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NUCLEAR
EU takes action against Britain over nuclear waste
Taiwan Conducted Plutonium Experiments
UC Regents lose control of nuclear weapons program
EU takes action against Britain over nuclear waste
European nations to offer nuke incentives
U.S. investigates Iraq nuclear theft
U.S. to Look into "Vanished" Iraqi Nuclear Gear
Iraq says nuclear sites now fully protected
U.S., EU Differ on Whether to Permanently Cancel North Korean Nuclear
Terror beyond terrorism
Permanent U.N. Body Needed to Seek WMD, Panel Says
Exhibit Pays Tribute to Atom Bomb Workers
Duke Power has no plans to dismantle controversial MOX program
Tennessee Uranium Fuel Project Receives Third and Final Approval
Congress Approves Nuclear Waste Reclassification Plan
YUCCA MOUNTAIN PROJECT: Money request approved
Group admits violating state open-meeting law
Court refuses to delay radiation ruling
MILITARY
15 Afghan Candidates to File Vote Complaints With Panel
'Growing threat' of bio-attack on coalition in Iraq
Blair Apologizes Over Iraq;
Boeing Competitors Protest
Chinese information warfare threatens Taiwan
Bomb Blasts and Suicide Attack Kill 6 U.S. Soldiers in Iraq
Insurgent Alliance Is Fraying In Fallujah
Allawi Threatens Military Action
Radical Sunni, Shi'ite groups help free U.S. photographer
Official: 2 Attempts Made to Rescue Hostages
Arafat Relative Unhurt in Gaza Car Bombing
Israel Seizes Hamas Leader Accused of Organizing Attacks
Sectarian Tensions Simmer in Lebanon
Rumsfeld To Appeal For NATO Aid in Iraq Training
NATO Agrees to Deploy 300 Trainers to Iraq
Ex-U.S. Detainee Now Leading Kidnappers
Chechen terrorists probed
A Bosnian Serb Leader Faces War-Crimes Court
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Justices Agree To Hear 2 Cases On Display of Commandments
Top court to consider Commandments cases
Man Guilty in Case of Terror Ties
Court to Hear Pleas On Executing Juveniles
Cyber-Security to Get Higher-Profile Leader
Dayton Closes Senate Office, Cites Threats
Airport Security Screeners Overworked, Report Says
Internal Report Targets Port Security Work
Officials say schools not affected by scare
Phoenix targets alien smugglers
Father Denounces Hamdi's Imprisonment
POLITICS
How Tax Bill Gave Business More and More
Bush's Health Care Ads Not Entirely Accurate
The Role of Radio Sawa In Mideast Questioned
Bush Policy Gets a Ride on the House
John Kerry and the Democrats' Project for a New American Century
ENERGY
Unions, Environmentalists Like Clean Energy's Economic Potential
Hydrogen Economy Far From Reality
OTHER
Census Says Impasse Over Funds Threatens Survey
ACTIVISTS
Whistleblowers Ignored, Investigations on the Wane
MARY KELLY TOOK AN AXE AND STRUCK A BLOW FOR JUSTICE
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- britain
EU takes action against Britain over nuclear waste
Reuters
13 Oct 2004
By Peter Nielsen and Jeff Mason
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L13509614.htm
BRUSSELS, Oct 13 (Reuters) - Britain faces legal action from the European Commission over its failure to notify Brussels over how it disposes of radioactive waste at the Atomic Weapons Establishment, home to its nuclear weapons industry.
The European Union executive said on Wednesday the UK Environment Agency had failed to notify it of an authorisation granted in 2000 for the disposal of nuclear waste from AWE.
AWE employs around 3,600 people at its two sites at Aldermaston and Burghfield in southern England. AWE is critical to Britain's nuclear deterrent as it designs, builds, maintains and disposes of nuclear warheads.
Under EU rules, governments must inform the Commission in advance if it wants to grant authorisation for radioactive waste disposal so that it can assess the risks to health in neighbouring countries.
"In fact no data were submitted to the Commission, neither in the course of the licensing procedure nor after its closure," the European Union executive said in a statement.
The Commission has sent a so-called reasoned opinion to London, the final step in an infringement procedure before it files suit at the European Court of Justice.
"We are in disagreement with the Commission but it would be inappropriate for us to argue the issues in public when this case is likely to come before the European Court of Justice," said a spokesman for the UK Ministry of Defence.
He said the UK did not accept that the Euratom treaty -- which governs the use of nuclear energy in the EU and which the Commission sited in its decision -- covers defence activities.
"The ministry of defence abides by international accepted safety and environmental standards as published by bodies such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Commission for Radiological Protection," the UK spokesman said.
The Euratom treaty aims to promote the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
The Commission is also on Britain's case in two other nuclear cases.
In October 2003 the Commission took Britain to court for breaking EU rules on radioactive waste from a dockyard that refits and refuels nuclear submarines.The Devonport dockyards, run by Devonport Management Limited, are owned by KBR, a division of U.S. engineering and construction firm Halliburton <HAL.N>.
Last month the Commission also said it would drag Britain to court for failing to grant EU inspectors full access to part of its Sellafield nuclear site so they could account for highly-radioactive materials.
(additional reporting by Margaret Orgill in London)
-------- china
Taiwan Conducted Plutonium Experiments
U.N. Agency Says Taiwan Conducted Plutonium Separation Experiments Up to the Mid 1980s
The Associated Press
Oct. 13, 2004
http://abcnews.go.com/International/print?id=161918
VIENNA, Austria - The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has found that Taiwan's experiments with plutonium extended up to the mid-1980s, diplomats said Wednesday, uncovering a key detail about the country's now-abandoned nuclear weapons program.
It had been known that Taiwan briefly revived its nuclear weapons research program in the 1980s, and the revelations confirm suspicions that plutonium separation experiments were carried out at that time.
Taiwan first launched its nuclear weapons program in the 1960s, but suspended in the following decade under pressure from the United States, which apparently feared the response from Taiwan's rival China.
Taiwan's governent has never acknowledged having a secret weapons program, according to analysts.
The experiments were uncovered in inspections and testing conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency after the Taiwanese government agreed to voluntary extra controls on the country's peaceful nuclear program, the diplomats said.
The diplomats told The Associated Press that their information was based on preliminary samples taken in Taiwan by IAEA inspectors indicating that plutonium separation experiments probably continued until about 20 years ago.
The diplomats, who are familiar with the IAEA, spoke on condition of anonymity. Officials at the Vienna-based IAEA said they would not comment.
One of the diplomats cautioned against drawing parallels between Taiwan and South Korea, whose government recently acknowledged that its scientists once dabbled in extracting plutonium and enriching uranium both of which can be used to make nuclear arms.
While the South Korean revelations reflected continued secret weapons-related research, it was common knowledge that Taiwan had engaged in nuclear weapons research after China exploded its first bomb in the 1960s, the diplomat said.
What the agency now was trying to do was to flesh out details of the Taiwanese program, with environmental sampling and other methods, he said.
The agency was not expecting to find new experiments with possible weapons applications beyond the mid-1980s, said the diplomat. "But there will be new things they did not discover in the past" about the previously known program because of the extra access Taiwan was now granting agency inspectors, he said.
In Taipei, Taiwan, Foreign Ministry spokesman Michel Lu said that ministry was not aware of the reports and would not immediately comment on them. Officials at Taiwan's Atomic Energy Council were not available after business hours Wednesday.
Andrew Yang, a defense analyst at the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, a Taipei think tank, said that it has long been common knowledge in Taiwan that the island's nuclear scientists were working on a bomb in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yang said the work was done at the Chung Shan Institute, the military's biggest research center. He said the government has yet to publicly confirm the project existed.
"I don't think they got anywhere close to building a nuclear device," Yang said. "But they did have the technology and the know-how."
The program was shut down and U.S. officials sealed off the laboratories and test sites in 1988 shortly after a military officer involved in the project, Chang Hsien-yi, defected to the United States with computer information about the program.
Taiwan's nuclear weapons program has been the subject of numerous media reports and books.
Jay Taylor, a former Asia specialist in the U.S. Foreign Service, wrote in his biography of the late Taiwanese President Chiang Ching-kuo, who took overall responsibility for the secret nuclear project, that the CIA recruited Chang to gather information about the program.
The project was approved by the late President Chiang Kai-shek, Ching-kuo's father. The elder Chiang in 1965 ordered that the nuclear bomb study move from research to development, the book said.
The CIA estimated in 1974 that Taiwan would be ready to build a nuclear weapon in "five years or so," according to Taylor's book, "The Generalissimo's Son," published in 2000.
In 1976, IAEA inspectors found that 10 barrels of used fuel containing about 1 pound of plutonium were missing.
The Washington Post cited official U.S. sources in an Aug. 29, 1976, report that said Taiwan had been secretly reprocessing for some time and had been producing plutonium for a nuclear weapon. The same article said that Washington demanded Chiang Ching-kuo dismantle the reprocessing facility and ship back related equipment to the United States.
Chiang accepted the U.S. demands and asserted that Taiwan had no intention to develop nuclear weapons. He issued a statement on Jan. 23, 1977, supporting President Jimmy Carter's call for a total ban on nuclear testing.
Taylor writes that "privately, Ching-kuo ordered the reprocessing program put on hold for the time being but for research work to continue."
Associated Press Reporter Bill Foreman in Taipei contributed to this story.
On the Net: www.iaea.org
-------- depleted uranium
UC Regents lose control of nuclear weapons program
Five admirals, Carlyle Group and Rand take over - Part 5
10/13/04
sfbayview.com
by Leuren Moret
http://www.sfbayview.com/101304/nuclearweapons101304.shtml
Our children: uranium meat
How was the truth about depleted uranium covered up and hidden from the American people? The same way Agent Orange was hidden for decades from Vietnam veterans and the public.
As Henry Kissinger said, "Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy." The health impact of exposure to depleted uranium, known as Gulf War Syndrome, has been covered up under three presidents beginning in 1991, with former President George Bush. Establishment doctors and scientists helped with the cover-up.
Dr. Joyce Lashof, appointed by President Clinton as chair of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses (1995-1997), is a medical doctor and former dean of the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. As a member of the faculty at the university that has managed the nuclear weapons labs for 61 years for the U.S. goverment, she had access to the best information on the health effects of depleted uranium.
After all, the nuclear weapons labs are mandated to spend 5 percent of their budgets on research concerning the biological effects of radiation. Annual lab budgets at each facility are over $1 billion.
Sandia Labs, now owned by Lockheed, of which 70 percent is owned by Carlyle, has been studying mitochondrial damage from DU exposure in Gulf War vets. Higher rates of mitochondrial related diseases - Parkinson's, Lou Gehrig's (ALS) and Hodgkin's disease - have been reported in Air Force and Army Gulf-era veterans. Despite the fact that a nuclear weapons lab found a link between DU exposure in Gulf War veterans and these diseases, Lashof categorically stated that "everyone" gets Lou Gehrig's disease:
"We heard veterans describe their diagnosis that we know happened to the general population. I mean, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a disease that happens to people ... Lou Gehrig's disease. And there is a veteran who has that. He feels it's due to his service in the Gulf. We don't know the cause of Lou Gehrig's disease, but we know it happens to lots of people who didn't go to the Gulf" (from "Update: Gulf War Syndrome," interview with Greg Krause, ONLINE NewsHour, Jan. 7, 1997, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/gulf_1-7.html).
When asked during an interview on PBS what her findings were, after complaints from veterans resulted in her appointment by presidential order as chair of the investigative committee, Dr. Lashof stated in 1997: "Well, we were critical of the Pentagon in one area and one area only. And I think it's important to emphasize that the government has done a very good job of setting up physical examinations, of treating veterans as they come in, of launching a whole series of studies that should give us the kinds of answers we're looking for. But the one area that we did fault them in was that they did not take very seriously the need to determine whether or not there were releases of chemical agents during - not only during the war but rather after the war as well and, indeed, whether people were exposed to these agents" (same source).
Terry Jemison of the Department of Veterans Affairs reported the astounding news to the American Free Press that as of August 2004, "Gulf-era veterans" now on medical disability number 518,739, with only 7,035 reported wounded in Iraq in that same 14-year period.
A Gulf War I medical doctor reported that in a unit of 20 soldiers who served in Iraq in 2003, eight have malignancies just 16 months later. These 2003 soldiers were not exposed to chemicals or bioagents, but they were exposed to DU at levels many times more than in Gulf War I. And the Gulf-era veterans have been treated just as Vietnam veterans were - they've been ignored. Almost none have been able to get medical care.
Dr. Joyce Lashof also downplayed birth defects in post-Gulf war babies reported in Gulf-era veterans. She said: "It was heart-rending to sit and listen to the woman with a child with a congenital defect. She feels it's due to service in the Gulf. I think it's completely understandable, but it's just not valid. Birth defects are very common. About 3 percent of births have some type of congenital defect. The initial studies we have show no greater frequency of birth defects among those children born to veterans who were in the Gulf, either women veterans or men" (same source).
A 1995 Life photo-essay, "The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm" (see below), focused on the numerous cases of severe birth defects that had occurred in families of veterans from that war. It reported, "Of the 400 sick vets who had already answered (Don Riegle's Senate Banking) Committee inquiries, a startling 65 percent reported birth defects or immune-system problems in children conceived after the war." Post-war babies in that 65 percent have been born with severe births defects - some with missing brains, no eyes, missing organs or fingers, and blood diseases.
"The legacy of the Gulf War should be a recognition by all Americans that the government acknowledges and honors its obligation to care for Gulf War Veterans, not the perception the government cannot be trusted to candidly address their health concerns" (from "Clinton announces new money for Gulf War Syndrome Research," CNN, Nov. 19, 1997, http://www.cnn.com/US/9711/08/gulf.war.illness/).
The report produced by the presidential committee chaired by Dr. Joyce Lashof was another government whitewash by all too willing scientific and medical prostitutes. And Clinton's administration was the second presidential cover-up of depleted uranium, which was used in Yugoslavia in 1995 and 1999 under President Clinton's orders.
References
Henry Kissinger, quoted in "Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POW's in Vietnam" (1990) p. 97, citing "The Final Days" by Woodward and Bernstein (Simon and Schuster 1976).
"Update: Gulf War Syndrome," interview with Greg Krause, ONLINE NewsHour, Jan. 7, 1997, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/gulf_1-7.html.
"Clinton announces new money for Gulf War Syndrome Research," CNN, Nov. 19, 1997, http://www.cnn.com/US/9711/08/gulf.war.illness/.
Birth defects: "The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm," Life photo-essay (1995), http://www.life.com/Life/essay/gulfwar/gulf08.html.
-------- europe
EU takes action against Britain over nuclear waste
(Reuters)
13 Oct 2004
By Peter Nielsen and Jeff Mason
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L13509614.htm
BRUSSELS, Oct 13 - Britain faces legal action from the European Commission over its failure to notify Brussels over how it disposes of radioactive waste at the Atomic Weapons Establishment, home to its nuclear weapons industry.
The European Union executive said on Wednesday the UK Environment Agency had failed to notify it of an authorisation granted in 2000 for the disposal of nuclear waste from AWE.
AWE employs around 3,600 people at its two sites at Aldermaston and Burghfield in southern England. AWE is critical to Britain's nuclear deterrent as it designs, builds, maintains and disposes of nuclear warheads.
Under EU rules, governments must inform the Commission in advance if it wants to grant authorisation for radioactive waste disposal so that it can assess the risks to health in neighbouring countries.
"In fact no data were submitted to the Commission, neither in the course of the licensing procedure nor after its closure," the European Union executive said in a statement.
The Commission has sent a so-called reasoned opinion to London, the final step in an infringement procedure before it files suit at the European Court of Justice.
"We are in disagreement with the Commission but it would be inappropriate for us to argue the issues in public when this case is likely to come before the European Court of Justice," said a spokesman for the UK Ministry of Defence.
He said the UK did not accept that the Euratom treaty -- which governs the use of nuclear energy in the EU and which the Commission sited in its decision -- covers defence activities.
"The ministry of defence abides by international accepted safety and environmental standards as published by bodies such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Commission for Radiological Protection," the UK spokesman said.
The Euratom treaty aims to promote the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
The Commission is also on Britain's case in two other nuclear cases.
In October 2003 the Commission took Britain to court for breaking EU rules on radioactive waste from a dockyard that refits and refuels nuclear submarines.The Devonport dockyards, run by Devonport Management Limited, are owned by KBR, a division of U.S. engineering and construction firm Halliburton <HAL.N>.
Last month the Commission also said it would drag Britain to court for failing to grant EU inspectors full access to part of its Sellafield nuclear site so they could account for highly-radioactive materials.
-------- iran
European nations to offer nuke incentives
October 13, 2004
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041012-101452-5726r.htm
The Bush administration said yesterday it is open to European incentives for Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment - a key to producing nuclear weapons - but it will not offer any U.S. benefits to Tehran.
Britain, Germany and France are to present a benefits package at a meeting of officials from the Group of Eight leading industrialized countries at the State Department on Friday, spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters.
"We'll hear what they've put together. We'll hear them out and talk together with them about how to move Iran into compliance" with the requirements of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mr. Boucher said.
The discussions on a package of incentives are a last-ditch effort to persuade Iran to abandon its uranium-enrichment activities before a crucial November meeting of the IAEA board of governors, U.S. and foreign diplomats said.
If Tehran does not comply, it most likely will be referred to the U.N. Security Council, which could impose sanctions.
Mr. Boucher, who would not use the word "incentives," dismissed suggestions that the administration is compromising its own policy of no deal-making with "axis of evil" countries - Iran, North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
"What we are doing now is to examine how to get Iran to meet [the IAEA] requirements," he said.
At the same time, he said, the United States will continue to insist that the matter be referred to the Security Council, even if Tehran accepts the European offer.
"Its past behavior merits referral" to the council, Mr. Boucher said.
A senior State Department official said: "We are not going to make any new offers."
The European Union decided on Monday to prepare a package of "carrots and sticks."
"They have always made clear that there are certain aspects, certain benefits in the EU relationship with Iran that wouldn't happen without Iranian compliance," Mr. Boucher said.
The senior State Department official said those benefits would include lifting some EU economic penalties and opening of trade opportunities.
Russia, which will be represented at the Friday meeting, is expected to provide nuclear fuel for Iran's civilian reactor in Bushehr, the official said.
The U.S. team at the meeting will be led by John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, and Glyn Davies, deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs.
The Group of Eight also includes Italy, Japan and Canada.
Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said yesterday that the EU cannot force Iran to give up its right to enrich uranium.
"It is wrong for them to think they can, through negotiations, force Iran to stop enrichment," he told a conference in Tehran. "Iran will never give up its right to enrichment."
Iran's nuclear program has become a presidential campaign issue, with Sen. John Kerry, President Bush's Democratic challenger, accusing him of not being involved enough with the Europeans in resolving the matter.
The Friday meeting could help Mr. Bush counter Mr. Kerry's charges. It also could upset some of the president's conservative supporters if it is perceived as a softening of the U.S. stance toward the Islamic republic.
U.S. differences with Iran go beyond suspicions it is attempting to make nuclear weapons. It is on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.
The Washington Times reported in yesterday's editions that Iran is attempting to influence fellow Shi'ite Muslims concentrated in southern Iraq by sending weapons, money and suicide bombers.
The Times also quoted a leading Iranian dissident in Paris as saying Iran is infiltrating hundreds of Shi'ite clerics into southern Iraq ahead of January elections in an attempt to set up a sister fundamentalist Islamic republic.
-------- iraq / inspections
U.S. investigates Iraq nuclear theft
October 13, 2004
By Betsy Pisik
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041013-122137-3321r.htm
NEW YORK - U.S. officials yesterday said they would look into a report that radioactive material and sophisticated equipment had disappeared from Iraq's nuclear power and research facilities, but expressed confidence that such dangerous materials are now secure.
In a letter to the U.N. Security Council on Monday, Mohamed El Baradei the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warned that whole buildings had suffered "systematic dismantlement" and that sensitive equipment previously subject to U.N. verification and monitoring had disappeared.
U.S. officials at the United Nations and the State Department said Washington would investigate the charges, but expressed no urgency.
"I think we share the general concern that some material might have gotten out into the market immediately after the war," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said yesterday.
"But to the extent that all of us have been able to bring it under control, we have done that, and we have been able to - I think the Iraqis have been able to put in place the kind of monitoring safeguards and control systems that are necessary to prevent any further leakage."
At the United Nations yesterday, Deputy U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson told reporters: "Obviously, we'll do a full investigation, working with the Iraqis."
But other U.S. officials seemed eager to play down the two-page letter, saying they had not seen it before yesterday.
The IAEA concerns surfaced only three weeks before the U.S. presidential election, in which the Iraq invasion and its justification have become issues.
In a long-awaited report to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, Charles A. Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, said that U.N.-imposed sanctions had been close to crumbling before the war and that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had wanted to re-create his illicit weapons capability once they did.
"Saddam sought to sustain the requisite knowledge base to restart the program eventually," Mr. Duelfer reported. In the interim, he said, the regime wanted to keep "the inherent capability to produce such weapons as circumstances permitted in the future."
The specter of an Iraqi nuclear-weapons program was a primary justification given for the 2003 war. Although no weapons were found, poorly secured power plants, storage facilities and research compounds were looted and vandalized in the postwar security vacuum.
Radiation levels among Iraqis living near the sprawling Tuwaitha nuclear facility south of Baghdad spiked shortly after the invasion, with equipment and supplies from the facility turning up in people's homes.
In the past year, the IAEA has located plainly tagged nuclear equipment in shipments intercepted in the Rotterdam, Netherlands, port and abandoned in junk heaps in Jordan.
The IAEA repeatedly has called on governments to police their ports and borders for Iraqi contraband and to report leads to the agency. There is no confirmation that any of the missing dual-use equipment - such as electron beam welders and milling and turning machines have landed in countries with covert-weapons programs.
Mr. Boucher stressed yesterday that Washington is working with the interim Iraqi government on nuclear security, but that it's up to Baghdad to take the lead.
"We're very supportive of the Iraqi government," he told reporters. "We work with them on export control; we work with them on border control; we work with them in supporting their efforts, helping them define the mission; and obviously, we work with them in helping with security at facilities. But they have the lead on this one."
In Baghdad, Iraq's minister of science and technology said the IAEA inspectors were welcome to return to Iraq whenever they want.
"We are happy for the IAEA or any other organization to come and inspect," Rashad Mandan Omar told Reuters news agency.
Inspectors have been back to Iraq twice since the March 2003 invasion, both times under severe restrictions on their mandate and mobility.
The Bush administration has informed the IAEA that it has transferred to the United States nearly two tons of enriched uranium and 1,000 highly radioactive items.
Based on satellite imagery and other "open-source" information, the IAEA letter implies that authorities in Washington and Baghdad did not realize that the theft was occurring.
"Pursuant to the ongoing monitoring and verification plan, Iraq is obliged to declare semi-annually changes that have occurred or are foreseen at sites deemed relevant by the agency," wrote Mr. ElBaradei in the letter.
"The agency has received no such notifications or declarations from any state since the agency's inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in March 2003."
The letter is unlikely to do anything to improve relations between Washington and Mr. ElBaradei, who is seeking a third term at the helm of IAEA over U.S. objections.
--------
U.S. to Look into "Vanished" Iraqi Nuclear Gear
October 13, 2004
By Irwin Arieff,
Reuters
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=178
UNITED NATIONS - The United States will investigate a report by the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency that equipment and materials that could be used to make nuclear arms have vanished from Iraq, a U.S. diplomat said Tuesday.
In Baghdad, a government minister said U.N. nuclear inspectors - barred from Iraq by Washington during the U.S. occupation, which officially ended in June - would be welcome to return if they wanted to check for the missing equipment and materials.
"Obviously we'll do a full investigation, working with the Iraqis," U.S. Deputy Ambassador Anne Patterson told reporters at the United Nations when asked about the report by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The IAEA, relying on satellite imagery, said entire buildings in Iraq that once housed high-precision equipment that could help a government or terror group make nuclear bombs had been dismantled since the March 2003 war on Iraq.
Equipment and materials helpful in making bombs also had been removed from open storage areas in Iraq and disappeared without a trace, IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said in a report to the U.N. Security Council.
Released three weeks ahead of the U.S. presidential election, the report could fuel criticism of President Bush, whose campaign has focused heavily on the dangers of nuclear proliferation and terrorism.
Monitoring Stopped Before War
The equipment, including high-precision milling and turning machines and electron-beam welders, and materials, such as high-strength aluminum, were tagged by the IAEA years ago as part of the watchdog agency's shutdown of Iraq's nuclear program following the first Gulf War.
U.N. inspectors then monitored the sites - due to their "proliferation significance" - until their evacuation from Iraq just before the 2003 war.
The IAEA said neither Baghdad nor Washington appeared to have noticed the disappearance of the equipment and materials.
In Baghdad, Iraqi Science and Technology Minister Rashad Omar said the interim government favored transparency.
"We are happy for the IAEA or any other organization to come and inspect," he said.
In Vienna, Western diplomats said the IAEA was worried the U.S.-led war, aimed at disarming Iraq, may have unleashed a proliferation crisis if looters have sold equipment that could be used to make atomic weapons.
"If some of this stuff were to end up in Iran, some people would be very concerned," a diplomat close to the IAEA said. "The IAEA's big concern would be profiteering, people who would sell this stuff with no regard for who is buying it," the diplomat said, adding that the profiteers could have sold the items on to groups or countries interested in weapons.
In London, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, whose government took part in the war and the later occupation, said he believed most of the removal of materials and equipment took place in the chaos that reigned shortly after the invasion.
"It is not clear, but it appears, and I'm seeking more details after receipt of the IAEA report overnight, that most of the unauthorized removal took place in the immediate aftermath of the major conflict in March and April last year," Straw told parliament.
U.S. officials charged the report had been given to the media before Washington had a chance to see it. But U.N. officials said it had been sent last week to Security Council members, including the United States.
Prewar U.S. allegations that Saddam had revived his atomic weapons program from the early 1990s have never been proven.
But the IAEA has warned countries to keep a close eye on all their nuclear sites due to multiple warnings from Western intelligence agencies that terrorist organizations are interested in getting their hands on a nuclear device.
Additional reporting by Louis Charbonneau in Vienna and Luke Baker in Baghdad
--------
Iraq says nuclear sites now fully protected
(AFP)
Oct 13, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041013/wl_mideast_afp/iraq_nuclear_041013123447
BAGHDAD - The Iraqi government said all nuclear sites are now fully protected after lapses in security during the early days of the US-led occupation.
"Since the transfer of power and the passage of certain sites to the responsibility of our ministry, all sites are protected," said Mohammad Jawad al-Shareh, director-general of the ministry of science and technology.
Shareh said in the aftermath of the US-led invasion in March 2003 "people snuck in and took some equipment and material," but that the situation had improved since the country regained its sovereignty at the end of June.
In an October 1 letter to the UN Security Council, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei said he was concerned that material and equipment, in some cases entire buildings housing sophisticated technology, are disappearing from Iraq (news - web sites).
The State Department acknowledged Tuesday that such items had been looted from Iraqi facilities after the invasion but maintained that "most, if not all," had been accounted for and that Iraqi authorities had acted to prevent further thefts.
An IAEA team visited Iraq two months ago to inspect sites, Shareh said, adding the agency had put equipment under seal and the government transferred the materials to heavily- guarded locations.
"We have asked the IAEA to furnish us with the list of equipment they recorded in 2003 so we can compare what we have with what existed before the war," he said.
Shareh said the ministry had asked the IAEA to help it decontaminate nuclear sites, including Tuwaitha, near Baghdad, which was ransacked by looters after the war.
-------- korea
U.S., EU Differ on Whether to Permanently Cancel North Korean Nuclear Reactor Project
Reuters
Carol Giacomo
Oct. 13, 2004
The European Union supports the continued suspension of a light-water nuclear reactor project in North Korea during diplomatic efforts to resolve the standoff over Pyongyang's nuclear program, Yonhap news agency reported (see GSN, Oct. 13).
The United States, however, is pushing to terminate the project permanently, according to Yonhap (see GSN, May 28). It was suspended for one year nearly 11 months ago, after the United States accused North Korea of uranium-enrichment efforts (see GSN, Nov. 21, 2003).
"We don't think there is any reason to terminate it at this stage," said Dorian Prince, the EU ambassador to South Korea. "We don't want to do anything negative, and we see no reason to change our position."
He added that he believed terminating the project could have a negative influence on diplomatic efforts with Pyongyang (Kazinform.com, Oct. 14).
A South Korean official also voiced support today for a continued suspension, adding that the program should be considered for resumption if the standoff with North Korea is resolved, the Korea Times reported.
"Though the project has been stopped due to the (North's) nuclear problem, we believe it should be resumed if the six-party talks go well and produce tangible results," Foreign Affairs Minister Ban Ki-moon said (Ryu Jin, Korea Times, Oct 14).
Meanwhile, Washington is expected to move quickly following the Nov. 2 U.S. presidential election to begin a new round of talks on North Korea's nuclear program, South Korea's ambassador to the United States told Reuters yesterday.
If Democrat John Kerry is elected, Ambassador Han Sung-joo said it was "quite plausible" that that the North Koreans would wait until he took office on Jan. 20 before resuming talks. He added that he believed a potential Kerry administration "will take advantage of experienced people (who worked on North Korea) during the Clinton administration ... and so they can get to work on this issue - which they consider a highly important and urgent issue - almost immediately after taking office."
Kerry has said he would continue multilateral talks but would also engage in bilateral negotiations with Pyongyang, as Clinton did.
The Bush administration has recently allowed senior U.S. envoys to hold side discussions with the North Koreans during multilateral talks, but continues an official policy of only engaging with the North in a multilateral setting.
Such contacts constitute a "dialogue" rather than "negotiation," according to Han. They have "not been terribly productive," he said.
If Bush is re-elected, Han said he did not expect much change in the U.S. policy on North Korea.
The Bush administration "wants to see a resolution of this (nuclear) issue through ... dialogue and by peaceful means and I think there will be a stepped-up effort to realize the fourth round of the six-party talks with concrete dates," Han said.
Following U.S. elections, Pyongyang could respond more favorably to recent U.S. overtures, such as repeated statements of nonhostility and allowing North Korean representatives at the United Nations to attend a conference in Washington, Han said.
"All the U.S. has to do is to continue to do what it has been doing," Han said
-------- terrorism
Terror beyond terrorism
IndyStar
Dan Carpenter
October 13, 2004
http://www.indystar.com/articles/6/185879-9716-021.html
While a presidential election may hinge on whether Americans really think George W. Bush really thought Saddam Hussein might be thinking about nuclear weapons, two nations are capable of destroying the Earth before this article goes to press.
The United States and Russia have thousands of missiles on hair-trigger alert, aimed at each other just as in Cold War days; they've already had close calls that would have been last calls, unleashing enough explosive power, heat, radiation, mega-hurricane winds and cloud cover to turn the planet into something much worse than Hiroshima.
This reality, alongside which such issues as taxes and ISTEP don't quite seem so pressing, was very much in our consciousness back in the 1980s, when an Australian doctor named Helen Caldicott was leading a young organization called Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Though the nuclear freeze movement can take credit for helping prod governments well down the road to disarmament, cocked nuclear weapons, shaky preemptive warning systems and aging nuclear power plants remain in force. So does Caldicott.
Last weekend, the 66-year-old author and Nobel nominee addressed the fourth annual Earth Charter Summit held by Indiana supporters of the Earth Charter, a widely endorsed global manifesto of environmental protection, economic development, human rights and peace.
If the couple hundred activists in Unitarian Universalist Church needed passion and punch to rally them in this election year, Caldicott delivered. But she served food for discouragement as well.
"I am sad," she said, "at what has happened to the planet. Sad that almost all politicians are scientifically illiterate . . . Sad that this country, with so much potential not just to save the Earth but to save itself and become civilized, is going backward."
Not exempting her own country, Caldicott decried powerful nations in thrall to a military-industrial complex that profits from death at the expense of the sick and hungry. Mocking the pious hand-wringing over nations such as Iran and Iraq, which possess a negligible share of the global arsenal, she declared, "The real rogue nations in the world today are Russia and America, threatening extinction."
Caldicott, who knows more about nuclear warfare than any president, maintains that it is going on in Iraq now -- tons of depleted uranium left by coalition shelling, toxic for millennia.
"Wouldn't you say the people in charge need to be removed from office for the public health of the planet?" she cried to a round of cheers.
But she admonished that the defeat of President Bush would not fundamentally change a political culture of "corporate prostitutes" beholden to military, economic and environmental violence.
"You are providing the weapons that kill lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of people," she told these liberal taxpayers. "War is good for business."
To accomplish a "second revolution" and turn away from destruction, she said, Americans must awaken spiritually.
"Why would God specifically bless one country to the exclusion of all others when only 5 percent of the world lives here? That's antithetical to what Jesus would do."
By implication, the other 95 percent depend upon how the blessed ones use their power.
"We are the curators of life on Earth," the famed physician pleaded. "We have the most profound responsibilities the human race has ever had."
Carpenter is Star op-ed columnist. Contact him at (317) 444-6172 or via e-mail at dan.carpenter@indystar.com .
-------- u.n.
Permanent U.N. Body Needed to Seek WMD, Panel Says
Global Security Newswire
By Jim Wurst
October 13, 2004
http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2004_10_13.html#8CED411D
UNITED NATIONS - Drawing on the lessons learned from weapons inspections in Iraq, a panel of nongovernmental arms-control experts said last week that a standing U.N. investigative body for weapons of mass destruction would lend "international legitimacy" to the campaign to control unconventional arms (see GSN, Oct. 7).
It would be "in the objective interest of all governments" to have "unbiased assessments at hand" to settle disputes over any country's WMD programs, said Henrik Salander, the secretary general of the WMD Commission. Such an initiative depends on the "international legitimacy" that "can only be derived from the United Nations," he said. The WMD Commission is chaired by Hans Blix, the last U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq.
The panel was held on Thursday, the day after the release of the report by chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq Charles Duelfer, who said that inspections and sanctions in place since 1991 had prevented Iraq from reconstituting its WMD programs. Duelfer said that by the time of the 2003 war, Iraq had no nuclear weapons or infrastructure and no significant chemical or biological weapons, thus confirming the basic positions of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
"If there was any doubt that this issue is important, it was put to rest by the Duelfer report," said W. Pal S. Sidhu of the International Peace Academy.
Whether Iraq "is an exception or part of a trend," he said, promoting nonproliferation or disarmament "has to result in a change of attitude in the [targeted] government."
The United Nations helped eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction "through inspections and sanctions," said Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, chairwoman of the chemical and biological weapons working group at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation. "The success of the U.N. underlined the need for the U.N. to be prepared for when the need arises. And the need will arise, there are suspicions aplenty."
She added investigations are useful not only for inspections but also for deterrence.
Panelists said the general idea would be to have a permanent body within the United Nations that would have the expertise and authority to investigate charges that a country was engaged in illegal WMD activities. Rosenberg said this unit must be allowed "to go beyond the limits of existing treaties." The International Atomic Energy Agency can conduct inspections of parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention has its own verification body, but there are no verification provisions for the Biological Weapons Convention (see GSN, April 13).
Salander outlined several scenarios under which such a body might be useful. Among them were a case such as Libya, in which a country renounces WMD ambitions "and wants it confirmed in a credible way," and a North Korean model in which there are "accusations of noncompliance" with a nonproliferation treaty.
Two related issues are how an inspection could be triggered - other than being requested by an accused country - and under whose authority the unit would be placed under: the U.N. Security Council or the General Assembly. The Security Council already has the authority to order an inspection under its mandate to maintain international peace and security. The General Assembly is more representative of the international community, thus any decision could be seen as more legitimate, but it has no enforcement powers under the U.N. Charter. This means no country would be compelled to cooperate with an investigative arm of the assembly.
Salander and Sidhu said the unit should be under the authority of the Security Council. Salander said this approach "is not without its complications," but the other options also have problems. Sidhu said since most investigations are likely "to be exceptional and unusual," requiring a flexible response. "Like it or not," he said, the council is the most flexible U.N. organ.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Exhibit Pays Tribute to Atom Bomb Workers
By CHERYL WITTENAUER
Wednesday October 13, 2004
Associated Press
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-4547548,00.html
WELDON SPRING, Mo. (AP) - For more than a year, Denise Brock has been trying to win government compensation for workers who were exposed to high levels of radiation while helping to create the atom bomb and Cold War-era weapons.
Now Brock has her eye on another kind of recognition for their toil.
Brock is working with the Department of Energy to build an exhibit that will tell the story of more than 3,500 Missourians who worked on the U.S. atom bomb program and at Cold War-era nuclear sites in St. Louis, Weldon Spring and Hematite, Mo.
``It's bittersweet,'' said Brock, whose father died of cancer in the 1960s after working at the old Mallinckrodt Chemical Co. plant in St. Louis, which produced uranium dioxide for the atom bomb.
The tribute should be completed by year's end and will become a permanent display at the Weldon Spring Interpretive Center.
The display will include a timeline of the nuclear age, photographs, a book of workers' names, and a glass case of old badges and other plant artifacts. A replica of the St. Louis Gateway Arch will emphasize the St. Louis connection, Brock said.
The exhibit also will recognize workers at a Hematite, Mo., plant that turned uranium into fuel rods under a string of owners from Mallinckrodt in 1956 to Westinghouse Electric in 2001.
The DOE's Pam Thompson said recognizing the workers' efforts during World War II and the Cold War is just as important as the government offering them compensation and decontaminating the site where they worked.
``It's important to tell the story that we closed the circle for them,'' Thompson said.
A four-year-old federal law requires the government to compensate workers in the nuclear weapons industry, or their survivors, for job-related cancer or other diseases. Workers from about 350 sites nationwide, including 10 in Missouri, may qualify.
But critics call the system burdensome and time-consuming. Claimants must show proof of employment as well as exposure to radiation, even though records often are missing or were never kept.
Tony Windisch, who suffers from cancer, said he couldn't serve in World War II, so instead he worked on the Manhattan Project in St. Louis, helping to create the atomic bomb that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Now, as he sees his co-workers dying from multiple cancers, and their survivors struggling to get compensation, he feels betrayed by a government that he says didn't adequately protect them from radiation exposure.
``To find out at this late date, not only did they destroy (workplace) documents, but treated us as guinea pigs, that's what really angers me,'' said Windisch, 78.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- south carolina
Duke Power has no plans to dismantle controversial MOX program
PAUL NOWELL
Wed, Oct. 13, 2004
Associated Press
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/breaking_news/9904041.htm?1c
YORK, S.C. - The concrete moat under construction at Duke Power's Catawba Nuclear Power Station south of Charlotte has little to do with the utility's plans to start burning mixed-oxide fuel containing small amounts of weapons-grade plutonium next spring.
Designed to prevent everything from passenger cars to military tanks from getting too close to the reactor, the moat is part of a post-Sept 11, 2001, security upgrade under way at the plant.
Still, company officials surely wouldn't mind if the barricade also kept away angry environmental groups who claim that mixed-oxide fuel, or MOX, is potentially dangerous and could make the nuclear plant a target for terrorists.
"They are still as adamant as ever," Steven Nesbit, Duke's MOX fuel project manager, said Monday when he was asked if critics have eased their condemnation of the MOX program in recent months. "If they've eased up, I haven't heard about it."
Reached Tuesday at her office, Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League executive director Janet Zeller said her group remains staunchly opposed to the MOX tests.
"Our organization is dedicated to stopping Duke from endangering the people around Charlotte," she said. "Even the amount that will be shipped there for the testing is enough plutonium to make several nuclear bombs."
Zeller can't believe there isn't more of a public outcry about Duke's plans.
"They are saying, 'Trust us,' and I don't think we should," she said. "They have given no reasons to trust them and they have made the Charlotte area a greater terrorist target."
Duke plans to start testing the fuel in early 2005 at the Catawba Nuclear Power Station near York - about 30 miles south of Charlotte - and the McGuire Nuclear Power Station, 20 miles north of Charlotte near Huntersville, N.C.
The Duke plants would be the first in the United States to burn MOX, which contains a small percentage of weapons-grade plutonium. MOX made from plutonium is now used in more than 30 European reactors.
The company says using MOX to generate electricity is a practical way to consume surplus plutonium from nuclear weapons and reduce the risk of terrorist groups or rogue nations obtaining the material.
Built in 1974 at a cost of $3.6 billion, Catawba produces 2,258 megawatts of electricity by burning uranium dioxide. It - along with McGuire and a third plant in Seneca, S.C. - is one of three nuclear stations owned by Duke Power.
In August, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a preliminary finding allowing Duke Power to test MOX fuel at Catawba. The commission found that testing would not increase the likelihood of an accident at the plant or worsen the results in the event of an accident.
Zeller's group, based in Glendale Springs, N.C., has been one of the most vocal opponents of the MOX program but has not yet decided on a response to the NRC's decision, said Diane Curran, a Washington attorney representing the group.
Duke said the MOX fuel would be introduced in small quantities at the plants. The company plans to use four MOX fuel assemblies out of 193 total fuel assemblies beginning in 2005, Nesbit said.
If testing goes as planned, Duke would be able to seek regulatory approval for expanded use of the fuel beginning around 2010, Nesbit said Monday as he and other Duke officials led a group of reporters and photographers on a behind-the-scenes tour of the nuclear plant, including a rare peek at the spent-fuel pool where 900 fuel assemblies are currently stored under water.
The tour highlighted security measures put in place since Sept. 11, including bulletproof doors and the moat that will encircle the plant's two nuclear reactors.
Security at the plant will not change once the MOX program begins, except during the short period between when the fuel arrives at the plant and when it is placed in storage for later use, Nesbit said.
MOX opponents have raised concerns about security, and the NRC plans to conduct hearings on the matter, Nesbit said.
In August, a small flotilla of boats took to the waters of Charleston Harbor to draw attention to the shipping of weapons-grade plutonium, which demonstrators say is dangerous.
More boats from along the East Coast are expected later this year, when a shipment of plutonium arrives in Charleston and is loaded on a ship for France.
A local environmental group, Citizens Against Plutonium, and Greenpeace want a full environmental impact statement on the Department of Energy's plans to ship 330 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium overseas for processing.
The plutonium powder, which critics say could make 50 dirty bombs, will be sent to France for processing and returned for use in a commercial reactor test run next year.
Nesbit says using MOX could provide McGuire and Catawba with a long-term, economical supply of nuclear fuel.
Each of the two reactors at Catawba produces enough electricity to supply the needs of a city the size of Charlotte. About 1,100 people work at the facility.
-------- tennessee
Tennessee Uranium Fuel Project Receives Third and Final Approval
October 13, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-13-09.asp#anchor4
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has approved a license amendment to authorize Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc., to possess and use special nuclear material at two facilities on its Erwin, Tennessee, complex. The amendment is the final of three associated with the Blended Low-Enriched Uranium (BLEU) project.
This license amendment allows Nuclear Fuel Services to begin using the oxide conversion building (OCB) and effluent processing building (EPB) for the BLEU project.
Special nuclear material refers to plutonium, uranium-233, or uranium enriched in the isotopes uranium-233 or uranium-235. In this case, the BLEU project will involve the blending of high-enriched uranium with natural unenriched uranium to produce low-enriched uranium. The oxide conversion and effluent processing operations, according to an NRC document, will convert low-enriched uranium liquid into a uranium oxide powder form. "The powder then will be shipped to another facility for fabrication of fuel for a commercial [nuclear] power reactor," the document states.
In July the NRC issued a finding that processing operations proposed for the oxide-conversion building and an effluent-processing building at the Nuclear Fuel Services facility in Erwin will have "no significant impact" on the environment, and therefore, an environmental impact statement will not be prepared.
But the NRC environmental assessment indicated that low levels of chemical and radioactive elements will be released to the environment as the result of the proposed OCB and EPB processing operations.
"Based on information provided by NFS [Nuclear Fuel Services], the safety controls to be employed for the proposed action appear to be sufficient to ensure planned operations will have no significant impact on the environment," the NRC document said.
Monitoring programs are already in place to ensure that any releases of chemicals or radioactive elements remain within allowable federal and state limits, the NRC document states.
The Nuclear Fuel Services plant is near the Nolichucky River, which is upstream from Greene County and is the main water source locally.
Friends of the Nolichucky River Valley, the State of Franklin Group of the Sierra Club, Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, and Tennessee Environmental Council have been fighting the licensing on the grounds that it will cause harm to the environment.
The groups have been seeking a full environmental impact statement, covering both past and potential hazards, to make the public aware of the potential dangers the project poses.
Another petitioner, Kathy Helms-Hughes of Butler, has been fighting the project on the grounds that it may pollute water springs northeast of the facility which are the source of drinking water for the city of Elizabethton and the communities of Hampton and Valley Forge.
The NRC approved the first amendment to Nuclear Fuel Services' license, for a uranyl nitrite building, in July 2003. A second amendment, for the blended, low-enriched uranium preparation facility, was approved in January.
NFS also submitted changes to its security plan to address physical protection of the new buildings, as well as changes to its nuclear materials control plan to support the amendment request. These changes were approved in the NRC's safety evaluation report for the license amendment.
The BLEU project is part of a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) program to reduce stockpiles of surplus high-enriched weapons grade uranium through re-use or disposal as radioactive waste.
Reuse is considered the favorable option by DOE because weapons grade uranium is converted to a form unsuited for weapons production, the product can be used for peaceful purposes, and the commercial value of the uranium can be recovered. Re-use is also considered preferable because it avoids unnecessary use of limited radioactive waste disposal space.
Notice of the approved license amendment was published October 12 in the Federal Register.
-------- us nuc waste
Congress Approves Nuclear Waste Reclassification Plan
WASHINGTON, DC,
October 13, 2004 (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-13-09.asp#anchor3
Language tucked into the massive $447 billion defense bill passed this weekend by the U.S. Congress allows the U.S. Energy Department to reclassify millions of gallons of high level nuclear waste stored in South Carolina and Idaho site as less hazardous.
The reclassification gives the department the authority to leave the waste on site - supporters say the change in policy will expedite cleanup at the site and save some $16 billion.
U.S. Energy Department Secretary Spencer Abraham said the policy change "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.
But critics say the move is irresponsible and unsafe and note that some of the tanks have already contaminated local groundwater.
"This back-room legislative fix would leave a legacy of radioactive contamination that could endanger drinking water for millions of Americans," said Geoffrey Fettus, senior project attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
At issue is high-level radioactive waste, largely created by the U.S. nuclear weapons program, stored in massive underground tanks at the two sites.
Some 34 million gallons of the liquid waste resides at the Savannah River site in South Carolina; some 300,000 gallons are stored in tanks at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory in Idaho Falls.
Federal law currently requires the government to encapsulate this waste in glass and bury it deep underground in a federal repository.
Although the liquid wastes can be drawn out and removed, the Energy Department's method for removing the most radioactive sludge out of the tanks has proven unsafe.
The department is exploring alternatives but the Bush administration favors diluting the waste with grout and leaving it on site permanently - for this to be legal the waste has to be reclassified as less hazardous.
Last year a federal court in Idaho rejected the agency's attempt do this through a rulemaking process. The Bush administration has appealed that ruling, but the language in the defense bill will make the policy legal for Idaho and South Carolina.
The provision does not cover the 53 million gallons of waste stored in tanks at Washington state's Hanford facility.
In June, Washington Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell attempted to strip the language from the bill, but failed by two votes.
Cantwell and other Washington state officials fear the language will give the Energy Department a precedent to force them into accepting a similar deal.
The language was inserted into the defense bill during closed-door negotiations late last week and was not debated by either body.
The Senate approved the bill by voice vote; the House passed the measure by a vote of 359 to 14.
--------
YUCCA MOUNTAIN PROJECT: Money request approved
Las Vegas Review-Journal
By SEAN WHALEY
October 13, 2004
CARSON CITY -- A panel that includes Gov. Kenny Guinn approved a request Tuesday for $1.75 million in additional funding for the state's ongoing efforts to fight construction of a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.
The request for $1.1 million for the Agency for Nuclear Projects and $650,000 for the attorney general's office for outside legal assistance was approved by the Board of Examiners and will go to the Legislature's Interim Finance Committee on Nov. 17.
Bob Loux, executive director of the Agency for Nuclear Projects, said the additional funding he requested from the Legislature's contingency fund is needed for several reasons.
The U.S. Department of Energy has indicated it plans to file a licensing application for Yucca Mountain with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in December, and the state has to be ready with its experts and legal advisers, he said. But funding to the state from Congress for its Yucca Mountain efforts is in limbo, because a new federal budget has not been passed for this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, he said.
If the federal budget is approved later this year and Nevada gets its funding, the extra state funding may not be required, Loux said.
Though it is unlikely the DOE will be able to file its licensing application because of Nevada's legal victory in the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals in July, the state has to be ready, he told the board.
That court decision voided a 10,000-year radiation standard the Environmental Protection Agency had written for the nuclear waste repository, suggesting the period should be longer, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years.
"We think the program is in big trouble," Loux told the board.
The board made up of Guinn, Attorney General Brian Sandoval and Secretary of State Dean Heller, approved the request for funding.
Guinn said the money should last through at least March, when the Legislature can debate the funding issues for the agency.
The 2003 Legislature put in just under $1 million a year in general fund revenue to support the state agency in its fight in the current two-year budget.
Another $2 million was allocated to the attorney general's office for legal expenses related to Yucca Mountain in the current two-year budget, but due to a misunderstanding, about $1.1 million reverted to the state general fund at the end of the 2003-04 fiscal year on June 30. The $650,000 request by Sandoval would be covered by the reverted funds.
The Nuclear Projects Agency has relied on federal support for its fight, but Congress allocated only $1 million for fiscal 2004, far less than the $2.5 million anticipated. And with the current budget stalemate, no funding is yet available this year.
Sandoval has sued the Energy Department for more government funding.
Guinn and most Nevada political leaders oppose plans by the DOE to bury 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste at the site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
-----
Group admits violating state open-meeting law
Las Vegas Review-Journal
By KEITH ROGERS
October 13, 2004
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Oct-13-Wed-2004/news/24981241.html
Elected officials from rural Nevada who met behind closed doors to discuss a rail corridor to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site violated the state open-meeting law, the state attorney general's office says.
The group, known as the Central Nevada Community Protection Working Group, was found to be a public body and admitted to violating the open-meeting law, according to a settlement agreement signed by Deputy Attorney General Neil Rombardo.
To avoid a criminal investigation, the group agreed "to hold as many public meetings as necessary to cure its failure to comply" with the open-meeting law, the agreement stated.
"At these meetings (the group) shall reconsider all past items and not consider any new items until all past items have been considered in public," said the agreement with officials from Lincoln, Esmeralda and Nye counties and the city of Caliente.
The group was formed last year at the suggestion of the Department of Energy. It includes Nye County commissioners Henry Neth and Candice Trummell; Esmeralda County Commissioner Ben Viljoen; Lincoln County commissioners Spencer Hafen and Tommy Rowe; Caliente Mayor Kevin Phillips and City Councilman Ashley Moore.
Phillips had said the open-meeting law didn't apply because they were "a very informal working group ... less than a quorum of folks talking about issues relate."
Instead, Rombardo found that the group, because of its members and function, meets the definition of a public body.
--------
Court refuses to delay radiation ruling
Nuclear industry seeking court review
Las Vegas Review-Journal
By STEVE TETREAULT
October 13, 2004
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Oct-13-Wed-2004/news/24980946.html
WASHINGTON -- A federal court has denied a nuclear industry appeal to keep a damaging Yucca Mountain ruling on hold until the Supreme Court decides whether to intervene.
The decision means a July court ruling throwing out a 10,000-year radiation protection measure for the proposed Nevada nuclear waste repository could become final within a week.
The legal setback could further complicate the Energy Department's repository program, which is facing other financial and technical problems.
Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency officials had said they accepted the July ruling and planned to develop new radiation standards to replace the ones invalidated by the court.
But the Nuclear Energy Institute indicated it wanted to ask the Supreme Court to review the issue. Industry attorneys asked a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to delay formalizing the July decision until the higher court could rule.
The appeals court denied the NEI appeal in a one-sentence order Friday that became available on Tuesday.
NEI officials "are assessing what our options are and we don't have a firm hand on it yet," spokesman Steve Kerekes said.
Asked if NEI might abandon its bid to take the Yucca Mountain case to the Supreme Court, Kerekes said, "That's a possibility, but I don't know. Everything is up in the air right now."
The deadline for filing a Supreme Court appeal is Nov. 30.
NEI in court papers said the Yucca case raises questions about EPA powers to form regulations. Legal experts considered it a longshot that Supreme Court justices would take an interest.
The industry's effort to attract the justices' attention probably would be hurt further because the government was not planning to join the appeal, the experts said.
The July ruling has complicated the Energy Department's plans to move the repository project forward.
DOE officials have said they want to complete a repository license application by the end of the year, but it has been unclear whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could review an application that lacks radiation protection standards.
DOE deputy secretary Kyle McSlarrow said last month the project's time lines were being reassessed in light of mounting problems.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
15 Afghan Candidates to File Vote Complaints With Panel
October 13, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/international/asia/13afghanistan.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 12 - Fifteen of the 17 candidates who ran against the interim president, Hamid Karzai, in Afghanistan's first presidential election met here on Tuesday to prepare official complaints of multiple voting, ballot box stuffing and other irregularities.
The complaints will be investigated by a commission set up by the United Nations after the 15 candidates called for a suspension of the election on Saturday and accused the United Nations and Afghan Joint Election Management Board of bias toward Mr. Karzai. The candidates agreed to abide by the panel's findings.
A spokesman for Mr. Karzai's campaign, Hamid Elmi, said Mr. Karzai's campaign office was also submitting complaints involving other candidates' supporters, but he did not specify what. The large number of complaints may slow down a counting process already expected to take at least two weeks.
The candidates' main complaint focused on the failure of a system to prevent multiple voting, in which voters' hands were marked with what was supposed to be indelible ink but which often washed off easily. Critics said the problem had opened the election to widespread fraud.
"It was systematic rigging," said Dr. Yassa, an aide to one candidate, Muhammad Mohaqeq, an ethnic Hazara and a Shiite Muslim.
"There are 15 candidates against Karzai and every one has dozens of complaints," said Abdul Bashir Bezhan, a party deputy to another candidate, Latif Pedram. He said there were numerous accounts of multiple voting, with some reports of people who had voted up to 15 times, and who were ready to admit it and show their multiple cards.
Other complaints involved ballot-box fraud. Dr. Yassa said two boxes from a Hazara district of Kabul had been found to be missing ballots - one lacked 300 and one 200 - at the counting center during the first checking procedure. He said he suspected foul play because the district was known for its support for Mr. Mohaqeq and the missing ballots would have almost certainly been in his favor.
Another candidate, Homayoun Shah Assefi, a former Afghan diplomat, told of a case he learned of on Saturday from a police official in Ghazni, some 100 miles south of Kabul, in which the manager of a polling station took home two ballot boxes and returned them on election morning stuffed with ballots. The police official, he said, gave the names of those involved and also had the numbers of the boxes.
The story did not end there: the manager was briefly detained by the local police but was released after saying the falsified ballots had been filled out in favor of Mr. Karzai, Mr. Assefi said, and the boxes were put in with the legitimate boxes.
"I don't know if such an infamous case has occurred in other places at this stage, but on that day I received complaints of fraud and cheating from Kandahar and Nangarhar as well," Mr. Assefi said.
In Spinbaldak, in southern Afghanistan, poll officers were ordered by their supervisor to fill out 700 ballots in favor of Mr. Karzai, according to an election official interviewed in Kandahar. Two men, tribal elders from a nearby refugee camp, arrived with 700 registration cards and said they wanted to vote for the entire camp, said the election official, who asked to remain anonymous.
The 700 cards were divided among the poll officers in five adjoining rooms. A poll official said he was handed 100 cards and ordered to punch each of them with a hole-puncher, while his colleague was told to mark ballots for Mr. Karzai. The election official said the poll official had objected but had been told by his supervisor, "You should not worry, you should just do your work."
Another poll official described working in a mountainous area in southern Afghanistan and being ordered by tribal chiefs to fill out 60 to 70 extra ballots for absentee voters, many of them women. The man said his supervisor had told him to comply. "It was in the middle of the desert," he said. "The supervisor said we are so far from anywhere, please just do it. It does not matter." All the extra ballots were filled out for Mr. Karzai, he said.
-------- biological weapons
'Growing threat' of bio-attack on coalition in Iraq
CIA warns of insurgents' plans for germ warfare
Los Angeles Times
OCT 13, 2004
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/topstories/story/0,4386,277292,00.html
WASHINGTON - Insurgent networks across Iraq are increasingly trying to acquire and use toxic nerve gases, blister agents and germ weapons against coalition forces, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) says.
Investigators said one group recruited scientists and sought to prepare poisons over seven months, before being dismantled in June. Advertisement
US officials say the threat is especially worrisome as leaders of the previously unknown group, which investigators dubbed the 'Al Abud network', were based in Fallujah in proximity to insurgents aligned with fugitive militant Abu Musab al Zarqawi.
The CIA says Zarqawi, who is blamed for numerous attacks on US forces and beheadings of hostages, has long sought to use chemical and biological weapons against targets in Europe as well as Iraq.
An exhaustive report released last week by Mr Charles Duelfer, the CIA's chief weapons investigator in Iraq, concluded that Saddam Hussein destroyed his stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990s and never tried to rebuild them.
But a little-noticed section of the 960-page report warns that the danger of a 'devastating' attack with unconventional weapons has grown since the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq last year.
Neither of the two Al Abud chemists had any ties to Saddam's long-defunct weapons programmes, and Mr Duelfer's investigators found no evidence that the group's poison project was part of a 'prescribed plan by the former regime to fuel an insurgency'.
The leaders and financiers of the network 'remain at large, and alleged chemical munitions remain unaccounted' for, the report said.
It added that other insurgent groups are 'planning or attempting to produce or acquire' chemical and biological agents throughout Iraq, and warns that the availability of chemicals and munitions, as well as sympathetic former Iraqi weapons scientists, 'increases the future threat'.
The new discoveries are separate from several attacks this year involving chemical munitions, the report said.
In May and June, insurgents used chemical-filled artillery shells, left over from Iraq's pre-1991 stocks, in three roadside bombs. Partly because of the shells' age, no chemical injuries were reported.
In all, US forces have recovered 53 decaying chemical-filled shells or artillery rockets that apparently were looted from unguarded ammunition bunkers or other sites.
Investigators from Mr Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group learned of the Al Abud threat by chance in March, when a US Army patrol raided a laboratory in a Baghdad market known for chemical supply shops.
They discovered an Iraqi chemist who had successfully produced small quantities of ricin, a potentially deadly toxin made from castor beans.
After the chemist was interrogated, Mr Duelfer quickly created a special team of covert agents, analysts and weapons experts to track down the scientist's contacts and arrest other members of the Al Abud network, named for the laboratory where the chemist was found.
By June, the team was able to identify and 'neutralise' the group's chemists, chemical suppliers, and other members of the network.
A series of raids, interrogations and detentions 'disrupted key activities at Al Abud-related laboratories, safe houses, supply stores' and organisational centres, according to Mr Duelfer's report.
-------- britain
Blair Apologizes Over Iraq;
Rejects Tory Charge of Deception
October 13, 2004
By PATRICK E. TYLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/international/europe/13cnd-blair.html
LONDON, Oct. 13 - Prime Minister Tony Blair gave his most explicit apology to date for the flawed intelligence assessments upon which he took Britain to war in Iraq, but he rejected opposition accusations that he had misrepresented that intelligence.
"I take full responsibility and apologize for any information given in good faith that has subsequently turned out to be wrong," Mr. Blair told the House of Commons during a spirited exchange with opposition members.
"What I do not in any way accept is that there was a deception of anyone," Mr. Blair said. "I will not apologize for removing Saddam Hussein. I will not apologize for the conflict. I believe it was right then, is right now and essential for the wider security of that region and the world."
Though Mr. Blair made a muscular defense of his position, his remarks today reflected his careful management of the issue in Parliament, where a large fraction of his Labor Party is in rebellion over the Iraq policy. Together with opposition members, they have been demanding an apology of some sort for mistakes about the existence of prewar weapons stockpiles and for inadequate planning for stabilizing and rebuilding Iraq.
Britain's M.I. 6 intelligence service has been forced to retract its assertions that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons and that such weapons could be deployed on 45 minutes' notice, a claim that helped to galvanize British public opinion in favor of war.
Michael Howard, the Conservative opposition leader who supported the war, rose to confront Mr. Blair over his handling of the intelligence that led up to it.
He said that before Mr. Blair could move on politically, "there is one matter that you must deal with: You didn't accurately report the intelligence you received to the country."
"Will you now say sorry for that?" Mr. Howard demanded.
Mr. Blair accused Mr. Howard of playing politics over the issue of faulty intelligence, and seemed to borrow a line from President Bush by questioning Mr. Howard's support for British troops and his qualifications to be a prime minister. British forces in Iraq number 9,165, a Ministry of Defense spokeswoman said today.
"Remember that he and his party supported the war for precisely the same reasons as we did," Mr. Blair said, adding, "It would be more helpful if he would back our troops out in Iraq rather than doing what he is doing now."
But Mr. Howard retorted calmly: "We back our troops wholeheartedly. I didn't ask him to apologize for the war, because I support it. I didn't ask him either to apologize for what he describes as the information.
"I asked him very specifically about the way he misrepresented the intelligence he received to the country. Why can't he bring yourself to say sorry for that?"
Mr. Blair responded: "I cannot bring myself to say that I misrepresented the evidence, since I do not accept that I did."
-------- business
Boeing Competitors Protest
Lockheed, BAE Dispute Druyun's C-130 Choice
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 13, 2004; Page E03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28017-2004Oct12.html
Lockheed Martin Corp. and BAE Systems North America Inc. filed protests with the Air Force yesterday over a $4 billion contract to upgrade electronics on C-130 military transport planes awarded to Boeing Co. in 2001.
The companies had 10 days to dispute the contract after former Air Force procurement officer Darleen A. Druyun acknowledged in court documents that an "objective selection authority may not have selected Boeing." Druyun admitted she favored Boeing after the company gave jobs to her daughter and son-in-law.
Raytheon Co. also was in the competition but has since sold the unit that bid for the contract and did not file a protest. "When we have more information, we will determine if any action on our part is appropriate," a Raytheon spokesman said. The company could still file a protest with the Government Accountability Office or a claim with the Court of Federal Claims.
Druyun was sentenced to nine months in federal prison Oct. 1 after admitting she gave Boeing preferential treatment for years because she felt indebted to the firm. Druyun accepted a position as a Boeing vice president after retiring from the Air Force in 2003.
The C-130 work is among hundreds of contracts Druyun helped award that are now being reviewed by the Pentagon inspector general. "We will take appropriate action based upon the IG investigation and an evaluation of the protest," Air Force spokesman Doug Karas said.
Contract protests are typically considered long shots, but the unusual circumstances surrounding Druyun's admissions have made it more likely the Air Force will take some action, industry analysts said. Both companies will likely try to recoup the millions they spent bidding for the work, and the Air Force also could consider reallocating some of the contract or holding a new competition, they said.
"Ms. Druyun's admitted bias and quid-pro-quo actions as the source selection authority clearly corrupted the acquisition process, which we had assumed at the time was being managed with fairness and integrity," BAE said in a statement. Lockheed's loss of the 10-year C-130 contract was considered stunning within the defense industry, particularly since Lockheed had built the planes for decades.
"It is important for us to restore our corporate reputation after the contract loss . . . and it's important to find a remedy for an injustice that Darleen Druyun caused through her unlawful actions," Lockheed spokesman Tom Jurkowsky said.
Lockheed also asked the Air Force to review all of its competitions that Druyun helped decide, including a contract of more than $2 billion for a small-diameter bomb. The deal was awarded to Boeing in August 2003, months before Druyun retired and accepted a job at the company. The review also should include two classified programs, as well as other contracts, Lockheed said. "We are confident that the Air Force will act on these requests expeditiously to resolve them," Jurkowsky said.
Druyun was also involved in a 1990s competition for rocket launchers in which Boeing was awarded a majority of the work over Lockheed. That contract is now the subject of a federal investigation since Boeing acknowledged that several of its employees had proprietary Lockheed documents during the competition. Lockheed is also suing Boeing over that work.
The first of more than 400 C-130 upgrades is not expected to begin until January 2005, the Air Force said. Boeing, which has spent the past three years developing the technology, has already earned more than $300 million on the contract.
"Boeing is not aware of having received any special consideration in the award of the [C-130 contract], and believes the award was justified on its merits," Boeing spokesman Douglas J. Kennett said.
-------- china
Chinese information warfare threatens Taiwan
October 13, 2004
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041012-101455-7846r.htm
Taiwan is facing a growing threat from Chinese computer attacks and other information-based strikes designed to cripple its infrastructures, a senior Pentagon official says.
"China is actively developing options to create chaos on the island, to compromise components of Taiwan's critical infrastructure - telecommunications, utilities, broadcast media, cellular, Internet and computer networks," said Richard Lawless, deputy undersecretary of defense for East Asia and Pacific affairs.
Mr. Lawless said in a recent speech that China is looking at several "coercion options" for strategic information warfare to be conducted in a calculated manner.
"These threats range from computer network attacks to compromising Taiwan's public utilities, communications, operational security and transportation," he said.
Speaking at the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference held in Scottsdale, Ariz., which was attended by defense officials from the Republic of China (Taiwan), Mr. Lawless also warned that Taiwan's legislature needs to pass a special $18 billion defense spending bill or risk losing international support. A copy of the Oct. 4 speech was obtained by The Washington Times.
"Make no mistake, the passage of this budget is a litmus test of Taiwan's commitment to its self-defense," he said.
The Bush administration has offered Taiwan about $20 billion in weapons systems, including guided-missile destroyers, P-3 anti-submarine aircraft, diesel submarines and Patriot PAC-3 anti-missile systems.
Since 2001, however, only $700 million in long-range radar systems were sent to bolster the island's security. By contrast, China's military has started a large-scale buildup of forces opposite the island that include about 600 missiles aimed at Taiwan.
China's military also has stepped up work on information warfare - the use of computers and other weapons to target computer-based and electronic systems in crippling attacks, either electronically or with kinetic weapons.
The goal of the Chinese "would be to paralyze Taiwan's economy and the government's ability to function," said Mr. Lawless, noting that Beijing's information warfare efforts are targeting Taiwan's ability to function as a society.
Mr. Lawless said Taiwan's information infrastructure has a few physical connections that link its communications to the rest of the world. The United States, which is committed to preventing China from using force to reunite the island with the mainland, could be cut off from Taiwan, he said.
Security of energy supplies and transportation networks also must be strengthened.
"By hardening Taiwan critical infrastructure, Taiwan can protect itself from pervasive coercive attacks that could undermine domestic and international confidence in Taiwan's ability to identify, manage and resolve a crisis," Mr. Lawless said.
On Monday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman criticized Mr. Lawless for remarks that "highlighted the so-called military threat" from China.
China's government protested the meeting in Arizona as a violation of the "one-China" policy of denying formal recognition to Taiwan's government.
-------- iraq
Bomb Blasts and Suicide Attack Kill 6 U.S. Soldiers in Iraq
October 13, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/international/middleeast/13CND-IRAQ.html?ei=5094&en=aa3df80e84c2b4d0&hp=&ex=1097726400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 13 - Six American soldiers were killed in roadside bomb blasts and a suicide attack, the military said today, as insurgents continued their assaults.
Two soldiers died in the northern city of Mosul today, after a suicide driver rammed his explosives-filled vehicle into an American convoy at 2:20 p.m. One soldier was seriously wounded and two others returned to duty, the military said.
Four soldiers were killed by roadside bombs, one in the western part of the capital at about 4:40 this morning, the military said. Three others were killed late Tuesday night in eastern Baghdad, when a roadside bomb exploded in their convoy.
At least 1,075 American soldiers have died since March 2003, when the war began.
Later today, an Iraqi group led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi beheaded two Iraqi intelligence officers and posted a video of the killings on the Internet, Reuters reported.
In the video, said to be from the One God and Jihad Group, the two men said they were captured in Baghdad on Sept. 28.
One of the men said, "I advise my brothers, the sons of Iraq, who are working for the government agencies, in intelligence, the armed forces and the police to repent," the news agency said.
Both were then beheaded.
Separately, the Iraqi interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, threatened military action unless foreign militants led by Mr. Zarqawi were handed over.
The continuing deaths followed a series of aggressive strikes on Tuesday by American forces in insurgent strongholds west of Baghdad, including firing missiles into the streets of Falluja and conducting raids alongside Iraqi commandos in seven mosques in Ramadi.
The wave of assaults inflamed Sunni Muslim leaders and residents of the cities, who said innocent civilians were killed or arrested in the operations.
Warplanes attacked twice in Falluja in the early hours, with the first strike demolishing one of Iraq's most celebrated kabob restaurants, Haji Hussein, named after the owner. Mr. Hussein's son and his nephew, both working as night watchmen, were killed in the attack, residents said. The second attack took place about four hours later in another neighborhood, hitting an empty house and injuring two neighbors, nearby residents said.
The American military issued a statement asserting that the first target was a meeting place for insurgents associated with Mr. Zarqawi, head of a network that has taken responsibility for numerous attacks on American and Iraqi security forces, as well as for the beheadings of Western hostages. As for the second attack, it said missiles had been aimed at a safe house used by the Zarqawi network. "Intelligence sources tracked and confirmed that Zarqawi associates were using the safe house at the time of the strike," the military said.
In nearby Ramadi, the seat of restive Anbar Province, American troops and Iraqi soldiers arrested a Sunni cleric, Sheik Abdul Aleem Saidy, and his son Osama, both members of one of the country's most famous religious families, according to spokesmen for the Muslim Scholars Association, a prominent group of mostly Sunni clerics. Among the Iraqi soldiers involved in the mosque raids were former Kurdish and Shiite militiamen, one of the spokesmen, Abdul Satter Abdul Jabbar, said. "There is a sense of sectarianism in this," he said.
American commanders have in the recent past deployed units of the Iraqi National Guard that are made up of militiamen recruited from political parties representing diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds. Last April, during a two-front uprising across western and southern Iraq, marines in Falluja fought alongside the Iraqi National Guard's 36th Battalion, which has fighters recruited from Kurdish and Shiite political parties. The battalion reportedly fought well, but the use of such units has raised the ire of Sunnis.
The attacks on Tuesday came as the American military was trying to put rebel-held territory around the country, especially the hotspots of Anbar Province, under control to prepare for general elections scheduled in January. A wide voter turnout, even in areas hostile to the American occupation, is needed to ensure a sense of legitimacy. American officials have said they could very well invade Ramadi and Falluja, the most intractable cities, but may hold off until after the American presidential elections in early November.
In the southern holy city of Najaf, the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered Shiite cleric in Iraq, issued a statement from calling for all Iraqis qualified to vote to properly register for the elections. The ayatollah also called on Iraqi leaders to organize committees in neighborhoods to help register voters.
Ayatollah Sistani has been one of the strongest proponents of popular elections in Iraq, pushing for the American government and the United Nations to honor the January timetable. Because Shiite Muslims make up at least 60 percent of the country's population, Shiite candidates will presumably dominate the elections and take over control of the region, which has been run by Sunnis since the days of the Ottoman Empire.
Various Shiite groups are already jockeying to put together slates of candidates and win backing from prominent religious leaders such as Ayatollah Sistani and Moktada al-Sadr, a popular anti-American cleric.
Ayatollah Sistani asserted in his statement that neighborhood committees should help people register for "the election that we hope will be held at the scheduled time and will be free and honest, based on the participation of all Iraqis."
In Sadr City, a vast slum in northeastern Baghdad, people continued selling heavy weapons to Iraqi security forces at three police stations, as part of an amnesty agreement between the organization of Mr. Sadr and Iraqi and American officials. The weapons purchase program began on Monday and is to run until Friday. After weeks of having his militia, the Mahdi Army, pounded by the American military, Mr. Sadr has agreed through his aides to disarm it.
Mr. Sadr has made such promises before but broken them by reigniting attacks against American soldiers and Iraqi security forces. This time, though, his aides say he is serious about trying to get involved in a legitimate political process, especially given the short timetable before the scheduled elections. He commands enormous support throughout the south and especially among the 2.2 million people of Sadr City, and could play a significant role in any popular election.
The American military said Tuesday that soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division handed out 300 frozen chickens to residents of Sadr City one day last week. The military said in a statement that the soldiers drove up to a "major thoroughfare" with boxes of frozen chicken and began opening them, attracting swarms of impoverished children. After a half-hour, "all that was left were empty boxes, most shredded by the groping hands of the Iraqi children," the military said.
In Mosul, gunmen fatally shot a provincial council member, Abdul Majid al-Antar, and his driver as Mr. Antar was going to work, police and health officials said.
Marines in Ramadi said the mosque raids on Tuesday came after insurgents had repeatedly used mosques as shelters or as staging areas for attacks. The most recent incident occurred on Monday afternoon, when guerrillas fired at marines and Iraqi National Guardsmen from a mosque in the nearby town of Hit, the First Marine Division said in a statement. After a three-hour exchange of gunfire, the division said, the marines launched an airstrike that dropped "precision-guided munitions" on the mosque.
"It's a very bad situation in Ramadi," Muhammad Bashar al-Fadhi, a spokesman for the Muslim Scholars Association, said in an interview. "The Americans are just arresting whoever is in front of them at the mosques. They're behaving in a strange manner."
--------
Insurgent Alliance Is Fraying In Fallujah
Locals, Fearing Invasion, Turn Against Foreign Arabs
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 13, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28105-2004Oct12?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Oct. 12 -- Local insurgents in the city of Fallujah are turning against the foreign fighters who have been their allies in the rebellion that has held the U.S. military at bay in parts of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland, according to Fallujah residents, insurgent leaders and Iraqi and U.S. officials.
Relations are deteriorating as local fighters negotiate to avoid a U.S.-led military offensive against Fallujah, while foreign fighters press to attack Americans and their Iraqi supporters. The disputes have spilled over into harsh words and sporadic violence, with Fallujans killing at least five foreign Arabs in recent weeks, according to witnesses.
"If the Arabs will not leave willingly, we will make them leave by force," said Jamal Adnan, a taxi driver who left his house in Fallujah's Shurta neighborhood a month ago after the house next door was bombed by U.S. aircraft targeting foreign insurgents.
Located 35 miles west of Baghdad in Iraq's Sunni Triangle, Fallujah has been outside the control of Iraqi authorities and U.S. military forces since April, when a siege by U.S. Marines was lifted and Iraqi security forces were given responsibility for the city's security. Local and foreign insurgents gradually gained control, and Iraqi and U.S. officials say Fallujah has become a principal source of instability in the country.
U.S. and Iraqi authorities together have insisted that if Fallujah is to avoid an all-out assault aimed at regaining control of the city, foreign fighters must be ejected. Several local leaders of the insurgency say they, too, want to expel the foreigners, whom they scorn as terrorists. They heap particular contempt on Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose Monotheism and Jihad group has asserted responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks across Iraq, including videotaped beheadings.
"He is mentally deranged, has distorted the image of the resistance and defamed it. I believe his end is near," Abu Abdalla Dulaimy, military commander of the First Army of Mohammad, said.
One of the foreign guerrillas killed by local fighters was Abu Abdallah Suri, a Syrian and a prominent member of Zarqawi's group. Suri's body was discovered Sunday. He was shot in the head and chest while being chased by a carload of tribesmen, according to a security guard who said he witnessed the killing.
Residents say foreign fighters recently have taken to gathering in Fallujah's grimy commercial district after being denied shelter in residential neighborhoods because their presence so often attracts U.S. warplanes. The airstrikes and the turmoil in the streets have spurred perhaps half of the city's 300,000 residents to flee, residents and officials said.
U.S. aircraft hit Fallujah twice on Tuesday. An airstrike just after midnight destroyed the city's best-known restaurant, a kebab house that a military statement said was used as an arms depot, citing "numerous secondary explosions." A second strike at 4 a.m. destroyed "a known terrorist safe house" in the northeast of the city, the statement said.
Adnan, the taxi driver who moved his panicked wife and four children to another town, said attitudes toward the foreign fighters have changed dramatically since they poured into Fallujah after the Marines' siege ended in April. "We were deceived by them," he said. "We welcomed them first because we thought they came to support us, but now everything is clear."
Among the tensions dividing the locals and the foreigners is religion. People in Fallujah, known as the city of mosques, have chafed at the stern brand of Islam that the newcomers brought with them. The non-Iraqi Arabs berated women who did not cover themselves head-to-toe in black -- very rare in Iraq -- and violently opposed local customs rooted in the town's more mystical religious tradition. One Fallujah man killed a Kuwaiti who said he could not pray at the grave of an ancestor.
Residents said the overwhelming majority of Fallujah's people also have been repulsed by the atrocities that Zarqawi and other extremists have made commonplace in Iraq. The foreign militants are thought to produce the car bombs that now explode around Iraq several times a day, and Zarqawi's organization has asserted responsibility for the slayings of several Westerners, some of which were shown in videos posted on the Internet.
There was another digital display of a beheading on Tuesday. The victim apparently was a Shiite Muslim Arab, and the group that said it posted the video identified itself as the Ansar al-Sunna Army.
Abu Barra, commander of a group of native insurgents called the Allahu Akbar Battalions, said: "Please do not mix the cards. There is an Iraqi resistance, a genuine resistance, and there are other groups trying to settle accounts. There is also terror targeting Iraqis.
President Bush, he said, "knows that and so does the government, but they purposely group all three under the tag of 'terrorism.' "
Barra and other insurgent leaders said the "genuine resistance" is a disciplined force that restricts its attacks to military targets, chiefly U.S. forces. It is motivated, they say, by Iraqi nationalism and humiliation over what it regards as a foreign occupation.
"The others," Barra said, "are Arab Salafis who claim that any Iraqi or Muslim not willing to carry arms is an infidel. They are the crux of our ailment. Most of them are Saudis, Syrians" and North Africans. Salafism is a strain of Islam that seeks to restore the faith to the way it was in the days of the prophet Muhammad, 14 centuries ago.
"It is the Zarqawis and his Salafi group who are going to lead Fallujah, Samarra, Baqubah, Mosul and even some parts of Baghdad to disaster and death," Barra said.
Such worries are encouraged by U.S. and Iraqi officials, who together have mounted offensives in recent weeks to reclaim areas held by insurgents. U.S. forces have led battles to take Najaf, Tall Afar, Samarra and, last week, a string of towns southwest of Baghdad. The operations are intended to establish government control over the entire country before nationwide elections promised for January.
But they also serve, officials say, as a psychological lever on Fallujah, long considered the toughest insurgent outpost.
"The pressure is certainly going up, both as a result of our airstrikes and as a result of their seeing Najaf, Tall Afar, Samarra giving a sense this whole thing is serious," a senior U.S. official in Baghdad said. "There's a lot of fear in Fallujah."
Many residents say the same. A delegation of six prominent Fallujans began negotiating with Iraq's interim government late last month. But senior government officials said it was only after the Oct. 1 assault on Samarra that the Fallujah delegation approached the task with new zeal.
The proposal the delegation took back to Fallujah calls for surrendering control of the city to the Iraqi National Guard. U.S. forces would remain outside the city unless the lightly armed government forces were attacked.
But first, all foreign fighters must leave the city, and the foreigners are adamantly and publicly opposing the plan. Their representative voted against it in a meeting last week of the city's ruling mujaheddin shura, or council of holy warriors, which supported the peace proposal, 10 to 2. The local insurgent who cast the other negative vote was later persuaded to change his mind, residents say.
Foreign fighters already are blamed for violating a cease-fire in April and prompting a Marine offensive that killed hundreds. Dulaimy said a Syrian was slain by local insurgents "after he fired on American forces during the last truce." In remarks broadcast from one of the city's main mosques on Thursday, an insurgent negotiator, Khalid Hamoud Jumaili, said a city of several hundred thousand should not be sacrificed for a handful of foreign fighters.
Meanwhile, U.S. forces kept up military pressure Tuesday in several nearby cities. Marines raided eight mosques allegedly used as armed bases in Ramadi, a provincial capital about 25 miles west of Fallujah, and called in airstrikes in the town of Hit, about 60 miles to the northwest.
"I think there is unquestionably a fissure and there are probably several different splits based on different groups," said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because his remarks were not cleared by Washington. But "whether any of the townspeople have enough force to make this fissure into something that changes the complexion of things" remains to be seen, the official said.
The assault on Samarra was mounted after a more unified local establishment headed by tribal leaders failed in a similar bid to eject a far smaller band of insurgents and foreign fighters than are holding Fallujah, the official noted.
Maki Nazzal, a Fallujah native who travels into the city frequently as an aid worker, said substantial support remains for the foreigners, especially given the number of civilian casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes.
"Not all the people in Fallujah want these people to leave," Nazzal said. "They always have the explanation of Americans bringing people from Spain, Salvador, Poland and over the world to help them and why can't our brothers help us?"
Some foreign fighters already have left, at least for now. The fighting Tuesday in Hit erupted as Marines pursued insurgents who had recently arrived in the city from Fallujah, residents said.
"There are Arab fighters and Iraqis too," said Omar Jabbawi, 23, an engineering student at Anbar University. "They are supplied with modern weapons which even the modern army didn't have. They killed some of the people the moment they came, saying that they were spies for the Americans."
The blend of insurgents held the town, some patrolling a street of shuttered stores, others praying on the sidewalk.
"Most of the people of the city knew that after Fallujah, the fighters will come to Hit because it is an open city and has many wide woods in which maneuvering is easy," said Abeer Fadhill, 32, a traffic policeman.
A woman in Hit said one fighter had said they had come to liberate Hit as they had Fallujah.
"We don't want to be another Fallujah," said the woman, 45, who gave her name as Umm Hussein. "Ramadan is coming, and we don't have any will to lose a father, a son, a relative or even a friend. Let them leave in peace and fight in a desert away from houses and people."
--------
Allawi Threatens Military Action
October 13, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Fallujah.html?oref=login
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq's interim prime minister on Wednesday threatened military action against the main insurgent stronghold of Fallujah if residents don't hand over Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's warning came as government negotiators and Fallujah representatives were trying to hammer out a deal to restore government control over the city, seen as the hardest of the militant-held regions to crack.
The chief negotiator representing Fallujah said Wednesday the talks are in their final phase but differences remain over handing over insurgents wanted by Iraqi and U.S. authorities on criminal charges. Many in the city view the Iraqis fighting in the insurgency as heroic ``mujahideen,'' or holy warriors.
Fallujah, in Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland, is also believed to be a stronghold of al-Zarqawi's feared Tawhid and Jihad group, which has kidnapped and beheaded numerous foreigners and has carried out a number of bloody bombing attacks.
``If they do not turn in al-Zarqawi and his group, we will carry out operations in Fallujah,'' Allawi told a meeting of the 100-member interim National Council on Wednesday. ``We will not be lenient.''
``I would like to reassert once more that the option of using force is a last resort for the government to settle the security situation,'' he said. ``We shall remain prepared to deal positively with any initiative to disarm and enter the political process.''
But he warned of the likelihood of more bombings and other insurgent attacks. ``The more we crack down on terrorist havens, the more these strikes are going to increase,'' he said.
U.S. and Iraqi authorities have used a mix of diplomacy and force to try to regain control of insurgent enclaves in time to hold nationwide elections in January. Troops swept into the militant stronghold of Samarra, northwest of Baghdad, earlier this month and have been carrying out smaller-scale raids in recent days in other areas.
In Fallujah, a city of 300,000, U.S. forces have staged weeks of ``precision strikes'' aimed buildings believed to be safehouses of al-Zarqawi's network and its associates -- even as negotiations have continued.
Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, fell under the control of hardline Islamic clerics and their armed followers after Marines ended a bloody three-week siege in late April.
``Fallujah of course is an honest city but it has been manipulated by a deviant bunch that wants to harm Iraq,'' Allawi said.
He promised to show council members photographs and documents confirming terrorist activity in the city and other insurgent strongholds.
``You can see for yourself the evil of these people and their ongoing fight to strike Iraq,'' Allawi said. He gave no details.
In his comments Wednesday, Fallujah chief negotiator Sheik Khaled al-Jumeili did not mention al-Zarqawi specifically or address demands for the Jordanian's handover.
``There are only a handful of Arab fighters in Fallujah. When a deal is struck, they will just leave the city,'' he told the Associated Press by telephone from Fallujah.
Al-Jumeili said city leaders are concerned over how insurgents will be treated if Iraqi National Guardsmen take control. ``The people of Fallujah want guarantees that they will not be attacked by the National Guardsmen,'' he said.
He said it was agreed that the National Guard units taking over security in Fallujah would include natives of the city and that residents whose relatives have been killed or injured or whose property has been damaged would receive compensation. There was no immediate government or U.S. comment.
Still to be ironed out is what happens to specific individuals wanted by Iraqi and U.S. military authorities to face criminal charges, al-Jumeili said. They presumably include the killers of four U.S. contractors in March, whose deaths led to the three-week siege of Fallujah in April.
``They are outlaws to them but they are mujahedeen to us,'' he said.
It is not known how many foreign fighters are in Fallujah and how many Iraqis have worked with al-Zarqawi. Fallujah residents say foreign Arab fighters number no more than 25 -- a figure contested by the Americans.
Al-Jumeili said he last met government representatives Monday evening and that the government was waiting for the American response to the negotiations.
The continued violence, however, has led to some grumbling by residents who now privately speak of their wish for the mujahedeen to leave and spare the city further turmoil.
Already, vast swathes of Fallujah facing U.S. Marines' positions are deserted for fear of renewed fighting, making way for the insurgents to fortify their positions.
AP correspondent Rawya Rageh contributed to this report.
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Radical Sunni, Shi'ite groups help free U.S. photographer
October 13, 2004
By Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041013-122214-7886r.htm
LONDON - An American photojournalist who was kidnapped during a photo shoot in Baghdad Sunday has been driven into the center of Baghdad and set free - after what appears to have been unprecedented cooperation between Sunni clerics and hard-line Shi'ite fighters loyal to the renegade cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Both are rivals and oppose the U.S. presence in Iraq.
The kidnapping was first reported in The Washington Times.
"We find it encouraging that the level of tolerance for kidnapping among anti-Western groups in Iraq seems to be declining," said a security source, who declined to be identified.
A spate of recent beheadings had left security officials in Baghdad worried that an American captive might face a similar grisly fate.
In his five months in Iraq, Paul Taggart, 24, had performed a number of dangerous assignments for World Picture News, including extensive photo shoots in the battle-scarred holy Shi'ite city Najaf.
He was starting a 10-day assignment to photograph fighters in Sadr City, a sprawling Baghdad slum area comprising 2.2. million people. In recent months, many parts of it have fallen to Mahdi's Army, under the control of the young Sheik al-Sadr.
"I was well treated and well fed," Mr. Taggart told his parents last night, the relieved couple said.
In one of the main squares of the volatile district Sunday, a gang of three masked men forced Mr. Taggart out of his car at gunpoint.
Although Mr. Taggart's driver-translator had brought him to his own local area of Sadr City, he was unable to prevent the kidnapping. The attackers let the driver go, and he reported the seizure to the authorities.
According to Sadr City residents, the captors, who were Shi'ites, later approached Baghdad's Sunni Muslim Islamic Council, offering to "sell" Mr. Taggart to any Sunni extremist group - presumably also including the group under the notorious Jordanian insurgent leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi, whose men have so far beheaded 10 captives, including two Americans and a Briton.
Though strongly anti-American, the council members immediately contacted members of Mahdi's Army. Spokesmen for the group had vehemently denied any involvement in the kidnapping.
Mahdi's Army, according to its own insiders' account, sent armed men to rendezvous with the kidnap gang, which was overpowered. Five men were then placed in their custody, and Sheik al-Sadr's fighters started negotiations to hand over Mr. Taggart to U.S. forces.
That sort of development would have seemed unthinkable a few months ago.
However, Sheik al-Sadr's group is now trying to improve relations with the U.S. forces which they had been battling, and it is aiming to participate in next January's election process.
A turnover of arms in Sadr City began Monday, in which Sheik al-Sadr's fighters are getting paid to turn in rocket-propelled grenade launchers, semi-automatic weapons and rocket-launchers.
However, Sheik al-Sadr told his fighters last week that the turnover is "voluntary."
It is apparently the second time he has been instrumental in releasing a kidnapped journalist.
James Brandon, a young reporter for a British newspaper, was severely beaten and subjected to a mock execution in the southern British-controlled city of Basra in August, but was released after an order or appeal from the renegade cleric. Shi'ite gangs of kidnappers, usually seeking financial reward, are not known to have killed any non-Iraqi hostages; Sunni extremists are blamed for all foreign hostage deaths so far.
Probably coincidentally, Mr. Taggart had been staying at the same hotel as one of the two French journalists who were also kidnapped in August. Both men are still missing.
The hotel lies within a cluster around the Hamra hotel frequented mainly by journalists, along with some foreign businessmen and a dwindling band of humanitarian aid workers.
That group of hotels has its own barriers to block streets: sandbags, concrete defensive walls and a security system run by uniformed Iraqi guards.
Journalists generally avoid using sport utility vehicles that have made contractors the targets of shooting or kidnap attempts, and generally use normal Baghdad taxis or regular saloon cars. Very few, apart from some television crews and major international newswire agencies, have armed protection.
Mr. Taggart was briefly taken to the offices of a U.S. news organization, where he spoke to his parents by phone, before being driven to the U.S. Embassy inside the heavily fortified green zone of central Baghdad.
After recuperation and a debriefing, he is expected to fly back to the U.S. rather than carry on his assignment.
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Official: 2 Attempts Made to Rescue Hostages
Associated Press
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28035-2004Oct12.html
Coalition personnel mounted two operations last month to rescue three men held hostage in Iraq but did not find them, a U.S. official said yesterday.
British civil engineer Kenneth Bigley and U.S. engineers Eugene "Jack" Armstrong and Jack Hensley were the targets of the rescue. They were kidnapped from their homes in Baghdad on Sept. 16.
The first operation came before Sept. 20, when Armstrong is believed to have been beheaded by his captors, the U.S. official said, discussing sensitive operations on the condition of anonymity. The second came after Armstrong's death but before that of Hensley, which was reported Sept. 21.
CNN reported U.S. forces found no signs of the three during each operation.
Bigley's killing was confirmed Sunday. Another U.S. official said there is credible information that Bigley tried to escape with the help of one of his captors but was recaptured and beheaded.
Tawhid and Jihad, led by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for the abductions and killings.
More than 150 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq, some for ransom and others as leverage against the United States and its allies. Bigley was at least the 28th to be killed.
-------- israel / palestine
Arafat Relative Unhurt in Gaza Car Bombing
Associated Press
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28034-2004Oct12.html
JERUSALEM, Oct. 12 -- A top Palestinian security leader who is related to Yasser Arafat escaped unharmed Tuesday when a booby-trapped car exploded near his convoy in Gaza City.
The bomb rocked Gaza City after nightfall as Moussa Arafat's convoy was leaving his headquarters. Arafat, a cousin of the Palestinian leader, was not hurt, security officials said.
Israel's military denied involvement. It appeared more likely that local opponents were responsible, though no one asserted responsibility for the attack. Palestinian riots torpedoed Yasser Arafat's attempt to appoint his cousin as head of security in Gaza in July.
In a statement, Moussa Arafat called the bombing an assassination attempt, but he did not name suspects. Last year he escaped injury in an explosion in his office, when he said his Palestinian enemies fired a rocket at the building.
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Israel Seizes Hamas Leader Accused of Organizing Attacks
October 13, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/international/middleeast/13CND-ISRA.html?hp&ex=1097726400&en=13ea45b61a3d05cf&ei=5094&partner=homepage
JERUSALEM, Oct. 13 - The Israeli military killed three Palestinian militants today as troops pushed into another town in the northern Gaza Strip, extending a two-week-old operation aimed at silencing Palestinian rocket fire.
The Israeli tanks and armored vehicles moved into Beit Lahiya, adjacent to the Jabaliya refugee camp, which has been the main focus of the Israeli forces.
The soldiers killed two armed members of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, and a militant from Hamas who was preparing an antitank missile, according to the Israeli military and Palestinian hospital officials and witnesses.
"The expansion of the operation proves we don't mean to let up," Israel's deputy defense minister, Zeev Boim, told Israeli Army radio.
Nonetheless, Palestinians fired two more rockets at Israeli communities just outside Gaza, though they caused no damage. An Israeli radar system, built to warn of incoming rockets, was put into service as intended for the first time today, sounding a siren about 20 seconds before the rockets landed, one in an open field in the West Negev and the other in a Palestinian area, the army said.
The rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip have fueled criticism of a plan by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to evacuate Jewish settlements in the coastal strip by the end of 2005.
In the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis, a 10-year-old Palestinian girl, Ghadeer Jaber Mokheimer, died from a gunshot wound to the abdomen that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency said she sustained a day earlier while sitting at her desk in a school run by the agency.
The Israeli military said soldiers fired in the area on Tuesday in response to shelling by Palestinian mortars but were unaware that a girl had been shot. The military said it was investigating.
In a similar incident on Sept. 7, a 10-year-old Palestinian girl was hit by a bullet in the head at another school run by the refugee agency, in Khan Yunis. She died of her injuries two weeks later.
"That two young children have been shot and killed, sitting at their desks in U.N.R.W.A. schools in the last month, is horrific by anyone's standards," the head of the refugee agency, Peter Hansen, said in a statement.
In another case involving a girl killed by gunfire, the Israeli Army today suspended a platoon commander accused of firing multiple shots into the body of a 13-year-old Palestinian girl who had already collapsed after being hit by Israeli gunfire.
The girl, Iman al-Hams, was shot on Oct. 5 as she approached an Israeli military outpost in the southern town of Rafah. Soldiers had suspected that she had a bomb in her bag, the military said, but her family said she was merely on her way to school and was carrying only books.
The military and the soldiers at the outpost have given conflicting accounts of the shooting, and the military has ordered an investigation.
Some soldiers have told the Israeli news media that the commander walked up to the fallen girl and fired his automatic rifle at her until his ammunition clip was empty. The commander has disputed that account. Palestinian doctors who saw Iman's body said she had been hit by at least 15 bullets.
In the West Bank town of Hebron, a senior Hamas figure, Imad Qawasmeh, surrendered after Israeli troops surrounded a house where he had been hiding and began to tear it down.
Israel says that Mr. Qawasmeh is the local leader of the Hamas faction, and that he orchestrated multiple attacks, including a double-suicide bombing on Aug. 31 that killed 16 Israelis on two buses in the southern town of Beersheba.
"Qawasmeh is a mass murderer whose hands are covered with the blood of many Israeli citizens," Israel's defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, said.
After surrounding the house where Mr. Qawasmeh was believed to be, a soldier on a loudspeaker called on the inhabitants to come out. All of them did, except for Mr. Qawasmeh, the military said.
As the military began to demolish the home, Mr. Qawasmeh emerged and soldiers ordered him to take off his clothes to ensure he had no hidden weapons. He complied and then knelt in the dirt before being blindfolded and taken away.
Mr. Qawasmeh is from a prominent Hebron clan that has been linked to numerous attacks against Israel