense technology to European Union countries if EU members support a French effort to end the bloc's 15-year arms embargo on China, a senior State Department official said Thursday.
Washington argues that lifting the European embargo could undermine stability in East Asia and hurt efforts to improve human rights in China.
"It will be a significant obstacle to U.S. defense cooperation with European Union member states," warned Gregory Suchan, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs.
President Jacques Chirac of France was preparing to visit China on Friday, and has again urged his EU partners to drop the ban, which was imposed after the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
"France favors lifting the embargo," Chirac said Thursday in an interview with China's official Xinhua News Agency.
"We are trying to obtain from the European Union the lifting as soon as possible of an embargo that dates to another time and that no longer corresponds to the reality of things," Chirac said.
Chirac and other European leaders will meet Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China at a weekend EU-Asia summit meeting in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi.
France is expected to try to have the arms ban lifted when foreign ministers from the 25 EU nations hold their regular monthly meeting Monday in Luxembourg.
EU officials said U.S. lobbying had made it unlikely that there would be the unanimous support that is needed for lifting the ban unlikely. "I don't think we have any chance," one EU official said. Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands and others have backed the U.S. position.
The United States fears that sales of high-tech European military equipment, such as radars and communications equipment, could lead to China's increasing intimidation of Taiwan, upset the military balance in the Pacific and even threaten U.S. troops in the region.
"U.S. forces could find themselves targeted by weapons that were built in NATO countries," said Colonel Michael Ryan, defense adviser at the U.S. mission to the EU.
Ryan said EU arms sales to China could force the United States to move troops from Europe to strengthen forces in Asia. Suchan added that the U.S. Congress would almost certainly halt moves to free up the flow of defense technology across the Atlantic and would instead tighten restrictions.
EU nations also face pressure from human rights groups and the European Parliament against lifting the arms ban.
Opponents of the ban say the EU would continue to monitor arms sales to China and restrict exports of goods that could be used for internal repression or international aggression, even after the lifting of the ban.
They argue that the embargo hinders good relations with China, by keeping it on an EU arms black list with Myanmar, Zimbabwe and Sudan. The EU is expected Monday to lift its weapons embargo against Libya.
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Northrop Grumman Conducts First Flight of First Navy Global Hawk
Palmdale CA (SPX)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/uav-04zzz.html
Northrop Grumman conducted the first flight of the first RQ-4A Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle slated for the Navy's Global Hawk Maritime Demonstration (GHMD).
The air vehicle, dubbed N-1, flew from the company's Palmdale, Calif., production facility to the Birk Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.
A joint U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force and contractor team will begin preliminary testing of the air vehicle in preparation for its delivery to the Navy in 2005.
N-1 is the first of two Global Hawks Northrop Grumman is producing for the GHMD program. The second air vehicle is scheduled to make its maiden flight early next year. GHMD will demonstrate the system's ability to support Naval maritime surveillance missions. The Navy will operate both vehicles from Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md.
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French anger at Duelfer report charges over Iraq corruption
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007182821.gkrujhkc.html
France on Thursday complained to the United States over accusations that French nationals and businesses took bribes from Iraq made in a report by the chief US weapons inspector.
The French embassy approached the White House and the US State Department to express anger at the way the allegations were made public.
"The ambassador told the White House and the State Department of our displeasure concerning the methods used," an embassy official told AFP.
The official said France was particularly unhappy about "the fact that the names of individuals and companies were made public without any apparent attempt to verify the allegations, and without giving them an opportunity to explain themselves."
The study by the Iraq Survey Group said former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein paid millions of dollars in cash and petrol export vouchers to elicit help in his bid to end the UN sanctions regime on his country.
Mentioned in Charles Deulfer's report are former French interior minister Charles Pasqua and Patrick Maugein, an official of the French petroleum company Soco International said to be close to French President Jacques Chirac.
Pasqua and Maugein have strenuously denied accepting consideration from the Saddam regime.
France and Russia were the main recipients, according Duelfer's report, by virtue of the influence they wielded as permanent members of the UN Security Council.
The French foreign ministry denied the accusations earlier, calling them "unverified, either with those concerned or with the authorities of the concerned countries."
Duelfer's report, citing documents recovered from Saddam's intelligence services, said the Iraqi payments particularly targeted French political, economic and journalistic circles.
The report refers to a list published last January by the Baghdad newspaper Al-Mada of some 200 names from 40 countries that allegedly peddled influence with Iraq in return for export vouchers for millions of barrels of oil.
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Sadr militia offers arms-for-prisoners exchange with Iraqi government
BAGHDAD (AFP)
Oct 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041007191854.46y5kmix.html
Shiite militiamen loyal to radical cleric Moqtada Sadr offered Thursday to surrender heavy and medium weapons in return for the release of prisoners and a role in Iraq's political process, a spokesman for Sadr said.
The US-backed Iraqi government welcomed the news, but did not say whether it would comply with the concessions.
"We are ready to lay down our heavy and medium-sized weapons in return for the release of all those imprisoned from our movement, a commitment that members of our movement will no longer be pursued and the restoration of basic services to areas like Sadr City," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Darraji told AFP.
"This initiative is being presented only to the Iraqi government," rather than the US-led multinational forces with which Sadr's militia has been battling, he stressed.
For its part, the interim administration was upbeat over the development.
"The government welcomes the announcement by Sayyed Moqtada Sadr that his militia will disband, hand in their weapons, respect the authority and unity of the state, and abide by the rule of law," national security adviser Qasim Dawood said in a statement.
"The government therefore looks forward to this undertaking being respected and implemented," he said, reiterating a pledge to offer amnesty to anyone who did not commit crimes against the Iraqi people.
The Sadr spokesman said that Sadr's movement was willing to take part in nationwide elections provided they were "free of US influence and overseen by international monitors".
The government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has been trying to work out a deal that calls on fighters to lay down their weapons unconditionally in the Baghdad district of Sadr City and the return of full control of the area to Iraqi forces.
The deal, which is being mediated by local tribal leaders, also calls for the launch of reconstruction in the mostly Shiite district.
But the tough-talking Allawi insisted Wednesday that the government was responding to a call from Sadr City citizens to restore stability to the area and that there were "no negotiations or deal to be signed".
Sadr's partisans protest that the frequent US assaults and air strikes against its militia positions in Sadr City are an obstacle to ending the violence.
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Lies, Damned Lies, and Bush's Iraq Statistics
The security forces are inadequate, the coalition is a joke, and reconstruction has barely begun.
By Fred Kaplan
Thursday, Oct. 7, 2004
The current Iraqi forces are just a start George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have lately been touting three sets of statistics to justify their claims of great progress in Iraq. First, they say, we've trained 100,000 Iraqi security forces. Second, 31 other countries are contributing troops as part of the vast international coalition. Third, Iraqi reconstruction is moving along on schedule, thanks to the $18.4 billion in U.S. economic aid.
Yet the U.S. State Department's most recent Iraq Weekly Status Report, dated Oct. 6, reveals that all three of those claims are either false or so misleading that they might as well be. http://www.export.gov/iraq/pdf/state_wklyrpt_100604.pdf
First, it's true there are 100,000 Iraqi security forces, about three-quarters of whom are police, army troops or National Guardsmen. But that falls far short of the 272,000 forces that the report calculates are required. (For a breakdown of how many trained security forces exist and how many are needed, by category,
http://slate.msn.com/id/2107914/sidebar/2107921/ .
Second, about those 31 coalition members: All told, according to the report, they're contributing about 24,000 troops. The British alone are supplying about 8,000. So the remaining 30 countries have a total of 16,000 troops in Iraq-an average of just over 500 troops per country. The United States has about 130,000 troops over there-more than five times as many as all the other 31 countries combined. (For a full list of the countries involved-which include such powerhouses as Albania, Azerbaijan, and Tonga-click here - http://slate.msn.com/id/2107914/sidebar/2107920/ .) This is not a coalition in the recognized sense of that word.
Compare those figures with these: During the 1991 Gulf War (according to U.S. Central Command's official history of that conflict), 37 other nations took part, sending a total of 800,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, as well as 300 combat support battalions, over 225 naval vessels, and 2,800 fixed-wing aircraft. Those aircraft flew 112,000 sorties and dropped 87,000 tons of munitions on Iraqi targets. Among the nations sending at least one army division were Egypt and Syria. Now that's a coalition. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB39/document6.pdf
More damning are the report's figures on Iraqi reconstruction. Yes, the U.S. Congress has appropriated $18.4 billion for this effort; but, according to the report, the authorities on the ground in Iraq have spent just $1.3 billion-about 7 percent of the money set aside.
The specifics of this disparity are still more depressing. For security and law enforcement, $3.2 billion was appropriated, but only $646 million has been spent. For electricity, $5.4 billion was appropriated, $330 million spent. For water resources and sanitation, $4.2 billion was appropriated, a pathetic $23 million spent. For oil infrastructure, $1.7 billion was appropriated, just $47 million spent. For justice, public safety and civil society, $1 billion was appropriated, $55 million spent. For health care, $786 million was appropriated, but $4 million spent. For transportation and communication, $500 million was appropriated, $12 million spent. And the list goes on.
Although the State Department issued this report, you will not find it-or its weekly updates-on the State Department's Web site. Nor will you find it on the site of the Agency for International Development (though AID does have a similar report, with far vaguer and rosier figures). Instead, you'll find it on the Web site of the U.S. Commerce Department's Iraq Investment and Reconstruction Task Force-in short, on a site for businesses that need to know what's really happening over there.
What's really happening-in numbers as clear as day-is that the training of security forces is proceeding way too slowly, the coalition is a misnomer, and reconstruction has barely got off the ground.
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate.
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http://slate.msn.com/id/2107914/sidebar/2107921/