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NUCLEAR
Critics say NRC move makes it impossible to judge performance
Beyond the nuclear stalemate
Pentagon accounts for some explosives
Pentagon: Army Took Munitions
EXPLOSIVES Facts and Questions About Lost Munitions
For a Scary Halloween, Read the Duelfer Report
IAEA Head Seen Unswayed by U.S. Hostility to New Term
SRS must compete for project
Yucca Plan May Sway Nev. Electoral Votes
Equipment issues still concern at PSEG Nuclear
Barriers keep Ohio State reactor off limits to football crowds
Davis-Besse's restart energizes FirstEnergy
No early release of VY report
Judge prepares for downwinders lawsuit
MILITARY
KABUL Afghan Militants Threaten to Kill Hostages
Liberian mobs bring curfew to Monrovia
China to showcase military might in air show
U.S. awaits word to attack Fallujah
Marines Await Orders to Attack Fallujah
Abbas chairs PLO while ailing Arafat is in Paris
U.S., Israel Discuss Internal Growth in West Bank Settlements
2 Russian generals given awards in Iraq on war eve
Collins Eyes the Powers Bush Gave to CIA
Pentagon Extends Tours of Duty for About 6,500 U.S. Soldiers
Along With Prayers, Families Send Armor
Need for Draft Is Dismissed by Officials at Pentagon
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
U.S. Warns on Terror; Alert Stays Orange
Intelligence Bill Talks to Resume After the Election
Ridge Says U.S. Has No Specific Election Threats
China irked by Guantanamo releases
Bin Laden threatens more strikes
Bin Laden Warns U.S. Voters
In Video Message, Bin Laden Issues Warning to U.S.
Terrorist training school in progress
POLITICS
Budget Deficit Will Keep Market Defensive
Part of 9/11 Report Remains Unreleased; An Inquiry Is Begun
Bush, Kerry promise to hunt down Al-Qaida leader
Cheney: Kerry Took Poll on bin Laden Tape
Alaskans, wake up to Bush
Another Wait Feared In Knowing the Winner
OTHER
Big Arctic Perils Seen in Warming, Survey Finds
Study of Pesticides and Children Stirs Protests
ACTIVISTS
33 Arrested in Mass Cyclist Demonstration
Thailand to free 900 protesters
Italians in anti-war rally
-------- NUCLEAR
Critics say NRC move makes it impossible to judge performance
October 30, 2004
Plain Dealer
John Mangels and John Funk
http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1099129078156502.xml
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's decision this week to block access to its vast document collection has left the public with no way to judge if the agency is adequately policing the industry, critics said Friday.
The NRC temporarily shut its Web portal to more than 700,000 documents - covering every aspect of its regulatory activities - out of concern that terrorists could download "potentially sensitive information" about radioactive materials in hospitals and universities.
The action comes two months after the agency permanently barred the public from seeing security inspection results at the nation's 103 nuclear plants. The NRC also will no longer disclose when it has punished a reactor operator for security lapses.
Those steps were an overreaction, said several watchdog groups, a First Amendment organization and a member of Congress, and are part of a post-Sept. 11 pattern of excessive secrecy in virtually all federal agencies.
"The government is withholding far more information than terrorists could ever use," said Rebecca Daugherty of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "It's incredibly frustrating because if you can't monitor the vulnerabilities of nuclear plants, you are not going to be able to demand any kind of action to make them safer."
Advocacy groups like Public Citizen acknowledge that the public should not have access to documents that could assist terrorists, such as defense plans at a specific reactor. In fact, several organizations said they have alerted the NRC when they have discovered sensitive documents that were left accessible to the public.
But with its action this week, the agency has withheld its entire document collection, most of which doesn't concern security issues.
"The Bush administration has increased secrecy enormously on issues that really need to be in the public forum," said Public Citizen legislative director Michele Boyd. "It's not that we want to know where the hole in the fence is. We want to know that the fence has been fixed.
"Essentially the public is being asked to have blind faith. They're on the one hand being told everything is fine and on the other hand being given no information. History shows that usually leads to problems."
For every dollar the Bush administration spent on declassifying documents in 2003, it spent $120 to make and keep documents secret, according to OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of journalists, consumers and good-government groups.
The White House press office did not return a phone call Friday seeking comment.
In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the NRC removed the most-sensitive information about nuclear power plants from its document collection. A spokesman said the agency has been gradually removing other documents about small sources of radiation in hospitals and laboratories that might be used in a "dirty bomb."
"Given the much smaller amount of materials that these licensees possess, we felt they were a lower priority than what we were concerned about with the nuclear plants," said the agency's Scott Burnell.
Though the NRC said it was making progress, it took this week's drastic step the same day that an NBC News broadcast claimed the NRC's public database still contained documents that a terrorist could use to find material for a dirty bomb.
"The NRC has known quite a while that records in its public database contained sensitive information," said Union of Concerned Scientists nuclear safety engineer David Lochbaum. "They didn't do anything until they got embarrassed on national TV."
Lochbaum and others argue that the NRC response was overly broad but that if the entire document collection is unavailable to the public, the agency also should suspend all regulatory hearings. Without access to the materials, public-interest groups can't independently determine whether the actions of the NRC or nuclear plant operators are appropriate or should be contested.
"It really challenges our ability to hold them accountable," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight. "I really chafe at the assumption that less information means more security."
The NRC estimates it will be at least several weeks before it can begin restoring a limited access to its public database.
U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, a Democrat of Massachusetts, asked in a letter Friday to NRC Chairman Nils Diaz that the agency suspend all "non-essential" regulatory proceedings until the public regains access.
To reach these Plain Dealer reporters:
jmangels@plaind.com, 216-999-4842
jfunk@plaind.com, 216-999-4138
-------- iran
Beyond the nuclear stalemate
Asia Times
Oct 30, 2004
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FJ30Ak02.html
TEHRAN - As expected, two rounds of talks between Iran and the European Union Big Three (EU-3) - France, Germany and Britain - have failed to resolve the growing dispute over Iran's quest to produce low-enriched uranium. In response to the EU-3's demand that Tehran halt enrichment activities, Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, this week denounced what he called an "oppressive and unreasonable request" and warned that Iran may terminate nuclear dialogue if the other side persists in asking Iran to forego its "inherent right".
The European negotiators in Vienna, including a representative from the EU, refrained from calling the talks a failure, however, and, seeking to salvage a seemingly sinking ship of diplomacy, expressed hope for a more fruitful result in the next round, reportedly scheduled on November 5 in Paris, just a couple of weeks before the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), meets in late November to review the growing storm over Iran's program. The EU has warned Iran it will back United States calls for Iran to be reported to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions at the November 25 IAEA meeting if enrichment suspension is not verifiably in place by then.
From Iran's vantage point, in light of some 15 visits by the IAEA inspectors in the past couple of years, the 23-member IAEA board of governors should "close the file" on Iran - or face the prospects of Iran withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But at the same time, not every aspect of the EU-3's "package offer" has been appraised negatively by Tehran.
On the contrary, Iranian officials tried to put a positive spin on the offer, which included promises from the EU that it would help Iran acquire nuclear fuel "at market prices" and also support its light water facility, as well as Iran's bid to join the World Trade Organization if Iran agrees to suspend its nuclear enrichment program pending a "long term agreement". A spokesman for Iran's Supreme National Security Council interpreted this as a step forward from the previous, US-led demand that Iran suspend its enrichment activity "indefinitely". On the eve of the second Vienna talks, Iran's top negotiator articulated a sentiment widespread among Iranian officials for a European deal that "would be thicker on the positive and thinner on the negative".
Meanwhile, the United States and Israel, playing anxious observers, made a concerted effort to up the ante, with an Arabic paper in London circulating a "reliable rumor from Washington" regarding an impending strike by US forces against various Iranian facilities "including certain mosques", and Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon airing his fear of "Iran's existential threat to Israel".
Concerning the latter, there are reasons to take such fears with a grain of salt. For one thing, it was Iran under Cyrus the Great who freed the Jews enslaved by the Babylonians and issued a decree allowing them to return to their homeland. Even in today's Islamic Republic, with a population steeped in ancient history, it is hard to see how Iran would ever venture to drop nuclear bombs on Israel, killing not only the Jews but also the Muslim Arabs inhabiting Israel. Israel is widely regarded as an "out of area" country by most Iranian foreign policy makers, and while Iran remains ethically committed to the struggle of Palestinian people for their right to self-determination, this does not, and for the most part has not, translated into any Iranian "over commitment" to the Palestinian people.
Nor is the situation of Lebanese Shi'ites, led by militant group Hezbollah, any different, substantively speaking. Iran no doubt enjoys its hard-earned sphere of influence in Lebanon, after 23 years of military and financial investment, and has encouraged the Hezbollah to take the parliamentary road to power. Thus, Israel's paranoia about an Iranian bomb in Hezbollah's hands imperiling Israel's existence is a tissue of an unrealistic nightmare scenario built around a caricature of the Muslim "other" as irrational zealots, when in fact, a cursory glance at Iran's foreign policy indicates the rule of sober national interests over ideology.
From the Persian Gulf, where Iran has entered into low-security agreements with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, as well as shared energy projects with nearly all the oil states of the Gulf, to Central Asia-Caucasus, where Iran has promoted regional cooperation through the Economic Cooperation Organization, and, in addition, has acted as a crisis manager (eg, in Tajkistan and Nagorno-Karabakh), Iran's foreign policy has been widely praised by its neighbors, including Russia, as constructive, pragmatic, and peace-oriented.
For US and Israeli officials - and their media mouthpieces - to overlook this and, instead, attribute an out-of-control, purely ideological orientation to Iran's foreign policy, begs the question of objectivity on their part; their virulent Iran-bashing actually serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy, since by causing the further wrath of Iranians by their pre-scripted policy of sanctions and isolation of Iran, Tehran's hardliners turn out to be the major beneficiaries, much to the detriment of Iran's liberalist reformers.
This aside, it is important, particularly for Europe, to consider the fact that Iran is still leaving the door open for the extension of Iran's voluntary suspension of the fuel cycle. Hence, the glass may actually be half full, and the EU-3 should ultimately embrace this opportunity to seal an agreement with Iran, even though it may be short of their hoped-for maximum objective. To do so, however, the EU-3's leadership must recognize that Iran is not another Iraq, and that with its strong military and a population twice the size of the rest of Persian Gulf combined, Iran must be treated with a great deal more deference than Iraq.
After all, Iran is a main source of energy for Europe, both now and more so in the future, and any UN sanctions on Iran's oil industry will instantly translate into higher prices at the European gas pumps, hardly a pleasant prospect for the EU as a whole. Not only that, some EU countries, such as Norway, Spain, Greece, and Italy, are likely to oppose the EU-3's hard diplomacy toward Tehran in light of their cordial economic and trade ties with Iran. This means that the collateral damage of a failure of EU-3's Iran diplomacy may be a lot more widespread than hitherto thought; that is, it may introduce policy fractures inside the European Union itself.
With the stakes so high, a prudent European approach to the Iranian nuclear stalemate might be explored along the following lines: A balanced package whereby Iran would agree to a temporary, six months to a year's halt in its enrichment activities as part of a "confidence building" measure, in exchange for which Iran would implement its declared policy of "full transparency" and allow unfettered access of IAEA inspectors to the nuclear facilities in Natanz, Isfahan, and elsewhere in Iran, per the terms of the IAEA's Additional Protocol.
Such an agreement may not allay Europe's fear of Iran going nuclear altogether, but at least it provides institutional mechanisms for close monitoring of Iran's nuclear programs, which in turn, minimizes the risks or threats of Iran telescoping these programs to weaponization. If combined with parallel initiatives, such as an Iran-EU security dialogue, this initiative would likely be effective in terms of the long-term process of dissuading Iran from the path of acquiring nuclear weapons, a path that in the current milieu of a sole Western superpower acting like a "wild elephant", to quote an Iranian official, is theoretically conducive to the idea of Iranian nuclear deterrence. Historically, rising insecurity has been a prime motive force for nuclear weapons, and Iran may turn out to be no exception, in the long haul, if the US and Israel fail to address Iran's security worries.
For the moment, such theoretical concerns do not appear to have influenced the drift of actual Iranian policies, notwithstanding the repeated public pledges of Iran's leader to refrain from pursuing nuclear weapons considered "amoral". Yet, the dictates of national security interests may dictate otherwise in the future, all the more reason to consider the issue of Iran's nuclear program within the larger framework of regional and global security, instead of apart from it.
Unfortunately, the US and some European officials often overlook that other countries too may have legitimate national security worries, a serious oversight caused by their consistent Euro-centrism and US-centrism. As long as a clean break from such arcane, underlying security conceptualizations, or a cognitive map, has not materialized, it is hard to see how the two sides in this stalemated negotiation can achieve a healthy, mutually satisfactory, breakthrough. Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and Iran's Foreign Policy Since 9/11, Brown's Journal of World Affairs, co-authored with former deputy foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003. He teaches political science at Tehran University.
-------- iraq / inspections
Pentagon accounts for some explosives
October 30, 2004
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041030-120747-9986r.htm
The Pentagon yesterday said U.S. Army troops removed an estimated 250 tons of ammunition, including plastic explosives, from the Al-Qaqaa weapons storage site in Iraq weeks after the war began.
Defense officials said they believe the 250 tons of explosives that Army troops destroyed after overruning the facility south of Baghdad included some of the 380 tons of explosives that have been reported missing.
"We believe [the 250 tons] constitutes some portion of those weapons," said Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita. The Pentagon is still investigating the possibility of missing explosives, including ingredients for plastic explosives and nuclear weapons.
Army Maj. Austin Pearson, who was with the 24th Ordnance Company at Al-Qaqaa, said the weapons his company removed and destroyed were not under seal by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The IAEA was notified by the new Iraqi government in a letter earlier this month that 380 tons of high explosives at Al-Qaqaa that had been under seal were missing and presumed looted by Iraqis in the chaos after the fall of Baghdad April 6.
"I did not see any IAEA seals at the locations that we went into," Maj. Pearson said. "I was not looking for that."
Mr. DiRita said the IAEA statements that the missing explosives included 141 tons of RDX, an ingredient in plastic explosives, are also being questioned.
"They first said there were some 141 tons of it there; we're now trying to better understand some of the reports that indicate there may have only been three tons of it at that particular facility," Mr. DiRita said.
News videotape showing barrels containing unidentified explosives at Al-Qaqaa that was filmed by an ABC affiliate crew during the conflict also have not yet been identified as either RDX or HMX, which are used in making nuclear weapons, Pentagon officials said.
Mr. DiRita said there were signs that the missing explosives were moved out of the facility by Saddam's government before the war.
"There was some apparent movement of heavy equipment in this facility at a time when only Saddam Hussein was in control of that facility, meaning after [U.N.] inspectors left the country and before U.S. forces arrived to begin the liberation of the country," Mr. DiRita said.
John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, revealed this week that two European intelligence services have evidence that Russian special forces units were dispatched to Iraq in the months before the invasion.
Mr. Shaw told The Washington Times that the intelligence reports indicated that the Russians shredded documents on Moscow's arms deals with Iraq, and used trucks to move weapons covertly to Syria, Lebanon and possibly Iran.
Other Bush administration officials have said they are unaware of Mr. Shaw's information, and the Russian government has denied any involvement.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told a radio interviewer on Thursday that he had no information on the Russian role in moving weapons and "cannot validate that even slightly."
However Mr. Shaw is standing by the foreign intelligence reports, which are still being investigated by his office, a defense official said.
The missing explosives became a topic of sharp debate in the final days of the presidential election campaign after the New York Times reported on the IAEA report Monday. CBS' "60 Minutes" initially planned to air the story tomorrow night, two days before the election, but said they agreed to let the Times, its "reporting partner," use it, fearing they'd be beaten by other competition. CBS network news ran the story Tuesday.
Democratic presidential contestant Sen. John Kerry has said in speeches that President Bush allowed dangerous explosives to be taken by Iraqi insurgents from Al-Qaqaa.
Mr. Bush said Mr. Kerry does not know the facts and was making reckless statements about the missing explosives.
In New York, IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei dismissed reports that he timed his request for information about the missing Iraqi explosives to influence the presidential campaign.
"It's total junk," Mr. ElBaradei told the Associated Press. "The timing probably is unfortunate, but there is a world out there other than the American election."
Mr. DiRita acknowledged yesterday "there's a lot we don't know" about the explosives and what happened to them.
The unusual activity seen in satellite photographs at the explosives facility include truck transports that were at the site before U.S. troops entered Iraq on March 20, 2003, he said.
"Unusual activity meaning large trucks in front of bunkers - doing what, we don't know," Mr. DiRita said. "We've seen other photos, photos we didn't release because we don't understand them well enough, that show a significant number of large trucks on that site near those bunkers."
Maj. Pearson said that his troops used trucks and forklifts to move pallets of ammunition and explosives. He described the material at TNT, plastic explosives and detonation cord.
The material was moved on nine tractor trailers and taken to another facility and destroyed, he said.
Maj. Pearson said he did not know whether some of the missing 380 tons of IAEA-monitored explosives were among the 200 to 250 tons of material he removed.
--------
Pentagon: Army Took Munitions
250 Tons Removed From Disputed Site; No IAEA Seals Reported
By Bradley Graham and Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 30, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9244-2004Oct29.html
The Pentagon reported yesterday that U.S. Army soldiers removed about 250 tons of material from the Qaqaa munitions complex in April 2003, the first time defense officials have credited U.S. forces with carting away a large amount of explosives from the Iraqi site for destruction.
But the Army major who commanded the operation told reporters he could not say whether any of the munitions were part of the 377 tons at the center of a political firestorm this week between the campaigns of President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry.
The officer, Maj. Austin Pearson, said some of the material taken from storage bunkers at the sprawling installation included "plastic explosives." But he said he saw no closed bunkers or seals of the kind that the International Atomic Energy Agency had put on the bunkers containing HMX, one of the explosives in the disputed group.
Pearson's appearance at a Pentagon news conference represented the latest effort by the Bush administration to defend its work to secure Iraq's vast stockpiles of munitions after last year's invasion. Kerry has seized on the disappearance of the 377 tons, which the IAEA announced Monday, to further his argument that Bush has mismanaged military operations in Iraq.
Each day this week has produced new disclosures and statements -- by international weapons experts, government officials, journalists and others -- attempting to shed light on what might have become of the missing explosives. Increasingly, evidence has pointed to the conclusion that some or all of the material was looted after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003.
One of the strongest indications that the disputed explosives were still at the site in mid-April comes from a videotape shot April 18 by a crew from KSTP-TV of Minneapolis-St. Paul and aired nationally Thursday by ABC. It showed two soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division, whose unit had camped near Qaqaa, checking out sealed bunkers at the complex. Entering the buildings, they discovered crates with what appeared to be IAEA labeling.
According to the TV crew, the soldiers did not remove the explosives, and left the bunkers open and unguarded when they rejoined their unit. A source with firsthand knowledge of IAEA activities in Iraq said yesterday that the seal in the videotape "looks similar if not identical" to that used by the IAEA.
Nevertheless, Pentagon officials yesterday continued to hold open the possibility that the explosives were taken by Iraqi authorities after the departure of IAEA inspectors in mid-March and before the arrival at Qaqaa of the first U.S. troops in early April. Pentagon spokesman Lawrence T. Di Rita stood beside Pearson yesterday and spoke of "some apparent movement of heavy equipment" at the munitions complex in that period.
On Thursday, the Pentagon released an aerial reconnaissance photo dated March 17 showing two big trucks in front of two bunkers, although what the bunkers contained was not specified. Di Rita said yesterday that other photos show "a significant number of large trucks on that site near those bunkers," but these pictures remain classified, he said, "because we don't understand them well enough."
Pearson's operation occurred on April 13. As commander of the 24th Ordnance Company, Pearson and his team were to find any "exposed" Iraqi ammunition caches that posed a threat to U.S. forces and dispose of the munitions. The unit was attached to the 3rd Infantry Division, which led the Army advance on Baghdad and reached Qaqaa on April 3.
Pearson said the material his unit carted away included plastic explosives, TNT, detonation cords and white phosphorous rounds. Di Rita asserted at the outset of the news conference that some of the removed material included a portion of the RDX -- a key ingredient in some plastic explosives -- that is among the missing substances. Pearson stopped short of making such a link.
"I did not see any IAEA seals at the locations that we went into," Pearson said. "I was not looking for that. My mission specifically was to go in there and to prevent the exposure of U.S. forces and to minimize that by taking out what was easily accessible."
Unlike the HMX, which had been stored in sealed bunkers because of its potential use to trigger nuclear devices, the RDX was not.
The IAEA has been criticized by Bush administration officials for publicizing the loss of the high-grade explosives so close to the U.S. presidential election. In an interview yesterday, Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA's director general, said he had not intended to influence the election. He said the Iraqi interim government, which reported the explosives lost in an Oct. 10 letter to the IAEA, is responsible for bringing the issue to the public's attention.
ElBaradei, a former Egyptian diplomat, said he passed the information to U.S. authorities five days later, hoping they could help retrieve the explosives. He withheld the information from the U.N. Security Council until the New York Times, working with CBS News, broke the story on Monday.
"The whole thing was driven by the Iraqi letter," he said.
ElBaradei's relations with the Bush administration have been tense since he challenged U.S. claims that Iraq had made significant advances in developing a nuclear bomb before the war. The administration opposes ElBaradei's bid for a third term as IAEA chief.
Lynch reported from the United Nations.
--------
EXPLOSIVES Facts and Questions About Lost Munitions
October 30, 2004
The New York Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/30/politics/campaign/30bomb.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The report that hundreds of tons of high explosives are missing from the Qaqaa munitions facility in Iraq has loomed over the last week of the presidential campaign, and led to a blur of charges and countercharges about what actually happened, and why the news came out so close to Election Day.
Senator John Kerry has seized on the news, first reported by The New York Times and CBS' "60 Minutes," to reinforce his argument that the Bush administration bungled the postwar occupation of Iraq.
President Bush has rejected Mr. Kerry's statements as "wild charges," and the White House has argued that the explosives may have been removed by Saddam Hussein's forces before the war or that some may have been blown up shortly after the end of the war by an ordnance unit.
What follows are some questions and answers about the explosives, what is known and unknown about their whereabouts, and how the story came to light.
The Pentagon says it has destroyed or secured 400,000 tons of the estimated 650,000 tons of munitions in Iraq. Even if 350 metric tons (385 American tons) are missing, does it make much difference?
By this estimate, the whereabouts of at least 250,000 tons of munitions remains unknown. What made the 385 tons different was its type and its location. More than half of it was HMX, a high explosive that - unlike artillery shells or other weapons - can be easily moved around, dropped and jostled without fear of explosion until it is fabricated into a weapon. That makes it well suited for small, powerful bombs; less than a pound of a similar type of high-grade explosives brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. HMX is also used as the detonator in nuclear weapons, though there is no evidence it has fallen into the hands of anyone with nuclear capability.
Because of its potential nuclear use, and because it was stored at Al Qaqaa, where Saddam Hussein tried many years ago to fabricate the triggering devices for nuclear weapons, the International Atomic Energy Agency put it under special seal. So among the many explosives dumps in Iraq, the location, size and contents of this one were well known to the nuclear agency - and to the United States.
If the whole country was an ammunitions dump, how could anyone expect to secure it all?
In Iraq, commanders say it would be an impossible job. The number of troops is finite, so there is a constant calculus under way about whether to assign forces to guard depots or whether to use them to patrol the cities and hunt down insurgents.
The officers also note that weapons were not just in depots. Much was dispersed by Mr. Hussein before the war, or in its early days. Much has been looted since. And the arms still in the depots might not alter battle on the ground, since the insurgents already are well armed.
Moreover, the HMX and RDX at Al Qaqaa may be available elsewhere in the country. "There's probably a lot of stuff that is chemically identical to this all around Iraq, but it wasn't under seal because it wasn't located at a place previously associated with nuclear work," said one senior administration official.
Why didn't the international energy agency blow this material up in the 1990's?
At the White House and even inside the agency, which is based in Vienna, many people think this was a huge mistake. But the agency decided to allow Mr. Hussein to keep it because he argued he would use it in civilian construction projects.
Who saw it last?
When inspectors returned to Iraq in late 2002, they visited the site, which is dozens of square miles, examined the material and resealed it in January 2003. They visited again just before leaving the country in mid-March, and the seals were intact. Late Wednesday, the Pentagon released a photograph of trucks belonging to Mr. Hussein's forces at the site right after the inspectors left the country, suggesting that Mr. Hussein's forces could have moved the material. But the photograph showed no evidence that anything was being loaded or unloaded, and the trucks do not appear to be near the bunkers that held the HMX.
On Friday, the Pentagon said that on April 13, a special ordnance unit went to Al Qaqaa and destroyed 250 tons of explosives. But the Pentagon did not assert it was the same explosives that the atomic energy agency had under seal. On April 18, videotape taken by a Minneapolis television station shows American troops breaking what appears to be an energy agency seal and entering a bunker that contained what former inspectors say is clearly HMX. That unit, according to the station's cameraman, left the bunker unlocked, and soon left the area. It is unclear whether units that returned to Al Qaqaa in May searching for weapons of mass destruction saw the HMX or exactly when it disappeared.
Does the satellite photo that the Pentagon released show Iraqi trucks removing high-grade explosives from Al Qaqaa before the American invasion?
Weapons experts say the trucks are parked in front of a different bunker than the ones that contained the sealed HMX. At Al Qaqaa, only 9 of 56 bunkers contained HMX, according to the energy agency, and its maps show that the bunker near the trucks, No. 45, held none of the high-grade explosive. "It's not an HMX bunker," said a weapon expert familiar with the work of the international inspectors in Iraq.
Pentagon officials say the satellite photo is intended only to show that the area was not secure. "All we are trying to demonstrate is that after the I.A.E.A. left, and the place was under Saddam's control, there was activity," said Lawrence DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman.
Is there any reason that the coalition troops should have known to look for the explosives?
The atomic energy agency thinks so. Its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, warned about the HMX when briefing the United Nations Security Council in January 2003. The C.I.A. had the site listed as a "medium" priority on its own list of places the United States would have to search or secure after an invasion. Because Al Qaqaa was where Mr. Hussein once made conventional warheads and some chemical weapons, it was well known to American intelligence officials. But more importantly, because the HMX would have been needed in any nuclear weapons project - a program the Bush administration had alleged Mr. Hussein was seeking to revive - it would have been a natural place to look immediately for evidence of efforts to assemble weapons of mass destruction.
But some of the first troops to arrive there on the drive to Baghdad apparently did not know any of that. Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said his troops got to the site on April 10 and camped there overnight, but until this week he did not know it was considered important. "We happened to stumble on it," Colonel Anderson said. "I didn't know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission. It was not our focus."
The agency said it sent another specific warning to the Bush administration, through the American representative to the agency, in May 2003, after reports of widespread looting in Iraq. Agency officials say they never heard a response. Mr. DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman, said the teams that searched Iraq in the days after Mr. Hussein's fall were looking chiefly for weapons of mass destruction - and the high explosives did not qualify. Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said this week that there were "a number of priorities," from securing oil fields to getting reconstruction going.
Is anyone looking for the explosives now?
It is unclear. Many explosives are being rounded up. But identifying HMX takes experience, and in granular form it can be easily divided up and hidden.
Isn't there a huge discrepancy between the nearly 350 metric tons of high explosives that the energy agency claimed were at Al Qaqaa and what was actually there, especially for the explosive known as RDX?
No, weapons experts say. A Iraqi government letter of Oct. 10 identified the lost stockpile as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, 141.2 metric tons of RDX, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN.
On Wednesday, ABC News reported that it had obtained a confidential document from the energy agency showing that its inspectors in January 2003, had reported the existence of a little more than three tons of RDX explosives at Al Qaqaa - not the 141.2 metric tons in the Iraqi letter.
Melissa Fleming, an agency spokeswoman, said Friday that the confusion about the quantities arose because Al Qaqaa had more than one site for RDX storage. Three tons were kept at Al Qaqaa, she said, while 125 tons under Al Qaqaa administrative control were kept at Muaskar al Mahawil, about 30 miles away. So the total recent RDX inventory was 128 tons - 13 tons less than the Iraqi ministry wrote in their letter this month.
While Mr. Hussein was still in power, Ms. Fleming said, Iraq told agency inspectors before the war that it had used 10 tons of the RDX between late 1998 and late 2002, when the United Nations did not monitor Al Qaqaa. So the discrepancy, she said, boiled down to three tons.
"We were in the process of verifying and reconciling the three missing tons when the war erupted," she said.
Why is this coming out in the week before the election?
The answer depends on whom you ask. The memorandum from the Iraqi interim government to the energy agency was dated Oct. 10. It was sent in response to a request from the agency for an accounting of missing materials. The Bush administration says it smells a political motive: the head of the agency, Mr. ElBaradei, was told a few months ago that the United States would not support him for another term. They suspect an effort at retribution.
Mr. Bush's political strategist, Karl Rove, said this week that he believed The Times deliberately published the story the week before the election in an effort to harm Mr. Bush's candidacy. Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, said that the paper first obtained a copy of the Iraqi letter early in the week of Oct. 18, and that its reporters and CBS began asking questions about the explosives in Baghdad, Vienna and Washington during that week. The article was published on Oct. 25. The White House said President Bush was told of the Iraqi warning to the energy agency around Oct. 16.
--------
For a Scary Halloween, Read the Duelfer Report
Antiwar.com
by Michael Roston
October 30, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/roston.php?articleid=3881
America received a frightening jolt when the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that heavy-duty explosives perfectly suited for terrorist bombing attacks had gone missing from critical sites in Iraq. But a far more terrifying revelation was made in the Central Intelligence Agency's publicly released Duelfer Report on Oct. 6. It took some effort, but anyone who dug deep enough into this document submitted by Charles Duelfer, fully titled the Comprehensive Report of the Special Adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, found reading far scarier than any of the ghost stories you might hear this Halloween.
If you thought the missing explosives were bad, just turn to the annex labeled "Al-Abud Network" buried in the report's third volume. In plain language, the Iraq Survey Group reports on the activities of insurgents who worked with a civilian Iraqi chemist to build chemical weapons to use against coalition forces. Fortunately, these insurgents foundered before they were caught by U.S.-led troops. But, the report menacingly warns that al-Abud is "not the only group planning or attempting to produce or acquire CBW agents ... availability of chemicals and materials dispersed throughout the country, and intellectual capital from the former WMD programs increases the future threat to Coalition Forces."
So, since we toppled Saddam Hussein for threatening us with WMD that weren't there, terrorists in Iraq have started working with Saddam's intellectual dream team to build new WMD to use against American forces?
This point escaped scrutiny when President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry grappled over the meaning of the Duelfer Report in the second of this year's presidential debates. In that debate, President Bush rolled out a familiar argument - Iraq's scientists, technicians, and engineers, capable of building nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, were a sufficient reason to go to war against Iraq. Someday, the president argued, Saddam would use this gifted intellectual capability to reconstitute Iraq's mass destruction armaments, and this "gathering storm" was enough of a danger to require America's invasion.
The employment of this particular casus belli to justify the invasion of Iraq is an unbelievable instance of hypocrisy. While President Bush has failed to secure deadly explosives in Iraq, his administration has also failed to take serious action to make sure that Iraq's intellectual resources, possessing in-depth knowledge for making WMD, do not employ their knowledge against coalition forces, or sell them out to the highest bidder among neighboring countries developing their own WMD capacity.
Knowledge of this danger is nothing new, but reaches back to shortly after the president declared "Mission Accomplished" in 2003. Undersecretary of State John Bolton told the House International Relations Committee on June 4, 2003, "The biggest threat that we now face from Iraq's defunct WMD program is ... that other rogue states or terrorist organizations will hire and offer refuge to these WMD experts." So why does this threat continue to menace America and international security more than a year after the invasion?
Criminally awful planning is one major culprit. While responsible officials at the State and Energy Departments worked early on to bring the considerable toolbox of WMD brain drain prevention programs successfully deployed in the former Soviet Union to bear in Iraq, they were blocked during war planning. In an address before the U.S. Institute of Peace on February 10, 2004, Duelfer's predecessor David Kay declared that early efforts to give incentives to Iraqi weapons scientists not to flee the country or collaborate with terrorists had fallen victim to "some of the worst ... most pointless inter-agency wrangling I've ever seen."
The situation has not improved much. The State Department is still getting by on crumbs, and has only been able to scrape together $2 million in funds after the administration's non-proliferation budget request for this year failed to include any funding to put Iraqi weapons scientists to work.
Even more unfortunately, Iraq's endlessly deteriorating security situation makes it difficult to tell if funding these programs could do much good at this stage. With constant news media reports confirming the kidnapping and assassination of Iraqi intellectuals, including scientists, Duelfer confessed that "individuals related to Iraqi WMD tried to avoid being found. Even long after the war, many Iraqi scientists and engineers find little incentive to speak candidly about the WMD efforts of the previous regime."
In the midst of the cacophony of electioneering, it is unlikely that many Americans will be able to get beyond the spin of the Duelfer Report's almost 1,000 pages by the various parties to this year's political fracas. But this critical point must not be forgotten. As President Bush and his advisors have used Iraq's WMD specialists as a political tool in this season's election, his administration has failed to do anything about the threat those scientists could become now. The shortsightedness of this policy is only making it more likely that the worst of America's fears about WMD in Iraq will finally come true.
-------- u.n.
IAEA Head Seen Unswayed by U.S. Hostility to New Term
October 30, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-iaea-usa.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency is unlikely to drop plans for a new term despite U.S. anger after pre-election revelations of missing Iraq explosives, a diplomat close to the agency said on Saturday.
A senior U.S. official said on Friday the Bush administration would seek to unseat International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei if Bush is re-elected president.
He accused ElBaradei of interfering in next week's U.S. election after the IAEA reported that 377 tons of explosives had gone missing from an Iraqi site which the U.S. military had not secured.
But the diplomat close to the IAEA said ElBaradei ``enjoys huge support from the majority of member countries of the IAEA.
``As far as I know, he would not be swayed by any new opposition to his candidature coming from Washington.''
An IAEA spokeswoman declined to comment.
ElBaradei requires a simple majority of votes from the IAEA's 35 board member countries and from the agency's annual general conference next September to be confirmed for a third term.
He already knew he faced opposition from the Bush administration when he declared in September he would seek a renewal of his position.
U.S. officials had previously urged ElBaradei to step down after two terms, but that view has now hardened.
If Bush wins re-election next Tuesday, the plan is ``to move from urging him to (leave the IAEA) to active opposition'' to his reappointment, the senior U.S. official told Reuters.
He said U.S. officials see ElBaradei's hand in this week's disclosure about the explosives missing from the al Qaqaa complex south of Baghdad.
They could be used to detonate a nuclear bomb, blow up an airplane or building or many other military applications, experts said.
ElBaradei, speaking to reporters at the United Nations in New York, ``absolutely categorically'' denied the report was politically motivated to harm Bush's re-election chances.
The story has dominated headlines and given Democratic candidate John Kerry a weapon against Bush in the final days of a dead heat election campaign.
Kerry has accused the administration of a major blunder in failing to safeguard the explosives. But Bush accused his rival of making ``wild charges'' and rushing to judgment without the facts.
Who heads the IAEA is of growing importance because the agency has become a key player in efforts to halt the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Administration hard-liners have faulted ElBaradei and the IAEA for not being tough enough on states seeking to develop such weapons.
Traditionally, IAEA chiefs have not had term limits. But the United States and other key U.N. member states told ElBaradei when it backed him for a second term in 2001 it would not support him for a third.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
SRS must compete for project
Modern Pit Facility site hasn't been set, congressman says
Associated Press
October 30, 2004
http://www.charleston.net/stories/103004/sta_30srs.shtml
NEW ELLENTON--The Savannah River Site should have to compete in a businesslike fashion for big federal Energy Department projects, a key U.S. House budget writer said while touring the sprawling facility.
Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, on Thursday chilled some of the hope people have for quick funding for future jobs that would come with building a nuclear weapons trigger factory and a national hydrogen fuel cell research center.
Some hoped that SRS would become the site of a $4 billion, 2,500-job Modern Pit Facility to build triggers for nuclear weapons.
Hobson, chairman of the energy and water resources subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, says a pit facility will be much smaller than what the Energy Department envisions and that more research is needed on the aging of plutonium used in existing triggers.
"We don't have the science to build the Modern Pit Facility. We don't know the size. We don't know where to site it yet," he said.
While Hobson emphasized the need for research into other energy sources, he said SRS and its research arm, the Savannah River National Laboratory, would have to compete with other national labs and university research centers for federal funding.
"I'm interested in keeping the science and finding the best way of fitting this into the needs of the next century," he said.
The budget bill Hobson's subcommittee approved and that cleared the House in July had no money for the trigger factory nor expanding the role for Savannah River National Laboratory.
The measure cut funding for President Bush's hydrogen fuel initiative as well as a program aimed at converting weapons-grade plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors.
The visit came at the invitation of Rep. Gresham Barrett, R-S.C.
"The bottom line is, he said we needed a Modern Pit Facility, but DOE needs to do more homework. We've got some homework to do, and he's right," Barrett said.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
Yucca Plan May Sway Nev. Electoral Votes
October 30, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nevada-Stakes.html
LAS VEGAS (AP) -- The key to winning Nevada's five electoral votes might lie with a ridge of volcanic rock some 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Yucca Mountain rises 4,950 feet over the Nevada desert on federal land where no one lives. Yet a Bush-approved plan to bury high-level nuclear waste there divides voters statewide and threatens President Bush's ability to win the state again.
``This is the issue that will defeat Bush in Nevada,'' said Sen. Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat polls show coasting to his fourth term. Bush won here in 2000 by 3.5 percentage points, but polls indicate the race with Sen. John Kerry is neck and neck.
Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval, a Republican leading the state's legal challenge to the plan, said he doesn't think it's fair to blame the president for approving the project.
``He made a decision based on the information that was provided to him,'' Sandoval said.
Yucca Mountain is in line to begin receiving 77,000 tons of the nation's most radioactive waste by 2010. Nevada has battled the plan for decades, but in 2002 Congress and Bush authorized the site.
Kerry has vowed to kill the project if elected, saying he prefers to keep the waste at nuclear power plants across the country.
``It will take a Democratic president to stop this,'' said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev.
During his only visit to Nevada in 2000, Bush said any decision on Yucca Mountain would be based on ``sound science.'' Democrats believe the statement was enough to swing voters his way and now contend the president didn't keep his promise.
Sen. John Edwards, a North Carolina Democrat, voted in favor of the repository in 2002. Shortly before he joined the Democratic ticket as Kerry's running mate, Edwards promised to oppose it if he were vice president.
Kerry has opposed the project multiple times, including the crucial 2002 vote that solidified Yucca Mountain's future.
``When it's counted, I've voted no to waste at Yucca Mountain,'' Kerry said during an August visit to Las Vegas.
However, Republicans point out that Kerry voted in favor of an appropriations bill in 1987 that included a proposal to narrow the number of potential repository sites from three to one -- Yucca Mountain.
Bush has accused his opponent of using the issue as ``a political poker chip'' now and questioned what Kerry might do later. ``My point to you is that if they're going to change, one day they may change again,'' he said.
``John Kerry is trying to take the moral high ground and he cannot ... because of his record,'' said Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev. ``If Yucca Mountain was not an issue, George Bush would win Nevada by 10 points.''
On the Net:
Nevada Democratic Party: http://www.nvdems.com
Nevada Republican Party: http://www.nevadagop.org
-------- new jersey
Equipment issues still concern at PSEG Nuclear
Bridgeton News
By BILL GALLO JR.
October 30, 2004
http://www.nj.com/news/bridgeton/local/index.ssf?/base/news-9/1099128037280160.xml
LOWER ALLOWAYS CREEK TWP. -- Although substantial improvements have been seen, equipment issues remain one of the key areas that PSEG Nuclear must continue to concentrate on at the Artificial Island nuclear generating complex here, officials said Friday.
"Overall we are demonstrating progress, but we know we have much more work to do," said Chris Bakken, president and chief nuclear officer of the utility company which operates the three reactors -- Salem 1, Salem 2 and Hope Creek --at the complex.
On Friday Bakken reviewed the company's first quarterly report card on progress the utility is making in creating a more safety conscious work environment at the Island.
The report, stems from PSEG's commitment to make changes urged by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The federal agency which oversees the nation's nuclear power plants in January told the utility it should take proactive steps to improve the work environment at the Island before serious problems might arise.
Diane Screnci, a spokeswoman for the NRC's Region I office in King of Prussia, Pa., said the NRC had just received the report Friday and would review it.
NRC and PSEG Nuclear officials will meet in December to discuss the utility company's progress in creating a more safety conscious work environment, Screnci said.
Bakken emphasized again Friday, as NRC officials have said in the past, the problems cited at the Island are not of the magnitude that the units cannot operate safely.
"Let me assure you, we will never operate our plants unless I am totally confident that it is safe to do so."
Bakken said the utility's approach in its corrective action plan has been to concentrate on three broad areas -- people, processes and the physical plant. All three are intertwined, he said.
"We have taken steps to foster a more fair, consistent and open workplace where people feel free to raise concerns and have the confidence they will be heard," Bakken said.
One of the key points raised by the NRC had been that some employees reportedly were afraid to speak up about concerns because of fear of retaliation, or had spoken up but felt frustrated because they believed their concerns were ignored by top plant leaders.
Island management has undergone training and an Executive Review Board has been created to make sure recommended personnel actions -- because of the circumstances -- are not erroneously perceived to be retaliatory, according to Bakken.
Also, an Employee Concerns Program has been created to handle Island workers' concerns about the workplace. In 2003, out of 33 concerns registered, 16 were raised either confidentially or anonymously. To date, in 2004 out of 27 concerns raised, only 3 percent requested confidentiality or anonymity, Bakken said, an indication employees are more comfortable speaking up.
While management hopes workers are more at ease airing concerns and are comfortable with the overall work environment, Bakken said with 1,800 workers on the site, there remains a mix of "skeptics, cynics and supporters."
Bakken also said Friday positive progress had been made in the utility's corrective action plan --identifying work needed in the plant, planning the work, scheduling it, completing it and verifying it has been done correctly.
-------- ohio
Barriers keep Ohio State reactor off limits to football crowds
Associated Press
October 30, 2004
http://www.onnnews.com/Global/story.asp?S=2469676
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Sixty concrete barriers installed around Ohio State University's nuclear reactor laboratory are there for a reason other than to block illegal parking on football Saturdays.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a terrorism alert in place for university research reactors.
The Buckeyes played at home Saturday against Indiana.
NRC spokesman Jan Strasma would not comment on security recommendations, but said directives were issued to all reactor operators, including Ohio State's.
Earle Holland, Ohio State's director for research communications, said the outer perimeter was reinforced in early September as a preventative measure because the research reactor was "one potential target of opportunity."
Holland and Robert C. Glenn, spokesman for the Ohio Emergency Management Agency, said inspectors from the NRC visited Ohio State's reactor to assess its security.
"There have been no targeted threats," Strasma said. "We have required upgraded security at nuclear plants, including research reactors."
Holland said the barriers were installed "because there would be six home football games on campus. We have a stadium of 100,000 people a stone's throw away."
The 33-year-old research reactor uses low-enriched uranium fuel, which is not considered nearly as hazardous as spent fuel from commercial reactors that generate electricity. Its nuclear-fuel core is submerged in water to dissipate heat and provide radiation shielding.
--------
Davis-Besse's restart energizes FirstEnergy
Debt reduction also boosts quarterly profit
Beacon Journal
Oct 30, 2004
http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/business/9984980.htm?1c
FirstEnergy Corp.'s profit nearly doubled in the third quarter as the Akron utility returned its Davis-Besse nuclear power plant to service and continued paying down debt.
The company posted earnings Thursday of $298.6 million, or 91 cents a share, up from $152.7 million, or 51 cents a share, a year earlier.
The strong results seemed to mark another positive step for FirstEnergy, which has been plagued by operational problems in recent years.
The company came under intense national scrutiny for its role in the massive August 2003 blackout, as well as for a surprise earnings restatement and a two-year shutdown of Davis-Besse.
Company officials said the strong quarter was a result of several factors, including a debt paydown and refinancing program that resulted in a decrease of about $982 million in debt in the first nine months of the year. That will help to save about $78 million a year, the company said.
FirstEnergy also saw its generation sales climb 5 percent in the quarter as a result of increased sales on the wholesale market. The company said its generating plants posted a record output in the quarter and the first nine months of the year.
Total revenue in the quarter was $3.5 billion, up from $3.4 billion last year.
``Our third-quarter earnings reflect the strong progress we've made this year, particularly in the areas of electricity distribution, generating plant performance and our debt-reduction program,'' CEO Anthony Alexander said.
Investors greeted the news cautiously. Shares in FirstEnergy dipped 11 cents, closing at $40.94.
The earnings announcement came one day after FirstEnergy disclosed that federal regulators have upgraded to a formal investigation their inquiry into financial statements. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has subpoenaed the company for background documents on Davis-Besse and restatement issues. FirstEnergy said it is cooperating with the investigation.
FirstEnergy said it continues to pursue its strategy of selling noncore assets, such as heating and ventilation companies, but it apparently is selling them at a loss. Sales of such assets resulted in a charge of 5 cents a share in the quarter.
-------- vermont
No early release of VY report
Reformer
By CAROLYN LORIé
October 30, 2004
http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102~8860~2501776,00.html#
BRATTLEBORO -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission decided to stick to its standard procedure when it comes to sharing information with the public about the Vermont Yankee engineering inspection.
There will be a public exit meeting on Nov. 9 and the release of the full report will follow within 45 days. The meeting will be held at the Vernon Elementary School from 6 to 10 p.m.
After NRC officials meet with Entergy personnel, the public will have the opportunity to make comments and ask questions.
Earlier this week, NRC staff discussed the possibility of releasing the report early and holding an additional public meeting, but those plans have been abandoned.
According to Neil Sheehan, NRC spokesman, the preliminary findings from the inspection will be available prior to Nov. 9 on the agency's Web site. It will also be available in hard copy the night of the meeting.
Last week, Vermont's congressional delegation wrote a letter to NRC chairman Nils Diaz requesting that the agency "expedite" the release of the report.
Rep. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., and Sens. James Jeffords, I-Vt., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., also reminded Diaz that the agency had given assurance that parties interested in intervening in the uprate case could amend their petitions based on the results of the inspection.
"We believe that the independent engineering assessment may contain new information of interest to the requesters and they should have adequate time to review the results," read the letter.
The Vermont Department of Public Service and the nuclear power watchdog group, the New England Coalition, both petitioned to intervene. Their petitions are being considered by the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel.
Prior to the Aug. 30 deadline for filing a petition, the state requested a deadline extension. The NRC turned down the request, stating that the petition could be amended after it was filed.
David O'Brien, commissioner of the Department of Public Service, has said that he was not concerned with the release date of the report and believed that the opportunity to amend the petition would not change.
Members of the New England Coalition, however, disagree with that assessment and have been critical of the NRC for not releasing the report.
"This is unacceptable," said Raymond Shadis, technical advisor to the coalition.
According to Shadis, the longer the parties take to amend their petitions, the less likely it is that they will be accepted.
He was also concerned that holding a meeting prior to releasing the report will curtail the public's ability to take part in the meeting.
"How can people ask informed questions when they don't have the information. It's really a huge insult to the people of Vermont," said Shadis.
Sheehan, however, said that enough information will be released for members of the public to have a good grasp of the inspection results.
Since the NRC will not hold an additional meeting, the coalition plans to hold its own.
As soon as the report is released, the group plans to distribute copies of the report, convene a panel of experts, hold a public meeting and then publish the comments from it.
"I suppose we have to show the NRC how to do it," said Shadis.
In addition to the meeting about the engineering inspection, the NRC will also hold a meeting on Nov. 9 about its special inspection of the fuel reported missing from the plant in April.
Beginning at 3 p.m., the meeting will be held at the Governor Hunt House on the plant grounds.
It will be open to the public, with time for comment and questions once the meeting between NRC officials and Entergy personnel is completed.
Carolyn Lorié can be reached at clorie@reformer.com
-------- washington
Judge prepares for downwinders lawsuit
The Associated Press
October 30, 2004
http://www.registerguard.com/news/2004/10/30/b4.wa.hanford.1030.html
SPOKANE, Wash. - With a major Hanford downwinders lawsuit set to begin in March, a federal judge this week was educated about the complicated language of nuclear physics, atomic bombs and human illness.
The science lesson was provided Thursday at U.S. District Judge William. Nielsen's request to prepare him for the trial that pits thousands of people against the Hanford contractors who made plutonium for nuclear weapons starting in 1944.
Plaintiffs contend in their 1991 lawsuit that they got thyroid cancer and other illnesses from radioactive iodine-131, which was released from smokestacks at the southcentral Washington nuclear reservation and fell on grass that was consumed by milk cows in communities from Walla Walla to Spokane.
Lawyers clashed over whether Nielsen should declare Hanford's plutonium-making mission during World War II and the early decades of the Cold War an ``ultra-hazardous activity.''
Downwinders' attorney Peter Nordberg of Philadelphia said there's precedent for such a ruling from the famous case of Karen Silkwood, the nuclear whistleblower at a Kerr-McGee plutonium fuels plant in Oklahoma.
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Kerr-McGee plant was an ultra-hazardous activity; her case was settled out of court in 1986 for $1.3 million.
If Nielsen rules that Hanford was also an ultra-hazardous facility, the plaintiffs won't have to prove contractor negligence, Nordberg said.
``Legal liability would be a given. We'd only have to argue causation'' that the iodine-131 released from Hanford could have caused the downwinders' thyroid cancers and other illnesses, Nordberg said.
But strict liability should not apply for routine radiation releases, said Randy Squires, an attorney for the defendant contractors, including DuPont de Nemours Inc. and General Electric Co.
The contractors argued with the government to delay chemically separating the nuclear fuel to extract plutonium so the unwanted radioactive byproducts, including iodine-131, could decay to less-harmful levels, but the government refused to delay the production schedule, Squires said.
The plaintiffs' assertion that an estimated 740,000 curies of radioactive iodine-131 were released from Hanford is ``meaningless,'' Squires said.
``The question is, how much iodine-131 that went up the stacks actually got to a plaintiff? Our perspective is, very little,'' Squires said.
Radiation released from Hanford ``is rivaled only by the explosions of the test weapons themselves,'' Nordberg countered, in a reference to weapons tests in the Pacific and Nevada that exposed hundreds of thousands of people to radioactive fallout.
Although the science lesson for Nielsen was supposed to be neutral, lawyers disagreed over the significance of the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study, which concluded in 2000 that no link could be found between Hanford's radiation releases and thyroid disease.
Defense lawyers contend those findings will be a tough hurdle for the plaintiffs to overcome before a jury. Attorney Brian Depew, arguing for the plaintiffs, said the Hanford study was statistically weak and other studies have conclusively shown a connection between iodine-131 and thyroid disease.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
KABUL Afghan Militants Threaten to Kill Hostages
October 30, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/30/international/asia/30afghan.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 29 - A militant group claiming to have kidnapped three foreign election workers in Afghanistan said Friday that it would execute the hostages if the authorities pursued their search for the kidnappers.
"We demand the search is stopped," said Akbar Agha, who described himself as the leader of Jaish-e-Muslimeen, or Army of Muslims, in a telephone call to Reuters. "If the U.S. and Afghan forces find our mujahedeen during operations, we will kill them," he said, referring to the hostages.
The group did not make any demands for the release of the hostages and offered no proof to verify its claims, Reuters reported.
[On Saturday, the group said the hostages were safe, Reuters reported. It gave Reuters identity card numbers it said were from two of the hostages to prove its claims. The numbers were being checked with the authorities.]
The three United Nations workers - a British-Irish woman, Annetta Flanigan; an Albanian woman from Kosovo, Shqipe Habibi; and a Filipino diplomat on assignment to the United Nations, Angelito Nayan - were seized from their car in a rapidly executed abduction at lunchtime on Thursday in a busy part of Kabul, the Afghan capital. All three were working on the United Nations-sponsored election process in Afghanistan. Police officials in Kabul have reserved comment on whether the kidnappers were thought to be linked to the Taliban or Al Qaeda, or whether it was the work of a criminal gang or irregular militia group. One official said that it was unlikely that a group with links to the Taliban could have launched such a brazen attack in the capital without the help of local militia or criminals.
But the intelligence chief in southern Afghanistan, Dr. Abdullah Laghmani, said Jaish-e-Muslimeen was a breakaway group from the Taliban movement. Dr. Laghmani, who said he had been tracking the group since it formed about nine months ago, said the group's leader, Mr. Agha, had served as a minor commander during the Taliban's rule but had been influenced by Al Qaeda and broke away to form his own group.
Mr. Agha's group is based in Pakistan and has "a direct connection with Osama bin Laden," Dr. Laghmani said. The group was thought to have carried out only three or four minor attacks until now, Dr. Laghmani said. In one incident, he said, an attacker who was later identified as one of Mr. Agha's men threw a grenade at American forces in Kandahar four or five months ago. When American forces pursued him, he took cover in a cemetery and then blew himself up.
Afghan security forces in Kabul refused to comment Friday on the progress of the search for the three United Nations election officials.
The police said they had arrested three men late on Thursday while searching an area west of Kabul. The men were armed and wearing military uniforms as the kidnappers had been, but had not admitted to any connection to the abductions, said a police officer at the Kabul headquarters, who asked not to be named. News agencies reported that the police had found the black sport utility vehicle used by the kidnappers, but the reports could not be confirmed.
The Afghan police were out in force all day patrolling the western suburbs and stopping cars at checkpoints, but otherwise there seemed to be little activity in the capital on Friday, a day of rest in Afghanistan. United Nations staff members were confined to their homes and forbidden all but essential travel after the kidnapping. About 2,000 foreigners are based in Kabul, working for the United Nations and other foreign aid agencies and organizations.
-------- africa
Liberian mobs bring curfew to Monrovia
October 30, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Jonathan Paye-Layleh
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041029-101345-5246r.htm
MONROVIA, Liberia - Mobs brandishing machetes, sticks and assault rifles rampaged through Liberia's war-shattered capital yesterday, prompting the country's leader to order an immediate daylight curfew to stem the outburst of Muslim-Christian violence.
A U.N. armored vehicle trying to disperse a crowd inadvertently crushed three persons to death, a policeman said.
At least three churches and two mosques in the eastern suburb of Paynesville were set ablaze after midnight, and several wounded people lay in the streets, a photographer on the scene said. One man, stabbed in the head with a knife, could be seen on a main road in a pool of blood, apparently unconscious.
Plumes of black smoke rose from Paynesville, where U.N. peacekeepers in armored personal carriers fired in the air to try to maintain order. U.N. choppers rumbled overhead.
It was not clear what sparked the violence.
"The curfew starts now," interim head of state Gyude Bryant said in a statement broadcast over the private radio station DC101 FM. "The United Nations mission has been instructed to use every force to put the situation under control.
"I am appealing to all of you to remain calm," he said. "We are determined to ensure that peace is restored."
Riots are common in the capital amid demonstrations over the government's failure to pay school tuition that was promised last year to help rehabilitate soldiers after a long civil war.
But religion-based attacks are relatively rare.
Residents said the latest troubles began early Thursday in Paynesville and spread west to an Atlantic Ocean port.
Sporadic gunshots could be heard throughout the morning in Paynesville, as mobs hurled rocks and stones at each other.
Violence had also reportedly spread to Kakata, 35 miles north of the capital, where two mosques were destroyed, a local journalist who visited the site said on the condition of anonymity.
-------- arms
China to showcase military might in air show
BEIJING (AFP)
Oct 30, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041030110702.a716jftu.html
China will showcase a range of advanced military hardware, including missiles and satellites, at a major air show and exhibition in southern China next week, state media reported Saturday.
One of the highlights of the Fifth China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition in Zhuhai will be the first showing of a new "short-range ultra-low-altitude portable air defence missile", Xinhua news agency reported.
The missile, developed by China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp, is primarily for conducting field operation air defence and can be used against low-flying military helicopters, ground-attack aircraft, unmanned aircraft and cruise missiles, said Xinhua.
The Chinese government-owned aerospace company will also display a range of short-range air defence missiles and surface-to-air missiles, plus various small civilian communications satellites.
Among other first showings at the exhibition of some 100 weapons and aerospace products between November 1-7 will be a short-range surface-to-surface missile with a range of 150 kilometers (93 miles), Xinhua said.
The air show will feature stunt teams from Britain, France, Russia and China.
-------- iraq
U.S. awaits word to attack Fallujah
October 30, 2004
By Edward Harris
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041029-114754-1058r.htm
NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq - American forces are gearing up for a major operation in Fallujah, where up to 5,000 Islamic terrorists, Saddam Hussein loyalists and common criminals are hunkered down, U.S. officers said yesterday.
American planners believe many of Fallujah's 300,000 residents have already fled the city, which has become the symbol of Iraqi resistance and where militants last spring ambushed and killed four American contractors, mutilated their bodies and hung them from a bridge.
American officials stress that the final order to launch a big operation would come from Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who has warned Fallujah to hand over followers of terror mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi or face attack.
Mr. Allawi has issued no such order, but preparations are clearly under way, including the movement of British soldiers into areas close to Baghdad so that American forces can be redeployed for the showdown in Fallujah.
"We're gearing up to do an operation and when we're told to go we'll go," Brig. Gen. Dennis Hejlik, deputy commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said at a camp near Fallujah. "When we do go, we'll whack them."
Gen. Hejlik spoke as soldiers from the 850-strong battle group from the British Black Watch Regiment continued to arrive, the ministry said without specifying how many were in each wave.
The base is located 20 miles west of Mahmoudiya, a town that has seen frequent attacks south of Baghdad.
A first convoy of troops and heavy equipment arrived at the base, known as Camp Dogwood, by land Thursday, slowed by roadside bombs along the way.
A blast went off 10 miles south of the base as the convoy passed, forcing several trucks off the road but inflicting no casualties, according to a pool report by a Daily Express newspaper correspondent embedded with the convoy. More bombs were discovered and defused.
A report in Monday's Washington Times by a correspondent in nearby Latifiyah quoted militants saying they were preparing a welcome for the British by planting mines and roadside bombs.
The Americans asked for the deployment in order to free up U.S. forces for a new assault on Sunni insurgents who have taken control of Fallujah and a number of towns north and west of Baghdad.
Clashes were reported yesterday on the northeast edge of Fallujah and in Ramadi - an almost daily occurrence as the showdown looms.
In other developments, a body believed to be that of Japanese adventurer Shosei Koda was found in Iraq after the expiration of a deadline set by his captors for Japan to withdraw its troops from the country, the Japanese government said today.
The body found in Balad, north of Baghdad, bears signs of torture and beatings, a diplomatic source told Kyodo news agency.
Meanwhile, two car bombs in the northern city of Mosul targeted two U.S. patrols, killing an Iraqi civilian and lightly wounding five U.S. soldiers, according to the U.S. military and hospital officials.
A Turkish truck carrying bottled water also was attacked in the city, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad. Attackers killed the driver and left the vehicle engulfed in flames, according to witnesses and Mosul police.
In Baqouba, Aqil Hamid al-Adili, an assistant to the governor of Diyala province, was killed by gunmen as he sat in a friend's office, according to police Lt. Hussein Ali.
Days earlier, Mr. al-Adili had warned of infiltration in the Iraqi security forces after a deadly ambush in which 50 U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers were killed near the Iran border last weekend.
--------
Marines Await Orders to Attack Fallujah
Interim Iraqi Government to Give Green Light;
Allawi 'Losing Patience' With Talks
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 30, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8960-2004Oct29.html
NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq, Oct. 29 -- U.S. Marines are preparing for a decisive battle in the Sunni Triangle area west of Baghdad, where rebels are using violence and intimidation to extend their influence out from the city of Fallujah, senior commanders said Friday.
"We are gearing up to do a major operation, and when we are told to go, we will go," said Brig. Gen. Dennis J. Hejlik, deputy commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which is responsible for security in the area. "When we go . . . we're going to go in there and whack them."
Hejlik said the Marines were awaiting orders from Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, to launch an offensive in Fallujah and in Ramadi, the nearby provincial capital. Iraqi security forces and U.S. Army units would also take part in the operation, he added.
"This will be directed by the interim Iraqi government," Hejlik said during a briefing with reporters. "They are calling the shots."
Insurgents have controlled Fallujah since April, when Marines laid siege to the city, but an offensive was called off under pressure from the White House and L. Paul Bremer, the civilian administrator of the U.S.-led occupation authority then in charge of in Iraq. Since then, military officials have described Fallujah as a hub of the Iraqi insurgency and the base for Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant who has proclaimed allegiance to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization.
While Zarqawi and other foreign militants have vowed to fight until U.S. and other occupying forces quit Iraq, local insurgents have been negotiating with Iraqi authorities to hand over control of the city peacefully. But Taha Ali, a press officer for Allawi, said Friday that the government was "losing patience" with the discussions.
Allawi favors the "peaceful solution," Ali said, but added that "this might be the last" chance to accept it.
In Fallujah, about 50 religious leaders met with members of the Shura Council of Mujaheddin, the self-appointed group that governs the city. The council closed the meeting to reporters, but a source familiar with the discussions said the group agreed to issue a fatwa, or religious order, calling for a holy war if U.S. forces pushed into Fallujah.
"War is very close," Abdullah Janabi, the head of the council, said while leading Friday prayers at the Hadhra Muhammadiya mosque, one of the most important in Fallujah.
"The government is responsible for the bloodshed in Fallujah," he said. "We have no choice -- it is either victory or martyrdom."
On a typical Friday, prayers draw more 3,000 men to the mosque. This week, only about 200 attended, reflecting the recent exodus from Fallujah. Sabbar Janabi, the police chief, said about 16,000 families had fled. About 1,800 are living in tent camps outside the city, and another 2,000 are squatting in school buildings.
Abbar Muhi, 49, covered a burned-out bus outside the city with paper and made it into a shelter for his wife and three children. Muhi said he had to close his auto shop when the family fled. "We have no food, no money," he said. "We live in hunger."
Kona Aswad, 36, left her home for one of the camps set up west of the city. "We don't have money," she said as she filtered river water through a piece of cloth. "We asked the mujaheddin to help us. They refused. We went to the U.S. forces to ask their help. They investigated us and asked us about Fallujah, but they didn't help us."
In one sign of preparations for battle, Marines at an outpost near Fallujah are no longer getting hot meals three times a day; instead, to conserve food, they get packaged rations for lunch, a Marine spokesman said. The Marines also conducted a gas-mask drill on Friday, their first since they took over security duties in western Iraq from the U.S. Army seven months ago.
For weeks, U.S. warplanes have been striking targets in Fallujah believed to be linked to Zarqawi's guerrilla organization. U.S. and Iraqi authorities have blamed Zarqawi and his supporters for many of the deadliest attacks in Iraq in recent months. The U.S. government has offered a $25 million reward for his capture or death.
"Zarqawi is nothing more than a thug who is illiterate," said Maj. James West, a Marine intelligence officer. Ordinary Iraqis "are more scared of Zarqawi because of what he has done" than they are of any government or military force, he said.
West said Fallujah had become a base for foreign fighters who have come to Iraq for jihad, or holy war, against American forces and the Iraqi government. "As long as Fallujah becomes a giant hub, they are starting to push out farther and farther," he said of the insurgents.
Marine leaders said they had no idea how many foreign fighters were in Fallujah. West said some estimates put the force at 5,000 but that he believed it to be closer to "several thousand." He acknowledged that the U.S. military did not know for certain that Zarqawi was in Fallujah.
Eliminating Zarqawi and his network would not stop the insurgency in Iraq, West said, but "if you don't catch him, the insurgency will not stop."
Special correspondents Omar Fekeiki, Khalid Saffar, Bassam Sebti and Naseer Nouri in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.
-------- israel / palestine
Abbas chairs PLO while ailing Arafat is in Paris
October 30, 2004
From combined dispatches
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041029-101344-7778r.htm
RAMALLAH, West Bank - Former Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas is to chair a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee today, a move that elevates him above other Palestinian leaders during Yasser Arafat's stay in Paris for emergency medical treatment.
"It will be the first time that a meeting of executive committee has met without Yasser Arafat as its president," said Bassam al-Sahli, a member of the committee.
Another Cabinet minister, Saeb Erekat, confirmed that Mr. Abbas has been put in charge of the central committee of Fatah, the key political group within the PLO.
Many had written off 69-year-old Mr. Abbas as a political force in the aftermath of his resignation as prime minister last year, following a series of bruising confrontations with Mr. Arafat
Mr. Arafat, suffering from a mystery illness, was flown to France yesterday and was rushed to a military hospital where doctors, including specialists in blood disorders, immediately began examining him.
The health crisis brought the 75-year-old Mr. Arafat out of his sandbagged headquarters compound in the West Bank town of Ramallah for the first time more than two years.
He has been sick for the past two weeks and blood tests revealed he has a low platelet count - a possible symptom of leukemia, other cancers or a number of other maladies.
In Washington yesterday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell urged the Palestinian leader to yield control of security in Palestinian-run areas to a prime minister as a way of furthering peace.
It would give Israel a partner for negotiations, Mr. Powell said in an interview with Egyptian Television and Nile News. Like the Bush administration, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon refuses to deal with Mr. Arafat, the longtime symbol of the Palestinian movement.
"We believe the Palestinian people would be better off with an empowered prime minister who has political authority and who has control of the security forces," Mr. Powell said.
The Washington Times reported yesterday that Mr. Arafat had approved in principle the creation of a new post - "deputy chairman" of the Palestinian Authority, to which Mr. Abbas would be named.
Although Mr. Arafat prefers to be addressed as president, his formal government title is chairman of the Palestinian Authority.
Mr. Abbas has remained out of the public eye since his resignation in September 2003 after just four months on the job.
But he retained his position as general secretary of the PLO and as deputy head of Fatah, the real power behind the Palestinian Authority.
Mr. Arafat and Mr. Abbas were not on speaking terms for months after the resignation, but a rapprochement was sealed earlier in the week when Mr. Abbas paid a bedside visit to Mr. Arafat in his leadership compound, where today's PLO meeting will take place.
--------
U.S., Israel Discuss Internal Growth in West Bank Settlements
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 30, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10520-2004Oct29.html
The Bush administration is negotiating with Israel over whether its settlements in the West Bank can grow within existing settlement boundaries, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday.
The U.S.-backed peace plan known as the "road map" calls on Israel to freeze "settlement activity," including what is known as "natural growth," or construction because of births and marriages. The Israelis have never accepted that definition and have long pressed the Bush administration to allow growth within what are called existing "construction lines." U.S. officials have quietly discussed ways to accommodate Israeli concerns, but in public statements they have insisted that a freeze on settlement growth means a freeze.
In an interview with Egyptian television, however, Powell said: "We are concerned about all kinds of settlement activity, to include different definitions of what growth is. And we're working with the Israelis to define what a settlement is and what the difference is between natural growth and expansion, and is natural growth something that is consistent with the Israelis' commitments to us."
Israeli officials and some administration officials said Powell's statement appears to be the first official acknowledgment that the United States is prepared to adopt a more flexible definition of a freeze as sought by Israel.
A senior State Department official, after checking with Powell, said Powell did not mean to suggest a new policy. "The policy is to have an end to settlement activity," the department official said. "The Israelis have some ideas about what that means," but the administration wants to make sure Israeli actions on settlements are "consistent with the commitments they made to us."
Yet the administration's statements have undergone an evolution in recent months, especially as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon battled for his plan to unilaterally withdraw from settlements in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli Knesset approved the plan this week.
At a briefing on Aug. 18, when asked if natural growth of settlements was open to interpretation, spokesman J. Adam Ereli said: "I don't have anything for you on that."
But last month, also during an interview with Egyptian television, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage mused openly about a definition of natural growth. "If you have settlements that already exist and you put more people into them but don't expand the physical, sort of, the area -- that might be one thing," he said. "But if the physical area expands and encroaches, and it takes more of Palestinian land, well, this is another."
In fact, some key administration officials, such as Elliott Abrams, the top Middle East specialist on the White House's National Security Council staff, privately have long pressed for a more expansive definition of natural growth.
After Sharon announced his plan to withdraw from Gaza last December, a senior administration official told reporters at a briefing that the purpose of a settlement freeze is to make sure additional settlers would not impede Palestinian life or prevent the formation of a viable Palestinian state. It makes no difference, he said, if the Israelis add another house within a block of existing homes. "We have not taken the position there has to be an end to natural growth in settlements," he said.
In April, President Bush said that Israel could expect to retain some West Bank settlements in a final peace deal because of "new realities on the ground." In a letter to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice at the time, a top Israeli aide to Sharon committed to quickly seeking restrictions on settlement growth, including having U.S. and Israeli officials "jointly define the construction line of each of the settlements."
A technical team of U.S. experts was scheduled to visit Israel to review the Israeli proposals several months ago, but the trip was postponed.
Officials familiar with the discussions said it has been difficult to draw such lines, in part because synagogues are sometimes placed far from housing in settlements. When the synagogue is included, in some cases the construction line would allow significant expansion within a settlement.
-------- russia / chechnya
2 Russian generals given awards in Iraq on war eve
October 30, 2004
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041029-110322-3343r.htm
Two Russian generals were photographed receiving awards from Saddam Hussein's government for helping Iraqi military forces less than 10 days before the U.S.-led invasion.
The two retired officers were identified by the newspaper Gazeta.ru as Col. Gen. Vladimir Achalov and Col. Gen. Igor Maltsev, both former high-ranking officers involved in Soviet rapid-reaction and air defense forces.
Both generals were photographed receiving awards from Iraqi Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed in early March 2003, only days before the war began on March 20, 2003. The photographs were taken in a building that was bombed by U.S. cruise missiles during the first air raids on Baghdad, the newspaper stated.
The mission and the reason the generals received the awards were not disclosed in the April 2, 2003, report. However, Gen. Achalov told the newspaper that he "didn't fly to Baghdad to drink coffee."
The comment bolsters the claims of Pentagon officials who say Russian military advisers and special forces units were helping Iraq's military and intelligence services before the Iraq war.
The Pentagon has identified Russia as Iraq's top arms supplier, along with France and China. U.S. military officials have said Russian military suppliers sold Iraq special electronic jammers that were designed to thwart attacks by U.S. satellite-guided joint direct attack munitions, or JDAMs.
The jammers were bombed by the JDAMs, after the global positioning systems satellites signals used to guide them were boosted.
John A. Shaw, deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said this week that two European intelligence services have obtained documentary evidence indicating Russian spetsnaz, or special forces, troops were involved in a covert program to shred documents on Russian arms sales to Iraq, and to move weapons out of the country to Syria, Lebanon and possibly Iran.
The Russians were hired by the Iraqis to protect special Russian weapons and to organize the removal of arms through truck convoys. The Russian special forces troops were working for the GRU military intelligence service and wore civilian clothes, defense officials said.
The Russian Embassy yesterday denied that the country's special forces took part in moving Saddam's weapons.
"This is completely far-fetched," said Yuri Ushakov, the Russian ambassador, who dismissed Mr. Shaw's statements as false. "To try to scapegoat Russia for such shortfalls is utterly unfair."
Mr. Ushakov said statements by other U.S. officials "devalidate" Mr. Shaw's remarks about the Russian arms-dispersal program in Iraq.
The Gazeta.ru stated that it obtained the photographs of the generals from an unidentified source but confirmed their authenticity with Gen. Achalov.
Gen. Achalov was a former Soviet deputy defense minister and airborne troops commander and chief of the rapid-reaction forces. Gen. Maltsev was chief of the Soviet air defense forces. Both backed the aborted coup against Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 and were sacked afterward.
A third photograph shows the two generals with the head of the Iraqi chief of the general staff, Gen. Izzat Ibrahim.
Asked about the award, Gen. Achalov said the award ceremony took place "even less than 10 days before the war."
The generals had made some 20 visits to Iraq in the past five or six years and appeared to be playing a role in preparing the Iraqi military for conflict, the newspaper stated.
"Given such a schedule - three to four trips a year - it is almost beyond doubt that Achalov and Maltsev, as well as, possibly, other retired Soviet and highly placed Russian military personnel were giving advice to Iraq as it prepared its army for imminent war," the newspaper said.
-------- spies
Collins Eyes the Powers Bush Gave to CIA
Chief Intelligence Negotiations Still Deadlocked
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 30, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10555-2004Oct29.html
Seeking to break a House-Senate deadlock over intelligence reform, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) is exploring whether the added budgetary powers President Bush granted the director of central intelligence last August through an executive order can be permanently shifted to a new director of national intelligence by law.
Collins, the leading Senate negotiator, told reporters yesterday she was "very disappointed" that she and her colleagues have been unable to reconcile competing House and Senate bills to restructure operations of the 15 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community.
The main stumbling block has been over determining the extent of budget and spending authority granted the new intelligence director. Annual intelligence spending, now said to total $40 billion, is largely hidden in the Pentagon budget and is under the control of the defense secretary.
The Senate bill, which is supported by members of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and by House Democratic negotiators, calls for ending that secrecy and giving the money directly to the new director. House Republicans oppose declassification and want the defense secretary to continue controlling the funds.
The president's Office of Management and Budget has drafted compromise language for the Senate conferees that would keep the intelligence funding secret and part of the Pentagon budget, but would give the new intelligence director control over how the funds are spent. So far, the proposed compromise has received a cold reception from the Republican negotiators.
Now Collins, chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, wants to write into law a variation of Bush's August executive order to give the new director what she described as "control over budget execution" for the three Pentagon-based intelligence collection agencies. The CIA director would be stripped of that authority under the legislation.
Even under this approach, the new national intelligence director would control only three-quarters of the intelligence gathering system. The rest, dealing with tactical military intelligence gathering, would remain under the control of the defense secretary.
In a conference call with reporters yesterday, the top four congressional negotiators -- Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Collins said they still hope compromise legislation can be passed during Congress's lame-duck session scheduled for mid-November.
On Thursday, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) charged that Bush had "squandered what may have been a last opportunity to get Congress to approve meaningful intelligence reform." Last July, Kerry called for quick approval of the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission.
-------- us
TROOPS
Pentagon Extends Tours of Duty for About 6,500 U.S. Soldiers
October 30, 2004
By THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/30/international/middleeast/30military.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 - The Pentagon has ordered about 6,500 soldiers in Iraq to extend their tours, the first step the military has taken to increase its combat power there in preparation for the January elections, senior Defense Department officials said Friday.
About 3,500 members of the Second Brigade of the First Cavalry Division will stay in Iraq two months longer than initially ordered, and about 3,000 soldiers assigned to headquarters and support units of the First Infantry Division will have their tours extended by two and a half weeks. While Pentagon officials and military officers previously had left open the possibility that additional troops would be required to battle a tenacious insurgency ahead of the elections, they had also expressed hopes that new Iraqi security forces or foreign units might fill the need. The decision to extend the stay of American forces in Iraq at a time when replacement troops also are arriving means a significant increase in the overall American combat presence for the first time since the summer.
No other extensions have been approved, and no units now preparing for Iraq duty have been ordered to speed up their departure, according to Pentagon and military officials.
But senior Defense Department officials said they had considered plans that would allow the American military in Iraq to quickly increase its forces by as many as three brigades - a total of as many as 15,000 troops, the combat power of a traditional Army division - but that no steps had been taken other than the extensions discussed Friday.
If Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of American forces in the Middle East, requests even more troops, it is possible that the Third Infantry Division, which led the drive for Baghdad during the war and is set to return to Iraq in January, could speed the arrival of some combat units, officials said. Other options also are under consideration.
Under the extension orders, which have been approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the soldiers whose departures are delayed will still leave Iraq for their home bases before the 12-month deployment limit promised by the Army, as the units had initially been given assignments of less than a year.
The order will result in some good news for about 3,000 members of the 42nd Infantry Division of the New York National Guard, based in Troy. Those soldiers are to replace the headquarters units of the First Infantry Division whose stay in Iraq is being extended, and the departure for Iraq of those 42nd Infantry Division soldiers is to be delayed by up to 60 days, allowing many to spend the holiday season at home.
Their slowed departure is necessary because there will be no living space or equipment for those members of the 42nd Division until the First Infantry Division soldiers leave. While the additional time will allow for more training, two senior Defense Department officials said the delay was a matter of logistics and infrastructure, and not a reflection on readiness of those New York National Guard soldiers.
The Islamic holy month of Ramadan has already prompted a 25 percent increase in daily attacks, according to Pentagon officials. But these officials said they had seen no indication yet of a major insurgent offensive like the one a year ago. But military commanders said they must prepare for a guerrilla offensive that could come in November or December, as voter registration gets under way in earnest, or for attacks timed to the elections in January.
Pentagon and military officials said commanders were already planning to take advantage of the overlap of arriving and departing soldiers around the time of the elections, as that offers a natural, if temporary, increase in troop strength in certain areas. The number of American troops in Iraq has averaged about 138,000 since the summer.
General Abizaid, said one senior Defense Department official, "wanted the most experienced forces available to us" as the election approached. Time already spent in Iraq has allowed those troops to gain combat experience and to develop important ties with Iraqi leaders and the local population that cannot be immediately replaced by arriving forces, the official said.
Military officers in Baghdad said Friday that soldiers of the Second Brigade of the First Cavalry Division had already been informed of the decision to delay their mid-November departure until mid-January. The First Cavalry Division is responsible for security in Baghdad, including the Sadr City district that is a center of Shiite unrest. Senior officials described the Second Brigade as "a very seasoned force" that would serve as an "operational reserve" and quick-reaction force during its two-month extension.
The headquarters units of the First Infantry Division now will depart on Feb. 14 instead of Jan. 27. The division is deployed north of Baghdad in restive Sunni Muslim cities, including Samarra, Balad and Baquba.
In the previous troop rotation this year, 250,000 American soldiers changed places in Iraq in the largest shift of troops since World War II. While successful, the quick pace of the rotation put a huge strain on the military's air and sea transportation system, on temporary deployment bases in Kuwait and on the Iraqi road system. Military officials decided to spread the new round of troop replacements over a longer period, with the bulk arriving and departing between this fall and spring 2005.
To make that new, longer rotation timetable work, some units were scheduled for only 10 months in Iraq, including those now scheduled for extension.
The Army has previously had to extend deployments for soldiers in Iraq, causing complaints from some soldiers and some of their families.
The first extension was for some troops of the Third Infantry Division after the end of major combat operations. The second was earlier this year, when the First Armored Division had its yearlong tour extended by 90 days. The division was sent south from Baghdad to put down the first uprising of a militia loyal to the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
--------
PROTECTING TROOPS
Along With Prayers, Families Send Armor
October 30, 2004
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE and JOHN KIFNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/30/international/middleeast/30equip.html?pagewanted=all
George and Beverly Isenberg with a photo of their grandson, Specialist Benjamin Isenberg of the Oregon National Guard. Specialist Isenberg died when he drove a Humvee over a bomb north of Baghdad on Sept. 13.
hen the 1544th Transportation Company of the Illinois National Guard was preparing to leave for Iraq in February, relatives of the soldiers offered to pay to weld steel plates on the unit's trucks to protect against roadside bombs. The Army told them not to, because it would provide better protection in Iraq, relatives said.
Seven months later, many of the company's trucks still have no armor, soldiers and relatives said, despite running some of the most dangerous missions in Iraq and incurring the highest rate of injuries and deaths among the Illinois units deployed there.
"This problem is very extensive," said Paul Rieckhoff, a former infantry platoon leader with the Florida National Guard in Iraq who now runs an organization called Operation Truth, an advocacy group for soldiers and veterans.
Though soldiers of all types have complained about equipment in Iraq, part-timers in the National Guard and Reserve say that they have a particular disadvantage because they start off with outdated or insufficient gear. They have been deployed with faulty radios, unreliable trucks and, most alarmingly for many, a shortage of soundly armored vehicles in a land regularly convulsed by roadside attacks, according to soldiers, relatives and outside military experts.
After many complaints when the violence in Iraq accelerated late last year, the military acknowledged there had been shortages, in part because of the rapid deployments. But the Army contends that it has moved quickly to get better equipment to Iraq over the last year.
"War is a come-as-you-are party," said Lt. Gen. C. V. Christianson, the Army's deputy chief of staff for logistics, in an interview yesterday. "The way a unit was resourced when someone rang the bell is the way it showed up.
"As we saw this become a more enduring commitment, those in the next rotation had full protective gear, like the newest body armor," he said. General Christianson acknowledged, however, that more work needed to be done to protect vehicles in particular and that broader changes were needed so that the Army and Reserve would be better prepared in the future.
Not all National Guard units are complaining about their equipment. The soldiers in Company C of the Arkansas Army National Guard's First Battalion, 153rd Infantry Regiment, have operated in one of the riskiest parts of Baghdad since they arrived in April.
Capt. Thomas J. Foley, 29, the company commander, and his soldiers bragged in recent interviews that their equipment, from Bradley fighting vehicles to armored personnel carriers, was on par or better than what many regular Army units in Iraq now have.
The improvements are of little solace to many soldiers' families. Progress has been made, but it has been slow and inconsistent, soldiers, families and other military observers said. When 18 reservists in Iraq refused an order to deliver fuel on Oct. 13, they cited the poor condition of their trucks and the lack of armed escorts in a particularly dangerous area.
Families Buy Equipment
Before the 103rd Armor Regiment of the Pennsylvania National Guard left in late February, some relatives bought those soldiers new body armor to supplant the Vietnam-era flak jackets that had been issued. The mother of Sgt. Sherwood Baker, a member of the regiment who was killed in April, bought a global positioning device after being told that the Army said his truck should have one but would not supply it.
And before Karma Kumlin's husband left with his Minnesota National Guard unit in February, the soldiers spent about $200 each on radios that they say have turned out to be more reliable - although less secure - than the Army's. Only recently, Ms. Kumlin said, has her husband gotten a metal shield for the gunner's turret he regularly mans, after months of asking.
"This just points to an extreme lack of planning ," said Ms. Kumlin, who is 31 and a student. "My husband is part of the second wave that went to Iraq."
Critics who say that disparities and shortages persist fault the Pentagon for incorrectly assuming that American troops would return home quickly after the war. As a result, they say, little was done to equip and train the thousands of National Guard and Reserve soldiers who were called to serve in Iraq and who now make up 40 percent of American troops there.
"I am really surprised that planners relied on the best-case military scenario," said Jonathon Turley, a military historian at George Washington University Law School who wrote last year about shortages of body armor. He was then deluged with e-mail messages from soldiers complaining of such shortages, 90 percent of them from the National Guard and Reserve.
Military officials strongly dispute assertions that reservists and National Guard troops have training and equipment inferior to that of the regular Army. "The resourcing and equipping of the National Guard today is indistinguishable from that of active duty soldiers," said Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum. "In no time in history have soldiers gone to battle as well equipped as they have gone into Iraq."
Structured like the regular Army, the National Guard functions as a state militia, typically called out for natural disasters or civil disorder. The Reserve, in contrast, is largely composed of support elements like civil affairs, the military police and supply. Both groups train one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer. The rest of the military does not consider them as well trained, well equipped or well led as the standing Army, and many of these part-time soldiers are also older.
Reliance on Reserves
Under a reorganization of the military after the Vietnam War, support functions were passed from the Army to the Reserve. Historians say the idea was to protect the Army from being sent into another unpopular war because widespread support would be needed to call up the reserves.
In his biography of Gen. Creighton Abrams, "Thunderbolt" (Simon & Schuster, 1992), Lewis Sorley wrote than General Abrams built into the restructuring "a reliance on reserves such that the force could not function without them, and hence could not be deployed without calling them up."
The reliance on the Reserve and National Guard also increased with the shrinking of the active military from roughly 2.1 million at the end of the Persian Gulf war to some 1.4 million today.
But for years, under what is called the Tiered Resourcing System, new equipment went to those most likely to need it - the active Army - while the Reserve and the Guard got the hand-me-downs.
"In addition to personnel shortfalls, most Army Guard units are not provided all the equipment they need for their wartime requirements," said Janet A. St. Laurent of the General Accounting Office in testimony before Congress in April. Ms. St. Laurent noted that many Guard units had radios so old that they could not communicate with newer ones, and trucks so old that the Army lacked spare parts for them.
Army officials concede that the old approach to training and equipping the Guard and Reserve did not prepare them for the new realities of Iraq. Progress appears to have been made in providing modern body armor and some other equipment, families and soldiers say.
The Army says it is on schedule to armor all its Humvees in Iraq by April 2005, despite the fact that only one factory in the United States puts armor on the vehicles. Moreover, the Guard is developing a plan to heighten the training and preparedness of its soldiers, under which a given unit could expect to be deployed every six years.
But the glaring problem for soldiers and families remains the vulnerability of trucks. In a conventional war there would be a fixed front line and no need for supply trucks to be armored. But in Iraq, there are no clear front lines, and slow-moving truck convoys are prime targets for roadside attacks.
Gen. James E. Chambers, the commander of the 13th Corps Support Command, to which the recalcitrant soldiers who refused the assignment are attached, told a news conference in Baghdad: "In Jim Chambers' s opinion, the most dangerous job in Iraq is driving a truck. It's not if, but when, they will be attacked."
Of the Illinois National Guard units now in Iraq, none of the 11 units has suffered as many casualties as the 1544th Transportation Company. Of the approximately 170 men and women in the unit, 5 have been killed and 32 wounded since the unit arrived in Iraq in March and began delivering supplies and mail and providing armed escort to civilian convoys.
Three of the soldiers died during mortar attacks on their base south of Baghdad. The other two were killed when roadside bombs exploded next to their unarmored trucks. Soldiers' relatives said that they expected the Army to outfit the trucks better than they themselves could have, after being told by the military that the steel plates proposed by the families would shatter if hit.
But in fact, most of the trucks in the unit have nothing more than the steel plates that the families offered to have installed in the first place, said Lt. Col. Alicia Tate-Nadeau, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Guard.
3 Meanings of Armored
The Army considers the 1544th's vehicles armored, a word that has a broad and loose meaning in the Iraq conflict. There are three categories of armored vehicles, Colonel Tate-Nadeau said. The "up-armored" ones come that way from the factory and provide the best protection for soldiers. Then come vehicles outfitted with "armor kits," or prefabricated pieces, on the chassis. The last option consists of "whatever the soldiers try to do themselves, from large sheets of metal on their trucks to sandbags on the floor of the cab," Colonel Tate-Nadeau said.
"If we're one of the richest nations in the world, our soldiers shouldn't be sent out looking like the Beverly Hillbillies," said the mother of one soldier in the unit, who, like many parents, asked not to be identified for fear of repercussions for their children.
According to figures compiled by the House Armed Services Committee and previously reported in The Seattle Times, there are plans to produce armor kits for at least 2,806 medium-weight trucks, but as of Sept. 17, only 385 of the kits had been produced and sent to Iraq. Armor kits were also planned for at least 1,600 heavyweight trucks, but as of mid-September just 446 of these kits were in Iraq. The Army is also looking into developing ways to armor truck cabs quickly, and has ordered 700 armored Humvees with special weapons platforms to protect convoys.
Specialist Benjamin Isenberg, 27, of the Oregon National Guard, died on Sept. 13 when he drove his unarmored Humvee over a homemade bomb, the principal weapon of the insurgents, said his grandmother, Beverly Isenberg of McArthur, Calif. The incident occurred near Taji, the town north of Baghdad where the 18 reservists refused to make a second trip with fuel that they say had been rejected as contaminated.
"One of the soldiers in his unit said they go by the same routes and at the same times every day," said Mrs. Isenberg, whose husband is a retired Army officer and who has two sons in the military and another grandson in the Special Forces who was wounded in Iraq. "They were just sitting ducks in an unarmored Humvee."
Carolyn Marshall contributed reporting for this article.
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Need for Draft Is Dismissed by Officials at Pentagon
October 31, 2004
By THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/politics/31draft1.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 - Rumors of a secret plan to reinstate the draft are churning across the Internet, worrying some in Congress and even coloring the presidential campaign, but senior Pentagon personnel officials and Army officers insist that there is no need for a draft - and that they do not want one, either.
To counter public fears that conscription is returning, these officials produced internal studies to illustrate the economic and demographic reasons why a draft is not necessary, and why it would be a step backward for the quality of the current all-volunteer force.
Army and Pentagon officials hope that efforts under way to reorganize the service to form at least 43 combat brigades from today's 33 will create additional deployable units and alleviate the stress on the Army. And as both the Air Force and Navy shrink their personnel rosters, some of those departing personnel are being courted by the Army in a program that also serves as antidote to the draft.
If a decision is made that the American military should grow, then the Pentagon could ask Congress to finance a permanent expansion in personnel, including enough money to attract recruits and retain those in uniform without undercutting accounts for operations and weapons systems.
Officials note that Congressional proposals for expanding the military, mostly in the range of 30,000 to 40,000 more troops, would hardly require a new draft to force conscripts from across the approximately two-million-strong cohort of current 18-year-old Americans.
In fact, the demographics of America are cited by Pentagon officials as a major reason why the draft makes no sense today.
The Pentagon's top personnel officer, David S. C. Chu, said the size of today's military - 1.4 million in the active component, and 1.2 million in the National Guard and Reserve - is a much smaller percentage of a much larger pool of possible recruits than the United States faced during World War II and into the 1950's.
And since the military could not possibly absorb all the 18-year-olds in the population should a draft be reinstated, there is little doubt that a system of deferrals would be established that, just as in the Vietnam era, could create a caste-like system separating the privileged of America from the others.
"What do you do when not all need to be called and only a few are chosen?" said Mr. Chu, who is under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness. "It becomes a question of fairness."
Today's high-technology military also benefits from personnel who are committed to staying in the service for several years, allowing the armed services to reap full benefit from their costly training. During the draft, soldiers were required to stay in the service for only two years. But Pentagon studies show that current recruits need one to three years to reach full competency in combat or support skills.
A study by Mr. Chu's office makes that point in arguing against reinstating a draft that was allowed to lapse on July 1, 1973.
"Draftees quit early; volunteers stay - so today's mid-grade and senior noncommissioned officers are well-experienced," said the study, written by Bill Carr, deputy under secretary for military personnel policy.
"During the most recent draft, 90 percent of conscripts quit after their initial two-year hitch, whereas retention of volunteers is five times better - about half remain after their initial (normally four-year) military service obligation," said the study, which was published in the spring 2004 edition of "World Defense Systems," a military journal.
Those statistics may not be persuasive to those who believe the United States is poised for a broader array of offensive military operations against other adversaries that would require a draft, nor to those who feel that a program of required national service would benefit the nation and America's 18-year-olds.
But senior officers stress that the all-volunteer military is also more competent, better educated and more disciplined than in the final years of the draft.
"I served in the draftee Army," said Gen. Richard A. Cody, who is now vice chief of staff for the Army, the service most under stress from worldwide deployments.
"Those soldiers were just as loyal as today," he said. "But it was like Forrest Gump. You know, 'Life is like a box of chocolates.' With conscripts, you never know what you're going to get."
General Cody said the strain to meet current global commitments cannot be minimized - nor the strain to meet recruiting goals. But he said the young men and women who signed up today were of a higher quality than any he had seen in 29 years of command.
"I don't have rose-colored glasses on," General Cody said. "But we don't need the draft and we don't want the draft. There are plenty of Americans who still want to be in the military."
Perhaps the most often-cited reason for opposition to a draft is the motivation of the all-volunteer force.
"The most important thing about a draft is that the people you draft, by definition, don't all want to be there," Mr. Chu said. "The great strength of the volunteer force is the ranks of people who all made a positive, voluntary decision that this is what they want to do."
The current American military "is also smarter than the general population" from which conscripts would be drawn, according to the study by Mr. Chu's office. "Over 90 percent of new recruits have a high school diploma, while only 75 percent of the American youth do; 67 percent score in the upper half of the enlistment (math/verbal aptitude) test," it stated.
"These attributes translate to lower attrition, faster training and higher performance," it concluded.
Mr. Chu said that studies of the military also showed that the all-volunteer force had fewer disciplinary problems than a draftee service.
"All that comes together in the performance of the force in the field, which is the ultimate test," Mr. Chu said. "How does this force fight? How well does it carry out the nation's objectives? How disciplined is it in the face of challenges? I don't think anyone can look at the events of the three-plus years since 9/11 and not see the payoff in the volunteer force."
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-------- homeland security / national intelligence
U.S. Warns on Terror; Alert Stays Orange
October 30, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Bin-Laden.html?oref=login
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration left the terror threat level unchanged Saturday, despite warning state and local officials that a videotape message from Osama bin Laden may portend a new terrorist attack.
``We don't have to go to (code level) orange to take action in response either to these tapes or just general action to improve security around the country,'' Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told reporters.
Ridge urged Americans to go ahead with plans to vote in Tuesday's elections without undue concern.
His words and appearance both seemed designed to convey a lack of alarm. The nation's top anti-terrorism official made his remarks in casual clothes standing outside his office, rather than at a formal news conference of the type he and other administration officials have conveyed word of increased danger in the past.
Ridge's department and the FBI issued a memo late Friday to local and state officials, hours after a new videotape of bin Laden surfaced.
``We remain concerned about al-Qaida's interest in attacking the American homeland, and we cannot discount the possibility that the video may be intended to promote violence or serve as a signal for an attack,'' it said.
Most of the United States has been at code yellow, the midpoint of a five-point color-coded warning scale, for much of the year.
Since August, the terror alert for the financial section in New York, Wash