Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Bush Toughens Line On Nuclear Threats
Bush zeros in on nuclear weapon projects
Black horsemen swoop down on White House
Study Links Cancer Cases In Sweden to Chernobyl
Dounreay workers exposed to lethal plutonium
Legislator Takes Up Veterans' Cause Will Back Depleted Uranium Tests
Bush Says Iran Speeds Output of A-Bomb Fuel
LaPorte warns that N. Korea may try to sell plutonium
ONCE-SECRET EXPERIMENTS DRAW U.N. SCRUTINY
US 'Star Wars' missiles will be in Europe in five years
Unthinkable? An attack on an American city by terrorists
The price of blowing the whistle in Salem
DOE team to hear Hanford worker complaints
MILITARY
Rebel Attacks Raise Tensions in Darfur
Rights Groups Cite Pattern Of Abuse by Nepal's Army
Britain joins EU army
Senators Want Boeing Deal Investigated
Cost of War in Iraq Escalates
Iraq: The Uncounted
'Hey, hurry up. You're holding up my men'
The soldiers' story: the war the video cameras do not see
Rockets from over the river make terror just part of army routine
Falluja women, children in mass grave
Iraq Schedules National Elections for Jan. 30
Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos
Baghdad Suffers A Day of Attacks, Assassinations
Rebels Keep Up Attacks in Central and North Iraq
In Falluja, Young Marines Saw the Savagery of an Urban War
Palestinians: Arafat poisoned
3,000 Indian Troops Pull Out of Kashmir
Intelligence Overhaul Bill Blocked
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Where Execution Feels Like Relic, Death Looms
Intelligence Overhaul Bill Blocked
Pentagon Called Major Factor in Defeat of Intelligence Bill
House Leadership Blocks Vote on Intelligence Bill
Broad Influence for Justice Dept. Choice
Peru Won't Release Imprisoned N.Y. Woman
City and F.B.I. Reach Agreement on Bioterror Investigations
POLITICS
In role reversal, president rescues Secret Service agent
Congress Agrees on Tight Budget for U.S.
Taking Charge Even if she doesn't
The Power-Values Approach to Policy
Spending Bill in Hand, Congress Departs
ENERGY
Sixth Iraq oil well set ablaze by saboteurs
OTHER
Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos
Creditors consider writing off 80 percent of debt
ACTIVISTS
Bahrain Activist Pardoned by King
Anti-war advocates contemplate 'where to go from here'
Additional fence and barbed wire fail to stop Latin school protest
-------- NUCLEAR
Bush Toughens Line On Nuclear Threats
President Singles Out Iran, N. Korea
By Mike Allen and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64951-2004Nov20?language=printer
SANTIAGO, Chile, Nov. 20 -- President Bush said Saturday that he believes Iran is continuing to pursue a nuclear weapon, which he called "a very serious matter," and said he had won pledges from Asian allies to increase pressure on North Korea's leader to restart disarmament talks.
During his reelection campaign, Bush said little about the two nuclear threats. But with aides contending that his victory gave him new international leverage, he took confrontational lines with both countries, insisting they disarm but pledging to pursue that goal diplomatically.
At his first international summit since being reelected, and on his first trip abroad in five months, Bush escalated warnings issued by outgoing Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, saying he did not believe claims by Iran's ruling clerics, who have denied that the country was taking steps to develop a nuclear weapon.
Bush said the United States was closely monitoring Iran's activities in the run-up to Thursday, when the International Atomic Energy Agency is scheduled to meet in Vienna to determine whether to refer the country's nuclear activity to the U.N. Security Council. In an agreement with Britain, France and Germany that was announced this month, Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment, the pivotal process in a peaceful nuclear energy program capable of being diverted for military use.
"We're concerned about reports that show that prior to a certain international meeting, they're willing to speed up processing of materials that could lead to a nuclear weapon," Bush said on the sidelines of the 12th annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. "The world knows it's a serious matter, and we're working together to solve this matter."
Bush said it was "very important for the Iranian government to hear that we are concerned about their desires," and that he would continue working with European powers "to convince the Iranians to give up any nuclear ambitions they may have."
"The reason why they're involved is because they do believe that Iran has got nuclear ambitions, as do we, as do many around the world," Bush said, as Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi stood at his side.
The president met with the leaders of his four partners in arms talks with North Korea -- China, Japan, Russia and South Korea -- and said afterward that all had supported his call for them to bolster their united front to try to get North Korea to return to talks that have been on hold since June. Bush went into the summit determined to urge them to more energetically apply pressure on North Korea, and by day's end, he had declared his diplomacy a success.
In a speech to chief executives meeting here at the base of the Andes Mountains, Bush said: "I can report to you today, having visited with the other nations involved in that collaborative effort, that the will is strong, that the effort is united and the message is clear to Mr. Kim Jong Il: Get rid of your nuclear weapons programs."
A Chinese Foreign Ministry official told reporters that President Hu Jintao had said to Bush, "This is a rather complex issue, and it requires all relevant parties to display patience, flexibility and sincerity."
Bush ate lunch with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and in contrast to their previously jovial appearances together, the two men were silent when photographers were briefly ushered in. A senior administration official who attended the meeting said Bush expressed skepticism about Putin's proposals to change the Russian political system in ways that have raised questions about his commitment to democracy.
The official said Bush "noted the concerns that we've had about checks and balances, about the centralization of power inside Russia, and asked Putin to give his own explanation of what was going on and why these steps were being taken inside Russia."
The official said Putin "went back deep into Russian history, the Stalinist period, and made the point that what the Russian government was trying to do at this point was to develop a democratic style of government that was consistent with Russian history and the unique problems that Russia faced as a multiethnic society on a large landmass."
Bush branded Iran part of an "axis of evil" in 2002, along with Iraq and North Korea, and in April said it would be "intolerable" if Iran were to develop an atomic weapon. Iran agreed Monday to a deal brokered by three European powers -- Britain, France and Germany -- to indefinitely suspend uranium enrichment until a permanent agreement could be reached to ensure that Tehran complies with its obligations as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But diplomats in Vienna have reported that Iran is scrambling to convert nearly raw uranium, also called yellowcake, into hexafluoride gas, the end stage for the uranium before it can be enriched, in advance of the deadline.
Powell, appearing a few hours after Bush at a joint press conference with Chile's foreign minister, Ignacio Walker, expressed frustration with Iran over what he depicted as its clandestine efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.
"Iran has been working on long-range missiles," Powell said. "They have been working on intercontinental range missiles, which they claim are for perhaps space-launch purposes. And we have reason to believe that when you see what they have been doing, the high aspects of their nuclear programs, when you see what they have been doing over the years with missiles and potential delivery systems, it is a cause of concern."
Speaking about North Korea after his meeting with Koizumi, Bush said it was "very important for the leader of North Korea to understand that the six-party talks will be the framework in which we continue to discuss the mutual goal we all have, which is to rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons."
A Japanese government official said after the meeting that Koizumi had told Bush he wanted "to continue cooperation toward Iraq's reconstruction," but stopped short of promising to extend the deployment of Japanese troops beyond their current commitment of Dec. 14.
Bush met with Hu, China's president, for the first time since Hu assumed his full powers. "I invited President Hu to come and visit the United States as soon as he can, and he invited me to China," Bush said.
During Bush's meeting with the chief executives, he won the heartiest applause when he recognized "a man who has served our country so well, a great United States secretary of state, Colin Powell."
"Right after my speech, he's headed to the Middle East. That's a heck of a retirement, Mr. Secretary," Bush said, drawing laughter. "I look forward to your report when you get back."
Bush, reprising an issue he had discussed with Koizumi, acknowledged to the leaders his "concern about whether or not our government is dedicated to dealing with our deficits."
He said he looked forward to outlining to Congress in his State of the Union address in January the steps he will take in his new budget to deal with the deficit.
----
Bush zeros in on nuclear weapon projects
New York Times
By David E. Sanger
November 21, 2004
http://www.marinij.com/Stories/0,1413,234~24410~2549945,00.html
SANTIAGO, Chile - President Bush increased the administration's pressure on Iran yesterday, saying there were indications that the country was speeding forward in the production of a key ingredient for nuclear weapons fuel, a move he said was "a very serious matter" that undercut Iran's denials that it is seeking to build weapons.
On the first day here of the annual gathering of Pacific Rim leaders, his first summit meeting since winning re-election, Bush also tried to re-establish a unified front against the other nuclear challenge facing his second term: North Korea.
In back-to-back meetings with the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea here yesterday morning, Bush urged each to draw North Korea back into six-nation negotiations. And in a speech later, he issued a direct challenge to North Korea's reclusive leader that echoed President Reagan's demand in 1987 for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. After the meetings, Bush said, he was convinced "that the will is strong, that the effort is united and the message is clear to Mr. Kim Jong Il: Get rid of your nuclear weapons programs."
His aides played down informal intelligence estimates that the country has already produced enough plutonium in the past two years to manufacture six additional nuclear weapons.
Bush's efforts here underscored his determination to reverse two nuclear projects that appear to have made significant progress while American attention has been focused on Iraq.
In Iran's case, he is clearly skeptical about a European-led effort to suspend the country's manufacture of nuclear material, and in North Korea he is facing a country that has defied every previous effort he has made to force it to dismantle what it has already built.
He told reporters yesterday that he was "concerned about reports" that said Iran appeared "willing to speed up processing of materials that could lead to a nuclear weapon."
Diplomats had said the day before that Iran had told the International Atomic Energy Agency that it was racing to produce uranium hexafluoride, a gas that can be enriched into bomb fuel, before it begins to observe the temporary suspension of nuclear activity that it negotiated with the Europeans.
The president's comments marked the second time this week that the administration has accused Iran of heading quickly toward nuclear weapons, despite its protestations to the contrary.
Following Bush's assertion yesterday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment, Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared at a news conference here with Foreign Minister Ignacio Walker Prieto of Chile and was asked to provide details to back that up but declined to do so. He said that in the past four years, as a result of American cries of alarm about Iran's intentions, the international community was now "as concerned as we are" about the problem.
The focus of most of Bush's sessions was North Korea, and one participant said Bush hinted he would show "some flexibility" in offering incentives to the North, a subject of furious infighting within the administration. But a senior American official told reporters yesterday afternoon that could only happen after North Korea returned to the negotiating table.
"The North Korean strategy of running out the clock didn't work," said this official, referring to the speculation that North Korea thought Bush would be defeated on Election Day.
In 2003 Bush said he "will not tolerate nuclear weap-ons in North Korea," and in April 2004, he told a convention of newspaper editors in Washington that a nuclear program in Iran was "intolerable" and would be dealt with, starting at the United Nations if necessary. He did not repeat either phrase yesterday, and the agreement with Europe appears to have halted, at least temporarily, the administration's hopes of taking the Iranian program to the U.N. Security Council this month.
But Bush's quickness to seize on the Iranian production of uranium hexafluoride was driven, administration officials said, by a sense among his national security aides that there is still time to stop Iran from actually producing a weapon. "We're past that point with North Korea," one senior adviser said recently. "With the North, it's a question of unwinding what's already happened."
So far, there have been three sessions of talks involving North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States, but no real agreement on the scope of the North Korean program. Meanwhile, North Korea appears to have reprocessed a trove of 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods.
In preparation for the meeting yesterday morning with China's president, Hu Jintao, American officials took the unusual step several weeks ago of passing to Beijing what one senior Asian official called "classified packets" of data intended to convince the Chinese that North Korea has two weapons programs under way.
Chinese leaders had few doubts that North Korea has been trying to produce plutonium weapons, and they have not questioned unofficial American intelligence estimates that the North has reprocessed enough plutonium for four to six weapons since international inspectors were expelled from the country nearly two years ago.
But until recently China expressed considerable doubts about a second program that the United States believes the North started with help from A.Q. Khan, then the head of Pakistan's nuclear weapons project. Like the Iranian program, which also received extensive aid from Khan's network in the 1990s, the North's program involves enriching uranium to make bomb fuel.
"The Chinese made their own inquiries from Pakistan, and we believe they got confirmation there," said one senior Asian official involved in yesterday's talks with Bush. "They don't seem to be questioning the validity of that intelligence anymore, at least in private."
-----
Black horsemen swoop down on White House
Mike Davis
SF Chronicle
Sunday, November 21, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/21/ING5A9TCVL1.DTL
Earlier this year, four gaunt horsemen in black shrouds cantered down Pennsylvania Avenue. No one complained or even noticed, and they grazed their hungry steeds on the White House lawn. They've been there ever since and threaten never to leave.
This interview with them is a Chronicle exclusive: "First Horseman, please state your name for our readers."
"My name is Oil, and my price is $50 per barrel and higher yet to come."
"Fine, and you're from ...?"
"Huppert's Peak."
"Is that in Colorado?"
No response.
"Are you in Washington for business or pleasure?"
"Both, actually. While wrecking the American economy, I'm also hoping to bring immense happiness to a handful of giant energy corporations."
"Well, that's a popular cause in this town, so please enjoy your stay. Now, Second Horseman, can I have your name for the record?"
"My name is Proliferation, son of Wot and destroyer of worlds."
"Wot?"
"The War on Terrorism. Only the strong and nuclear-armed shall survive, so sayeth Bush."
"I see, you're a traveling salesman. Visited any exotic locales lately?"
"Mainly Tehran and Pyongyang with some overnights in Karachi, Delhi and Brasilia. But I have a heavy travel schedule over the next year."
"Enjoy your frequent-flier points. And now, No. 3, if I could interrupt for a minute?"
"No problem. My name is Global Chaos. I was just sorting through some vacation photos. Take a look."
"Thanks. Hmm, very National Geographic."
"Yes, I love the great outdoors. This is a melting glacier in Alaska. Here's a flood in Bangladesh. Oh, one of my favorites, the epic drought in the American Southwest."
"Eh, what are those white objects?"
"You mean the bones?"
"Bones? Maybe I'd better move on and meet Horseman Four."
"I am the pale rider, and my name is Plague."
"I bet your first name is Bubonic?"
"No, that's my cousin. I'm the avian influenza pandemic."
"I'm sorry, but have I heard of you?"
"The World Health Organization says I am an unprecedented threat to humanity. The world is utterly unprepared to deal with my arrival."
"Well, that's one helluva blurb."
"Yes, and my grandfather killed 100 million people in 1918-19."
"No kidding? Well, thanks for sharing. Now, I wonder if I can ask a few questions of the entire group. First, does your posse, band, whatever, have an agent or publicist?"
"Yes, St. John."
"OK, and has he arranged your D.C. publicity? Have you had much election- year media exposure? You know, O'Reilly, the Washington Post, 'Meet the Press, ' 'NewsHour' ... ?"
"Oh, no," laughs Chaos, "no one has interviewed us."
"Come on, four big guys in black on horses, here in front of the White House during an election season ..."
"No, honest," Proliferation chips in, "they don't want to acknowledge our presence."
"Well, how about the other side, the opposition party? Surely, they've looked to you for a juicy angle. I mean the horse doo-doos all over the White House lawn, not to mention ... Hey, are you guys even citizens? Do you have passports?"
"I can assure you," Proliferation insists, "none of that matters. No one wants to admit we're here."
"But why?"
Plague speaks. "Apocalypse denial. Your whole society is suffering from acute apocalypse denial."
"That's preposterous, we're afraid of all kinds of things these days. We tremble at the very thought of anthrax in the mail, plutonium on the subways or botulism in our Big Macs. We have regular orange alerts ..."
Plague interrupts. "No, that's the whole point. You're so terrified of the shadows your rulers project on the wall that you can't see us standing here, right outside your door."
"Hmm, so I guess you guys are the real deal?"
"Believe it."
"So what's your business plan?"
Chaos clears his throat. "For generations, the wealthier 40 percent of your population has lived inside an extraordinary bubble of privilege."
"In addition to enormous security of wealth and status," Proliferation takes over, "your affluent classes have been sheltered from the bitter winds of history."
"We're the bitter winds," adds Plague.
"And we'll burst your bubble," Oil promises.
A pale horse neighs.
"Unfortunately, my recorder has run out of tape. I'm afraid we'll have to end the interview with that."
"No problem," Oil smiles. "Y'all come back and visit. We're not going anywhere."
Mike Davis is the author of "Dead Cities: And Other Tales'' and "Ecology of Fear.'' A version of this piece appeared on tomdispatch.com.
-------- accidents and safety
Study Links Cancer Cases In Sweden to Chernobyl
By Mattias Karen
Associated Press
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A827-2004Nov20.html
STOCKHOLM, Nov. 20 -- More than 800 people in northern Sweden may have cancer as a result of the fallout that spewed over the region after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, according to a new study by Swedish scientists.
The figure is significantly higher than any previous estimate, and the study drew immediate fire from critics who said they doubted the accuracy of the results.
The radiation was released on April 26, 1986, when reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded and caught fire, contaminating an area roughly half the size of Colorado. The accident forced the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people and ruined some of Europe's most fertile farmland.
The study monitored cancer cases among the more than 1.1 million people in the northern parts of Sweden who were exposed to radioactive fallout. Researchers found that the cancer risk increased in areas with higher levels of fallout, which was spread by winds.
Of the 22,400 cancer cases among the group, 849 can be statistically attributed to Chernobyl, said Martin Tondel, a researcher at Linkoeping University who headed the study. The findings were first published in this month's issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, a science magazine.
Leif Moberg, a radiation expert with the Swedish Radiation Protection Authority, questioned the findings. "The radiation dosage that we in Sweden got after the accident was too low to produce this many cancer cases," Moberg said, adding that it was probably too early to see any definite results of Chernobyl. "Most cancer cases don't develop until 20, 30 or 50 years later," he said.
Tondel said that although the increase in cases cannot directly be attributed to Chernobyl, he could not see any other explanation. "We've tried our best to explain it in other ways, but we can't," he said.
-------- britain
Dounreay workers exposed to lethal plutonium
Lab sealed off after mucus samples reveal highest contamination levels on record
By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor
Sunday Herald
21 November 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/46186
A laboratory at the Dounreay nuclear plant has been closed and sealed off because it has contaminated at least 10 workers with plutonium over the last three months.
The Sunday Herald has discovered that high levels of radioactivity have been detected in "nose-blow" samples taken from three workers. One was 200 times the "action level" that triggers a health investigation, and the highest that Dounreay safety officials could remember.
An investigation has been launched by the government's safety watchdog, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate. If it finds evidence that safety rules have been breached, it will submit a report to the procurator fiscal, which could lead to Dounreay being prosecuted.
Anti-nuclear campaigners claim the contamination is "life-threatening" and have accused Dounreay of acting irresponsibly. But this is denied by the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA ), the government body that runs the plant, near Thurso, Caithness.
Plutonium is a heavy metal which emits short-range alpha radiation. Although relatively harmless outside the body, experts say that when it has been inhaled or ingested, it can bombard living cells with radiation and increase the chances that they will trigger cancers.
The contamination has come from the Pulsed Column Laboratory, an old plutonium research facility. It was where scientists used to study how best to reprocess the plutonium burnt in fast breeder reactors, which are now defunct.
The lab, along with other facilities at Dounreay, was in the process of being decommissioned. But on August 24 a routine nose-blow sample from a worker who had been in the lab was found to contain more radioactivity than the action level of 0.5 becquerels (Bq).
On October 19 a sample from another worker in the lab also breached the action level, and decommissioning work was halted. But workers were still sent into the facility to do other work.
Then on November 11 three people working on the building's ventilation system suffered high levels of plutonium contamination. The mucus blown from their noses onto tissues contained respectively 17, 22 and 100Bq of radioactivity.
As a result the UKAEA decided to bar all access to the lab while the cause of the contamination is investigated. It accepts that 100Bq is a high level of contamination, but stresses that it will take two or three weeks of additional sampling to discover how far the plutonium has spread into the workers' bodies.
All five of the workers with nose-blow samples in excess of the action level have been put on a biological monitoring programme. This involves regularly measuring their urine and faeces for plutonium.
Another five workers who had nose-blow samples below the action level are also being monitored, along with a further five, who had been in the building, "as a precaution". Automatic monitoring systems have not picked up any unexpected levels of contamination, or any leaks to the environment.
So far the biological monitoring suggests that the whole-body radiation doses received by two of the 15 workers are well below the safety limits. But the results for the others - including those with the worst contaminated nose-blow samples - are not yet available.
Dounreay's spokesman, Colin Punler, stressed that nose-blow samples were just a rough, initial, indication of contamination and that a proper assessment of the risks couldn't be made until full biological monitoring had been completed.
But he accepted that the higher the contamination of the samples, the greater the worry. "Any unplanned exposure to radiation is a cause for concern," he said. "Any incident such as this is a matter of regret."
Lorraine Mann, from Scotland Against Nuclear Dumping, accused Dounreay of exposing its workers to unnecessary risks. "Sending them in when they knew there was a problem is irresponsible in the extreme and quite unforgivable," she said.
"This is a life-threatening position they put people into. The extent to which they put these guys at risk was appalling."
It was an anonymous phone call to Mann last week that first suggested that one of the nose-blow samples had been higher than anyone at Dounreay could recall. The UKAEA had been downplaying the risks, she alleged.
"They have been deliberately misleading," she claimed. "Nothing has changed. They still refuse to tell the truth until they are forced to." She would be astonished if the contamination didn't lead to a prosecution.
The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate said it had been informed of the contamination by the UKAEA. Inspectors at Dounreay last week had begun an investigation into the cause, but it was too early to say what the outcome would be.
A spokesman for the inspectorate argued it had been "a prudent step" to close the building. "If we find any breaches of legal provisions, we will take appropriate action," he said.
-------- depleted uranium
Legislator Takes Up Veterans' Cause
Will Back Depleted Uranium Tests
The Hartford Courant
By THOMAS D. WILLIAMS
November 21, 2004
http://www.ctnow.com/news/health/hc-dubill1121.artnov21,1,7836871.story?coll=hc-headlines-health
Eddie Miles' legs were blown off in Vietnam. Despite his injuries, the Army veteran spent much of the rest of his life obtaining artificial limbs for Vietnamese and Cambodian children injured by the landmines the war left behind.
Inspired by the work of Miles, a high school friend of hers, state Rep. Patricia Dillion, D-New Haven, says she is committed to helping those Connecticut National Guard veterans who were exposed to depleted uranium during the wars in Iraq.
"What [Miles] taught me," Dillon said, "was that the war never ends, because the people who are affected by it continue to suffer, but the politicians forget about it."
Dillon, Democratic deputy majority whip in the House, will propose a bill in the General Assembly to provide for independent laboratory health screening of service members from Connecticut who may have been exposed to depleted uranium munitions dust. The bill probably would have to go through the health and appropriations committees.
During the past three years, Dillon has obtained documents and searched the Internet to find what she considers proof of the health dangers those exposed to depleted uranium, or DU, dust can face. The dust is a byproduct of exploding DU munitions used by the United States and Great Britain in Iraq.
As a legislator and community activist, Dillon, 56, has been involved with financial and other issues for the veterans hospitals in Rocky Hill and West Haven. Her husband, Dr. Jack Hughes, teaches at the Yale University School of Medicine and is an internist and part-time physician at the VA hospital in West Haven.
Dillon said she decided to get involved because veterans hospital administrators and veterans advocates constantly discussed the health crisis faced by veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, including illnesses they believed were related to depleted uranium dust. As planning began for the present war in Iraq, Dillon said, she began to worry that more soldiers would be exposed.
In April, Dillon said, she read in the New York Daily News that independent tests determined that four soldiers from a New York Army National Guard unit probably had become contaminated with dust from the depleted uranium shells fired by U.S. troops in Iraq. When her legislative aides called New York Guard officials to find out what was wrong with the soldiers and what the state was doing about it, Dillon said, they "hit a brick wall of silence and bureaucracy."
The same month she read in the British newspaper The Guardian that British soldiers returning from the war in Iraq were being tested for depleted uranium exposure. That convinced Dillon that Connecticut needs to do the same.
Even though federal law requires blood and health tests for returning war veterans, Dillon said she is not convinced the Pentagon or the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is properly screening service members for possible DU poisoning.
Dillon said she plans to lobby hard for her bill when the legislative session opens in January because the health effects of depleted uranium are a "hot button issue." The U.S. Department of Defense has long ignored DU's toxic dangers just as it ignored landmines after Vietnam, Dillon said.
The Defense Department insists the dust is only dangerous when inhaled in large quantities, usually an unlikely event.
The United States and Great Britain used tons of DU to destroy tanks and bunkers in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They continued to use it in the Balkans, Afghanistan and the present war in Iraq. The inhalation of DU dust by soldiers and civilians has long been suspected as one of the causes of the illness known as gulf war syndrome.
Depleted uranium is a toxic, heavy metal byproduct of uranium enrichment for use in nuclear weapons and reactor fuel. It is also used in munitions, ballast for airplanes, tank armor and other products. It has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Its use on the tip of shells fired at tanks is lauded by the military because it ignites a fiery mass that can destroy or disable a tank with a single shot.
But the fine DU dust created by the blast can blow in the wind for many miles and if inhaled, ingested or absorbed through the skin in sufficient quantities can cause lung cancer or kidney ailments. In 2002 at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., researchers found that even though the alpha radiation from depleted uranium is relatively low, internalized DU as a metal can induce DNA damage and carcinogenic lesions in the cells that make up bones.
Last December at a national conference of state legislators, Dillon asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the states' partnering with the Defense Department to pay for health care for returning troops. Rumsfeld, she said, promised to consider less wartime reliance on the National Guard, but did not comment on partnering with states on funding military health care.
One urine screening test for depleted uranium exposure by an independent lab can cost as much as $2,500, said Tedd Weyman, who works for the Uranium Medical Research Center in Toronto. Because his center does not make profits from the tests, it charges $1,100 per test, he said. But if a state has an available mass spectrometer capable of measuring isotopes in parts per billion, he said, it could reduce that cost to $500. Federal urine tests presently performed on veterans are insufficient to do the job, he said.
More than 32,000 veterans of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are said to have illnesses many of whose causes have not been identified.
Dillon is not convinced federal help is on the way. After talking to administrators in state hospitals and veterans advocates, she decided to offer the bill, which, if adopted, would require depleted uranium exposure screening for all state service members returning from the war.
Dillon's friend, Eddie Miles, died in January at age 60. An obituary in the Manhasset Long Island Press said Miles' quest for artificial limbs for the children took him throughout the world raising money, generating medical research and support and, in 1991, establishing a prosthetics clinic at Kien Khleang, outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Michael Bennett, a spokesman for Miles' organization, the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, said: "We certainly support any and all efforts to ensure the health and welfare of our troops as they return home. This [legislation would be] a great step toward recognizing the risks of depleted uranium on the battlefield."
Jose Llamas, a spokeswoman for the VA in Washington, said the VA does not screen veterans specifically for DU exposures, but its representatives and literature make the veterans aware of DU's potential health dangers.
Dillon said the DU bill is in part dedicated to Miles. "I don't want this war to be like Vietnam, where public officials waved the flag and no one did anything about it [except the veterans]," she said. "We should learn from our mistakes."
-------- iran
Bush Says Iran Speeds Output of A-Bomb Fuel
November 21, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/politics/21prexy.html?ei=5094&en=b7f042cd9c0e0422&hp=&ex=1101099600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=
SANTIAGO, Chile, Nov. 20 - President Bush increased the administration's pressure on Iran on Saturday, saying there were indications that the country was speeding forward in its production of a key ingredient for nuclear weapons fuel, a move he said was "a very serious matter'' that undercut Iran's denials that it was seeking to build weapons.
On the first day here of the annual gathering of Pacific Rim leaders, his first summit meeting since winning re-election, Mr. Bush also tried to re-establish a unified front against the other nuclear challenge facing his second term: North Korea.
In back-to-back meetings with the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea here Saturday morning, Mr. Bush urged each to draw North Korea back into six-nation negotiations. And in a speech later, he issued a direct challenge to North Korea's reclusive leader that echoed President Reagan's demand in 1987 for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. After the meetings, he said, he was convinced "that the will is strong, that the effort is united and the message is clear to Mr. Kim Jong Il: Get rid of your nuclear weapons programs."
His aides have played down informal intelligence estimates that the country had already produced enough plutonium in the past two years to manufacture six additional nuclear weapons.
Mr. Bush's efforts here underscored his determination to reverse two nuclear projects that appear to have made significant progress while American attention has been focused on Iraq.
In North Korea, he is facing a country that has defied every previous effort he has made to force it to dismantle what it has already built. And in Iran's case, he is clearly skeptical about a European-led effort to suspend the country's manufacture of nuclear material.
He told reporters on Saturday that he was "concerned about reports" that said Iran appeared "willing to speed up processing of materials that could lead to a nuclear weapon." Diplomats had said the day before that Iran had told the International Atomic Energy Agency that it was racing to produce uranium hexafluoride, a gas that can be enriched into bomb fuel, before it begins to observe the temporary suspension of nuclear activity that it negotiated with the Europeans.
Following Mr. Bush's assertion on Saturday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment, Mr. Powell appeared at a news conference here with Foreign Minister Ignacio Walker Prieto of Chile and was asked to provide details to back that up but declined to do so. He said that in the past four years, as a result of American cries of alarm about Iran's intentions, the international community was now "as concerned as we are" about the problem.
The focus of most of Mr. Bush's sessions was North Korea, and one participant said Mr. Bush hinted he would show "some flexibility'' in offering incentives to the North, a subject of furious infighting within the administration.
But a senior American official told reporters this afternoon that could only happen after North Korea returned to the negotiating table. "The North Korean strategy of running out the clock didn't work,'' this official said, referring to the speculation that the North thought Mr. Bush would be defeated on Election Day.
In 2003, Mr. Bush said he "will not tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea," and in April 2004 he told a convention of newspaper editors in Washington that a nuclear program in Iran was "intolerable" and would be dealt with, starting at the United Nations if necessary. He did not repeat either phrase on Saturday, and the agreement with Europe appears to have halted, at least temporarily, the administration's hopes of taking the Iranian program to the United Nations Security Council this month.
But Mr. Bush's quickness to seize on the Iranian production of uranium hexafluoride was driven, administration officials said, by a sense among his national security aides that there is still time to stop Iran from actually producing a weapon. "We're past that point with North Korea," one senior adviser said recently. "With the North, it's a question of unwinding what's already happened."
So far, there have been three sessions of talks involving North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States, but no real agreement on the scope of the North Korean program. Meanwhile, North Korea appears to have reprocessed a trove of 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods.
In preparation for the meeting on Saturday morning with China's president, Hu Jintao, American officials took the unusual step several weeks ago of passing to Beijing what one senior Asian official called "classified packets" of data intended to convince the Chinese that the North has two weapons programs under way.
Chinese leaders had few doubts that the North has been trying to produce plutonium weapons, and they have not questioned unofficial American intelligence estimates that the North has reprocessed enough plutonium for four to six weapons since inspectors were expelled from the country nearly two years ago.
But until recently China expressed considerable doubts about a second program that the United States believes the North started with help from A. Q. Khan, then the head of Pakistan's nuclear weapons project. Like the Iranian program, which also received extensive aid from Mr. Khan's network in the 1990's, the North's program involves enriching uranium to make bomb fuel. "The Chinese made their own inquiries from Pakistan, and we believe they got confirmation there," said one senior Asian official involved in the Saturday talks with President Bush. "They don't seem to be questioning the validity of that intelligence anymore, at least in private."
But Mr. Bush was clearly concerned that South Korea's president, Roh Moo Hyun, might diverge from the American strategy, and offer the North more aid and investment even before it agrees to surrender its weapons, halt its production of new weapons and allow open inspections.
Iran's intentions are unclear. If it is truly suspending the production of all nuclear fuel, it is unclear why it would work so quickly to finish production of the raw material that is fed into centrifuges and enriched. At low enrichment levels, the fuel could be used to produce nuclear power; at high enrichment levels, it could make the core of a bomb.
American officials said Mr. Bush spoke out because he wanted to highlight the possibility that Iran could cheat on its deal with the Europeans, and to raise the possibility that it had a secret complex of centrifuges that could keep producing bomb fuel. A dissident group operating outside Iran charged this week that Tehran was doing exactly that, but American officials say they cannot verify the claim.
Mr. Bush's day was tense in other ways, as well. He had an unusual encounter with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, questioning him over lunch about Mr. Putin's efforts to concentrate more power in the Kremlin. It was the first time Mr. Bush had expressed his concerns in person to the Russian leader.An American official said later that Mr. Putin responded with "a very long explanation, went back deep into Russian history, the Stalinist period'' and said the country was still struggling to "develop a Russian-style democracy.''
The conversation did not appear to satisfy either side, but the American official said it would be the "basis for further conversations."
Then, in an odd scene on Saturday before dinner, Mr. Bush had to rescue his lead secret service agent.
The agent had been blocked from entering the ornate dinner hall and was surrounded by a scrum of shoving Chilean security officers. The president, realizing what was happening, turned around and walked up to the group, reached in to pull his agent free, and walked back into the hall, shaking his head.
-------- korea
LaPorte warns that N. Korea may try to sell plutonium
Stars and Stripes
By Teri Weaver,
November 21, 2004
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=25623
SEOUL - The United States' top military commander in South Korea warned Friday that North Korea might market its plutonium to terrorists to bolster the communist country's economy.
"An additional concern the international community shares is that North Korea, in its desire for hard currency, would sell weapons-grade plutonium to some terrorist organizations," Gen. Leon J. LaPorte, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, told a breakfast forum in Seoul. "And that would be disastrous to the world."
LaPorte said North Korea has the ability to harvest plutonium and is known to sell missile technology throughout the world.
"Clearly, they have an opportunity to harvest plutonium from the enrichment rods," LaPorte said. "From a military standpoint, they do have a capability we must address."
LaPorte's concern comes as talks among the United States, North Korea, South Korea and three other Asian nations to stem North Korea's nuclear ambitions have stalled.
At the same time, America and South Korea have pledged billions of dollars to upgrade defense systems and weaponry in the next few years as the United States pulls 12,500 of its 37,500 troops from the peninsula.
This week, South Korea announced plans to spend $92.5 billion by 2008 to develop defenses less reliant on American forces. In return, U.S. officials have pledged $11 billion toward weapons systems by 2006 to supplement remaining troops on the ground.
The investments include improvements in communication, intelligence and surveillance systems, as well as a weapons system that includes precision-guided missiles, he said.
Earlier this week, U.S. Forces Korea announced LaPorte has agreed to extend his command by one more year through 2006.
----
ONCE-SECRET EXPERIMENTS DRAW U.N. SCRUTINY
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
By Tim Johnson
Nov. 21, 2004
http://www.kentucky.com/mld/heraldleader/news/world/10236810.htm
SEOUL, South Korea - South Korea is in the global "hot seat" over its once-secret experiments with nuclear materials, and it fears that it risks being hauled before the U.N. Security Council as an example to more serious apparent nuclear renegades: Iran and North Korea.
Officials under South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun say state nuclear engineers had no high-level approval for the small-scale experimentation over the past two decades and sought only to satisfy "scientific curiosity."
The testing involved tiny amounts of plutonium in 1982 and uranium in early 2000. A confidential report last Thursday from the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said the uranium-enrichment experiment four years ago produced a minuscule amount of near-weapons-grade nuclear material.
By nearly all accounts, South Korea has cooperated fully with three teams of international nuclear inspectors since early September. The 35-member board of governors of the U.N. watchdog agency will meet Nov. 25 to decide whether to refer the case to the U.N. Security Council as a possible violation of international nuclear safeguards. South Korea says it has no ambitions to build nuclear weapons.
"There is nothing to hide," said Moon Chung-in, a Yonsei University professor and adviser to Roh on Northeast Asian security.
But parts of East Asia, including China, are skeptical of the suggestion that state-employed nuclear engineers at the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute acted on their own, without approval and with lax oversight.
The South Korean government says those scientists "were doing it by themselves. It is not credible," said Shi Yinhong, a Northeast Asia expert at People's University in Beijing.
Some three decades ago, South Korea's military leaders tried to crank up their own covert nuclear-weapons program. Washington halted the scheme. In 1991, U.S. forces withdrew their own nuclear weapons from the peninsula and oversaw a treaty that banned South Korea and North Korea from seeking their own nuclear weapons or possessing nuclear-processing or uranium-enrichment facilities.
In more recent years, under democratic rule, South Korea's civilian nuclear-energy program has been a source of national pride. The program oversees 19 nuclear power plants and generates 40 percent of South Korea's energy needs.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, as the U.N. watchdog is called, hasn't said how it learned of South Korea's nuclear experiments. Some South Koreans say Washington passed the word to the agency as a lesson to the Roh government, with which it's had rocky relations even though South Korea is an ally.
-------- missile defense
US 'Star Wars' missiles will be in Europe in five years
independent.co.uk
By Severin Carrell
21 November 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=585127
The US wants to base at least 10 missiles in Europe for the "son of Star Wars" missile defence system within the next five years, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
The Pentagon has also already decided to prepare for a major new missile interceptor base in Europe and is starting detailed studies to find the best site - including possible bases in the UK.
These proposals - which go far beyond previous statements about US plans in Europe - were disclosed by Lt-Gen Henry Obering, the head of the US Missile Defence Agency, in an exclusive interview with the IoS.
Lt-Gen Obering revealed that the US would start buying missiles for the new site as early as October next year, and would choose which European country would host the site soon afterwards.
He confirmed that the UK is in the running to host the interceptors - provoking angry claims from opposition MPs and defence analysts that Parliament and British voters were being deliberately kept in the dark by the Government.
The base is a key part of President Bush's $10bn-a-year plan to construct a "missile shield" to protect the US and its European allies from weapons fired by rogue states in Asia and the Middle East, such as North Korea and Iran. Two sites have already been built in Alaska and California.
Lt-Gen Obering said he was unaware of Tony Blair's informal pledge to President Bush - revealed by the IoS last month - that Britain would agree to a US request to station the missiles in Britain, as long as it is made after the election. "There are several nations that we're undergoing talks with, with respect to the hosting of the third site," he said, adding: "We're still very much in the exploratory stages of what's possible - not just with the UK."
In a reference to his plans to begin ordering the missiles next year, he said: "We've some significant money in the 2006 President's budget that we would begin to execute in October 2005."
The agency is now starting a "technical assessment" of possible sites, he said, to determine, for example, whether the ground could bear the weight of the silos, the quality of power supplies and roads, and the site's military suitability. The US is understood also to be looking closely at Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.
However, the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office deniedthe Government was helping the US to find a site in Britain, and insisted no decision had been made on whether the UK would allow the missiles to be based here.
-------- terrorism
Unthinkable? An attack on an American city by terrorists armed with a small nuclear device is an even bet within a decade, some experts say
Charles Burress,
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, November 21, 2004
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/21/BURRESS.TMP
Imagine a relatively small nuclear bomb of 10 kilotons exploding in San Francisco's Union Square. "Everything to the Museum of Modern Art would vaporize," writes Harvard security analyst Graham Allison in his chilling new book, "Nuclear Terrorism."
"Everything from the Transamerica building to Nob Hill would be sites of massive destruction; everything within the perimeter of Coit Tower and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge would go up in flames."
No survivors would be found amid nearly 100 square blocks, and buildings in about 400 square blocks would be totally destroyed or left looking like the Oklahoma City federal building after it was crushed by a truck bomb.
To alert Americans to the intimate extent of the peril, Allison's book is linked to an Internet "Blast Map" showing the radius of destruction for such a nuclear device anywhere in the United States. It can be viewed by ZIP code at www.nuclearterror.org.
Allison and other experts agree that the most likely form of nuclear terrorism is a "dirty bomb," where radioactive material is scattered by a conventional explosive or perhaps an attack on a nuclear reactor.
But some analysts are worried more by the less likely but far more catastrophic detonation of a terrorist nuclear bomb.
"The gravest danger, however, and the one requiring the most urgent attention, is the possibility that terrorists could obtain highly enriched uranium or plutonium for use in an improvised nuclear device," according to Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and former Sen. Sam Nunn, now head of the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Their warning comes in the opening pages of another sobering new book, "The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism," from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, the nation's largest nongovernmental organization focusing exclusively on nonproliferation issues. Based on a two-year study, the book says terrorist organizations are now able to build crude nuclear bombs.
This new nuclear nightmare was summoned up in the presidential campaign last month, when Vice President Dick Cheney warned in a widely reported speech:
"The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us -- biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind, to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans."
The Boston Herald's story about Cheney's speech carried the headline, "Vote Kerry, get nuked, veep warns." Critics accused Cheney of election scaremongering, but analysts on both sides of the partisan divide share his assessment of the terrorist nuclear threat, even if they disagree with him about Kerry.
"Fissile material is widely available," said UC Berkeley Professor Harold Smith, a nonproliferation expert who served in the Clinton White House. "The technology is widely known. The prudent man would assume that this kind of tragedy is going to happen and should be asking himself, 'What can I do about it?' "
Fueling the alarm was an ABC News demonstration last year of how easy it would be to penetrate post-Sept. 11 security. A news team successfully sent uranium inside a shipping container from Jakarta through the Port of Los Angeles.
The shipment underscored findings of a report from the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, that terrorist transport of nuclear weapons by sea or by land "probably would not be detected."
The U.S. government has several approaches to reducing the danger, but critics question their adequacy. The strategies range from new radiation detectors at U.S. ports to Department of Homeland Security advice to "learn how to build a temporary fallout shelter ... even if you do not live near a potential nuclear target."
In August, San Francisco became the first port on the West Coast to receive the radiation detectors, with Oakland scheduled to be added by the end of this year.
If sufficient funding is provided, the Department of Homeland Security hopes to have the machines at all of the United States' more than 300 ports of entry -- including sea, land and air -- by the end of 2005, said Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Barry Morrissey.
Asked if the monitor would have detected the ABC News uranium shipment, Department of Homeland Security spokesman Michael Milne said, "It's designed to, yes. They should identify most sources of radiation."
UC's Smith was skeptical. "I doubt it will be very effective," he said, adding that radiation from highly enriched uranium and plutonium "is difficult to detect and easily shielded." Also, he added, the system wouldn't prevent offshore detonations inside a port harbor.
Allison welcomes the screening, but he too believes the current technology can be circumvented. "The opportunities for shielding overwhelm the current capability for finding," he said.
Allison urges that top priority be given to denying terrorists access to nuclear materials and weapons in the first place, with such steps as securing existing stockpiles and weapons, blocking production of new fissile materials, stopping more nations from acquiring nuclear arms and eliminating the nuclear black market.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced legislation in April directing the president to establish a task force on removing nuclear materials from vulnerable sites around the world, but opposition turned the measure into a "sense of Congress" recommendation in this year's defense authorization bill.
Everyone agrees on one thing: A nuclear blast in a U.S. city would eclipse Sept. 11 in its horror.
"With a 10-ton nuclear weapon stolen from the former Soviet arsenal and delivered to an American city in a cargo container, al Qaeda could make 9/11 a footnote," said Allison, founding dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a former assistant secretary of defense for policy and plans.
"And if not al Qaeda, one of its affiliates can step up, using a weapon built of (highly enriched uranium) from Pakistan or North Korea or from a research reactor in Uzbekistan," Allison wrote.
Such a bomb at noon in New York's Times Square would kill a million people in the blast itself and in collapsing buildings, fires and fallout in the following hours, he said.
"A nuclear terrorist attack is more likely than not within the next decade," he told The Chronicle. To dramatize the point, he's accepting bets, at 51-to-49 odds, on such an event.
Alarm over the prospect of a city being devastated by a terrorist nuclear bomb was sounded soon after Sept. 11, but has grown noticeably louder in recent weeks and months.
"An American Hiroshima" was the ominous title of a recent New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof. It quoted former Secretary of Defense William Perry saying there is an even chance of a nuclear terror strike in the United States in the next six years.
"We're racing toward unprecedented catastrophe," said Perry, a Stanford professor and co-director of the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project. "This is preventable, but we're not doing the things that could prevent it."
The most dangerous source of a "loose nuke" or the materials to make one, many security analysts say, are the former states of the Soviet Union, where much of the nuclear materials and weapons left over from the Cold War remain scattered and inadequately guarded.
To confront the danger, Lugar and Nunn started the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, by which the U.S. government assists former Soviet states in securing nuclear materials and weapons, a program Smith implemented when he served in the White House.
That program and similar efforts, however, receive only about $1 billion a year, just a third of the amount recommended by a bipartisan presidential commission in 2001.
"Roughly two-thirds of Russia's fissile material is inadequately secured," Carl Robichaud of the Century Foundation said a critical report in August, "What the 9/11 Commission Forgot."
At the same time, fears have been fueled by mounting evidence of terrorist groups making repeated attempts to obtain nuclear materials and weapons at the same time as potential sources multiply. Added to the stockpiles in the former Soviet Union are the contraband exports of nuclear secrets and materials from Pakistan, Iran's uranium enrichment plans and North Korean nuclear weapons development.
At Berkeley, Smith has a somber plan, not for prevention but for the harrowing days and months after such a catastrophe. He and Professor Steven Weber, director of the Institute of International Relations at UC Berkeley, propose to study what would happen if a nuclear bomb blew up in a major city somewhere in the world.
Their proposed study, for which they seek funding, would use Moscow as the hypothetical target, given the frequent terrorist strikes in Russia.
Unlike disaster-response plans already developed by the United States and other governments for a nuclear terrorist strike, the two UC researchers want to look beyond emergency response, evacuation and radiation containment.
They ask: What precautionary plans could help avert retaliation against the wrong target, mass panic, a collapse of world trade brought on by sudden closure of ports?
If Moscow were destroyed by an anonymous bomb, what could reduce the risk of Russian retaliation mistakenly launched against Chechnya or the United States?
One of their ideas is to have a team of international technical experts prepared for immediate dispatch to assess the bomb's origin by analyzing its distinctive radioactive signature, Smith and Weber said.
"A week's delay in retaliation could literally save the world," said Smith.
It's a topic so chilling that few people want to face it, Smith said. "I'm finding what I call the psychology of denial."
Yet, given al Qaeda's many efforts to acquire nuclear materials, its desire to inflict extensive casualties and the unrelenting stepping up of the scale of its attacks, the prospects of what-if must be faced, Smith and Weber said.
"I'm a great believer in having these thinking-the-unthinkable discussions up front," Weber said. "It would be irresponsible not to plan for it."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new jersey
The price of blowing the whistle in Salem
November 21, 2004
By JEROME MONTES,
Press of Atlantic City Staff Writer, (856) 794-5115
http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/news/cumberland/112104NCRITIC_N20.cfm?CFID=1209376&CFTOKEN=dd28bc64d0fb7819-5CC53BCA-C7EE-F057-9B425B097037B5A7
Dr. Kymn Harvin's pulse raced as she slipped a tape recorder under a file folder on her office desk.
In the corridor next to her office she could hear the footsteps of Larry Wagner, a director at Salem's nuclear power plant, as he walked toward her.
Moments before he walked in, Harvin hit the record button on the hidden device.
"What did you mean yesterday when you said this place is 'dangerous?'" Harvin asked after Wagner sat down in front of her desk. "Is it the decision-making ... like muddled?"
Wagner had spoken to her about company officers nearly deciding to restart an offline reactor without repairing a malfunctioning bypass valve.
"Yes, I meant it from a nuclear-safety standpoint," Wagner replied. "When I say dangerous, we almost talked ourselves on Monday of just starting right back and not going into the bypass valve."
Wagner said he was shocked company officers would even consider such an action.
"If we had done that ... that would have been grounds for taking the keys away," he said. "That would be grounds for 'You guys aren't safe.'"
Moments after Wagner left her office, Harvin began trembling. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
"I felt awful, feeling I was betraying someone I cared about, someone who was confiding in me," she said.
The taped conversation took place March 20, 2003. Eight days later, Harvin left Public Service Enterprise Group, the Newark-based company that owns the Salem County nuclear plant.
The plant in Lower Alloways Creek Township is the second-largest in the country. Two reactors are located on the plant's Salem facility; another is located on the adjacent Hope Creek facility.
About 1,800 employees work on the 292-acre site. The plant provides electricity for about 60 percent of PSEG's 2 million customers.
Harvin, who has a Ph.D. in organizational development, had worked for AT&T and Pennsylvania's government and was running her own consulting firm when she came to work for PSEG in 1998.
The 48-year-old Watchung resident was given the role of manager of development, quality and culture transformation at the Salem nuclear plant. Harvin said employee morale was low because of harsh working conditions and the perception that upper management did not value workers.
Harvin coached Salem plant executives on leadership and worked to improve communication and accountability throughout the site. She said the resulting boost in employee morale helped generate millions of dollars in cost savings and revenue.
But things unraveled after she stood up for a group of employees concerned about an improper repair action taken by an operations manager in late 2002 at the Salem plant.
Harvin said there was a growing perception that senior leadership valued production over safety and would go to dangerous lengths to keep the plant running. Over the next several months, she frequently urged senior leaders to address employee safety concerns.
Harvin was given her 45-day termination notice Feb. 26, 2003. The notice said her position was eliminated in a force reduction.
She consulted an attorney, who advised her that it was legal in New Jersey to tape conversations without another party's consent.
At first, she wasn't sure about secretly taping conversations with colleagues, especially those she respected.
It took a conversation with Wagner on March 19, 2003, to convince Harvin that someone had to gather evidence about the plant's safety practices.
The facility's Hope Creek reactor had been offline. When Wagner complained to Harvin about the company officers' push to bring the reactor online prematurely, she decided to get his comments on tape.
Harvin taped Wagner on March 20, 2003, and went on to record conversations with other colleagues.
The recordings are now evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit she filed against PSEG in September 2003. Harvin has alleged that PSEG retaliated against her for raising safety concerns.
Harvin said she felt less guilty about a tape she made directly after Wagner's.
After her conversation with him March 20, Harvin walked into the office of her direct superior, then-PSEG Chief Nuclear Officer Harry Keiser.
She had butted heads with Keiser over safety issues and was convinced that he had betrayed both her and the site. But Harvin also wanted a final chance to relay Wagner's concerns to him.
"The message that's being sent, whether intended or not, is that production and getting the Hope Creek unit back online is more important than nuclear safety," Harvin told her boss that day.
"Yeah, I appreciate that feedback," Keiser replied. "I don't believe it, but I appreciate it, right?"
"So when the guys with the licenses say that they are being pressured to start the unit back up and don't believe it is safe, I owe you that feedback," Harvin said. "The word that got spoken to me this morning is 'dangerous.'"
"It's a bunch of (expletive)," Keiser said. "I mean, you've got an operator who doesn't know (expletive) ... saying he's being pushed, right? And he's not putting out the effort to begin with."
The next day, PSEG informed Harvin that her termination date had been moved up to March 28, 2003.
The message stung, but it made her even more determined to gather as much evidence as possible before her final day as an employee.
On March 27, 2003, Harvin taped a heated, tearful conversation with then-PSEG Vice President Timothy O'Connor, a colleague she respected.
"Are they after me?" Harvin asked O'Connor.
"They are after you and they are after others," he replied. "And it is only a matter of time and I will be in the same position."
PSEG officials said O'Connor left voluntarily after Harvin's termination; O'Connor could not be reached for comment.
Harvin said she made no more recordings after she left PSEG, but won't comment on the number of tapes in existence.
In her civil lawsuit, Harvin contends that she was fired because of her refusal to keep silent on issues of industrial and nuclear safety. Such expression is protected under the state's Conscientious Employee Protection Act.
Harvin said she contacted PSEG Chairman of the Board Jim Ferland to request an independent investigation into the Salem facility's safety and her termination.
But she felt the result was a whitewash. That convinced her to approach the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September 2003 and to file her own lawsuit against the company that month.
NRC officials said Harvin's testimony helped launch recent investigations into general working conditions at the plant. The commission also is investigating Harvin's specific allegations that she was retaliated against for raising safety concerns.
Since her dismissal, the PSEG plant has drawn criticism, citations and calls for corrective action from federal regulators and independent consultants on issues ranging from faulty equipment to workers being reluctant to report maintenance problems.
Federal investigators are looking into an Oct. 10 steam leak that prompted the shutdown of the Hope Creek reactor. The reactor has remained idle since then for repairs and refueling.
Hope Creek suffered other mishaps after the leak. A Freon leak Oct. 28 temporarily restricted access to the building's second floor. On Nov. 3, a worker was hospitalized after fracturing his fingers and suffering slight radiation contamination.
PSEG spokesman Skip Sindoni said Harvin's termination had nothing to do with retaliation.
"Her position was eliminated in a company reorganization," Sindoni said.
Calls to Keiser, who is no longer with the company, and Wagner, who is now manager of plant support at the Salem facility, were not returned.
Harvin returned to consulting after leaving the company, and is in the process of writing a book about leadership. She wants to return to the nuclear industry but believes she has been blacklisted.
And she continues to pay an emotional price for speaking out.
Harvin said former co-workers phone and e-mail her, fearful that they have been caught on tape.
When she plays the tapes she took so much trouble to conceal, she can't help breaking into tears.
"I thought I might be a doctor or a senator when I grew up," Harvin said.
"I never thought I'd be a whistleblower."
To e-mail Jerome Montes at The Press:
JMontes@pressofac.com
-------- washington
DOE team to hear Hanford worker complaints
tri-cityherald
By Annette Cary
November 21st, 2004
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5810287p-5738685c.html
The Department of Energy has brought in consultants to evaluate concerns regarding harassment, intimidation and discrimination at the vitrification construction project at Hanford.
More than 100 construction workers at the project responded to notices saying DOE would like to interview Bechtel National employees, said Erik Olds, spokesman for DOE's Office of River Protection in Richland. About 1,100 to 1,200 construction workers are employed at the site, including subcontractor employees.
The concerns were raised by a group of employees at the construction site, Olds said.
Some were among a group of employees who previously raised similar concerns to DOE, he said. "Given that there are multiple and serious concerns and that this is the second time concerns were raised, we've brought in a small team of independent investigators," Olds said.
He declined to discuss specifics of the complaints.
The independent investigators, all former law enforcement officials, are working with officials at the DOE employee concerns office, he said.
Interviews with workers have concluded, and DOE is waiting for a written report, he said.
Some Bechtel National employees were notified in a letter that DOE would be evaluating equal employee opportunity, labor relation, industrial safety and human resources concerns from employees.
Employees who did not feel comfortable meeting with the investigation team at the construction site were offered the chance to meet with the team on their own time at the Federal Building in Richland.
"We're cooperating with DOE's investigation" and have encouraged employees to raise concerns, said John Britton, spokesman for Bechtel National in Richland. "We can't deal with them if they do not raise them."
DOE contractor Bechtel National is building a $5.8 billion plant to turn some of the worst waste from the past production of plutonium at Hanford into glass logs for permanent disposal.
It's believed to be the largest construction project in the nation.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Rebel Attacks Raise Tensions in Darfur
Hostage-Taking Sparks Retaliations;
Insecurity Cuts Refugees Off From Aid
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A824-2004Nov20?language=printer
ZALINGEI, Sudan -- The wobbly bus chugged up through the hills, bound for Fadel Sesese Mohamed's village. He was feeling tired but optimistic after a long journey from Libya, where the 72-year-old tribal leader had participated in a peace conference last month aimed at ending Sudan's civil conflict.
The bus suddenly stopped, and a group of men armed with AK-47 rifles leaped on board, Mohamed recounted last week. They poked at the luggage and asked if any passengers had military ID cards. They pulled a group of men off the bus, punching one over and over and shouting, "Are you a soldier?"
Then the gunmen, who wore the green and brown netted head covers of a rebel group called the Sudanese Liberation Army, motioned at the bus driver to resume his journey. Most of the hostages have not been seen since.
There are contradictory reports about how many passengers were taken. The United Nations has said 18 were taken. The African Union said five of the hostages had been released. It is also not clear whether they were civilians or soldiers, and whether they were all Arabs or included some Africans.
But the incident, which alarmed the international aid community, has highlighted the growing number of attacks by African rebels. Until now most of the human rights abuses in the western region of Darfur have been blamed on pro-government Arab militiamen.
Officials of the United Nations and the African Union, which has sent a force of military observers into Darfur to monitor a shaky cease-fire, said the hostage-taking incident also shows that rebel groups -- not just the Arab militias known as Janjaweed -- must be pressured to uphold an agreement signed in Abuja, Nigeria, on Nov. 9.
In a report issued this week, Human Rights Watch strongly criticized the Khartoum government for fueling the conflict, but it also blamed rebel groups and urged the Sudanese Liberation Army to release all hostages.
"There's no security. There's no stability. This is the main problem," said Mohamed, a leader of the Fur tribe, waving his walking stick in agitation as he recounted the story of the hostage-taking at home here. He said he sympathized with the African rebels, but that in this case they had "made a mistake."
Within hours of the hostage-taking, Janjaweed militiamen threatened to attack this hillside town and a cluster of nearby refugee camps if the captives were not released. Foreign relief organizations quickly pulled 82 staffers out of the area. No attack took place, but the workers have not returned.
Meanwhile, tribal leaders and human rights groups said, the government responded to the crisis by arming local Janjaweed members. On Oct. 26, a squad of uniformed Janjaweed militiamen ambushed an African Union mission trying to retrieve the hostages, killing a Sudanese Liberation Army commander and four others, officials said.
In camps for displaced families surrounding Zalingei, food was distributed Saturday for the first time since the end of September. Highway banditry had cut off aid to the 82,000 people there, and the once-bustling town remains in limbo, with few buses traveling the hazardous roads and only helicopters able to reach the remote spot.
Tony P. Hall, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. World Food Program, flew to Zalingei to tour the camps last week. Families living in tattered shelters told him that security was their main concern. On Friday, more than 50 women who ventured outside the camp to collect straw and firewood were stopped by militia forces and held for more than five hours, aid workers told Hall.
U.N. and aid officials said the African rebel groups, which enjoy support from African tribes in the area, are hurting the local populace as they resort to such tactics as ambushing food convoys, stealing aid trucks and taking hostages.
"The rebels are using the wrong instruments to make their points," Jan Pronk, the U.N. special representative to Sudan, said during a visit earlier this month to Nyala, the capital of South Darfur. "They have to stop. Otherwise they are blocking access to the very people they say they are protecting."
The Darfur conflict erupted in February 2003, after the Sudanese Liberation Army and another rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, attacked police stations and military outposts to protest what they called regional discrimination by the mostly Arab clique controlling Sudan's government.
Relief groups say the government responded by arming and supporting the Janjaweed, an Arabic word often translated as "devils on horseback," to crush the rebellion. Tens of thousands of people have died in the violence and more than 1.5 million have been uprooted.
Abdou Abdullah, a leader of the Sudanese Liberation Army and a member of the African Union's cease-fire commission, said the rebel group had never mistreated its hostages, most of whom were soldiers. He promised the group would stop taking hostages.
"We are serious about the peace deal," Abdullah said in a telephone interview from El Fasher. "Now we have to see that the government also keeps its promises and stops attacking us and our villages."
Last week, the rebel group turned 20 captured government soldiers and police over to the African Union mission.
In the fetid camps that stretch for miles outside Zalingei, people have barely enough to eat, and relief officials said the food situation could become desperate if security was not established.
Inside one camp this week, old men passed out from the relentless heat. Children flew kites made of plastic bags, and a few donkeys -- survivors of wartime livestock looting -- wore leather pouches filled with Koranic verses to guard against danger.
Khartouma Mohamed Abakar, 25, sat despondently in her shelter, too depressed to adjust her disheveled scarf or shoo the flies off her sleeping infant. Her husband was killed in a militia attack on their village, 20 miles north. Last week, when she went out to collect firewood, she said a strange man taunted and beat her, calling her a "rebel wife."
Abakar has one small bag of millet left over from the last food distribution to feed her children. She dreamily recalled better times, when the family had mutton, sugar cane, watermelon and cucumbers to eat. Now, she said, they are grateful for the gooey yellow porridge that keeps them alive.
-------- asia
Rights Groups Cite Pattern Of Abuse by Nepal's Army
U.S. Gave $22 Million to Forces Trying to Contain Maoists
By John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A680-2004Nov20?language=printer
KATMANDU, Nepal -- His captors said it was time to "swim in cold weather," Basu Sigdel recalled.
Blindfolded and stripped to his undershorts, the 40-year-old lawyer struggled to breathe as strong-armed men repeatedly plunged his head into a water-filled steel drum, Sigdel said in an interview. They demanded to know the whereabouts of several Maoist rebels, accusing him of lying when he said he didn't know.
"It was so long that I almost choked, and I felt that I might die," Sigdel said, describing the early morning interrogation on the fourth day of his 50-day unofficial detention by Nepal's security forces last winter. "I could feel foam coming out of my mouth. Most probably the water got into my lungs."
Sigdel's ordeal highlights what human rights monitors call a pattern of abuses by government security forces, who have received roughly $22 million in U.S. military aid over the last several years. The forces are struggling to contain a Maoist insurgency that began in 1996 and recently has spread to virtually every corner of this picturesque Himalayan kingdom.
In a report last month, New York-based Human Rights Watch accused both the Maoist rebels and government forces of "summary executions, torture, arbitrary arrests and abductions, and persecution based on political associations." Of particular concern, the report said, was the growing phenomenon of "enforced disappearances," in which rebels or people suspected of helping them -- a loose category that includes lawyers who argued their cases in court -- were secretly taken into custody by the army or police and sometimes tortured or killed.
One disappearance that has received widespread attention involves a 15-year-old girl, Maina Sunuwar, who allegedly was murdered by soldiers in the Kavre district earlier this year. The incident occurred after the girl's mother claimed in statements to journalists and human rights workers to have witnessed an extrajudicial killing.
"There has been a massive increase in the number of disappearances" since the breakdown of a cease-fire agreement between the rebels and the government in August 2003, said Achyut Acharya of the National Human Rights Commission in Nepal, which has recorded 1,260 cases of disappearance involving security forces since 2000. "Most of the disappeared cases are in detention centers controlled by the army."
Brig. Gen. Dipak Gurung, chief spokesman for the Royal Nepal Army, said he would "not rule out the fact that some human rights violations might have taken place," and he acknowledged that the army sometimes held people without disclosing their whereabouts.
He said such methods were necessary to avoid compromising investigations and that torture and other forms of abuse were contrary to army policy. Gurung noted that in 2002, the army established a special "human rights cell" to investigate claims of abuses and had sometimes prosecuted soldiers accused of particular crimes.
Gurung also asserted that claims of abuses should be treated with skepticism because they often were based on information from "Maoists and Maoist sympathizers."
The army has no monopoly on mistreatment of civilians. According to human rights groups, the Maoists have grown increasingly brutal in their methods, which include cutting out the tongues of suspected informants and burning them alive.
Once part of Nepal's political mainstream, the Maoists took their movement underground in 1996 and launched what they call a "people's war" against the constitutional monarchy now run by King Gyanendra. His family has dominated this impoverished and isolated country of about 25 million people for more than two centuries. Nepal has not had a functioning parliament since 2002, and Gyanendra has assumed an increasingly autocratic role, political analysts say.
So far, human rights monitors say, about 10,000 people, many of them noncombatants, have died in the conflict.
Over the last two years, the Maoists have made steady gains and now roam freely throughout most of Nepal's 75 administrative districts, according to Western diplomats. Maoist attacks on police outposts have proved so effective that the government has closed roughly 80 percent of them.
The Maoists have also struck in the capital, Katmandu, staging several high-profile assassinations and, in September, a bomb attack against a cultural center affiliated with the U.S. Embassy. The bombing caused no casualties but helped precipitate the withdrawal of Peace Corps volunteers from the country.
U.S. officials contend that a Maoist takeover could be disastrous for the region, especially for India, an increasingly close ally that is battling several Maoist insurgencies of its own. The United States is supplying Nepal's army with M-16 rifles, night-vision gear and body armor and has dispatched Special Forces instructors to train troops in counterinsurgency tactics.
Human Rights Watch accused the United States of paying insufficient attention to complaints of abuses by the army. It said that the U.S. Embassy had not issued any statements critical of army actions, though it has routinely condemned Maoist atrocities.
In an interview, U.S. Ambassador James F. Moriarty described that statement as "flat-out wrong." But he added: "I do not think abuses are part of government policy. . . . We have seen individuals tried and convicted, court-martialed." The military aid is necessary, he said, for the simple reason that without it, the Maoists might win.
"You should never underrate the possibility of a Maoist takeover, particularly given the horrors that that would entail," he said.
Sigdel, the lawyer, seems an unlikely participant in the conflict.
A farmer's son with a wife and three children, he works out of a grubby second-floor walk-up with no computer, earning a modest living, he said, from land disputes, commercial cases and other routine civil matters. He described himself as apolitical, but once served on a human rights committee of the Nepal Bar Association. On several occasions, he has represented families trying to learn the whereabouts of relatives picked up by security forces on suspicion of involvement with the Maoists, he said.
On the morning of Jan. 22, Sigdel said, he was confronted in his office by three men in civilian clothes, who refused to identify themselves or produce an arrest warrant. He was bundled into a small van, blindfolded with dark goggles and a cloth sack and driven to what he presumed was an army facility in Katmandu.
For the next 50 days, he said, he was kept alone in a tent and repeatedly questioned about his political views as well as his purported associations with Maoists, of whom he claimed to have no knowledge. During the dunking session, he recalled, he struggled so violently for air that he opened wounds on both knees.
Shortly after his disappearance, Sigdel's wife, Sharda, filed a legal petition demanding that the army produce her husband in court, but the government denied knowledge of his whereabouts, Sigdel said. He was returned to his home one evening after signing a document falsely stating that he had been treated well, Sigdel said.
Gurung, the military spokesman, confirmed that Sigdel had been held in army custody. "I don't think he was that brutally handled -- maybe a bit roughed up," Gurung said. Asked specifically about the immersion treatment, a technique known to human rights workers as "submarining," Gurung acknowledged the possibility that it had occurred: "We don't have truth serum," he said. He added: "If it happened, he should lodge a protest."
-------- britain
Britain joins EU army
UK Times Newspapers Ltd
November 21, 2004
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1368150,00.html
BRITAIN is to commit more than 2,000 troops to a new 18,000-strong European Union army that will be deployed as a peacekeeper to the world's trouble spots, write Adam Nathan and Nicola Smith.
Despite concerns within the military about overstretch, ministers will announce this week that at least one battle group will be ready by January.
They will also say the force will expand by 2007 to comprise a multinational force of up to 12 elite rapid-reaction battle groups - each with 1,500 soldiers. At least two of these groups will be ready to deploy at 15 days' notice to humanitarian or peacekeeping emergencies, primarily in Africa.
Soldiers from the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines have been earmarked for the new force.
A British official said: "A commander could immediately draw on 1,500 troops who will be sitting in the barracks with their boots on, ready to go."
The creation of the force was signalled earlier this year by Tony Blair following the crisis in Darfur, Sudan, and comes only a week after Britons had to be evacuated from fighting in the Ivory Coast.
Although it is not envisaged that the battle groups would be deployed to the Middle East, they could have a role in supporting policing and the rule of law. An EU team is to visit Iraq within the next fortnight.
The force - which would comprise the rapid-reaction units in an EU army that supporters want to expand to 60,000 - is already prompting some concerns that it could duplicate the role of Nato.
Nicholas Soames, the Conservatives' defence spokesman, said: "We believe the EU defence contribution should be under the Nato umbrella. Anything that undermines Nato is damaging. We will be studying the details but this sort of duplication is an expensive waste of time."
Some Nato planners are concerned that the new force should not be used as a cheaper substitute for the alliance and insist that EU military units must be trained to Nato standards. "It is right to pose the political questions, but at the moment we do not need to sound the alarm bell," said a diplomat at Nato HQ in Brussels.
Any deployment would require an emergency meeting of the EU's council of ministers. Membership of a battle group would not be compulsory and individual nations would retain a veto over deployment.
Military command in the field would lie with the country with the biggest contingent. Britain, France, Italy and Spain will each provide one battle group made up solely of its troops, while Britain will share a second battle group with the Dutch. Seventeen EU countries have committed soldiers.
General Jean-Paul Perruche, French head of the EU's military staff, said the creation of the battle groups was a "significant" development.
"It is the adaptation of the capabilities of Europe to the new context of crisis in the world. To be able to commit at short notice a significant trained force, to intervene in an emerging crisis ," he said.
It has also been mooted as an attempt to encourage European countries to investment more in military capabilities. There is growing concern within Britain's armed forces about their ability to meet their commitments after it emerged that more than £1 billion is to be cut from "frontline" forces.
Senior officers - including, it is believed, General Sir Michael Jackson, chief of the general staff - are concerned that it will leave the army without the funding needed for 1,000 soldiers, about 1% of its force.
# Commonwealth troops working in sensitive positions in the British armed forces have been told to adopt British nationality or lose their jobs. Some 8,000 Commonwealth troops work for the services and the ultimatum will affect those with access to sophisticated equipment and sensitive information, particularly in the special forces.
The Ministry of Defence said: "There are various criteria that must be satisfied for personnel with access to sensitive material, one of which is nationality. The Home Office will fast-track dual nationality, but if they do not wish to take it we will endeavour to move them to another part of the service. We are not asking them to turn their backs on their countries."
-------- business
Senators Want Boeing Deal Investigated
November 21, 2004
By PETER T. KILBORN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/politics/21boeing.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 - Leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee asked the Defense Department on Friday to have its inspector general's office investigate the Air Force's effort to give the Boeing Company a $23.5 billion contract for aircraft-refueling tankers.
In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Republican Senators John W. Warner of Virginia, the committee chairman, and John McCain of Arizona and the committee's ranking Democrat, Carl Levin of Michigan, asked for an investigation of all who had a role in awarding the contract, not just someone acting criminally.
In a 42-minute Senate speech on Friday, Mr. McCain disclosed a score of often pungent e-mail letters to and from Boeing executives and lobbyists, Air Force Secretary James G. Roche and Pentagon officials.
They depicted Mr. Roche belittling competitors and critics of the plan, both in the government and among defense analysis organizations, on the grounds of cost and need for the planes. The senators said the Pentagon's earlier, criminal investigation had not gone far enough.
As a result of that investigation, Darleen Druyun, an Air Force procurement official, was found to have been favoring Boeing with contracts while negotiating a $250,000-a-year job with the company. Ms. Druyun has been sentenced to nine months in prison.
In their letter, the senators wrote, "It is astonishing to us that one individual could have so freely perpetrated, for such an extended period, this unprecedented series of fraudulent decisions and other actions that were not in the best interest of the Department of Defense."
An Air Force spokesman, Lt. Col. Frank Smolinsky, said the e-mail messages cited in Mr. McCain's speech "reflect negotiations on an acquisition program that is now behind us."
-------- iraq
Cost of War in Iraq Escalates
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
JAMES W. CRAWLEY
November 21, 2004
http://www.counton2.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WCBD/MGArticle/CBD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031779280062&path=!news!localnews
WASHINGTON - As casualties mount in Iraq, so has the cost of the war. The military is now spending more than $5.8 billion each month, top officials told Congress this week.
The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps service chiefs told the House Armed Services Committee the price of war has jumped as fighting continues and reconstruction efforts are stymied by security concerns. And, in a few months, more money will be needed.
The Army, with about 110,000 troops on the ground in Iraq, has a monthly "burn rate" of $4.7 billion. The Air Force is spending about $800 million monthly. The Marines, which are spearheading the fighting in Fallujah, had an average monthly war cost of $300 million. The Navy, which was silent about its spending during the committee hearing Wednesday, did not provide its war spending Thursday.
War spending, known euphemistically as the "burn rate," includes the cost of fighting, feeding and fueling the forces in the area, according to the military. Besides consumables such as bullets, bombs, food and gas, the money is used to bolster the body and vehicle armor protecting troops; buy weapons, uniforms, tents and other gear for soldiers; and replace vehicles lost in attacks, roadside bombs and accidents.
It doesn't include soldiers' regular pay and other routine costs unchanged by the war.
On a yearly basis, the war tab is about $70 billion.
"That's larger than the gross domestic product of most nations," said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., think tank.
The price of war is escalating.
Initial cost estimates pegged the monthly burn rate at $2.2 billion in early 2003. By July 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said costs were running about $3.9 billion per month. In June, the Pentagon comptroller testified the monthly bill was nearly $5 billion.
In August, the Pentagon got a $25 billion boost for the war through a supplemental appropriation, but military officials said this week the money will likely run out in a few months unless another temporary spending bill is approved.
The Marine Corps' $1.6 billion set aside will "take us through the spring," said Marine Commandant Gen. Michael Hagee. He testified alongside Army Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Air Force Gen. John Jumper and Navy Adm. Vern Clark.
Defense analyst John Pike said the burn rate is likely to increase.
"I think the burn rate is going to get worse because the counter-insurgency effort will continue to be on our shoulders," said Pike, who is director of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent think tank.
The fighting in Fallujah and other cities has been rising as January elections in Iraq near. The increasing war costs could have lasting impacts on the military's future, military analysts say.
"If the current rate of expenditures is sustained, this will cut into Rumsfeld's plan to transform the military" into a more capable and flexible force, said Lexington's Thompson.
The result, he suggested, could be cutting new weapons systems or stretching out the purchase of fighters, warships and other weapons.
To help understand how much money $5.8 billion is, think of it in $1 bills.
That would be 5,800,000,000 bills, weighing nearly 12.8 million pounds. Stacked, the bills would reach more than 393 miles into space. That's for one month.
What does the money buy?
The Army has already bought 180,000 new combat uniforms for deployed troops with 130,000 more coming. Body armor - which has been instrumental in saving many soldiers from roadside bombs and snipers, but is in short supply - has been bought for more than 400,000 troops. About 373,000 more vests are needed as new troops rotate into the combat zone.
Also on the Army shopping list are 41,600 radios, 25,000 machine guns, 33,000 M-4 and M-16 assault rifles and thousands of radio jammers to foil improvised explosive devices, Schoomaker said.
While war materiel is expensive, an immeasurable price has been paid by the 1,216 troops who have died so far.
The fighting for Fallujah has been the toughest of the war, including last March's invasion, Hagee said.
By Thursday, 51 Marines had been killed and another 425 wounded in Fallujah, said Lt. Gen. John Sattler, the senior Marine Corps commander in Iraq, during a televised briefing from Iraq.
And, said GlobalSecurity's Pike, every time a soldier is killed or wounded, there are additional costs to the military, including medical treatment and transportation to Germany and U.S. hospitals, along with replacement personnel and equipment.
"Every (improvised explosive device) that puts a soldier in the hospital puts a vehicle in the junkyard," he added.
-----
Iraq: The Uncounted
CBS
Nov. 21, 2004
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/19/60minutes/main656756.shtml
(CBS) Approximately 300,000 American men and women have served at one time or another in Iraq.
Most will return to the United States more or less intact. But some come home the hard way - on a stretcher, bloody and broken.
And, as Correspondent Bob Simon says, there are few bloodier or more broken than Chris Schneider.
Schneider says he believed in the war in Iraq, and liked wearing the uniform. "[I was] proud to wear it. I loved wearing it," says Schneider, a Kansas boy straight off the recruitment poster.
He went to college on a wrestling scholarship, started a family, and joined the Army Reserves. This past January, his unit was providing security for a supply convoy traveling through 100 miles of dangerous Iraqi desert. He was riding in a two-and-a-half ton cargo truck, armed to the teeth.
"In my vehicle there was my driver, there was my 50-cal gunner who was in a turret on top," says Schneider. "And then there was myself and another individual in back. We both had M249 machine guns."
Schneider saw another convoy coming in his direction - a line of HETS (heavy equipment transports), big rigs on steroids, hogging the road. The first HET just missed hitting his truck. The second one did not.
"It threw me up over my vehicle, over the HET and about 50 feet into the field on the left," says Schneider. "When I landed, the next HET in line had locked up their brakes to keep from rear ending the one that we hit. And when he came to rest, the first set of tires on his trailer were parked on my pelvis. And the second set had my lower leg wedged in it to the axle. I've been told a rough estimate of approximately 120,000 to 140,000 pounds."
Today, Schneider walks with a limp, on his artificial leg. But even though he was injured while on a mission in a war zone - and even though he'll receive the same benefits as a soldier who'd been shot - he is not included in the Pentagon's casualty count. Their official tally shows only deaths and wounded in action. It doesn't include "non-combat" injured, those whose injuries were not the result of enemy fire.
"It's a slap in the face. Although it was through no direct hostile action, I was on a mission that they'd given me in hostile territory. Hostile enough that we had to have a perimeter set up at the time of my accident to prevent from an ambush or an attack," says Schneider. "For those of us that were unfortunate enough to get injured. Whether it was hostile action or not, we're all paying the same price." How many injured and ill soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines - like Chris Schneider - are left off the Pentagon's casualty count?
Would you believe 15,000? 60 Minutes asked the Department of Defense to grant us an interview. They declined. Instead, they sent a letter, which contains a figure not included in published casualty reports: "More than 15,000 troops with so-called 'non-battle' injuries and diseases have been evacuated from Iraq."
Many of those evacuated are brought to Landstuhl in Germany. Most cases are not life-threatening. In fact, some are not serious at all. But only 20 percent return to their units in Iraq. Among the 80 percent who don't return are GIs who suffered crushing bone fractures; scores of spinal injuries; heart problems by the hundreds; and a slew of psychiatric cases. None of these are included in the casualty count, leaving the true human cost of the war something of a mystery.
"It's difficult to estimate what the total number is," says John Pike, director of a research group called GlobalSecurity.org.
As a military analyst, Pike has spoken out against both Republican and Democratic administrations. He's weighed all the available casualty data and has made an informed estimate that goes well beyond what the Pentagon has released.
"You have to say that the total number of casualties due to wounds, injury, disease would have to be somewhere in the ballpark of over 20, maybe 30,000," says Pike.
His calculation, striking as it is, is based on the military's own definition of casualty - anyone "lost to the organization," in this case, for medical reasons. And Pike believes it's no accident that the military reports a number far lower than his estimate.
"The Pentagon, I think, is afraid that they're going to lose public support for this war, the way they lost public support for Vietnam back in the 1960s," says Pike. "And minimizing the apparent cost of the war, I think, is one way that they're hoping to sustain public support here at home."
60 Minutes asked the assistant secretary of Defense for Health Affairs about that claim - that casualties are being underreported, for political reasons. And we got a flat denial. In a letter, he told us, "We in the Department of Defense categorically reject the notion that we are underreporting casualties from Operation Iraqi Freedom."
He pointed out that he'd already provided us with some figures - the 15,000 evacuations of non-combat injured and ill. Still, Pike says the military is trying to minimize the casualty count. It's an effort Pike believes is misguided, because he says that even if Americans understood the full human cost of the war, public support would not weaken.
"I think that all of the public opinion polling that we're seeing suggests that the public is prepared to sustain far higher casualties than politicians give them credit for," says Pike. "I think that it's basically that the politicians and the Pentagon, don't have confidence in the American people." The Department of Defense did not include non-battle injuries in its casualty reports in other recent wars, either. But that's of little comfort to Joel Gomez, who was riding in the back of a Bradley fighting vehicle, looking for insurgents, when disaster struck.
"Unfortunately, the Bradley was too heavy for the road, a dirt road, and the ground gave way. And we wound up flipping down the mountain. And it landed upside-down in the Tigris River," says Gomez.
His two buddies were killed. Gomez made it out, but he's now paralyzed. "[It's] a horrific change. I can't move my legs. I can't move my arms," says Gomez. "It just totally changes your life in a manner that you could never imagine."
Even though Gomez tumbled into the Tigris while looking for insurgents, he is, by the Pentagon's definition, "non-combat injured."
"They blow it off and say it's just an accident," say Gomez. "I'm sure that somebody getting shot in the back would just be an accident. But that's how they see it."
The Department of Defense says the injuries and illnesses suffered by Gomez and thousands of other troops should not be taken out of context. In their letter to 60 Minutes, they said: "In order to understand rates of injuries and diseases, it is necessary to understand what the normal or usual rates of injuries and diseases might be in other situations."
What does this mean? That there are always going to be a certain number of accidents and injuries, war or no war - though they offer no numbers for comparison.
"Soldiers and Marines are gonna get sick. They're gonna get into accidents. But there's gonna be more disease, more accidents, more psychiatric stress in Iraq than if they were back here," says Pike, who adds that hundreds of troops in Iraq have been so paralyzed by stress that they've had to be medically evacuated - though you won't see them reported in the casualty count. Traditionally, that count has not included combat stress. It was long thought, in the military's macho culture, that psychological trauma is best suffered in silence.
Graham Alstrom has been back from Iraq for over a year, but he's still haunted by what he saw - and what he did to other people. "Some of them I shot. Some of them I blew up with grenades. Some of them were stabbed," says Alstrom.
The memories of killing invaded his mind. Soon after he returned home, Alstrom's life began to unravel.
"The drinking started immediately. I stopped sleeping. And I started getting very angry. I didn't want to talk to my family anymore. I didn't want them to see me. I didn't want to see them. I felt like they were ashamed of me," says Alstrom. "I was partly ashamed of some of the things I had done. ...I couldn't separate the killing people and killing them in combat."
He says he's frustrated that the military says his illness is not combat-related. "I know what I was like before I went to combat. I had a life beyond the Army," says Alstrom. "I talked to my family. I'd share feelings and emotions with people I cared about. I lived a very regular life."
Alstrom won't get a Purple Heart for his service in Iraq. It was only his mind that was wounded in battle. "It doesn't matter what the paperwork says. We know what happened over there. We know what we did over there," says Alstrom. "And no piece of paperwork saying that I'm not a casualty could ever take that away. For any of us."
They've had so much taken away already, but both Alstrom and Schneider insist that what remains inside them is the heart of a good soldier.
"I'm very supportive of why we're there. I'm very supportive of what we did while I was there," says Schneider. "I believe wholeheartedly that not only should we have gone, but that we've done the right thing."
Now, he'd like the military to do the right thing, too.
"Every one of us went over there with the knowledge that we could die," says Schneider. "And then they tell you - you're wounded - or your sacrifice doesn't deserve to be recognized, or we don't deserve to be on their list - it's not right. It's almost disgraceful."
--------
'Hey, hurry up. You're holding up my men'
telegraph.co.uk
21/11/2004
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/11/21/wirq21.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/11/21/ixworld.html
Once the fighting in Fallujah began, Toby Harnden was keen to prove he would not be a burden to his platoon. Here he reveals his life embedded with the US Army.
The ground rules were simple, said Lieut Nathan Braden, as he read out all 12 pages of them to our group of embedded journalists. We were to bring no drugs, no alcohol and no guns. Especially no drugs, he repeated, his gaze lingering over the longer-haired photographers. US Army troops search for insurgents
"If you have it, get rid of it. If we find it on you, we'll kick you out."
We had just been helicoptered into Camp Fallujah for what the United States marines referred to euphemistically as the likelihood of "increased activity in our area of operations".
This was the attack on the rebel-held city. It was going to be a big battle and we would be part of it. First, we had to agree to behave.
In addition to forswearing all illegal substances, we promised not to print or broadcast details of battle plans, troop numbers or force locations. The names or images of dead American soldiers were not to be published until their next of kin had been informed.
In return, we would have a soldier's-eye-view of the conflict.
With our flak jackets marked "Press" and helmets that had our blood group scrawled on them - one wag had a sticker reading: "O+. If found injured, please apply drugs. Lots of drugs" - we joined our units.
I was assigned to the US army's Task Force 2-2. On the Thursday, I was told that the battle would start at 7pm on Monday.
I knew that 24 hours earlier US Special Forces would seize the hospital on the Fallujah peninsula and secure the bridges on the west of the city. I could not report any of this. I could not even reveal where I was.
"Near Fallujah" was as specific as I could get.
None of us had much difficulty with any of this. After all, anything that put the lives of soldiers at risk would be potentially just as dangerous for us.
For the next two weeks we would share the vehicles, fears and possibly the fate of the troops. One reporter was to be hit by shrapnel and a photographer injured when her convoy was hit by a roadside bomb on the eve of battle.
The soldiers received me with some bewilderment. "You don't have a weapon?" asked a sergeant, brushing aside my protest that we weren't allowed to carry a gun, as I climbed into the back of his Bradley fighting vehicle.
"If you change your mind, there are plenty spare."
They were also mystified that I wasn't being paid more to go into combat.
"You're either crazy or have balls the size of watermelons," observed the sergeant. After that, I was treated as one of the team. The sergeant was responsible for my safety as well as that of his men.
I had already pondered the gun issue. If it came to it, I wanted to be able to use one. I had visions of being stuck in a damaged Humvee with three dead soldiers and several M16s lying around me as insurgents approached.
So while in America a few months ago, I had persuaded a friend to take me to the National Rifle Association range in Virginia where I fired an AR15, the civilian variant of the M16, the US army's standard infantry rifle.
In Fallujah, I was essentially a member of the platoon. When clearing buildings, I was an extra pair of eyes. If a room had been overlooked or there was a possible sniper position nearby, I would tell the sergeant.
Before becoming a journalist, I served in the British armed forces. Last week, if the distinction between journalist and soldier was becoming blurred, it was part and parcel of being an "embed".
On one occasion, I spotted a copper wire that could have been the trigger for a booby trap. The sergeant thanked me and we all stepped over it.
My view of the action was detailed but incomplete. Task Force 2-2 went only into the east and south of the city. I knew nothing of what happened elsewhere. What they saw, I saw - nothing more, nothing less.
Yet my access to them was total. Lt Col Pete Newell, Task Force 2-2's commanding officer, had a policy of transparency.
I attended the main battle briefing, held over a mocked up battlefield using broken bricks for city blocks and artillery rounds for mosques.
I heard the eve-of-war address at which he pointed to Fallujah and told his men: "I expect you to pile in and kick someone's ass."
During a morning command briefing, a hulking chief warrant officer saw a Washington Post reporter and me taking notes and ordered us to leave.
We protested, saying that the colonel knew we were there. "Are these civilians cleared to be present?" the marine asked, halting the briefing as 30 pairs of eyes turned to us. "Yep," said Lt Col Newell, as we inwardly cheered.
Once the fighting began, I had to prove that I would not be a burden.
"Hey, hurry up," one soldier shouted on the first night, when I hesitated momentarily before vaulting over a wall. "You're holding up my men." I vowed to do better.
Sitting in the back of the Bradleys for hours, sweating, I soon learnt much about these men.
"I went to London once," a medic told me. "I met a girl on the internet. It didn't work out because she hadn't told me about her two children, and the picture she had used was of her sister. When I arrived, she said, 'I thought you were lying too'."
When we heard the fighting was over, we were in an abandoned house after spending the night sleeping on the floor.
Spontaneously and joyfully, the soldiers began to smash up the place. It had been wrecked already but there were a few windows and doors still intact.
They jumped, trying unsuccessfully to pull down a cheap fan hanging from a high ceiling. Seeing it was on a hook, I grabbed a piece of wood.
As they watched, I gave it a sharp prod and it came crashing to the floor. There was a hearty cheer from the platoon. I had become one of them.
But relations did sour towards the end, when a photograph of a dead soldier - whom I had been speaking to minutes before he was killed - appeared in a German newspaper.
It was a haunting image of the body lying in a dusty kitchen, blood seeping from a bullet wound to the head. For me it summed up much of what had happened in Fallujah and was also a memorial to a brave American who died for his country.
In the pain of the moment, Task Force 2-2 saw it differently.
"Grab your stuff, asshole, and come with me," was how a captain addressed Stefan Zaklin, of the European Picture Agency, when news of the picture reached the unit.
Zaklin was placed under armed guard and told he had violated the rules of propriety. Nothing in the rules had been broken. The soldiers had seen Zaklin snapping away in the kitchen - but it seemed that this was where the military and the media parted company.
I, too, was castigated, for quoting a searingly authentic talk by a staff sergeant, in which he suggested to his men that their commanding officer had been killed because he had been careless. He did say it. But only so much reality could be tolerated.
-----
The soldiers' story: the war the video cameras do not see
independent.co.uk
21 November 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=585070
This is a momentous time for the US marines in Iraq. Their story here is intrinsically linked to the story of Fallujah, and the fallout from what is happening there will shape what happens to this country in the days to come.
One of the seminal moments in the assault on the rebel stronghold was the shooting by a US marine of a wounded prisoner in a mosque. It is likely to become one of the enduring images of the conflict, much the way the shooting of a Viet Cong prisoner by a South Vietnamese officer became during that war.
The killing, captured on television, has been played over and over internationally, and nowhere more so than in Iraq, with Americans, British and Iraqis all saying it has brought back bitter and barely healed memories of the infamous Abu Ghraib scandal. The International Red Cross yesterday highlighted the mosque shooting and the murder of the kidnapped aid worker, Margaret Hassan, as signs of how "basic tenets of humanity" have unravelled in Iraq.
The US marines have also played a key part in the events which has made the struggle for Fallujah so symbolic. Last April, after a mob had lynched four American security guards, the White House and Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, ordered the city to be invested. The then commander of the marines, General James T Conway, advised strongly against this, pointing out that an attack would look like pure revenge and destroy relations he and his men were trying to build with the people of Fallujah through reconstruction projects.
The general's protestations were ignored. But within days, with graphic pictures and accounts of death and devastation in the media, inter- national condemnation, and a jittery Tony Blair urging caution on George Bush, the assault was halted and the marines withdrew.
The attack, which had left 600 Iraqis dead, triggered the rebellion that has swept through the country since. The American retreat was also a huge propaganda triumph for the insurgents, and for the next six months Fallujah became their national headquarters as well as the base of the murderous Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Mortar and rocket attacks were planned there, and waves of car bombers sent to the rest of the country, especially the capital, Baghdad.
With Fallujah "pacified", the US marines are now engaged in a bloody, and largely unreported, struggle in what is the new heartland of the militants in Babil, south of Baghdad - the so called "triangle of death". Zarqawi is believed to have taken refuge from Fallujah here, and the scale of action, as well as the body count, is far higher than anything taking place in Mosul or elsewhere in Iraq.
The operation is by the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), with the Black Watch battlegroup playing an essentially defensive, blocking role. The British deployment has, of course, been hugely controversial in Britain, and Downing Street, we are told, has attempted to impose an information straitjacket. Reports of soldiers openly declaring that they did not want to deploy to this new area, calling Tony Blair a liar, and the leak of an email in which the commander, Col James Cowan, himself appeared to question the mission, created a fractious atmosphere in which there have been several bruising encounters between journalists and the military.
At the Black Watch base, Camp Dogwood, the media are essentially corralled into a room and a tent, with no access to the rest of the base. Interviewees are brought over to the tent by arrangement, and press officers sit in during the interviews.
At the marines' base, Camp Kalsu, Colonel Ron Johnson, 48, the commander of the 24th MEU, had very different ideas. "You can go and talk to anyone in this base," he declared. "They may say to you they hate Iraqis, they may say to you this is an unjust war. I'll accept that. But if anyone says 'no comment' let me have his name. Iraq is too important for people to come and serve here and not have any views."
Major General Bill Rollo, the British commander in Basra, came in for a flying visit, and Col Johnson invited me to sit in at their meeting. "After all, you represent a British newspaper, it'll be useful." I pointed out it was highly unlikely that the British military would agree to anything like that, and, of course, that turned out to be the case. The colonel's own meetings with his staff remained open.
Col Johnson, a big, cigar-chomping man with a resemblance to Robert De Niro, looks straight out of central casting. He has a reputation of being tough, but seems popular among his men - "a marine's marine," said a sergeant. "He is prepared to take the same risks as you are, he will stand up for you, and he doesn't give you bullshit. Believe me, these qualities can be pretty rare in officers."
The colonel, who comes from Duxbury, Massachusetts and is married with a 12-year-old daughter, has some surprising views. The United Nations sanctions on Iraq, he feels, harmed ordinary people far more than it did the regime. He was not convinced by the claims made about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, although he insists that it was worth having the war to free the people of Iraq from Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship.
He also eschews terms like "terrorists" because they are "too simplistic". In many cases, he holds, impoverished Iraqis are joining the insurgents because the occupying powers have failed to provide them with jobs and means of earning a livelihood.
The colonel talked about TE Lawrence - "Lawrence of Arabia" - and his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. There is, he says, a void in the US military's knowledge of the Arab world. He would like to take his staff officers on courses to study the language and culture. But, unfortunately, "wars keep getting in the way".
The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, said Col Johnson "was an appalling, disgusting thing. No one should attempt to justify it. It led to a lot of anger among the Iraqi people, and who can blame them? We have got our own detention centre here, and I have made sure that nothing like Abu Ghraib will ever happen here. I want the Red Cross and human rights groups to carry out snap inspections here. I want the media to go and also see for themselves. I think all this will be beneficial, it'll keep us on our toes."
Lt Col Robert l'Abriola, in charge of the detention centre, said air-conditioning was put into the cells, on Col Johnson's instructions, before much of the rest of the camp. The prisoners get the same food as the marines, with adjustments made for religious reasons. The rules also stipulate that the guards must account for every hour of their duty. "The prisoners are treated according to regulations laid down," said Lt Col l'Abriola. "I try to apply the rules of the Geneva Convention as far as possible."
There is, however, an acceptance that the footage of the shooting of the prisoner in the mosque will lead to adverse publicity, and there will be a linkage to Abu Ghraib. Did Col Johnson think the two are comparable? This is an uncomfortable matter for him and other marines. There is a desire for solidarity, especially at a time when they are facing action every day.
"There will be an inquiry, and if there is evidence the guy will be charged," he said finally. "But I do think there are differences. Abu Ghraib was premeditated and organised. Here something happened in the heat of a conflict. This guy had been shot himself the previous day, and they had come across booby-trapped bodies.
"I am not condoning what happened, but these are things that will have to be taken into consideration in anything that follows. The big problem is the effect on the Iraqi people. We have been making progress since Abu Ghraib, now we have just slid a hell of a long way back."
There is, predictably, sympathy for the marine who carried out the shooting among his comrades. But it is not universal. "I hear people saying things like the other side would have done the same, and much worse. But aren't we saying we are better than the other side?" asked a young lieutenant in the huge, hangar-like canteen at Camp Kalsu. " If we are going to say that, then we have got to be accountable, there is no getting away from that. I am glad the TV camera was there - hopefully what was shown will prevent something similar happening in the future."
Unlike some other American and British officers, who privately speak about the interim Iraqi government's security forces with disdain, Col Johnson displays an almost messianic zeal in his support of them. "These guys are leading far more dangerous lives than the rest of us," he said. "When they are captured, they are killed, sometimes after torture. Their families have been murdered as well. I think it takes a hell of a lot of guts under these circumstances to do what they do.