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NUCLEAR
US plutonium reaches French plant
DIANA versus HAARP
US Bomb-Grade Plutonium Convoy to Cross France
India, the US and nuclear proliferation
U.S. Says Iraq Sought Russian Defense Systems
Hussein's Aims, Capabilities Often Differed
Former U.N. Inspectors Cite New Report as Validation
Japan Kansai Elec ready to restart 3 nuclear units
Opposition to grill gov't over U.S. report of no WMD proof in Iraq
Military Begins Missile-Defense Exercises
Russia's Gazprom to acquire key nuclear firm-paper
DOE Commends Defense Authorization Conference Committee Action
Compensation Overhauled for Nuke Workers
The big choice on waste at SRS
MILITARY
Rumsfeld Comes to Macedonia: Give US More Soldiers for Iraq
Afghan Vote Is a Referendum on Karzai
U.S. Report Says Hussein Bought Arms With Ease
Many Helped Iraq Evade U.N. Sanctions On Weapons
Ministers 'sorry' for Iraq error
As head of Halliburton, Cheney sought to do business with Iran
Deal Would Bar Lease of Boeing 767s
Boeing loses $23.5bn US Air Force contract
Beheadings Mark Haiti's Latest Misery
UN oil-for-food:
Inspector's Report Says Hussein Expected Guerrilla War
U.S. Releases Senior Aide to Sadr
British Hostage Is Beheaded by Militants in Iraq
Pentagon Sets Steps to Retake Iraq Rebel Sites
An Ominous Drone in the Gaza Sky
Rescue Workers Pick Through Wreckage at Egyptian Resort
Death Toll Is Uncertain After 3 Explosions Strike Resort Towns
NATO agrees plans for Iraq training mission
Vieques Supporters Ask Superfund Cleanup of Weapons Area
US spy vs Indian spy
Many Helped Iraq Evade U.N. Sanctions On Weapons
U.S. Delaying Action on Violators of Iraq Sanctions
Pentagon Leaders Tell Ranks to Get Ballots and Use Them
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
U.S. Supreme Court Debates Pollution Cleanup Lawsuits
Judge challenged about visit to CIA
Journalist Cited for Contempt in Leak Probe
GOP Backs Alternative to Terrorist Deportation
Senate Rejects Plan Endorsed by 9/11 Panel
Lawmakers Fight to Strip Bill of Its Immigration Measures
House Approves Spyware Bills
POLITICS
THE BUSH RECORD : Mounting Debt
House Passes Corporate Tax Bill
Democratic Leaders Call for DeLay's Ouster
After Ethics Rebukes, DeLay's Fortunes May Lie With His Party's
Links Between Lobbying, Fundraising, Legislation Laid Out
Ex-Postal Official Admits Taking Nearly $800,000 in Bribes
Anthrax Inquiry Draws Criticism From Federal Judge
Bush's Isolation From Reporters Could Be a Hindrance
In New Attacks, Bush Pushes Limit on the Facts
What I Really Said About Iraq
Reporter for Times Is Facing Jail Time
Full Transcript: Second Presidential Debate
Kerry's 'global' test
Candidates Use Arms Report to Make Case
Arms Report Spurs Bitter Bush-Kerry Exchange
OTHER
Green and greener: Nobel prize highlights rise of environmentalism
Scientists Find New Way Stem Cells Repair Organs
Push Against Polio Launched in Africa
ACTIVISTS
Lawyers' Group Sues City Over Arrests of Protesters
Bennington war protester to be sentenced by board
Japan: Peace group coalition calls for troop withdrawal from Iraq
-------- NUCLEAR
US plutonium reaches French plant Police guarded bridges along the route south
Friday, 8 October, 2004
(BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3726002.stm
A controversial shipment of US weapons-grade plutonium has reached a processing plant in southern France.
Several dozen anti-nuclear protesters met the convoy on arrival at the plant in Cadarache. They said the plutonium was vulnerable to terrorist attack.
The 125kg consignment was heavily guarded on its journey across France.
The state-owned firm which will reprocess it - Areva - insists it is safe and will be converted into fuel to generate electricity commercially.
The treatment is part of a post-Cold War agreement between the United States and Russia to get rid of plutonium from excess nuclear warheads.
Tight security
The plutonium has been in transit since two British-registered ships left South Carolina last month and delivered it to Cherbourg in northern France. It was then loaded onto lorries and driven to the plant in nearby La Hague for overnight storage before being taken to Cadarache.
Police guarded all the bridges along the route, while armed guards accompanied the convoy and helicopters hovered overhead.
"This is a high-risk strategy being played by the nuclear industry with the lives of millions of people," said Shaun Burnie, of Greenpeace International.
A French court has ruled that any protester who goes within 100 metres of the shipment faces a 75,000 euro fine.
"The plutonium... is shipped in casks that comply with the regulation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)," Areva said in a statement. "Its transport is the object of the strongest safety and security measures."
Cogema will process the material and convert it into mixed oxide nuclear fuel (MOX), which will then be shipped back to the US for civilian use.
The US Department of Energy says the plutonium has to be shipped overseas because there is no plant capable of carrying out the conversion process in the US.
-------- depleted uranium
DIANA versus HAARP
vheadline.com
Franz J. T. Lee
October 08, 2004
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=23055
University of Los Andes (ULA) professor Franz J. T. Lee writes: Over the last years, we have continually informed our readers about the USA's gigantic war projects and other metropolitan powers against humanity, about their bellicose production of arms of mass destruction (WMD'S), of their ABCDE ... weapons.
For example, we explained the arrogant attitude of the USA, which itself amasses a galaxy of WMD'S ... piling them up in Israel, and elsewhere.
Then the UN sends inspectors to Arab countries; find nothing substantial, and shortly thereafter, the USA bombs countries like Iraq to pieces with the very same WMD's that they're looking for ... using low intensity atomic warfare, all over the show, dropping depleted uranium and the mother of all bombs, destroying nature and society for generations to come in these regions at the whim and caprice of their leaders.
We also informed the public about the Philadelphia Experiments, Mkultra, Operation Paper-Clip, the Manchurian Candidate, HAARP, Pentagon Aliens, Tesla's free energy technology, Wilhelm Reich's orgone, US scramjets, scalar waves, ELF waves and about the current, invisible, stealth war submarines of Germany and France, etc.
Obviously, in spite of our extreme radicality ... our grasping of the global problems at their very root ... it seems that even we have not touched the tip of the iceberg; current global reality is worse.
We also underestimated the brutality of homo homini lupus, of ruling class man. He does not amass these WMD'S for video-games, War of the Galaxies, but eventually to eliminate six billion obsolete physical labor forces. As we all know, long ago, as a result of the introduction of intellectual labor that now accounts for the lion's share of world production, the USA (via the UN) planned programs for the reduction of the world population, of world poverty by progressively simply eliminating the poor themselves.
Concerning the coming world wars, and the corresponding deadly weapons, two years ago, Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa, warned that "in addition to the devastating impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the ozone layer, the World's climate can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated 'non-lethal weapons.'"
In fact, long ago already, the Pentagon and the Kremlin had developed weapons to manipulate the world's climate. For example, already in the Vietnam War, the USA had used them against the Vietcong. In the USA, this kind of war technology is being used in the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) as part of the (Star Wars) Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), which till this day is being propagated as part of the Project for a New American Century.
The world renowned scientist Dr. Rosalie Bertell confirmed that "US military scientists ... are working on weather systems as a potential weapon. The methods include the enhancing of storms and the diverting of vapor rivers in the Earth's atmosphere to produce targeted droughts or floods." (The Times, London, 23 November 2000)
HAARP, situated in Gokoma (Alaska) is a jointly managed project of the US Air Force and the US Navy ... other similar projects exist in Europe and Russia ... as a global war instrument is currently fully operational. It is experimenting on triggering earthquakes, droughts, floods and hurricanes; in fact, according to Thomas Bearden, ever since 1970, in the very USA no normal, natural, weather conditions exist anymore ... soon the weather of the whole planet will be in chaos.
In the past, it was very difficult to detect where and when these weapons of mass destruction have been tested or used; furthermore, many extreme weather phenomena, like the well known climate disaster over Vargas (Venezuela) ... appearing miraculously on days of decisive political events in December 1999 ... could easily have been the indirect results, ... perhaps caused unintentionally ... the "collateral damage" of dangerous global experiments in the region, within the context of full spectrum dominance.
In the article mentioned above, the scientist Dr. Nicholas Begich described HAARP as follows: "A super-powerful radiowave-beaming technology that lifts areas of the ionosphere [upper layer of the atmosphere] by focusing a beam and heating those areas. Electromagnetic waves then bounce back onto earth and penetrate everything -- living and dead."
Dr. Rosalie Bertell depicted HAARP as: "a gigantic heater that can cause major disruption in the ionosphere, creating not just holes, but long incisions in the protective layer that keeps deadly radiation from bombarding the planet."
HAARP can easily be used as a bellicose instrument of imperialist conquest within the "axis of evil", and it is capable of selectively destabilizing agricultural and ecological systems of entire regions anywhere on earth. In a previous commentary we have already elaborated the other evil functions of this weapon of "environmental warfare." We also spotlighted the US "Spanish Flu" arm of biological warfare, as revealed by the "Sunshine Project."
However, the global situation is worse, we should not forget that a while ago, according to the international press, President Bush of the USA had ordered the Pentagon to target seven nations for attack -- of course, Venezuela was not included in this list of the "axis of evil," yet, as oil-producing country, she is permanently under attack.
Also, the USA made it very clear that they planned widespread use of nuclear weapons in war, including "low intensity nuclear warfare," that includes the use of lethal weapons of depleted uranium, as were and are being used in Iraq.
In reality, the Bush administration's policies, the new Pentagon doctrine, the ferocious Economic World War between the Great Powers, all bring the world far closer to the actual use of nuclear weapons of war, with incalculable consequences for humanity. Indeed, as things develop currently, such a war is all but inevitable...
Really, the global situation is critical, not even the weather is fine anymore. However, the truth is the only thing that can free, can emancipate us. Hence, to be fully conscious about our precarious existence, is the revolutionary conditio sine qua non to inspire us daily, every hour, to be on the alert, to dedicate our whole life in the service of revolutionary emancipation, of human survival.
In spite of the global, fascist Sword of Damocles over our heads, as comradely inspiration for all our young Latin American Bolivarians, in conclusion, I will cite the first paragraph of one of the very first articles that I ever wrote, published more than forty years ago. Already then I spoke about "securing universal peace and equal relations for Latin America," and elsewhere.
Then already you could hear my "Diana," see my "Battle of Santa Ines" against all possible HAARPs of global fascism ... this is a trans-historic example of tenacious, adamant, permanent, revolutionary practice and theory on a global scale.
"In the twenty years after World War II there emerged what French geographers and social scientists call the Third World -- Tiers Monde. It stretches from Latin America, across Africa and the Middle East, to Indonesia and the tropical Pacific Islands. It is populated by almost two thousand million people -- two-thirds of the world population. These 'native' peoples share a common past: a past of humiliation, exploitation and poverty. This legacy binds them together in a vast 'Commonwealth of Poverty.' Angola -- Portuguese West Africa -- is one of these emergent states, trying to shake off the shackles of colonialism, and aiming at securing universal peace and equal relations throughout the world."
"The Roots of the Ultra-Colonial War in Angola"; Article in "Review of International Affairs", Vol. XIV, No. 329, Belgrade, December 20, 1963
Franz J. T. Lee franzjutta@cantv.net
-------- europe
US Bomb-Grade Plutonium Convoy to Cross France
by Jacky Naegelen
REUTERS FRANCE:
October 8, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/27593/story.htm
CHERBOURG, France - A heavily guarded convoy of vehicles believed to be transporting U.S. weapons-grade plutonium left a plant in northern France yesterday for a recycling factory 660 miles southeast.
French state-owned nuclear energy firm Areva, whose Cogema unit will recycle the plutonium into nuclear fuel, declined to confirm the content of the convoy that witnesses saw leave the La Hague plant in the early hours of the morning.
Environmental activists are worried about the safety of the shipment which arrived in the port of Cherbourg Wednesday after a more than two-week journey from Charleston in the United States. They fear it is vulnerable to terrorist attack.
"This is a high-risk strategy being played by the nuclear industry with the lives of millions of people," said Shaun Burnie of Greenpeace International.
A Reuters photographer said that a convoy of several dozen trucks, cars and buses left the La Hague plant at around 4:30 a.m.
Police were guarding all bridges on the convoy's route to the Cadarache plant in southeastern France, where the plutonium will be recycled into nuclear fuel.
This will then be shipped back to the United States for use in an electricity-generating reactor.
It is part of the U.S. Department of Energy's program to turn plutonium from "excess" nuclear warheads into mixed-oxide (MOX) plutonium-uranium enriched fuel. Greenpeace says the shipment is of 308 pounds of plutonium. A spokesman for the U.S. Security Administration said the amount being transported is 125 kg.
The delivery is part of a post-Cold War agreement between the United States and Russia to get rid of plutonium from excess nuclear warheads.
French state-owned nuclear energy firm Areva, whose Cogema unit will recycle the plutonium into nuclear fuel, says the shipment is safe.
"The plutonium ... is shipped in casks that comply with the regulation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Its transport is the object of the strongest safety and security measures," Areva said in a statement.
But activists, who expect the cargo to reach Cadarache during the night or Friday, say the transport is irresponsible and they have called for a rally close to the southeastern factory later Thursday. "Independent expert analysis presented by Greenpeace to the French government earlier this year exposed the potential scale and severity of an accident or terrorist attack on plutonium transports," Greenpeace's Burnie said.
Wednesday, protesters watched as the boat docked but did not interfere when the plutonium was loaded into a truck to be transported to the La Hague peninsula. A French court ruling has barred protesters from going within 100 meters of the shipment.
Activists Tuesday bolted a heavy truck to the road leading to La Hague and chained themselves to the vehicle to try to stop the delivery. Police used chain cutters to cut free the protesters and later removed the truck.
Under Tuesday's court ruling, any protester who goes within 100 meters of the shipment faces a 75,000 euro ($92,230) fine.
-------- india / pakistan
India, the US and nuclear proliferation
Asia Times By Sultan Shahin Oct 8, 2004
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/FJ08Df05.html
NEW DELHI - Deeply perturbed over the development, India has asked the United States to withdraw sanctions it has imposed against two Indian nuclear scientists accused by Washington of transferring technology for weapons of mass destruction and missile secrets to Iran.
New Delhi is particularly worried about the timing. This has happened soon after President George W Bush's Democratic challenger Senator John F Kerry and then he himself named nuclear proliferation as "the single most serious threat to the national security of the United States". The fear is that this may turn out to be a precursor to a wider sanctions regime on the unsubstantiated excuse of Indian nuclear proliferation based on US intelligence reports - some of which have proved to be laughably outlandish in Iraq.
It is possible, high-level Indian officials feel, that this is merely a case of some officials in the US administration trying to score points by showing their alacrity in fighting nuclear proliferation at this late stage in their four-year term, even though this has clearly not been their priority in recent years, as is illustrated by the long rope given to Pakistani nuclear scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program and the apparent mastermind of a global nuclear smuggling network. Khan has not even been interviewed by any non-Pakistani investigator, much less been interrogated by officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as should have happened immediately after his activities came to light.
To rub salt into Indian wounds, as it were, US companies have turned out in force - Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, United Defense and several smaller companies - to exhibit their wares at the same venue in Pakistan where for years Khan's company, Khan Research Laboratories, used to hand out glossy brochures advertising specialized equipment for making a nuclear bomb - IDEAS 2004 in Karachi. In what appeared to one observer, analyst Joshua Kucera, to be an oblique reference to the most notorious past IDEAS exhibitor - Khan - Pakistan's missiles, including the nuclear-capable Shaheen II, are displayed outside, behind a sign reading "Technological Demonstration - not for sale". Interestingly, in a display of Orwellian black humor, the slogan for this year's version of Pakistan's biggest arms show is "Arms for Peace".
The US imposed weapons sanctions against Pakistan in the 1990s after it found out about that country's secret nuclear-bomb program. But then came September 11, 2001, and the war in Afghanistan, where Pakistani support was required to fight their proteges, the Taliban. Pakistan once again became America's new best friend, a frontline sate in the "war on terror", and the sanctions were lifted.
Although Pakistan is still a state spawning Islamic fundamentalists and obscurantists from its madrassas (religious seminaries), Washington has opened up its pocketbooks again. Over the next five years, Pakistan will get at least US$1.5 billion in defense aid from the US as part of a $3 billion aid package. An announcement made at IDEAS 2004 suggests where some of that money is going to be spent: Pakistani officials revealed that the US is ready to reverse its longtime opposition to selling new F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad. The chief of the Pakistani air force told a journalist that Washington wants to provide the F-16s, in part, to help Pakistan fight Islamist extremists in the tribal areas in the northwestern part of the country, though anyone in strategic business should know that if ever these aircraft were used in combat they would be used against India.
To clarify matters on its part, Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna told reporters that the two Indian scientists had sold neither materials, equipment nor technology. "No transfer of sensitive technology has taken place," he said. "Our track record in this is well known. The US government has been asked to review the issue and withdraw the sanctions."
Last week, US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told a press briefing in Washington that two Indian scientists were among "14 entities" against which the US has imposed sanctions. He did not specify which entities were individuals or firms. But he said there were seven from China, two from India and one each in Belarus, North Korea, Russia, Spain and Ukraine. "The penalties apply to the entities themselves and not to countries or governments," Boucher said. The penalties prohibit those named under the sanctions from visiting the US or doing business with any US-based companies.
Explaining the innocence of the Indian scientists, Sarna said one of them has never been to Iran and the other one had not visited the country since mid-2003. "It has been conveyed that we don't share the US views," he added.
India is worried over the impact this controversy may have on the efforts India is making for the transfer of sensitive technology from the United States. India and the US have deepened technology cooperation over the past few months. Last month, Washington announced it had agreed to lift export controls on equipment for nuclear facilities in India after New Delhi assured the US it would address that country's non-proliferation concerns. The deal was the first phase under the "Next Steps in Strategic Partnership With India" (NSSP) agreed in January between Bush and former Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
The State Department did not detail the specific offenses by the two scientists, but officials said it involved alleged assistance to Iran's nuclear program during the first half of 2003. Analyst Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Washington-based Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center, was quoted by news agencies as having speculated that the sanctions may relate to India's breakthrough development of an economic way to produce tritium, a radioactive isotope used in nuclear bombs. The US and other Western countries accuse Iran of using a civilian nuclear energy program as a cover to develop atomic weapons, a charge Tehran vehemently denies.
It is a measure of the close defense ties developing between the two countries that US forces are seeking to benefit from the vast experience the Indian military has had in fighting wars in high-altitude mountains, glaciers and deserts, and even in urban warfare, in quelling local disturbances as India has been fighting insurgencies in its northeast for more than half a century.
Only this week, beginning Monday, the Indian navy for the first time displayed its capability with the long-range maritime and submarine hunter aircraft P3C Orions in what are euphemistically called joint exercises with the US Navy off the Goa coast. In the sixth of the Indo-US series of "Malabar Exercises", the frontline Indian anti-submarine warfare ships matched their skills with the US Pacific Fleet's Los Angeles class nuclear submarine as well as a Ticonderoga missile cruiser and an Oliver Hazard Perry class guided-missile frigate. New Delhi and Washington are negotiating for the Indian navy acquiring 10 P3C Orions on a government-to-government sale to augment its depleted maritime capabilities.
On its part, the Indian navy is in the process of attaining higher skills in intercepting unknown vessels, carrying out search and seizure on the high seas to tackle terrorism-related activities as well as protecting the country from external aggression. Intercepting vessels on the high seas, called Visual Boarding Search and Seize (VBSS), is being carried out extensively by the US Navy, and India is right now engaged in learning more about the technicalities of the operation, said C S Patham, commanding officer of INS Mysore. The ship is docked at Mormugao Port in Goa to take part in the India-US joint naval exercises - Malabar 2004.
Only last month, the US administration lifted decades-old US export restrictions on equipment for New Delhi's commercial space program and nuclear power facilities. "It's an odd time to be lifting those restrictions" when the administration is concerned enough about India's cooperation with Iran to impose new sanctions, said Sokolski. The new sanctions are consistent with Under Secretary of State John Bolton's determination, officials claimed, to enforce non-proliferation laws, even if it upsets countries where the US is pursuing better ties. Bolton oversees non-proliferation policy.
US officials also claimed that the Indian scientists' so-called proliferation activities were discussed with the government in New Delhi in advance and sanctions imposed only after New Delhi failed to take action. The administration waived sanctions on Indian companies "four or five times in the last couple of years", but if the government did not take concrete action to redress the situation sanctions could not be waived, one official said.
Another official stressed that the two scientists, not the Indian government, were sanctioned, and New Delhi "needs to do some punishing of people like this itself and prevent these things from happening". Sokolski sees India competing for influence in Iran against nuclear rival Pakistan, whose top scientist Khan ran a black market that sold atomic technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea before being stopped by Islamabad at US prodding.
Pakistani intelligence had earlier accused India of helping Iran when the latter admitted last year that it had received foreign help, and media reports had named Pakistan as one of countries whose nuclear technology Iran was believed to be using. Editors of the Pakistani newspaper the Daily Times of Lahore, who have for long been passionately advocating normalization of ties with India, had surprisingly concluded, even from their own analysis, that India was involved (see Iran nukes and the South Asian puzzle , August 30, 2003).
India had not bothered then to respond vigorously to the Pakistani allegations, probably believing that the charge was too outlandish to be given credence. The Indian record on nuclear non-proliferation has been excellent. It has had very close relations with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, both leaders perpetually on the lookout for nuclear technology in the 1970s and 1980s and in a position to pay very well in cash and kind (oil), but despite its weak economy, always in need of foreign exchange, particularly to import oil, India never gave a thought to the many blandishments offered.
One of the reasons the US and other nuclear powers are wary of India on the nuclear front, however, is that it was not party to any aspect of the international non-proliferation regime until 1997, when it signed the Chemical Weapons Convention. Among the significant treaties it has not signed are the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Thus India has a very limited safeguards agreement with the IAEA, which does not cover any of its nuclear research facilities. That is why after its tests in 1998 the US was hard put to find any multilateral mechanism through which to sanction India.
India's biggest regret, in the present controversy, however, is the awkward timing of the accusation, which virtually seeks to put Indian scientists at par with Pakistan's rogue scientists. India is going all out to ensure that the NSSP initiative is invested with some real substance and at least the US Department of Commerce has claimed that things are going very well in bilateral relations. When an Indian journalist wrote an editorial last week claiming that the NSSP was devoid of any real substance, Matthew S Borman, deputy assistant secretary for export administration, US Department of Commerce, wrote a lengthy rejoinder to counter the claim.
On its part, India is determined to persuade the US that its project of spreading democracy requires that it develop special ties with democratic countries and shuns dictatorships such as Pakistan, even if it needs to use them for a while in some project. The US, in according "major non-NATO ally" status to Pakistan recently, has drawn criticism in India.
The recent and the first meeting between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Bush had also appeared to have gone well. The new United Progressive Alliance government is in any case keen to demonstrate that it has been able to maintain the forward momentum created by the previous government in developing close strategic ties with the US, despite the sanctions imposed after the 1998 Pokhran II nuclear tests.
Indian worries were best expressed in an editorial in the Indian Express (October 4):
As happened in the Iraq case, it is possible that interested parties have got together to slap the charge on retired individuals trying to make it generically somewhat similar to the proliferation undertaken by Dr A Q Khan. These sanctions have the potential of slowing down, if not actually derailing, the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership between the two countries. It is not enough for the Indian government to ask the US to review its assessment since no such transfer has taken place. The issue goes well beyond sanctions on two retired individuals who are unlikely to be affected beyond their prospects for travel to the US. This case is far more likely to be used by the non-proliferation hardliners in the US as an example of poor Indian commitment to non-proliferation, strategic literature is going to be recycling half-truths to paint India as a new source of proliferation. What is needed is greater transparency on the issues involved. If, however, there is any substance at all in US claim, then we owe it ourselves to find ways to ensuring such cases do not recur.
New Delhi is hoping that the present controversy will soon blow away and the countries will be able to get down to business as usual in the shortest possible time. But there is also apprehension that the inexplicable and totally unfounded accusation may be a precursor to reimposition or further tightening of the sanctions regime promulgated after the nuclear tests of 1998. These sanctions had been removed primarily because they had to be removed in the case of Pakistan, which became a close US ally after September 11 and the US could not be seen to be treating the two newly-proclaimed nuclear weapon states differently. In any case, the US has persisted with treating India and Pakistan at par with each other, a hyphen that India has long resented, but to no avail.
Sultan Shahin is a New Delhi-based writer.
-------- iraq / inspections
U.S. Says Iraq Sought Russian Defense Systems
The Moscow Times
By Simon Saradzhyan
October 8, 2004
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2004/10/08/010.html
Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime actively sought and in some instances acquired missile expertise and other defense know-how from Russian entities and individual specialists, but the Russian government neither sanctioned nor was apparently aware of these transfers, the CIA said in a report.
The report, compiled by U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, says that Russian missile engineers traveled to Iraq from 1999 to 2003 to assist Iraqi companies and organizations in developing or improving systems, ranging from ballistic missiles to air defense systems.
-----
Hussein's Aims, Capabilities Often Differed
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 8, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16309-2004Oct7?language=printer
The administration's argument that Iraq was a grave threat even without stocks of illicit weapons and warranted a preemptive military attack centers on the answer to this question: Did Saddam Hussein intend to restart his weapons programs if the crippling U.N. sanctions were lifted? Or, as President Bush put it yesterday, "once the world looked away."
Charles A. Duelfer, the top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, found no plans and no existing capability to restart these programs, and he said in his report released Wednesday that divining Hussein's intention "is like having the picture box cover of a jigsaw puzzle to guide the assembly of the component puzzle pieces."
But, Duelfer concluded: "Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq's WMD capacity."
Duelfer based his conclusion about Hussein's intentions on the Iraqi leader's past actions; on post-invasion interviews with Hussein, his inner circle and weapons scientists; and on the type of industrial equipment the Iraqi government imported and maintained.
"Most senior members of the regime and scientists assumed that the programs would begin in earnest when sanctions ended," Duelfer said. "And sanctions were eroding." Others counter that sanctions had disrupted Iraq's weapons efforts and that there was no consensus at the United Nations for lifting them before the March 2003 invasion.
Referring to Hussein's view of himself, weapons of mass destruction and his country, Duelfer said: "What seems clear is that WMD was a tool of power or leverage that varied in its utility in advancing toward his goals for himself and Iraq."
Hussein's top goal was to defend Iraq against Iran. The neighbors had fought an eight-year war, and Iraq had used tens of thousands of chemical weapons to repel Iranian fighters.
"Saddam argued Iraqi WMD development, while driven in part by the growth of Iranian capabilities, was also intended to provide Iraq with a winning edge against Iran," the report noted.
Nuclear weapons were no longer Hussein's top priority, although he still aspired to have a nuclear capability, Duelfer said. Hussein was more keen on developing ballistic missiles and tactical chemical weapons suited for a battle with Iran.
Duelfer drew many of his conclusions from interviews with Hussein's top advisers and military leaders conducted while they were detained after the invasion.
"Many former Iraqi officials close to Saddam either heard him say or inferred that he intended to resume WMD programs when sanctions were lifted," the report noted. "Those around him at the time do not believe that he made a decision to permanently abandon WMD programs."
For example, former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz told interrogators that "Saddam never formally stated this intention," but that Hussein "did not believe other countries in the region should be able to have WMD when Iraq could not."
Abd Tawab Mullah Huwaysh, director of the Military Industrial Organization, which was the primary agency responsible for developing weapons of mass destruction, "speculated" to investigators that Hussein had increased funding to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, and took an interest in its achievement because he wanted to restart the nuclear program and would need the commission's scientists and staff.
Since 1991, the report noted, Hussein had ordered advisers to keep Iraq's nuclear scientists fully employed, and they made arrangements to do so.
In interviews, Hussein "made clear his view that nuclear weapons were the right of any country that could build them," the report noted. "He was very attentive to the growing Iranian threat, especially its potential nuclear component, and he stated that he would do whatever it took to offset the Iranian threat, clearly implying matching Tehran's nuclear capabilities.
"Saddam observed that India and Pakistan had slipped across the nuclear weapons boundary quite successfully," it added.
But Huwaysh also quoted Hussein as saying: "We do not intend or aspire to return to our previous programs to produce WMD, if the Security Council abides by its obligations. . . ." Huwaysh did not specify whether that meant the lifting of U.N. sanctions.
At the time of the U.S.-led invasion, Duelfer said, Iraq had no active programs for chemical or biological weapons, but had industrial equipment that could have been used to help restart the efforts.
On chemical weapons, Duelfer said, "Iraq would have been able to produce mustard agents in the period of months, and nerve agent in less than a year or two" using the existing chemical infrastructure. The report, however, found "no explicit guidance from Saddam on this point" and no other plans to do that.
On biological weapons, Hussein abandoned his program in 1995 but retained the scientists and other technicians "needed to restart a potential biological weapons program," the report noted. Although there was no proof of efforts to rebuild his anthrax programs, "given the developing infrastructure in Iraq in the late 1990s and early 2000, such a reconstitution could be accomplished quite quickly."
On missiles, "Iraq's investments in technology and infrastructure improvements, an effective procurement network, skilled scientists, and designs already on the books for longer range missiles" clearly indicated that Hussein "intended to reconstitute long-range delivery systems and that the systems potentially were for WMD."
Staff researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this report.
--------
Former U.N. Inspectors Cite New Report as Validation
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 8, 2004; Page A30
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16221-2004Oct7.html
Two former chief United Nations weapons inspectors said yesterday that the latest report on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs proved that U.N. sanctions, inspections and monitoring had succeeded in keeping the Iraqi leader's illicit arms programs in check from 1991 until the invasion of March 2003.
The report released Wednesday by U.S. weapons inspector Charles A. Duelfer confirmed that the Iraqi leader had destroyed his chemical and biological weapons stockpiles in the 1990s and had effectively ended his elementary efforts to pursue nuclear weapons.
"We can see today that the inspections worked," said Rolf Ekeus, the director of the first United Nations Special Commission and former Swedish ambassador to the United States, who led the first inspectors into Iraq in 1991. Ekeus said the report documented that most all of Hussein's weapons and prohibited production equipment and facilities had by 1995 either been destroyed or placed in non-weapons activities.
Hans Blix, the chief U.N. inspector from 2000 to 2003, said in a telephone interview from Sweden that Duelfer's report showed that "international inspection is another means of war without fighting."
Blix said that if his inspectors had been allowed to remain in Iraq and continue their work -- instead of having to leave on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion -- Hussein would have been effectively contained. If several more months of inspections had shown there were no weapons stockpiles, monitoring of Iraq's production facilities would have continued along with import controls and spot inspections.
"Saddam would have remained," Blix said, "but he would have become like [Fidel] Castro or [Moammar] Gaddafi, in power but not a threat to his neighbors."
While the U.N. inspections and sanctions had been sharply criticized as ineffective by the Bush administration before the war, U.S. officials are discussing going to the United Nations to seek broader sanctions against Iran. U.S. and European officials are concerned that Iran's nuclear program could be used for weapons, although Iran insists the program is peaceful.
Duelfer's report concludes that U.N. inspections and sanctions beginning in 1991 forced constraints on Hussein's weapons programs. This in turn forced the Iraqi leader to cut back on weapons programs and make his strategic goal the removing of the sanctions.
Ekeus said most people did not realize that the original U.N. resolutions on Iraq, which were part of the settlement of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, put a tight economic noose around Iraq. They allowed inspectors to limit what goods could be imported and destroy items with potential military use that came into the country to be tracked and destroyed if not used for civilian purposes.
He recalled that Russian gyroscopes were smuggled into the country and his U.N. inspectors got divers to go into the Tigris River to find them where the Iraqis had attempted to hide them.
Ekeus said senior officials in the administration of President George H.W. Bush considered the sanctions and inspections "their main legacy from the Gulf War," because it would disarm Hussein without sending U.S. troops into Baghdad.
By the late 1990s, however, Hussein began a campaign to end the sanctions. He used favorable contracts and bribes to undermine Security Council support and a public relations campaign to show the economic harm being done to the Iraqi people.
When the Bush administration came to office, newly named Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made one of his first goals the creation of "smart sanctions," limiting prohibited imports to items directly related to weapons. He said that the 10 years of sanctions worked.
"He [Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction," Powell said in February 2001. "He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place."
Powell's new list of sanctioned materials was approved by the United Nations in the summer of 2001.
By that time, Duelfer told a congressional committee Wednesday, "My personal view is that the sanctions were in free fall. They were eroding. There was a lot of corruption. Were it not for 9/11, I don't know that they would exist today."
Hussein's apparent support for Osama bin Laden's attacks on the United States lost him support, not just within the United Nations but from many in the Arab world. Suddenly, as Duelfer put it, Hussein "saw U.N. sanctions, he saw forces around him, he saw diplomatic isolation, he saw his revenue streams dropping -- he chose at that point in time to allow U.N. inspectors in."
Duelfer said he believed when Hussein began discussions with the United Nations in late 2000 about readmitting inspectors, "to me that was a very key indicator that there probably wasn't large stocks there to be found." When the U.S. troop buildup began in the Gulf, it became "clear that Saddam chose not to have weapons at a point in time before the war," he added.
-------- japan
Japan Kansai Elec ready to restart 3 nuclear units
Fri Oct 8, 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6450999
TOKYO, Oct 8 - Japan's Kansai Electric Power Co. (9503.T: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Friday it was ready to restart three nuclear power generation units in Fukui prefecture, northern Japan, after replacing pipes.
A company spokesman said it informed the Fukui local government on Friday that it had replaced pipes in the Nos.1 and 2 units at its Mihama plant and in the No.1 unit at Ohi.
It plans to restart the units after receiving approval from the local and central government, the spokesman said.
He did not specify a date for the restarts.
The three units were shut for inspections after an accident at the No.3 Mihama unit on Aug. 9 in which steam leaking form a pipe killed four workers.
Currently, four of Kansai Electric's 11 nuclear units are generating electricity.
----
Opposition to grill gov't over U.S. report of no WMD proof in Iraq
Kyodo News
October 8, 2004
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/041007/kyodo/d85imh000.html
Opposition parties said Thursday they plan to grill Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi over his political responsibility for throwing Japan's support behind the United States in its launching of a war in Iraq, after the revelation of a U.S. report suggesting there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at the time.
The opposition parties are also expected to step up calls on the government to withdraw Japan's Self-Defense Forces troops from Iraq given that the WMD issue has now allegedly been settled.
Koizumi's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, meanwhile, has defended the premier's decision while its coalition partner, the New Komeito party, expressed concern at the opposition parties' expected moves in the extraordinary Diet session set to convene Tuesday.
In Hanoi, where he is attending the Asia-Europe Meeting, Koizumi said Japan's support for the U.S.-led war on Iraq last year remains unchanged despite the report, and that Japan's support is based on related U.N. Security Council resolutions.
Koizumi's comments were in response to Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, who told Congress on Wednesday the group had found no evidence of WMD and that 12 years of U.N. sanctions had diminished former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's ability to develop weapons.
Koizumi backed U.S. President George W. Bush, his closest ally on the international stage, over the war, citing as one of his reasons the WMD allegations.
Yukio Hatoyama, the shadow foreign minister in the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan, criticized Koizumi for "easily supporting the U.S. attack based on inaccurate information."
He said the premier's reference now to the Iraqi violations of the U.N. resolutions as a pretext of the war was merely a "quibble."
"The grounds for waging war have been shaken at its roots, and suspicions have become stronger that the Bush administration used the WMD issue as a pretext for waging a preemptive attack," Hatoyama said.
Japanese Communist Party Chairman Kazuo Shii said Koizumi's "huge political responsibility in supporting an illegitimate war of invasion based on false reasons must be called into question."
Seiji Mataichi, secretary general of the Social Democratic Party, said, "The premier has a duty to show the criteria on which he based his decision to support the war."
Senior members of the LDP, however, played down the latest development, saying the report is within the range of what the government envisioned and that they do not believe the government's responsibility in supporting the war will "immediately become an issue."
Tsutomu Takebe, who holds the LDP's No. 2 post as secretary general, said, "The U.S. and British use of force (in Iraq) is based on U.N. resolutions and, as such, naturally holds legitimacy. There was no mistake in the government's handling (of the situation)."
But senior members of the New Komeito expressed some alarm at the planned moves by the opposition parties, believing they now have more ammunition with which to attack the government and ruling parties, especially given the fact of a recent donation scandal.
The LDP is under fire over a donation scandal involving its largest faction, led until recently by former Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, and a dentists' organization.
There are also concerns within the LDP that the Koizumi administration will be greatly shaken if Bush is defeated in his reelection bid in the November presidential election, according to one LDP member.
-------- missile defense
Military Begins Missile-Defense Exercises
Fri Oct 8, 2004
Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=542&u=/ap/20041008/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/missile_defense_1&printer=1
WASHINGTON - The military has begun a series of exercises with its national missile defense system to move it a step closer to activation. The exercises involve testing crews and activating the network of sensors and command centers to ensure they transfer information properly, Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, said Friday.
"No problems have cropped up," he said.
Although five ballistic missile interceptors are in their silos at Fort Greely, Alaska, they are not yet operational because their arming pins have not been removed, so the system is not considered "on alert" yet, Lehner said.
The exercises, each of which can last several hours, have been under way for about a week, Lehner said. They will continue for several more weeks.
The military does has no date set to put the missile defenses on alert but still expects to by the end of the year. Once the system is fully activated, the interceptors will be capable of launching during an ICBM attack from eastern Asia.
The system includes a tracking radar on the Aleutian island of Shemya in Alaska, an early-warning radar at Beale Air Force Base, Calif., and command centers at Colorado Springs, Colo., and at Fort Greely. It also will rely on early-warning satellites to detect missile launches.
Additional interceptor missiles will be placed at Greely and at Vandenburg Air Force Base, Calif.
A Navy destroyer has begun patrolling the Sea of Japan with an upgraded Aegis radar capable of tracking North Korean missile launches and feeding information into the missile defense network.
Critics say the system has not been tested properly and has yet to prove it would work in a crisis. Military officials describe the system as still experimental but insist it would be capable of firing in a crisis.
On the Net:
Missile Defense Agency: http://www.acq.osd.mil/mda/
-------- russia
Russia's Gazprom to acquire key nuclear firm-paper
Fri Oct 8, 2004
(Reuters)
By Maria Golovnina
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6449669
MOSCOW, Oct 8 - Russia wants gas monopoly Gazprom to extend its reach into nuclear power by taking over a company that builds atomic power stations outside Russia, Vedomosti daily said on Friday.
The move comes as the Kremlin seeks to create a web of control over the strategic energy sector through Gazprom, the world's biggest gas company.
The nuclear company, Atomstroieksport, is one of the pillars of the Russian nuclear industry. It builds reactors only outside Russia and has an order book of $3 billion. It is constructing a nuclear reactor in Iran -- a project the United States says Tehran can use to acquire atomic arms.
Gazprom is due to take over state oil firm Rosneft soon in a stock-funded deal, which will enable the state to regain control over the gas company lost in the 1990s.
Chief Executive Alexei Miller, a close associate of President Vladimir Putin, also said this week Gazprom had built strategic stakes in national power group UES and in Moscow's regional utility in its bid to become a fully integrated energy group.
Vedomosti quoted a source close to Atomstroieksport as saying Gazprom subsidiary Gazprombank would soon take over the company by buying 54 percent of its shares from firms linked to Russian machinery giant OMZ (OMZZ.RTS: Quote, Profile, Research) .
The remainder belongs to state companies controlled by Russia's Federal Atomic Energy Agency, or RosAtom. Vedomosti said the transaction had been completed and that Gazprombank may sell the shares to firms linked to RosAtom in the future.
IRAN
A source in RosAtom could not confirm the deal but said the government had been trying to regain OMZ's shares.
"Our position is that a strategic company like that should belong to the government, and I can confirm that we've been working on that for some time," the source told Reuters.
"This is an area where the government has to make strategic and political decisions.
"Atomstroieksport is Russia's key builder of nuclear reactors, and that is of course being done within the framework of international agreements, and the government is responsible for that," the source added.
Atomstroieksport's contruction of the Bushehr nuclear station in Iran is a major irritant in Russia-U.S. relations. Moscow has defied U.S. pressure to ditch the project in Iran, a country Washington believes wants weapons of mass destruction.
A Gazprom spokesman declined to comment.
Officials from OMZ, whose general director Kakha Bendukidze is also Georgia's economy minister, were not available for comment.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
DOE Commends Defense Authorization Conference Committee Action Allowing Continuation of Tank Cleanup Projects in South Carolina and Idaho
October 8, 2004
U.S. D.O.E.
http://www.energy.gov/engine/content.do?PUBLIC_ID=16744&BT_CODE=PR_PRESSRELEASES&TT_CODE=PRESSRELEASE
WASHINGTON, DC - U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham released the following statement today commending the Congressional Defense Authorization Conference's approval of language allowing the Department of Energy (DOE) to proceed with tank waste cleanup projects in South Carolina and Idaho:
"We are pleased that the conferees have adopted language that will allow the Department of Energy to move forward with safe and sensible environmental cleanup of nuclear waste storage tanks in South Carolina and Idaho. Under this law, we will be required to meet Nuclear Regulatory Commission performance criteria and continue our work with state authorities to ensure that our tank cleanup plans meet cleanup standards. We look forward to completing our work to ensure environmentally sound cleanup of nuclear waste storage tanks.
"I want to thank Senator Lindsey Graham and the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the Senate and House conference committee for their leadership on this important issue. I also want to thank Governor Dirk Kempthorne of Idaho and Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina for their steadfast commitment to protecting their states' environmental interests. In addition I want to thank Idaho Senators Larry Craig and Mike Crapo and Congressmen Mike Simpson and Butch Otter, along with Congressmen Gresham Barrett and John Spratt of South Carolina for their contributions and commitment to resolve this important issue."
Media contact: Joe Davis, 202/586-4940
----
Compensation Overhauled for Nuke Workers
October 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Weapons-Workers.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congressional lawmakers have agreed to dramatically reform a compensation program for sick nuclear weapons workers and take it out of the hands of the Energy Department, which has been criticized for taking too long to pay the workers.
The program is for tens of thousands of people nationwide who helped build Cold War-era bombs or cleaned up waste left behind. Many got sick from harsh toxins and are seeking compensation for disabling illnesses and time off the job.
House and Senate negotiators finalized a defense authorization bill Friday that included an overhaul of the program, which was created by Congress four years ago.
The changes include moving it to the Labor Department and requiring the government -- not contractors who ran the nuclear sites -- to pay the bills.
Worker advocates say that's necessary because some people deemed eligible for compensation were not getting paid because the contractors are long gone. In other cases, the government could not compel contractors to pay because they are privately insured.
``It guarantees a willing payer and will ensure that these claims are processed in a timely manner,'' Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., said of the changes, which he helped write. ``Since the program was created four years ago, not one Kentuckian has been paid the benefits they are owed.''
Most of those who filed claims worked for contractors at Energy Department facilities in Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and Washington.
The Labor Department will rely on a national formula, rather than state worker compensation laws, in deciding how much to pay workers for their disabilities and lost wages. The most any worker can receive is $250,000.
But the workers can apply for additional help under a separate Labor Department program if they have radiation-related cancer or diseases linked to lung-clogging beryllium and silica. That pays a lump sum of $150,000.
Worker advocates say it's only fair for people to have access to both programs. They say the existing Labor Department effort is an ``apology payment'' for putting workers in harm's way, similar to a tort settlement, while the newly reformed effort resembles a worker compensation program that replaces lost wages.
The government previously kept quiet about the toxins workers were exposed to at the nuclear sites. Four years ago, after the Clinton administration apologized, Congress passed the dual compensation programs.
``The loyal men and women who did so much to build the nation's defenses were often unknowingly exposed to radiation and other toxic substances that led to serious long-term illnesses and early death,'' said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.
The overhauled program helps not only the workers but their dependent survivors. Each dependent survivor could get $125,000, and in some cases a little more, if the spouse or parent died from a job-related illness.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who grew up 30 miles from one of the government's major nuclear facilities, says it makes sense to help the workers' families.
``These are families, many of whom I lived with and grew up with, who put their faith in the government,'' Alexander said.
The program's estimated cost is about $1 billion over 10 years. Lawmakers say they did not have a good estimate of what the cost would be if the program remained unchanged.
Lawmakers made the program an entitlement, ensuring it will have money to pay out benefits without any further action by Congress.
On the Net:
Labor Department: http://www.labor.gov/
Energy Department: http://www.doe.gov/engine/content.do
-------- south carolina
The big choice on waste at SRS
The State
Fri, Oct. 08, 2004
By ROBERT ALVAREZ AND MICHAEL BERG Guest columnists,
http://www.thestate.com/mld/state/news/opinion/9864866.htm
As Election Day approaches, America is on the edge of a momentous decision that could profoundly affect its future for generations. Hint: It is not the presidential election, though that is important, too. It is the decision, now percolating quietly through Congress with little or no public debate, about whether to clean up or abandon millions of gallons of nuclear weapons wastes - some of the most dangerous materials on earth. Much of it is currently sitting at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site.
During the last half of the 20th century, the United States produced about 100 metric tons of plutonium for nuclear weapons, leaving behind as a byproduct some 220,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste. This enormous radioactive brew is stored in hundreds of underground tanks at Department of Energy sites around the country, each of which individually could hold a basketball court. More than a third of these aging tanks already have leaked.
In addition to remaining dangerous for hundreds of centuries, these wastes are potentially explosive and give off lethal penetrating radiation, even in very small amounts. Everything they touch becomes radioactive and dangerous.
In a rush to end cleanup at several profoundly contaminated weapons sites, the Energy Department is now, in an Orwellian move, attempting to redefine these lethal materials by simply renaming them as "incidental" wastes. This sets the stage for the Energy Department to abandon as much as 90 percent of its most dangerous nuclear wastes near major regional water supplies, including the Columbia River, the Savannah River, the Snake River Aquifer and the Tuscaloosa Aquifer, the primary fresh groundwater supply for the Southeastern United States.
In 1982, the United States government clearly recognized high-level waste hazards by passing the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The law requires these materials to be placed in permanent, deep, geologically stable vaults so as to protect humans for at least 10,000 years. But now the Energy Department wants to end-run around the law and a federal court ruling upholding it, citing excessive costs and delays if it complies.
Embedded in the Senate version of the Defense authorization bill is a hotly contested provision to allow the Energy Department to "reclassify" its high-level wastes as "incidental" at the Savannah River Site. So far other states with nuclear weapons sites such as Washington and Idaho remain opposed, despite DOE's repeated efforts to withhold funding unless they support the reclassification scheme.
"There's nothing going to be left behind... that will not be secured... to protect South Carolina," claims Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., author of the provision. But the National Academy of Sciences is not so sanguine, warning last year that defense high-level waste hazards "will persist for centuries... millennia... or essentially forever."
Why would Congress allow this preposterous name-change to go through? It comes down to money. Estimated at $100 billion, geologic disposal of defense high-level wastes is the Energy Department's most expensive cleanup endeavor.
Originally DOE was supposed to remove 99 percent of the radioactivity from the high-level waste, then mix it with molten glass in a process called vitrification, for disposal at a licensed high-level radioactive waste repository. However in 2002, the Energy Department announced geologic disposal of these wastes will be curtailed by 60 percent. This means much greater amounts of radioactivity will be disposed permanently on site.
The Energy Department concedes it could geologically dispose of all its projected defense waste containers, but this will cost money that the Bush administration would rather spend on items such as a new generation of nuclear weapons. And so, DOE is rushing to abandon the majority of its most dangerous wastes - just as was done, with tragic consequences, in the former Soviet Union.
To put things into perspective, the geologic disposal of these wastes cost less than one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the $4 trillion spent to amass the U.S. nuclear arsenal. High-level wastes by any other name are still just that: the largest, most dangerous legacy of the nuclear arms race. They must be treated as such. Otherwise, the price of a name change could well prove incalculable.
Mr. Alvarez is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and served as senior policy adviser to the U.S. secretary of energy from 1993 to 1999. Mr. Berg is the co-director of the Carolina Peace Resource Center.
-------- MILITARY
Rumsfeld Comes to Macedonia: Give US More Soldiers for Iraq
By Irina Gelevska
October 08, 2004
Reality Macedonia
http://www.realitymacedonia.org.mk/web/news_page.asp?nid=3736
Skopje-The US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will arrive in Macedonia on Sunday evening as a part of his tour throughout the countries which have soldiers in Iraq.
As expected, the security in the Macedonian Capitol Skopje on Sunday and Monday will be doubled. Last time such measures were undertaken-with over 3000 policemen were on the streets-during the funeral of late President Boris Trajkovski in March 2004.
According to Macedonian Government sources, the US Secretary of Defense will have meetings with the President Branko Crvenkovski at 10:30 on Monday, and at 11:00 with the Prime Minister Hari Kostov and his deputies Radmila Shekerinska and Musa Xhaferi in the Government building. The Macedonian Minister of Defiance Vlado Buchkovski will attend this meeting, also.
The first topic of the talks will be the support of the antiterrorist coalition in Iraq. Macedonia will stay in Iraq and in February 2005 will increase the number of soldiers there. Donald Rumsfeld will not ask directly for more Macedonian soldiers in Iraq, but he will say that the Macedonian soldiers are well trained and needed. The Macedonian Minister of Defense will announce the plan to send 210 Macedonian soldiers in peacekeeping missions in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2005. According to sources from the MOD, Macedonia can send about 100 soldiers to Iraq after 3-4 months of training at home.
The second topics of the talks will be the Bilateral Agreement for not spreading technology that can be used for making weapons of mass destruction. The Agreement will be signed soon under names United States of America and Macedonia instead of Republic of Macedonia. The Macedonian Government considers this a positive step towards resolving the name dispute with Greece which opposes any use of the word Macedonia.
Donald Rumsfeld is expected to give support for the Macedonian Government who is facing the Referendum against the law for territorial organization in Macedonia on 7-th of November 2004.
The Macedonian President Crvenkovski will ask help from the US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for finding information about the three kidnapped Macedonian workers in Iraq a month and a half ago. They were employed by the US Company Soufan Engineering as construction workers.
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Vote Is a Referendum on Karzai
October 8, 2004
New York Times
By AMY WALDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/international/asia/08karzai.html?pagewanted=all
HAZNI, Afghanistan, Oct. 5 - "Don't be harsh to the people!" President Hamid Karzai beseeched his security detail, which was bearing down on an overly eager crowd with sticks and automatic weapons. "They will calm themselves!"
Below the stage, white pigeons meant to symbolize peace were tentatively stepping out of their coop. Soon Afghanistan's president tried to do the same.
"If you sit in your place, I will come say hello to each one of you," Mr. Karzai told the surging crowd, and then he marched off the stage toward the throng. He did not get far before his guards intervened.
"I came to say hello to each of you, but the security people turned me back," he said. "So what should I do?"
The American-driven security that separates him from the populace has come to define Mr. Karzai, the front-runner this Saturday in Afghanistan's first presidential election.
He spends most of his time confined in the palace compound in Kabul, where he takes nightly loops for exercise. When he leaves, he is accompanied by an armada of DynCorp Inc. guards - one of whom slapped a government minister who got too close in a recent trip to the north - and, at this rally, American attack helicopters.
Mr. Karzai was so frustrated after a trip to Gardez was aborted because of a rocket attack that he sneaked out with two guards to a neighborhood in Kabul, evoking a fablelike image of a king so eager to be among his people that he disguises himself as a commoner.
For many Afghans, as a result, Mr. Karzai has become an insubstantial figure, clearer for what he stands for than for who he is or what he has done. To supporters who will vote for him on Saturday, he represents three years of relative peace and national unity, as well as the leader of an important Afghan tribe. Opponents see him as weak, beholden to the West or incapable of fulfilling the expectations they had for reconstruction.
Given how little-known most of his 15 rivals are, the election is largely a referendum on the perception of Mr. Karzai himself, and the record of the international community - that has backed him.
Supporters and opponents say that if, as expected, Mr. Karzai wins Saturday or in a second round of voting that would follow if no candidate secures a majority, it may represent his last chance to assert himself as a leader rather than a figurehead.
He will have to use his electoral mandate to deliver the changes most Afghans still await, or face their disappointment or worse.
"I hope, with newfound legitimacy, he feels his power and is supported by the international community to provide more visionary leadership than we've seen to date," said Andrew Wilder of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, an independent research group based in Kabul.
Mr. Karzai was chosen as interim leader at a conference in Bonn in November 2001, as Afghanistan's Taliban rulers were falling before the American-led invasion. Out of the same conference came a coalition government of the country's rival factions and ethnic groups that has come to define his rule.
Mr. Karzai's selection was backed by the United States in part because he was a member of the Pashtun ethnic majority, which has ruled Afghanistan for most of its history. He is the chief of the Popolzai tribe, and had remained active in Afghan politics from exile in Pakistan.
From 1992 to 1994, he was deputy foreign minister in the Afghan government formed by the mujahedeen after the fall of the Communist government. He initially supported the Taliban, the fundamentalist Islamic militia that took over in the late 1990's, believing they could restore order, before eventually turning against them. He blames the Taliban for assassinating his father in Quetta, Pakistan, in 1999.
Mr. Karzai brought innate advantages that continue to bolster him. He has no reputation for "blood on his hands," noted Mr. Wilder, and he is not seen as personally corrupt. But Mr. Karzai came out of what Mr. Wilder calls a "deal-making culture," a tradition of tribal politics that aims more for conciliation than confrontation. "I think at times he doesn't recognize his own power," Mr. Wilder said. "I think for the last two and a half years he's been unnecessarily risk-averse." The result was what Mr. Wilder called a "business as usual" agenda in which corruption took root and entrenched powers held sway.
In a sense, Mr. Karzai's record is that of the United States, and the international community as a whole. During his tenure, Afghanistan has made strides in some areas. Five million children are in school, 40 percent of them girls, and about three million refugees have returned.
The Kabul-Kandahar road has been rebuilt, cutting travel time between the cities to less than a day, and work has started on other roads. A Unicef study shows that some indicators of child health, such as infant mortality, have marginally improved in the last four years. Factional fighting has flared, government ministers have been killed, a Taliban insurgency has taken hundreds of lives, but the country as a whole has remained at peace. After 23 years of war, Afghans say that cannot be taken for granted.
But many parts of the country, particularly in the south and southeast, have seen few benefits. Mr. Karzai has failed to rein in blatant corruption among members of his cabinet or below, and has been slow to disarm the many armed militias and defend average Afghans against their abuses.
He made his first tough decisions this year, dropping Muhammad Fahim, the defense minister, as his running mate and removing Ismail Khan as governor of Herat. On both cases he was prodded, some say steeled, by foreign diplomats.
Even the Bush administration says that Mr. Karzai's government has failed to check the country's opium production. The illicit drug trade is enriching many commanders Mr. Karzai says he opposes, creating security threats, and probably financing the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Mr. Karzai's close relationship with his American overseers has also proved tricky. To those Afghans who believe the international community's continued presence is essential to rebuilding their country, it is an asset. To others, concerned about foreign interference in Afghan affairs or about the behavior of American forces hunting the Taliban and Al Qaeda, it is a liability.
Haji Nazim, a leader of the Zadran tribe in the southeast, said his tribe would vote for Mr. Karzai because the patriarch of a respected religious family had told them to. "Otherwise we would never vote for Karzai," he said, citing the lack of reconstruction and transgressions by American soldiers in his area.
The campaign period has only strengthened the perception that it is the Afghan-born American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, and not Mr. Karzai, who is the real power here. Mr. Khalilzad has met with candidates - they say to persuade them to withdraw, a charge he denies - and orchestrated road openings that appear designed to strengthen Mr. Karzai's support.
The ambassador did little to hide his role in removing Mr. Khan from Herat. This week, while Mr. Karzai went to Germany to accept a human rights award, Mr. Khalilzad flew to Herat and announced that Mr. Khan had agreed to join the government in Kabul.
A recent cartoon in an Afghan newspaper showed a trembling Mr. Karzai in Mr. Khalilzad's arms as his campaign rivals pranced in a boxing ring. "Don't worry," the caption had Mr. Khalilzad saying, "I'm the referee for this match."
-------- arms
THE SANCTIONS
U.S. Report Says Hussein Bought Arms With Ease
October 8, 2004
New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON and SCOTT SHANE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/politics/08sanctions.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 - Enriched with billions of dollars raised by exploiting the United Nations' oil-for-food program, Saddam Hussein spent heavily on arms imports starting in 1999, finding six governments and private companies from a dozen other nations that were willing to ignore sanctions prohibiting arms sales, the report by the top American arms inspector for Iraq has found.
The purchases, which included components of long-range missiles, spare parts for tanks and night-vision equipment, were not enough to allow Iraq to significantly rebuild its conventional military or create a viable chemical, biological or nuclear weapons program, according to the report by the inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, which was released Wednesday.
But the relative ease with which Mr. Hussein was able to buy weapons - working directly with governments in Syria, Belarus, Yemen, North Korea, the former Yugoslavia and possibly Russia, as well as with private companies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East - is documented in extraordinary detail, including repeated visits by government officials and arms merchants to Iraq and complicated schemes to disguise illegal shipments to Iraq.
"Prohibited goods and weapons were being shipped into Iraq with virtually no problem," the report says. "Indeed, Iraq was designing missile systems with the assumption that sanctioned material would be readily available."
The report suggests that Mr. Hussein was justified when, speaking at a gathering of leaders of the Iraqi armed forces in January 2000, he boasted that despite efforts by the United States and the United Nations to isolate Iraq, he would still be able to buy just about whatever he wanted. "We have said with certainty that the embargo will not be lifted by a Security Council resolution, but will corrode by itself," Mr. Hussein said in the speech, a remark that is quoted on the cover of the chapter in Mr. Duelfer's report that details the ineffectiveness of the embargo.
The report is replete with names, dates and documents detailing negotiations over arms purchases and technical advice, which continued until just days before the United States-led invasion in March 2003. An Iraqi memo from 2000 tells military officials in Baghdad that the deputy general manager of the French company Sofema, a military-component marketer, will be bringing a company catalog so that they can "discuss your needs with him."
President Bush, speaking to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday, said the report demonstrated that Iraq was determined to illegally rebuild its military. "Saddam was systematically gaming the system, using the United Nations oil-for-food program to try to influence countries and companies in an effort to undermine sanctions," he said.
While the scope of the inquiry did not extend beyond Iraq, the report raises fundamental questions about the effectiveness of sanctions, a tool the United States has frequently used as a foreign policy tool short of military action. Offered lucrative contracts by Mr. Hussein, both arms suppliers and government officials seem not to have hesitated to ignore United Nations trade restrictions, going so far as to disguise tank engines as agricultural parts.
What actions, if any, the United States will take toward sanctions violators is unclear, as are the implications for current United States standoffs with nations like Iran and North Korea over nuclear weapons programs. But sanctions remain one of the few options in many complex international disputes.
"They're often better than nothing," said Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who is writing a book on the United Nations.
The illicit trade accelerated as the years passed and the threats of possible military action by the United States increased, with the number of deals among the top suppliers climbing from about 5 transactions in 1998 to more than 15 in 2000 and more than 35 in 2002, the report says.
North Korea and Belarus made perhaps the most aggressive effort to sell advanced military equipment to Iraq, the report says, delivering items that included radar technology that was ultimately used against American attack planes.
President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus was involved in the deals, the report says, noting that he "was anxious that illicit trade should continue on a regular basis and requested that a firm called Belarus Afta be established in Baghdad as a clearinghouse for illicit military trade."
A spokesman from the Belarus Embassy in Washington said that any items sold to Iraq complied with United Nations' rules. "We have always maintained and we continue to maintain that all these accusations are preposterous," said the spokesman, Valentin Rybakov.
Among European allies, France's military industry had extensive contacts with Iraqi officials. The report describes, for example, repeated trips by an executive from the French company Lura, which sold Iraq a tank carrier.
Other private companies from Jordan, China, India, South Korea, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Cyprus, Egypt, Lebanon, Georgia, Poland, Romania, Taiwan, Italy and Turkey offered or sold items that supported Iraq's conventional arms programs or could have been used by Mr. Hussein to make weapons of mass destruction, the report says.
No American individuals or companies were named in the report as supplying Iraq with military goods or other prohibited items. But a number of United States companies and at least two American citizens are listed as having received oil vouchers that permitted them to profit from the oil-for-food program.
Unlike hundreds of voucher recipients from other countries, the American recipients are not named in the report but only listed as "United States company" or "United States person," an omission that a government official said was required by American privacy laws.
In January, an Iraqi newspaper, Al Mada, ran a list of 270 recipients of oil vouchers that appears to closely parallel the list in the Duelfer report. That list included two Americans, Shaker al-Khafaji and Samir Vincent, neither of whom could be reached for comment on Thursday.
Iraq went to great lengths to build a missile system with a range longer than the limits imposed by the United Nations, a major technological challenge that required the import of an array of banned parts. Companies from China and Russia sold, or negotiated to sell, missile guidance systems, the report says. A Polish company supplied a propulsion system. An Indian company built and sold Iraq a missile-fuel processing plant.
In some cases, governments moved to stop the illicit trade. In 2002, for example, Indian authorities arrested executives at NEC Engineering, which the report says imported solid propellant ingredients for Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles.
The report describes in detail the extraordinary measures taken to move illicit goods into Iraq and to cover the tracks of violators. Iraqi diplomats smuggled radar-jamming devices in diplomatic pouches. An airline created by Iraq and Belarus used four Boeing 747's to move goods from Minsk, the Belarussian capital, to Baghdad "under cover of humanitarian aid missions."
"During the sanction years, traders used a pool of private dhows, barges, and tankers to smuggle oil out and commodities into and out of Iraq's southern ports with relative ease," the report says.
The report also cites evidence that the Jordanian government closely monitored illegal shipments and canceled an inspection arrangement with Lloyd's Register Group of London, an independent monitor of trade, to make smuggling easier.
----
Many Helped Iraq Evade U.N. Sanctions On Weapons
Fri, Oct 08, 2004
By Craig Whitlock and Glenn Frankel,
Washington Post Foreign Service
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1802&ncid=1802&e=2&u=/washpost/20041008/ts_washpost/a16142_2004oct7
BERLIN, Oct. 7 -- As part of its stealth effort to evade U.N. sanctions and rebuild its military, the Iraqi government under President Saddam Hussein found that it had no shortage of people around the world who were willing to help. Among them: a French arms dealer known only as "Mr. Claude," who made a surreptitious visit to Iraq four years ago to provide technical expertise and training.
Mr. Claude worked for Lura, a French company that sold tank carriers to Iraq, according to documents recovered by the top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq. The mysterious Frenchman may have also helped the Iraqis attempt to acquire military-related radar and microwave technology, despite a U.N. ban on such trade with Iraq since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Other French military contractors came to Baghdad with offers to supply the Iraqi government with helicopters, spare parts for fighter aircraft and air defense systems after 1998, when U.N. weapons inspectors withdrew under pressure, according to a report issued this week by Charles A. Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector. The report cites evidence that contacts between the French suppliers and Hussein's government continued until last year, less than one month before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
While not denying that the transfers took place, a spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry, Herve Ladsous, said the accusations "were not verified either with the people themselves or with the authorities of the countries concerned," according to the Associated Press.
The French were hardly alone in helping Hussein to reinvigorate his military forces during the 12 years that Iraq was under strict U.N. sanctions. Arm dealers and military suppliers from the former Eastern Bloc -- Russia, Poland, Romania, Belarus and Ukraine -- provided critical assistance to Iraq as it tried to build a long-range missile program and other systems that weapons inspectors feared could have been used someday to launch chemical, biological or even nuclear attacks.
"It was well known within the U.S. government that individuals and companies were selling Iraq various kinds of prohibited items," said Gary Samore, a nonproliferation specialist in the Clinton administration who now works as an analyst for the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
While the United States sought to shut down suppliers through diplomatic and other means, Samore said, it was common knowledge that Iraq was able to bypass sanctions by buying in small quantities and paying high prices, using a network of front companies in Jordan, Syria and other countries in the Middle East.
"The world is awash in conventional arms, and every time there's been an arms embargo on a country they've been able to circumvent it," he said. "It's much more difficult to buy more exotic technologies like nuclear weapons, but there are so many private dealers and corrupt state entities, especially in the former Soviet Union. The best you can do is slow down sales, obstruct them or make it more expensive."
Numerous other nations bought and sold on the Iraqi military shopping network, including such dictatorships as North Korea and the former Yugoslavia before the downfall of President Slobodan Milosevic. While some of the countries were politically friendly with or sympathetic to Iraq, the biggest motivation was usually money, according to Duelfer's report to the CIA.
"As long as the regime had enough cash to pay for these items, it really wouldn't have been too much of a problem to obtain these things and smuggle them in," said Jeremy Binnie, Middle East editor for Jane's Sentinel Security Assessments, a London-based magazine. "It just takes people with enough money and the ability to find the right contacts to get their hands on this stuff."
The Iraqi pipeline extended to four countries -- Bulgaria, Poland, Romania and Ukraine -- that later sent troops to Iraq to join the U.S.-led military coalition.
In Poland, Iraqi intelligence officers helped set up a front company called Ewex, which obtained engines and guidance components for surface-to-air missiles from Polish scrap dealers and middlemen who scoured military surplus stockpiles for the parts, the report said.
U.S. inspectors estimated that Iraq bought about 280 engines from Poland from 2001 to 2003 with the intent of using them to equip a new missile that violated U.N. range limits. The engines had been removed from Polish missiles decommissioned after the Cold War.
Polish authorities arrested some Ewex executives in 2003 on charges of making illegal arms deliveries to Iraq. Purchasing documents confiscated later showed that many of the engines were funneled through Syria.
In Bulgaria, a firm called the JEFF Co. exported more than $7 million worth of warheads, missiles and launcher units to Baghdad in 2002 in violation of U.N. sanctions, the report found. Other Bulgarian traders sold chemicals and machine tools to Iraq that could be used for civilian purposes but were really intended for missile components and other military purposes.
In Romania, Iraqi intelligence agents used diplomatic pouches to send photos of tanks and other military equipment available for sale in that nation back to Baghdad. Although weapons inspectors said it was unclear how much equipment was purchased by the Iraqi government, they did uncover documents after the war showing that a Romanian firm, Uzinexport SA, signed a contract in October 2001 to sell magnets to Iraq that "could have been suitable" for a uranium enrichment program.
In most cases, U.S. weapons inspectors found no clear evidence that officials in those countries were involved in the arms deals. One exception was Ukraine, where leaders gave their blessing to military sales to Iraq.
The Duelfer report calls Ukraine "one of the countries involved in illicit military-related procurement with Iraq" after the 1991 Gulf War, noting that President Leonid Kuchma personally approved the sale of a $100 million antiaircraft radar system to Iraq via a Jordanian intermediary in 2000. Ukrainian officials have since said the sale was never completed, and weapons inspectors said they had not found any evidence that the radar system was shipped to Iraq.
In 2001, Iraqi intelligence agents also bought five motors from a Ukrainian company as part of a project to develop unmanned spy planes. The motors were shipped to Iraq from Ukraine in diplomatic pouches to avoid the attention of international inspectors, the report said.
A Ukrainian electronics professor whose private firm transferred missile engines and motors to Iraqi companies was rewarded with vouchers and credits for more than 7.5 million barrels of Iraqi oil from 1998 to 2000, the report found. The professor, identified as Yuri Orshansky, made about $1.85 million in profits under the U.N. oil-for-food program, which was designed to generate revenue for the Iraqi people under economic sanctions.
Some of the clearest evidence of government corruption, according to the report, involved Russia, a country that has vast storehouses of military technology.
Although the Russian government has denied past accusations that it played a role in supplying arms and military equipment to Hussein's government, U.S. weapons inspectors reported finding "a significant amount of captured documentation showing contracts between Iraq and Russian companies."
In one case, a Russian general, Anatoly Makros, formed a joint company with Iraqi partners in 1998 "just to handle the large volume of Russian business," according to the report, which also cited a former Iraqi diplomat as saying that Russian customs officials ignored the illegal commerce in exchange for bribes.
Trade with Russia was so brisk that Iraqi Embassy officials smuggled military supplies on weekly charter flights from Moscow to Baghdad, according to the former Iraqi diplomat, who was not named in the report. The equipment included radar jammers, night-vision goggles and small missile components.
One Russian company signed contracts valued at about $20 million to provide material for Iraq's missile systems. Another Russian firm, Uliss, negotiated a deal to support a tank project dubbed "Saddam the Lion," according to the report.
Frankel reported from London.
-------- britain
Ministers 'sorry' for Iraq error
Ms Hewitt stood by the decision to go into Iraq
(BBC)
Friday, 8 October, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3725380.stm
Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt has made the government's first direct apology for using inaccurate intelligence to justify the Iraq war.
Appearing on BBC One's Question Time, Ms Hewitt said she was speaking on behalf of the entire Cabinet.
"All of us who were involved in making an incredibly difficult decision are very sorry and do apologise for the fact that that information was wrong."
But she added: "I don't think we were wrong to go in."
Ms Hewitt was responding to members of the audience who challenged her comment that Prime Minister Tony Blair had already apologised for the inaccuracy of the intelligence.
At Labour's annual conference last week, Mr Blair said: "I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam."
Ms Hewitt told Question Time: "What we said at the time and in the dossier about the stockpiles of weapons was wrong and we've apologised for that."
But one audience member shouted out: "You haven't".
Another woman said of Mr Blair's conference comment: "That is saying 'I'm able to apologise but I'm not actually apologising'."
Conservative policy co-ordinator David Cameron, who was on the Question Time panel, said it was "seriously refreshing" that Ms Hewitt used "the S- word".
"They are apologising for the wrong thing," he told BBC Radio 4's Today.
"Yes, the information about WMDs was wrong... What the apology is required for is the way in which the information was presented to Parliament."
'Whole truth'
Mr Blair had told MPs the information was "extensive, detailed and authoritative", said Mr Cameron, but the Butler report into the intelligence suggested it was "sporadic and patchy".
What had been needed in such a serious situation was "the whole truth and nothing but the truth," Mr Cameron added.
Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell echoed Mr Cameron's comments.
"It is not the intelligence for which we need an apology but the way in which it was used," he said.
"Patricia Hewitt may have said 'sorry' but the only apology that would count would be from the prime minister acknowledging that the government took us to war on a flawed prospectus."
'False premise'
On Thursday, the Iraq Survey Group released a report saying it had found no evidence Saddam Hussein had chemical, biological or nuclear weapons when Iraq was invaded.
But Mr Blair highlighted its finding that Saddam hoped to revive a WMD programme once sanctions were lifted.
BBC political correspondent James Hardy said the prime minister's conference statement had annoyed many Labour activists.
He said: "Ms Hewitt's unexpected intervention might appease some critics, others will say it's not an apology for the intelligence that they want, but an apology for the war."
A Downing Street spokesman denied that Ms Hewitt had gone further in her apology than Mr Blair.
Commons statement
Speaking during a trip to Ethiopia, he said the report showed Saddam "never had any intention of complying with UN resolutions" and was "doing his best" to get around UN sanctions.
He added: "And just as I have had to accept that the evidence now is that there were not stockpiles of actual weapons ready to be deployed, I hope others have the honesty to accept that the report also shows that sanctions weren't working."
The Liberal Democrats have called on Mr Blair to make a Commons statement on the ISG report, while the Tories say it shows the prime minister has not been honest.
Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy said: "The prime minister must come to the House of Commons and make a full statement as a matter of urgency to explain why this country went to war on a false premise."
Conservative leader Michael Howard said: "I don't think he [Mr Blair] told the truth about the intelligence he received."
-------- business
As head of Halliburton, Cheney sought to do business with Iran
By MATT KELLEY
Oct 8, 2004
Associated Press
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_5428.shtml
Vice President Dick Cheney, who has called Iran "the world's leading exporter of terror," pushed to lift U.S. trade sanctions against Tehran while chairman of Halliburton Co. in the 1990s. And his company's offshore subsidiaries also expanded business in Iran.
Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards criticized Cheney in Tuesday night's debate for his position on Iran during the 1990s, and Edwards said he supports expanding the sanctions against Iran.
Cheney countered that he now supports sanctions against Iran but sidestepped the issue of Halliburton's involvement, saying it was being raised by Democrats "to try to confuse the voters."
Halliburton's foreign subsidiaries did about $65 million in business with Iran last year, company documents say. A federal grand jury is investigating whether Halliburton or its executives deliberately violated the U.S. ban on trade with Iran.
Foreign subsidiaries of American companies can do business with Iran as long as no Americans participate in or direct that business. Halliburton says it did not break that law.
While he headed the Houston-based oil services and construction company, Cheney strongly criticized sanctions against countries like Iran and Libya. President Clinton cut off all U.S. trade with Iran in 1995 because of Tehran's support for terrorism.
Cheney argued then that sanctions did not work and punished American companies. The former defense secretary complained in a 1998 speech that U.S. companies were "cut out of the action" in Iran because of the sanctions.
At an energy industry conference in 1996, Cheney said sanctions were the greatest threat to Halliburton and other American oil-related companies trying to expand overseas.
"We seem to be sanction-happy as a government," Cheney said. "The problem is that the good Lord didn't see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments."
Although Cheney maintained his opposition to unilateral U.S. sanctions during his first months as vice president, the Bush administration renewed the trade ban with Iran in March 2001.
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President Bush grouped Iran with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and North Korea as members of an "axis of evil" nations with ties to both terrorists and weapons of mass destruction.
Cheney now sounds a harder line against Iran.
"The government of Iran is the world's leading exporter of terror," Cheney said less than a month after Bush's January 2002 "axis of evil" speech.
On the campaign trail, Cheney has often boasted of how the Bush administration helped shut down an underground network supplying nuclear technology to Iran, which he called one of "the world's most dangerous regimes" in an August campaign speech in Davenport, Iowa.
Halliburton, meanwhile, has defended the business deals with Iran that intensified under Cheney.
"It is neither prudent nor appropriate for our company to establish our own country-by-country foreign policy," Halliburton said in a January statement amid criticism of its Iran deals.
Much of Halliburton's business with Iran comes through Halliburton Products & Services Ltd., a subsidiary incorporated in the Cayman Islands and based in the United Arab Emirates. Halliburton Products & Services opened a Tehran office in early 2000, before Cheney left Halliburton to become Bush's running mate.
Halliburton Products & Services Ltd. does between $30 million and $40 million in business each year with Iran, Halliburton said in response to a challenge by New York City Comptroller William Thompson Jr. Other foreign subsidiaries did about $25 million in business with Iran in 2003, the company said.
Halliburton also has kept alive a U.S.-based subsidiary called Kellogg Iran, Inc. Halliburton spokeswoman Cathy Gist said that company has not done anything since 1977, before Cheney acquired Kellogg Iran's former parent company for Halliburton.
Thompson, whose office oversees pension funds for New York City police and firefighters, has criticized Halliburton and other companies for doing business with Iran and other nations that sponsor terrorism.
"Halliburton is saying they adhere to the letter of the law, when it poses risks to the company but also to the United States and the world. I don't think it's excusable," Thompson said. "This began in February 2000, and Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton then. Yes, he obviously bears some responsibility." AP Researcher Randy Herschaft contributed to this report.
On the Net:
Halliburton: http://www.halliburton.com
New York City Comptroller: http://www.comptroller.nyc.gov
----
Deal Would Bar Lease of Boeing 767s
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 8, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16647-2004Oct7.html
Members of a House-Senate conference committee have reached a preliminary agreement that would prohibit the Air Force from leasing refueling aircraft from Boeing Co., congressional sources familiar with the deal said yesterday.
The deal will not be final until the committee completes its work, which stretched into last night. But language agreed on during its deliberations on the 2005 defense authorization bill would prohibit the lease and subsequent purchase of Boeing 767 tankers and allow the Air Force to buy up to 100 tankers, the sources said. It was not clear last night whether the Air Force would be required to hold a competition before buying the aircraft.
Sources familiar with the committee's work described the agreement, speaking on condition of anonymity because the committee was still working. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, confirmed late yesterday that a deal had been reached.
John Ullyot, spokesman for the Senate Armed Services Committee, said it was not possible to predict the outcome of the conference until the conferees finished their work. A House Armed Services Committee spokeswoman said the bill was expected to be filed early today and then voted on by the House and Senate.
The Air Force originally wanted to lease, then buy the planes from Boeing in a $23 billion deal, but critics said the program was expensive and unnecessary. The program was derailed last December when Chicago-based Boeing fired former Air Force procurement officer Darleen A. Druyun for negotiating employment with the company while overseeing Boeing's work at the Air Force, including negotiating the tanker contract.
Last week, Druyun was sentenced to nine months in prison after admitting she inflated the price of the deal as a "parting gift" before her Pentagon retirement to ingratiate herself with Boeing.
The Pentagon has said a decision on how to move forward on the tanker program would not be made until after the election, pending studies of alternatives. The authorization bill agreement, if passed by the House and Senate, would prevent the department from reverting to the original program, congressional sources said.
The Air Force has not reviewed the authorization bill, said spokesman Col. Dewey Ford. Boeing declined to comment.
----
Boeing loses $23.5bn US Air Force contract
By Caroline Daniel in Chicago
October 8 2004
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/d90cef62-18cf-11d9-8963-00000e2511c8.html
After months of controversy, Boeing's deal to provide $23.5bn aircraft refuelling tankers to the US Air Force using a complex leasing mechanism was finally declared dead on Friday.
The new provisions, which form part of a more than $420bn defence authorisation bill for fiscal 2005, still authorise the Air Force to buy 100 re-fuelling aircraft, but require that they fund the acquisitions up front. The bill set aside just $15m towards procurement in 2005 and $80m towards R&D costs.
The Senate Armed Services Committee, said on Friday the conferees had authorised "a multiyear procurement for 100 new aerial refueling aircraft, while prohibiting the lease of KC-767A tanker aircraft by the Air Force. They also agreed to require that any contract for the maintenance and logistics support for new aerial refuelling aircraft be competitively awarded."
"The Boeing lease is dead. They will have to get budget authority upfront for the entire acquisition. Practically, it could be one, or six or 20 aircraft," said one congressional source, "In addition a separate $5.7bn sole source contract [for Boeing] to provide maintenance for the tankers will have to be competed out."
Manfred Bischoff, chairman of the European aerospace giant EADS, says the idea of "national fights over national products in our industry is outdated". Go there
The announcement is a blow to Boeing as there are considerable doubts about how much money will eventually be found to fund the purchase of the refuelling tankers, as it will now have to compete for funds with other Air Force projects.
Morgan Stanley also warned that the "killing of the current tanker deal," could force Boeing to take a $201m write down for inventory and will also now face added pressure to close its production line for its 767 aircraft, which was to have been converted into the refuelling tanker, sometime in 2005.
The new provisions have has been prompted by the ethics scandal concerning Darleen Druyun, the Pentagon official who helped negotiate the contract for the Air Force before taking a job at Boeing. Last week Ms Druyun was sentenced to nine months in prison after admitting that she steered contracts to Boeing over a period of four years, including boosting the price of the Boeing tanker contract.
Her admission shocked the defence community as it casts doubt on the credibility of a much wider range of contracts than were initially believed to be tainted.
Referring explicitly to those ethics concerns, the House Committee in Armed Services, said: "Since last year, evidence of impropriety in the lease of aerial refueling tankers has been uncovered and, as a result, the conferees recommend the.... programme be restarted as a 100-aircraft procurement programme."
The changes mark need a significant victory for Senator John McCain who has led opposition to the initial contract and has also been instrumental in highlighting concerns about how the contract was negotiated. His actions have helped trigger the resignation of Phil Condit, chief executive of Boeing, the ongoing investigations into Mike Sears, the former finance director of Boeing, as well as blocking various nominations of Air Force officials who were involved with the tanker negotiations.
However, it was unclear whether the entire 100 aircraft contract would now be opened to a new competition such as from EADS, its European rival. EADS has argued that concern that it could be asked to re-compete for the tanker contract may have influenced the decision by Boeing to press the US government to launch their WTO case against the EU concerning illegal subsidies to Airbus, the commercial aviation company.
Manfred Bischoff, chairman of EADS, told the FT in an interview in Washington: "One of the obvious intentions of our competitors is to make it look like unfair competition. It is a funny coincidence that we are just competing, or would like to compete, for the tanker aircraft in the US. We have not yet been asked to offer a proposal, but they seem very eager to keep us out of that," he said.
He added: "There must be a reason for why now? And we look at what is on the market, and there is a potential competition coming up for a market that Boeing thought would be a monopoly. Their first lease offer was so outrageous that only when we sent in an unsolicited proposal [the cost] went down by billions."
Morgan Stanley added: "When a full review and/or competition arises, we expect Boeing will battle fully for a lead role and Airbus may secure a meaningful percentage but we'd be surprised and impressed if Airbus commanded the lion's share of any future deal."
-------- haiti
Beheadings Mark Haiti's Latest Misery
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 8, 2004; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16234-2004Oct7.html
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Oct. 7 -- At first it looked like an old glove, black and rubbery and flattened in traffic. But a closer look revealed toenails.
The human foot was the last recognizable bit of a headless and burned body still smoldering Thursday in the middle of a busy road in this capital city, which has been convulsed for a week by demonstrations that have left at least 19 people dead. Officials here said at least four people, including three police officers, have been beheaded in violence committed by supporters of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Sentilus Sherulist, 33, stood near the smoking remains, his shoeshine kit in one hand and a little bell to call customers in the other. He said he was finally back at work here in the sprawling slum known as La Saline after the violence kept him at home for days. Asked what had caused the rioting, Sherulist said: "Things are hard. Life is not easy. A lot of people are hungry. A lot of people want Aristide to come back."
The violence has been portrayed by officials here as a harsh expression of popular support for Aristide, who left the country in February in the face of an armed uprising. Government officials have said Aristide's supporters, especially in the vast slums of the capital of the hemisphere's poorest country, are mimicking the savage practices of some Iraqi insurgents with a beheading campaign in their quest to return a president they believe was forced to leave under U.S. pressure.
The violence also interrupted deliveries of relief supplies to the northern city of Gonaives, which suffered massive death and destruction when Tropical Storm Jeanne hit on Sept. 18. More than 3,000 people were killed or are missing, and most of the city's 200,000 residents were left homeless by ravaging floods. The country's main commercial port sits adjacent to La Saline -- the main gate is just a few yards from where the charred body lay in the street Thursday -- and tons of food supplies were stranded there during the violence, relief officials said.
"The situation is volatile," said Anne Poulsen, spokeswoman for the U.N. World Food Program. She said 135 containers with about 2,500 tons of emergency food had been stuck at the port for more than a week. The violence made it impossible to enter the port, she said, and customs officials and other port workers had refused to come to work for days. "You can't blame people for not wanting to risk their lives," Poulsen said.
Poulsen said relief agency trucks, escorted by U.N. peacekeeping troops and Haitian police, were finally able to move nine containers with about 180 tons of food out of the port on Thursday. She said that food would be trucked to Gonaives, where thousands of homeless people are still living almost exclusively on donated goods.
Police and members of the 3,000-member peacekeeping force, which is led by Brazil and has been in Haiti since Aristide left, cracked down on the violence in the past two days and arrested scores of people.
Gerard Latortue, the U.S.-backed interim prime minister, has blamed the violence on street gangs roaming the city with machetes and guns and shouting for Aristide's return.
Leslie Voltaire, who had been in Aristide's cabinet, denied Thursday that Aristide's supporters, or members of his Lavalas political party, were behind the beheadings. Voltaire, in an interview, accused the Latortue government or its supporters among former members of the armed forces of committing the violence as an excuse to crack down on Aristide's followers.
Former members of the military, disbanded by Aristide a decade ago, led the uprising that ousted Aristide, now in exile in South Africa. While not part of the interim government, they are still a powerful presence in many parts of Haiti.
The beheadings are "not a Lavalas thing," Voltaire said. "This is not the practice of Lavalas, and Lavalas is not benefiting. Who is benefiting is the ex-militaries who need to crush the popular support for Aristide."
The violence erupted on Sept. 30, during a Lavalas march through the center of this sweltering city. Voltaire said thousands of Aristide loyalists were marching peacefully, their ninth such demonstration in recent months, when police shot into the crowd. Then the demonstrators "began acting like hooligans because they were furious" about being fired upon, he said. Police said they fired only after the demonstrators turned violent.
The result was more than a week of violence that caused businesses to close and stopped downtown traffic, as barricades of tires burned at major intersections. Late Thursday afternoon, the streets of La Saline and Bel Air, another downtown neighborhood, were black with soot and the remains of burned tires. More fires could be seen deep inside Bel Air, which was inaccessible to traffic because of makeshift roadblocks. Most stores remained closed because of fear of more violence.
"If Aristide would come back, I would love it," said Granol Pelon Altidor, 42, a mother of nine standing a few feet from the charred corpse. "My life is much worse now. People are dumping bodies here and there is lots of insecurity. And the prices of food and everything else is three times higher than it used to be."
Voltaire said those sentiments are widely held among Haiti's poor, who overwhelmingly supported Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest who emerged from a poor parish of this city to win the first truly democratic elections in Haiti in 1990. Aristide was ousted by a military coup just months after he took office, then restored to power by the U.S. military in 1994. He was reelected in 2000 but left office when confronted with the rebel uprising, allegations that his government was corrupt and employed armed gangs to control the population, and a loss of confidence in him by his former allies in Washington.
"After seven months of governing, nothing is happening in the slums," Voltaire said. "There is no work, no nothing. Aristide spoke to the people, but this government is not. If we want to have peace, we need to have a national dialogue and a sharing of responsibilities that includes Lavalas. This government is not doing that."
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UN oil-for-food:
Hussein's 'piggy bank' Report indicates no WMD, but uncovers more of UN scandal
by Jim Bencivenga
csmonitor.com
October 8, 2004
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1008/dailyUpdate.html
The detailed study by the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) that garnered worldwide headlines on Wednesday found Saddam Hussein's government had no weapons of mass destruction at the time the US led coalition militarily invaded Iraq.
But on Friday, as if echoing the refrain of radio commentator Paul Harvey, there's "The rest of the story."
The ISG study also closely examined the UN oil-for-food program for Iraq.
What went largely overlooked in the release of the report on Wednesday by Charles Duelfer, head of ISG, was its description of "how Saddam Hussein created a web of front companies and used shadowy deals with foreign governments, corporations, and officials to amass $11 billion in illicit revenue in the decade before the US-led invasion last year," reports The New York Times.
Through secret government-to-government trade agreements, Saddam Hussein's government earned more than $7.5 billion, the report says. At the same time, by demanding kickbacks from foreign companies that received oil or that supplied consumer goods, Iraq received at least $2 billion more to spend on weapons or on Saddam's extravagant palaces.
The oil-for-food program ran from 1996 until the outbreak of war in Iraq last year. It was designed to alleviate the effects sanctions had on ordinary Iraqis by allowing limited quantities of oil to be sold to buy food and medicines. The program was under UN supervision.
Media coverage is now zeroing on this aspect of the report which is certain to receive continued coverage as the US presidential election - with the Iraq war as the central issue - enters its final weeks.
Conservatives leaped on the ISG findings about misdirected funding as vindication for US policies in Iraq, citing such practices as proof of the obstructionist role played by "supposed" allies like France and Russia.
Mr. Duelfer "found information enough to blow the lid off the simmering scandal of the United Nations Oil-for-Food program," writes Claudia Rosett in National Review. "As it turns out, Oil-for-Food pretty much was Saddam Hussein's weapons program." She continues:
Indeed, there is so much here, involving so many businesses and officials and illicit networks worldwide, that it may take a while for many of the disclosures to be winnowed out, and sink in. But what it boils down to is that the U.N. provided cover for Saddam to steal, smuggle, deal, and bribe his way back toward becoming precisely the kind of entrenched menace that all of the UN's erstwhile integrity and well-paid activity was supposed to prevent - equipped with weapons that may even now be killing both civilians and Coalition troops in Iraq.
Columnist Jehl Break writing in The Weekly Standard pokes a clear jab at liberal bias in the media, when he questions why many mainstream newspapers failed to cite on Wednesday what the report states: "Hussein's government retained data and personnel knowledgeable about weapons, and used funds from the Oil for Food relief program to upgrade his chemical industry so that weapons materials could be produced once sanctions ended."
He continues his critique by quoting from the report:
A threat remains that chemical weapons could be used against US and coalition forces, noting information from earlier this year that Iraqi scientists had linked up with foreign terrorists in Iraq. A series of raids beginning last March, Duelfer said, prevented the problem from 'becoming a major threat.'
Duelfer told Congress in releasing the report on Wednesday, "It's pretty clear that the Iraqi strategy and tactics of dividing the Security Council were having a fair amount of success," reports The Washington Times.
'I think that's clear in the report when you see that the amount of conventional military equipment that was being sold to Iraq, being transported into Iraq ... with the help of some Security Council members, there is, in my mind, little doubt that the ... constraints that the UN was able to put around Iraq were collapsing.'
Charges against the UN on the oil-for-food program in the ISG report are already under investigation by a UN appointed panel headed by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Paul Volcker. This panel will issue its own report, but it has "fueled impatience on Capitol Hill over the slow pace of the Volcker investigation and the UN refusal to make documents available to Congress," reports the Times.
"The world cannot wait years for answers to the growing body of evidence implicating senior UN officials in outright corruption,' said Rep. Henry J. Hyde, Illinois Republican and chairman of the House International Relations Committee.
He called for 'immediate public access' to internal UN documents.
UN officials privately told the Times that they hoped Mr. Volcker could "work a little faster, at least to investigate the apparent complicity of their own personnel."
On Thursday France urged "caution in dealing with a US inspector's allegations that it was involved in corruption concerning the United Nations oil-for-food program in Iraq, while others singled out in the report rejected the charges as far-fetched," reported The Associated Press
A French foreign ministry spokeswoman refused to comment on the allegations until the report had been studied, reports The Guardian. "France was fully cooperating with a UN investigation into the running of the oil for food program," she was quoted as saying.
Russia, "pledged to cooperate with investigations into allegations of Iraq-related corruption following the release of a US weapons inspectors' report charging that Saddam Hussein tried to bribe Russian and French officials and firms to win support for Iraq in the UN Security Council," reports CNS.
Russia's Foreign Ministry expressed support for the investigation into the alleged bribes reports AP, citing the Russian news agency Interfax.
'The investigation that is being conducted should result in an objective picture of possible irregularities that could have been committed under the oil-for-food program,' Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said.
'Russia, like all countries, is interested in the results of this investigation being objective.'
The ISG report comes "at a time when Moscow already is feeling US pressure over Iraq," reports CNS News. A recent US congressional report accused Russia, France and China of blocking US and British efforts to "maintain the integrity" of the UN's oil-for-food program, reports CNS News.
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INTELLIGENCE
Inspector's Report Says Hussein Expected Guerrilla War
October 8, 2004
New York Times
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/politics/08intel.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 - On the eve of the American invasion in March 2003, Saddam Hussein instructed top Iraqi ministers to "resist one week, and after that I will take over.'' To his generals, Mr. Hussein's order was similar - to hold the American-led invaders for eight days, and leave the rest to him.
Some of those who have recounted those words to interrogators believed at the time that Mr. Hussein was signaling that he had a secret weapon, according to an account spelled out in the new report by the top American arms inspector in Iraq. But what now appears most likely, the report said, is that "what Saddam actually had in mind was some form of insurgency against the coalition.''
American intelligence agencies have reported since last fall that the broad outlines of the guerrilla campaign being waged against American forces in Iraq were laid down before the war by the Iraqi Intelligence Service. But the intimate picture spelled out in the report by the inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, provides an extraordinary glimpse of Mr. Hussein and his advisers on the eve of war, just three months after the Iraqi leader had finally told his aides that Iraq no longer possessed chemical weapons.
As described by Mr. Duelfer, a deep apprehension among senior Iraqis over having to face the Americans with conventional arms alone competed with a conviction, at least on the part of Mr. Hussein, that the American advance could be slowed with the help of a popular uprising, and that those Iraqis who fled would be free to fight again.
The report is drawn from extended interrogations not just of Mr. Hussein, but of many of his top deputies, including former Iraqi officials like Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister. From their prison cells, some of them, including Mr. Aziz, even responded in writing to the Americans' questions, in a process that Mr. Duelfer describes as completing homework assignments. The Duelfer report suggests that the American failure to anticipate the Iraqi insurgency was just one of several major misreadings of Mr. Hussein and his deputies.
Among the disconnects cited in the report are some that portray the United States and Iraq as if they were in parallel universes. As late as March 16, 2003, the report says, three days before the war began, American intelligence services continued to receive reports from foreign services and other sources they regarded as credible saying that Mr. Hussein had decided to use chemical weapons against American troops in the event of war.
In fact, Mr. Duelfer concludes, on the basis of the interviews with Iraqis, chemical weapons were never part of the Iraqi defense strategy because Mr. Hussein had conceded in December 2002 that he had none. What the United States believed to be an Iraqi "red line,'' beyond which an American advance would set off an Iraqi chemical-weapons reprisal, was instead merely part of a standard tactical doctrine, taught to all Iraqi officers, that included the concept of a last line of defense, the report says.
The report does not offer a clear verdict on the extent to which the Iraqi insurgency that has raged for 18 months was planned. But it says that from August 2002 to January 2003, Army leaders at bases throughout Iraq were ordered to move and hide weapons and other military equipment at off-base locations, including farms and homes.
A single sentence in an annex also confirms that a branch of the Iraqi Intelligence Service known as M14, the directorate for special operations, oversaw a highly secretive enterprise known as the Challenge Project, involving explosives. A Pentagon intelligence report described by The New York Times in April detailed an operation in which Mr. Hussein's intelligence officers scattered, as American-led forces approached Baghdad, to lead the guerrilla insurgency and plan bombings and other attacks.
The report by Mr. Duelfer describes the M14 unit as having trained Iraqis, Palestinians, Syrians, Yemeni, Lebanese, Egyptian and Sudanese operatives in counterterrorism, explosives, marksmanship and foreign operations at its facilities at Salman Pak, near Baghdad. But on the Challenge Project in particular, Mr. Duelfer's report says only that "sources have not been able to provide sufficient details'' about that enterprise. The report includes recent debriefings of senior Iraqi officials, including one on June 23 with Mr. Aziz, who was reminded by an American interviewer that "you appeared confident'' on the eve of the American invasion, when Mr. Aziz had s