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NUCLEAR
Nuclear Deception Enters Its 60th Year
Australia accused of double standards as anti-proliferation meeting starts
British Energy to delay rescue as court date looms
Guangdong plans nuclear plant No 4 to stem shortage
India launches second missile test
Bush Says Iran Must Go Beyond Nuclear Suspension
Nuclear Agency Praises Iran IAEA Supports Arms Pact, Won't Seek Sanctions
UN action frustrates U.S. on Iran
UN to issue alert over spread of nuclear arms
Domenici: Measure Would Ensure Nuclear Waste's Removal
Nuclear lobbyists won't fight Yucca ruling
MILITARY
Fallujah: America's Halabja
U.S. a No-Show At International Anti-Landmine Conference
Iraq's Neighbors Prepare to Meet in Iran
Black Sea Intrigue
Defense, CIA vie for power
U.N. Calls for an Updated Council
Annan Says He Wasn't Aware of Son's Deal With Swiss Firm
Red Cross Finds Detainees Intentionally Tortured in Guantanamo
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
U.S. Loses Ruling Over College Bans on Military Recruiters
High Court Not Receptive to Marijuana Case
New DEA Statement Has Pain
Tom Ridge Steps Down as Chief of Homeland Security Dept.
POLITICS
Author attacks White House "Gestapo tactics"
Officials recant claim about plot to kill Bush
Grassley Defends Whistle-Blower Senator Asks FDA Not to Retaliate
Gutierrez Is Pick for Commerce Secretary Bush's Nominee Runs Kellogg Co.
Civil rights leaders urge close study of Gonzales
Recount Effort Is Expanded to New Mexico and Nevada
New Ohio Vote Tallies Question Legitimacy of Election
ENERGY
Project to Develop Nuclear Fission Hydrogen Production
WWF Wants Power Companies to Make More Efforts on Renewable Energy
Cape Wind Energy Hearing Open to Public Comments
Under All That Ice, Maybe Oil
UK Power Network Charges to Rise 1% in 2005
OTHER
Federal Tests Find Rocket Fuel Toxic in Milk, Lettuce
Rocket Fuel Chemical Found in Lettuce From Ariz., Organic Milk From Md.
At Least 55 Whales Die in New Zealand Mass Stranding, Officials Say
Twenty Years Later, Bhopal Toxic Disaster Drags On
Birdflu Far More Deadly than SARS, WHO Says
Sale of Homeless Shelter Tabled
ACTIVISTS
Secret Service Not Coddling Hecklers
Demonstrators Greet Bush in Canada
Burma Extends Suu Kyi's Detention
City of Portland to pay $300,000 in protest settlement
-------- NUCLEAR
Nuclear Deception Enters Its 60th Year
November 30, 2004
by Norman Solomon
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/solomon.php?articleid=4080
Top officials in Washington are now promoting jitters about Iran's nuclear activities, while media outlets amplify the message. A confrontation with Tehran is on the second-term Bush agenda. So, we're encouraged to obliquely think about the unthinkable.
But no one can get very far trying to comprehend the enormity of nuclear weapons. They've shadowed human consciousness for six decades. From the outset, deception has been key.
Lies from the White House have been part of the nuclear rationalizing process ever since August 1945. President Harry Truman spoke to the American public three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Calling the civilian-filled Japanese city a "military base," Truman said: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."
Actually, U.S. planners had sought a large urban area for the nuclear cross hairs because - as Manhattan Project director Gen. Leslie Groves later acknowledged - it was "desirable that the first target be of such size that the damage would be confined within it, so that we could more definitely determine the power of the bomb." Thirty-five years later, when I looked at the U.S. Energy Department's official roster of "Announced United States Nuclear Tests," the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were on the list.
We're now six decades into the Nuclear Age. And we're farther than ever, it seems, from a momentously difficult truth that Albert Einstein uttered during its first years, when the U.S. government still held a monopoly on the split atom. "This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms," he wrote. "For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world."
Today, no phrase could better describe U.S. foreign policies - or American media coverage - than "narrow nationalisms." The officials keep putting on a proudly jingoistic show, and journalists report it without fundamental challenge.
So, any whiff of sanity is conspicuous. Just before Thanksgiving, when the House and Senate voted to cut funding of research for a new line of tactical nuclear weapons including "bunker buster" warheads, the decision was reported as the most significant victory for arms-control advocates since the early 1990s. That's because the nuclear-weapons industry has been running amok for so long.
While Uncle Sam continues to maintain a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying life on Earth, the American finger-wagging at Iran is something righteous to behold.
Current alarms, wailing about an alleged Iranian program to develop nuclear weapons, are being set off by the same Bush administration officials who declared that an invasion of Iraq was imperative because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. As we now know, he didn't. But that hasn't stopped the Bush team from launching the same kind of media campaign against Iran - based on unverified claims by Iranian exiles with a track record of inaccuracy and a clear motive to pull Washington into military action. Sound familiar?
We ought to be able to recognize what's wrong with U.S. officials who lecture Iran about the evils of nuclear-arms proliferation while winking at Israel's arsenal, estimated to include 200 nuclear weapons.
When Einstein called for "the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world," he was describing a need that news media ought to help fill. But instead, mostly we get the official stories: dumbed-down, simplistic, and - yes - narrowly nationalistic. The themes are those of Washington's powerful: our nukes good, our allies' nukes pretty good, unauthorized nukes very bad.
That sort of propaganda drumbeat won't be convincing to people who doubt that a Christian Bomb is good and a Jewish Bomb is good but an Islamic Bomb is bad. You don't have to be an Einstein to understand that people are rarely persuaded by hypocritical messages along the lines of "Do as we say, not as we do."
-------- australia
Australia accused of double standards as anti-proliferation meeting starts
(AFP)
Nov 30, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1530&ncid=733&e=3&u=/afp/20041130/wl_asia_afp/australia_us_weapons_proliferation
SYDNEY - Australia may have "innocently" exported nuclear technology to parties with weapons of mass destruction programs, Defence Minister Robert Hill said on the sidelines of an anti-proliferation forum.
As environmental lobby Greenpeace accused Australia of double standards over nuclear proliferation, Hill urged all Southeast Asian nations to closely monitor their exports of what he called "dual-use" goods.
Hill did not specify whether the material in question may have gone to government or non-government bodies, and said he had no reports of such products being obtained by terrorist organisations.
He described the goods as "nuclear-area technologies that can have legitimate non-threatening value, but at the same time can be used within a nuclear weapons program".
"They can be exported quite innocently and there have been suggestions that some may have been exported from Australia innocently that have been used within WMD, at least research programs," he told reporters after addressing an international meeting of the US-backed Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI).
The minister was responding to a report by Greenpeace accusing the government of supporting a company known as Silex Systems Ltd. in its research of laser-based uranium enrichment.
Greenpeace said the program could inadvertently help the spread of nuclear weapons.
Hill declined to comment specifically on Silex, which occupies floorspace of the government-funded Australian Nuclear Science Technology Organisation (ANSTO) at the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney.
Greenpeace campaigner James Courtney said the government's support set a "dangerous double standard that erodes international efforts to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons-related technology."
Courtney called on the government to set an example to the rest of the world by ending research into sensitive nuclear technologies that posed proliferation risks.
"Our government is currently pressuring Iran to abandon its enrichment program and went to war to stop Iraq (news - web sites) from developing this type of technology," he said.
Hill described Australia's system for monitoring exports as "quite sophisticated".
"Any company that is exporting a dual-use or potential dual-use technology from Australia that falls within the definitions within our legislation requires export approval and we examine that very carefully," he said.
"We look at the record of the intended recipient, the state and company or institution that's receiving those technologies, and sometimes we give guidance to the company.
"Sometimes under our legislation we simply advise them that the export will not be permitted."
Hill also told delegates from 19 countries attending talks by the US-backed Proliferation Security Initiative in Sydney: "We would like to see our efforts in that regard reciprocated by all states within our region."
Australia's Greens said they intended to ask questions in parliament about Silex's activities, saying its research could inadvertantly help the spread of nuclear weapons.
-------- britain
British Energy to delay rescue as court date looms
(Reuters)
By Gerard Wynn
Nov 30, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=TRLH5CY2FTMXSCRBAELCFEY?type=topNews&storyID=6953249&pageNumber=1
LONDON, Nov 30 - Nuclear power firm British Energy is seeking creditor approval to push a rescue deadline to March 2005 from January as it prepares to battle potential objections to its proposed 1 billion pound ($1.9 billion) debt-for-equity swap.
Britain's biggest power producer is groaning underneath total liabilities of 5.8 billion pounds at Aug. 30, against assets of 2.6 billion, and wants to wipe 1 billion pounds of bond and bank debt off its balance sheet through the debt-for-equity swap.
The company has got European Commission approval and agreement with major stakeholders to meet a Jan. 31 deadline to complete the rescue, but it wants to extend the deadline to March 31.
British Energy still needs court approval, which requires an open hearing that would give shareholders an opportunity to lodge objections.
"We plan to implement the restructuring by end-January, but want an extension put in place in case any unforeseen circumstances arise," a BE spokesman said.
The company must have court approval on Jan. 14, and the extension would allow for a broader debate in court after Jan. 14, Chief Executive Mike Alexander said.
"The process is an open process," he said. "The court decides whether the (rescue) scheme is well supported."
British Energy has already fought off minority shareholder Polygon, which claimed that the restructuring was biased in favour of bondholders over shareholders. The company de-listed its shares last month to fend off Polygon.
British Energy bonds traded at 235 percent of face value on Tuesday, one debt trader said.
Alexander told a conference call he expected to pay adviser fees of 104 million pounds if the company completed the rescue by January.
INSOLVENCY PROCEEDINGS
British Energy has already obtained approval for extending the deadline from the UK government -- which underwrites the firm's 5 billion pounds in nuclear liabilities -- and is hoping to get approval from creditors by the end of the week, Alexander said.
The power generator, which provides about a fifth of the UK's electricity, warned on Tuesday that if it did not get approval for the extension and did not complete its restructuring by Jan. 31, then it would have to commence insolvency proceedings.
The firm said that shareholders and bondholders would get a vote on the rescue plan on Dec. 22. It is proposing that creditors get 97.5 percent of the new shares and shareholders get the rest plus warrants for a further 5 percent.
If shareholders do not approve the plan, the company is proposing a so-called disposal route. It would transfer all its assets and liabilities into a new company, which would then re-list. Under that scenario shareholders might not get anything.
Alexander said the firm would consider a share dividend in March 2007 and was planning 250 million pounds a year on plant investment. British Energy nearly collapsed two years ago after weak power prices forced its high-cost operations towards insolvency.
-------- china
Guangdong plans nuclear plant No 4 to stem shortage
Pamela Pun - pamela.pun@globalchina.com
November 30, 2004
Hong Kong Standard
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/stdn/std/China/FK30Ad03.html
Guangdong plans to build a fourth nuclear power plant as pressure for energy from the fast-growing economy surges and to reduce the environmental havoc wrought by its fossil fuel power plants.
The government has begun a preliminary feasibility study for potential coastal sites in Huilai county or Lufeng city, according to the Guangzhou Daily.
Two weeks ago, more than 40 nuclear experts from the central and provincial governments descended on four prospective sites to assess transportation, geological, hydrological and environmental conditions.
The sites under consideration are Wuyu in Huilai county, and Jiadong, Haijia and Tianwei in Lufeng city.
According to the newspaper, the experts agreed that all four sites were suitable but more studies were required.
The report gave no details of size, cost or when construction might start.
Guangdong has two nuclear plants in operation, both located in Shenzhen's Daya Bay, with a third approved for Yangjiang city where construction is due to begin in 2006.
Work on the original Daya Bay plant began in 1987 and was completed in 1994 at a cost of US$4 billion (HK$31.2 billion). During the past decade, it has generated 15 billion kilowatt-hours per year on average, of which Hong Kong's CLP Power buys 70 per cent.
In 1995, construction began on the nearby Lingan plant. Two of its four, one million-kilowatt generators now are operational.
The third nuclear power station in Yangjiang will be larger than its predecessors, with six, one million-kw generators. At an estimated cost of US$8 billion, it is China's most ambitious nuclear power project yet.
Nuclear plants supply 13 per cent of Guangdong's electricity, a much higher proportion than in the rest of the country. It is estimated that by the time its fourth plant is completed, the province will account for half of China's nuclear generating capacity.
With a view to both economic growth and environmental protection, Guangdong has compelling reasons to concentrate on cleaner energy sources like nuclear power.
Since 2001, power shortages in the province have worsened, frightening away many potential domestic and foreign investors from the booming Pearl River Delta.
The province pays a heavy price for its reliance on imported coal and crude oil for power generation. Not only are fuels costs hovering near record levels, but pollution is blighting the environment. Acid rain affects 70 per cent of the province, entailing estimated economic losses of four billion yuan (HK$3.76 billion) a year.
Each year Daya Bay produces electricity equivalent to that generated by burning six million tonnes of coal, the Guangzhou Daily said.
China's first nuclear power plant in Qinshan, Zhejiang province, went into operation in 1991. However, as of July the country's nine nuclear power plants accounted for just 1.7 per cent of the country's electricity.
-------- india / pakistan
India launches second missile test
Reuters
November 30, 2004
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200411/s1255106.htm
India has successfully tested a short-range, surface-to-air missile from a mobile launcher in the second such test in four days, a Defence Ministry official says.
The test of the Akash missile off the eastern seaboard comes a day after neighbour and rival Pakistan tested a nuclear-capable ballistic missile.
"We have test-fired the Akash and the missile hit its intended target," the official said, offering no further details.
The missile, which can hit targets up to 25 kilometres away and carry a payload of 55 kilograms, was also test-fired on Friday.
On Monday, Pakistan tested its surface-to-surface missile Hatf-111 Ghaznavi, which has a range of 290 kilometres.
The Indian official says the Akash test had been planned earlier and is not in response to the launch of the Pakistani missile.
Nuclear rivals India and Pakistan came to the brink of war in 2002, but tensions have since eased.
Both sides, who normally notify each other ahead of missile tests, are developing a range of missiles, including some capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
-------- iran
Bush Says Iran Must Go Beyond Nuclear Suspension
(Reuters)
Nov 30, 2004 http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20041130/pl_nm/iran_nuclear_bush_dc_3
OTTAWA - President Bush on Tuesday welcomed a decision by Iran to freeze sensitive nuclear activities but said that was not the final step and the Islamic republic needed to go further to show its commitment to abandoning nuclear weapons ambitions.
"The Iranians agreed to suspend but not terminate their nuclear weapons program. Our position is that they ought to terminate their nuclear weapons program," Bush said during a joint news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin.
In his first public comments on Iran since the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency on Monday passed a resolution approving Iran's week-old suspension of sensitive nuclear activities, Bush said Iran had "obviously got more work to do."
The passage of the resolution by the International Atomic Energy Agency allowed Iran to escape censure over its nuclear program.
Bush reiterated U.S. demands that the suspension must be verifiable.
"I viewed yesterday's decision by the Iranians as a positive step, but it is certainly not the final step and it is very important for whatever they do to make sure that the world is able to verify the decision they have made," Bush said.
"It is taking a long time to get to the stage where Iran is willing to suspend," he added.
-----
Nuclear Agency Praises Iran IAEA Supports Arms Pact, Won't Seek Sanctions
Washington Post
By Dafna Linzer
November 30, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19565-2004Nov29.html
The International Atomic Energy Agency praised Iran yesterday for suspending its uranium-enrichment work and removed an immediate threat of sanctions against the Islamic republic, which built its program in secret over 18 years.
The resolution endorses an agreement Iran struck with Britain, France and Germany two weeks ago to suspend its nuclear activity in exchange for assurances that it will not be referred to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions.
The European trio began negotiating with Iran a year ago in the hope of slowing its nuclear advances and convincing Washington the issue could be solved through diplomacy. Iran has maintained that its nuclear program was for producing energy, but others have suspected that it could be diverted to making weapons.
The passage of the resolution marked a new chapter for the Islamic republic, despite the questions about its nuclear ambitions, and made it clear there was little international support for the Bush administration's drive to ratchet up diplomatic pressure against Iran.
The Bush administration did not block the IAEA resolution but criticized it afterward and said for the first time that it is willing to take Iran to the Security Council on its own.
Meanwhile, Iran's leaders claimed the resolution as a diplomatic victory, while U.S. officials expressed disappointment the international community did not take a harder line.
Diplomats and nuclear experts said the resolution dramatically alters the way Iran will now be judged by the international community and could make it easier for the United States to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council if it violates the suspension, officials and nuclear experts said.
"This is really a win-win situation for the administration," said Robert Einhorn, who was assistant secretary for nonproliferation policy at the State Department from November 1999 to August 2001.
"Iran's nuclear progress is impeded as long as it keeps up the suspension, and if they are seen as breaking the pledge, the administration can claim that as a way to take it to the council," Einhorn said.
Iran is legally entitled to enrich uranium to fuel nuclear power reactors, but the same process can be used to make the key ingredient of an atomic bomb. The Tehran government is agreeing -- for the moment -- to do neither. But it is also preserving the capacity to reverse that decision at will.
U.S. policymakers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they would now turn their attention to negotiations Iran will hold with Britain, France and Germany. The European countries want the talks to produce a commitment from Iran to give up its nuclear programs. But Iranian officials say they are determined to hold on to their right to develop a nuclear program that could produce a stable energy source.
The White House, convinced that Iran's true intention is to build nuclear weapons, has been skeptical of the new diplomatic track that led to Iran's current suspension deal. But it is taking a wait-and-see approach, U.S. officials said, convinced the negotiations will fall apart within months.
The agreement was negotiated over U.S. objections, and the Bush administration has taken the role of bystander, neither participating in nor supporting the initiative.
For two years, the White House has pushed for tougher diplomatic moves against a country that President Bush once said was a member of an "axis of evil," along with North Korea and Iraq.
------
UN action frustrates U.S. on Iran
The New York Times
By Elaine Sciolino
November 30, 2004
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2004/11/29/news/nuke.html
VIENNA In a defeat for the Bush administration, the 35 countries of the United Nations nuclear agency board adopted a mildly worded resolution Monday welcoming Iran's freeze of a sensitive part of its nuclear program.
The resolution, approved by consensus without a vote, means that Iran once again has thwarted the Bush administration's goal of getting the international board to bring Iran before the Security Council for possible censure or even sanctions.
It also rescues an agreement reached earlier this month between Iran on one side and Britain, France and Germany on the other that requires the Islamic republic to suspend all uranium enrichment activities, opening the way for negotiations of possible rewards for Iran to begin, as scheduled, in mid-December.
The United States went along with its fellow board members on the International Atomic Energy Agency, then vented its rage. In a nine-page statement delivered to a closed-door session after the resolution passed, Jackie Wolcott Sanders, head of the American delegation, accused Iran of deceit and the agency board of irresponsibility.
She charged that Iran's assertion it wants to produce nuclear energy, not bombs, was untrue and that Iran had a clandestine program that "poses a growing threat to international peace and security." She also argued more than once that the board had a "statutory obligation" to recommend consequences for Iran in the Security Council, adding that the United States could bring Iran before the council unilaterally.
"The United States reserves all its options with respect to Security Council consideration of the Iranian nuclear weapons program," Sanders said.
A White House spokesman said the agreement was welcome but "what's important and critical now is the implementation and verification" to show whether enrichment and reprocessing activities have in fact stopped.
"We will see over time if Iran is firmly committed to complying fully with its commitments," said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman. In the event of violations, he said, "then that matter will be reported back to the IAEA members to consider additional action."
The UN agency board "welcomes the fact that Iran has decided to continue and extend its suspension of all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities," the resolution stated.
The suspension "is a voluntary confidence-building measure, not a legal obligation," it added.
The resolution also noted Iran's right to develop peaceful nuclear energy programs, although it criticized Iran for failing to cooperate fully with the agency and leaves open the possibility that Iran has an "undeclared" nuclear program that could be used to make nuclear weapons.
Throughout the complicated, confusing diplomatic brinksmanship of the last several days, the Bush administration found itself isolated, even from some of its closest European allies.
Britain, France and Germany, who led the negotiations on the resolution, were eager to salvage their hard-fought agreement.
They negotiated hard with the Iranians and finally persuaded them on Sunday to back off a demand that 20 sophisticated centrifuge machines be exempted from the agreement.
In exchange, the Europeans accepted Iranian demands that the resolution be watered down to reflect Iran's insistence that it was freezing its programs as a voluntary, confidence-building measure and not because of outside pressure or coercion.
The face-saving solution for both sides was celebrated with Champagne on Sunday night at the residence of France's ambassador to the agency, a participant said. The Iranians drank water.
Unlike the Security Council, the agency has a tradition of passing resolutions by consensus, with all 35 countries on the board agreeing to the language and approving it in closed session.
The dispute over Iran's nuclear program coincides with brutal political battles at home as Iran's presidential campaign has begun, even though the vote is six months away. There also is deep hostility in Iran to any effort from outside the country to limit what Iranians consider their sovereign right to develop a nuclear energy program.
But the fact that negotiations have been so messy and Iran's position so fluid raises another possibility: That there is a resistance among some factions in Iran to any negotiation and that the agreement ultimately may lead to improved relations with the West.
In Tehran on Monday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader and the most powerful official in the country, said that Iran would proceed with its nuclear program in defiance of the United States.
"The people and the officials are not afraid of the political threats made by powers in the service of oppression," the state-run television quoted Khamenei as saying. "Iran will never abandon its nuclear program. That is our red line."
President Mohammed Khatami, meanwhile, praised the resolution as a victory for the Islamic Republic.
"This resolution which was approved by the IAEA was a definite defeat for our enemies who wanted to pressure Iran by sending its case to the United Nations Security Council," the state-run radio quoted Khatami as saying.
Even Monday, Hossein Mousavian, the head of the Iranian delegation, refused to say that Iran had agreed to shut off the 20 machines, saying that his country merely agreed in a letter to stop all testing.
Asked by reporters whether the centrifuges would continue to spin, he said, "These are technical issues which I really don't know."
But Mohamed ElBaradei, who heads the Vienna-based agency, told reporters that the machines had stopped and had been put under surveillance.
"This is clearly a first step in the right direction," ElBaradei said. "It will help mitigate international concern about the nature of Iran's program and over time should help to build confidence with regard to Iran's nuclear program."
-------- u.n.
UN to issue alert over spread of nuclear arms
By Mark Turner at the United Nations
November 30 2004
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/2ecedea6-4260-11d9-8e3c-00000e2511c8,ft_acl=,s01=2.html
The world system to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons is being rapidly eroded, threatening a "cascade of proliferation," a high-level panel on UN reform will say this week.
The report, due to be released on Thursday, will recommend the UN Security Council slow the spread of weapons using an explicit pledge of "collective action" against any state or group that launches a nuclear attack or even threatens such an attack on a non-nuclear-weapon state.
Kofi Annan, UN secretarygeneral, last year established a panel of 16 veteran politicians and diplomats from around the world to identify the main threats facing mankind. It identifies nuclear proliferation as a particular danger and it warns: "The nuclear proliferation regime is at risk because of lack of compliance with existing commitments, a changing international security environment, and radical advances in technology.
"We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the nuclear regime could become irreversible, and result in a cascade of proliferation." In 1963, only four states had nuclear arsenals. Today eight states are known to have one, and several others are suspected of developing them. Close to 60 states operate or are building nuclear power or research reactors, and at least 30 possess the infrastructure to build nuclear weapons at relatively short notice. Terrorists are also believed to be seeking them.
To help prevent secret weapons programmes, the panel will also urge all countries to stop building enrichment or reprocessing facilities, until a global scheme is designed to enable the International Atomic Energy Agency to guarantee the supply of fissile material to genuine "civil nuclear users".
The panel examined a wide range of threats, including terrorism, disease, poverty and environmental degradation. But the risk of nuclear Armageddon may be the most pressing of all, and has led to growing disagreement over how to tackle nuclear advances in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.
It argues that nuclear weapons states "must honour their commitments to move towards disarmament", and reaffirm promises not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. The Security Council pledge for "collective action" could help ease non-nuclear states' concerns.
All de facto nuclear states, including Israel, Pakistan and India (which are not named), should "pledge a commitment to non-proliferation and disarmament", ratify the comprehensive test-ban treaty and support talks on a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty. In order to reduce supply, the panel says the IAEA's additional protocol should become the standard, and urges a new system whereby peaceful nuclear technology users could be guaranteed fissile material although the right to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes "must be preserved."
In a possible bow to Washington, it also calls on "all states" to join the US-led Proliferation Security Initiative, with UN Security Council backing.
-------- us nuc waste
Domenici: Measure Would Ensure Nuclear Waste's Removal
The Associated Press
November 30, 2004
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/state/apdomen11-30-04.htm
SANTA FE - U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici says a measure he sponsored will ensure that waste from a proposed nuclear fuel factory near Eunice is sent outside of New Mexico.
Gov. Bill Richardson last week questioned the adequacy of the measure, which Domenici, R-N.M., added to a massive spending bill approved by Congress.
Domenici, who supports the uranium enrichment facility, said Monday he's confident no radioactive waste that the plant generates will remain in New Mexico.
Louisiana Energy Services has proposed building a $1.2 billion National Enrichment Facility five miles east of Eunice. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must license the plant, is considering LES's application.
New Mexico officials are concerned about waste since the uranium enrichment process - which produces fuel for nuclear reactors - generates a type of waste that can't be dumped anywhere in the United States.
LES has said it is holding discussions with companies to build a deconversion facility that could treat the waste, but currently one does not exist.
Richardson, along with citizens' groups that oppose the plant, contend Domenici's provision could be construed to allow radioactive waste to remain in the state.
Domenici said he's committed to working with the state and LES to include additional provisions in the plant's federal license to specify no waste will remain in the state.
"We are working on language that will be in the license that will make it legally binding," he said.
Domenici's provision would give LES a backstop if a private deconversion facility is not built. The provision would require the U.S. Department of Energy "to take title to and possession of such depleted uranium at an existing . . . storage facility."
Spokesmen for two national watchdog groups, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service and Public Citizen, said they believe that could allow waste to stay in New Mexico. They said it's possible a federal storage facility could be built in the state for the waste.
They also question the word "existing" in the provision, contending it could mean the LES site itself becomes a storage facility simply by having waste on site.
Richardson said last week that while he appreciated Domenici's efforts to specify wastes will be removed, the language was inadequate. However, he added: "Senator Domenici and the state of New Mexico will work together to get an agreement with the company to incorporate language that makes sure the waste is removed from New Mexico in a timely fashion into the license for the facility."
Alex Flint, staff director of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said existing storage facilities for depleted uranium are in Ohio and Kentucky, and the provision requiring the DOE to take possession of waste from the LES plant will require waste to be taken to one of those sites. He said LES attorneys agree with that interpretation.
-----
Nuclear lobbyists won't fight Yucca ruling
Las Vegas Review-Journal
By STEVE TETREAULT
November 30, 2004
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Nov-30-Tue-2004/news/25370796.html
WASHINGTON -- The Nuclear Energy Institute has decided to drop its fight against a federal court ruling that has handicapped plans for a Nevada nuclear waste repository.
Attorneys for the trade association will not ask the Supreme Court to review a repository health standard that was thrown out on July 9 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a spokesman said Monday.
NEI spokesman Mitch Singer said the group's lawyers concluded chances were slim the Supreme Court justices would have agreed to hear the case.
The odds increased further, Singer said, when the U.S. Solicitor General's office announced in October the government had no interest in joining any appeal.
NEI attorneys "thought the odds would be pretty long, especially without the participation of the government," Singer said.
The NEI decision appeared to close the book on a suite of lawsuits that were filed in 2001 and 2002 challenging government decisions to proceed with nuclear waste burial at Yucca Mountain.
The state of Nevada and environmental organizations challenged actions by the Energy Department, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House to further the project. The Nuclear Energy Institute also filed a lawsuit against the EPA.
Ruling in July, a three-judge panel upheld many segments of the nuclear waste effort. But it threw the Yucca project into uncertainty by one decision voiding a 10,000-year radiation protection standard for the site.
The judges said EPA did not follow a National Academy of Sciences recommendation that radiation protections should be in place for thousands of years longer.
EPA officials have said they plan to develop new radiation standards to respond to the court's criticism.
However, EPA has not indicated how long it could take to write new rules and formalize them through a public review process. Some experts have said that could take several years at least, potentially keeping the Yucca program in limbo that long.
DOE officials announced last week they were postponing a year-end goal to complete a repository license application, in part because of uncertainty over the radiation standard.
Another option is for Congress to intervene and reinstate the radiation standards that were voided by the federal court, or set new standards itself.
Singer said NEI has not decided yet whether to lobby Congress to reinstate the 10,000-year standard.
-------- MILITARY
-------- iraq
Fallujah: America's Halabja
By Yamin Zakaria
Al-Jazeerah,
November 30 ,2004
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2004%20opinions/November/30%20o/Fallujah%20America's%20Halabja%20By%20Yamin%20Zakaria.htm
"People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election."
(Otto Von Bismarck - Prussian Prime Minister 1815 -1898)
Indeed corporate driven wars of Capitalist nations and elections share the trait of 'deception'. This is expected as elections are the usual means to get into the driving seat to prosecute wars. Wars are primarily driven by corporate interests diluted with chauvinistic nationalism concealed by lofty slogans. However, why the need to conceal the true motives and deceive its own masses? Because, it is the ordinary citizens that always pays the price by getting used as Cannon Fodder.
Michael Moore vividly demonstrated this in his documentary (Fahrenheit 9/11) when he tried to get the members of Congress to enlist their sons and daughters in the war, none showed any interest in their children being used as Cannon Fodder. To date only one member of Congress has a child serving in Iraq. Instead, the corporate machinery happily recruit and send the underprivileged Afro-Americans and Hispanic kids along with Green Card applicants like it was done during the Vietnam war. Iraq was no different, governed by a handful of self-serving elites with the Western inspired secular Ba'athist ideology. The leading Generals and the elites either betrayed or simply capitulated leaving the ordinary soldiers and the defenseless civilians to face the American onslaught.
The lies generated to deceive the masses can be subtle like some of the media spins that are regularly generated, often with help from the pro-Zionist camps but they can also be stark and stupid, as for example George W. Bush said:
"Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction." (George W. Bush)
I am sure many are laughing whilst others are scratching their heads, asking, what is this man really saying? This type of idiotic claims is not uncommon. Recently one right-wing Christian fundamentalist alleged that most of the college professors are communists, her reasons for coming to such conclusion is based on their anti-War stance. The most educated sections of the American society are perhaps facing an uphill struggle to enlighten these close-minded and brainwashed citizens. Instead, they prefer to listen to the 'wisdom' of George W. Bush, who talks to God and frequently claims that God is on his side. This all sounds like the mindset of medieval Europe operating in the heart of the free world.
Bush has already implied many times that nations that are not approved by the US are not 'free', therefore, was it Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan or Syria that invented Nuclear, Biological and Chemical weapons? On the contrary, it was the free nations that have invented these weapons of mass destruction and are constantly enhancing them. The US military budget for research and development is larger than many nations GDP put together. The so-called 'free' nations are the ones who have used them against civilians and have the largest stockpile and make the most profit through their lucrative arms industry in the business of genocide and destruction.
In the case of Iraq, what is so unusual is that the lies used to prosecute the war and deceive the masses have turned out to be self-incriminating as the following points will demonstrate and jog some memory.
WMD -
Iraq was invaded under the pretext of removing its alleged WMDs, but now we know for certain that the only WMD found in Iraq was that used by the Americans, literally or its equivalent; for example when we witnessed the initial "Shock and Awe" campaign reported by the Fox-TV crew with big smiles on their faces. Furthermore, many independent reports are emerging from Fallujah pointing to the use of Chemical weapons by the US forces.
Human Rights Violation -
The propaganda machine amplified Saddam's violation of human rights after failing to find WMDs. However, the US was already complicit with Saddam Hussein back in the 80s. Then the shameless treatment and incarcerations of the captives in Ca! mp-X-Ray. Eventually, the US was caught red-handed softening up prisoners like Saddam Hussein's regime in Abu-Ghraib. There are also video clips showing US soldiers killing civilians on the streets and executing wounded Iraqis. Such examples are clear violation of basic human rights that the US constantly preaches about and certainly dwarfs Saddam Hussein's track record.
Mass Graves -
Saddam's mass graves have so far turned out to be around 5,000 from the prewar hype of hundreds of thousands to millions. This has been easily surpassed by the US made mass graves in Fallujah alone; the total number of victims estimated for the entire war is around 40,000 to 100,000. This is excluding the mass graves generated by the US led sanctions and its wanton massacre of the Iraqis retreating on the road to Basra in 1991.
Executions -
The prewar propaganda of Saddam's evil executioners was replaced with the corporate style grotesque monsters called 'civilian' contractors. They were behaving worse than animals, and led to the just Iraqi retribution by killing and mutilating the four contractors back in April 2004. The result was unsatisfactory as those 'contractors' should have been tortured to death slowly as they were doing to the Iraqis inside Abu-Ghraib and other US-run prisons.
Dictators -
After having a convenient amnesia about Saddam's American origin, as the CIA agent Geoffrey Kemp said "Saddam was a son of a bitch but he was our son of a bitch", the US installed another Dictator who has already proven to be just as ruthless after failing with a Ahmed Chalabi who was a known criminal. Iyad Alawi personally executed six prisoners by shooting them at close range. He then gave the recent 'fatwa' permitting his National Guards infested with Kurdish bandits from the Peshmergas (or Pesh-Muggers) tribe to take the women of Fallujah as booty, i.e. legalizing rape!
Oil -
Despite the early denials, the world saw through the real reasons for the enthusiasm displayed by the US to 'save' the poor Iraqis from Saddam. No such enthusiasm was ever exhibited for the Rwandans, apartheid South Africa and the long suffering Palestinians. The oil ministries were never bombed unlike the other civilian facilities in Iraq. After the oil revenues were seized, contracts awarded without bid to the well-connected Cheney-Halliburton and billions of oil revenue went 'missing'. Even the shameless theft from Iraqi household was taking place as one Iraqi old woman cried on TV, stating that the US soldiers stole her money, which she saved up to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Occupation -
The primary pretexts of Saddam and WMDs are no longer there so what is the reason for the continuing occupation. Those lying pro-war prostitutes within are silent as when they vociferously, cunningly and even naively urged the US to bomb Iraq to save it from Saddam! As if the US is a charitable institution! Have they not seen the language deployed by the US intelligentsia towards the Arabs? They are described as rag-heads, sand-niggers, camel-humpers, goat-humpers.
Democracy -
Election and George Bush has always been controversial! It would have been nice to see genuine free elections inside the US that are not fixed in advance by the corporate lobbies. Many of the able leaders in Iraq that did not comply with the US interests are being systematically targeted. The calls for elections were resisted from the onset, Rumsfeld and Bremer stated that elections would be permitted as long as an Islamic government was not produced. So there you go 'democracy' i.e. "rule of the Iraqis by the Iraqis for the Corporate-Americans" Now the desperate attempts to hold elections in January under occupation will be no different to the elections held under Saddam; simultaneously it will provide a good exit opportunity for the US forces, giving pseudo independence to Iraq.
Halabja Syndrome (War Crimes) -
Another prewar hype was resurrecting the 15 year old event at Halabja at the time the US was the chief supplier to Saddam Hussein. The alleged gassing of the Kurds by Saddam Hussein is disputed by the CIA itself. But, even if we assume that Halabja was the work of Saddam and it was deliberate but that has been repeated by the US in Fallujah as many reports of Chemical weapons used in the area are emerging. One doctor has already identified corpses without any external injury and discolored. Many corpses are burnet indicating the use of Napalm and Phosphorus bombs: "Halabja in Fallujah".
A leading lawmaker from Turkey's governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) on Thursday accused the United States of committing "genocide" in Fallujah. He went on to state that: "genocide of such proportions was committed neither under Mussolini, nor Hitler". This is why the US deliberately sealed the place from independent press coverage, prevented the Medical help by deliberately attacking hospitals and doctors who back in April gave independent verification of the casualty figures.
The US was not just trying to hide figures but how the operation was conducted. Multiple reports from many sources indicate that the US policy was to shoot indiscriminately at civilians, even old women with a white flag raised were shot, ordinary people trying to cross the river fleeing away from Fallujah were shot. Since Kofi Annan declared the war to be illegal along with most of the world all the direct and consequential killings resulted from the invasion.
Now, why the US denial of using Chemical weapons is not being verified by the UN or some other independent body? Or is the UN only there to verify and support American allegations against other nations? Why the neighboring Arab/Muslim regimes are silent on this issue? What happened to Arab and Islamic unity? Where are those moderates who are enthusiastic to label resistance fighters as terrorists but it seems they are perfectly comfortable to accept this type of savagery? Their ugly hypocritical lips were sealed after the Abu-Ghraib revelations, maybe the seal is permanent.
Yamin Zakaria, London, UK
-------- landmines
U.S. a No-Show At International Anti-Landmine Conference
democracynow.org
November 30th, 2004
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/30/1525250
The Bush administration decided not to send any representatives to an international conference on eradicating land mines that opened in Kenya this week. We go to Nairobi to hear from a spokesperson for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. [includes rush transcript] An international conference on eradicating land mines has opened in Kenya this week. The conference is the first review of progress in ridding the world of anti-personnel mines since the 1999 Ottawa Convention. Ethiopia became the 144th nation to accept the Convention banning antipersonnel mines. Some 40 countries including the US, China and Russia have refused to sign the treaty, which bans the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of antipersonnel mines and calls for mined areas to be cleared within 10 years.
The Bush administration has decided not to send any representatives to the conference. Actor Danny Glover, making his first trip as a goodwill ambassador the UN Children"s Fund (UNICEF), said: "As a citizen of the U.S., I feel embarrassed and angry."
An estimated 20,000 people die because of landmine explosions every year.
Mark Hiznay, spokesperson for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch. He joins us on the line from Nairobi.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: We are joined now by Mark Hiznay. He's spokesperson for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch. He joins us from Nairobi. Welcome to Democracy Now!
MARK HIZNAY: Thank you for having me on today.
AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Can you explain the significance of this conference?
MARK HIZNAY: It's -- it marks the fifth year of implementation of the treaty that was negotiated and signed in 1997 to comprehensively ban the weapon, the anti-personnel mine. This is a weapon that claims more civilians than it does military and denies the socioeconomic use of land and claims casualties now ranging somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 people a year. We have been able to document in the year 2003 over 8600 casualties, but we also recognize that more than half of the incidents go unreported. So this is where the state's parties get together and take stock of how far they have come in five years and have cooperatively working hand in hand with civil society and the U.N. to implement this treaty, to destroy the weapon, to assist the victims and to clear the mines. It's also looking forward to the next five years which in 2009, the first deadlines for states to clear mines that are in the ground, start happening. So there's a lot of work to do and there's a lot of commitments to be made and followed through on here.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the countries that have not signed on? Ethiopia's the latest country, 144 to sign the treaty. What about the United States? Why does the United States hold out, and is it alone in not even sending a representative to the Nairobi conference?
MARK HIZNAY: It's kind of a curious situation because no one noticed here. Yes, they knew that the U.S. was not going to send a delegation officially, and they cited cost reasons because the way these conferences happen, the U.S. would have had to bear 20% of the conference cost, which would have been somewhere between $80,000 and $90,000. But they have been putting statements out here that are quite puzzling to the countries that are here, and there are about 43 countries that have not joined the treaty and over half of them are here. China is here, Russia is here, India is here, Israel is here. All of these countries that have used land mines in the recent times, which the United States hasn't used anti-personnel mines since 1991, they are here and they are listening. The U.S. was evidently concerned that the political agenda against -- the political agenda, as they say, against countries that retain the weapon and retain the right to use the weapon would be too severe for them to withstand. In February, the Bush administration announced its new policy of regarding land mines and it foreswore this treaty, and said it retained the right it use certain types of antipersonnel mines indefinitely and without geographic restrictions. It walked back many years and several commitments of previous administrations. It's collectively "so what."
AMY GOODMAN: And what about Britain? I mean Princess Diana made this her number-one issue when she was alive.
MARK HIZNAY: Well, definitely the role of bringing this issue into the public attention during a critical time when the treaty was being negotiated certainly helped and the United Kingdom is an active partner in matters of treaty interpretation, resource mobilization and bringing other countries here that might affect the countries that couldn't necessarily afford it to make sure everyone is represented here. Britain announced today, in fact, with Argentina in a joint statement that they are beginning cooperation to begin demining the Falkland Islands which Argentina mined during the conflict there in the early 1980's.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Hiznay, I want to thank you for being with us, spokesperson for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Joining us on the line from Nairobi where the International Conference Against Anti-Personnel Landmines is taking place.
-------- mideast
Iraq's Neighbors Prepare to Meet in Iran
Associated Press
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Nov 30, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&ncid=736&e=6&u=/ap/20041130/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iran_iraq_s_neighbors
TEHRAN, Iran - Iran's capital is an unlikely place for Iraq (news - web sites)'s neighbors and Egypt to discuss the infiltration of terrorists into Iraq. Not only does the Persian country have a long history of conflict with Arabs, it is also accused by the United States of supporting the insurgency across the border.
Tuesday's meeting, though, is intended to send a signal that Tehran recognizes the threat of groups such as al-Qaida and is ready to help stabilize Iraq ahead of the first elections since the fall of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites).
"The objective of the meeting is to help Iraqis overcome instability and create security especially on their borders with neighbors," said Ali Asghar Ahmadi, an Iranian security official.
Ahmadi said Iran tries to keep insurgents from infiltrating its border with Iraq. But at nearly 1,000 miles long, the frontier is hard to police.
Iran's solution is to offer to train Iraqis to police the border and provide them with the necessary equipment.
The participants have a wide range of national interests - many at odds with each other - that could pose further problems for Iraq.
The United States is expected to push Iran to clamp down on militants entering Iraq, but on another front it is pressing Tehran to freeze any nuclear activities.
Turkey, Iraq's northern neighbor, may be more interested in pursuing its longstanding demand for a crackdown on Kurdish militants who are allegedly holed up in northern Iraq and are fighting for autonomy in southeastern Turkey.
The conference is designed to help countries share intelligence on militant groups suspected of ties to the insurgency in Iraq. Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt and the United Nations (news - web sites) have all sent representatives.
The meeting may also boost efforts by Iraqi government officials to undermine support for militants and organize elections scheduled for Jan. 30.
The selection of Iran as the venue is seen as symbolic.
"It is an assertion by Iran that it is committed to Iraq's internal security and that Iran agrees to stopping infiltration through its borders," said Abdul-Ridha Aseeri, a political science teacher at Kuwait University.
Iraqi Vice President Ibrahim al-Jaafari told President Mohammad Khatami (news - web sites) in Tehran Saturday that insurgents, having been flushed out of Fallujah, were "changing their tactics from a military phase into a political agenda to undermine the upcoming elections."
Washington has accused Tehran of interfering in Iraq and sending money and infiltrators to support the insurgency there. Tehran has denied the charges and says it has no interest in fomenting instability across the border.
It was unclear how Iraq would respond to the Iranian offer to train security personnel. The countries fought a war from 1980-88 that killed or wounded nearly one million people on both sides.
Egypt and Jordan have also offered to train Iraqis.
-------- russia / chechnya
Black Sea Intrigue
Ukraine takes everyone's eyes off Iraq, keeps Russkies off-balance
Village Voice Media
November 30th, 2004
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0448/mondo1.php
WASHINGTON, D.C.-While George W. Bush may view the Ukraine election crisis as a helpful revival of Cold War animosities, pushing aside the eroding situation in Iraq, the underlying situation is hair-raising.
Running beneath the talk of nationalism and Western-style economics, there are hard facts strongly suggesting that Russia is not about to give up Ukraine, which it had controlled, until the Soviet empire collapsed, since the 17th century.
Russian interests include the eastern industrial regions but, perhaps most importantly, are focused on the Black Sea Fleet, an armada mostly under Russian control that is a key factor in Moscow's future abilities to project power into the former Soviet satellite states in Central Asia, with their big oil and gas fields.
According to a helpful report on ocnus. net, the Black Sea Fleet's existence depends on Ukraine's acquiescence to Russian naval vessels in its key ports of Simferopol and Odessa. The fleet is based on Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, which Catherine the Great had annexed in 1783. Without these bases, Russia would lose its southern ports. And that would lead to a major shift in political power.
After the Soviet Union broke up, Russia negotiated a deal with Ukraine to berth 250 ships that make up the fleet in Sevastopol. If Ukrainian nationalists, revved up by anti-Russian fervor, led by the U.S. and Western European countries, tell the Russians to remove the fleet, war is a serious possibility. According to one survey, this fleet, in 1995, had 48,000 military personnel, 14 subs, 31 surface ships, 43 patrol craft, 125 combat aircraft, and 85 helicopters. The Russians also have one coastal defense division, with 175 tanks, 450 armored infantry fighting vehicles, and 72 artillery pieces. In addition, Russia has major construction facilities along the Black Sea and runs research stations for all sorts of new ship and aircraft development.
Under terms of the '90s fleet deal, the Ukrainians got a fair number of ships, but no real capacity to build a competitive navy.
If the neocons here want to start a war over Ukraine that will spread through Central Asia, they've got a ready-made opportunity.
-------- spies
Defense, CIA vie for power
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Rowan Scarborough
November 30, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041129-111949-8194r.htm
At the heart of a dispute over legislative intelligence reform are confidential meetings between the defense secretary and the CIA director during which they decided where to point spy satellites.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former CIA director George Tenet, and their staffs, talked frequently about where to position satellites that relay overhead images and overheard conversations during the war on terror.
For example, during the December 2001 battle for Tora Bora in Afghanistan, the Pentagon decided to fix a number of spy assets over the region, both tactical and space-based, in the hunt for al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, former U.S. officials said.
The procedure for "tasking intelligence assets," as the discussion is called, is spelled out in the 1947 National Security Act. Amended numerous times since then, the act details the working relationship between the CIA director and defense secretary.
In practice, the law gives the defense chief broad powers to place satellites. In addition, the defense secretary directs and controls the budgets for three main providers of technical intelligence: the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which runs the network of satellites; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which analyzes images; and the National Security Agency (NSA), which intercepts electronic communications.
The intelligence reform bill, which Senate and House members crafted in response to recommendations from the September 11 commission, is stalled in Congress over just how the relationship between the intelligence community and the defense secretary should be molded for the 21st century.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, California Republican, opposes a compromise. He said the bill gives too much power to a new national intelligence director. The result, he warned, could be the director's interference in the chain of command between the defense secretary and his field commanders.
"That means that when the Department of Defense has to have a satellite over Fallujah, for example, because they've got people being shot at on the ground, they need to know where the enemy is," Mr. Hunter said on "Fox News Sunday." "You have to be able to control that agency."
His replacement language, Mr. Hunter said, retains safeguard for the current military chain of command, and ensures the budget request for the NRO, NGA and NSA flow from the new director, through the defense secretary, to Congress.
Senate conferees, so far, opposed such language, called "Preservation of Authority," as weakening the new director.
Congressional staffers, who asked not to be named, are circulating a three-page document opposing Mr. Hunter's position.
The paper points out that for years the CIA director has had ultimate control on satellites, in consultation with the defense secretary. The president never had to intervene because the CIA always deferred to Pentagon needs.
The director of central intelligence (DCI) "gave the DoD's [Department of Defense] collection requirements the highest priority during each of these conflicts; no transfer of authority was necessary," says the paper, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times. "During conflicts, the DCI has ensured that DoD requirements are satisfied before any other requirements are addressed."
Mr. Hunter's staff is circulating its own point paper backing the congressman's stand, which is supported by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"The [Bush] administration is not asking Hunter to drop his opposition on preserving the military chain of command," the paper states. The staff states that the White House itself has submitted replacement language that supports Mr. Hunter's position.
-------- un
U.N. Calls for an Updated Council
NY Times
By WARREN HOGE
November 30, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/international/30cnd-nati.html?pagewanted=1&ei=1&en=5f337122aed1b292&ex=1102852624
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 30 - The United Nations proposed the most sweeping changes in its history today, recommending the overhaul of its key decision-making organ, the Security Council, and suggesting standards of international legitimacy for countries that have not been attacked to go to war against an enemy posing an imminent threat.
The changes were outlined in a much-awaited 101-recommendation report from a 16-member panel commissioned by Secretary General Kofi Annan a year ago in the aftermath of bitter divisions that had left the United Nations feeling ill-equipped to meet modern day challenges represented by terrorism, failed states, nuclear proliferation, poverty and mass violence.
In its most attention-getting recommendation, calling for a 24-member Security Council, the panel, led by Anand Panyarachun, a former prime minister of Thailand, was unable to agree on one proposal and ended up suggesting two options. Both are aimed at broadening the membership of the 15-member council to reflect the world of today rather than the one that existed when the council set up after the end of World War II.
It currently consists of five veto-bearing permanent members - Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States - and 10n members elected to two-year terms.
One alternative would add six new permanent members from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe - the likely candidates are Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Egypt and either Nigeria or South Africa - as well as three new two-year term members.
The other would create a new tier of eight semi-permanent members chosen for renewable four-year terms and one additional two-year term seat.
The right to cast vetos would continue to be limited to the five members that now have that right.
The new arrangement is aimed at rewarding both countries that have achieved economic and regional prominence over recent decades and countries that make the most significant contributions to the United Nations.
Addressing the legitimacy of the use of force, a source of crippling tensions at the United Nations last year when the United States was seeking Security Council authorization to go to war in Iraq, the panel said it found no reason to amend the United Nations charter's Article 51, which restricts the use of force to countries that have been attacked.
The report said that this language did not constitute, as some have charged, a summons on nations to wait to be attacked and that many countries had exercised the right to go on the attack themselves if they felt threatened.
But it acknowledged that a new problem had arisen because of terrorism "where the threat is not imminent but still claimed to be real: for example, the acquisition, with allegedly hostile intent, of nuclear weapons-making capability."
It said if the arguments for such "anticipatory self defense" were good ones, they should be put to the Security Council, which would have the power to authorize military action.
In apparent anticipation of objections from Washington over this requirement, the report said, "For those impatient with such a response, the answer must be that, in a world full of perceived potential threats, the risk to the global order and the norm of non-intervention on which it continues to be based is simply too great for the legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct from collectively endorsed action, to be accepted. Allowing one to so act is to allow all."
A senior participant on the panel who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity said that after the year's deliberations, the panel emerged with a far greater appreciation of the enormity and intrerconnectedness of six specific threats to international peace. The report listed them as "interstate conflict, civil war, economic and social threats, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and organized international crime."
While there was no immediate reaction from Washington to the issuance of the report, the official said, "From the American perspective, this is good for U.S. security."
He explained that some of the panel members had been in the habit of faulting the United States for exaggerating the threat of terror and seeking what they called "perfect security" but that they had come to a sharp new appreciation of the menace of nuclear and chemical agents and how easily they could be infiltrated into western societies.
Though the bitter dispute over whether or not to go to war in Iraq was a principal reason for the institutional crisis at the United Nations that persuaded Mr. Annan to name the panel, the official said that members did not discuss it. In answer to repeated questions, he declined to speculate whether the recommended reforms would have forestalled the crisis over Iraq.
"This was a forward-looking panel," he said.
Addressing a long sought codification of terrorism that would not allow people to class it as an acceptable act of national liberation or resistance, the panel suggested defining terrorism as any action "that is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population or to compel a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act."
In their terror deliberations, he said they concentrated on the previously underappreciated "second death toll" throughout the developing world from a strike causing massive death in a developed nation, the "unseen deaths" caused by a post-attack global economic dislocation that would plunge entire nations below poverty lines.
One area in which the United Nations was criticized was the ineffectiveness of existing conventions to curb nuclear proliferation, and the report predicated that the "erosion of nuclear regimes could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation." Noting that at least 30 nations have the capacity to build nuclear weapons, it said that a way had to be found for a strict plan whereby the International Atomic Energy Agency could guarantee that countries were genuine "civil users" and not bomb makers.
The 16-member panel was created by Secretary General Annan in a speech to the General Assembly in September, 2003 in which he said that divisions over how to achieve collective global security had brought the world institution to a moment as critical as the post-World War II moment of its inception.
In addition to Mr. Panyarachun, the chairman, the membership included Brent Scowcroft, the United States national security advisor under the first President Bush, Yevgeny Primakov, former prime minister of Russia, Qian Qichen, former foreign minister of China, Gareth Evans, former foreign minister of Australia, Amre Moussa of Egypt, secretary general of the League of Arab States, Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway, Jõao Baena Soares of Brazil, former secretary general of the Organization of American States, David Hannay, former British ambassador to the United Nations, and Robert Badinter, a member of the French senate.
One of the few upward trends the panel noted was the United Nations' ability to end civil wars through intervention, an outcome that virtually never occurred until the 1990's. The official said that if the civil wars in Rwanda and Angola had been ended the way they were in places like Guatemala, El Salvador, Mozambique and Namibia, two to three million lives would have been saved.
The panel agreed that the menace of the spread of infectious disease and its economic and social consequences was such that only a major commitment to upgrading public health, particularly in the developing world could turn it back. He said this effort would also benefit developed nations because it would help them fight bioterrorism.
The panel said that the United Nations had failed to provide the expected leadership in developing a way to combat terror and at the same time protect human rights and the principles of international law. In that connection, it needed to come up with better ways to fight organized crime and to create a new international convention on money laundering.
In the case of humanitarian interventions, countries thinking of intervening with force would have to follow guidelines in determining when a state had failed in its primary responsibility to protect its own citizens and troops were required. The panel said also that states could no longer use sovereignty as a shield to hide behind when large scale killing or genocide was occurring.
The panel was very critical of the Human Rights Commission, a body that has often brought the United Nations into disrepute by incorporating some of the worst rights violators, like Libya and Sudan, in its membership. Too often, the panel said, the chief motivation for such countries to join the commission was to deflect attention away from deplorable rights conditions at home. The panel called for the creation of a new office in the Security Council structure called the Peacebuilding Commission.
"Too often when countries transit from peacekeeping to something else, they fall off the radar screen of the Security Council," the official said. He cited Haiti and Liberia as two victims of this process and the kinds of countries that the new commission would keep track of and assist to full recovery.
The panel also called for a one time voluntary buyout package for employees of the United Nations, where accusations of stultifying bureaucracy date to its beginnings. "When the panel looked around," the official said, "it saw a lot of deadwood in places where a new generation of people in their 30' and 40's with lots of field experience and original ideas feel very frustrated and unable to advance."
Mr. Annan is expected to refind the 101 recommendations into 8 to 10 principal subjects in a report in March. The recommendations will be taken up at a summit of heads of state at the United Nations in September before the opening of the General Assembly.
The preparation of the report required six meetings of the panel itself and more than 50 workshops and consultations around the world in which staff members took soundings. Some panel members are expected to lobby for the report in their regions.
Many of the recommendations can be put into effect by the secretary general himself or the various organs of the United Nations involved. Amendments to the charter, like a new makeup of the Security Council, must be approved by two-thirds of the 191 United Nations member states and ratified by the legislatures of two-thirds of the governments, including all five permanent members.
------
Annan Says He Wasn't Aware of Son's Deal With Swiss Firm
Washington Post
By Colum Lynch
November 30, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20661-2004Nov29.html
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 29 -- U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said Monday that he was unaware his son, Kojo, received as much as $150,000 in payments from a Swiss company while it profited from the U.N.-run oil-for-food program in Iraq.
Annan said he recognized that the payments created a "perception of conflict of interests and wrongdoing" and that he was "very disappointed and surprised" that his son had not disclosed them to him.
Kojo Annan's ties to the company, Cotecna Inspection Services SA, are the subject of U.S. congressional probes and a U.N. investigation into influence peddling and mismanagement in the oil-for-food program. The latest disclosure of the younger Annan's relationship with Cotecna comes after allegations that the head of the U.N. program, Benon Sevan, received certificates to purchase millions of barrels of oil at a favorable rate. Sevan has denied the allegations.
Annan said he thought his son had severed financial links to Cotecna in 1998, shortly before the company received a contract to oversee U.N.-managed trade with Iraq. He also denied any wrongdoing, saying he had played no role in granting U.N. contracts to Cotecna or any other companies.
"Naturally, I have warm, family relations with my son, but he is in a different field," Annan said. "He is an independent businessman. He is a grown man, and I don't get involved with his activities and he doesn't get involved in mine."
The oil-for-food program began operating in December 1996 to allow Iraq to export oil to purchase humanitarian goods for its people. The United Nations oversaw the export of $64 billion in oil before the program was transferred to U.S.-led authorities in Iraq in November 2003.
Allegations of wrongdoing by U.N. officials surfaced after the fall of Saddam Hussein, triggering investigations by Congress and U.S. prosecutors into the diversion of billions of dollars in oil money and kickbacks from the U.N. program to Hussein's government. Annan appointed Paul A. Volcker, the former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman, to investigate U.N. misconduct. He urged reporters to be patient until Volcker, who has been looking into Kojo Annan's relationship with Cotecna, concludes his inquiry.
John C. Danforth, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Monday that the United States takes the allegations of U.N. misconduct "very seriously" but that there should be no "rush to judgment until all of the facts are in." Danforth also pressed Volcker to release 55 internal U.N. audits and other documents to congressional probers as "quickly as possible."
Volcker said in a recent interview that he had reached an agreement with Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, to hand over the audits after he finishes the first stage of his investigation in January.
Kojo Annan worked for Cotecna, first as a trainee and later as a consultant in Africa, from December 1995 to December 1998. The United Nations had previously asserted that his commercial relations with Cotecna ended in December 1998, the same month the company received a $4.8 million contract to monitor the import of humanitarian supplies to Iraq for the United Nations.
The Wall Street Journal reported in September that Cotecna began paying Kojo Annan $2,500 a month provided he did not disclose anything about his employment with the company to competitors. The United Nations confirmed a report Friday in the New York Sun that those monthly no-compete payments continued through February 2004.
Kojo Annan declined to comment on the case through an attorney in London. Lawyer Clarissa Amato said that "at the moment Kojo Annan is cooperating with the Volcker inquiry. Aside from that he is really not willing to discuss the allegations any further."
-------- war crimes
Red Cross Finds Detainees Intentionally Tortured in Guantanamo as Lawyers in Germany Charge Rumsfeld, Tenet With War Crimes in Iraq
Tuesday, November 30th, 2004
Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/30/1525237
In a confidential report, the Red Cross concluded that the U.S. has been intentionally using psychological and sometimes physical coercion "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. We go to Germany to speak with Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who is filing a criminal complaint charging a group of U.S. officials with war crimes in Iraq. [includes rush transcript] The International Committee of the Red Cross has concluded that the U.S. has been intentionally using psychological and sometimes physical coercion "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. This according to a report in the New York Times.
The conclusion comes in a confidential report written by the Red Cross based on information the group obtained during a visit to Guantanamo in June.
The report also concluded that the military had a set up a system at Guantanamo devised to break the will of the prisoners , and make them wholly dependent on their interrogators through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions." The U.S. has rejected the charges.
Meanwhile in Germany, the Center for Constitutional Rights is filing a criminal complaint today on behalf of four Iraqi citizens who allege that a group of U.S. officials committed war crimes in Iraq.
The Iraqis claim they were victims of electric shock, severe beatings, sleep and food deprivation and sexual abuse. Among the officials named in the complaint are Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Former CIA Director George Tenet. Germany's laws on torture and war crimes permits the prosecution of suspected war criminals wherever they may be found.
Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Berlin to Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Welcome to Democracy Now!
MICHAEL RATNER: Thank you for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what this lawsuit is all about?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well Germany has the best single law probably in the world right now for prosecuting alleged war criminals. You can prosecute them anywhere in the world. They have universal jurisdiction and we decided to come to Germany partly on the basis of that law and partly on the basis that three of the people involved in torture are actually in Germany. Ricardo Sanchez, who is the general in charge of all the of the military bases in Iraq, as well as the Iraq War during the Abu-Ghraib period, his Deputy Major Picowski and Colonel Pathos, they are all at U.S. military bases in Germany, so that gives you another handle. They are actually here. They are people who we allege were deeply involved in the abuses and torture that took place. Germany is different than the United States in the sense that you can actually bring a criminal complaint and the prosecutor has to do something with it. He has to either investigate it, go ahead and do something, indict people, or he could reject it, but in that case you can always go to a court. We decided this, really, we have been working on it for a number of months. The German complaint is 160-some pages, quite detailed. Most of it is based on the public record of what these people have authorized over a period of years and we came here really for two reasons. One is the U.S. is not doing anything to investigate the chain of command going up. The investigations are a complete fraud. There are only criminal indictments at best against low-level officials and there's nowhere you can turn to international courts; the U.S. isn't in the ICC. So this is really, I consider this a major and important initiative and it will really say whether the German law has the teeth that it should and whether or not big torturers like the United States can get away with setting an agenda that is taking us into the Dark Ages. Coming on the heels of, of course, the Guantanamo article in the Times, it's quite extraordinary. Coupled with the attempts to keep Bush out of Canada right now that are being made on the grounds that their immigration law doesn't allow war criminals for people who violate laws of war into Canada. We're really, I think, trying to make I think this world right now as uncomfortable for these people in the administration as we can.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, can you talk about this report on the front page of the New York Times today, "Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse at Guantanamo," a confidential report calls practice tantamount to torture. You are representing some of the detainees at Guantanamo.
MICHAEL RATNER: Yes. I was really, I mean I was really--I wasn't pleased at what I saw in the report, but I have known about this for a long time. In fact they talk about what happened to three of our clients, the three from the United Kingdom who told me their stories in March that, March of this year, that track exactly what happened, what the New York Times article says from shackling to isolation to stripping, a whole range of conduct both psychological and physical that now the Red Cross says, as of June 2004, that are tantamount to torture and what's extraordinary to me is this is like the emperor has no clothes. Everybody in the world knows the U.S. is engaging in everything from cruel inhuman and degrading treatment to torture. They are doing it around the world, they're doing it in Guantanamo, they're doing it in Baghram, they're doing it in Iraq. And United States insists as Donald Rumsfeld says in that article, as the Pentagon spokesman says, we treat people humanely. The world has become utterly Orwellian. War is peace, torture is humane treatment. That article is just extraordinary because it does detail exactly what happened to our clients, the Center's clients in Guantanamo and it's one of the reasons we are here in Germany. When you can call that treatment humane treatment, we have a world and we have a government, we have a government that has to be changed. Something has to be done that these people have to be held accountable. In 10 years or 20 years from now, I don't want to see us then finally write "nunc amas" like they did in Argentina after all of the tortures that took place there. We should do something about it now. And what's amazing is, this is not in the past. This is continuing today. What's going on in Guantanamo, what's going on in the detention facilities around the world is continuing today. And our highest level government officials are authorizing it, condoning it and then trying to say oh, no, it's a few bad soldiers. But that's not the case.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, the Red Cross report goes on to say, quote, "The construction of such a system whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture." I wanted to ask you about that linked to Congress expanding its threats to cut off aid, both military and civil aid, to countries which refuse to guarantee immunity to Americans from prosecution by the International Criminal Court.
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, it's all related, Amy. What I have always said about our refusal to even join the International Criminal Court and now our desire, or our efforts to enter special agreements with these countries and to cut off aid, it's related to our highest government officials know that they are engaged in basic violations of the laws of war and humanitarian law and they don't want to be prosecuted anywhere in the world and they want their soldiers to be able to carry those illegal acts out all over the world without, with impunity from prosecution. And it goes right to the Gonzales memo that was written in January 2002 when he said well, we better not say the Geneva Conventions apply because if the Geneva applies, we can be charged with war crimes under Geneva and the best defense is to simply say they don't apply. So what we're doing around the world is we're coercing countries with our political, economic, and military power into saying the United States is not just exceptional in its many ways it thinks but is exceptional even in the sense that the laws prohibiting torture should not apply to it. It's an extraordinary moment. One that is taking us back really to the Middle Ages.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally Michael Ratner, President Bush making his first state visit to Canada today and Lawyers Against War, a legal organization, has called on the Prime Minister, the Canadian Prime Minister, Paul Martin, to issue a warrant for President Bush's arrest for breaking the country's Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act.
MICHAEL RATNER: What they have actually done in Canada is say that because Bush is president, he can't actually be prosecuted right now in Canada until he's out of office, but that he should be barred from entering Canada because alleged war criminals, people who violate humanitarian law, cannot come into Canada and he should be barred from coming into Canada and it is true, their law is very clear on that, and if the Canadians have any guts, that's what they'll do. But unfortunately, although the world knows that this country, the United States, is now harboring torturers at the highest level, so far we haven't seen people stand up. I want to say one more word about the German case. We're going to need support all over the world to make sure that prosecutor really does an investigation. If people visit the CCR web site at ccr-ny.org, they will in a few hours find a letter they can send directly to the German prosecutor urging the German prosecutor to begin a serious investigation. But really we are facing a moment that's a very bad moment on terms of what the U.S. is doing but a very good moment in that lawyers and other activists all over the world are really pursuing these tortures to the end of the earth. We called them in our legal jargon, enemies of all humankind who can be brought to justice wherever found. And that is what we have to do.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Michael Ratner is President of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is speaking to us from Berlin, Germany.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
U.S. Loses Ruling Over College Bans on Military Recruiters
Washington Post
By Michael Dobbs
November 30, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20657-2004Nov29.html
A federal appeals court yesterday prohibited the government from withholding funds from colleges and universities that refuse to cooperate with military recruiters because of the Pentagon's discrimination against gays in the armed forces.
In a 2 to 1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia blocked the government from enforcing a law known as the Solomon Amendment, which punishes universities that refuse to allow military recruiters on campus. The law was originally passed by Congress in 1996 but was not actively enforced before the beginning of President Bush's administration.
"This is a landmark decision," said Joshua Rosenkranz, lead counsel for a network of 25 law schools and 900 law professors who complained that the Solomon Amendment violated their First Amendment rights. "The court understood that, in a free society, the government cannot co-opt private institutions as government mouthpieces."
The court ruled that the Solomon Amendment violated the free-speech rights of schools that restricted on-campus recruiting in response to the military's ban on gays. By threatening to withdraw federal funds from schools that refused to cooperate with military recruiters, the court wrote, the government was compelling them "to express a message that is incompatible with their educational objectives."
Pentagon and Justice Department officials did not immediately return calls seeking reaction to the court ruling. The government can appeal the decision to either the Supreme Court or the full 3rd Circuit, but neither body is obligated to accept the appeal.
While the Solomon Amendment applies to all types of universities, law schools were most vociferous in objecting to what they viewed as the military's discriminatory policies against gay men and lesbians. Some law schools banned military recruiters from holding job fairs on campus, while others refused to cooperate in more minor ways. Similar lawsuits have been filed around the country.
The Pentagon sent letters in late 2001 to more than 20 law schools threatening to cut off federal funds to them and their parent universities unless they reversed their policies. Faced with this threat, the law schools begin cooperating with the Pentagon but filed complaints in federal court seeking to overturn the law.
"This is a big vindication of our efforts," said Kent Greenfield, a law professor at Boston College and founder of the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, one of the main plaintiffs in the case. "This ruling allows schools and universities around the country to refuse to be agents of military discrimination against some of their students."
Yesterday's ruling in a case originally brought by New Jersey law schools overturned a decision by a lower court judge and marked the first time an appeals court had blocked the government from enforcing the law. The Solomon Amendment, named after a Republican congressman from Upstate New York, in effect required law schools to choose between getting federal funds and following their own policies, which barred discrimination against students on the basis of sexual orientation.
-----
High Court Not Receptive to Marijuana Case
Medical Use Seen as Subject to Regulations
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 30, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19944-2004Nov29?language=printer
Advocates of medical marijuana received a mostly skeptical reception from the Supreme Court yesterday as the court heard oral arguments in a case that will decide whether the federal government can still ban possession of the drug in states that have cut or eliminated sanctions for using it to treat symptoms of illness.
At issue is the small, homegrown quantity of marijuana used by two Northern California women at the recommendation of their doctors, as permitted by California's Compassionate Use Act, which was adopted by an overwhelming majority of voters in 1996.
But a majority of the justices made comments suggesting they thought that even small amounts of ostensibly medical marijuana, obtained for free, were part of a national market for licit and illicit drugs -- and thus subject to Congress's constitutional power over trade among the states.
"Medicine by regulation is better than medicine by referendum," Justice Stephen G. Breyer remarked at one point. "I have to take this case on the assumption that there is no such thing as medical marijuana that is special and beneficial."
"Cannabis does have a substantial medical effect," replied Randy E. Barnett, a law professor representing the two women, Angel McClary Raich and Diane Monson. He conceded that it has "ancillary effects" that may cause harm, but said that "when people are suffering and dying, they are willing to run risks."
At that point, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy intervened, eliciting from Barnett the concession that California's law does not apply only to life-threatening illnesses such as AIDS or cancer.
Monson, for example, was prescribed marijuana for lower back pain; Raich received hers for a variety of chronic conditions.
Monson's home was raided and her marijuana plants seized by federal agents in 2002; Raich says she receives free pot from caregivers and joined Monson's suit because of her fear that her marijuana could be seized. Raich's suppliers are also in the case, as John Does One and Two.
Monson and Raich say the federal government's crackdown on medical marijuana in California, which began under President Bill Clinton and continues under the Bush administration, is unconstitutional as it applies to them because their cultivation and use of the substance is a noneconomic activity that takes place in one state.
Their argument relies heavily on two Supreme Court cases within the past 10 years, in which the court limited Congress's power to make laws in the name of regulating interstate commerce.
The court ruled in 1995 that Congress could not criminalize the possession of guns near schools; in 2000, the court said Congress lacked the authority to give rape victims the right to sue their attackers in federal court. The court said the link between school gun violence or rape -- both of which are already illegal under state law -- and the national economy was too attenuated.
The strongest voice on the court in favor of Monson and Raich belonged to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who challenged acting Solicitor General Paul D. Clement to show how the use of federal power in this case was better justified than it was in the 1995 and 2000 cases.
"Did not the court say Congress can't use a long 'but-for' chain of causation? Did the court not make that statement, and does it not cut against what you are saying?" O'Connor asked.
Clement answered that federal enforcement of federal marijuana laws is an essential part of a larger regulatory scheme involving drugs and health care, and as such constitutional under the court's precedent.
The case is Ashcroft v. Raich, No. 03-1454. A decision is expected by July.
-------- drug war
New DEA Statement Has Pain
Doctors More Fearful Agency Reneges on Guidelines Worked Out for Narcotics
Washington Post
By Marc Kaufman
November 30, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20537-2004Nov29.html
An extensive effort to ease tensions between physicians who specialize in treating pain and the Drug Enforcement Administration over the use of morphine-based painkillers has backfired -- leaving many pain doctors and patients more fearful than before that they could be arrested for practicing what they consider good medicine.
The DEA triggered the new impasse this month when it published a statement clarifying its position on a number of issues central to pain medicine. The document discusses when a doctor is at risk of being investigated for alleged prescription drug diversion, whether patients with known drug problems can ever be prescribed narcotic painkillers and whether doctors can give patients prescriptions to be filled on a future date.
On all these issues, the new DEA position is at odds with a set of guidelines negotiated over several years by DEA officials and a group of leading pain-management experts. Those guidelines were posted on the agency's Web site in August as part of an effort to reassure doctors who properly prescribe narcotics, but several weeks later the document was abruptly removed and described by the agency as inaccurate and unofficial.
Pain-management experts have responded to the new notice with dismay, saying its provisions may well result in the denial of pain relief to millions of sufferers.
Howard A. Heit, a pain and addiction doctor in Fairfax County, said yesterday that "over 90 percent" of patients and doctors could face investigation under the new guidelines.
"This approach is chilling to me, and I work with the DEA all the time," Heit said in an interview. "General practitioners will see this and say, 'Why should I prescribe opioids and risk getting into trouble?' "
In a letter to the DEA last week, David E. Joranson, a University of Wisconsin pain expert who led the negotiations with the agency, accused it of unilaterally changing important and long-standing practices. Some of the changes, the letter said, leave doctors confused about how they should prescribe painkillers and "are likely to interfere in medical practice and pain management."
In explaining why it took down the guidelines in early October, the DEA said the document contained misinformation that would soon be corrected. The reworked version published Nov. 16 in the Federal Register toughened the agency's position on some of the most sensitive issues.
The new DEA statement said, for instance, that the earlier guidelines were incorrect in saying that the number of patients in a doctor's practice receiving prescription narcotics, the number of tablets they receive, and how long their therapy lasts "do not, by themselves, indicate a problem."
In its November statement, the DEA said all three of those factors "may indeed be indicative of diversion." In addition, the statement said, "it is a longstanding legal principle that the Government 'can investigate merely on suspicion that the law is being violated, or even just because it wants assurances that it is not.' "
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Tom Ridge Steps Down as Chief of Homeland Security Dept.
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT and MARK J. PRENDERGAST
November 30, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/politics/30cnd-ridge.html?adxnnl=1&oref=login&adxnnlx=1101931377-4P1zQloN4YaMh1x2Npw3BA
WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 - Tom Ridge, who was given the task of bringing together myriad federal agencies under a new department for a new kind of war in the aftermath of 9/11, said today that he would resign as the country's first secretary of homeland security effective Feb. 1, unless a successor was confirmed before then.
Mr. Ridge, who described his decision in an afternoon news conference as "very difficult," had long been reported to be planning his exit from the Bush administration for personal reasons, so his departure did not come as a surprise.
"I just want to step back and pay a little more attention to personal matters," Mr. Ridge told reporters today, noting that for people who work in government "the whole family puts on the public service uniform."
Mr. Ridge said he was satisfied that progress had been made by his new agency in warding off threats posed by terrorists, but also acknowledged that "there will always be more work for us to do in homeland security."
Referring to the 180,000 employees of his department, Mr. Ridge said that "individual decisions that these men and women make out there at ports of entry have as much to do with the security of the country as any individual decisions we might make here at headquarters."
"We have to be right a billion-plus times a year," he continued, "meaning we have to make literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of decisions every year, or every day, and the terrorists only have to be right once."
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, praised Mr. Ridge's efforts but faulted the Bush administration for not providing Mr. Ridge and the new department with the proper resources.
"Tom Ridge is a decent man and a fine public servant but unfortunately was not given the leeway or resources to tighten up homeland security the way it should be done," Mr. Schumer said. "We hope that whoever the administration chooses to succeed him will be given the tools needed to really do the job."
Several names are circulating as possible successors to Mr. Ridge, among them:
¶Asa Hutchinson, 53, a former congressman from Arkansas and former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who is now a deputy to Mr. Ridge, as undersecretary for border and transportation security.
¶Frances Townsend, 42, a former prosecutor, who is now the White House homeland security adviser. Previously, she served as the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism, but she has never managed a bureaucracy as vast as that at Homeland Security. Her resume includes service as assistant commandant for intelligence at the Coast Guard and intelligence adviser to Attorney General Janet Reno during the Clinton administration.
¶Mike Leavitt, 53, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency since November 2003 and a former Utah governor with experience in homeland security issues.
¶Mitt Romney, 57, the governor of Massachusetts since November 2002, and a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Committee. Mr. Romney, a Republican, lawyer and financial specialist, was president and chief executive officer of the organizing committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, which took place without incident in the aftermath of 9/11.
¶Bernard Kerik, the senior adviser to the American presidential envoy in Iraq. He was previously interim interior minister of Iraq and before that the New York City police commissioner.
¶Joe Allbaugh, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has 2,500 employees who oversee federal disaster relief activities.
Mr. Ridge, 59, is the seventh member of President Bush's cabinet to announce his resignation since Election Day as the White House thoroughly reshapes the administration in preparation for a second term. A former governor of Pennsylvania and a former Republican congressman from Erie, the lakeport city in the upper northwest corner of that state, Mr. Ridge was sworn in as the first director of the Office of Homeland Security in October 2001, just weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
-------- POLITICS
-------- propaganda wars
Author attacks White House "Gestapo tactics"
(Reuters)
By Ellen Wulfhorst
30 November, 2004
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=629850
NEW YORK - The Bush administration uses "Gestapo tactics" to clip civil liberties in its war on terror but the author of a new book said on Monday that today's climate pales compared to other times of war in U.S. history.
While prisoner detentions or the Patriot Act may spark criticism about an erosion of constitutional rights, the United States has seen far more worrisome violations practically since its inception, said Geoffrey Stone, author of "Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime".
Nonetheless, he notes, some actions of the administration are "shameful," such as holding prisoners incommunicado without access to an attorney, Stone said in an interview on Monday.
"I don't throw the words 'Gestapo tactics' around loosely, but that is what it is," he said. "It's breathtaking in its excess."
Also troubling, he said, are government infiltration and surveillance and government actions cloaked in secrecy, such as the untold hundreds of closed deportation hearings held in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
"No administration has been as effective at clamping down on access to information as this one has," said Stone, a professor of law at the University of Chicago. "Part of it is chutzpah. Closing deportation proceedings takes a lot of nerve."
In his book Stone writes that six eras in U.S. history outrank today in terms of the battle for free speech -- 1798 when the Sedition Act made disloyal statements a crime; the U.S. Civil War when habeas corpus, which guards due process, was suspended; and the two World Wars, Cold War and Vietnam War when dissent was suppressed.
The nation has learned from its past, he writes in his book, published this fall by W.W. Norton & Co. For example, the prosecution of anti-war Socialist candidate Eugene Debs in 1918 would be analogous to prosecuting Howard Dean for his opposition to the Iraq war, he said.
"It seems ludicrous to us ... but the truth is he did nothing less than Eugene Debs did," he said.
A development unseen in the past is the voice the Internet gives to people to express themselves, Stone said.
But while the political response to the September 11 attacks may have so far been measured in historical terms, all bets are off should the nation fall victim to another attack, he said.
"In the absence of another major attack ... this is not a period that can realistically compare with any of the six," he said. "If somebody were writing this book 50 years from now and we never had another major terrorist attack in the United States, this would not count.
"But, of course, we're not done," he said. "If we had a couple more serious terrorist attacks, I think we would have been deep within one of those periods."
--------
Officials recant claim about plot to kill Bush
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Andrew Selsky
November 30, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041129-100950-5769r.htm
BOGOTA, Colombia - The government yesterday backpedaled on a sensational claim by the defense minister that Marxist rebels wanted to assassinate President Bush during a recent state visit.
Defense Minister Jorge Uribe told reporters Friday that informants had said the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, had instructed followers to "assassinate President Bush" during his visit to the seaside city of Cartagena on Nov. 22, where he met with President Alvaro Uribe.
The defense minister, who is no relation to the president, did not say from where the information came, and there was no indication Mr. Bush's life was ever in danger. He was protected by 15,000 Colombian troops and police, U.S. troops and Secret Service agents during his 31/2-hour visit to Colombia.
Interior and Justice Minister Sabas Pretelt played down the comments yesterday, saying he had no information about any assassination plot against Mr. Bush.
"There is nothing specific," Mr. Pretelt said. "What these terrorist organizations normally try to do is disturb the visits of any head of state ... like President Bush. But we took all [security] measures, and there was no disturbance."
The defense minister told reporters yesterday that he did not want to elaborate on his earlier comments, but his spokeswoman indicated he had either misspoken or been misunderstood.
"The FARC wanted to make a noise because of Bush's visit, that's to say to place a bomb in Cartagena or something like that," spokeswoman Daisy Canon said. "But a structured plan, with details to attack Bush - that we don't know about."
The FARC has not commented on Mr. Uribe's statement.
Carlos Lozano, managing editor of Colombia's Communist Party newspaper, who has had contact with rebel leaders in the past, dismissed the assertion as outlandish.
"This is just another clownish statement from the minister," Mr. Lozano said. "He launches these rumors which lack seriousness. I think it is his way of trying to get the United States more involved in the war here."
Washington has provided $3 billion in mostly military aid to help Colombia battle the rebels, who have waged war for 40 years and who finance themselves through drug trafficking, kidnapping and extortion.
Up to 800 U.S. troops and 600 U.S. contractors provide training, planning and logistical support to Colombia's armed forces.
-------- us politics
Grassley Defends Whistle-Blower Senator Asks FDA Not to Retaliate
Washington Post
By Marc Kaufman
November 30, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20662-2004Nov29.html
Food and Drug Administration whistle-blower David J. Graham believes he will soon be transferred or fired in retaliation for telling a congressional hearing that the agency is falling short on ensuring drug safety, but his Senate champion is trying to keep that from happening.
In a letter sent yesterday to acting FDA Commissioner Lester M. Crawford, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) formally asked whether Graham was going to be moved, and made clear that he would regard any reassignment as punishment for Graham's public criticism of the agency.
"I understand that retaliatory action against dissident employees can come under many guises," Grassley wrote. "Therefore, I . . . request that you address allegations that administrative action may be taken against Dr. Graham, including that he may be terminated or transferred against his wishes to a job other than conducting scientific research. Please advise me whether there is any truth to these allegations."
An FDA spokesman said that he could not comment on personnel matters because of privacy considerations.
During his Nov. 18 testimony before Grassley's hearing into the withdrawal of the arthritis drug Vioxx, Graham said the FDA is incapable of protecting the public from similar harmful drugs in the future. Asked by another senator whether other unsafe drugs remained on the market, Graham named five that he considered to be problematic: the diet drug Meridia, the arthritis drug Bextra, the asthma medication Serevent, the acne treatment Accutane and the cholesterol-lowering drug Crestor.
His attorney, Tom Devine of the Government Accountability Project, a whistle-blower protection group, said Graham was offered a transfer to the FDA commissioner's office just before his Senate testimony. Devine said that Graham declined -- saying his life's work was to review the safety of drugs on the market -- but that efforts to move him have continued.
"The reason that Dr. Graham is surviving in his position now is solidarity beyond the call of duty from Senator Grassley and his being in the public spotlight," Devine said. "Without that, he'd be gone."
The federal whistle-blower protection law offers no help because of changes made since it was enacted, Devine said.
During the Vioxx hearing, Grassley told senior FDA officials that Graham should be allowed to continue doing his scientific work on drug safety. Last week, Grassley asked for an Office of the Inspector General inquiry into alleged agency efforts to smear Graham before his testimony.
Devine said that after Graham asked his whistle-blower group for help in October, he received a number of anonymous calls criticizing Graham as personally and professionally irresponsible and calling him a bully. Based on several indicators, Devine said he believes the anonymous callers were managers at the FDA.
In his letter yesterday, Grassley demanded full FDA cooperation with the inquiry into Devine's charges, and an FDA spokesman said the agency would cooperate fully.
Graham has worked in the FDA's Office of Drug Safety for 20 years. Ten drugs he questioned were ultimately withdrawn.
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Gutierrez Is Pick for Commerce Secretary Bush's Nominee Runs Kellogg Co.
Washington Post
By Mike Allen and Jonathan Weisman
November 30, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19761-2004Nov29.html
President Bush began reshaping his economic team for a second term yesterday by nominating Carlos M. Gutierrez, the Cuban-born chief executive of the Kellogg cereal company, to replace Bush's friend Donald L. Evans as secretary of commerce.
The selection of Gutierrez, one of the nation's most prominent Hispanic corporate executives, was the opening move of what administration officials said will be a near-total remake of Bush's economic team over the next few months.
Bush, who smiled broadly as he presented his surprise choice in the White House's Roosevelt Room, called Gutierrez "a great American success story" and said he "will take office at a time of historic opportunity for our changing economy."
"With Carlos's leadership, we'll help more Americans, especially minorities and women, to start and grow their own small business," Bush said.
Administration officials said Bush and senior adviser Karl Rove believe their economic lineup was a shortcoming of the first term and are determined to seat a stronger team to sell Congress on Bush's campaign promises to add private accounts to Social Security and rewrite major portions of the tax code.
As part of the White House's desire to signal a fresh start on economic policy, Gutierrez is the first of the four Cabinet members Bush has named since his reelection who is not a White House aide. In choosing Gutierrez, the president passed up an ally described by aides as the original front-runner for the job -- Mercer Reynolds, a Cincinnati businessman who was partners with Bush in the Texas Rangers baseball team and finance chairman of the president's $255 million reelection campaign.
Republicans said more than half the Cabinet will turn over before Bush is finished. Gutierrez, whose appointment continues Bush aides' aggressive courting of Hispanics, is an unusual choice because Bush does not know him well and the post has traditionally gone to confidants of presidents. The nomination now goes to the Senate for confirmation.
Speaking briefly after Bush, Gutierrez said he left Cuba as a political refugee in 1960, joined Kellogg Co. of Battle Creek, Mich., by selling cereal out of a van in Mexico City, and became Kellogg's president and chief executive in 1999. He said his experience shows him that Bush's vision of an "ownership society" is "real, and I know it's tangible."
Bush noted during the 10-minute ceremony that Gutierrez learned English from a bellhop at a Miami hotel. "At every stage of this remarkable story, Carlos motivated others with his energy and optimism and impressed others with his decency," the president said.
Although virtually unknown in Washington, Gutierrez turned Kellogg into a corporate titan and Wall Street darling through smart deals, strict fiscal management and a shift of focus from peddling cereal by the ton to selling higher-end products.
Many people had indicated an interest in being commerce secretary, but White House officials said they sought out Gutierrez instead of the other way around. The officials said Bush had met Gutierrez on a few occasions over the past few years and had always been impressed with him. They met two weeks ago at the White House and Bush made the decision early last week at his Texas ranch, the officials said. Gutierrez informed his board on Friday, but word did not leak.
Bush aides said that in addition to Gutierrez's inspiring immigrant's story, they see his background in sales as a crucial credential, since Bush has used his economic team primarily to promote the White House agenda rather than to make policy. Officials familiar with the search process said that, Gutierrez notwithstanding, the White House has found it harder to attract a top-flight team because some candidates are unwilling to give up lucrative posts to come to Washington to be White House cheerleaders.
One economist, who was rumored to be up for a position on the Council of Economic Advisers, said he could not take a job that has been steadily pushed to the sidelines over the past two years. "You can't be attracted to a job where you'd be out of the loop," he said.
A top White House official disputed that, saying: "The idea we can't recruit people to serve because they don't want to be cheerleaders is absolutely wrong."
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist James Poterba, the top choice to replace N. Gregory Mankiw as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, has declined the post, sources inside and outside the White House said. Poterba told White House officials he did not want to move to Washington and disrupt his teenage children's lives.
Stanford University's John Cogan, a top economist for President George H.W. Bush, has declined invitations to join the administration as a point man for Social Security reform, White House officials say.
White House officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said both cases involved personal circumstances and were not a reflection of the desirability of White House employment. The officials asserted that the new team at the National Economic Council and the Council of Economic Advisers will be involved in crafting policies that will make up the core of Bush's plans to overhaul Social Security and the tax code.
But some Republican economists say the administration's top economic jobs have been marginalized, while their inhabitants have been publicly humiliated.
"Why would you want to take a job where you have no influence?" asked Bruce Bartlett of the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis. "What's the point?"
Stephen Friedman, who had said last week that he planned to step down as Bush's chief economic adviser, submitted a letter of resignation yesterday saying he planned to return to the private sector.
The dismissals of Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill and chief economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey two years ago signaled that Bush would accept no dissent or friction in his administration, Bartlett said.
Treasury Secretary John W. Snow is seen as more of a promoter of White House policymaking than a policymaker, and Snow faces anonymous quotes predicting his departure. "It doesn't look like the White House treats its economic advisers very well, regardless of competence or loyalty," Bartlett said.
Among those mentioned as a possible Snow successor is New York Gov. George E. Pataki, who said in Utica, N.Y., yesterday that he is not interested. When asked why his name keeps popping up for one Bush administration job or another, Pataki replied, "God only knows."
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Civil rights leaders urge close study of Gonzales
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Jerry Seper
November 30, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041129-111950-7750r.htm
More than two dozen national civil rights leaders, saying they have "serious concern" over the nomination of White House counsel Alberto Gonzales as attorney general, yesterday challenged a Senate committee to closely scrutinize his "record, his positions and his future plans for the Justice Department."
As part of a growing chorus of criticism over the nomination, which senators last week said was certain to be approved, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights - in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican, and the panel's ranking Democrat, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont - wants the committee to determine Mr. Gonzales' "suitability" to head the Justice Department.
"The attorney general is the nation's chief law-enforcement official, with responsibility for enforcing federal law on behalf of all persons under the Constitution," the letter said. "We strongly believe this appointment is one of the most important any president can make, and your constitutionally mandated review of Mr. Gonzales' nomination is especially important.
"We believe there are aspects of Mr. Gonzales' record that raise concerns and must be closely scrutinized by the Judiciary Committee before you and the American people can determine his suitability for the position of attorney general," it said.
The letter was signed by Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights; Mark D. Agrast, a senior vice president at the Center for American Progress; Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law; Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice; Marsha Atkind, president of the National Council of Jewish Women; and Charles J. Brown, president of Citizens for Global Solutions.
Last week, the liberal People For the American Way, which helped organize more than 200 groups to oppose the 2000 nomination of Attorney General John Ashcroft, issued a similar challenge on the Gonzales nomination. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said it was taking "no official position" on the nomination, but called for a thorough Senate confirmation process that scrutinizes his positions on key civil liberties and human rights issues.
The same liberal groups vigorously opposed Mr. Ashcroft's nomination in 2000, forcing bitter Senate hearings and a 58-42 confirmation vote in the Senate, the narrowest for any attorney general in recent times.
In its letter, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights asked the committee to examine four major areas of concern regarding the role played by Mr. Gonzales in:
- Setting administration policy on detention, interrogation and torture in the war of terrorism. As White House counsel, it said, Mr. Gonzales oversaw the development of policies for the handling of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, and wrote a memo disparaging the Geneva Conventions, arguing they did not bind the United States in the war in Afghanistan.
- The administration's failure to disclose documents that could show the extent of Mr. Gonzales' role in setting policy requiring or encouraging the Defense Department and the CIA to cast aside laws and practices that would have prevented torture. It said the committee should review the documents before the confirmation hearing. - The formulation of administration policies and legal theory in the war against terrorism, which placed "detainees beyond the reach of the law by declaring them enemy combatants" and holding them indefinitely without charges.
- Shaping the administration's civil rights policies, which the letter described as weak and ineffective, particularly in the areas of voting rights, racial profiling, enforcement of sex discrimination laws and police misconduct issues.
In addition, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights urged the committee members to determine whether and to what extent Mr. Gonzales planned to continue the policies adopted by Mr. Ashcroft on civil rights and civil liberties, which it said included "harsh and ineffective anti-immigrant policies imposed in recent years that deny due process and infringe on the basic rights against detention without charge."
Mr. Hatch has said he would like to have confirmation hearings as soon as possible, but no date has been set.
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Recount Effort Is Expanded to New Mexico and Nevada
Washingtonpost
Brian Faler
November 30, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost