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NUCLEAR
Experts fear nuke genie's out of bottle
Outside View: Not All Nuclear Is Bad
Last nuclear rods leaves Sydney
Empire of the Senseless
EU drafts Iran nuclear timetable
Amanpour: Iran promises not to 'be nuclear'
Iran Says It Suspends Uranium Enrichment Program
Japan to speed up response time to missile attack
Scare Is Over, and Siberia Won't Glow in the Dark
Hungarian to head up nuclear non-proliferation organization
Residents in Western US Fear Government Plans
Robert Bacher, Manhattan Project Physicist, Dies at 99
DOE Cleanup Chief Tours Nuclear Reservation
MILITARY
U.S., Afghan Forces Search for Kidnapped U.N. Workers in Kabul
Contracts Awarded
Local Contract Pentagon Weighs Satellite Needs
EU agrees on new joint military units
Europe's New "Bill of Rights"
Iran Halts Key Nuclear Work to Avoid Sanctions
Iran has produced uranium gas: UN nuclear chief
United States, Iraq look toward reconstruction of Fallujah
'Baghdad is now a battlefield, and we are in the middle'
More Fallujah Hostage Sites Found
Officers See Need For Bigger Iraq Force
Iraqi Election Set for Jan. 30
HORRORS Clues on Hostages Emerge From Houses in Falluja
Powell Arrives for Talks On Palestinian Transition
Powell Says Israel Will Ease Strictures for Palestinian Vote
An ascendant NATO?
White House seeks study on whether to transfer CIA forces to Pentagon
Rolling Back the Fog of War
Institute Looks at Military Families
Saddam lawyers consider suing US for war crimes
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Medicinal pot before high court
Passage of Intelligence Bill Called Doubtful
Bush Says He'll Seek to Revive Intelligence Bill House Blocked
POLITICS
Republican Defiance on Intelligence Bill Is Surprising. Or Is It?
Read the WSJ, If You Can Stand It
Cameraman Details Marine's Role in Mosque Shooting
Powell 'pushed out' by Bush for seeking to rein in Israel
How the Ohio election was rigged for Bush
Hong Kong Democratic Chief Resigns Over Election Results
ENERGY
D.C. Regulators Should Counter PEPCO's Rate Hikes
OTHER
Great Lakes Region Ponders How to Keep Its Precious Waters Safe
US Plans Would Defer Roan Plateau Drilling
ACTIVISTS
SOA Watch Update From Columbus, Georgia
Anti-war group slams the BBC
-------- NUCLEAR
Experts fear nuke genie's out of bottle
Arms technology spreading beyond Iran, North Korea
San Francisco Chronicle
James Sterngold
November 22, 2004
The Road to a Nuclear Bomb. Chronicle Graphic Nuclear Weapons Across the Globe. Chronicle The three-decade-old system for preventing the spread of nuclear arms may be eroding irreversibly as the spread of technology for producing weapons fuel circulates among smaller powers, experts warn, signaling that a quiet, low-scale arms race may be taking shape.
Despite occasional positive news, there are numerous ill omens. European diplomats appeared to score a success last week by persuading Iran to freeze its programs for enriching uranium, the heart of nuclear bombs. But a range of specialists said the success could prove temporary because Iran still has the know-how to transform peaceful facilities for creating reactor fuel into weapons plants. And the administration of President Bush charged over the weekend that Iran was hastily enriching a large amount of uranium before the freeze, which Iranian officials said would take effect today.
Not only do Iran and North Korea have the capability to make the fuel, the experts warn, but so do several dozen other countries -- from Brazil, Japan and South Korea to Turkey, Syria and Egypt.
As a result, after decades of nonproliferation policies based on the idea that the global community could prevent the spread of nuclear weapons by controlling nuclear materials and technology, such containment strategies may no longer be possible, these experts reluctantly agree.
The concern is that legitimate facilities, built to develop what is called the nuclear fuel cycle, could be used to increase the concentrations of enriched uranium or for processing plutonium to make weapons-grade fuel. Not only is the technology for these processes widely available to countries rich and poor, but some of the equipment needed for the job, such as high-powered computers and precision machine tools, can now be purchased easily, experts say.
Lack of faith
"Even if you take this out of the context of North Korea and Iran, at this point you have a fundamental lack of faith in the system that secured us for the past 30 years," said Jon Wolfsthal, a former U.S. nuclear inspector and now deputy director of the Nonproliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "We are ending up in the exact world we were trying to avoid for the past 30 years. Nuclear weapons are increasingly available and valuable in international affairs, and the fuel cycle issue is making it worse."
Added David Smith, a former arms-control negotiator under the first President George Bush and now chief operating officer of the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative Washington think tank, "Maybe in some ideal world where the sky is a different color, maybe you can stop the spread, but in my world there are just too many competing interests, too much technology that is already out there. What you can do is make it more expensive, harder to do, to get the bad guys from obtaining nuclear weapons."
In a recent interview with The Chronicle, Mohamed ElBaradei, director- general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.-affiliated body that has tried to halt nuclear proliferation with its monitoring and inspection system, called the widely distributed facilities for developing the fuel cycle "latent bomb plants."
"We are really headed in a really dangerous path, in my view," he said.
The numbers
"The Nuclear Tipping Point: Why States Reconsider Their Nuclear Choices," published recently by the Brookings Institution, examines in detail how many countries may be starting down this dangerous path. The book analyzes the situations in Egypt, Syria, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, looking at their incentives for turning fuel cycle or research plants into bomb plants.
Peaceful uses of nuclear facilities include energy production, medicine and research. But both inside and outside the U.S. government, many experts now call ostensibly peaceful nuclear fuel facilities "virtual nuclear arsenals, " because those same programs can quickly become the heart of a weapons program.
"I think the sense that things are not going well is shared by a lot of people because of these programs," said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a leading Washington think tank on nuclear weapons issues.
Albright calls himself an optimist, believing that inspections and persuasion can still prevent wider proliferation, but, he conceded, "we've reached a point where if we don't solve some of these problems, it becomes overwhelming."
Some of these fuel cycle programs have been covert, and some in the open. Iran, for instance, had violated the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by concealing some aspects of its program to build a fuel cycle -- a uranium enrichment facility. And some opponents of the fundamentalist regime have claimed the government is still hiding weapons facilities, though they have produced no evidence so far.
But most of Iran's efforts have been done legally, and the government has said that, under the deal with the Europeans, it would only suspend, not dismantle, its fuel cycle program. Iran says its nuclear facilities are intended only for peaceful purposes, but the Bush administration has generally insisted that the program has to be permanently shut down.
It is unclear how much that would matter.
Countries of concern
Currently, nine countries -- the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea -- possess, or are suspected of possessing, nuclear weapons. ElBaradei said that within a decade or so, as many as 40 countries will have the ability to make fuel, and thus warheads. He suggested that, no matter the outcome of the deal with the Europeans, Iran has essentially crossed the nuclear weapons threshold.
"Iran has developed every aspect of the fuel cycle. ... I'm saying they have the know-how," ElBaradei said.
Most of the recent efforts by the United States, the United Nations and the major industrialized countries in halting the spread of nuclear weapons have focused on what are regarded as the key vulnerabilities -- the large, poorly guarded stocks of weapons-grade material in the former Soviet bloc countries or rogue scientists from nuclear-armed countries selling their know- how on the black market, as happened in Pakistan.
Now there is growing concern over an alternative scenario -- exploiting fuel-cycle technology.
Nearly four decades ago, the global powers agreed to a world-wide containment approach to prevent the proliferation of weapons technology. The big five powers of the Cold War era, the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union and China, would maintain their nuclear monopoly. In return, other countries would be given access to what at that time was regarded as peaceful nuclear technology, in the form of reactors and other facilities, so long as they were opened to international monitoring.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which took force in 1970, did appear to help prevent a rapid spread of weapons. But the seeds of today's problem were spread widely as numerous countries obtained reactors and experimented with the fuel cycle.
Newcomers
Experts worry now that some countries, fearful over the success of Iran and North Korea in enriching fuel, could push their own programs, igniting an arms race. If North Korea's bomb program is not shut down, for instance, neighboring countries with fuel cycle technology -- Taiwan, South Korea and Japan -- might take the next step and build warheads.
South Korea, which has large commercial and research programs, recently admitted that it had secretly experimented with uranium enrichment, in violation of its treaty obligations. The South Korean government said the experiments were done by scientists without official approval, but North Korea seized on the disclosures to argue that it needed to maintain its programs.
"If North Korea conducts a test and breaks into the nuclear club, and if Iran completes facilities for enriching or reprocessing, the whole set of nonproliferation constraints will unravel quickly, maybe even explode," said Graham Allison, a senior Defense Department official in the Clinton administration and author of "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe."
During the presidential campaign, both Bush and Sen. John Kerry said in their first debate that the spread of nuclear weapons was the greatest security threat facing the United States.
In a speech last February, Bush said no new countries should be permitted to develop fuel cycle capabilities. But he has not offered any specific new policies, other than an initiative to seize illicit shipments of equipment or material on a case-by-case basis.
ElBaradei and some others have proposed the creation of a multilateral consortium that would take control of all fuel enrichment facilities, perhaps under U.N. supervision. Countries with peaceful nuclear reactors would be guaranteed access to fuel at reasonable prices, as long as it was properly monitored, but no new countries would be allowed to develop fuel cycle technology.
Many experts say a greater sense of urgency is needed. Raymond Jeanloz, a UC Berkeley physics professor who in January will become chairman of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control at the National Academy of Sciences, said the issue is a frequent topic among scientists knowledgeable about weapons programs.
At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of America's primary warhead design labs, the Center for Global Security Research, a think tank and advisory body, is devoting most of next year to an intensive series of forums and studies of latent proliferation.
In May, the fuel cycle problem is expected to be an important topic at a conference in New York, where the 189 signatory countries will review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and consider whether it needs to be updated.
Bush critics
Some critics of the Bush administration's record have insisted that the United States needs to play a more active role in trying to halt fuel cycle programs, in Iran and elsewhere. For instance, the administration has raised no objections to Brazil building an active fuel cycle, which it says is for commercial and peaceful purposes, even though that country has resisted opening all its facilities to full inspections by ElBaradei's agency.
The United States has said that since Brazil is regarded as a friendly and peaceful country, the program is not dangerous. But critics say the Bush administration has to be more consistent and treat all such programs as a threat.
"In the end, the big loser in all of this is the U.S.," since nuclear weapons are the only devices that can defeat America's overwhelming conventional military superiority, said Wolfsthal of the Nonproliferation Project.
"Fifteen to 20 more countries could develop this technology in a decade," he said. "It's disturbing, almost horrifying, but not unrealistic."
Some conservatives argue that it is already too late. The United States needs to focus, therefore, on stamping out programs only in the hands of perceived foes -- for example, Iran, Libya and North Korea -- and not worry about allies and friends.
"There's no answer, no solution that's practical," said Fred Ikle, for years a senior arms control negotiator and a well-known neoconservative. "It's hard to get the horses back in the barn. One should work to slow it down as much as possible. That's all you can do." NUCLEAR WEAPONS ACROSS THE GLOBE
Nine countries have acknowledged or suspected nuclear weapons programs. Others, including some nations that have abandoned their weapons programs, are suspected of maintaining nuclear fuel cycles - that is, the capability to produce nuclear fuel that could be used for peaceful purposes or be further processed for nuclear weapons..
-- Countries with confirmed nuclear weapons
United States: 10,500 nuclear warheads
Russia: 20,000 warheads, half of which are deployed
China: 400 warheads
France: 450 warheads
Britain: 185 warheads
India: 65 warheads
Pakistan: 30-50 warheads. The head of its nuclear weapons program was fired in February for secretly supplying nuclear technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran..
-- Countries with unconfirmed nuclear weapons
Israel: 110-190 (projected number) warheads; has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferaton Treaty (NPT).
North Korea: 2-9 (projected number) warheads; announced its withdrawal from NPT in January 2003..
-- Countries reported to be pursuing development of nuclear programs
Algeria, Syria: Suspected intentions to produce nuclear weapons, but no nuclear weapons programs have been identified.
Iran: Suspected of pursuing uranium enrichment and nuclear weapons programs since the 1970s. After disclosures by opponents of the regime, Iran admitted to having secret centrifuge facilities for producing highly enriched uranium, and last week agreed to freeze its enrichment program, at least temporarily, while negotiations continue..
-- Countries that have disbanded nuclear weapons programs
Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan: Inherited nuclear weapons at the breakup of the Soviet Union, but returned the weapons to Russia and signed the NPT as nonnuclear weapons states.
Argentina: Admitted only that it conducted unsafeguarded uranium enrichment and reprocessing.
Australia, Egypt: Ended their programs before they signed the NPT.
Brazil: Ended weapons program before 1970. Admits having a nuclear fuel cycle, but has resisted allowing U.N. nuclear weapons inspectors broader access to its nuclear facilities.
Iraq: Nuclear weapons program started in the early 1970s, but was effectively halted in 1991 by Security Council-mandated inspections. In 1998, Saddam Hussein refused to allow inspections to continue and was suspected of resuming a nuclear weapons program. But the final report by U.S. weapons inspectors, released in October, said Iraq did not have such a program at the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003.
Libya: Agreed in December 2003 to abandon its nuclear program, including centrifuges and bomb designs provided by a rogue Pakistani scientist. It disclosed its history of trying to build the nuclear fuel cycle in return for a promise that Western countries would lift trade sanctions.
Romania: Former Warsaw Pact country once had a plutoniumseparation program.
South Africa: Abandoned its program before it signed the NPT in 1991, but maintains stockpiles of plutonium and highly enriched uranium under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.
South Korea: Program ended after 1970. Disclosed recently that its scientists had secretly conducted a plutonium-based experiment in 1982 and a uranium enrichment project in 2000.
Spain: May have had an unacknowledged nuclear weapons program under the previous military dictatorship.
Sweden: Had a program that was essentially ended by the time it signed the NPT.
Taiwan: Ended its program after 1970.
Yugoslavia: The former communist government had a program that was ended after 1970.. -- Sources: Nuclear Threat Initiative; Center for Defense Information; Monterey Institute for International Studies; "Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945- 2000," by Robert Norris and William Arkin; Institute for Science and International Security; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April 2000; BBC News; United Nations (disarmament.un.org); additional research by Chronicle librarian Lois Jermyn THE ROAD TO A NUCLEAR BOMB
Building a nuclear bomb requires either highly enriched uranium or plutonium, and both can be produced with reactors and other nuclear facilities intended for use in research or for commercial purposes..
Commercial power reactors generally use fuel that has a 3 percent to 5 percent concentration of uranium 235, the same material used in bombs. Most of the remainder is another variation of the material, an isotope called uranium 238. Any fuel with a concentration of more than 20 percent U235 is considered highly enriched, but for bombmaking purposes a concentration of 80 percent or higher is considered optimal.. -- ENRICHING URANIUM PLUTONIUM
There are several methods for enriching uranium, but the most common involves turning the uranium into a gas called uranium hexafluoride, and feeding it into a long series of tall, narrow centrifuges, together known as a cascade. Each centrifuge spins the gas into higher concentrations of U235. . -- The Process
1. Uranium gas is fed into the middle and circulates in the chamber.
2. Subjected to centrifugal force thousands of times greater than gravity, a fraction of the uranium becomes depleted of U235.
3. The depleted uranium is spun toward the outer wall and falls to the bottom.
4. Another fraction of the uranium, enriched in U235, is collected in the top of the chamber.
At the end of the process, the enriched gas is turned back into a solid,and the highly enriched U235 is turned into a metallic state, which is used for bombs.. -- PLUTONIUM
Plutonium is a by-product of nuclear reactor operations. Once the reactor fuel is spent, it is dissolved in hot nitric acid, and then a procedure known as reprocessing can begin. Through a series of chemical steps, uranium can be extracted from this nuclear soup, as can another isotope, plutonium 239. When the plutonium 239 is removed and purified, it is turned into a metal, a bomb-making material.. -- STOPPING THE PROCESS BEFORE ENRICHMENT Many countries have several different kinds of fuel cycles, producing both enriched uranium and plutonium, but most countries stop the enrichment processes before weapons-grade materials are obtained. These facilities, if built legally, are monitored closely by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA conducts regular inspections to make sure no nuclear materials are diverted and that the fuels are not enriched to weapons quality.
Sources: Institute for Science and International Security; New York Times; Associated Press
E-mail James Sterngold at jsterngold@sfchronicle.com.
-----
Outside View: Not All Nuclear Is Bad
Nov 22, 2004
Washington (UPI)
by Ted Galen Carpenter
E-Mail: tcarpent@cato.org
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclear-doctrine-04y.html
The conventional wisdom is that all instances of nuclear weapons proliferation threaten the stability of the international system and the security interests of the United States.
Indeed, that is the underlying logic of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty adopted by the bulk of the international community in the late 1960s, which is the centerpiece of the existing non-proliferation system.
Members of the arms-control community have over the decades spent an enormous amount of time and energy agonizing over the possibility that stable, democratic status quo powers such as Germany, Japan, Sweden and South Korea might decide to abandon the NPT and develop nuclear deterrents.
Indeed, they have devoted at least as much attention to that problem as they have to the prospect that unstable or aggressive states might build nuclear arsenals.
The recent flap over the small scale (and probably unauthorized) nuclear experiments in South Korea is merely the latest example of such misplaced priorities.
The hostility toward all forms of proliferation is not confined to dovish arms-control types but extends across the political spectrum.
As the North Korean nuclear crisis evolved in 2002 and 2003, some of the most hawkish members of the U.S. foreign policy community became terrified at the prospect that America's democratic allies in East Asia might build their own nuclear deterrents to offset Pyongyang's moves.
Neo-conservative luminaries Robert Kagan and William Kristol regarded such proliferation with horror: The possibility that Japan, and perhaps even Taiwan, might respond to North Korea's actions by producing their own nuclear weapons, thus spurring an East Asian nuclear arms race ... is something that should send chills up the spine of any sensible American strategist.
That attitude misconstrues the problem. A threat to the peace may exist if an aggressive and erratic regime gets nukes and then is able to intimidate or blackmail its non-nuclear neighbors.
Nuclear arsenals in the hands of stable, democratic, status quo powers do not threaten the peace of the region.
Kagan and Kristol - and other Americans who share their hostility toward such countries having nuclear weapons - implicitly accept a moral equivalence between a potential aggressor and its potential victims.
America's non-proliferation policy is the international equivalent of domestic gun-control laws -- and exhibits the same faulty logic. Gun control laws have had little effect on preventing criminal elements from acquiring weapons.
Instead, they disarm honest citizens and make them more vulnerable to armed predators. The non-proliferation system is having a similar perverse effect.
Such unsavory states as Iran and North Korea are well along on the path to becoming nuclear weapons powers while their more peaceful neighbors are hamstrung by the NPT from countering those moves.
The focus of Washington's non-proliferation policy should substitute discrimination and selectivity for uniformity of treatment.
U.S. policymakers must rid themselves of the notion that all forms of proliferation are equally bad. The United States should concentrate on making it difficult for aggressive or unstable regimes to acquire the technology and fissile material needed to develop nuclear weapons.
Policymakers must adopt a realistic attitude about the limitations of even that more tightly focused non-proliferation policy. At best, U.S. actions will only delay, not prevent, such states from joining the nuclear weapons club.
But delay can provide important benefits. A delay of only a few years may significantly reduce the likelihood that an aggressive power with a new nuclear weapons capability will have a regional nuclear monopoly and be able to blackmail non-nuclear neighbors.
In some cases, the knowledge that the achievement of a regional nuclear monopoly is impossible may discourage a would-be expansionist power from even making the effort. At the very least, it could cause such a power to configure its new arsenal purely for deterrence rather than design it for aggressive purposes.
Washington's non-proliferation efforts should focus on delaying rogue states in their quest for nuclear weapons, not beating up on peaceful states that might want to become nuclear powers for their own protection.
The other key objective of a new U.S. proliferation policy should be to prevent unfriendly nuclear states from transferring their weapons or nuclear know-how to terrorist adversaries of the United States.
Those objectives are daunting enough without continuing the vain and counterproductive effort to prevent all forms of proliferation.
Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, is the author of six books and the editor of another 10 on international affairs. His latest book, co-authored with Doug Bandow, is Korean Conundrum: America's Troubled Relations with North and South Korea (Palgrave/Macmillan).
-------- australia
Last nuclear rods leaves Sydney
AAP
November 22, 2004
http://au.news.yahoo.com/041122/2/ru45.html
The last shipment of spent nuclear fuel rods under a French-Australian reprocessing agreement left Sydney by ship on Monday.
Under the agreement, the rods from Australia's only nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney's south are reprocessed and later returned to Australia as low or medium level radioactive waste for storage.
Future shipments of rods will go to the United States, but they will not be reprocessed or returned.
"The rods, stored in shielded casks, were taken by road to Port Botany at 2am (AEDT) today, and the ship left for France about 4am," the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) said.
The shipment contained 276 spent fuel elements. A further 387 spent fuel rods remain at Lucas Heights, along with 82 new elements still to be used.
All of these rods will eventually be shipped to the US.
ANSTO spokesman Craig Pearce said the rods were transported safely through Sydney, but community concern was understandable.
"Since 1971 there's been 7,000 shipments of spent fuel around the world, but there's never been an incident resulting in the release of radioactivity," he said.
"It's a pretty good safety record.
"You can't blame anyone for being concerned about radioactive material passing through where they live, but the safety record speaks for itself."
Greenpeace campaigner James Courtney said there was no truly safe method of transporting the fuel rods.
"ANSTO should take responsibility and admit that there are always risks surrounding these transports, and they should be telling the community the truth about what those risks are," he said.
"That's the only way that you can have adequate emergency planning.
"If something happens to one of these casks, the people living near it need to know what to do in an emergency."
The Australian Conservation Foundation called for a halt to the licensing of the replacement nuclear reactor being built at Lucas Heights.
And last week, the NSW government recommended the licence for the reactor not be granted, after a report on the transport and storage of nuclear waste was tabled in state parliament.
"A licence should not be granted until the Commonwealth has resolved the question of how to deal with nuclear waste currently being generated at Lucas Heights," Environment Minister Bob Debus said.
The federal government must promise that waste would not be dumped off the NSW coastline or on Commonwealth-owned land in regional NSW, he said.
-------- depleted uranium
Empire of the Senseless: A Review of Bill Blum's Freeing The World to Death
by Adam Engel
November 22, 2004
dissidentvoice.org
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov2004/Engel1122.htm
Bill Blum, one of the great American historians of the post WWII period, surely one of the boldest and most interesting, has his work cut out for him. From 1946 until now, this moment, and in the foreseeable future, the U.S. Empire's record of invasions, interventions and general malicious meddling in the governments, societies and "freedoms" of foreign peoples is virtually unparalleled in the history of meddlesome Empires. Never have so many been made so miserable so often by so few. And it's all on the public record, or enough of it to fill tomes denser by orders of magnitude than the two previous volumes, Killing Hope and Rogue State, both sizeable books Bill Blum has already written (he also penned a fascinating autobiography, West Bloc Dissident, regarding the pursuit of intellectual liberty in the totalitarian mindscape of the "free world").
Unlike most "academic" historians, Blum's style is to rely not on obscure scholarly journals or information grudgingly released by the government under the Freedom of Information Act, but on everyday newspapers accessible to all: the bulk of his citations come from dailies such as the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, the London Guardian, The Observer and others, both full-size and tabloid, that millions read regularly as hard-copy or on the web but do not penetrate. Unlike Blum, they/we do not read between the lines, but accept the relentless propaganda churned out by Washington and Wall Street and dutifully "reported" by the nations "most respected" papers as truth. Hence the charade of "objective journalism" in which every uncomfortable fact or point of view is "balanced" by a cheerful explanation of "what's really going on" by a government official or hack journalist/lobbyist hired to help the public "understand" the news.
It's not that Blum "trusts" the mainstream newspapers more than the "alternative" journals and websites he himself writes for, or that he hasn't waited years for various tidbits to be released under the FOIA. Rather, it is his method to record and comment upon events that are exposed to all, accessible to all, even read by some, but seldom seen for what they really are and, on such rare occasions, never believed. To believe the truth about U.S. Foreign policy would be to fight against it with every fiber of one's being, or live a quiet, desperate lie. Fortunately, Blum has chosen the former, for if we assume that what has taken place since the end of WWII has actually taken place, that it is not the result of a conspiracy to fool us into thinking the world is bad, or worse, America is bad, "We the People" don't know anything. Or worse: we don't care.
But what about Bill Blum, author of the essays collected in Freeing the World to Death? Well, he's an historian, he's supposed to know stuff. Does that excuse us from not knowing? Or allow us to deliberately tell ourselves childish lies, such as we're "liberating" the people of Iraq by slaughtering 100,000 of them, not to mention the 100,000 we slaughtered in Persian Gulf I and the several hundred thousand, perhaps a million, we killed after that, literally starved, with sanctions.
Well, if Uncle Sam did it, it must have been the right thing. Even Madeleine Albright, who was not only gainfully employed, but rose to the position of Secretary of State, said all the living people who became dead ones during the sanctions were "worth it." That is, worth more to The Empire dead than alive. In America, and perhaps beyond, that is the conventional wisdom, "all that goes without saying," to paraphrase Nietzsche, who noticed some troubling trends in German culture that were later to manifest themselves in the ugliness, barbarism, mass murder and plain old tackiness of Nazism. What Blum argues is not so much the hypocrisy of the American government, but the gullibility or "willful ignorance" of the American people. Blum takes his citations from some of the most popular news sources of our time. The facts are there for everyone to see. Yet we don't see, or we gaze with eyes wide shut.
The United States, "leader of the free world," has spent over 50 years harassing over 100 countries world-wide, compiling a nearly spotless record of always supporting the most brutal, corrupt, and murderous dictators, even schooling these exotic beasts in the American way of torture and murder at the infamous School of the Americas, whose graduates rank among the vilest representatives of our species.
Freeing the World to Death cites sources that are familiar to many of us as the daily paper on the street or the URL that's so commonplace it's often pre-packaged as a "News Site" bookmark with new internet browsers (though since 9/11, U.S. Journalism has become such an obvious public relations arms of Washington and Wall Street that Blum has turned to the Guardian and the Observer, both British papers, to find out what's actually happening as a result of U.S. Foreign Policy). In his previous books, Killing Hope, and Rogue State, Blum demonstrated that today's journalism is tomorrow's history, culling the most outrageous transgressions of the U.S. against the rest of the planet (and its own citizens, who end up fighting its wars or taking the hit come "blowback" time i.e. September 11, 2001). But what if the corruption of American journalism, the deconstruction of the "fourth Estate" into an outhouse, is so pervasive that there will be nothing left but lies for future historians to sort through?
Well, there's always the victims. The many millions who did not have to "bear witness" or even get a job with a big corporate news outlet to experience U.S.-sponsored violence first-hand. By being born in the wrong place at the wrong time and daring to "say no to America," they became "the news" and consequently, "history", in every sense of the term.
Freeing the World to Death is history as most of us U.S. Citizens have "lived" it, via CNN or Fox News flashing and spewing in the background, or the daily reporting, corrections, and re-reporting of "the morning paper." The daily violations of human dignity that is the media background to our lives. I guess it's better than being the focus of attention a la the "victims", but there is a relationship, however distant, between the rebel fighting the Empire's G.I.s or local proxies, and the U.S. Citizens whose tax dollars foot the bill.
Blum writes, "An Empire can be defined as a state that has overwhelming superiority in military, economic and political power, and uses those powers to influence the internal and external behavior of other states to accommodate the empire's needs. This imperial power intrinsically includes the ability to overthrow or otherwise punish those governments which seek to thwart the empire's desires." (Freeing the World to Death, p. 8).
We must pause just to address the invasions/interventions that have occurred since 1987, the year after the first edition of Killing Hope was published: did the people of Panama want the U.S. Marines to "oust" Noriega, causing massive damage to lives and property? Do the people of Cuba, who are no more responsible for what their allegedly "Communist" government does than the people of China, living under an even more repressive "Communist" system, want to be punished by U.S. sanctions? Did the people of Nicaragua, having survived a revolution against the U.S.-sponsored Somoza dictatorship and a relentless "covert" war against U.S.-backed "contras", want to cede to U.S. demands that the Sandinistas be removed from power? Did the people of the Sudan want the U.S. to destroy the country's largest pharmaceutical plant because the U.S. "mistook" it for a chemical weapons factory, and since a mistake had been made, didn't they deserve reparations? Did the people of Serbia deserve to be bombed into the stone age for "humanitarian reasons" by the U.S. and it's NATO "allies?" Do the people of Iraq think it's "worth it" (declared in 1996 -- a whole lotta blood under the blown-up bridges since then) that 100,000 people died in the first "Gulf War" in 1991, followed by an estimated million deaths due to 12 years of sanctions, followed by another estimated 100,000 deaths (and counting), again mostly civilian women and children. Did those people choose to sacrifice their lives, since the April, 2003 invasion, to get rid of Saddam Hussein, the man the U.S. armed and supported when he "bombed his own people," as well as when he pursued a bitter internecine war with Iran which resulted in another million deaths on both sides (Hoorah! cried Uncle Sam. Got rid of two birds with one stone and didn't have to waste a shot)?
Oh, I didn't mention the ouster of Aristide in Haiti, or the absolute destruction of what was left of Afghanistan, or the U.S.'s $3-5 billion/year support of Israel while upbraiding the Palestinians as an "equal partner" in both peace and war. Blum covers these topics and other "diplomatic" sleights-of-hand. ("Interventions: The Unending List;" "Debate in Dublin" and other chapters in Freeing the World to Death).
Ask most Americans what "wars" the U.S. has been involved in before 1991, and you'll probably hear "WW1 and WWII - the 'good' wars - Korea, and Vietnam." But according to Blum there were at least 50 "attempts to overthrow foreign governments; unprovoked military invasion of some 20 sovereign nations; 25 countries who suffered the onslaught of U.S. bombing campaigns, including 40 consecutive days and nights in Iraq in 1991, 78 days and nights in Yugoslavia in 1999, and the subsequent destruction, post-9/11, of Afghanistan and Iraq." Depleted Uranium (DU), "one of the most despicable weapons ever designed by mankind" was and is still used with increased frequency and intensity, turning the areas we bombed into nuclear wastelands and poisoning the people exposed to DU, including U.S. troops, dooming them to a truncated future of illness, deformed children, and other maladies experienced by the survivors of the world's two other nuclear Petri dishes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Blum, p. 129)
The U.S. has used its massive but ever-expanding "defense" budget to finance the oppression of the planet, either through open invasions, like the ones we're witnessing today in Afghanistan and Iraq, or "covert" operations as we saw -- if we caught the movie, "Missing" -- in Chile, in which the CIA, (with a little help from the NSA and other branches of the military, not to mention the storm troopers of whatever lucky tyrant we happen to be supporting in the name of "freedom", in this case Pinochet), staged and supported a coup by a ruthless dictator and the inevitable "purging" of "radicals or extremists" (anyone who made the mistake of fighting back, like the Iraqis of today, in defense of his/her country's independence from U.S. domination - "Foolish mortals! Resistance is futile!" chortled the Bad Guy from Planet X).
We saw it all in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Central America. We watched the Empire grind up thousands if not millions worldwide, day to day, thwarting human desire and fulfillment of the basic necessities of life, never mind liberty and the almost unthinkable "pursuit of happiness" (can you imagine that some wacko idealist once considered that a "human right?"), yet we did and continue to do nothing. Well, not absolutely nothing: many of us voted for a cleaner, more efficient war in Iraq run by Kerry. Surely we realize some connection between the suffering of millions across the globe and the excessive, wasteful, much ballyhooed "life style" that more and more Americans cannot afford.
Our recent "great struggles" between Democrats, so called, and Republicans, so called, in light of bi-partisan support for Bush's invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq, the absence of any real investigation into the affairs of 9/11, and Kerry's graceful acceptance of defeat as if, like Gore, he at least acknowledges that sometimes the "good" guys win, and sometimes the "bad" guys win, but no one ever cries "fix" or "foul" in Pro Wrestling.
We were an empire when Kennedy invaded Cuba as surely as we were an empire when both Johnson and Nixon showered South East Asia with ordnance. We were an empire under the "human rights" champion, Jimmy Carter, whose regime trained al Qaeda and began the U.S.'s covert economic and military offensive against Nicaragua, just as we were an empire under Ronald Reagan who, perhaps falling back on his old tricks as a Hollywood stool-pigeon and back-stabbing snitch during the McCarthy Inquisitions, supported both sides with guns and butter during the Iraq/Iran war. We were an empire under Bush I, who as CIA Chief, Vice-President and President helped arm and create the tyrant, Saddam, even as the latter "gassed his own people" with chemicals manufactured by American and European corporations.
Reagan and Bush armed, trained, and supported a fanatic fundamentalist named Osama Bin Laden (whose family goes back a long way with the Bushes) and his fellow Mujahadeen.
When I first read Killing Hope ten years ago, then Rogue State a few years after that, I pushed them on friends and family alike, saying "read this, you're not gonna believe ninety percent of this stuff, but it's been there all along, right there in the newspapers in front of our faces." The newspapers we skimmed daily without actually reading "between the lines." The dull block-paragraphs we failed to compare to similar paragraphs relating the same events months, weeks, perhaps days earlier with a "different" skew or spin according to what the powers in D.C. willed us to believe.
We'd already tossed the newspapers in piles for recycling or weaned puppies on them without questioning the "revisions" these proudly "objective" journals placed on events, without reading between the lines.
The newspapers purported to "balance" unpleasant facts with avuncular, "expert" opinion provided by corporate and government PR flacks who washed from our brains the vague suspicion that the U.S. was not acting with the best of intentions for all the good, hard-working people who didn't take drugs and "played by the rules" or some other such nonsense.
"The main shortcoming of the establishment media lies in errors of omission, much more than errors of commission. It's not that they tell bald lies so much as it is that they leave out parts of stories, or entire stories, or historical reminders, which if included might put the issue in a whole new light, in a way not compatible with their political biases. Or they might include all the facts, leading to an obvious interpretation, but leave out suggesting an alternative interpretation of the same facts which stands the first interpretation on its head. But the information they do report is often quite usable for my purposes." (Blum, p. 233.)
More than any particular "fact" or omission, reading Bill Blum and others like him teaches us not what so much as how to read: how to read between the lines; how to recognize government double-speak from facts reported by "renowned" journalists or even burped up by accident - then quickly retracted - from our "leaders'" own mouths. Such "accidents" and misstatements have kept George Bush's press handlers and their willfully gullible audience of mainstream reporters busy explaining what the president didn't say when he said whatever offensive thing he said the previous day, but what he meant to say, which was [fill in the blank and wish upon a star].
Though Blum's specialty is American Foreign Policy, also included in this collection, destined to provide fodder for future historians of our era, are essays regarding our domestic illusions or rather, the kind of domestic policy which one would expect to complement a foreign policy which puts us at endless war with everyone always: The War Against Drugs (but not Drug Companies); The War Against Crime (and Free Speech); The War Against Cholesterol (but not Fast Food conglomerates); The War Against The Philistines (or Palestinians, as Israel's all-powerful persecutors are known as today); The War Against Hugo Chavez (and any other defiant Latin American leader who might threaten the U.S. by setting a good example); The War Against Communism (or selective memories of it: sanctions against Cuba, but free trade with China), and of course, Son of the War Against Communism, the War Against Terror ("we have nothing to fear but fear itself?"), which is the toughest one of all. Freud, Jung, and countless others before and after them have devoted their lives to fighting Terror and the best anyone is yet to come up with is Oxycontin, to name only one of the legal chemicals, besides alcohol, in our vast armory of WMDs (gallant Republican Warrior, Rush Limbaugh, used Oxycontin to fight terror for over five years!)
Finally, Blum's book leaves one with a queasy feeling not only about the government created, ostensibly, "of the people, by the people and for the people," but...the people. Either "we" are extraordinarily ignorant and naïve, believing what "our" government tells us no matter what facts, opinions, or international outcry appears on the scene to nudge us awake, or we are not a very kind people at all. True, if one looks at Blum's citations one would see that virtually all of them are from nationally famous, "mainstream" newspapers, television news shows, and magazines, but not all of us have the skill of a historian for sorting public information from Public Relations.
Blum points out that "in the absence of European and Arab governments showing a lot more courage to stand up to the empire, it's the American people we have to turn to, for no one has the potential leverage over the monster than the monster's own children have. And that's the problem, for the American people are...well...how can one put this delicately?...like one in every 50 adult Americans claims a UFO abduction experience; a National Science Board survey found that 27 percent of adults believe the sun revolves around the earth; according to a Gallup poll 68 percent believe in the devil (12 percent are unsure); and most Americans believe that God created evolution...There are all kinds of intelligence in this world: musical, scientific, mathematical, artistic, academic, literary, and so on. Then there's political intelligence, which might be defined as the ability to see through the bulls
t which every society, past, present and future, feeds its citizens from birth on to assure the continuance of prevailing ideology." ("Winning Hearts and Mindless" pp. 265-267)
Is Blum saying that a citizenry 42% of whom believed (according to June, 2003 polls) that Iraq had a direct involvement with 9/11, most being certain that Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers and 55% of whom believed that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, (pg 265) aren't up to the task of being responsible citizens of a working democracy?
"One can only wonder what, besides a crowbar, it would take to pry such people away from their total support of what The Empire does to the world," writes Blum (pg 266).
Freeing the World to Death is an invaluable contribution to understanding (or attempting to understand) why contemporary Americans behave the way they do. The strongest point of this book, among many strong points, lies in its re-evaluation, from the side of rationality, not "gut feeling" or "faith", of all the "news" we've been exposed to since the "humanitarian" war in Serbia ushered in the age of Bush. It was Democrat Bill Clinton, after all, who signed the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act well before 9/11; Clinton who liquidated hundreds of thousands of Iraqis with sanctions; Clinton who said he would refuse to lift the sanctions, which amounted to a siege that hurt the Iraqi people, not Saddam, so long as Hussein remained in power; Clinton who oversaw the Empire between Bushes I and II. Kerry, it should be noted, debated Bush not on whether the U.S. Military should be in Iraq, but how it can be used most effectively while in Iraq.
Every American old enough to remember the enormous amount of government time, citizens' tax-money and creepy, voyeuristic wind, the foul air of a moral scold's "secret" perversions, blown across the "Lewinsky Scandal" should read this book. The news events are the stories they heard, or read, as they were occurring, but with the difference that Blum puts them into the necessary context of an Empire at war - covert or overt - with much of the planet, including its own pathetically loyal and unquestioning citizen/consumers ("We want to feel needed. What can we do to help?" asked the Citizen/Consumers. "Shop", said the Retailer-in-Chief).
Blum writes of "people who get virtually all their news from the shock-and-awe tabloid weeklies, AM-radio talk shows, and television news programs which, because of market-place pressure, aim low in order to reach the widest possible audience, resulting in short programs with lots of commercials, weather, sports and entertainment. These news sources don't necessarily have to explicitly state the above falsehoods to produce such distorted views; they need only channel to their audience a continuous stream of statements from the government and conservative 'experts' justifying the war and demonizing Saddam Hussein as if they were neutral observers; ignore contrary views except when an expert is on hand to ridicule them and label them 'conspiracy theories'; and never put it all together in an enlightening manner. This constant drip-drip of one-sided information, from sources who can be described as stenographers for the powers-that-be, can produce any benighted variety of the human species." (p. 267).
Ultimately, after reading a book such as Freeing the World to Death, we are faced with the question we ourselves put to Nazi Germany: to what extent are "the people" responsible? It is difficult, almost impossible, to finish this book, to "re-live" the events written about (often at the time they were happening at the end of the nineties and first years of this decade up to June, 2004, but with the perpetually happy talking heads excised, commercials lifted, man behind the curtain exposed), without asking oneself the question that was asked again and again of the citizens as well as the leadership of Nazi Germany: what kind of people would let this happen?
Bill Blum's updated commentary on the affairs of The Empire can be viewed on www.killinghope.org.
Adam Engel is a disloyal, disobedient, disgruntled and disillusioned citizen-by-circumstance of The Empire. He has seen crowds of up to 100,000 people at open air music and sports events, but he has never met 100,000 people, or even counted sheep past a few hundred, yet as a tax-payer, he has participated in the killing of 100,000 Afghans and Iraqis and over 1000 Americans, mostly since President-elect George Bush posed in a flight suit on May 1, 2004 and declared victory over...what? He can be reached at: bartleby.samsa@verizon.net.
-------- iran
EU drafts Iran nuclear timetable
bbc
22 November, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4033569.stm
The three European nations that won Iran's consent to suspend uranium enrichment have drawn up a resolution to maintain pressure on Tehran.
Iran said on Monday it was halting work on enrichment in a move hailed by the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The IAEA board is scheduled to discuss Iran's compliance on 25 November.
Diplomats who have seen the motion drawn up by France, Britain and Germany say it is unlikely to satisfy the US.
The US has led calls for the IAEA to refer Iran to the UN Security Council, which has the power to impose sanctions.
Early stages
The European nations' draft resolution calls on Iran to "sustain the suspension" of uranium enrichment at nuclear facilities in the cities of Isfahan and Natanz.
It proposes that the head of the IAEA should "report immediately" to the agency's board if there is any evidence of incomplete suspension".
The US is thought to prefer a tougher stance, whereby any lapse would immediately trigger Iran's referral to the UN Security Council.
"For the US, there's a lot of negotiating left to go," AFP news agency quoted one diplomat as saying.
Another, who also did not wish to be named, said "much work" remained to be done on the draft resolution but expressed confidence that a solution would be reached. The IAEA is now checking "to see that everything has been stopped", the watchdog's director general Mohamed ElBaradei said.
He will deliver his verdict on Iran's conduct when the agency's 35-member board meets on Thursday.
Stepping stone
Mr ElBaradei welcomed news of Iran's suspension as "a good step in the right direction" that could "build confidence" in the Iranian government's intentions.
He also said that Iran had made the uranium gas used in enrichment but that the quantities involved were not enough to produce a nuclear weapon.
Iran reacted angrily to recent reports that it was speeding up uranium enrichment during the week-long gap between the deal being struck and the deadline for its introduction.
Tehran also hit back at outgoing US Secretary of State Colin Powell's assertion that it was trying to adapt its ballistic missiles to carry nuclear warheads.
"I believe Powell has understood his remarks were false," Iran's nuclear chief Hassan Rohani told state television on Sunday. "Such claims are totally baseless."
But Mr Powell has refused to back down, telling reporters on a flight to the Middle East: "I stick with it."
Sanctions unlikely
Iran has always denied US claims that it is developing a nuclear weapons programme, saying its intentions are peaceful.
UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told reporters in Brussels that Iran's move was a positive one but warned that it was not the end of the matter.
"If there is a failure by Iran to meet its obligations then Britain and also Germany and France reserve our collective right to refer the matter to the Security Council," Mr Straw said.
Sanctions remain unlikely as China and Russia, two of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, have said they support Iran's stance.
-----
Amanpour: Iran promises not to 'be nuclear'
(CNN)
November 22, 2004
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/11/22/otsc.amanpour/index.html
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt -- Iran confirmed on Monday a report from the U.N. nuclear watchdog group, the International Atomic Energy Agency, that Tehran has suspended its uranium enrichment program, a program that the United States says could contribute to the development of nuclear weapons.
Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi confirmed the news during an interview with CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour in Egypt, where Kharrazi is attending a special international conference focusing on events in Iran's neighbor to the west, Iraq.
AMANPOUR: Today the head of the IAEA is telling us "I think pretty much everything has come to a halt in terms of uranium enrichment in Iran." Can you tell us precisely what step Iran has taken now on this issue?
KHARRAZI: As a matter of fact, since today, the whole enrichment process has been suspended. And this is going to be verified by inspectors of IAEA.
AMANPOUR: Now, it just seems that every time you make these announcements and you take these steps it all sort of, so to speak, blows up again within a few months. The latest is that not only the opposition groups but others have said that Iran has "aggressively produced" a quantity of uranium hexafluoride, which is essential for the enrichment process. Also, that weapons-grade uranium has been purchased and bomb designs from Pakistan.
What is actually going on?
KHARRAZI: As a matter of fact, this was announced and it is not true, that Iran has not enriched uranium yet or has not bought any uranium from outside.
AMANPOUR: So it is now suspended?
KHARRAZI: Yes.
AMANPOUR: And is that an indefinite suspension? What is the plan?
KHARRAZI: The plan is based on the agreement reached between Iran and some of the Europeans, that we started negotiations in three working groups.
AMANPOUR: And what would constitute positive?
KHARRAZI: Positive means that we are arriving to some conclusions. And the commission and the commitments met by the other side is going to be materialized.
AMANPOUR: And what specific commitment are you talking about right now?
KHARRAZI: There are three working groups, and each group is going to evaluate different measures that has to be taken. But the final measure naturally is to come up with a mechanism that would assure Europeans that Iran is not going to divert to nuclear weapons.
AMANPOUR: You know your fiercest critics are in the United States. Your American counterpart, Secretary of State Colin Powell, said just last week that he has been shown intelligence that Iran is "working hard to produce a nuclear-tipped missile," a missile that can take a nuclear warhead.
KHARRAZI: He has better to share this intelligence that he claims with others. Just claiming something is not enough. And the burden to prove is on the shoulder of the person who makes the claims.
AMANPOUR: Are you denying it?
KHARRAZI: Yes.
AMANPOUR: Does it concern you though that similar voices that were heard in the preamble to the Iraq war are saying about Iran that they suspect you have nuclear weapons or you're trying to produce nuclear weapons, and that it needs to be dealt with additional economic sanctions, with military action, or even with regime change?
KHARRAZI: I believe doing on wrong information has not added to the reputation of American administration, but has put it into serious question internationally. I believe there is need of more information. And American administration is in lack of information.
AMANPOUR: So you're just saying that the lack of intelligence on nuclear weapons in Iraq...
KHARRAZI: No, just generally. Iraq is one example. Americans have made many mistakes out of ignorance, out of lack of information, out of wrong information. And Iraqis won't accept that.
AMANPOUR: And are you nonetheless not concerned, though, that there is a very serious movement in the United States that they will not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran?
KHARRAZI: No, Iran is not going to be nuclear at all. Iran does not have any plan to produce nuclear weapons. It is determined to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. And nobody can deny the right of Iran to do it.
AMANPOUR: So are you -- what will you do then after three months? Will you start enriching again in order for peaceful purposes? Or what happens? If you are determined to pursuit peaceful...
KHARRAZI: We hope. We hope to arrive to some kind of agreement with the European side that assures them that Iran is not going to divert toward nuclear weapons, but at the same time continue with ... technology for peaceful purposes.
AMANPOUR: Are you planning to have any dialogue here at this meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell?
KHARRAZI: No, it has not been scheduled.
AMANPOUR: So you will not meet him?
KHARRAZI: No.
AMANPOUR: Do you worry or are you concerned or are you prepared for a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities?
KHARRAZI: There are some concerns, but the question is that what happens if there would be such a preemptive action? I don't think it helps anyone, but it creates more crisis and more problems. And we have enough problems in the world. And therefore, I believe that leads to nothing but more crisis.
AMANPOUR: Can you tell me how you plan to bolster, if you like, the level of trust between your country and Western countries, whether it be Europe or -- or the United States? As I say, we've seen these declarations by Iran before, these instances of suddenly last year suspending the uranium enrichment, and then, you know, other things come to the surface. People then again point to the fact that, well, you've been doing this secretly and that secretly. I mean, how are you going to actually bolster the level of trust?
KHARRAZI: To take measures that would create more confidence. And that's what exactly what we are doing. If we have decided to suspend uranium enrichment ... it's just to bring more confidence, nothing else. And we hope that this measure's good and to more confidence. Otherwise it may be not useful.
-----
Iran Says It Suspends Uranium Enrichment Program
November 22, 2004
By NAZILA FATHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/22/international/middleeast/22cnd-iran.html
TEHRAN, Nov. 22 - Iran said today that it had suspended its uranium enrichment activities as a sign of cooperation, even as the United States has been stepping up pressure over the country's nuclear program.
"To build confidence and in line with implementing the Paris Agreement, Iran suspended uranium enrichment (and related activities) as of today," according to a brief radio announcement.
In Vienna, the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency said the suspension appeared confirmed.
"I think pretty much everything has come to a halt," Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told reporters, Reuters reported.
Mr. ElBaradei said he expected to have a definitive ruling by Thursday on whether Iran had honored its pledge - made earlier this month - to freeze activities that can be used in energy programs, but also to make nuclear weapons.
Iran agreed earlier this month with Britain, Germany and France to suspend its uranium enrichment program in return for economic benefits. The country said it would halt production on Nov. 22 in a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which will meet Thursday to decide whether to send Iran's case to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions.
While Iran has insisted that its nuclear program is for electricity production only, the United States has accused it of trying to make nuclear weapons. The Bush administration increased its pressure on Iran after diplomats familiar with the country's case accused it last week of racing to produce significant quantities of uranium hexafluoride, a gas that can be enriched for use in nuclear weapons, right up to its deadline.
An Iranian opposition group also said last week in Vienna and in Paris that Tehran was deceiving the world and conducting a secret weapons program at an undisclosed site.
On Sunday the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hamid Reza Mr. Assefi, dismissed accusations about its nuclear program and said the report about uranium hexafluoride production was "just a part of the propaganda to weaken relations between Iran and the agency and the work on building trust with the Europeans."
"What we have been doing over the past few days conforms with the Paris accord and had been carried out under the supervision of the agency," he added.
Mr. Assefi accused the United States of "trickery," and said the Bush administration's recent allegations about Iran's nuclear activities were "a sign of its anger."
"The Americans are not happy about our cooperation with the Europeans, but taking into account that we have cooperated with the I.A.E.A. and Europe, there is nothing to be worried about," he said.
Gholamreza Aghazadeh, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, also denied the charges that Iran had accelerated enrichment activities, the official IRNA news agency reported.
A team of inspectors from the I.A.E.A. is in Iran to police the complete suspension of activities related to uranium enrichment.
In addition, a four-member group from the agency's Board of Governors visited Iran's conversion plant in the city of Isfahan on Saturday. The team is scheduled to return to Vienna on Monday.
-------- japan
Japan to speed up response time to missile attack
TOKYO (AFP)
Nov 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041122075245.qmvlmy5n.html
Japan said Monday it wanted to speed up its military response to a potential missile attack as a report said the officially pacifist country was willing to let the prime minister take direct action in a crisis.
The move comes amid a standoff over North Korea's nuclear weapons drive and six years after Pyongyang test-launched a missile over Japan.
"Under current procedures we could not respond in time after a missile is prepared and appears ready to strike Japan," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda told a news conference.
Hosoda said the government was still working out specific measures.
Under current procedure, the prime minister must convene his cabinet and a national security council to decide on any military action.
Kyodo News reported that Defense Agency Director-General Yoshinori Ono, on a weekend visit to Washington, said he wants to allow the prime minister to bypass the meetings in the event of a missile launch.
Japan's constitution imposed after World War II renounces war, but the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is reportedly mulling an overhaul of the document to allow a limited use of force.
Japan's military, known as the Self-Defense Forces, has asked for a 35 percent increase in missile defense and intelligence systems spending for the fiscal year to March 2006 to 144.2 billion yen (1.4 billion dollars).
The money would be used mainly to buy seaborne SM-3 missiles, upgrade land-based PAC-3 anti-missile systems and remodel high-tech Aegis system-equipped destroyers.
North Korea provoked an international outcry in 1998 by firing the missile over Japan, which the Stalinist state claimed was a satellite launch.
-------- russia
ZMEINOGORSK JOURNAL
Scare Is Over, and Siberia Won't Glow in the Dark
November 22, 2004
By C. J. CHIVERS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/22/international/22plutonium.html?pagewanted=all&position=
ZMEINOGORSK, Russia, Nov. 16 - The gun buy-back program in this old Siberian mining town works like similar programs anywhere else.
There is a kitty of money. The local police put announcements in the newspaper, notifying residents that they will grant amnesty and pay small sums - in this case up to about $17.25 in rubles - to anyone who turns in an unregistered gun.
Then they wait at the station for the usual trickle of tired or inherited hunting guns. Usually they get shotguns (about 10 in the past six months). Sometimes they get boxes of ammunition. Often they receive weapons in such disrepair that they can no longer be fired.
Nothing in their experience, in other words, prepared them for the appearance of Leonid I. Grigorov, one of the stranger pack rats the world has ever known, who turned up at the police station last month in search of his $17.25.
"I have plutonium," he said.
So began a madcap chapter in the history of Zmeinogorsk, population 14,000, and in the life of Mr. Grigorov, who is learning that amnesty for weapons does not extend to Russians who store radioactive isotopes at home.
Mr. Grigorov, 58, a retired laboratory technician, had kept nine tablet-shaped bits of radioactive isotopes in his garage since 1996. In Russia, where it is a reliable news media chestnut that fuel for a nuclear or a radiological bomb is loose or unsecured or both, poisoning residents and tempting black marketeers, Mr. Grigorov's cache ignited a small wave of hysteria.
The police were alarmed, of course.
Mr. Grigorov, who wears square-framed glasses and a dark fur hat, did assure the police that his collection included industrial plutonium, not weapons-grade plutonium. But police officers are not physicists, and plutonium is a word with frightening connotations, invoking thoughts of hot fuel for reactors or mushroom clouds.
The authorities quickly seized the isotopes and locked them away. Mr. Grigorov had been helpful, an investigator at the prosecutor's office said - he had placed the radioactive material in a yellowish-green lead cylinder for the police to find on his porch.
Soon, the official certificates inside the cylinder told them that it held three tablets of cadmium 109, two of an isotope of iron, and four of plutonium 238. And they learned that just as Mr. Grigorov had insisted, plutonium 238 is not weapons grade. (Bomb fuel is a different plutonium isotope.)
Moreover, after having a local physicist test the radiation emitted when the lead cylinder was opened, they learned that the isotopes were too weak to be of much threat in a so-called dirty bomb, which theoretically could be made by dispersing radioactive isotopes with a conventional blast.
The case was all but closed.
Police interviews with Mr. Grigorov and former mine supervisors filled in the last level of detail: the isotopes had been components of a standard technical instrument, similar to an X-ray machine, that Mr. Grigorov had used to analyze ore at the now defunct mining laboratory where he had been employed.
Mr. Grigorov claimed to have found them abandoned after the laboratory closed in the mid-1990's, and decided to safeguard them himself in their original lead sleeve.
Mikhail Filippovich, Zmeinogorsk's mayor, described the decision in a sadly noble way. "During privatization, everybody got what he got, and Leonid got a container with some isotopes in it," he said. "It was not the most successful acquisition."
"But we are thankful for this," he added, "because thanks to him the isotopes did not get into any other hands."
Because Mr. Grigorov risked a criminal charge for illegal storage of radioactive substances, and a potential jail sentence of two years, the authorities filed reports to their regional bosses in Barnaul. They noted that the pack rat remained perplexed and incorrigible.
"He simply couldn't understand why he wasn't given any money," said Capt. Dmitri Boiko, the deputy police chief.
But as the case drew near its end, it grew stranger still. Someone in Barnaul, who knew only a sketch of the case, leaked inaccurate information about it, the police here say. Within hours their detective work was for naught.
Russian news agencies, radio stations, newspapers and television stations reported that weapons-grade plutonium had been discovered in a garage in Siberia. One account said more than a pound had been found, which in the age of modern terror would have been a frightening amount.
The reports provoked swift denunciations. Nikolai Shingaryov, spokesman for Russia's Federal Atomic Energy Agency, insisted that Russia had not lost custody of any plutonium bomb fuel. "What has been written absolutely doesn't correspond to what is there," he said in a telephone interview.
This opinion corresponds with the understanding of the case at the United States National Nuclear Security Administration, in Washington, which has helped Russia secure 900 radiological sources in recent years.
Paul M. Longsworth, deputy administrator of the administration, said that while the incident did not involve American help - the radiation level of Mr. Grigorov's plutonium tablets was well below the threshold of what the administration considers threatening - it carried larger meanings.
"While it is a humorous story on one level, it does indicate that there are sources out there that are unsecured," he said in a telephone interview. "It does indicate why we are doing what we are doing."
As the Russian news media dropped the story, its lasting effect seems not to have been on national security but on Mr. Grigorov, who, the authorities said, has been suffering from cancer, and was deeply uncomfortable about finding himself the subject of both a media storm and his neighbor's stares.
"Now he's scared," the mayor said. "He does not want to see anybody. He's hiding."
Mr. Grigorov did make an appearance this week in the lobby of the prosecutor's office, but when he saw three journalists, he dashed outside. When he heard his name called, he spun and showed a frightened face, then sped up and disappeared down the snowy streets.
Now the case is closing again. Captain Boiko mused that in the end he hoped there would be leniency for the ailing mine technician who gave Russia a brief but unfounded scare. "He is a normal guy,'' he said. "Quiet, balanced, competent in his sphere. I personally think that this case will just be stopped."
-------- u.n.
Hungarian to head up nuclear non-proliferation organization
VIENNA (AFP)
Nov 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041122201228.77sbg83q.html
Hungarian Tibor Toth was elected the new executive secretary of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), said the group from its Vienna headquarters on Monday.
The 50-year-old Toth, who is Hungary's permanent representative to the United Nations in Geneva, will replace outgoing executive secretary Wolfgang Hoffman of Germany starting on August 1, 2005.
Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1996, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty is a cornerstone of the international regime on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.
The Preparatory Commission was established to prepare for the Treaty's entry into force.
By instituting a total ban of any nuclear weapon test explosions the CTBT will constrain the development of advanced new types of weapons.
The Treaty will enter into force after it has been ratified by the 44 states that formally participated in the 1996 session of the Conference on Disarmament.
Today only 32 of those countries and three of the world's five nuclear powers (Britain, France and Russia) have ratified the treaty.
The other two, China and the United States, still have not done so.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Residents in Western US Fear Government Plans to Resume Nuclear Weapons Testing
voanews.com
By Serena Parker
22 November 2004
http://www.voanews.com/english/NewsAnalysis/2004-11-22-voa18.cfm
Preston J. Truman grew up in Enterprise, Utah, a small farming community of 800 people located 100 miles east of the U.S. government's nuclear weapons test site in the state of Nevada.
Anti-nuclear activist Preston J. Truman
Utah resident Preston J. Truman developed lymphoma as a result of the nuclear testing.
"My actual first memory of life is sitting on my father's knee watching an A-bomb go off on the Nevada Test Site," he says. According to Mr. Truman, the U.S. government would warn citizens when they were testing and where the radioactive fallout cloud was moving. But he says officials insisted there was no danger, even after people started getting sick.
"Within a few years after the testing started, we had our first case of childhood leukemia in town, and then there were clusters in nearby communities and then pretty soon it was adult cases," he remembers. "And in a very short period of time we all knew that something was dreadfully wrong."
The U.S. government finally banned above ground nuclear testing in 1963, but underground testing continued into the 1970's. It was only in 1990 that the U.S. Congress passed legislation to provide compensation to people who lived under the clouds of nuclear fallout, so-called Downwinders. Downwind refers to the fact that nuclear fallout was carried from Nevada by westerly winds across the continental United States.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, or RECA, provides $50,000 dollars to individuals living or working in 21 counties in three states who were downwind of the Nevada Test Site and who later contracted cancer as a result of this exposure. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 11,000 people in the United States died of cancers caused by exposure to radioactive fallout. In some instances, entire families were afflicted. One resident of Arizona, Danielle Stephens, has lost 26 of 31 family members to cancer.
Although radiation exposure in these 21 counties was high, there were similar so-called hot spots elsewhere in the United States. According to Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, the radioactive fallout has many components, including iodine-131, which tends to concentrate in animal's milk.
"Milk contamination happened in hot spots where fallout rained out of the sky," he says. "And the greatest exposure was in those hot spots for farm children who were drinking fresh milk. So you could find people in say Iowa, Kansas, even in Vermont that were very highly exposed because they lived in hot spots."
Currently, these people are not covered under RECA, but that may change soon. The National Academies' National Research Council is considering whether the U.S. Congress should amend RECA to include additional geographic areas and other types of cancers. Dr. Isaf Al-Nabulsi who is directing the study tells VOA that the report will be turned in to Congress at the end of March 2005 and made available to the public by the end of April.
Downwinders, like Utah resident J Truman, are anxious to read the report's recommendations, especially since many of them fear the government is planning to resume nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site.
"Why are they putting money into getting the test site ready to resume testing on a presidential order within a short period of time? Of course, it means testing if it goes forward," he says.
But Bryan Wilkes, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration in Washington vehemently denies that. "We can foresee no need for any testing in the near future. We are not planning any tests. We are not discussing any tests. It's just not on the table," he says.
According to Mr. Wilkes, the current budget does contain money to maintain the Nevada Test Site, but there are no plans to start mass producing nuclear weapons or testing them. "We do have money every year in the budget for what's called test readiness," he says. "That's because the Nevada Test Site is a huge complex that requires a lot of upkeep. And if we let that fall into disrepair that could mean that we wouldn't have any means for testing. And there could come a point some day - we don't foresee it right now - but there could come a point that there would be a need for testing."
Bryan Wilkes says the only reason the government would conduct a nuclear test is if there were some serious safety issue that couldn't be resolved using computer models. But many Downwinders, who feel that they were betrayed once by their government, remain unconvinced.
-----
Robert Bacher, Manhattan Project Physicist, Dies at 99
By JEREMY PEARCE
November 22, 2004
NY TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/22/obituaries/22bacher.html?ei=5070&en=c0d4ab1b5c9e9b03&ex=1103000400&pagewanted=print&position=
Dr. Robert F. Bacher, a nuclear physicist and one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project, died on Thursday at a retirement home in Montecito, Calif. He was 99.
His death was announced by the California Institute of Technology, where he had been a professor and provost.
In 1943, Dr. Bacher joined the Manhattan Project, the budding effort to develop an atomic weapon at Los Alamos, N.M. He served as head of the project's experimental physics division before leading its bomb physics division in 1944 and 1945.
Dr. Robert F. Christy, a colleague on the Manhattan Project and later at Caltech, said Dr. Bacher had urged J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director, to reject placing the project under military control as a way to ensure greater secrecy and security.
"Bacher had a sense of what was right and not right," Dr. Christy said. "He told Oppenheimer not to take an Army commission, and that scientists had to be able to think independently." The bomb project continued under civilian oversight.
After the war, Dr. Bacher served on the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to 1949 and testified before a joint Congressional committee about a deterioration in the nation's nuclear weapons program. In 1946, he took an inventory at Los Alamos and later testified that he had been "deeply shocked to find how few atomic weapons we had." Bomb production increased soon afterward with technical improvements in preparing plutonium and other fissionable materials.
Dr. Bacher became a professor of physics at Caltech in 1949. He served as the institute's first provost, from 1962 to 1970, and as chairman of the division of physics, mathematics and astronomy from 1949 to 1962. He became a professor emeritus in 1976.
Dr. Murray Gell-Mann, a colleague at Caltech who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969, recalled Dr. Bacher as "a worldly wise person, an administrator who could always see the problems ahead, organizational, political and so on."
Dr. Gell-Mann cited Dr. Bacher's role at Caltech in building an electron synchrotron, a particle accelerator, as well as his support and testimony in defense of Oppenheimer when his security clearance was questioned, and ultimately revoked, in 1954 after Oppenheimer was accused of having Communist ties.
Robert Fox Bacher was born in Loudonville, Ohio. He received his undergraduate degree and doctorate from the University of Michigan, and also taught at Columbia and Cornell.
He was a former president of the American Physical Society and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. He was awarded the President's Medal for Merit in 1946.
Dr. Bacher is survived by a daughter, Martha Bacher Eaton of Santa Barbara, Calif., and a son, Andrew Dow Bacher, a nuclear physicist at the University of Indiana.
Correction: December 10, 2004, Friday:
A picture caption on Nov. 22 with an obituary of Dr. Robert F. Bacher, a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, referred incorrectly in some copies to the date of the first atomic bomb test. (A similar error occurred in a caption on May 11, 1999, with an article about research into atomic espionage, and in a caption on July 18, 1996, with an obituary of Dr. Kenneth T. Bainbridge, who also worked on the bomb.) While the photograph of Dr. Bacher and other Manhattan Project scientists was made in September 1945, the test was in July 1945.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- washington
DOE Cleanup Chief Tours Nuclear Reservation
November 22, 2004
By Annette Cary,
Tri-City Herald
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=427
The Department of Energy still is evaluating its options on Initiative 297, said Paul Golan, DOE's acting assistant secretary for environmental management, last week.
Golan, who holds the position sometimes called the cleanup czar, spent two days visiting the Hanford nuclear reservation just two weeks after residents of Washington state voted to ban importing radioactive waste to Hanford until waste already there is cleaned up.
In Benton County, Washington, the only county that voted against the initiative, residents have been concerned that DOE's nationwide cleanup plan calls for importing some low-level radioactive waste to Hanford but sending far more radioactive material from the site to Nevada, New Mexico and possibly South Carolina.
Speculation has focused on whether DOE will challenge the legality of the initiative.
The nation will have to work together to clean up and shut down its nuclear sites left from the Cold War, Golan said. Hanford made plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program. When DOE's nuclear complex was built, it was integrated across the nation and the cleanup must be the same, Golan said.
"We will do it on our watch," he said.
DOE continues to push to open Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a national nuclear repository, he said. Some of Hanford's worst waste is planned to be turned into glass logs at a $5.8 billion vitrification plant now being built at Hanford and sent to Yucca Mountain for disposal. The state of Nevada is fighting to prevent the mountain from being used as a national repository for nuclear waste.
Just as it took years of work to open a national repository in the New Mexico desert for DOE wastes tainted with plutonium, it will take some time for Yucca to open for high-level radioactive waste and nuclear industry waste, Golan said. Hanford wastes already are being sent to the New Mexico repository, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project.
DOE also is working to find a place to ship leftover plutonium, Golan said. Hanford officials would like to start moving the plutonium kept in a heavily guarded vault in central Hanford to a more appropriate location in 2005.
"We're looking for a complete solution, and we do not have that yet," Golan said, although talks continue to send the plutonium to the Savannah River, S.C., nuclear site. The Hanford Advisory Board and boards for other nuclear sites across the nation are warning that challenges to disposing of waste at several DOE sites, including Hanford, are creating the risk of gridlock.
In a letter still making the rounds of site advisory groups for signatures, nine board chairmen warn that the challenges to waste disposal create the potential for skyrocketing costs and delays in cleanup. They're calling for a national forum to produce a technically and fiscally sound solution to dispose of waste and nuclear materials across the DOE complex.
Golan said he had not seen the letter, but that DOE is committed to working with communities and regulators.
He said he expects substantial progress in cleanup at Hanford and other DOE nuclear sites to continue in the next few years.
"Look at the magnitude of work and how much safer Hanford has become in the last three years," Golan said after touring the site. "Urgent risks are removed."
In 2004, Hanford workers emptied the last of the high-level radioactive liquid waste from the site's leak-prone underground tanks and finished stabilizing the plutonium left at the end of the Cold War in the Plutonium Finishing Plant. Within the last month, workers finished removing 2,300 tons of irradiated nuclear fuel that were corroding in leak-prone indoor pools 400 yards from the Columbia River.
Progress also has been made in preparing old reactors for long-term storage and digging up contaminated dirt near the Columbia River.
The tour "left a lot of good impressions of Hanford," Golan said.
He's pleased with the contractors at the site and with its local DOE leadership, he said, singling out Roy Schepens and Keith Klein, who manage DOE's two Hanford cleanup programs in the Tri-Cities.
Golan has served as acting assistant administrator since Jessie Roberson resigned in July, but this was at least his sixth trip to Hanford, he said. He was worked at DOE headquarters since 2000.
He met with representatives of the Yakamas, the Nez Perce and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation on Tuesday and Wednesday to continue government-to-government discussions, he said.
DOE has offered the tribes eight additional internships for high school or college students to work on science or technical projects, Golan said. He's also interested in more use of a Mid-Columbia-based bus equipped for training and education, he said.
After Golan left Washington, D.C., to tour the Rocky Flats, Colo., and Hanford nuclear sites this week, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham resigned. Abraham had a strong commitment to nuclear cleanup and seeing him leave is tough, Golan said.
When Abraham was energy secretary, cleanup spending at Hanford increased to about $2 billion a year, although that is expected to decline in coming years.
Golan also discussed the protests that have become routine when Hanford contracts have been awarded in recent years. The transition of the contracts have been delayed while protests are decided.
"We're going to have to deal with it," he said. Because of the strong bid proposals made for Hanford contracts, the losing contractors' protests are understandable, he said. With substantial progress made to clean up Hanford along the Columbia River, attention is turning to how to clean up central Hanford. It has some of the most technically challenging and heavily contaminated cleanup projects.
DOE will be applying knowledge learned on other cleanup projects, Golan said. The goal is to keep the workers safe, protect the environment and respect the taxpayer, he said.
"We're not going to be perfect," he said. But "there are a lot of great things we can do here."
Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
U.S., Afghan Forces Search for Kidnapped U.N. Workers in Kabul
November 22, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-Kidnapped-Foreigners.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan -- American and Afghan forces searching for three kidnapped U.N. workers smashed their way into houses in downtown Kabul early Monday, officials and witnesses said.
About 10 people were detained in the pre-dawn operation, but there was no indication that the three foreigners had been found.
A spokesman for the U.S. military, Lt. Col. Pamela Keeton, said the joint operation was ``related to the hostage situation,'' but said she had no further details.
Security forces began the assault in the west of the city at about 4 a.m., using rockets to blast a hole in a wall surrounding the two-story home of a doctor working for the United Nations, witnesses said.
The doctor, Munir Mosamem, and his 17-year-old son were detained, Mosamem's wife Zakia told The Associated Press. The intruders searched the house and confiscated three mobile phones and part of a computer, she said.
U.N. spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva confirmed that a doctor with that name worked at a clinic for the world body in the city, but had no information about the raid.
Another eight men were detained in a derelict house next door where several impoverished families of recently returned refugees were living, witnesses said.
A woman who gave her name as Angoma, 28, said her husband was among the eight taken away with his hands bound and his head covered by a hood.
``They showed us pictures of the three hostages, two women and one man, and asked if we had seen them,'' she said. ``I told them I recognized them from the television, but we don't know anything about them or where they are.''
An elderly woman called Mabuba sharing the doctor's house also said she had been questioned about the three.
``I told them no, and that we are very sad about this case,'' she said.
Armed men seized Philippine diplomat Angelito Nayan, British-Irish citizen Annetta Flanigan and Shqipe Hebibi of Kosovo in Kabul on Oct. 28, the first such abduction in the Afghan capital since the fall of the Taliban three years ago. It remains unclear where they are being held and by whom.
Afghan officials believe a criminal gang carried out the abductions and that negotiations have snagged over a ransom demand. But it remains unclear if the kidnappers are working for a Taliban splinter group which has claimed responsibility and demanded that Afghan and U.S. authorities free several prisoners.
-------- business
Contracts Awarded
Washington Technology
Monday, November 22, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3177-2004Nov21?language=printer
Lockheed Martin Information Technology, a division of Bethesda-based government contractor Lockheed Martin, won a seven-year, $525 million contract to provide a wide range of information technology services to the Social Security Administration. Lockheed Martin's teammates include Global Commerce and Information Inc. of Columbia, Pointe Technology Group Inc. of Landover, CPSI Inc. of Baltimore, RS Information Systems Inc. of McLean, Engineering Systems Solutions Inc. of Frederick, Apptis Inc. of Chantilly, SM Consulting Inc. of Linthicum, and BAE Systems Information Technology of McLean.
Avilar Technologies Inc. of Laurel won a four-year, $6.6 million contract from the Instituto Latinoamericano de la Comunicacion Educativa, an international organization formed by 13 Latin American countries to enhance education opportunities through technology. Avilar will provide an e-learning platform for tracking the competency of teachers and students and for other educational needs.
BAE Systems North America Inc. of Rockville won two new Navy contracts totaling $26.4 million to provide engineering, configuration and acquisition support services for Navy and foreign military sales of Aegis-class ships.
CGI-AMS of Fairfax, a subsidiary of CGI Group Inc. of Montreal, won five contracts worth a total of $100 million from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to provide technical solutions and support for the CMS and Medicare Web sites, and four other CMS systems.
Computer Sciences Corp. of El Segundo, Calif., won a four-year, $52 million contract from the Defense Department to provide product evaluations, biometric technology and application research, standards requirements and conformance testing, program management, and educational outreach to the department's biometrics fusion center in Clarksburg, W. Va.
Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda won a $30 million contract from the Army to build test beds for new technologies for the Comanche helicopter.
SI International Inc. of Reston won a $6.8 million, three-year task order from the Agriculture Department to provide information technology support for the Veterinary Services Processes Streamlining System, which monitors transport of animals to enhance food safety and protect against terrorism.
Sytel Corp. of Bethesda has awarded Electronic Data Systems Corp. of Plano, Texas, a one-year, $6.5 million subcontract to provide information technology infrastructure support to the Homeland Security Department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Dev Technology Group Inc. of Reston will be one of EDS's partners on the project. The contract, which includes five option years, could be worth as much as $34 million if all options are exercised.
Electronic Data Systems' Herndon office won a $29.4 million contract from the Pentagon Renovation Office for the Command Communications Survivability Program Systems integration contract.
L-3 Communications Flight International Aviation LLC of Newport News won a $7.6 million contract from the Naval Air Systems Command for Commercial Air Services -- Mediterranean. The work, to be performed in Naples, Italy, includes passenger transport and fleet training, including electronic warfare, air intercept control and target towing.
Booz Allen & Hamilton of McLean won a $13.5 million contract from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command for technical security engineering and technical program management support services. The contract value could reach $62.4 million if all options are exercised.
Accenture LLP of Reston won a $5.6 million contract from the U.S. Army Contracting Agency for evaluation, configuration, development, and software integration services to put in place human resources management software.
Lankford Sysco Food Services Inc. of Pocomoke City, Md., won a $12 million contract from the Defense Supply Center Philadelphia for full line food distributions for the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and federal civilian agencies.
Lockheed Martin Corp., Maritime Systems and Sensors of Manassas won a $31.9 million contract from the Naval Sea Systems Command for production of three sonar systems and six executive workstations.
Solipsys Corp. of Laurel won an $8.8 million contract from the Naval Sea Systems Command to support the design and development of the Pacific Fleet Tactical Component Network.
Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems of Linthicum, Md., won a $139.2 million contract from the Air Force's Headquarters Space and Missile Systems Center to assure launch readiness and operational performance for selected government-owned sensor units; perform upgrades to give sensors enhanced capabilities; assure maximum sensor data integrity to support quality weather products; and perform integration management oversight of sensor manufactures, vendors and government laboratories.
Hewlett Packard Co., through its Greenbelt office, won a $2.8 million contract from the Navy for information technology services.
S. Cohen & Associates of McLean won a $10.6 million contract from the Environmental Protection Agency for regulatory, analytical and evaluation support services for radiation protection programs.
Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore won a $15.8 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department for patient safety monitoring in international laboratories.
Assessment & Training Solutions Consulting Corp. of Virginia Beach won a $2.5 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Catapult Technology Ltd. of Bethesda won a $9.5 million ceiling contract from the Labor Department for software services.
Staff writer Judith Mbuya contributed to this report.
--------
Local Contract Pentagon Weighs Satellite Needs
By Susan M.Menke
The Washington Post
Monday, November 22, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3178-2004Nov21.html
The Defense Department's use of commercial communications satellites has soared with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, the Pentagon is trying to decide whether it can save money by buying service directly from satellite carriers instead of through three Washington area resellers.
It will take years for the military to launch enough satellites to fulfill its own bandwidth needs. The amount of commercial bandwidth bought by the Defense Department to fill the gap has grown ten-fold since 2001, before the war in Afghanistan, said Pravin Jain, chief scientist of the Defense Information Systems Agency's Global Information Grid engineering directorate.
The Pentagon needs commercial satellite services, for example, to support the operations of unmanned aerial vehicles and other intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sensors, as well as for voice communications.
The Defense Department relies on the Defense Satellite Transmission Services-Global contract. The contract with resellers, which began in 2001, could be worth as much as $2 billion if the Pentagon extends it for its full 10-year term. It is held by Arrowhead Global Solutions Inc. of Falls Church, Artel Inc. of Reston, and Spacelink International LLC of Dulles.
Together, the three companies have collected "$500 million to $600 million in revenue over the last three years," said Otto W. Hoernig III, chief operating officer of Spacelink.
The companies compete among themselves to provide satellite services to the military, and they make the satellite carriers compete to provide the communications bandwidth they need.
Now, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the National Reconnaissance Office are debating whether to start buying commercial satellite service directly from carriers. Their report is due in April.
Carriers affiliated with the Satellite Industry Association of Alexandria -- EutelSat, IntelSat, Loral Space and Communications Ltd., New Skies Satellites, PanAmSat Corp., and SES Americom Government Services Division -- have lobbied the Pentagon to buy directly from them, arguing that this would be less expensive.
"Where it's bulk capacity with no added value from an intermediary, the carriers want to deal directly" with the Defense Department, said Leslie Blaker, a vice president at SES Americom.
But Arrowhead president and chief executive Mary Ann Elliott said the resellers' cost per megahertz is 40 percent lower than it was before their contract began.
"The department has procured more commercial satellite service than at any other point in history, at lower cost and with greater flexibility of terms and conditions," she said.
Susan M. Menke, an editor-at-large, wrote about this contract for Washington Technology. For more details on this and other technology contracts, go to www.washingtontechnology.com.
-------- europe
EU agrees on new joint military units
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Nov 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041122104019.knww86v7.html
EU defence ministers agreed Monday to create 13 so-called battle groups, military units which can be deployed rapidly to crisis situations around the world, Dutch minister Henk Kamp said.
The 1,500-strong tactical groups, which will put flesh on long-standing EU plans to have an independent military capacity, will be able to be deployed within 15 days. One unit will be up and running by next year, said Kamp.
France, Italy, Spain and Britain have each agreed to form one unit, and all other EU states have agreed to contribute to at least one group, said the Dutch minister, whose country currently holds the EU's rotating presidency.
"The battle groups are at the forefront of capability improvement, providing the Union with credible, rapidly deployable, coherent force packages capable of stand-alone operations, for for the initial phase of larger operations," said an EU statement.
----
Europe's New "Bill of Rights"
European Parliament Approves New EU Constitution
Democracy Now!
Monday, November 22nd, 2004
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/22/1425243
As the European Commission prepares its agenda for the next few years, Europeans are debating the merits of a new Constitution signed by its 25 member states. Next February 20th, Spain will become the first country in the European Union to hold a popular referendum on the Constitution. This past week, the European Parliament approved a new European Commission, headed by the EU's new president, former Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manual Durao Barroso. Durao is best remembered internationally for hosting the summit in Azores between President Bush, Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar that declared war on Iraq.
The EU vote ended a crisis that began three weeks ago when the majority of parliamentarians refused to back Durao's choice of commissioners. He was forced to withdraw his list in order to remove his controversial choice for Justice, Freedom and Security, Italian Rocco Buttiglione. Buttiglione had publicly stated that homosexuality was a sin, and that a woman's place was in the home.
As the commission prepares its agenda for the next few years, Europeans are debating the merits of a new Constitution signed by its 25 member states. Next February 20th, Spain will become the first country in the European Union to hold a popular referendum on the Constitution. The treaty, which amounts to a European bill of rights, was signed on October 29th by leaders of all 25 European Union member states and three candidate countries. The countries now must ratify it individually. Some, like Spain, plan to put it to a popular vote, while others will approve it through Congressional ratification.
-------- iran
Iran Halts Key Nuclear Work to Avoid Sanctions
Reuters
Nov 22, 2004
By Louis Charbonneau
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20041122/wl_nm/nuclear_iran_dc_14
VIENNA (Reuters) - Iran on Monday suspended sensitive nuclear activities that could be used to make a bomb in a move likely to thwart U.S. efforts to report the Islamic Republic to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions.
Washington wants Iran to face sanctions, accusing it of trying to develop atomic bombs under the veil of a nuclear power project. But the EU has taken a softer line, persuading Tehran to stop sensitive activities in return for better ties.
Oil-rich Iran denies it is trying to develop a nuclear arsenal and says it just wants to generate electricity.
"Today the whole enrichment process has been suspended," Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi told CNN. President Bush (news - web sites) reacted to the announcement with mild skepticism. "Let's say, I hope it's true," he said.
Uranium is enriched to generate atomic power, but when it is highly enriched can be used in a nuclear warhead.
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) atomic watchdog, confirmed the freeze.
"I think pretty much everything has come to a halt right now. We're just trying to apply seals and make sure everything has been stopped," ElBaradei told reporters in Vienna.
Operations at an Isfahan facility readying raw "yellowcake" uranium for the enrichment process had also stopped, he said.
IAEA inspectors are verifying the suspension and plan to confirm it has been fully implemented at Thursday's IAEA board meeting which will discuss a draft EU resolution on the issue. Iran never fully suspended the program after making a similar promise to France, Britain and Germany in October 2003.
Iran has warned that the freeze of activities it considers a "sovereign right" would be short-lived. Kharrazi said Tehran would review the suspension in three months.
"If it was positive we can continue. Positive means we are arriving at some conclusions and the ... commitments made by the other side (the EU) are going to materialize," he said.
BUSH: IRAN MUST EARN TRUST
Bush said it was important for Iran to earn the trust of U.S. and European governments, who worry Iran wants the bomb.
"It looks like there is some progress, but to determine whether or not the progress is real there must be verification. We look forward to seeing that verification," Bush said.
France, Britain and Germany, who led the European Union (news - web sites) effort to persuade Tehran to abandon uranium enrichment, circulated a draft resolution to be submitted to the IAEA board.
The draft urges Iran to "sustain the suspension" and says ElBaradei should "report immediately to the IAEA board should the agency encounter evidence that the suspension is not fully implemented, or be prevented from monitoring all elements of the suspension."
But the text, obtained by Reuters, makes no mention of punitive measures if Iran resumed enrichment-related activities.
A Western diplomat said the EU draft was too weak for the Americans who want a "trigger clause" that would call for a referral to the Security Council if Iran resumed enrichment.
"For the U.S., there's a lot of negotiating left to go," said a diplomat on the IAEA board. But a European diplomat said it was doubtful the EU would allow anything tougher.
ElBaradei urged Tehran not to restart enrichment while inspections were under way. He said this would be a long time "in light of the undeclared nature of the program for many years, in light of the less than optimal cooperation in the initial phase of the inspections."
"I think it's in Iran's interest to maintain the suspension while we are going through the (inspections), while we are trying to restore confidence that the program is for peaceful purposes," he said.
The EU hopes to persuade Iran to make the suspension permanent by offering it economic and political incentives. But it may still refer it to the Security Council if Tehran goes back on the deal, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said.
Skepticism about Iran's intentions was heightened last week when Iranian exiles accused Tehran of running a secret enrichment plant and diplomats revealed that Iran had stepped up some uranium conversion activities just ahead of the suspension.
ElBaradei said the IAEA would only follow up on "credible information" and that it was "looking into" the issue.
"There's a big difference between doing robust verification and harassing a country," he said.
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Iran has produced uranium gas: UN nuclear chief
VIENNA (AFP)
Nov 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041122100912.euyv4tlt.html
Iran has produced up to two tons of uranium gas that can be used to make nuclear weapons, but this amount is not enough to make a bomb, UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei told journalists Monday.
ElBaradei said the amount of uranium hexafluoride (UF6) produced by Iran prior to a ban of uranium enrichment activites that began Monday was "probably a maximum of two tons."
An IAEA official said this was enough for "15 percent of a significant amount," that is 15 percent of the highly enriched uranium, which is made from UF6, needed to make an atomic bomb.
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United States, Iraq look toward reconstruction of Fallujah
11/22/2004
Arabic News.com
http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/041122/2004112207.html
The US forces in Iraq are turning their attention to the task of rebuilding Fallujah as the military campaign to oust the city's insurgents winds down. Together, the United States and the Iraqi government have earmarked as much as $100 million for the reconstruction effort, according to Ambassador Bill Taylor of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office.
"We have a commitment to the people of Fallujah -- indeed, to the people of Iraq -- to help them reconstruct their city and their country. We take that commitment very seriously," Taylor told reporters during a November 19 briefing from Baghdad.
He said that the reconstruction will likely begin with infrastructure projects aimed at restoring basic services. Specifically, he identified a need to repair electricity distribution lines, sewage lines and water treatment facilities.
Once basic services are restored, reconstruction efforts will turn to schools, clinics and solid waste management, he said.
Taylor said that reconstruction operations will likely begin within the next week or two depending on when the city is completely cleared of the remaining pockets of insurgents. "The first thing that has to happen is the final military action needs to be completed," he said.
According to Charles Hess of the Iraq Project and Contracting Office, the United States has committed $12.77 billion to reconstruction projects throughout Iraq. Of that money, $8.9 billion is already obligated under contract. Hess, who also spoke at the briefing, said that $1.77 billion has already been disbursed on the 873 construction projects that are currently under way.
Following is the transcript of Taylor and Hess' briefing:
Defense Department Briefing on Progress of Reconstruction Work in Iraq; Plans For Reconstruction in Fallujah
MODERATOR: BRYAN WHITMAN
WHITMAN: Good morning, gentlemen. This is Bryan Whitman from the Pentagon. Can you hear us?
HESS: Yes, we can.
WHITMAN: Good morning. As many of you here in the Pentagon know, the Project and Contracting Office is responsible for implementing nearly two-thirds of the $18.4 billion Iraqi Relief and Reconstruction Fund that was approved by Congress, and so they're a key organization to the success of our mission in Iraq.
And today we are welcoming Charles Hess, who is the director of the Iraq Project and Contracting Office, and Ambassador Bill Taylor, who is the director of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office, for what is going to be one in a series of briefings that we hope to bring you over time periodically. Thanks to Amy Burns for arranging for this one and for subsequent ones that we'll have as we go into the future.
They're also prepared today to discuss a little bit about the reconstruction plans for Fallujah.
They can hear you but they can't see your smiling faces today, so when we get to the questions, if you'd just identify yourself and your organization, that would be helpful for them. They do have a presentation that they're going to make before we get into the questions. And so with that, gentlemen, I'd like to turn it over to you.
HESS: Thank you very much.
This is Charlie Hess. And on behalf of the Army's Project and Contracting Office of the Department of Defense, we're happy to be here this evening to brief the Pentagon press corps from Baghdad.
We're also very pleased, as was indicated, to have Ambassador Bill Taylor of the State Department's Iraq Reconstruction Management Office joining with us tonight.
And again, while our group, PCO, is responsible for the contracting and program project management aspects of the Iraqi Reconstruction and Relief Fund, Ambassador Taylor's group has broad responsibility for identifying the requirements and the priorities as we discussed the last time we briefed, on the 7th of October. Together I think we can give you sort of a comprehensive understanding of where we are today with respect to reconstruction activities.
I know that you all have been actively engaged in covering the events in Fallujah. Many of your colleagues actually have been embedded in the action. We would also like to brief you today on that related subject and to include what's projected to happen in Fallujah as well as give you a broader sense of what's happening with reconstruction efforts in general.
Again, we'd like to give you some indication of what's happened in about the six weeks since we talked the last time, and so I will do that and then I'm going to turn it over to Ambassador Taylor to give you some thoughts and focus on what's happening with respect to Fallujah.
First of all, let me give you some insight into the metrics that we talked about last time, and again, which was briefed to you on the 7th of October. With respect to the money that's been committed of the $18.4 billion, that amount that we talked about last time was about $10.66 billion, that has grown to $12.77 billion today, which is an increase of almost 20 percent, or roughly $2 billion.
Obligations. The amount of money that we're contractually bound, obligated to pay firms is up by over a billion dollars, from $7.7 billion to $8.9 billion, or approximately 15.6 percent.
Additionally, as a point of information, many of those contracts, which were awarded in open -- full and open competition -- many of those have been awarded to Iraqi firms, approximately 4,500 of which are under the management and stewardship of Iraqi-owned firms.
Amount of money that's been disbursed with respect to the program has gone from 1.3 billion (dollars) to approximately 1.77 billion (dollars), which is an increase of nearly half a billion dollars, or 34 percent, since the 7th of October.
And while those financial numbers are, I think, good news, perhaps the more compelling story is the number of construction starts. Right now, since the 7th of October, when we had 703 construction projects under way, we've now increased that number to 873, which is an increase of approximately 24 percent. And we are on target to surpass our goal of having a thousand construction starts by year end, which was outlined to you in our last briefing.
As we've talked previously, security is still a serious challenge. But as we indicated in these metrics, we are still moving forward, and we are still working to achieve our three main goals, which we talked about also at that briefing: one, which was to improve the infrastructure of Iraq; second, to improve Iraqi employment through the use of local Iraqi firms and subcontracting to the maximum extent we can to Iraqi firms; and then, finally, to build capacity within the ministries and within the interim Iraqi government, so that they can in fact do much of this work in the future themselves.
With that as a backdrop, let me turn it over to Ambassador Taylor, who can update you as well and give you some specifics on the situation in Fallujah. Thank you.
TAYLOR: Thank you, Charlie.
On Fallujah, as you know, the successful military operation needs to be followed by an equally successful reconstruction operation. The Marines, who have been doing most of the work along with Army and working very closely with the Iraqi forces, have done a lot of preparation for the reconstruction in Fallujah. They have focused their attention on preparing for humanitarian work. They've pre-positioned a lot of stocks of food and water and medicine. They have been preparing to start up on small reconstruction projects, in particular those that will restore essential services. So people are taking a look and assessing what the problems are with electricity distribution lines, for example, and sewer lines, water treatment in order to get clean water to people. We will then be able to move into the smaller projects of schools and clinics, and then eventually get to the larger projects that will -- that have been planned for some time but have not been able to move forward during the past several months.
This, as I said, is a carefully coordinated program. We are working very closely with the Iraqi government. The Iraqi government has designated a Cabinet minister, Minister Hassani, who is the Minister of Industry and Minerals, to be the lead for the Iraqi government in this reconstruction effort. So he and I have met now two times. Our staffs have gotten together. The ministries of electricity and health and water resources, municipalities have gotten together with our folks in terms of the Marines and the Army, who are going to undertake these efforts, to coordinate that work. They've put up a good amount of money. We have some funds identified that will allow us to move forward on this reconstruction. As I say, this will be as important as the military operation in order to consolidate the victory.
With that, I think we're ready to take your questions.
WHITMAN: All right. Thank you, gentlemen, for that overview.
Let's go ahead and start right here.
Q: This is Will Dunham with Reuters. Gentlemen, can you say how much money is being devoted to Fallujah? When do you think the earliest that some of the projects can begin in earnest?
TAYLOR: We have identified tens of millions of dollars. The government of Iraq has identified tens of millions of dollars. These -- we're still working -- as I indicated earlier, we are working together with them to figure out which projects we should do and which they should do. This could get into the order of a hundred million dollars or so, into Fallujah.
In terms of when, of course, the first thing that has to happen is the final military action needs to be completed. As you know -- as you've seen, there are still some problems there. It's not totally done. I think we are in full control, but there are still pockets of resistance. And there's a lot of booby traps and of other explosives that are around that will inhibit our work.
Some work, however, has already begun. As I say, the Marines have begun some clean-up work themselves. I would imagine within a week or two our projects will be able to be assessed and begun in terms of contracts with local construction firms, that is with Iraqi construction firms there in Fallujah. So within a week or two, again, depending on when the city is cleared of people opposing what we're trying to do, we ought to be able to get the first of these small projects going, as I mentioned earlier.
HESS: (Off mike) -- with Bill's assessment there. Again, our experience in Najaf and Samarra has indicated to us that it takes approximately a week to two weeks. Many of these projects that will be started are in fact projects that were curtailed as a result of the hostilities. We have existing contracts, and it's a matter of just getting those contract entities back in position and getting them started up again. But clearly, we are waiting for our cue from the maneuver commanders to do that.
As an example of some of the projects that will be undertaken in Fallujah, we have a significant amount of money, approximately $8 million, identified for water-supply improvements. We've identified four new schools that will be constructed for a total of about $4 million. We'll be buying new solid-waste equipment, garbage trucks, so that they have some continuing means of debris and trash removal, along with many other projects. So those are the kinds of things that are in the portfolio.
Q: Briefly, the $100 million figure that you mentioned, that is a combination of U.S. money and Iraqi money?
HESS: That's correct.
WHITMAN: Pam, go ahead.
Q: Gentlemen, this is Pam Hess with UPI. Mr. Hess, I don't think we're related. (Laughter.) I have two questions for you. The first one is on that $100 million. That's money that was allocated before this battle. How much more do you think Fallujah is going to take to reconstruct, because that money was already on the books before at least 250 buildings were destroyed.
My second question is longer term. One of the problems that you have had throughout Iraq, but especially in Fallujah, is that there's not really a strong local economy. And it is our understanding from what you all have told us that the insurgency was a large part of that economy -- people were getting paid to take potshots at U.S. forces; paid to lay bombs. What are you going to do long-term for the economy there to make sure that Fallujans have actual jobs even after the initial money is spent from reconstruction, because obviously there will be an uptick in local employment for a while?
HESS: Let me start with the first question. And again, I think that addresses the issue of what needs to be done and how do we address those needs.
The reality is, we have teams of people, along with the civil/military operations folks, in Fallujah. They've been there for probably the last week to 10 days, assessing what needs to be done. And those -- frankly, those assessments will continue as more and more of the city becomes available for us to evaluate. So consequently, our estimates and our evaluation of what needs to be done will change, very likely, across the upcoming days.
Again, many of the projects that we've -- we have in our original portfolio are the kinds of things that you would need in any event -- again, improvements to the water system, power lines to certain neighborhoods, water pumping stations and so forth.
But in addition to that, we'll be certainly looking at damage. And again, one of the elements of this sort of portfolio that we're pulling together -- it's not just what's in the existing IRRF program, but it's also monies that had been allocated to the maneuver commanders and the Commanders' Emergency Response Program. So between that, the money that the Iraqi -- interim Iraqi government is going to be allocating for Fallujah, again, we will try and make the best match of projects and fill in the gaps with the money that's also coming in from other sources.
TAYLOR: Exactly right. That hundred million, as we said before, is both U.S. and Iraqi funds. And so none of the Iraqi funds were scheduled to go in there before the fighting. So those -- all of those are new.
As Charlie indicates, some of the more mobile programs, such as the CERP, the Commanders' Emergency Relief Program funds that the maneuver commanders have, but also USAID has similarly mobile funds under a program run by the Office of Transition Initiatives, OTI, in USAID -- and those you can move, and those have been increased. Both the CERP and the OTI funds have been increased, along with the Iraqi funds. They're a significant amount of new money going in, in addition to the current plans.
On the longer-term question, you're of course exactly right. In the long term, the economy needs to grow. People need to go back to work in jobs there -- Fallujah was known, has been known for some time as the center or a center of construction jobs and construction firms. So it has a base, it has an economic base that needs to be rebuilt because there is damage to the city, but that's the kind of program -- the