NucNews - December 6, 2004
-------- NUCLEAR
Energy Department Extends Acceptance Policy for Spent Nuclear Fuel from Foreign Research Reactors
DOE, December 6, 2004
http://www.energy.gov/engine/content.do?PUBLIC_ID=16940&BT_CODE=PR_HIGHLIGHTS&TT_CODE=PRESSRELEASE
WASHINGTON, DC – Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham today announced that he has extended a policy that to date has enabled the United States to recover nearly 500 kilograms of uranium-235 – enough to build about 20 crude nuclear weapons – in U.S.-origin high-enriched uranium (HEU) used to fuel foreign research reactors. The Department of Energy’s (DOE) decision to extend the period for spent fuel acceptance will provide additional time for research reactors to convert from HEU to low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel.
The current acceptance policy established by DOE and the State Department in 1996 permits the United States to accept certain eligible spent fuel that is irradiated by May, 2006, and returned to the United States by May, 2009. A revised record of decision, signed by National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Linton Brooks on November 22, 2004, extends the irradiation deadline to May, 2016, and the acceptance deadline to May, 2019.
“A principal goal of this administration’s nonproliferation policy is to secure and reduce worldwide stocks of HEU to keep potential weapons material out of the hands of terrorists and hostile countries,” Secretary Abraham said today. “This extension will enable the United States to recover HEU that will not be ready for return to the United States by the original deadlines.”
Some countries with eligible fuel have not used their fuel as rapidly as projected or have made alternative fuel processing arrangements, and there have been technical delays in the development of LEU alternatives. The acceptance policy is a cornerstone of the DOE Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI), which focuses on minimizing, and, where possible, eliminating the use of HEU in civil applications by converting research reactors to LEU and securing, returning or recovering vulnerable nuclear material. Since 1996, the acceptance program has successfully conducted 30 shipments involving 27 countries, resulting in the safe return of over 6,300 spent nuclear fuel assemblies.
Research reactors have important medical, agricultural and industrial applications. Under the Atoms for Peace program established in the 1950s, the United States provided reactor technology to further other countries’ research into peaceful uses of atomic energy.
Media contact:
Jeanne Lopatto, 202/586-4940
Bryan Wilkes, NNSA, 202/586-7371
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The Nuclear Third Rail: Can Fuel Cycle Capabilities Be Limited?
Jon B. Wolfsthal, December 2004 Arms Control Today
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_12/Wolfsthal.asp
In U.S. politics, some issues are so controversial that they are known as “third rails”—touching them risks political electrocution. Social Security, for example, has often been likened to the third rail of U.S. domestic politics. In the nuclear security world, the third rail has been the nuclear fuel cycle, that is, what restrictions if any should be placed on the ability of states to produce and use fissile materials (enriched uranium and especially plutonium), which have civilian purposes but also can be used to make nuclear weapons. Past attempts to alter the status quo on these issues have produced many political headaches, but few tangible results.
On Feb. 11, President George W. Bush delivered a major nonproliferation address that approached the nuclear third rail. In addressing a long-standing concern, he stated that, under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), states were “allowed to produce nuclear material that can be used to build bombs under the cover of civilian nuclear programs” and proposed to close this treaty’s “loophole.” The president said the world must create a “safe, orderly system to field civilian nuclear plants without adding to the danger of weapons proliferation.”
The following month, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei told the agency’s Board of Governors that “the wide dissemination of the most proliferation-sensitive parts of the nuclear fuel cycle—the production of new fuel, the processing of weapons-usable material, and the disposal of spent fuel and radioactive waste—could be the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of the nuclear nonproliferation regime.”
These comments echo those ElBaradei made in September 2003 when he urged states to consider “the merits of limiting the use of weapons-usable material (plutonium and highly enriched uranium [HEU]) in civilian nuclear programs, by permitting it only under multilateral control.” At that time, he also proposed limiting to international centers the production of new fissile material through reprocessing and enrichment. “It is clear that strengthened control of weapons-usable material is key to our efforts to strengthen nonproliferation and enhance security,” he said.
Both of these leaders focused on a central issue: whether the current nuclear nonproliferation system, or the global security architecture for that matter, is capable of preventing states from—or punishing states for—making use of civil facilities for weapons purposes if at some point they decide to abandon the NPT or related commitments. This “breakout” scenario, where a state could acquire virtually all of the weapons-related capabilities it needs under the NPT’s protection, is an increasing concern. Already, the fabric of the global nonproliferation regime is weakening with a chronic crisis over North Korea’s nuclear program and continuing concerns over Iran’s nuclear future. Whether the regime rips apart or will be sown back together is an open question.
The answer will have much to do with how the Iranian crisis in particular is resolved. A successful resolution will shore up a security system based on a small and eventually shrinking number of nuclear-weapon states. A failure could help pave the way to widespread proliferation, with many states looking for a nuclear insurance policy by acquiring civil capabilities that provide a base for weapons development. They could add to the 12 countries already known to possess enrichment or reprocessing facilities for either nuclear or civilian purposes. Although a recently announced agreement by Iran to suspend its enrichment activities while negotiations with three European Union countries proceed is a good first step, it is far too early to know if the proposed nuclear deal with Iran is a model or a mirage.
Technological Realities
At the crux of this challenge is the fact that nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants depend on the same basic raw materials—enriched uranium and plutonium—to provide their essential energy. Most civilian nuclear power plants, for example, use low-enriched uranium (LEU), which is uranium that has gone through a process to increase the percentage of uranium-235 by 3 percent to 5 percent for use in civilian power reactors. However, the same facilities that produce LEU can also produce the much higher concentrations of U-235 needed for the production of nuclear weapons.
Moreover, all nuclear energy reactors produce plutonium, albeit some more than others. Some countries treat this material as waste, leaving it encased in radioactive spent fuel for later disposal. Other countries such as Russia, France, and Japan separate out this plutonium and mix it with uranium to use as so-called mixed oxide fuel, or Mox, in power plants. The plutonium-separation plants, however, can also produce plutonium that can be used for a nuclear weapon, creating a weapons potential under the cover of civilian use.
The challenge then is how to ensure that enrichment and reprocessing plants do not support weapons activities. Uranium-enrichment plants, using centrifuge technology to purify the U-235 isotope, could be reconfigured from producing LEU for nuclear power plants to produce weapons-grade material within hours. For plutonium-separation plants, even in countries such as Japan, where reprocessing facilities are designed to produce mixtures of plutonium and uranium oxide, the additional purification to a weapon-usable form is straightforward.
Inspections carried out under IAEA safeguards agreements can detect changes in plants or the diversion of materials, a capability further enhanced if the inspections are carried out in countries that have adhered to variants of the 1997 Model Additional Protocol, which grants broader rights to inspectors. Yet, inspectors cannot be everywhere at every time. Additionally, even under the safeguards, the possession of large stocks of HEU and separated plutonium is permitted under the NPT as several legitimate peaceful uses for these materials exist.
Moreover, the world lacks an ironclad system for preventing defections from the nonproliferation regime or for denying states who defect access to nuclear capabilities acquired under the treaty’s protection. States can acquire enrichment or reprocessing facilities under the guise of the NPT and then legally withdraw from the treaty, allowing these “peaceful” facilities to be used to advance a weapons program. It does not mean all states with such capabilities will do so or even think about it, but the potential exists and must be recognized. It is not surprising, therefore, that some countries may view these plants as nuclear weapons insurance or hedging policies.
A Long-standing Problem
The fact that nuclear facilities can be used both for peaceful and military ends has been known for decades. The 1965 Gilpatric report to President Lyndon Johnson stated starkly that “the world is fast approaching a point of no return in the prospects of controlling nuclear weapons. Nuclear power programs are placing within the hands of many nations much of the knowledge, equipment, and materials for making nuclear weapons.” The report said every effort should be made to ensure that “peaceful atomic energy programs do not unreasonably contribute to potential proliferation of nuclear weapons capabilities.”[1]
Yet, three years later, Article IV of the NPT stated that it is the “inalienable right of all the parties to the treaty to develop research production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.”
Developing and many developed countries have long interpreted Article IV of the NPT as a right for all states to acquire uranium-enrichment and plutonium-separation capabilities as long as they are under IAEA safeguards. For just as long, however, some experts have questioned whether the inherent risk these facilities pose are consistent with an effective nonproliferation regime. These concerns have been echoed in U.S. and international export control policies that have sought to limit the availability of these capabilities, albeit in some countries only in the past few years.
For decades, efforts have been made to reconcile the two positions. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, these included the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE), the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy conference, and the six-year Committee on Assurances of Supply. Yet, all fell short of addressing this challenge or making any real adjustments to the global fuel-supply system due to concerns about the long-term availability of uranium, potential limits on industry growth, and conflicts between international security concerns and national sovereignty.
Countries that have made massive economic and technical investments in reprocessing and enrichment, such as Japan and France, have resisted any moves that might restrict their ability to engage in these activities for domestic or international export-related purposes. States such as Brazil also are pursuing enrichment capabilities to advance their own nuclear industries as well as to claim a position of technical leadership in the developing world. These institutional, economic, and political interests combine to make it exceedingly challenging to find support for major structural adjustments to the international fuel cycle.
Now, more than 20 years after INFCE, there is growing awareness that the world faces a long-term choice of either living with or seeking to adjust a system that enables states to develop virtual nuclear arsenals under the protection of the NPT and international safeguards. These issues can be addressed case-by-case, such as the current situation with Iran, or strategically to prevent such crises from emerging.
There is a reasonable international debate about the extent of the risks posed by safeguarded nuclear production facilities and fissile materials. States such as Japan with exemplary nonproliferation credentials and fully safeguarded facilities rightly point out that they have complied with all norms and should not be restricted now that countries such as Iran and North Korea have broken the rules. At the same time, as the nonproliferation regime is challenged, states can and should be alarmed at the prospect that more and more states will seek peaceful nuclear production capabilities as an insurance policy again proliferation by their neighbors. Already, South Koreans are calling for the development of a domestic enrichment capability on economic grounds, but with an understanding that it would also balance the nuclear capabilities in North Korea, Japan, and China.
In the past, the most effective nonproliferation tools have been those that reduce the perceived need to acquire nuclear weapons in the first place. Economic, political, and security integration of Japan, South Korea, Germany, and other countries once considered prone to proliferation have been critical to nonproliferation successes. Moreover, countries highly dependent on nuclear power are often dependant on outside sources for raw uranium or technical support from supplier states; and reorienting civilian nuclear plants to military production in countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan would have to be seriously weighed against the possible loss of nuclear cooperation, to say nothing of other issues, with the outside world. Yet, in the extreme circumstances where states closely allied with the United States would be actively considering nuclear options, violating bilateral or international agreements might be of lesser importance than hard security calculations.
Even if production facilities are not intended for weapons purposes, they can create tensions. South Korean officials, for example, are not shy about pointing to the large civilian stocks in Japan as a potential nuclear arsenal, even though Japan’s nonproliferation credentials are impeccable and relations between the Republic of Korea and Japan are quite strong. If the number of reprocessing and enrichment plants worldwide grows, such concerns are likely to grow as well. The bottom line is that states that do not possess the ability to produce nuclear materials are obviously less capable of acquiring nuclear weapons, except by theft or via black market purchases of material. The central axiom of nonproliferation is “no nuclear materials, no nuclear weapons.”
Three Approaches to the Fuel Cycle Dilemma
There are now three basic viewpoints in relation to the fuel cycle issue. The first school believes that the current system essentially works and that adjustments are needed to ensure that no unsafeguarded or illegal transfers of nuclear production technologies take place. A second group maintains that the possession of such capabilities by peaceful, integrated, and nonproliferation-compliant states is perfectly acceptable and that the focus should be only on states with bad track records, obvious incentives to proliferate, and poor justifications for acquiring nuclear production capabilities. A third, more ambitious approach holds that the national possession of enrichment and plutonium-separation capabilities undermines the very basis for nonproliferation and that such activities should be minimized to the extent possible and exercised only under international or multinational control to provide additional assurances that they will only ever be used for peaceful purposes.
Bush and ElBaradei
Bush and ElBaradei represent the second and third of these perspectives and have backed up their statements with explicit proposals. In February, Bush called on the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), an informal export control organization made up of the main nuclear exporting states, to deny the transfer of enrichment or reprocessing technologies to any country that “does not already possess full-scale, functioning enrichment and reprocessing plants.” The Group of Eight, which brings together the world’s richest countries, has since adopted a similar position in a one-year moratorium on such transfers, with the possibility of a longer-term extension. Bush optimistically stated, “[T]his step will prevent new states from developing the means to produce fissile material for nuclear bombs.” It is questionable whether even the 44-member NSG is comprehensive enough to prevent the spread of this technology.
Bush’s proposals came at the same time that the public learned of the black-market nuclear network established by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program. That network successfully and secretly disseminated enrichment capabilities to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. Controversy continues to rage over whether Khan’s activities were sponsored and approved by the Pakistani government. If they were, Bush’s proposal would have done little to shut down this network as Pakistan is not an NSG member.
ElBaradei has voiced his support for stronger export controls and enforcement but has also formed an experts group under the direction of former IAEA Deputy Director-General Bruno Pellaud to consider various alternatives to the current system of national control of special nuclear material production capabilities.[2] Some of the issues to be explored by the expert group are limits on the use of weapons-usable nuclear material in civilian nuclear programs by permitting it only under multilateral control and multinational approaches to managing and disposal of spent fuel and radioactive wastes.
In forming the group, ElBaradei stated, “I am aware that this is a complex issue. But we owe it to ourselves to examine all possible options. Common sense and recent experience make clear that the [NPT], which has served us well since 1970, must be tailored to fit 21st-century realities. Without threatening national sovereignty, we can toughen the nonproliferation regime.”
The group has already met twice and will hold a total of four meetings before reporting its initial findings to the March 2005 IAEA Board of Governors meeting. The leading nuclear countries, including the United States, are participating, and the panel has governmental and nongovernmental representatives with a broad background in the issue of the nuclear fuel cycle and nonproliferation.
Some hybrid solutions are also being mentioned in capitals around the world. Some have suggested that what is needed is a greater assurance that any misuse of safeguarded facilities will be challenged and the dangers counteracted. Openly discussed options include establishing clear obligations that a state must return any and all material, equipment, and technology acquired under safeguards if a violation is detected or a state withdraws from the NPT.[3] The key here, however, would be the ability and the willingness of states to enforce such an edict. Any country trying to withdraw from the NPT or willing to violate its obligations might be equally unwilling to comply with a “request” for nuclear materials to be removed. Thus, states may have to consider military actions to eliminate the potential nuclear option in such states. That, as can be seen from the Iraq experience, is no easy step.
Another set of ideas being floated by experts and officials is an objective set of criteria that might allow the international community to judge the “legitimate” need for states to acquire nuclear production capabilities. These might include the scope of the nuclear power industry and energy output of a state, the availability of other natural resources for energy production, a state’s nonproliferation credentials, and its integration into international economic and political organizations. Some would argue this would make it easy to judge between states such as North Korea and Iran on the one hand and Japan and Brazil on the other. It is not clear how such a set of criteria would be enshrined in international operations or whether it could be accepted by NPT members, many of who increasingly express their concern about the discriminatory nature of the existing regime.
A less legalistic set of approaches in a similar vein would seek to test the motivations of states seeking to acquire uranium-enrichment or plutonium- separation capabilities for civilian power applications.[4] These ideas would, in various ways, seek to outdo domestic nuclear production facilities economically by offering legally binding and economically attractive options to supply fresh fuel and remove spent nuclear fuel from states with nuclear power programs.
Such arrangements could be provided through the existing commercial market with groups of existing enrichers providing fresh fuel at attractive rates and countries agreeing to manage the spent fuel in their own countries or via international arrangements such as an IAEA-run fuel bank or internationally owned and operated consortium such as those being considered by the IAEA experts group. Refusal of viable and economically attractive options by a state would call into question its motives and possibly make it easier to galvanize the potential international response. Yet, as the Iran case demonstrates, it the difficult for states and the international community to muster political will to enforce global standards even in the face of obvious proliferation risks.
Assessment
The near-term prospects for a new international fuel-cycle system that limits the national ability of states to determine their own national capabilities are not bright. The main focus of nonproliferation efforts for the coming months and possibly years will be resolving or trying to deal with the aftermath of the dual nuclear challenges of Iran and North Korea. In the meantime, procedural adjustments to export controls and tighter enforcement through multilateral measures including the Proliferation Security Initiative, an informal coalition of states working together to enforce national export controls more effectively through legal and even military interdiction, can help slow the unsafeguarded acquisition of nuclear production facilities.
Thus, states concerned with the spread of production capabilities may be left trying to enforce a new discriminatory standard where some states are permitted to have uranium-enrichment and plutonium reprocessing capabilities and others are not. This system is inherently unstable and threatens to repeat what many consider to be the main weakness of the NPT itself.
Moreover, the two issues are intimately linked. Non-nuclear weapons states are unlikely to consider yielding to what many see as a basic right under the NPT. They will be especially resistant as many already question the commitment of the United States or other nuclear-weapon states to meet their own treaty obligations. In particular, they claim that the nuclear-weapon states have not made sufficient progress in achieving their stated goals of general and complete disarmament and their 2000 pledge that they were unequivocally committed to doing so. In other words, it will be difficult to tighten some portions of NPT implementation without states linking it to other efforts to enforce other aspects of the agreement.
What is clear is that the way the world succeeds or fails in addressing Iran will serve as a precedent in the coming years. In accepting an offer from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany to suspend and potentially abandon nuclear production plans in exchange for access to nuclear reactors, energy assistance, and fuller trade engagement, Iran and its negotiating partners may be creating a potentially useful model for others to follow. In the end, however, the choice is between trying to get ahead of the curve by changing the rules of the international system or resigning the United States and other major players to putting out nuclear fires every time a new state attempts to acquire reprocessing or enrichment technologies.
If the Iran talks fall apart or other states friendlier to the West decide to pursue nuclear production plans and are not equally opposed, the discrimination among states will be made more apparent and the underlying tensions will re-emerge. If, as many hope, the talks lead to a long-term deal to end Tehran’s fuel cycle ambitions, the United States and its allies should work to establish Iran as the model for a new norm where no new states acquire these special capabilities and those that have them move to operate them in ways that reduce the distinction between the haves and have-nots.
ENDNOTES
1. The White House, “A Report to the President by the Committee on Nuclear Proliferation,” January 21, 1965.
2. Miles A. Pomper, “ElBaradei Appoints Fuel Cycle Group,” Arms Control Today, September 2004.
3. George Perkovich et al., “Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security,” June 2004.
4. Ernest Moniz et al., “Making the World Safe for Nuclear Energy,” Survival, Winter 2004.
Jon B. Wolfsthal is an associate and deputy director for Non-Proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a co-author of Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 2002).
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The Nuclear Fuel Cycle: Is It Time for a Multilateral Approach?
Tariq Rauf and Fiona Simpson, December 2004 Arms Control Today
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_12/Rauf.asp
* Not the First Time: The Long History of Multinational Approaches to the Nuclear Fuel Cycle
* U.S. Nuclear Trade Restriction Initiatives Still on Hold
The continuing spread of nuclear technology, along with the emergence of clandestine nuclear supply networks, has led to discussion on revisiting multinational approaches to the nuclear fuel cycle. The idea had been explored in the 1970s and 1980s but failed to win approval. However, it has gained a new relevance recently amid several new and serious challenges to the nuclear nonproliferation regime: the discovery of Iran’s uranium-enrichment program, which is now subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards or verification; Libya’s December 2003 admission and renunciation of its clandestine nuclear-weapon development program; and the admission by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear weapon program, that he had organized a clandestine network to supply Iran and Libya, as well as North Korea, with uranium-enrichment technology.
These events have led to a rethinking of how the 1968 nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and the related nuclear nonproliferation regime might be reinforced. The NPT remains the world’s most adhered-to multilateral arms control treaty, currently with 189 states-parties, the only holdouts being India, Israel, and Pakistan.[1] It is based on an inherent, intricate, and interlinked three-part bargain: all states-parties that did not have nuclear weapons prior to January 1967 are required to renounce any ambitions for developing or possessing nuclear weapons. Furthermore, although these states-parties may use nuclear material and technology exclusively for peaceful purposes, they are required to subject their nuclear material and activities to IAEA verification, and nuclear-weapon states are required to pursue measures to achieve nuclear disarmament at an early date. In addition, several NPT states-parties that are the principal suppliers or transshippers of nuclear material and technology are administering export controls as required under the NPT regime (the Zangger Committee) or to supplement the regime (the Nuclear Suppliers Group).
Two basic approaches have been put forward; both seek to ensure that the nuclear nonproliferation regime maintains its authority and credibility in the face of these very real challenges. One calls for the further denial of technology to non-nuclear-weapon states and the reinterpretation of the NPT’s provisions governing the transfer of nuclear technologies. It is unlikely to succeed in light of lowered technical barriers to the development of sensitive technology and the increasing unwillingness of many non-nuclear-weapon states to accept additional restrictions to their right to peaceful nuclear technology under the NPT. The other approach would use multinational alternatives to national operations of uranium-enrichment and plutonium-separation technologies, and to storage of spent nuclear fuel.
The first to propose a fresh look at multilateral approaches was IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei. Addressing IAEA member states at the September 2003 General Conference, ElBaradei said that such approaches, based on improved nuclear technology control, greater operational transparency, and nuclear fuel and power plant supply assurances, could serve to strengthen the nuclear nonproliferation regime while not impeding the development of nuclear energy for states wishing to choose that option.
ElBaradei’s proposal put forward the possibility of supplementing and thereby strengthening the nonproliferation regime by re-examining the need for each state-party to control all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle, particularly with respect to the uranium enrichment and plutonium separation and the storage and disposal of spent nuclear fuel. Thus, the regime could be strengthened by placing these technologies under some form of multilateral or multinational control.[2] To explore this idea, an independent expert group has been set up at the IAEA to consider possible multilateral approaches to the nuclear fuel cycle. This group will submit a report to ElBaradei in the spring of 2005.
Old Regime, New Challenges
When the NPT entered into force in 1970, sensitive nuclear technology was widely considered out of the reach of most countries. This is clearly no longer the case. Access to such technologies has increased particularly over the last few years. As many as 40 countries may now have the technical know-how required to produce nuclear weapons, and the legal regime has not kept pace with these technological developments.
In the absence of an enhanced legal regime, the sole remaining and somewhat fragile barrier to development of nuclear weapons may be a state-party’s assessment of its security situation and requirements. Such considerations are rarely fixed but alter over time. In the face of external events, a country that now has no interest in incorporating nuclear weapons into its security doctrine may one day decide otherwise. One of the fallacies of the so-called good guys/bad guys distinction is that occupants of these categories may move from one to the other. Betting on future nonproliferation solely on the basis of the current benign intentions of states-parties dangerously narrows the margin of security.
Can the NPT Be Altered?
One straightforward option for strengthening the nonproliferation regime involves altering the NPT itself, whether de facto or de jure. In particular, some have suggested reinterpreting existing NPT language that guarantees non-nuclear-weapon states the right to pursue nuclear technology exclusively for peaceful purposes if they forgo nuclear weapons (Article II) and submit to IAEA safeguards (Article III). Such an approach, however, is unrealistic.
Article IV of the NPT has two interconnected elements. The first reaffirms the inalienable right of all NPT parties “to develop research, production, and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.” The second is a reaffirmation that “[a]ll the Parties to the Treaty undertake to facilitate and have the right to participate in the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy” and places an obligation on the parties to “cooperate in the development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes,” especially in the territories of non-nuclear-weapon states-parties, with due consideration for the needs of the developing areas of the world.
Article IV was specifically crafted to preclude any attempt to reinterpret the NPT so as to inhibit a country’s right to peaceful nuclear technologies as long as the technology is not used to produce nuclear weapons. Moreover, there is no formal mechanism for reinterpretation of the NPT. Any reinterpretation would probably have to occur through a consensually agreed decision at a review conference, which occurs every five years. This is how some past decisions and documents, which have not sought to alter any of the articles of the treaty but to provide benchmarks for implementation, were approved, such as at the 2000 Review Conference, where the states-parties agreed to take 13 practical steps to demonstrate their progress in implementing Article VI of the NPT.
Past experience, however, does not bode well for using such an approach. Some non-nuclear-weapon states have expressed frustration, for example, that some nuclear-weapon states such as the United States and Russia have backed away from the 13 steps. Given this history, it is unlikely that a reinterpretation of Article IV would hold or that an agreement on reinterpreting the NPT could be reached in the first place.
More broadly, the non-nuclear-weapon states would be disinclined to contribute to what many of them increasingly view as the growing imbalance in the NPT. They believe the nuclear-weapon states have backed away from their original guarantee that the non-nuclear-weapon states would enjoy “the right to participate in the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy,” as well as the right to receive assistance in this arena from “Parties to the Treaty in a position to do so.” The increasing concerns that the states-parties “in a position to do so” are not only no longer doing so but are placing still more restrictions on supply have fostered a belief among many non-nuclear-weapon states that the NPT bargain is being corroded.
The Limitations of a Denial Approach
Cognizant of these difficulties, a related but somewhat narrower approach has been advanced by President George W. Bush and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. In February, Bush told an audience at the National Defense University that “enrichment and reprocessing are not necessary for nations seeking to harness nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.” In view of this, he proposed that the 44-nation NSG “should refuse to sell enrichment and reprocessing equipment and technologies to any state that does not already possess full-scale, functioning enrichment and reprocessing plants.”
This approach also found voice in a proposal the same month from Straw, who questioned whether states that fail to comply with their safeguards obligations “should not forfeit the right to develop the nuclear fuel cycle, particularly the enrichment and reprocessing capabilities which are of such proliferation sensitivity.” The Straw proposal went on to suggest that “this does not mean that they would be deprived of the possibility of constructing and running civil nuclear power stations. These could still operate with fuel supplied by countries honoring their safeguards obligations.” Even though the Straw proposal is closer to the multilateral approach suggested by ElBaradei, both the Straw and the Bush proposals proceed from the basis of a denial of certain nuclear technologies.
Yet at the same time, the demand for nuclear energy and related technologies has continued and even risen as countries seek to add nuclear power to their energy mix to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels and in the future to meet their Kyoto Protocol carbon emission reduction quotas.
In this world, export controls, such as those of the NSG, serve as a useful but only temporary barrier to further proliferation. They are inadequate to address the most severe proliferation challenges as they rely on informal, nonbinding arrangements that are far from universal. Moreover, in recent years the spread of nuclear technology has been facilitated by clandestine nuclear supply networks ostensibly out of the control of governments.
These networks are easily established in response to the continuing and rising demand for nuclear technology. Current media attention has focused on A. Q. Khan and his international associates, but it should not be forgotten that similar networks also supplied Iraq prior to 1991. These networks appear to have encompassed companies and entities in more than 30 countries, ostensibly without the knowledge of their governments, including members of nuclear export control bodies such as the Zangger Committee and the NSG.
Indeed, the attempt to place ever more restrictions on supply may well have contributed indirectly to the emergence of clandestine nuclear supply networks. Iran, for example, has claimed that it was forced to turn to clandestine sources to meet its needs for civil nuclear technology when more open sources were shut off.
The concerns evoked by these clandestine networks, the availability of and increasing access to nuclear technology, and the possibility that some countries may be tempted to use such technology for nonpeaceful purposes cannot be ignored, particularly given past evidence of some countries not complying with their safeguards obligations. Consequently, it seems the time has come for new thinking or, to be more accurate, for a re-exploration of some old thinking in the light of new challenges.
Pros and Cons of a Multilateral Approach
ElBaradei’s initiative in the fall of 2003 attempted to jump-start this debate.[3] He did not set out a detailed plan but suggested a few guidelines: He said that any such venture would require proper rules of transparency and, crucially, assurance that legitimate users could obtain access to nuclear fuel for peaceful uses.
The potential benefits of such an approach for the nonproliferation regime are symbolic and practical. As a confidence-building measure, multilateral approaches have the potential to provide enhanced assurance to the international community that the sensitive portions of the civilian nuclear fuel cycle are less vulnerable to weapons proliferation, without singling out “good” and “bad” countries. If implemented, these measures may also have the potential to facilitate the continued use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and enhance the prospects for the safe and environmentally sound storage and disposal of spent fuel and radioactive waste.
The inherent proliferation risks of enrichment and reprocessing technologies could be reduced by having more than one country involved in their operation, because any country that sought to break out of its NPT commitments would not only be choosing to violate the will of the international community but potentially forcing a confrontation with another state or states that might not want to choose such a course.
In addition, such approaches could strengthen nonproliferation norms by requiring nuclear verification and security and safety measures that go beyond existing international agreements and conventions. The partners in such endeavors could conceivably allow IAEA inspectors “any time, anywhere” access rights, in addition to the use of any verification technologies deemed necessary by the agency, as well as other agreed confidence-building measures.
Multilateral approaches would provide benefits of cost-effectiveness and economies of scale for smaller countries or those with limited resources while providing the benefits of the products of nuclear technology, i.e., nuclear fuel for power plants and subsequent storage of spent fuel. Similar benefits have accrued in other high-technology and high-security sectors, such as aerospace and high-speed computing.
The argument, however, is not straightforward. Opponents of multilateral approaches point to loss or limitation of state sovereignty and independence of ownership or control over a key technology sector. Countries with differing levels of technology, institutionalization, political relationships, economic development, resources, or requirements might find multilateral approaches inconvenient, unfeasible, restrictive, or simply not beneficial. Other might argue that multilateral approaches could lead to further dissemination or loss of control over sensitive nuclear technologies and to weaker nuclear security and safety standards.
To be sure, if all sensitive technology is available to all participants in a multilateral arrangement, then there is no benefit to be gained. To guard against this, multilateral efforts must come with some restrictions in order to avoid the risks of sensitive technology transfer. Within a multilateral context, however, this can be done at a larger stage than unilateral denial policies, allowing countries greater access to truly peaceful nuclear technology while discouraging them from developing independent national programs either overtly or covertly that can lead to weapons development. To meet the twin objectives of nonproliferation and “multilateralization,” nuclear facilities can be provided to partners in a “black box” mode, i.e., the technology holders construct and operate facilities that are managed and operated multilaterally, without technical know-how being disseminated.
Any viable future multilateral approach will require states-parties with nuclear weapons to set an example by using their enrichment and reprocessing plants to provide nuclear fuel to other states that have eschewed these technologies. Assurances of supply will need to be devised in a manner that is commercially competitive, avoids monopolistic situations, and provides for back-up supply in the event that some suppliers might be unable to provide the required services for whatever reason.
Conclusion
Most observers agree that the new challenges to the nuclear nonproliferation regime require a fresh response. Any attempt to strengthen the regime by further denial of technology, however, holds little likelihood of success. A new look at multinational approaches to the nuclear fuel cycle is clearly in its infancy, and its progress dependent mainly on political will.
Still, despite the disappointments of past initiatives of this kind, such ideas merit serious consideration. It may be that new thinking on an old idea holds out the promise of a strengthened and relevant regime, one that is able to cope with contemporary and future challenges.
ENDNOTES
1. According to the February 12, 2003 Resolution adopted by the IAEA Board of Governors, North Korea’s nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) safeguards agreement remains in force and is binding. The 2003 and 2004 sessions of the Preparatory Committee for the 2005 NPT Review Conference remained silent on the matter of North Korea’s NPT withdrawal. Neither the UN Security Council nor the NPT depository states, as far as is known, have rendered any definitive opinion regarding North Korea’s withdrawal from the treaty.
2. The terms “multilateral” and “multinational” are used in a broad sense to refer to arrangements beyond solely national control.
3. For an outline of these proposals, see “Curbing Nuclear Proliferation: An Interview With Mohamed ElBaradei,” Arms Control Today, November 2003, pp. 3-6.
Not the First Time: The Long History of Multinational Approaches to the Nuclear Fuel Cycle
The idea of a multilateral approach to the fuel cycle is not new. Soon after the nuclear age began, the United States unsuccessfully advanced a proposal for multinational control of the nuclear fuel cycle: the 1946 Baruch Plan. Named for U.S. diplomat Bernard Baruch, the plan called for states to transfer ownership and control over civil nuclear activities and materials to an international development agency. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower unveiled his Atoms for Peace plan, which laid the groundwork for the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The real heyday for such explorations was the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s. After India conducted a “peaceful” nuclear test in 1974, concerns grew that other countries could follow India’s example and use their civilian nuclear program and plutonium reprocessing technologies to build nuclear weapons. Yet at the same time, countries wished to solve this problem within the context of the newly minted nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which sought to assure all states that they would be permitted to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes under IAEA safeguards.
Out of such concerns, the first feasibility study on multilateral approaches to the nuclear fuel cycle was undertaken. The Regional Nuclear Fuel Cycle Centres (RFCC) study of 1975-1977 was created to provide a forum for countries to examine the possibility of joining together to set up fuel cycle centers at selected sites. In keeping with contemporary concerns, the emphasis in this and other studies of the time was on the back end of the cycle, specifically reprocessing and plutonium containment. Although the RFCC study drew some favorable conclusions regarding the technical viability of such an endeavor, it also highlighted some potential problems, among them the risks of technology transfer and the interrelated difficulties of providing assurances of supply to all stakeholders, including making provisions for the possibility of host-country withdrawal or interference.
The International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE) study of 1977-1980, which among other things touched upon the possibility of regional fuel-cycle facilities and prospects for multilateral cooperation on plutonium storage, came to similarly positive technical conclusions. However, due in large part to diminishing concerns over the likelihood of a “plutonium economy,” the disinclination of some countries to give up national control over reprocessing, and the general lack of political will, neither the RFCC or INFCE studies resulted in any further pursuit of multilateral approaches.
The IAEA Expert Group on International Plutonium Storage (IPS), the next initiative in the field, moved away from the discussion of regional fuel-cycle centers to examine instead the prospects for IAEA-supervised management, storage, and disposition of spent nuclear fuel. Once again, no consensus was reached as states were unwilling to renounce sovereign control over nuclear technology and fuel. The same fate met the studies undertaken by the IAEA Committee on Assurances of Supply (CAS) in 1980. After seven years, 21 sessions, and little or no agreement among the participants, CAS went into formal abeyance, where it remains.
The efforts that began in the 1970s in the area of multilateral approaches finally ended with the UN Conference for the Promotion of International Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy (with the rather unwieldy acronym UNCPICPUNE) in 1987, but like its predecessors, it yielded little in the way of concrete results in this regard.
----
U.S. Nuclear Trade Restriction Initiatives Still on Hold
By Wade Boese
In a Feb. 11 speech setting out his agenda for checking nuclear proliferation, President George W. Bush called on a voluntary group of nuclear suppliers to implement two proposals to limit the spread of materials and technologies that could be used to make nuclear weapons. To date, neither has been adopted.
Bush urged the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), whose 44 members seek to coordinate their nuclear trade policies, to add two export guidelines. One proposed regulation would deny transfers of enrichment and reprocessing technologies to countries without functioning facilities for these activities. Such facilities can be used to produce fuel for civilian power reactors or key ingredients for nuclear weapons.
The other new restriction would block any nuclear-related trade unless a recipient had ratified an additional protocol to their safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Additional protocols grant the IAEA broader authority to verify that a recipient’s nuclear activities are confined to peaceful pursuits.
Putting a cap on the spread of enrichment and reprocessing technologies has generated “substantial concerns” among NSG members, according to a U.S. government official interviewed Nov. 19 by Arms Control Today. Several members question whether a blanket denial of specific technologies is consistent with the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) provision to allow non-nuclear-weapon states “the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.”
Countries are particularly anxious to forestall what may well prove to be a divisive debate at this May’s NPT Review Conference (see page 6). In addition, some EU countries contend that such a rule might conflict with the general EU policy of free trade among EU members.
Limiting nuclear trade to countries that have ratified an additional protocol has met less NSG resistance, but the group operates by consensus, so the initiative remains stalled. Argentina and Brazil, neither of which has adopted an additional protocol, assert that this criterion should be voluntary. Russia and at least one additional country have argued against tying all nuclear trade to a recipient ratifying an additional protocol. Instead, they advocate that such a restriction be limited to enrichment and reprocessing transfers.
U.S. officials intend to continue to press Bush’s proposals at the NSG. The next decision-making meeting of the group is scheduled for June in Oslo.
Although Bush has seen his proposals stymied so far at the NSG, the president succeeded in getting the more select Group of Eight to agree to a one-year moratorium on new deals involving enrichment and reprocessing technologies. (See ACT, July/August 2004.) This group includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Tariq Rauf is Head of Verification and Security Policy Coordination, and Fiona Simpson is an External Relations and Policy Coordination Officer, at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The views expressed here are personal and do not necessarily represent those of the IAEA.
-------- depleted uranium
International Weapons Conventions and Iran, Iraq
Electronic Iraq
Omar Khan
6 December 2004
http://electroniciraq.net/news/1741.shtml
Map of the United State's Active Nuclear Weapons Facilities.
http://electronicIraq.net/uploads/usweaponsites.jpg
In no less than hundreds of articles over the past few weeks, our press has tirelessly reported on Iran’s uranium enrichment program, or rather—in characteristic shorthand—on “Iran’s efforts to develop the capability to make nuclear weapons” (Foreign Affairs, 11/24). Early on the morning of the November 29th, however, in “Iran Backs Away From a Demand on A-Bomb Fuel,” the New York Times announced that a settlement between Iran and Britain, France, and Germany (EU-3) had been reached: Iranians had agreed to suspend all research on uranium enrichment. One hopes that with this agreement, daily scrutiny of hypothetical Iranian weapons might also give way to some observations of actual American weapons being deployed nearby.
For by many accounts, the use of unconventional weapons has likely been a US pastime in “The War on Terror” during even its most recent episodes. Dahr Jamail of Inter Press News Service has recorded Fallujan experiences of poison gas and bombs that “exploded into large fires that burnt the skin even when water was thrown on the burns”—a trademark of napalm and phosphorus bombs. Though many Americans will no doubt say such claims are dubious, they have reason to: no outside medical personnel or observers have yet been allowed into Fallujah to even allow further discussion of the matter. Less dubious is the continued use of depleted uranium munitions, which as Vishnu Bhagwat, former Indian Chief of Naval Staff, has written amounted in 2003 alone to the equivalent of nearly 250,000 Nagasaki bombs. But depleted uranium is nothing new, having been used extensively in southern Iraq during the first Gulf War. The Department of Environmental Engineering at the University of Baghdad has accordingly measured radiation levels in and near the city of Basra to range from hundreds to thousands of times the normal levels. Dr. Jawad Kadhim Al-Ali, Director of the Oncology Center in Basra, has theorized that depleted uranium may be a reason that the death rate from cancers in Basra has now reached 19 times that of 1988. It was also in Basra that a previous study led by Dr. Alim Yacoup found the incidence of leukaemia among children to have doubled between 1990 and 1999. Perhaps it is such reports that have led Dr. Asaf Durakovic, the nuclear-medicine expert of the Veterans’Administration, to characterize DU as a “threat to humanity.” According to an oft cited August 2002 UN report, the use of DU munitions breaches the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter, the Genocide Convention, the Convention against Torture, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980, and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.
Returning once more to Iran, one is reminded of the adage that history is indeed written by the victors: while the New York Times writes of Iran's "long history of concealment" in its relation to international weapons conventions, there is little need for such concealment by United States Government for its violations of such conventions as they go almost entirely unreported.
This double standard at work in the application of such conventions is emphasized by a closer look at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the basis for the present attention on Iran. Article 4(1) says that "Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes"; Article 4(2) says that "All the Parties to the Treaty undertake to facilitate, and have the right to participate in, the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy," it goes on, "with due consideration for the needs of the developing areas of the world."
It would seem that the United States, rather than Iran, would be bound by the terms of the treaty, which obligate it-as a signer to the Treaty-to undertake to facilitate the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials, and so forth to Iran, one such developing country of the world.
According to the aforementioned New York Times article, like all other coverage of the standoff in this country, such an exchange was of course not a right, much less a possibility.
That right was instead Iran's "demand," one that last week "came in two letters to the International Atomic Energy Agency from Iran's atomic energy agency, whose hard-liners oppose any concessions to outsiders."
But as these hard-liners, like other Iranians, have apparently conceded to their US and European watch dogs, the question arises with regard to Iraq, where any comparable watch dogs can be found to concede to.
Principle two of the Nuremburg Tribunal tells us that "the fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law."
A dying hope of Iraqis today would not be so ambitious as to imagine respite in the face of our longstanding war crimes, but instead an interruption of the silence that sanctions them.
Omar Khan is a writer and editor in Oakland. He is writing regular analysis, 'Covering Iraq', for Dahr Jamail's website. 'Covering Iraq' provides analysis and discussion of US mainstream news in light of Dahr Jamail's reports and photographs from Occupied Iraq. Its intent is to identify unreported news from Iraq and to make a broader audience aware of events there. 'Covering Iraq' encourages your comments, reactions, and participation.
-------- india / pakistan
Musharraf Scorns Nuclear Probe
Pakistani leader defends his decision to deny monitors access to accused proliferator Abdul Qadeer Khan as a matter of national pride.
Los Angeles Times
By Sonni Efron
December 6, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes429.htm
WASHINGTON — Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on Sunday defended his decision not to allow international investigators to interrogate Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist accused of peddling nuclear secrets around the world.
Appearing on CNN's "Late Edition" on Sunday, Musharraf said the requests from United Nations nuclear inspectors indicated a lack of trust in Pakistan, portraying the issue as a matter of national pride.
President Bush met with Musharraf on Saturday and urged the Pakistani military man to ensure that all information about the Khan network's nuclear proliferation be turned over to the Americans. Musharraf promised to do so.
But the White House did not ask for direct access to Khan — apparently in deference to Pakistani sensitivities about a man who, as the father of the country's atomic bomb, had been considered a hero.
However, the International Atomic Energy Agency still wants to interview Khan, whom Musharraf has pardoned, and Khan's assistant, who is held in Malaysia.
Lacking such cooperation, officials view it as unlikely that Khan's activities will ever be fully unraveled, The Times reported Sunday.
Musharraf told CNN that Pakistan could do the best job interrogating Khan.
"It shows a lack of trust in us," Musharraf said. "We can question him the best, and then there is … a domestic sensitivity. This man is a hero for the Pakistanis, and there is a sensitivity that maybe the world wants to intervene in our nuclear program, which nobody wants…. It is a pride of the nation."
Analysts have raised doubts about whether Musharraf is keeping Khan from speaking to international investigators for fear the scientist might reveal the extent to which some of his activities may have been condoned by the Pakistani military.
Musharraf denied "200%" that the Pakistani government or military knew that Khan was making nuclear weapons information available to other nations.
The Pakistani leader, a key Bush administration ally in its war on terrorism, also said that, in hindsight, the U.S. decision to invade Iraq was a mistake.
"We have landed ourselves in more trouble," he said.
There was no new information on where Osama bin Laden could be, Musharraf said, but he suggested that Al Qaeda's command structure in Pakistan has been broken by recent military operations aimed at rousting militants from tribal areas along the Afghan border.
In Pakistan, both pro-government and opposition parties staged large street demonstrations coinciding with Musharraf's foreign tour.
In the central city of Multan, a coalition of six Islamic parties, Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, held a rally and vowed to force Musharraf to quit as army chief if he reneged on his promise to do so voluntarily by year's end, according to Reuters.
Loosening the military's control over politics has been a key goal of the Pakistani democracy movement, but the parliament recently passed a law that would allow Musharraf to keep the top army job as well as the presidency.
-------- iran
Military Sites Off-Limits to UN Inspectors: Tehran
Agence France Presse, Arab News
6 December 2004
http://www.aljazeerah.info/News%20archives/2004%20News%20archives/December/6n/Military%20Sites%20OffLimits%20to%20UN%20Inspectors%20Tehran.htm
TEHRAN, - Iran said yesterday it was not obliged to allow UN atomic energy agency inspectors to visit military sites alleged to be involved in secret nuclear weapons work, but that it was willing to discuss the issue.
"It is not a matter of unlimited commitments and unlimited inspections," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters when asked if International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) teams would be able to probe two suspect military facilities.
"We will act in accordance with the NPT (nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), our duties and responsibilities," Asefi added. The IAEA is mandated under the NPT to verify that all nuclear material in a country is declared and not being diverted for nuclear weapons purposes, as the United States claims is the case in Iran.
But under the NPT and even its additional protocol - also signed by Iran - the agency has limited inspection powers.
The Vienna-based watchdog has asked Iran if it can visit the Parchin military base east of Tehran, where US officials have said the Iranians may be testing "high-explosive shaped charges with an inert core of depleted uranium" as a dry test for how a bomb with fissile material would work.
IAEA director Mohamed El-Baradei said in an interview that he had "every reason to expect that Iran will allow us to go" to the site.
But Asefi said Iran has not been officially asked by the IAEA if it can inspect Parchin, although he did add that "we are ready to cooperate within the framework of our commitments with the IAEA."
The IAEA is also researching another site in Tehran, Lavizan II, which the exiled Iranian opposition has alleged is a site involved in the secret enriching of uranium.
Iran insists its nuclear program is solely directed at generating electricity, and fiercely denies allegations it is seeking weapons.
The country escaped possible UN sanctions last week after agreeing to a deal with Britain, France and Germany to suspend its controversial fuel cycle work in exchange for a package of incentives.
"A temporary suspension means a short while, not a long time," Asefi said of the suspension.
However he said comments Friday by former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani that the freeze would not last more than six months should not be seen as a firm timeframe. Asefi said Rafsanjani only mentioned six months an "example".
An IAEA board of governors resolution on Iran last week had failed to give the agency the "unrestricted access" in the Islamic republic which nations like the United States say is needed if the IAEA is to resolve the Iranian nuclear question.
El-Baradei said the issue has been raised that "we do not have the authority to go everywhere" but he said this was a "non-issue because we have received access to every facility we asked for in Iran."
The IAEA goes beyond NPT accords in what it calls "transparency visits," when it asks Iran as a confidence-building measure to allow it to inspect sites, even if the agency does not have a suspicion of nuclear material at these places, El-Baradei said.
-----
Iran Hints It Sped Up Enriching Uranium as a Ploy
By NAZILA FATHI
NYTimes
December 6, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/06/international/middleeast/06iran.html?ex=1103000400&en=024d39d854d99ba0&ei=5006&partner=ALTAVISTA1
TEHRAN, Dec. 5 - Iranian officials have hinted in recent days that they sped up their enrichment of uranium in the past year to put Iran in a better position to negotiate with the West.
In a rare admission, Sirous Nasseri, a member of Iran's negotiating team with three European countries over its nuclear program, was quoted Sunday in the daily newspaper Shargh as saying that Iran had mastered the nuclear fuel cycle since last year, when it came under international pressure to abandon its uranium enrichment program.
"We are in a better negotiating position for political work than last year," the daily quoted him as saying.
Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's former ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, told students at Ferdowssi University in Mashhad on Wednesday that the government of President Muhammad Khatami had, for the first time, allocated money and facilities to make "advanced centrifuges" for uranium enrichment, Shargh also reported.
Iran has taken the position that its nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes, though it has pursued technology that could easily be converted to weapons production. The United States has accused Iran of secretly trying to make nuclear weapons and has urged its allies on the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear monitoring agency, to send Iran's case to the Security Council.
The agency opted for a gentler approach and issued a mildly worded resolution after Iran agreed in talks with the three European nations - France, Germany and Britain - to suspend its uranium enrichment activities. In return Iran expects rewards, including economic benefits, political and security cooperation with Europe and help with nuclear technology.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman said Sunday that Iran was not obliged to allow United Nations inspectors to visit military sites said to be involved in secret nuclear weapons work, but that it was willing to discuss the issue, Agence France-Presse reported.
"It is not a matter of unlimited commitments and unlimited inspections," said the spokesman, Hamid Reza Asefi. "We will act in accordance with" the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.
Despite statements by Iran's leaders that their nuclear program has wide public support, reaction among Iranians to the agreement to suspend nuclear activities has been muted.
Except for a protest outside the British Embassy in Tehran, for which about 200 members of a militia force were bused in, no noticeable protest has occurred.
Frustrated by more than two decades of isolation and eight years of war with Iraq, many Iranians indicate that they would rather avoid confrontation with other countries. They say their priorities are an improved economy and more political and social freedom.
"The government could spend the $12 billion it has spent over a nuclear program for development of the country," said Karim Bozorgmehr, 32, an English teacher. An analyst in Tehran, who had done surveys on the subject but who said he feared retaliation if his name was published, said a majority of people he approached viewed the government's nuclear ambition with skepticism, saying the government was seeking nuclear capacity as a deterrent and as a way to consolidate its power.
"The clerics want to get hold of the bomb to rule for another 50 years," said, Reza, 36, a civil servant, who, fearing retaliation, would agree to be identified by only his first name.
News of the United Nations agency's resolution last week helped Iran's economy, in which important sectors like real estate and the stock market had slumped over fears that the nuclear dispute could result in a military confrontation with Israel or the United States.
"People were in a wait-and-see situation," said Saeed Leylaz, a journalist and an analyst in Tehran. "The decline in the economy and the soaring unemployment led to discontent among people. Iranian society is not ready for any kind of confrontation, and this put pressure on the government to reach a deal with Europe."
Iran began its nuclear program before the Islamic revolution in 1979 with aid from the United States, Germany and France. But the world has been suspicious of the nuclear program of Iran's Islamic government.
-------- korea
Russian Envoy Sees Korea Nuclear Talks in Late Jan
Reuters
Dec 6, 2006
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20041206/wl_nm/korea_north_talks_dc_1
TOKYO (Reuters) - North Korea (news - web sites) could return to six-party talks on its nuclear programs in late January after President Bush (news - web sites) forms his new cabinet, Russian ambassador to Japan Alexander Losyukov said Monday.
"Probably, the negotiations could be restarted sometime at the end of January," Losyukov, Russia's former point man on the talks, told reporters. "We think the sooner we restart the negotiations, the better."
North Korea said on Saturday it would not return to the talks involving North and South Korea (news - web sites), the United States, Japan, Russia and China, until Bush assembled his new team and Washington decided its policy toward Pyongyang.
The six parties have met for three rounds of talks in Beijing but made little progress. A fourth round scheduled for September never materialized.
The nuclear standoff started two years ago when U.S. officials said North Korea had admitted to pursuing a secret uranium enrichment program, something the North has since denied.
Losyukov, whose country is one of North Korea's closest allies, also said he saw no signs of "regime change" in the isolated communist state.
"It is a very secluded system. They have been surviving as such for quite a long time ... They can go on like that for a number of years," he said. "We cannot expect some kind of collapse of the system in the near future."
Reports from diplomats and officials have said some of the long ubiquitous portraits of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il had been removed from public places and fewer people were wearing lapel badges of Kim.
The reports have sparked rumors of a coup in the North.
"I have not heard of any indications of possible collapse of the regime or drastic changes," he said. "I have not seen any evidence that changes are coming there."
--------
North Korea Said to Expand Arms Program
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: December 6, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/06/international/asia/06korea.html?oref=login
VIENNA, Dec. 3 - Nearly two years after
international nuclear inspectors were ejected from
North Korea, the director general of the
International Atomic Energy Agency says he is now
certain that the nuclear material his agency once
monitored there has been converted into fuel for
four to six nuclear bombs.
The assessment by the energy agency's chief,
Mohamed ElBaradei, in an interview here at its
headquarters, aligns with the private assessments
of many American intelligence officials. But it
goes well beyond anything that the Central
Intelligence Agency or President Bush and his
aides have said in public. Some Bush
administration officials have said they are not
eager to update their public assessment of North
Korea's abilities, out of a concern that it could
create pressure for action - either greater
efforts to force the collapse of the North Korean
government, or greater concessions in
negotiations, as North Korea has demanded.
In the interview, Dr. ElBaradei said his judgment
that North Korea had converted its stockpile of
spent nuclear fuel into weapons-grade plutonium
was not based on new intelligence. Instead, he
said, it was based on the agency's years of
accumulated knowledge of North Korea's abilities,
and the amount of time that had passed since North
Korea ejected inspectors and began removing the
8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods that inspectors had
been monitoring.
"I'm sure they have reprocessed it all," he said.
"We know they have the fissile material," he said,
a reference to the rods, which can be reprocessed
into weapons-grade plutonium. "The production
process is not that difficult" to turn the rods
into bomb fuel, he said, and now enough time has
passed for North Korea to have solved any
production problems.
Until now, the United States has insisted that
North Korea has enough nuclear material to make
only one or two weapons, based on an estimate made
in the early 1990's. Because the United States and
the I.A.E.A. have never seen that material or any
nuclear weapons, it was an educated guess, and one
that has been the subject of considerable
behind-the-scenes debate.
But it was also assumed that one or two weapons
posed relatively little threat: North Korea could
not afford to sell its plutonium, or even conduct
a nuclear test, if those actions would eradicate
its stockpile.
If Dr. ElBaradei's new estimate is right - and
several American experts interviewed in recent
days said they believed it probably was - then
that equation changes, and could give North Korea
far more leverage.
Richard L. Armitage, who is departing as the
deputy secretary of state, warned Congress nearly
two years ago that if North Korea reprocessed its
fuel rods, there was a far more significant risk
that it could sell the material. The comment
alarmed some administration officials, who have
striven to convey a sense that there is not a
great strategic difference if North Korea holds
one or two weapons or if it holds seven or eight.
But internally, there has been significant debate
on that subject at the White House and the
Pentagon. Last month, Gen. Leon J. LaPorte,
commander of United States forces in South Korea,
told reporters in Seoul that he was increasingly
concerned that "North Korea, in its desire for
hard currency, would sell weapons-grade plutonium
to some terrorist organizations."
Robert J. Einhorn, a scholar at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington
and a former senior State Department official who
has often dealt with North Korea, said Dr.
ElBaradei's comments "certainly create some
pressure on the Bush administration."
"Would the North Koreans ever sell their
plutonium? I don't think so, but who knows?" he
said. "It becomes more plausible if they think we
are turning the screws on them. And it makes the
military situation more difficult," he said,
because North Korea could hide its weapons around
the country, making them more difficult to target
or seize.
A spokesman for the National Security Council,
Sean McCormack, said he was unaware of any change
in the official assessment of North Korea's
abilities.
Dr. ElBaradei's assessment puts him in the
opposite position he was in two years ago, when
the Bush administration was pressing him to find
evidence that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear
weapons program. Dr. ElBaradei balked then, saying
there was little evidence of activity since the
1991 Persian Gulf war in 1991. His view was later
supported by the American-led Iraq Survey Group.
But in the case of North Korea, it is Dr.
ElBaradei who appears more willing to raise
alarms. That may reflect, in part, the breakdown
in communication between the I.A.E.A. and the
United States on North Korea - the agency has been
largely frozen out of the little new intelligence
that the United States has gathered about North
Korea's activities since inspectors left. One
senior official of the agency said that was to be
expected because "without inspectors in North
Korea, there's not much we could do with the
intelligence."
Dr. ElBaradei's assessment, in the same week that
he raised new questions about whether Iran might
be hiding elements of its nuclear program, frames
the two most urgent proliferation threats. While
Mr. Bush, who said last year that he would not
"tolerate" a nuclear-armed North Korea, has
avoided public discussion of its apparently
expanding nuclear capacity, the subject clearly
concerns his aides.
But there have been a few hints of those worries.
In September, just before the presidential
election, a senior administration official with
access to the highest level intelligence told The
New York Times that there was satellite evidence
indicating that North Korea was preparing to
conduct a nuclear test. The statement appeared to
be an effort to warn North Korea and China, the
North Koreans' main economic lifeline, not to
interfere with the election by proceeding with the
test. Soon after, activity at the suspected test
site diminished, though experts here in Vienna say
their own examination of other satellite imagery
suggests that a test is still a strong
possibility.
In interviews, officials here said that if their
assessment was correct, North Korea now had six or
more "bomb cores." But it is unclear whether those
cores have been made into weapons. Either way, the
officials said, North Korea's action could
complicate the inspection process if the North
agreed to disarm.
"This is going to be a nightmare if we don't have
full cooperation and full access" throughout the
country, said Pierre Goldschmidt, who directs the
department of safeguards at the nuclear agency,
which is responsible for inspections.
With so much material now produced, he said, North
Korea has had time to disperse it around the
country and conceal it. "It will almost be an
impossible job," he said.
But he said the agency had already developed a
plan in case talks between North Korea and five
other nations - China, the United States, South
Korea, Japan and Russia - resulted in a deal to
allow inspectors back into the country. That plan
calls for far more intrusive inspections than any
the agency has conducted before. Mr. Goldschmidt
said that even with full cooperation by the North
Koreans, completing the inspections could take
several years.
-------- mideast
Vanunu: Israeli nukes push neighbor states to get atomic arms
By The Associated Press
December 06, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/510345.html
LONDON - Israel's atomic weapons are pushing other countries in the Middle East to develop similar arms, nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu said Sunday.
He also said that tensions over Iran's nuclear activities were linked to the Israeli arsenal.
Iran insists its nuclear program is strictly for the generation of electricity. But the United States suspects the Middle East nation has a secret program to develop nuclear weapons, and has threatened to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council for sanctions.
"Iran tried to put pressure on the world to deal with Israel," Vanunu told Sky News TV, defying a government order that bans him from talking to the media.
"Iran doesn't need, I think, atomic bombs. Iran doesn't want to fight any state with atomic bombs," he said. "But because the world [is] ignoring Israel, that pushes Iran and other states to try to be equal with Israel."
Vanunu also said he felt unsafe living in Israel, although he didn't specify what threat he faced. A convert to Christianity, he has been living at St. George's Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem since his release from jail in April.
"I don't feel safe, I don't feel free, the only place I can feel freedom and enjoy new life after 18 years will be far away from Israel, abroad in England, or in Europe, or the United States," he told Sky News TV.
-------- russia
Russia reveals new missile threat
MOSCOW (AFP)
Dec 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041206184729.a51w65e1.html
Russia revealed Monday it was fitting its strategic bombers with cruise missiles capable of delivering a massive precision strike thousands of miles away -- giving away the first clear hint of its post-Cold War military strategy.
"Russia's long-range air force finally has a new weapon," the government's Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily announced in a headline. "We now have a strategic cruise missile with a non-nuclear warhead," the paper wrote
"We have broken the US monopoly on the use long-range conventional cruise missiles," an unnamed senior air force commander told ITAR-TASS.
The technology appears to be similar to cruise missiles that the United States has long attached to its own intercontinental bombers like the B-2 Stealth bomber.
The announcement followed months of cryptic statements from President Vladimir Putin and his top generals that Russia was developing a new missile program that is a step ahead of any Western rivals -- including technology developed by the United States.
Putin declared last month that Russia had "conducted tests of the latest nuclear rocket systems" in a cryptic comment that puzzled military strategists but seemed aimed at Washington and its mooted missile defense shield that Moscow considers illegal.
Russia has been developing a range of new missiles capable of penetrating US defenses as a result.
Generals announced earlier this year the successful tests of a hypersonic intercontinental missile that has no officially-confirmed rival in the United States.
Moscow is also believed to be developing a multi-stage intercontinental ballistic missile that uses cruise missile technology to zigzag and avoid being shot down once it re-enters the earth's atmosphere.
Finally Russia announced that it was making its most feared and powerful trans-Atlantic missile mobile within the next two years.
But the latest technology announced Monday would see old Soviet-era conventional missiles be carried by strategic bombers with a global range.
The Russian government daily said tests of the new system were being conducted in military exercises now under way in southern Russia.
"This year, our strategic Tu-160 and Tu-95s bombers have been equipped with new non-nuclear precision weapons," ITAR-TASS quoted an unnamed Russian air force general as saying.
"These cruise missiles have a range of more than 3,000 kilometersmiles) and can miss a target by no more than a few meters while carrying a warhead of hundreds of kilotons," the source said.
The report failed to specify the type of missile being used.
The bombers currently carry an intercontinental ballistic missile called X-55 (AS-15 Kent according to Western classification) that was first deployed in 1983.
But Russian news reports said at least some of the planes will now be re-equipped with a new smaller missile which in Russian is called OFAB-500 and which carries a massive cluster bomb weighing 515 kilograms (1,130 pounds).
The pudgy weapon only has a top speed of 1,200 kilometers (720 miles) an hour but would be launched from bombers that can reach any spot on earth.
A military source told ITAR-TASS the first Tu-160 has been equipped with 45 tons of bombs -- or about 90 missiles.
"These new cruise missiles are a very precise weapon," the Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) official defense ministry newspaper wrote.
"The crew will be capable of delivering, as they say, a 'present' through an open window," the paper said.
However the Russian government daily pointed out that Moscow has a long way to go before it can catch up with Washington.
Rossiyskaya Gazeta estimated said the United States now has 5,000 non-nuclear-tipped cruise missiles with up to 700 of them attached to global B-52 and B-2 bombers.
The unnamed general told ITAR-TASS that Russia's technology was primarily aimed for "anti-terrorist operations" rather than a major war.
--------
Russia Seeks Safety in Nuclear Arms
No more a superpower, its conventional forces greatly weakened, Moscow increasingly relies on the deterrent power of atomic weapons.
Los Angeles Times
By David Holley
December 6, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes427.htm
MOSCOW — It was near the end of President Vladimir V. Putin's reelection campaign early this year, and two days of high-profile military exercises highlighting his role as Russia's commander in chief had been marred by failed tests of submarine-launched missiles.
But with a few cryptic words, Putin dispelled the gloom. The exercises, he said at a news conference, confirmed that Russia would soon possess intercontinental nuclear weapons capable of maneuvering in flight to evade antimissile defenses.
"No other country in the world has such weapons systems," Putin said. "It means that Russia has been and will remain one of the biggest nuclear missile powers in the world. Some people may like it and some may not, but everyone will have to reckon with it."
The end of the Cold War, improved relations with the U.S. and the personal rapport between Putin and President Bush have all served to make Moscow's military seem far less ominous than in Soviet times. On top of that, Russia's conventional forces have vastly weakened.
The sad state of its regular military has forced Moscow to place fresh emphasis on nuclear weapons in order to protect its interests in Europe and Asia. Washington is building military bases in some former Soviet republics. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has expanded eastward into the former Soviet Baltic republics. Washington has continued to develop missile defenses.
The world may now have only one superpower, but the United States and Russia still could destroy each other many times over.
Source of Prestige
"In the current situation the role of nuclear weapons for Russia is hard to overestimate," said retired Gen. Makhmut Gareyev, president of the Academy of Military Sciences in Moscow. "Basically it is the only factor which can still ensure our country's safety. We have nothing else to repel strategic military threats anymore."
Nuclear weapons also ensure prestige for Russia. Some Russian analysts maintain that their country's nuclear arsenal is the only reason it has been given a seat at the table with the world's major industrial powers.
"It shouldn't be forgotten that Russia was invited to the G-8 because it has around 800 strategic missiles," military analyst Victor Litovkin wrote recently in the weekly newspaper Moskovskie Novosti. "Strategic missiles remain the only chance to make the world respect Russia in the near future."
Those within Russia's military and political elite who favor greater spending on nuclear weapons promote such views, said Ivan Safranchuk, head of the Moscow office of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information.
"I do not exclude that Putin buys this argument to some extent," he added.
The conventional forces are a shadow of the army that NATO once feared could overrun Western Europe. Dispirited and poorly trained draftees equipped with aging and badly maintained weapons have taken a beating from separatists in the southern republic of Chechnya. A tradition of brutal hazing still leads to high rates of suicide and desertion among conscripts.
The army is top-heavy and works with a technologically outdated command and control system.
But Russia has about 7,800 operational nuclear warheads, roughly divided between 4,400 strategic warheads and 3,400 tactical nuclear weapons, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an American journal considered among the most authoritative public sources for such information.
An additional 9,000 warheads are in storage or officially out of service and awaiting dismantling.
The United States, the journal said, has about one-third more strategic warheads, but a smaller total stockpile.
Russia's land- and submarine-launched strategic warheads have a total explosive power equal to about 120,000 bombs of the size that destroyed Hiroshima.
A single Hiroshima-sized blast in downtown Los Angeles, according to a computer projection done several years ago by Physicians for Social Responsibility, would kill about 150,000 people immediately and 100,000 more from neutron and gamma radiation. An additional 800,000 people would be exposed to high-level radiation.
Relying on Topol-M
Although the futuristic new weapon that Putin alluded to during his campaign and again in comments on Nov. 17 may never be deployed, Russia is already modernizing its nuclear forces.
The silo-based Topol-M missile, first deployed in 1997, was designed to accelerate faster during its booster phase to counter U.S. efforts to shoot down missiles immediately after launch. At least 36 are now in service, and a mobile version is in final testing. They will form the core of Russia's land-based missile force after 2015, said Yuri Solomonov, director of the state-run Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology, the missile's builder.
The Topol-M "belongs to the next generation of missile weaponry and differs fundamentally from everything that has been done before in this field in our country and abroad," Solomonov told journalists in May.
Russia has had more trouble developing a missile for use on new submarines.
Many of Russia's aging Soviet-era submarines have been scrapped. Some have been refurbished and three new ones are being built.
"The old submarines should go to a junkyard already. It's time," said Pavel Zolotarev, another retired general who is now deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' USA-Canada Institute.
"And a new submarine needs a new missile to be installed in it — more perfect, more safe, more reliable."
Four years ago, leaking torpedo propellant caused an explosion that sank the Kursk nuclear submarine, killing its 118-man crew in what Russia's top prosecutor called a technical malfunction for which no one was to blame.
Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov said the accident on Aug. 12, 2000, was triggered by a leak of highly unstable hydrogen peroxide that exploded after contact with kerosene and the metal body of the torpedo.
Construction of the three new submarines has been delayed, partly because of missile failures. Several missiles test-launched in the late 1990s blew up before reaching their targets. A new missile, the Bulava-30, was successfully tested in September, according to a Russian military publication. Like the Topol-M, the Bulava-30 boasts fast acceleration on takeoff and other "enhanced systems" to overcome missile defenses, the journal reported.
The first of the new submarines, named the Yuri Dolgoruky after Moscow's 12th century founder, is scheduled for delivery by 2006. All three are supposed to be in service by 2012.
Washington and Moscow may not have any intention of unleashing these weapons, but neither side fully trusts the other, either. And both are concerned about the possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists.
Bush and Putin have agreed to reduce deployed strategic nuclear weapons to no more than 2,200 each by 2012. However, their agreement contributed to the final demise of the 1993 START II treaty. The pact would have eliminated all land-based strategic missiles equipped with multiple warheads.
During the Cold War, missiles fitted with multiple warheads were considered particularly destabilizing. If one side launched the missiles first, it could theoretically destroy a larger number of enemy missiles than the number it used. That arithmetic made it more difficult to reach a stable balance between the two sides.
Both Washington and Moscow now plan to retain missiles with multiple warheads, and neither is under any obligation to destroy nonoperational warheads, leading some critics to question whether real arms control is taking place.
With so many bombs still in so many places, a lot of things could go wrong. The danger of terrorists gaining possession of a nuclear bomb may head the list.
Zolotarev, of the USA-Canada Institute, said terrorists could try to trick Moscow and Washington into firing missiles at each other. He painted a scenario where three events take place simultaneously: a sea-launched missile of undetermined origin is fired toward Russia, a so-called dirty bomb — a conventional device rigged with radioactive materials — explodes in a Russian city, and false information gets into the nuclear weapons management system.
"We must take into account that terrorists also get the knack of modern technologies, and to pit one nuclear power against the other nuclear power, to achieve their mutual destruction, can be a very alluring task," Zolotarev said.
Although unlikely, he said it was a bigger threat than a war between Russia and the United States. But that possibility hadn't disappeared altogether, either.
"There are forces in the United States which still dream of dismembering Russia and bringing it to its knees, all the way down," said Gareyev, the military academy president. "What if these forces gain the upper hand in Washington?"
Defense Spending
Such worries, together with Russia's new-found oil wealth and the high cost of reforming conventional forces, have combined to trigger a rapid increase in defense spending.
Russia's military budget — including items listed under other headings — has grown 84% in real terms since 1999, according to calculations by Safranchuk. The official military budget is set to jump an additional 17% next year, to about $22 billion.
In the late 1990s, when funds were tight, maintenance of Russia's nuclear forces was a top priority, Safranchuk said.
"The nuclear umbrella was regarded as a must to be funded, and it was taking up to 80% of procurement and research and development money," he said.
The nuclear forces lost their luster for a few years, but now seem to have regained it, he said.
Russia's official budget proposal for 2005 earmarks $300 million for the nuclear weapons sector and $2.8 billion for military research, the Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported. Many details of Russian military spending are secret, but the research category could include significant nuclear-related activities.
Alexei G. Arbatov, former deputy chairman of the defense committee of the lower house of parliament, said political leaders should tell defense planners on both sides to stop regarding the other side as a potential enemy.
"Until they are told not to do so … this will continue to poison our relations," he told a forum on U.S.-Russian security issues earlier this year at the Carnegie Center Moscow.
Nuclear weapons take years to develop, and with the Topol-M missile, Russia has countered one element of the Reagan-era "Star Wars" defense idea of a space-based laser system that would destroy missiles during their boost stage, Safranchuk said.
There are no details available on the maneuvering device Putin referred to in February, but it apparently is designed to protect a warhead after a ballistic missile reenters Earth's atmosphere. Russian experts have suggested it might resemble a cruise missile, or that it could be a gliding warhead that could use its momentum and the resistance of the atmosphere to change directions and evade U.S. defense systems.
Whether or not this new technology is deployed, for the foreseeable future Russia still has enough weapons to simply overwhelm any U.S. antimissile defense.
The Bush administration, for its part, insists that the purpose of antimissile defense is not to provide a shield against Russia but against a small number of missiles launched by a rogue state such as North Korea.
Pentagon officials say they closely monitor advances in ballistic missile technology by countries such as Russia and China, especially those that may affect plans for U.S. defense systems.
"We'd be fools to think that Russia is not taking steps to develop its ballistic missile capabilities," said one defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
In the past, defense experts have said that a maneuverable missile could evade a missile defense system. U.S. officials prefer to emphasize U.S.-Russian cooperation on terrorism and on reducing nuclear arsenals.
Brookings Institute President Strobe Talbott, a Russia expert who was deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, said that although U.S. policymakers had not completely dismissed the possibility of a confrontation with Russia, "they do not lay awake at night worrying about 'the bad Russia, the bad bear' coming out of its lair and threatening the United States."
However, U.S. officials are expressing concern about Russia's investments in submarines capable of carrying nuclear missiles because the money could be better spent elsewhere, he said.
"They say, 'This is bad because it's money that Russia can't afford. It's money that Russia ought to be spending on becoming a modern country.' "
Zolotarev said Russia and the United States should never allow any other countries to match the size of their nuclear arsenals. That would, in effect, require the two nations to work together to maintain strategic dominance for decades to come. Because Russia today is concerned with security closer to its borders rather than a global ideological conflict, tactical nuclear weapons may be more important than long-range missiles.
"A deterring role will be played by the tactical weapons," Zolotarev said.
'A Great Power'
Talbott said Russia had a choice between emphasizing military strength or other forms of influence — the economic, diplomatic and cultural weight sometimes defined as "soft power."
"Russia is a great power," he said. "It is going to be a great power forever, for all intents and purposes. The question is, is it going to be a great power that defines its greatness in military terms, or will it define its power in other terms…. If they spend too much, as they have traditionally done, on 'hard power,' it's going to be all the harder for them to catch up in 'soft power.' "
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said in an interview that apart from the cost of maintaining nuclear arsenals and the danger that they could fall into the hands of terrorists, the very existence of the weapons creates a risk that they will one day be used.
"Instead of the weapons being used to implement policy, the weapons may drive policy," Perry said. "I think that is the danger."
Speaking at the Carnegie forum, Perry paraphrased a comment by Russian physicist and human rights activist Andrei D. Sakharov during the Cold War: "Reducing the risk of nuclear war carries an absolute priority over all other considerations."
"During the Cold War it did," Perry said. "Today it should also."
*
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Nuclear arsenals
Although Russia and the United States have made sizable cuts in their strategic nuclear arsenals, both still have thousands of warheads and delivery systems:
Warheads
2000
Russia: 5,096
United States: 7,206
2001
Russia: 6,018
United States: 7,206
2003
Russia: 4,850
United States: 6,140
2004
Russia: 4,422
United States: 5,886
**
Delivery systems
Intercontinental ballistic missiles
Russia: 56%
United States: 25%
Submarine-launched ballistic missiles
Russia: 24%
United States: 47%
Bombers
Russia: 20%
United States: 28%
Note: Both sides maintain separate arsenals of tactical nuclear weapons. Unlike strategic weapons, these generally have a shorter range, lower yield and are intended for battlefield use. They can take the form of artillery shells and other munitions.
**
Nuclear agreements
Here are the most important nuclear arms treaties between the U.S. and Soviet Union/Russia:
SALT I (Signed May 26, 1972)
Limited strategic antiballistic missile defenses and capped the number of missile launchers for each side.
SALT II (Signed June 18, 1979)
Would have limited each side to a total of 2,400 launchers, with various sublimits.
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (Signed Dec. 8, 1987)
Eliminates ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 310 and 3,420 miles.
START I (Signed July 31, 1991)
Limits each side to a total of 6,000 strategic warheads with various sublimits. Reductions completed Dec. 5, 2001; remains in force until December 2009.
START II (Signed Jan. 3, 1993)
Passed by U.S. Senate in 1996
and ratified by Russian parliament in 2000.
Would have limited warheads to 3,500 with one sublimit. Russia declared treaty null and void June 14, 2002, after U.S. withdrew from ABM treaty portion of SALT I.
START III
Would have limited each side to 2,500 warheads. No agreement was reached.
**
Increased spending
Russia plans a big hike in its military budget next year, after two years of small adjustments.
2000: 9%
2001: 28%
2002: 19%
2003: 9%
2004: 2%
2005: 17%
Sources: Center for Defense Information; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation; U.S. State Department; Dr. Nikolai Sokov, Monterey Institute of International Studies. Graphics reporting by Tom Reinken
--------
Some Russian Export-Control Specialists Quitting, Expert Says
By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire, December 6, 2004
http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2004_12_6.html#79BAE2FE
WASHINGTON — Some Russian export-control officials are leaving the government rather than work for the Defense Ministry, which has assumed authority over Russia’s export control regulatory system for technology that could have WMD applications, an expert said Friday (see GSN, April 23).
The departure of the trained personnel could create “gaps” and “loopholes” within Russia’s export-control system, said Igor Khripunov of the University of Georgia’s Center for International Trade and Security.
As part of a massive governmental reorganization effort launched earlier this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin transferred control of Russia’s export-control framework from the Economic Development and Trade Ministry to the Defense Ministry.
The reorganization, which eliminated of about half of Russia’s Cabinet-level ministries, also saw the downgrading of the Atomic Energy Ministry to the Federal Atomic Energy Agency, which was first placed under the newly created Industry and Energy Ministry and then moved to the prime minister’s office.
Khripunov did not detail how many export-control specialists have chosen not to work for the Defense Ministry. Noting that the ministry had a “very militarized culture,” he said that some of the departing civilians were “allergic” to the military and had been concerned of the negative impact of the association to their future employment prospects.
There has long been concern that would-be proliferators may be interested in obtaining dual-use technologies from Russian entities. In a report released last month, the CIA listed Russia among those “supplier” countries of concern. Over the past year, Russian entities “continued to be eager to raise funds via exports and transfers” of technologies related to biological and chemical weapons, along with ballistic missiles, to a number of countries, including Iran, India and China, the CIA said (see GSN, Nov. 26).
The CIA also warned that while Russia has made progress in developing a system of export-control regulations, “lax enforcement remains a serious concern.”
Khripunov said Friday, though, that the departure of some export control specialists did not represent a “disaster.” More worrisome, he said, is the loss of “trained personnel” that the Russian government could ill afford to lose.
-------- u.n.
UN Nuclear Disarmament Debate Stalled
Wade Boese, December 2004 Arms Control Today
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_12/DisarmamentDebate.asp
If a recent month-long UN disarmament meeting is a signpost for where key nuclear arms control talks are headed next year, a dead end might be around the corner.
From Oct. 4 to Nov. 5, UN members discussed, disputed, and voted on a smorgasbord of nonbinding arms control resolutions at the First Committee, which is the UN General Assembly’s annual forum on disarmament and international security matters. Members endorsed a verification study, supported stricter controls for shoulder-fired missiles, and backed curbing the illegal small arms trade. Yet, no such consensus emerged on nuclear weapons.
Countries without nuclear arms pressed those possessing such weapons to do more to give them up, while nuclear-weapon states—the United States most vehemently—argued greater attention must instead be devoted to stopping the nuclear club from expanding.
To be sure, this is an age-old argument between the nuclear haves and have-nots, but this latest round came amid the lead-up to a review conference next May on the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which entered into force in 1970. Only India, Israel, and Pakistan—all three of which possess nuclear weapons stockpiles—have stayed outside the treaty. North Korea’s January 2003 withdrawal from the accord has not been recognized by the other 188 NPT states-parties.
Many countries are looking to the treaty review conference, which occurs every five years, as an opportunity to bolster what they fear is a weakening foundation for the global nuclear nonproliferation regime. The general concern is that the bargain between the non-nuclear-weapon states to forgo nuclear arms in exchange for access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and the nuclear-weapon states to disarm is eroding.
The First Committee meeting highlighted the sharp divisions over who shoulders the blame for the treaty’s perceived ills and how to remedy them.
Illicit attempts by non-nuclear-weapon states, most notably Iran, to acquire nuclear weapons are the greatest source of danger for the treaty, U.S. officials forcefully and repeatedly insisted. Solving this problem, they said, will require all states-parties to put a premium on ensuring and enforcing treaty compliance.
Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance Paula DeSutter stated Oct. 22 that “detecting a violation is not an end in itself; it is a call to action.” The United States is upset that other countries have resisted its attempts to take Iran before the UN Security Council for Tehran’s exposed illegal nuclear activities.
Many other countries, however, including the New Agenda Coalition of Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, and Sweden, pointed their collective fingers at the nuclear-weapon states for failing to fulfill their side of the NPT deal. “If the nuclear-weapon states continue to treat nuclear weapons as a security enhancer, there is a real danger that other states will start pondering whether nuclear weapons would not be a security enhancer also for them,” Swedish Ambassador Anders Lidén warned Oct. 4. The New Agenda Coalition sponsored a resolution that garnered 135 affirmative votes calling on the nuclear-weapon states to pick up their disarmament pace.
France, the United States, and the United Kingdom opposed the resolution, arguing it failed to take into account their past nuclear reductions and neglected “the full range of obligations of all of us toward nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament.” Israel and Latvia joined the three nuclear powers in their dissent.
On Oct. 8, Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control Stephen Rademaker labeled any allegation that the United States had not made progress toward nuclear disarmament as “unjust and untrue.” Washington later sponsored a resolution with Moscow touting their past nuclear reduction activities. It received the First Committee’s unanimous blessing, although the New Agenda Coalition noted that the removal of nuclear warheads from service under the May 2002 U.S.-Russian Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty “cannot replace irreversible cuts in and actual destruction of nuclear weapons.”
Japan offered a resolution advocating additional steps that the nuclear-weapon states, as well as others, could pursue toward nuclear disarmament. It won the support of 151 states. Only India and the United States rejected the initiative; another 16 countries abstained.
Washington’s opposition to the Japanese resolution stemmed from provisions that endorsed bringing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) into force and negotiating an “effectively verifiable” fissile material cutoff treaty (FMCT) to ban the production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons purposes.
In October 1999, the U.S. Senate rejected the CTBT, which prohibits all nuclear test explosions. Since taking office, the Bush administration has repeatedly voiced its opposition to the treaty. Meanwhile, the administration asserts that an FMCT cannot be crafted to detect cheating sufficiently and should therefore be negotiated without a verification mechanism. (See ACT, September 2004.) These viewpoints led the United States to cast the sole negative votes against separate First Committee resolutions backing these two measures.
The FMCT dispute does not auger well for another UN body, the 65-member Conference on Disarmament (CD). Although supposedly the home for international arms control negotiations, the conference, which operates by consensus, has not produced an agreement since 1996, when it finished crafting the CTBT.
Washington wants the CD to initiate FMCT negotiations on U.S. terms early in 2005, but the near unanimous support for an “effectively verifiable” treaty at the First Committee indicates the United States faces an uphill battle. A U.S. government official explained to Arms Control Today Nov. 16 that the United States is not ruling out the discussion of verification measures during FMCT negotiations, but that Washington would not participate in negotiations if they presuppose completing an “effectively verifiable” treaty.
One diplomat critical of the U.S. approach to an FMCT told Arms Control Today Nov. 16 that Washington’s decision to “march to a different drummer” constitutes a “recipe for further delay” at the CD.
The lingering standoff between the United States and a strong majority of other CD members, led by China and
Russia, on concluding an agreement to prevent an arms race in outer space also points to continued deadlock at the conference. The United States and Israel were the only countries to abstain from a First Committee vote urging the CD to take up the space issue.
Russian Ambassador Leonid Skotnikov pledged to the First Committee Oct. 5 that Moscow “shall not be the first to place any weapons in outer space” and called on other countries to follow Russia’s lead. The United States, which is exploring basing missile interceptors in orbit (See ACT, October 2004), contends there is no space arms race, so an agreement is unnecessary.
If the CD remains mired in deadlock during the first half of 2005, which several diplomatic sources say is a safe bet, it could further reinforce the divisions between countries heading into the NPT Review Conference, making efforts to forge a consensus on future implementation of the treaty more difficult.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
How Los Alamos is driving the development of new nuclear weapons
by Nick Schwellenbach and John Pruett
December 06, 2004 zmag.org
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=6808
In 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer declared, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," after he witnessed the first nuclear explosion under the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His statement, a line from the Bhagavad-Gita, displayed his own apprehensions with helping to create weapons capable of overwhelming destruction
Almost 60 years later, Los Alamos, located in northern New Mexico, once again stands at a major crossroads in nuclear weapons development, but this time around lab officials do not openly harbor the same reservations as Oppenheimer. In fact, Los Alamos, in its own entrenched institutional interest, has been driving drastic changes in national nuclear weapons policy. Now that Bush has been re-elected and Congress has drifted farther right, these troublesome developments are sure to continue
After almost a decade of management scandals and security failures at Los Alamos, the Department of Energy has decided to open management to outside competition, with the University of Texas System and several corporations such as Northrop Grumman and Bechtel eyeing the bid
Opposition to Los Alamos has been visible at both UT and at the University of California System, the long-standing manager of the Lab
Students, faculty and alumni have voiced opposition based on moral, as well as more mundane reasons-the rife security, management, and environmental problems and also whether management would, on balance, yield benefits over the costs and risks involved
UT and UC have both asserted that management of Los Alamos brings research and prestige to the university that manages the Lab. However, any qualified researcher from any university, manager or not, already has access to working on or collaborating with research done at Los Alamos. Due to this, several faculty members and students question the professed research benefits to their respective universities that would result from a management contract. Additionally, "prestige" from management of this so-called "crown jewel" of American science is also dubious when Los Alamos is revealed for what it truly is: a bomb lab
Proponents of the lab emphasize the few truly worthwhile projects such as HIV research, but downplay the overwhelming mission of the lab-maintaining the current nuclear stockpile and developing new nuclear weapons. In fact, out of a total DOE operating budget of $2 billion, the DOE budget request for fiscal year 2005 includes $1.36 billion for weapons programs, or about 79 percent of its total DOE budget, while other science programs receive a mere 3.4 percent or $59.8 million
Perhaps more revealing, is that funding for science programs has dropped from roughly $75 million in FY 2003 to just below $60 million requested for FY 2005. During the same time period, funding for weapons programs at the lab has increased by about $150 million. Los Alamos has clearly not shifted gears from its historic role as a core component of America's nuclear weapons complex
On the contrary, recent changes to nuclear policy have many experts concerned that a new nuclear arms race could soon unfold. The Bush Administration's nuclear initiative to develop a new class of weapons coincides with the competitive bid for Los Alamos as well as the congressional increases in lab funding. Researchers at Los Alamos, alongside those at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, are working to develop these new "mini-nukes." Despite the name, these weapons are not very "mini." They range from explosive yields of one-third to multiple times that of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in World War II which killed approximately 100,000 civilians. And like most weapons, "mini-nukes" do not discriminate between combatants and non-combatants
These new weapons are designed to deter so-called "rogue" states from possessing their own weapons of mass destruction capabilities
Advocates, including Los Alamos personnel, claim that "mini-nukes" provide a more credible deterrence than traditional nuclear weapons because they decrease the amount of "collateral damage" to civilian areas while still destroying targets such as airfields, underground tunnels and bunkers as well as enemy stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons
While the feasibility and possible benefits of these "mini-nukes" remain unclear at best, Los Alamos employees along with other officials have feverishly sought their realization. One seemingly obvious reason for the lab's enthusiasm is that a "mini-nuke" project would provide scientists and research with a reinvigorating mission and direction
A March 2002 article in USA Today pointed out the relative importance of this factor. Designing new nuclear weapons provides hands-on instruction for future generations of weapons scientists that are fast-replacing older Cold War personnel. Thus, the challenge allows Los Alamos and other national labs to gain a new technological edge and retain the top minds in research
However, persuading government leaders to dramatically change national nuclear policy has been no easy task for lab employees. Two analysts from Los Alamos, T.N. Dowler and J.S. Howard, authored a landmark essay for the Fall 1991 issue of Strategic Review calling for the development of what they referred to as "micro-nukes." Earlier that same year, they had lobbied and secured support for their plan from the Defense Science Board with a presentation entitled "Potential Uses for Low-Yield Nuclear Weapons in the New World Order." Unfortunately for Dowler and Howard, then-President George H. W. Bush called for a moratorium on new nuclear weapons development and testing in 1992. Subsequently, the nuclear weapons complex suffered from almost a decade of stagnation as it struggled to adapt to a post-Cold War era
The call for "mini-nukes" from Los Alamos employees continued. In 2000, Stephen Younger, then head of nuclear weapons work at the lab, wrote a paper supporting "mini-nukes" and their possible use in the future
Most recently, in October of 2003, four employees of Los Alamos authored an essay for the journal Comparative Strategy entitled "An Analysis of Reduced Collateral Damage Nuclear Weapons." This essay attempted to reconcile the development of "mini-nukes" with the Bush Administration's Nuclear Policy Review leaked to the public in January
Los Alamos personnel argued that in order for the US to reduce its nuclear stockpile but still retain a credible nuclear deterrent against "rogue" states, greater diversity in available nuclear weapons would be required (i.e. "mini-nukes"). They also stated that developing such weapons would allow US forces to avoid undesirable "collateral damage." In 2003, Los Alamos marked the 60th anniversary of the lab's creation by producing its first plutonium pit (the core of a nuclear weapon) in 14 years. The Global Security Newswire referred to this as "a first step toward reconstituting a nuclear warhead production program," and by 2007 Los Alamos expects to produce 10 such pits a year
Along with the resumption of pit production, the passage that same year of the Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2004 signals the implementation of a new, fundamentally different nuclear policy advocated by Los Alamos and the nuclear weapons complex. Most importantly, the congressional Act lowers the bar for future testing and repeals the "Spratt-Furse" provision banning low-yield nuclear weapons
The development of "mini-nukes" could prove even more dangerous than nuclear weapons production during the Cold War. As Newt Gingrich stated in 2003 for USA Today, "This would be a weapon designed to be used. It would not simply be a weapon of deterrence, as current nuclear weapons are." The threshold for nuclear weapons use will be lowered because the US will be more willing to use smaller nuclear weapons on non-nuclear weapons states. This would open a Pandora's Box. In turn states with weapons may become more likely to use their weapons, and prod more states to acquire nuclear weapons as a deterrent to US "pre-emptive" war. On a downward spiral the US may then utilize "mini-nukes" to attack these new nascent programs
The University of Texas and University of California Systems argue that management of Los Alamos is national service. What they really mean is that university management is active engagement with the warfare state by lending an academic gloss to activities many of the best and brightest might otherwise steer clear. Yet Los Alamos and its scientists and engineers are not simply just "following orders," in fact many of them are shaping an increasingly hostile American nuclear weapons policy from the bottom up. Whoever "manages" the Lab will be directly complicit in a new nuclear arms race. Los Alamos has shown over the years that it is a power unto itself and that, as evidenced by 60 years of University of California management, its main function as a weapons of mass destruction facility cannot be resolved or mitigated by university involvement
Nick Schwellenbach is a former member and John Pruett is a current member of the student-based watchdog group, University of Texas Watch (http://www.utwatch.org)
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- idaho
Possible Plutonium Production at Idaho National Laboratory
KIDK TV
By Siemny Chhuon
December 6, 2004
http://www2.kidktv.com/x18258.xml?ParentPageID=x3963&ContentID=x60231&Layout=kidk.xsl&AdGroupID=x18258
Idaho Falls - The Department of Energy is scoping out the public about a proposal to consolidate plutonium production at the new Idaho National Laboratory.
This kind of plutonium is used for deep space exploration and national security related missions, not the kind that's used for making nuclear weapons.
"In a post 9-11 environment, we are really seeing an increase in national security requirements. One of the key points is that the material we have that's available to use for national security--the same radioisotope power systems fueled with plutonium--that inventory of available plutonium is decreasing," explains Tim Frazier of the DOE.
Frazier says consolidating all plutonium operations at one highly secure site would reduce the cost and risk of transportation.
Public scoping meetings will be held according to the following schedule:
* December 7, 7 pm--Jackson Hole Middle School, 1230 South Park Loop Road, Jackson, WY * December 8, 7 pm--Fort Hall Tribal Business Center, Tribal Council Chambers, Prima Drive, Fort Hall Town Site, Fort Hall * December 9, 7 pm--Shilo Inn, 1586 Blue Lakes Blvd., Twin Falls
-------- new jersey
Small coolant leak at PSEG N.J. Salem 1 nuke
(Reuters) Dec 6, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=JFIBGI4IL5WFICRBAEZSFEY?type=topNews&storyID=7003972
NEW YORK, Dec 6 - Reactor coolant leaked outside of the containment at Public Service Enterprise Group Inc.'s (PEG.N: Quote, Profile, Research) 1,150-megawatt Salem 1 nuclear unit in New Jersey, the company told the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in an event report.
Officials at PSEG were not immediately available for comment, but said in the report that the leak did not hurt anyone.
The company estimated the leak rate as 0.68 gallon per minute.
At the time of the coolant leak on Dec. 5, both 1,150 MW units 1 and 2 at Salem were out of service due to an oil spill in the Delaware River.
On Nov. 26, crude oil leaked out of a damaged oil tanker in the river upstream from the Salem nuclear station. As the oil flowed downstream, PSEG shut the reactors on Dec. 3-4 to avoid possible problems because it uses river water to cool the reactors.
One megawatt powers about 1,000 homes, according to the North American average.
The Salem station is located in Salem, New Jersey, about 18 miles southeast of Wilmington, Delaware.
PSEG Nuclear, a unit of PSEG of Newark, operates Salem for its owners; PSEG (57 percent) and Exelon Corp. (EXC.N: Quote, Profile, Research) of Chicago (43 percent).
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
The State of U.S.-Africa Relations:
A Look at Debt Repayment, HIV/AIDS and the Impact of Bush's Reelection in Africa
democracynow.org
December 6th, 2004
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/06/1453252
We host a roundtable discussion on the state of U.S.-Africa relations with three experts: Rev. Molefe Tsele of the South African Council of Churches, Muthoni Wanyeki of the African Women's Development and Communications Network and Salih Booker of Africa Action. [includes rush transcript] The British aid agency Oxfam is warning that 45 million children will die needlessly over the next 10 years because rich nations have failed to live up to promises to fight global poverty. The group has released a new report titled Paying the Price that reveals that inn real terms, the aid budgets of rich countries are half what they were in 1960. Oxfam is also estimating that poor countries are now paying $100 million a day in debt repayments.
We are going to spend the rest of the hour taking a look at the state of U.S.-Africa relations, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, the impact of Bush's reelection, African foreign debt and how the war on terror has affected the continent.
* Rev. Molefe Tsele, General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches. * Muthoni Wanyeki, Executive Director of the Kenyan-based African Women's Development and Communications Network (FEMNET). * Salih Booker, Director of Africa Action.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: We are joined by Reverend Molefe Tsele who is the General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, by Muthoni Wanyeki, who is the Executive Director of the Kenyan-based African Women's Development and Communications Network known as FEMNET, and Salih Booker joins us again; he is Director of Africa Action in Washington, D.C. We welcome you all to Democracy Now!
GUESTS: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: This issue of repayment. Muthoni Wanyeki, let's begin with you and the debt. The amount of money, $100 million a day in debt repayment, that countries are paying now to the wealthier countries. What effect does that have on -- you come from Kenya but also you talk about the continent.
MUTHONI WANYEKI: Well obviously, what it means is that money that should be available for public investment and health, education, general social services just simply is not available. And even though there have been efforts around the HIPC, the highly indicted poor countries initiative, it is clear that those initiatives are simply insufficient: (1) they are limited to a certain range of country, (2) they are tied to, as usual, conditions around the macroeconomic framework underlying how countries are able to structure their economies. So, calls for debt cancellation remain very high on the agenda.
AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Tsele, how has the Bush re-election been received in South Africa? How does it impact your country?
REV. MOLEFE TSELE: Well, at the state level the word we hear from the President Mbeki is that nothing will change. However, on the ground, there are very serious concerns. Firstly, there's a growing presence of conservative evangelical American groups especially who are doing work on HIV/AIDS. But also there is an attempt to turn South Africa, which is one of the best democracies there, into possibly one of the sea of influence in the region so that in interventions in pro crisis areas such as the Great Lakes, basically the U.S. could continue to be involved through South Africa. And so there's an ambivalence and I can safely say that in the streets of Soweto there was a great depression and sadness after the results came out of Ohio.
AMY GOODMAN: Muthoni Wanyeki, the effect in Kenya of -- are you seeing the same kind of phenomenon, more evangelical groups both from Kenya and coming to Kenya from the United States?
MUTHONI WANYEKI: Definitely. I actually work for a Pan African organization so I should say this impact is being felt across the continent. It not just evangelical groups. What it means is that American bilateral cooperation money is increasingly tied to a religious right agenda in terms of how money is coming into HIV/AIDS, what kind of prevention strategies are being used and obviously this is at the expense of full demands for women's reproductive and sexual rights, which are at the heart of HIV/AIDS pandemic.
AMY GOODMAN: How concretely does it impact them? What does it mean?
MUTHONI WANYEKI: What it means is that groups that are talking about the full range of reproductive and sexual rights including the right to choice, including the need for more than abstinence only approaches to prevention are simply having funding cut and it also means that states that have taken a fairly holistic approach in the past are no longer able to do so because this is the biggest pot of money coming into HIV/AIDS.
AMY GOODMAN: Salih Booker, you are here in the United States. You work directly on U.S. policy and on lobbying the government, educating people in this country. How are you dealing with this and to what extent do people here understand what is happening?
SALIH BOOKER: I think increasingly people do understand what is happening. Certainly on debt cancellation for example there have been movements in the United States seeking debt cancellation, the Jubilee 2000, which became the Jubilee USA network. And we expect that in the coming years we are going to be able to achieve some victories in terms of getting debt cancellation for at least 33 of the worlds most impoverished countries, the majority of whom are in Africa. But the other critical thing about debt, in African countries, they are spending more on repaying these old an illegitimate debts that come from the cold war era.
AMY GOODMAN: And who do they pay it to, how does it actually work?
SALIH BOOKER: It is largely to the World Bank and the IMF and rich country creditors like the US the UK and France but the vast majority is the World Bank and the IMF. Of course, those institutions are controlled by the rich countries, the G-7 countries. That is $15 billion a year out of the African continent. That is more money than is spent on healthcare in the face of this AIDS pandemic; that is more than is coming in the continent in the form of new aid or loans or direct investment. So you have this cruel irony where the poorest region of the world is subsidizing some of the wealthiest institutions and wealthiest economies in the world. But the other critical thing about debt, also about foreign assistance or aid, is the strings that come attached with it. Debt is used not just to drain resources out of Africa but as leverage to force African governments to implement economic policies that the West demands: Privatization of hospitals and public services, privatization of public utilities like water. So, it is a tool used to maintain and perpetuate this imbalance between the rich minority in the world and the impoverished majority in the world. So when we demand debt cancellation we are talking about unconditional debt cancellation. We are trying to move the discourse toward one of reparations and ask the question of who really owes whom. Is it the poor countries that owe the rich countries or is it really these wealthy countries that have amassed their surplus capital by exploited poor countries over the years. I would just say the same on HIV/AIDS. It is not just that we need more funding. Obviously there is a need for more funding but it needs to be funding that provided to the Africans that are on the front lines fighting this pandemic, not by imposing fundamentalist ideologies over science.
AMY GOODMAN: Muthoni Wanyeki, when the stress is abstinence, what is the problem with that?
MUTHONI WANYEKI: Well, the problem is, first of all, looking at the fact that the face of HIV/AIDS is increasingly of that of young African women. Infection rates of women between ages of 15 and 24 are three to four times higher than the male counterparts. So you have to look at why this has arisen. And obviously it has arisen because abstinence is not strategy that most young African women can follow even if they would choose to because of their own personal religious beliefs or whatever. The idea --
AMY GOODMAN: Isn't the rate also increasing most among young married women?
MUTHONI WANYEKI: Exactly. And that again comes back to failures of the prevention approach. If you don't recognize that most women cannot afford -- do not have the capacity to negotiate sex and to demand abstinence or to demand uses of condoms, etc., then clearly we are not getting to the heart of the problem.
AMY GOODMAN: What is being done in South Africa, Reverend Tsele?
REV. MOLEFE TSELE: Well, maybe let's firstly let us complete the picture about the debt issue. You are aware that the core of African debt, a bad advise is that African governments receive from the World Bank and IMF, and wastefully expenditure even by dictators mainly barely getting debt in order to procure services from U.S. companies and then those dictators Sese Mobutu and others then on the scene. But what has happened is, repeatedly the people have said, oh these are old years debts that were not used in the interest of the people which therefore must be repudiated. And the stock answer from them, World Bank, is no, it cannot happen. And now lets fast-forward to post-Saddam Iraq and the similar situation has happened, the government had procured debts and today the argument is they were not used for the Iraqi people and the first thing that the Bush administration did there was, these debts must be repudiated. No company -- the government does not owe anybody. Exactly what we were demanding in Africa, which they said, no, no, it cannot happen. And so it these kinds of things that we say, in the post-election era we need to begin to look at the morality issues. And for an administration that prides itself as the frontrunner of a new morality including sexual morality, we need to begin to ask what is the balance or what is the core of that morality?
AMY GOODMAN: On that issue of debt repayment, on the issue of debt overall, was really President Clinton any better than President Bush? He went to Africa and really pushed through the African NAFTA. What are your thoughts?
SALIH BOOKER: Well, he certainly wasn't any better. He had the same kind of rhetoric, he made promises of writing off so much debt for poor countries but the U.S. administration whether under Republicans or Democrats has the same approach. They want to be able to dictate the economic choices of the rest of the world in the interests of American transnational corporations, in the interest of the American economy. So even while the Clinton administration made promises about debt reduction it was still tied to the same kind of formula where the World Bank and IMF will reduce debt if countries will adopt the economic policies that Washington is prescribing.
AMY GOODMAN: Quick question to the Reverend Molefe Tsele about President Aristide, who is in exile now in South Africa. I must say I was stunned to say CNN last week in a casual comment of an anchor questioning their reporter in Port-Au-Prince because General Colin Powell made the surprise visit saying, well we all know that the U.S. backed the coup in Haiti against Aristide. That is the first time I have heard one of the networks talk about that but what about Aristide in South Africa now?
REV. MOLEFE TSELE: Lest start by saying that South Africa has taken a position that is going link itself to the continent and then therefore will play a role in the request of the African Union. And President Aristide is a guest in the country, which I need to say that is hugely welcomed by a lot of the people especially in the townships. He is a very popular person there. We see it as something that South Africa did at the request of the African Union. And so it is something that we welcome. But beyond that there continues to be a traveling thing about how he left Haiti. Did he leave voluntarily, did the people in Haiti take him out or did people from outside? We don't know the truth about that. He himself has said, there needs to be an inquiry as to the events that let to his ouster and we know that even the UN has no interest in pursuing that and to us this is very troubling issue because it may be Aristide today and who will be next.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, before we wrap up, Sudan and the impact it having on the whole continent. Muthoni, if you could respond to that and what you think needs to be done.
MUTHONI WANYEKI: I think the continent has tried to respond to Darfur. The African Union as you know took a decision to send in peacekeepers. They took a decision to send in a mission from the African Commission on Human and People's Rights to investigate the spread of -- the extent and form of human rights violations. I think that was extremely significant in terms of showing the shift at the intergovernmental level within Africa because it showed Africa was ready to hold Sudan to account for what is going on in Darfur. What is needed is support for the AU's initiatives in this area. They simply don't have the resources to send in the kind of force that is needed. The also need to expand the mandate of the force so that it is more that sort of just monitoring the situation on the ground and that it is actually able to protect civilians. I think the UN has responded well in a humanitarian sense but we need the political leadership backed by resources under the AU banner.
AMY GOODMAN: Salih Booker, having concluded your meeting with African Americans and Africans setting an agenda in the new Bush years in Washington, what have you concluded will be a strategy for dealing with Sudan and Darfur?
SALIH BOOKER: Specifically on Sudan and Darfur, we agree quite frankly with what Muthoni just said. The African Union is providing leadership. It lacks the resources much of what the United States could provide. And we need to be mobilizing people to demand that the United States support and follow the leadership of the African Union, that Americans need to know that American power can be put to good use if it is joined with the efforts of the African nations, that the United States cannot solve the world's problems but that we can contribute our power to the collective efforts of others and this is a critical issue that has to be addressed in the Sudan.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you all for joining us, Salih Booker of Africa Action, Reverend Molefe Tsele, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches and Muthoni Wanyeki, Executive Director of the Kenyan-based African Women's Development and Communication Network, known as FEMNET.
-------- arms
Germany Seeks to End EU's China Arms Ban
By JOE McDONALD Associated Press Writer Dec 6, 1:31 PM EST
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CHINA_GERMANY?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
BEIJING (AP) -- German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on Monday called for an end to a 15-year-old European arms embargo on China imposed after the bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, as the two countries signed contracts worth $2.1 billion for Airbus jets and other industrial goods.
On his sixth trip to China, Schroeder received a warm welcome from Premier Wen Jiabao, who called the visit "another family meeting" at the start of talks in the Great Hall of the People, the seat of China's legislature in central Beijing.
At a news conference later, Schroeder noted his past calls for an end to the European Union's 15-year-old ban on weapons sales to China, and said, "My opinion hasn't changed."
Wen called the ban an outdated "result of the Cold War" and said he hoped for a decision on it at a European Union summit on Dec. 17, though he didn't say whether he expected the ban to be lifted.
Wen is expected to lobby European leaders this week at an EU-China conference in the Netherlands. Beijing says a failure to lift the arms embargo could harm diplomatic relations.
Germany and France are eager to do business with China's military, which is spending billions of dollars modernizing its arsenal, with much of the business now going to Russia. But other EU governments say Beijing has failed to do enough to improve its human rights record.
Schroeder has also been criticized by members of his Social Democrat and Green party coalition for backing a lifting of the arms ban.
Meanwhile, a $1.3 billion deal signed Monday calls for a state company that buys aircraft for China's airlines to purchase Airbus A319, A320 and A321 jets, according to German officials.
Germany's DaimlerChrysler AG is a major shareholder in the European consortium that owns Airbus SAS.
China also signed contracts with German industrial giant Siemens AG to purchase railway locomotives worth $480 million and power-generation equipment for $280 million, according to Schroeder's delegation.
Also Monday, the German leader attended the laying of a cornerstone for a new Beijing factory built by DaimlerChrysler and a Chinese joint-venture partner.
China says Germany has been its biggest European trading partner for three decades. In the first 10 months of this year, their trade totaled $43.6 billion, the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing figures from the Ministry of Commerce.
Schroeder was to meet President Hu Jintao on Tuesday before visiting the northeastern city of Changchun. He travels Wednesday to Japan, where he and Japanese leaders are expected to discuss the campaign by both of their governments to obtain seats on the United Nations Security Council.
--------
DARPA Awards Contract for Special Air Vehicles
The Washington Post
By Dawn S. Onley
December 6, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38341-2004Dec5?language=printer
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded an $8.9 million contract to three vendors last week to build a prototype for low-flying unmanned aerial vehicles that can work with Army ground combat vehicles to scout ahead of American forces.
The winning contractors, including Aurora Flight Sciences Inc. of Manassas, are to develop prototypes for the Organic Air Vehicle-II, a cross between a helicopter and an aircraft. When fully developed, the craft will run complex reconnaissance and surveillance missions, set the course for robotic and manned vehicles on the ground and target weapons.
The prototypes the contractors are developing will weigh less than 112 pounds and include a platform for advanced sensors and non-line-of-sight networking communications.
The vehicles, roughly the size of a 55-gallon drum, will have a sensor package, including day- and night-cameras and laser designators. They will also be outfitted with the software-programmable Joint Tactical Radio System, which provides multichannel voice, data, imagery and video communications.
Aurora is the only small business competing with two larger companies, BAE Systems Aircraft Controls Inc. of Los Angeles and Honeywell International Inc.'s defense and space electronic systems unit in Albuquerque.
The contractors will have six months to finish their prototypes and preliminary designs. By next June, DARPA will choose the best two to continue into a second phase, which is expected to last nine months. The Defense Department will eventually select one contractor to build, test and demonstrate the vehicle over 33 months.
Brad Tousley, a program manager at DARPA's Tactical Technology Office in Arlington, said the hybrid unmanned aerial vehicles fill a vital need in the military: They will launch from an Army combat vehicle and travel with an infantry company for important surveillance and reconnaissance missions.
The Defense Department research agency wants to see that the design works, that the aircraft can be quiet for secretive missions and that the vehicles have technology to avoid collisions with trees, power lines and buildings. The craft also must be able to integrate with the Army's next generation of ground vehicles, including tanks, Humvees and Bradleys.
The Defense Department has no low-flying, unmanned air vehicle that can help small ground units with surveillance, reconnaissance and target missions.
"The idea would be to have something that could move with the troops, that could be operated by small combat units and hover and maybe even land on the top of a building and watch what was going on in the streets," said John Langford, president and chief executive of Aurora.
Langford said DARPA wanted something that could be unobtrusive yet accurate. The agency also wanted an aerial vehicle that could travel long distances but take off and land vertically, a hybrid between a fixed-wing airplane and a helicopter.
Aurora is making upgrades to its GoldenEye-100 prototype unmanned vehicle under the contract.
Dawn S. Onley is a senior writer with Government Computer News. For more details on this and other technology contracts, go to www.gcn.com
-----
Lockheed Wins Contract to Build 5 Satellites
The Washington Post
December 6, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38376-2004Dec5?language=printer
Lockheed Martin, the Bethesda-based defense company, won a contract from Rainbow DBS, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems, to build its next five geostationary telecommunications satellites.
Designated Rainbow Ka-1 through Rainbow Ka-5, the satellites, with a predicted life of 15 years, will provide direct broadcast services across the continental United States. The companies didn't disclose how much the deal is worth.
"Rainbow Ka-1 through Rainbow Ka-5 represent a continuation of our successful partnership with Rainbow DBS, for whom we built and launched Rainbow 1, one of the world's most powerful and technologically advanced spot beam satellites," said Ted Gavrilis, president of Lockheed Martin Commercial Space Systems.
The satellites will provide a new service called VOOM. With a lineup of 39 high-definition channels, VOOM delivers more high-definition programming than any other satellite or cable service provider, according to Bethpage, N.Y.-based Cablevision, one of the nation's largest cable companies.
"We are delighted to partner once again with Lockheed Martin on the continued strategic evolution of VOOM," said Thomas C. Dolan, chief executive of Rainbow Media Enterprises. "By utilizing the most sophisticated technology, VOOM will continue to increase channel capacity and further enhance delivery of both high-definition and standard-definition programming across the United States." VIRGINIA
Xybernaut of Fairfax, which makes small, voice-activated computers and head-mounted screens that enable workers to keep their hands free, said it opened a wholly owned South Korean subsidiary. Xybernaut Korea expands the company's presence in the Asia/Pacific region and is discussing deals with "many leading Korean enterprises and institutions," the company said. "Xybernaut has been active in the Korean IT market for nearly a decade, and we firmly believe that this is the right time to leverage our relationships, know-how and corporate assets and expand on our efforts in Asia and the Pacific Rim by formalizing our operations in Korea," said Edward G. Newman, chairman and chief executive.
Dominion Virginia Power, the Richmond-based electric utility subsidiary of Dominion, closed on the purchase of an 80-megawatt, wood-burning electricity generating facility in Pittsylvania County. The plant and its two units wereowned by Multitrade of Pittsylvania County. Before this transaction, power from the facility was sold to Dominion Virginia Power under a 25-year purchase contract.
Apptis of Chantilly, a provider of information technology services primarily to the federal government, said it has reached an agreement to acquire SETA of McLean, which provides similar services to agencies including the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland security. Terms were not released.
The European Commission said it has suspended its antitrust probe into Microsoft and Time Warner's acquisition of Bethesda-based ContentGuard, a developer of digital-rights management technologies. The commission had said the deal could provide Microsoft with a monopoly on the technologies for which ContentGuard owns patents. Last month, however, the deal changed significantly when Microsoft and Time Warner said Thomson, of Paris, proposed to join them as a one-third owner. The European Union has a Jan. 6 deadline to act against the purchase or give it clearance.
Sandy Spring Bank of Olney, a subsidiary of Sandy Spring Bancorp, said Sandy Spring Insurance had agreed to acquire certain assets and liabilities of Wolfe & Reichelt Insurance Agency in Burtonsville. "It has been our goal to broaden our insurance agency business in the markets we serve," said bank president and chief executive Hunter R. Hollar. "This opportunity allows us to serve the small business community in the Montgomery County area and complements the products and services we already offer through Chesapeake Insurance Group."
Constellation Energy of Baltimore said its subsidiary, Constellation NewEnergy, signed an electricity purchase contract valued in excess of $100 million with Priority Power Management, a Texas-based independent energy management and consulting services firm. The agreement calls for Constellation NewEnergy to supply electricity to a cluster of 78 Texas companies that Priority Power Management represents to provide them with the most competitive rates for electricity. "This arrangement with Constellation NewEnergy is unique in that it allows us to address the needs of a large number of energy users with diverse energy needs," said Pat Ennis, Priority founder and principal.
Watson Wyatt, a leading human resources consulting firm, named William J. Trahant national leader of government consulting services. The hiring of Trahant and the creation of the government consulting services area show what the company said was an increased commitment to help U.S. federal agencies solve human capital challenges. Trahant was a partner for public-sector strategic change solutions at International Business Machines, where he supervised a team of federally focused consultants and sales executives.
-------- asia
Origami peace gesture met with violence in Thailand
Airdrop of paper 'birds of peace' is followed by bombings, shootings, and arson attacks.
By Matthew Clark | December 6, 2004, csmonitor.com
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1206/dailyUpdate.html
A creative peace offering has been met with renewed violence in the troubled south of Thailand.
Hours after 50 Thai army planes dropped some 100 million Japanese-style origami cranes over the predominantly Muslim region Sunday, suspected Muslim militants shot dead a former prosecutor in Pattani province, reports The BBC.
On Monday morning four Thai troops were wounded when a bomb was detonated remotely by a mobile phone at a rest-stop for patrolling soldiers in Narathiwat province, reports The Associated Press. Hours later, writes AP, another bomb exploded nearby seriously injuring an assistant district chief as he parked his car.
"...ordinary Thais across the country wrote messages on paper birds they had folded.
"As the birds fell to their targets in the provinces of Narathiwat, Yala, and Pattani, school children rushed out to collect them and seek the notes inside. Some students constructed giant nets stretched across school yards to capture the paper cranes."
One bird folded and signed by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra offered a scholarship if found by a child, or a job for an adult. The cranes could also be exchanged for food as The Bangkok Post reports.
"Twenty cranes can be exchanged for one egg, 50 cranes for 1kg of sugar or rice. All cranes collected would be given to authorities who will boil them and mix with lime to build a monument to peace."
Thaksin said the effort had achieved an "enormous, positive psychological effect" toward peace, reports AP.
But southern leaders have criticized it as a gimmick, according to the BBC.
"Critics said the campaign ... would not solve the complex problems that have caused the violence in the south, where more than 500 people have been killed this year. ...
"Our correspondent says the Muslim majority in the south appeared bemused by the idea of the aerial onslaught of paper cranes. But, while reluctant to reject any goodwill, they said a political solution would have more meaning."
On October 25, more than 80 Muslims died after security forces broke up a protest at Tak Bai in Narathiwat province. Most died of suffocation or were crushed in army trucks, which prompted fresh criticism of the Thai military's heavy-handedness and sparked increased violence.
The Bangkok Post reports that "relatives of those killed in the Tak Bai tragedy have belittled the release of millions of paper cranes, saying it won't make their loved ones come back to life or end unrest in the deep South."
"Other critics, including political columnists and Muslim officials, described the scheme as an insult because residents would be forced to pick up tons of garbage after the air drops," reports The Asia Times Online.
Another worry was that some birds may contain offensive messages, reports the Times.
"The millions of paper birds collected made it impossible to check if any had offensive messages written on them that would "add more fuel to the fire" if read by Muslims on the ground, warned Niran Pithakwatchara, chairman of the Senate committee on social development and human security."
This warning may have come true, according to Agence France-Presse
"...some southerners reportedly discovered a series of ugly messages that some fellow Thais had written on the birds. Mae-eya Bula, a 15-year-old in Narathiwat, told the Bangkok Post she collected a paper bird that said "I want to kill militants".
"Other residents found birds with messages including "Stop killing Thai people" and "All bandits must die," the daily added. "
-------- business
Putin pressures Turkey on oil refiner, helicopter projects
ANKARA (AFP)
Dec 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041206164002.v21ugsw5.html
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday urged Turkey to proceed with the sale of its oil refiner TUPRAS to a Russian firm, despite a court decision cancelling the project, and to buy Russian-made helicopters for the Turkish army.
Last month, Turkey's top administrative court scrapped the sale of 65.76 percent of TUPRAS to a joint venture between Germany-based chemicals company Efremov-Kautschuk GmbH, an affiliate of Russian oil producer Tatneft, and Turkey's Zorlu Holding company, citing breaches of law.
"The issue of TUPRAS is important. We are aware of the (legal) difficulties and we respect them, but we hope that... the tender will definitely be implemented," Putin told a meeting of Russian and Turkish business people during a visit to Ankara.
Turkish authorities had approved the sale in February, following a tender in which Efremov-Kautschuk and Zorlu Holding made the highest bid of 1.302 billion dollars (970 million euros).
Turkey's top administrative court upheld a lower court ruling that cancelled the tender on the grounds that it is against public interest and in breach of competition laws because it did not include an auction.
The privatization board now has one last recourse of appeal, but experts say it is unlikely to succeed.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the same gathering that his government was "very much" in favor of selling TUPRAS off to Efremov-Kautschuk and would use its last chance to avert the cancellation decision.
Putin also lobbied Ankara to buy attack helicopters from a joint venture between the Russian Kamov company and Israeli Aircraft Industries.
In 2000, Ankara had shortlisted the Russian-Israeli consortium, along with Bell Helicopter Textron of the United States, in a tender for 145 helicopters, but the project was cancelled last May for budgetary reasons, along with several other major defense industry tenders.
Ankara is expected to re-open the tenders.
"We want to take part (in the tender) as an equal participant. The product we offer is competitive and of good quality," Putin said.
Erdogan responded that Russian companies were welcome.
-------- europe
German navy assumes command of anti-terror mission in Horn of Africa
FLENSBURG, Germany (AFP)
Dec 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041206170558.osr7wxcu.html
The German navy said Monday it had assumed the command of the maritime security operation in the Horn of Africa, part of the US-led anti-terror mission Enduring Freedom.
Some 200 German troops using 10 navy ships and several aircraft have monitored traffic in the Gulf of Oman for three years and assumed the rotating command of the mission for the first time from the United States in May 2002.
In the past year, German military have carried out checks on 12,500 ships and searched 400 of them, looking for supplies and weapons destined for terrorist groups.
The Bundestag lower house of parliament voted overwhelmingly in November in favor of prolonging Germany's involvement in Enduring Freedom, which was launched after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
The mission allows for 3,100 German soldiers but only 500 are currently deployed -- 300 in the port of Djibouti in northeastern Africa and 200 in the Strait of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean.
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli committee calls for increased observation at army checkpoints
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Dec 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041206185215.2hrm5zbk.html
An Israeli MP on Monday called on the army to increase the number of observers at military checkpoints throughout the occupied territories to ensure soldiers respected Palestinians' rights.
"It is up to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to consider reinforcing the presence of military prosecutors at the main army checkpoints in order to ensure every effort is being made to protect human rights," said MP Michael Eitan, chairman of the parliamentary committee on constitution, law and justice.
Eitan's comments were made at a special committee session dealing with "human rights and the purity of arms during the war on terror".
In recent months, Israel's once-unshakable faith in the morality of the army has been put to the test by a series of recent scandals, one of which saw a soldier empty his weapon into the body of a young Palestinian girl who was already dead.
In another incident, soldiers at a checkpoint in the northern West Bank allegedly forced a Palestinian to his violin, prompting a bout of intense soul-searching among social commentators.
In the army's defence, Elazar Stern, head of the army's personnel branch, told the committee that while setting up checkpoints posed a moral risk, the idea of not having checkpoints posed a security risk.
"You cannot conduct a war wearing kid gloves. Every generation of officer needs to see himself as if he had come out of Auschwitz in two senses: not to do what they did to us, and to make sure that what they did to us isn't done again," he said.
Stern also said some 20 percent of soldiers joined the army with the preconception that Arab lives are worth less than Jewish lives, and subsequently behaved improperly at roadblocks, the website of the Haaretz daily quoted him as saying.
-----
Israeli special unit members suspended over Palestinian activists' killing
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Dec 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041206194300.rizskeit.html
The Israeli military has opened an inquiry into a Palestinian activist's killing in the West Bank and suspended the special unit members involved in the operation that led to his death, the army said Monday.
"A preliminary inquiry ... has highlighted the faults in the operation carried out by the unit," it said in a statement, without elaborating.
The unit, which is part of the Israeli navy's elite commandos, has been suspended pending the investigation
Mahmud Hammad, 28, a leading member of the armed wing of the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad, was killed last Friday by the unit which raided a house where he was hiding in Raba, close to the town of Jenin.
The Israeli troops opened fire in his direction as he was giving himself up, according to Palestinian security sources.
The owner of the house in which Hammad had taken refuge said the militant had first been wounded by Israeli fire as he was trying to flee the scene, and then killed.
"He tried to escape. They opened fire at him in front of the house and wounded him. Once they got confirmation he was the man they were after, they finished him off," Suleiman Qasrawi told AFP.
-----
Israeli army dismantles post on Jerusalem-Ramallah road
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Dec 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041206162822.mntqjmme.html
The Israeli army dismantled a post near the central West Bank town of Ramallah Monday which had been in operation for more than 20 years, an army spokesman said.
The Semiramis post, which lies to the south of Ramallah on the way to Jerusalem, was taken down after a routine strategic review, an army spokesman said.
"The IDF (army) has been renting the area from the Jerusalem municipality since 1982 but a standard re-evaluation deemed it unencessary and shut it down," he added.
Thousands of Palestinians used to pass the position which was manned 24 hours a day but it has been scaled down in recent months.
-------- nato
NATO faces renewed Iraq row at Brussels talks
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Dec 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041206174006.cth90irg.html
NATO ministers gathering in Brussels this week face yet another row over Iraq, even as they seek to put their bitter divisions over last year's war behind them, officials said Monday.
Specifically the US and its allies are angry with five countries -- including anti-war heavyweights France and Germany -- who are refusing to send officers to a NATO training mission being set up in the war-scarred country.
"It's a serious disagreement," said a senior NATO official ahead of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels on Thursday.
The five countries involved -- France, Germany, Belgium, Spain and Greece -- are not only refusing to send officers from their national armies to Iraq, as they made clear in June when NATO agreed the Iraq training mission.
Rather, Washington and other countries are angered because they are refusing to allow their officers assigned to NATO's command centres in Europe and north America to be sent by their commanding officers there to Iraq.
The official said the problem involves one in four officers based at two NATO command centres based in Mons, Belgium and Norfolk, Virginia.
"I don't believe this is right. It's an issue of principle for many allies. You have a responsibilty to NATO to allow those officers to serve and to follow the instructions of their commanders," said the official.
NATO's top commander in Europe, US General James Jones, raised concerns about the gaps in support for the Iraq mission, which aims to provide some 300 military trainers, during a visit to Washington last week.
In Brussels, where US Secretary of State Colin Powell is due to arrive Wednesday ahead of Thursday's talks with his counterparts, officials conceded there was discord but voiced hope it will be overcome.
"I don't want to paint a picture of crisis," he added, but admitted: "What we have is a point of difference, of philosophical difference," said one.
US ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns meanwhile sought to highlight the positive for the year ahead.
"2005 ought to be a year of renewed unity. All of us want to put the disagreements of 2003 behind us and all of us want to see NATO succeed," he said.
-------- pakistan / india
Musharraf says 'we have broken back of Al-Qaeda' in Pakistan
(AFP) Dec 6, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1512&ncid=731&e=6&u=/afp/20041206/wl_afp/britain_pakistan_attacks
LONDON - The Pakistani authorities have "broken the back" of Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al-Qaeda network in Pakistan after virtually removing its operatives from the cities and the mountains, President Pervez Musharraf declared while visiting Britain.
Musharraf said his government had had to fight Al-Qaeda militants who swarmed into Pakistan following the war US-led forced launched in Afghanistan (news - web sites) in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
"We have removed, apprehended more than 600 al-Qaeda members from our cities, and now our cities are reasonably clean," Musharraf told a press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites).
"We have cleaned them up from the mountains and now, as far as Pakistan is concerned, we have broken the back of al-Qaeda in Pakistan, and I say this with total conviction and authority," he said.
"They are on the run, their command and control structure is broken, their logistics bases have been smashed, and we occupy them," he said.
"Now there ought to be no reason for any doubts that Pakistan has won, is winning the battle against extremism and terrorism within its own area," he said.
However, Musharraf and Blair himself both stressed that in addition to using military and security forces to fight terrorism, the world community also has to attack the root causes of it.
Musharraf spelled out these causes as political disputes like the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as well as poverty and illiteracy.
But in an interview with the Washington Post, published Sunday, Musharraf, who had met with US President George W. Bush (news - web sites) at the weekend, said Bin Laden's trail has gone cold.
"He is alive, but more than that, where he is, no, it'll be just a guess and it won't have much basis," Musharraf said. "We don't know where he is."
On CNN television, he added: "He may be anywhere (and) he would be knocked out (in a military strike) if at all he is in one of the areas where we strike."
Bin Laden is presumed to be in hiding in the lawless frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
-------- space
Congressional Support of Vision for Space Exploration Cheered by Coalition
PRESS RELEASE
Date Released: Monday, December 06, 2004
Source: Space Foundation
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=15618
WASHINGTON -- The nation's Vision for Space
Exploration received a major vote of confidence today
when Congress gave final approval of the FY2005
spending bill that includes money for NASA to resume
Space Shuttle operations, continue assembly of the
International Space Station as an exploration research
outpost, and to actively pursue plans to send robots
and humans back to the Moon, on to Mars and beyond.
The Coalition for Space Exploration congratulates
Congress for its support of this bold new adventure
that will stimulate economic rewards, help sustain our
national security, inspire a new generation of
explorers and provide unimagined improvements in our
quality of life.
"Thanks to the direct involvement of the White House
and of key leaders of Congress, NASA will have the
money it needs in 2005 to move one step closer toward
realizing the goals of the Vision for Space
Exploration," said Jeff Carr, chairman of the
Coalition for Space Exploration's public affairs team.
The budget actions taken by Congress and the White
House reflect the will of U.S. citizens, according to
a Gallup Poll commissioned by the Coalition 69 percent
of those polled supported the Vision for Space
Exploration, including a majority of both Republicans
and Democrats.
"Without question, the majority of Americans support
space exploration. The Coalition looks forward to
working with the White House, Congress, NASA and
others to help realize this national Vision during the
coming months and years," Carr said.
NASA will receive $16.2 billion in 2005, about an $822
million increase from 2004. Although increased, the
space agency's share of the Federal Budget remains
less than 1 percent.
About the Coalition
The Coalition for Space Exploration is a collaborative
effort whose mission is to ensure the United States
will remain a leader in space, science and technology
- key factors that will benefit the nation's economy,
help maintain our national security, and gratify our
inherent human need to explore. The Coalition seeks to
generate momentum and enthusiasm for the newly focused
Vision for Space Exploration by sharing the
spirit-lifting excitement and tangible benefits of our
space program with the general public and our nation's
leaders.
Founding members include ATK Alliant Techsystems, The
Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin and United Space Alliance.
Other members include Aerojet, Analytical Graphics,
Inc. (AGI), California Space Authority, Delaware North
Parks Services, Florida Space Authority, Hamilton
Sundstrand, Harris, Honeywell, Northrop Grumman, Moog,
Pratt & Whitney, Raytheon, National Space and
Satellite Alliance, and the Space Foundation.
Coalition partners include The Astronauts Memorial
Foundation, Bastion Technologies, the National Space
Society, Parametric Technology Corp., and TUI Business
Systems.
Additional information about the Coalition and the
nation's Vision for Space Exploration can be found
online at www.spacecoalition.com.
-------- spies
U.S. Presidential Commission on WMD Intelligence Likely to Continue to Meet in Secret
Global Security Newswire December 6, 2004
http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2004_12_6.html#79BAE2FE
A presidential commission created in February to study U.S. intelligence on WMD proliferation may continue to meet in secret until it releases its final report, the New York Times reported today (see GSN, May 27).
Since its creation, the commission has met seven times behind closed doors, and has only issued brief public statements on its Web site, according to the Times. Among the commission’s responsibilities is investigating prewar intelligence on Iraq’s alleged WMD efforts and determining whether U.S. intelligence is effective in investigating other incidents of WMD proliferation. Over the past two weeks, the Times reported, U.S. President George W. Bush has also ordered the commission to review plans from the CIA, FBI and Defense Department on improving those agencies’ intelligence efforts.
The commission is scheduled to issue its report by March 31, 2005.
Commission spokesman Larry McQuillan said the panel needs to meet in private because of the nature of the topics discussed.
“When you get into the nitty-gritty details of where are we strong and where are we weak in terms of intelligence gathering, you can’t really share that with people,” he said.
The top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Representative Jane Harman (Calif.), said, though, that she would prefer the commission to “build some public understanding” about its work “to reassure the public that lessons have been learned about intelligence failures on WMD” (Douglas Jehl, New York Times, Dec. 6).
Utah National Guard Forms WMD Unit
A 20-member Utah National Guard unit trained to respond to WMD incidents was formed Thursday, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Nov. 23).
The 85th Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team, formed from full-time Army and Air Force National Guard personnel, was organized to respond to calls from civilian authorities to identify suspected chemical, radiological or biological agents and offer response advice for WMD incidents, according to AP.
“We look forward to becoming an extensive, highly visible and critical piece in Utah’s WMD response force,” said 85th Commander Lt. Col. Wendy Cline of the Utah Air National Guard (Associated Press/Salt Lake Tribune, Dec. 6, 2004).
-------- un
Straw welcomes UN plan for strikes on rogue states
By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor
UK Independent
06 December 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=590104
Changes to the UN charter would make it easier for Britain and the US to go to war with Security Council backing against rogue states, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, says.
In an interview in The Independent today - his first newspaper interview since Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, announced a planned shake-up of the UN - Mr Straw says Britain and the US could have gone to war on Iraq under the new UN rules, over Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses against his own people, including the Marsh Arabs.
Under the proposed changes, in a report by 16 experts, the UN's 15-member Security Council would be enlarged to 24 nations, and the UN stance on emerging threats would be tightened, because the world had a "responsibility to protect" people threatened with genocide, mass killings or ethnic cleansing.
Mr Straw said the proposed charter would prevent other members of the enlarged Security Council using the veto to block preventive action to protect people from genocide.
Asked whether he meant it would enable action to be taken against the Sudanese government over Darfur, Mr Straw said: "Not only Darfur, Iraq. Iraq was as much an example of large-scale human rights abuses, and what happened to the Marsh Arabs was getting on for genocide as much as that which has happened in Darfur.
"Had this new jurisprudence been there, I think the Security Council would probably - you can't be certain - have decided to take Chapter 7 action against Iraq in respect of human rights abuses. That would have been as much a basis for determining an ultimatum by the Council as weapons of mass destruction became. They are dealing with situations before a latent threat becomes imminent. That's very important."
The Foreign Secretary emphasised his belief that the threat of preventive action by the UN would in future force dictators and rogue states to bow to international pressure. But his remarks will alarm critics of the war, and raise fears that the changes would open the way to action by the US against other states, such as Syria and Iran, the latter identified by George Bush as part of an axis of evil.
Mr Straw firmly denies that he misled the UN over the case for war in Iraq, winning praise from Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, for his presentation. "I worked extremely hard to find a peaceful solution," Mr Straw says.
"The solution I wanted was a clear consensus in the Security Council to get Saddam to comply by the only means he understood, which was an ultimatum and threat of military action. If we had been able to do that we might have been able to find the truth out without military action." He said his evidence to the UN had stood the test of time.
Mr Straw says Britain is ready to offer observers and security support for the Palestinian elections. Two international conferences are required under the road-map. Beyond that, Mr Straw and Mr Blair are also offering London as a venue for a further meeting. That would be a "nuts-and-bolts" discussion of practicalities of the planned Israeli pull-out.
-------- us
Preemption for All!
by Paul Craig Roberts, December 6, 2004 Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=4116
Has President Bush lost his grip on reality?
In his Dec. 1 speech in Halifax, Nova Scotia, President Bush again declared his intention to preemptively attack "enemies who plot in secret and set out to murder the innocent and the unsuspecting." Freedom from terrorism, Bush declared, will come only through preemptive war against enemies of democracy.
How does Bush know who and where these secret enemies are? How many more times will his guesses be wrong like he was about Iraq?
What world does Bush live in? The U.S. cannot control Iraq, much less battle the rest of the Muslim world and beyond. While Bush threatened the world with U.S. aggression, headlines revealed the futility of preemptively invading countries: "Pentagon to Boost Iraq Force by 12,000," "U.S. Death Toll in Iraq at Highest Monthly Level," "Wounded, Disabled Soldiers Kept on Active Duty."
We are getting our butts kicked in Iraq, and Bush wants to invade more countries? It is clear as day that we do not have enough troops to deal with Iraq. The 12,000 additional troops "to improve security" are being acquired by extending the combat tours of troops already on duty in Iraq. More U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq in November than in any previous month. The U.S. is so hard-up for troops that the Pentagon is deploying soldiers who have lost arms and legs in combat. On Dec. 1, the Washington Post reported: "U.S. armed forces have recently announced new efforts to keep seriously wounded or disabled soldiers on active duty."
Redeploying the disabled is presented as a heroic demonstration of our gung-ho warriors' fighting spirit. But what it really means is we have no more troops to throw at the few thousand lightly armed Iraqi insurgents who have tied down eight U.S. divisions.
According to the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, the hospital has treated 20,802 U.S. troops for injuries received in Iraq. According to the Pentagon's figures, 54 percent of the wounded are too seriously injured to return to their units. If that figure is correct, it would mean that the insurgents have put 11,233 U.S. troops out of action. Add in the 1,254 U.S. troops who have been killed for a total of 12,487. That's 9 percent of our total force in Iraq and a much higher percentage of our combat force.
There is no indication that we have put 12,487 Iraqi insurgents out of action. Indeed, until very recently, the U.S. military estimated that there were only several thousand active insurgents in all of Iraq.
Someone needs to tell Bush that terrorists are stateless and that invading states creates insurgencies. In Iraq, our soldiers are not fighting terrorists. They are fighting an insurgency that Bush created by invading Iraq. Bush's preemptive wars are a good way to depopulate the U.S. and bankrupt our country.
For all our firepower, we are not winning the war. Fallujah has been destroyed, but the U.S. military can claim only 1,200-1,600 insurgents were killed. Many of the dead counted as insurgents are probably civilians killed by the U.S. military's indiscriminate use of high explosives. But even if we assume the military's estimate of enemy dead is accurate, it is an unimpressive figure in view of the 850 wounded and 71 dead Americans. U.S. Fallujah casualties of 921 is a strikingly high figure considering the heavy armor, artillery, helicopter gunships, jet fighters, and sophisticated communications that back up U.S. troops.
Why was Bush in Nova Scotia advocating preemptive invasion unless Bush has other Middle Eastern countries targeted? Iran and Syria are the only two remaining Middle Eastern countries that are not ruled by U.S. puppets.
Lacking sufficient military forces to successfully occupy Iraq, how is Bush going to engage in preemptive wars against Iran and Syria without bringing back the draft? If eight U.S. divisions can't do the job in Iraq, 16 U.S. divisions won't be enough for Iran. Defeating standing armies is a different game from occupying a hostile country. The U.S. military is good at the former, not at the latter.
Bush would serve our country and the rest of the world far better by ceasing his macho aggressive talk and working to create trust and good will. Bush is a very foolish man if he thinks America will bear no consequences for his support of Israel's appalling treatment of the Palestinians. Is Bush really as stupid as he sounds? Is the president of the United States so poorly informed that he believes that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have nothing to do with U.S. support of Israel's destruction of the Palestinian people?
Surely the American president is not so dumb as to believe that Osama bin Laden went to all the trouble of bringing down the World Trade Center simply because Muslims hate freedom and democracy? If all terrorists want to do is to show their disdain for Western freedom and democracy, they have much closer and softer targets in Italy, Greece, France, Germany, England, Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, and Belgium.
The American public is totally uninformed about the true character of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Americans could learn a great deal by reading Israeli newspapers and the reports of Israeli peace groups. However, it is impossible to believe that the U.S. government is equally in the dark about the consequences of Bush's support for Israeli aggression against the Palestinians and the impact Bush's support of Israel has on Muslims' attitudes toward the U.S.
A president who misled us about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and terrorist links will also mislead us about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, about Iran's intentions – indeed, about everything. Bush proved that his word cannot be trusted; yet Americans reelected him.
Bush got the voters' message: "Lie to us some more."
On Dec. 3, Russian President Vladimir L. Putin replied to Bush's Halifax speech by declaring Bush's policy "dictatorial and hypocritical." Russia's leader warned that policies "based on the barrack-room principles of a unipolar world appear to be extremely dangerous." Russian Air Force commander General Vladimir Mikhailov announced that Russia, too, can engage in preemptive attacks. Russia has informed neighboring Georgia that Russia might use cruise missiles and strategic bombers in preventive strikes against Chechen terrorists sheltering on Georgian territory.
Bush's insane doctrine of preemptive war promises a 21st century more bloody than the 20th.
--------
Former US soldiers ordered to active duty seek delays, exemptions
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Dec 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041206174616.0pohxxq4.html
More than half of the 4,024 former soldiers ordered to report for military duty have asked for delays or exemptions or have failed to respond to the orders, army statistics showed Monday.
The army in June announced it was calling up 5,674 members of the Individual Ready Reserves (IRR) to fill gaps in combat support units deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Former soldiers who serve less than eight years and do not join national guard or reserve units are put in the IRR, a pool that is rarely used except in national emergencies.
As of November 20, the army has sent out mobilization orders to 4,024 IRR members, said Lieutenant Colonel Pamela Hart, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
"Of that number there are only 628 soldiers who we are still trying to make positive contact with, either to ensure they received the order or understand the process," she said.
Another 1,855 have asked that their return to active duty be delayed or that they be exempted altogether, she said.
Of those, 1,044 requests have been approved, 750 are still pending and 61 were denied, she said.
Among the reasons given for requesting delays or exemptions are medical conditions, financial hardship, problems with arranging family care or to complete higher education studies, she said.
Former soldiers who get mobilization orders are given 30 days to deploy after which they risk being declared absent without leave.
But the army has opted to try to persuade people to report for duty voluntarily.
-----
Rumsfeld confirms will stay on, vows transformation of US military
KUWAIT CITY (AFP)
Dec 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041206183311.fwe6zksu.html
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Monday he would devote himself to transforming the military and bringing American troops out of Iraq as he confirmed he would remain in President George W. Bush's administration.
But the oldest serving head of the US Defence Department would not commit himself to a complete four year term in Bush's new term. He would also not set a date for the return of the approximately 135,000 US troops in Iraq.
Rumsfeld, 72, heading for trips to Kuwait, Afghanistan -- for the inauguration of President Hamid Karzai on Tuesday -- and later India, said he had met Bush last week to discuss his future.
"The election is over and the president asked me if I would be willing to stay on and I told him I would be delighted to do that," he told reporters.
Asked if he had ever considered quitting during his first four years when the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal caused international controversy, Rumsfeld said "certainly there are days."
Rumsfeld also highlighted the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that were used to justify the invasion. "That is clearly a disappointment," he said looking back at his first term.
But the defence secretary shrugged off criticism of troop levels in Iraq saying numbers had always been decided by the top US commanders, General Tommy Franks at the time of the invasion, and now General John Abizaid.
Rumsfeld rejected suggestions that more soldiers should have been sent. He said they would have been more vulnerable to attacks "and it creates more of an occupation impression."
The US defence chief highlighted Bush's insistence that US troops would remain in Iraq until the task of ensuring security can be carried out by the Iraqi security forces.
"The image of handing over that country to people who go around chopping off heads is not a pretty one -- that's a dark image."
Rumsfeld said that he and Bush had not set "a timetable" for his new tenure but he was carrying on "enthusiastically".
In about three years, Rumsfeld will have set the record for the longest serving US defence secretary. When he was in the post in the 1970s he set the record, at the age of 43, as the youngest defence secretary.
"I am fortunate, I have good health, I do not have young children, I am able to do this," he said.
Rumsfeld said his main reason for staying on was that he enjoyed working with Bush and "second, we have a lot of tough challenges facing our country."
Before he was forced into the war on terror after the September 11, 2001 attacks and preparations for the Iraq war, Rumsfeld went to the Defence Department to transform the US military.
He has sought to modernise the army and its administration while at the same time embarking on a huge operation to change the global deployment of US troops -- seeking to reduce numbers in Europe and Asia.
"We have got a big job to do. It is enormous," he said.
"The task of moving something as large as the US Department of Defence is a sizeable task. It is the kind of thing that does not happen instantaneously. Great bureaucracies do not spin on a dime."
Major changes are to be made to US deployments in Europe, particularly Germany, and in Asia in countries such as South Korea.
The defence secretary said the United States will "focus more on precision, equipment, speed, agility as opposed to numbers" while acknowledging opposition in some countries saying "we have seen it has been hard for people to understand."
There have also been changes to the drawing up of the huge military budget and the Defence Department is midway through rewriting all contingency plans for possible conflicts around the world.
Rumsfeld said some old plans took three or four years to write and were already "irrelevant" by the time they were finished.
He highlighted the greater importance of US special forces to the modern military. Numbers have been boosted in the past four years and Rumsfeld said special forces are now "an enormous part of the spearpoint of US military capability."
--------
Army expanding 'stop loss' order to keep soldiers from leaving
USA TODAY
By Tom Squitieri
1/6/2004
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-01-05-army-troops_x.htm
WASHINGTON - The Army will announce as early as Tuesday new orders that will forbid thousands of soldiers from leaving the service after they return this year from Iraq, Afghanistan and other fronts in the war against terrorism, defense officials said Monday.
The "stop loss" orders mean personnel who could otherwise leave the military when their volunteer commitments expire will be forced to remain to the end of their overseas deployments and up to another 90 days after they come home. "Stop movement" orders also bar soldiers from moving to new assignments during the restricted period. The orders do not extend any unit's stay overseas.
Although the orders cover all the approximately 160,000 returning troops, the Army said it estimates only about 7,000 of the returnees will have their time in the service involuntarily extended. Most deployed soldiers are not affected because they have service obligations that extend beyond their current deployments, Army Col. Elton Manske, chief of the Army's Enlisted Division, said Monday.
"This decision is really being driven by the readiness of units and the absolute intent to keep the units themselves intact down to as low as the squad and crew level, so we are assured of putting the best fighting force on the battlefield," Manske said.
Army officials also said Monday that the service is offering re-enlistment bonuses of up to $10,000 to soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait. Soldiers currently in those countries and replacements could receive $5,000 to $10,000 for enlisting for at least three years of additional Army service.
The latest stop-loss orders will be announced after Congress is briefed and affected Army units are informed, defense officials said. The new orders are an expansion of similar orders imposed Nov. 13 on more than 110,000 active duty soldiers whose units are preparing to go to Iraq and Afghanistan between now and May. They represent the first major changing of the guard in Iraq since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations May 1.
"The use of stop loss is often an indication of a shortfall of available personnel," says Loren Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, a think tank based in Arlington, Va.
The Army's commitments include about 130,000 troops in Iraq, 11,000 in Kuwait, 11,500 in Afghanistan, 37,500 in South Korea and 44,000 in Japan.
Congress first gave stop-loss authority to the military after the Vietnam War, when the Pentagon faced difficulty in replacing departing combat soldiers. The Pentagon didn't use the authority until 1990, during the buildup to the Persian Gulf War. All four service branches have issued stop-loss orders since then. The Pentagon issued stop- loss orders in November 2002 for Reserve and National Guard units activated for the war against terrorism. The orders remain in effect. A stop loss was issued for active troops in February 2003, but rescinded in May 2003.
-----
Rumsfeld Sees U.S. Troops Leaving Iraq Within 4 Years
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT
December 6, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/06/international/middleeast/06cnd-rums.html?hp&ex=1102395600&en=62eab879870a17de&ei=5094&partner=homepage
KUWAIT, Dec. 6 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that he expected American troops to withdraw from Iraq within four years, but he cautioned that any final decision hinged on the progress that Iraq's civilian government and security forces make by then.
Asked by reporters traveling with him whether United States forces would be out of Iraq by the end of his term, Mr. Rumsfeld paused to ask whether that meant a second four-term term. When told yes, he then said, "I would certainly expect that to be the case and hope that to be the case."
Mr. Rumsfeld quickly noted that President Bush has repeatedly said American forces would stay as long as needed in Iraq. But Mr. Rumsfeld's answer offered intriguing clues into his thinking on two crucial subjects: the duration of American troops in Iraq and how long he will stay in his job.
The Defense Department last week announced it would increase the number of American troops in Iraq to 150,000 from 138,000 by early next month, to help provide security for the Iraqi elections on Jan. 30 and to keep pressure on the insurgency.
Pentagon officials said this is only a temporary increase, through next March. But many American military officers and senior Iraqi ministry officials have forecast that the United States would have to keep a sizable troop presence in Iraq for years to come to battle a resilient and deadly insurgency, and to help prevent the country from spiraling into civil war.
President Bush last week asked Mr. Rumsfeld to stay on as defense secretary in his next administration, a request Mr. Rumsfeld confirmed today that he had "enthusiastically" accepted. But Mr. Rumsfeld said he and the president did not discuss how long he would remain, and the secretary declined to go into the subject with reporters.
Mr. Rumsfeld arrived here at the beginning of a four-day trip that includes joining Vice President Cheney at the inauguration of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in Kabul on Tuesday, a troop visit here and a stopover in India.
Speaking to reporters aboard his plane today, Mr. Rumsfeld struck an unusually reflective tone and ticked off several points suggesting that he would relish the opportunity to serve another four-term term. Ultimately, of course, that decision rests with Mr. Bush.
Mr. Rumsfeld, who is 72, said he enjoyed working with Mr. Bush, whom he called "an excellent executive," was in good health, had no young children and was eager to tackle of series of ongoing professional challenges, from revamping the military's overseas basing arrangements to overhauling the Pentagon's personnel system.
"I feel fortunate at this point in my life to feel like I can contribute to working on these important projects," said Mr. Rumsfeld, who has the distinction of being both the oldest and the youngest defense secretary in the nation's history (serving once before under President Ford).
Asked if he ever considered resigning in his first term, Mr. Rumsfeld said "Certainly there are days," without mentioning any one - or any incident - in particular.
Looking back over his first four-year term, Mr. Rumsfeld acknowledged that the two biggest mistakes or misjudgments that had been made - though not necessarily by him - were the failure to discover any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ("that's clearly a disappointment") and a lack of intelligence that predicted "the degree of insurgency today."
Mr. Rumsfeld remained defiant in the face of critics who say the United States failed to send enough troops to Iraq initially to handle postwar security and now, to combat the insurgents.
He said that the decision on troop levels was largely "out of my control," since he was following the advice and requests of his regional commanders, first Gen. Tommy R. Franks and now, Gen. John P. Abizaid and Gen. George W. Casey Jr.
While that technically may be true, Mr. Rumsfeld approves all decisions on troop levels in Iraq, and is famous among his commanders and top civilian aides for demanding detailed explanations for troop increases and movements.
American commanders in Iraq have said the timing of the withdrawal of any American troops in Iraq depends on the security situation on the ground and the ability of Iraqi security forces, now 115,000 strong, to conduct operations independently and competently.
Mr. Rumsfeld said the Iraqis have been "performing very well," but acknowledged that in the battle against a well-armed, well-trained and well-led insurgency, some troops, like Iraqi army forces, had fought well, but that poorly equipped police officers had been caught in "a mismatch" with militants.
"So we've got the task of continuing the training and equipping of the Iraqis so that they can take over the security responsibilities of their country," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "There's going to be some steps forward and steps back."
Mr. Rumsfeld said despite the increasing attacks on Iraqi police and other Iraqi security forces, there is no shortage of fresh recruits ready to sign up. "The more difficult task is the middle-level leadership," he said. "It's tying together morale."
The Iraqi defense and interior ministries, with help from American officers, continue to wrestle to establish equitable pay scales for troops who live at home and those who do not; develop compensation systems for families of Iraqi forces killed in action, and creating fair promotion and vetting systems, he said.
"The extremists have decided that the Iraqi security forces are a danger to them," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "Elsewise, why would they be running around trying to kill so many of them?"
Mr. Rumsfeld said the insurgents cannot defeat American forces militarily. "All they can do is try to outlast," he said.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
FDA completes plan to protect food supply from attacks
USA TODAY
By Elizabeth Weise,
12/6/2004
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-12-06-fda-defense-plan_x.htm
The Food and Drug Administration on Monday announced the final portion of its post-9/11 rules to protect the USA's food supply.
The action comes just four days after outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said he can't understand why terrorists haven't attacked the U.S. food supply, because "it's so easy to do."
The rules are the final piece of new authorities given to the FDA by Congress in the wake of the anthrax contamination that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. That contamination further highlighted the nation's vulnerability to less well-known forms of terrorism and harassment. Five people died because of their exposure to envelopes laced with the deadly bacteria.
The rules require that companies keep records so officials can trace the source of food contamination. The hope is that investigators will zero in on the exact point at which a particular food was tainted.
The new rules will be important in allowing the FDA to deal with food-related emergencies, "such as deliberate contamination of food by terrorists," says Lester Crawford, acting FDA commissioner.
Any company that manufactures, processes, packs, transports, distributes, receives, holds or imports food must keep records showing where it obtained the food and where it shipped it.
Farms, restaurants, food banks and individuals preparing food in the home are exempt.
Companies must retain records, from six months to two years, depending on the shelf life of the food. Larger companies have a year to comply with the new regulations. Smaller companies have 18 months to two years.
Three related rules, all now in effect, require the registration of food producers, prior notice of when food will be imported and the impoundment of food that producers or importers fear could be dangerous.
The Grocery Manufacturers of America and the National Food Processors Association both issued statements emphasizing their commitment to keeping the nation's food supply safe while commending the FDA for making its regulations manageable.
Thompson said Friday that he frets over the vulnerability of the nation's food supply "every single night."
And Caroline Smith DeWaal, a food safety expert with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says the new precautions are "hardly rock-solid protection against terrorism."
What's needed is a beefed-up government presence in the food industry, much like the steps that have been taken to secure the nation's airports, she says.
"We need enough of a government presence in food safety and food security that it acts as a deterrent to using food as a target," DeWaal says.
----
Pentagon metro station closed amid 'possible hazmat' incident
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Dec 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041206172939.qx3qgfhg.html
Authorities closed a subway train station adjacent to the Pentagon Monday, citing fear of possible contamination by a hazardous material, after passengers and workers experienced eye and throat irritation.
"The Pentagon Metrorail station is currently closed while an investigation is being conducted into a possible 'hazmat' situation," the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority said in a brief statement.
Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin said a hazardous materials response unit was dispatched to inspect the evacuated station, which serves the US military headquarters here.
Irwin said the action was taken after several people in the station reported experiencing eye and throat irritation.
"As a precaution, the Pentagon closed the metro entrance," she said.
Train service was suspended to the station, which is used by thousands of Pentagon officials and employees daily.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Cuba Frees Seventh Dissident in a Week
By ANDREA RODRIGUEZ
Dec 6, 2004 Associated Press
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CUBA_DISSIDENTS_FREED?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
HAVANA (AP) -- Authorities Monday freed an independent journalist who had opposed Cuba's communist government, bringing to seven the number of political prisoners released in a week.
Jorge Olivera Castillo, who worked on the magazine De Cuba and contributed to news agencies outside the country, was freed for health reasons after a medical checkup at a prison hospital.
Olivera, 43, had been sentenced to 18 years in prison after a massive government crackdown on 75 dissidents in March 2003. All the activists were accused of working with U.S. officials to undermine Fidel Castro's government.
Speaking to journalists at his home, Olivero defended his opposition to Castro. "Dissent shouldn't be seen as a criminal act," he said.
Olivera said he planned to leave Cuba for the United States on a visa he was granted before his arrest.
He said he thought Cuba would continue liberating more of the original 75, a process that began with the release of seven dissidents last summer and resumed unexpectedly with the liberation of six more last week, including another independent journalist, Edel Jose Garcia Diaz, and Raul Rivero, a writer who is the best-known of the group.
With the release of Olivera, who suffered from colon problems, the total freed from prison is 14 - all for health reasons.
"I trust that there's reflection on the part of the Cuban government, for the well-being of the country," he said.
Many of the remaining 61 prisoners had been brought to Havana for medical checkups - raising hopes that they, too, would be freed - but some have already been sent back to their provincial prisons, relatives of the dissidents said.
Castro's government has made no public statement about the releases, but analysts believe Cuba wanted to avoid the possibility that any dissidents would die in prison, while also signaling flexibility on human rights issues amid warming relations with Europe.
The De Cuba magazine was the first of its kind to publish independent writings on the island. Two issues came out before the 2003 crackdown, in which De Cuba editor Ricardo Gonzalez Alfonso was also imprisoned. He remains behind bars.
-------- terrorism
U.S. consulate attacked in Saudi Arabia
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 06, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041206-013247-4143r.htm
JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia - Militants lobbing explosives forced their way into the heavily guarded U.S. consulate in Jiddah on Monday before Saudi security forces stormed the compound and fought a gunbattle to end a four-hour standoff. Eight people, none American, were killed.
The bold assault, the worst in the kingdom since May, demonstrated that Saudi Arabia's crackdown on al-Qaida is still far from successful in the native land of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Saudi officials blamed a "deviant" group - the government's way of identifying al-Qaida extremists it holds responsible for a string of terror strikes over the past two years.
President Bush said the attack showed "terrorists are still on the move," trying to intimidate Americans and force the United States to withdraw from Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
The attack came a week after the deputy leader of al-Qaida, Ayman al-Zawahri, warned in a videotape that Washington must change its policies or face further attacks by the terror group.
Five consulate employees were killed, said a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman in Riyadh. Three of the five attackers also died in the shootout, the Saudi Interior Ministry said. One American was slightly injured.
Saudi security officials initially said four Saudi officers also died in the clash, but Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Gen. Mansour al-Turki later told The Associated Press no officers were killed. He said one was seriously injured.
The two other attackers were captured wounded, the Interior Ministry said.
The attack prompted the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh to urge thousands of Americans in the country - many of whom already live under extraordinarily tight security - to "exercise utmost security precautions."
Consulate employees rushed to a safe area inside the compound after the attack began, a State Department official said. There were conflicting reports about hostages, but the official said no Americans were held captive.
"We could hear the gunshots outside, but we didn't know what was going on," said a consulate employee who rushed to the safe area and later spoke to The Associated Press by telephone on condition of anonymity. "They were heavy at times and not so heavy at other times."
The attacks, immediately praised on militant Islamic web sites, showed that extremists in Saudi Arabia are still capable of carrying out sophisticated strikes despite the government crackdown.
"This was a very hard target to attack, and they pulled it off," said Diaa Rashwan, a Cairo-based expert on Muslim militants, predicting the attack would boost morale among extremists. "For the government, this was a security failure. For the militants, this was a military victory."
The Saudi Cabinet quickly convened and issued a statement condemning the attack and reaffirming the government's determination "to fight terrorism in all its aspects and to hunt down its perpetrators until they are rooted out and the society is cleaned of them."
Monday's assault began when the attackers sneaked on foot behind an embassy car that was entering the consulate through a gate, then lobbed hand grenades at guards to take control of the gate area, said al-Turki, the Interior Ministry spokesman.
He said the attackers also used incendiary grenades designed to create fires and to send up heavy smoke. Plumes of black smoke could be seen rising in the air shortly after the attack.
After getting inside the compound's outer security wall, the attackers held about 18 people hostage at gunpoint, said a senior Saudi official in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Those held at gunpoint were mostly either in the courtyard-like area to apply for visas, or were employees who worked in that area, the official said.
The attackers never made it inside the consulate's buildings, al-Turki said.
The Saudi official in Washington said the attackers then called a local police station to report they had hostages and would begin killing them unless Saudi security forces backed away from the compound. As the call was ending, Saudi security forces stormed the area and fought a short gunbattle, the official said.
Al-Turki denied that anyone was held hostage, but said the attackers did hurt those they came across in the courtyard area.
In Riyadh, U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Carol Kalin said four of the five employees killed held administrative jobs and that one was a private contract guard on the consulate's payroll. Four other embassy workers - all hired locally - were hospitalized, Kalin said.
Most were Sudanese and Indian, Saudi officials said.
Asked about the conflicting reports of the 18 hostages, Kalin said: "The investigation of the Saudi authorities is ongoing and the embassy has no comment on this report at this time."
Kalin said it was unclear if any of the U.S. Marine guards inside the consulate were involved in the gunbattle.
The consulate - like all U.S. diplomatic buildings and other Western compounds in Saudi Arabia - has been heavily fortified and guarded since last year's series of bombings against targets housing foreigners. Guard posts are located on the corners of the compound and a road open to civilian traffic runs along part of the wall.
Saudi and U.S. officials have blamed al-Qaida, led by bin Laden, for all major militant attacks in the kingdom since May 2003.
The Saudi government has cracked down hard, arresting and killing many key militants, and quieting the attacks somewhat.
Last May, however, 22 people were killed, including 19 foreigners, by militants who took over a resort complex in Khobar and held hostages for 25 hours.
In June, militants in Riyadh, the capital, kidnapped and beheaded Paul M. Johnson Jr., an engineer for a U.S. defense company.
About 9,000 Americans live in the Jiddah consular district, which encompasses western Saudi Arabia from Yemen to Jordan. The population of Jiddah is estimated at more than 2 million.
-------- POLITICS
Fear of Putin Gives Rise to Unlikely Allies
Dominance of President's Surrogate Party Forces Others to Cooperate for Survival
Washington Post
By Peter Finn
December 6, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38044-2004Dec5?language=printer
IVANOVO, Russia -- Under the bust of a pensive Vladimir Lenin, an unlikely group of politicians gathered here at the regional headquarters of the Communist Party last month. Representatives of the Communists, the Western-oriented Yabloko party and the Union of Right Forces agreed to mount joint rallies, work together in the local election commission and regional parliament, and consider strategic alliances in local elections next year.
The unspoken item on the agenda -- but the one really driving this group -- was the political survival of everyone in the room.
Faced with the near total dominance of United Russia, the surrogate party of the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin, and proposed political changes that could institutionalize its control, the men in the room said they easily coalesced around the idea of a common enemy, even though they have long seen the enemy in each other.
"Our ideas are very different, sometimes absolutely opposite, but we're united by the fact that all of us are facing one dominant party," said Sergei Kolesov, head of the Union of Right Forces in Ivanovo, a city about 180 miles northeast of Moscow. "A party that seems intent on seizing all political power -- that quickly creates some common language."
"We're facing extinction," said Mikhail Bogatyrev, first secretary of the Communist Party Committee in the region. "We have differences, we don't deny that, but we are all facing the tyranny of United Russia."
Alliances formed solely to combat the power of the Kremlin have been springing up across Russia. "This is tactical cooperation more than strategic cooperation, but the fact that it's happening is because they feel this huge pressure, and there's a real need to unite," said Nicolay Petrov, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
Putin has proposed abolishing the direct election of governors and replacing the direct election of half the members of parliament with a system in which people would vote for parties. The parties would then decide internally who is to sit in the legislature.
Other proposed measures would ban coalitions between smaller parties by preventing them from merging their party lists and raise the minimum national vote necessary for a party to enter parliament from 5 percent to 7 percent.
Yet another measure would tighten the requirements for registering as a political party. For instance, parties would need 50,000 members in each of more than half of Russia's 89 provinces.
According to Putin, the goal is to create a strong but manageable multiparty system. "If no environment is created for the growth of the parties' authority, we will never have a real multiparty system," the president said in a television interview last month. He added that it was necessary to create "parties that are capable of taking a real part in the political life of the country and providing for unified national interests."
The Communist Party is evolving toward moderation as it takes on younger members with social democratic rather than Leninist tendencies. That is making it an increasingly attractive partner for some liberals and is further accelerating new alliances.
"The young wing is eager to cooperate and unite forces while the older generation, at the moment, is staying silent," Petrov said. "The Communist Party is increasingly a parliamentary party and a party of opposition with slogans that are attractive to young people."
In the cities of Voronezh, Yaroslavl, Altay and Vladimir, among others, initiatives similar to Ivanovo's have begun. And in the region of Karelia, north of St. Petersburg, the Communists and Yabloko signed a charter committing themselves to joint action. They declared that "no one can break our common will to defend true democratic freedoms and social justice." Neither party sought the permission of national leaders before moving ahead with their union, local officials said.
"Time will show whether this will be enough," said Pavel Khyamyalyanen, head of the Communist Party in Karelia. "At least it slows down the process of United Russia concentrating power in its hands."
Opposition groups are also cooperating at the national level. The Communists, Yabloko, the Union of Right Forces and other small parties took a case to the Supreme Court last month challenging parliamentary elections last December in which United Russia won more than 300 seats in the 450-seat State Duma, the lower house of parliament.
"This case has no judicial future, but this trial is significant because it brings together all these different political forces," said Sergei Mitrokin, deputy leader of Yabloko. Mitrokin is running for election in east Moscow on Sunday for a vacated seat in the Duma. He noted that as part of the new cooperation, the Communists and other opposition parties will field a single election observer team to monitor the vote and count.
Also, on Dec. 12, at least five political parties and numerous nongovernment organizations will hold a civic congress in Moscow under the banner "Russia for Democracy, Against Dictatorship." The organizers say they hope to galvanize protests against Putin's political plans and begin organizing for a national referendum on his proposed changes. They say they have no hope of stopping them in parliament.
"The most important thing is to create structures capable of mobilizing the different resources of all these groups," Mitrokin said. "Our priority is mass action."
In Karelia last month, national leaders got a taste of what might be possible. A Communist-liberal rally drew about 1,000 people to the regional Duma, which was voting on a United Russia bill to replace certain social benefits, such as free housing, with cash payments. The Duma is dominated by United Russia, but the bill was defeated 24 to 22 because of defections from the party.
"What we have to learn is that if we unite and mobilize people we can have an effect," said Vasily Popov, deputy leader of Yabloko in Karelia. "This is the first case in this parliament when a draft law proposed and pushed by the government was not adopted."
-----
Powell plans talks in Europe, North Africa
(AP) 12/6/2004
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-12-06-powell_x.htm
SOFIA, Bulgaria - With just a few weeks left in office, Secretary of State Colin Powell is planning visits to three European countries this week in hopes of healing divisions stemming from the Iraq war and stressing a renewed U.S. commitment to multilateral solutions to global hot spots.
Powell will attend a meeting here Tuesday of the 55-nation Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, which played a key role in monitoring the fraud-ridden Ukraine election last month and agreed Monday to return to Ukraine for a revote on Dec. 26.
The OSCE may have as many as 1,000 monitors for that vote, twice the number of the previous round, officials said.
The United States and Europe have worked effectively to bring about a credible democratic process in Ukraine, a point Powell is certain to make during his visit.
Later in the week, Powell plans to attend a NATO meeting in Brussels, followed by a European Union meeting in the Netherlands.
He then goes to Morocco to hold discussions with Arab and other officials on promoting social and economic reform in the Arab world.
As a lame duck, Powell's words will carry less weight this week than they have had during his many trips abroad over the past four years. Still, he will be able to give the broad outlines of President Bush's second term aspirations. Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice is expected to replace him in January once she receives Senate confirmation.
The plane Powell normally uses on foreign trips is under repair so he was flying here Monday aboard a six-seat plane. A late night arrival was planned. A press contingent and members of Powell's staff flew here separately from Washington, arriving in early evening.
Powell said in November that he saw this week's trip as part of a broader effort to get U.S.-European relations on sounder footing after the bitter disagreements during the Iraq war.
It is highly unlikely, however, that the United States and all NATO allies will view the Iraq situation the same way. Much to the disappointment of the Bush administration, at least 10 allies are not taking part in NATO training of Iraqi forces - a task seen as indispensable for achieving the goal of Iraqi self-sufficiency in providing internal security.
Gen. James Jones, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, says he is disturbed by the number of nonparticipating NATO countries.
Bush said last week in Halifax, Nova Scotia, that he hopes to build "effective multinational and multilateral institutions" that support "effective multilateral action."
Bush has never foresworn use of alliances to achieve foreign policy goals. But during his first term the emphasis often focused on the need to act alone when necessary.
-------- propaganda wars
On Receiving Harvard Medical School's Global Environment Citizen Award
Common Dreams
by Bill Moyers
December 6, 2004
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1206-10.htm
On Wednesday, December 1, 2004, the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School presented its fourth annual Global Environment Citizen Award to Bill Moyers. In presenting the award, Meryl Streep, a member of the Center board, said, "Through resourceful, intrepid reportage and perceptive voices from the forward edge of the debate, Moyers has examined an environment under siege with the aim of engaging citizens." Here is the text of his response to Ms. Streep's presentation of the award:
I accept this award on behalf of all the people behind the camera whom you never see. And for all those scientists, advocates, activists, and just plain citizens whose stories we have covered in reporting on how environmental change affects our daily lives. We journalists are simply beachcombers on the shores of other people's knowledge, other people's experience, and other people's wisdom. We tell their stories.
The journalist who truly deserves this award is my friend, Bill McKibben. He enjoys the most conspicuous place in my own pantheon of journalistic heroes for his pioneer work in writing about the environment. His bestseller The End of Nature carried on where Rachel Carson's Silent Spring left off.
Writing in Mother Jones recently, Bill described how the problems we journalists routinely cover - conventional, manageable programs like budget shortfalls and pollution - may be about to convert to chaotic, unpredictable, unmanageable situations. The most unmanageable of all, he writes, could be the accelerating deterioration of the environment, creating perils with huge momentum like the greenhouse effect that is causing the melt of the arctic to release so much freshwater into the North Atlantic that even the Pentagon is growing alarmed that a weakening gulf stream could yield abrupt and overwhelming changes, the kind of changes that could radically alter civilizations.
That's one challenge we journalists face - how to tell such a story without coming across as Cassandras, without turning off the people we most want to understand what's happening, who must act on what they read and hear.
As difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a readable narrative for complex issues without depressing our readers and viewers, there is an even harder challenge - to pierce the ideology that governs official policy today. One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the oval office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.
Remember James Watt, President Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, 'after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.'
Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true - one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index. That's right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the twelve volumes of the left-behind series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious right warrior, Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.
Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): once Israel has occupied the rest of its 'biblical lands,' legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.
I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelation where four angels 'which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man.' A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed - an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144-just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.
So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist, Glenn Scherer - 'the road to environmental apocalypse. Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed - even hastened - as a sign of the coming apocalypse.
As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election - 231 legislators in total - more since the election - are backed by the religious right. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the senate floor: "the days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that i will send a famine in the land.' He seemed to be relishing the thought.
And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the Book of Revelation are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations or in the motel turn some of the 250 Christian TV stations and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"
Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, America's Providential History. You'll find there these words: "the secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie…that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece.' however, "[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's earth……while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people." No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on November 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.
I can see in the look on your faces just how had it is for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you think of the market?" "I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."
I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe that - it's just that I read the news and connect the dots:
I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration that wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act that requires the government to judge beforehand if actions might damage natural resources.
That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections; and ease pollution standards for cars, sports utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.
That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.
That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting coal-fired power plans and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies.
That wants to open the arctic wildlife refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.
I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend nine million dollars - $2 million of it from the administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council - to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.
I read all this in the news.
I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends at the international policy network, which is supported by ExxonMobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is 'a myth, sea levels are not rising, scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are 'an embarrassment.
I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.
I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer - pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age 12; of Thomas, age 10; of Nancy, 7; Jassie, 3; Sara Jane, nine months. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, 'Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do.' And then I am stopped short by the thought: 'That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world.'
And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice?
What has happened to out moral imagination?
On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: 'How do you see the world?" And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"
I see it feelingly.
The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist, I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free - not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called 'hocma' - the science of the heart…..the capacity to see….to feel….and then to act…as if the future depended on you.
Believe me, it does.
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Yes Men Hoax on BBC Reminds World of Dow Chemical's Refusal to Take Responsibility for Bhopal Disaster
democracynow.org
December 6th, 2004
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/06/1453248
The 20th anniversary of the Bhopal gas tragedy was a day of embarrassment for Dow chemicals and the major news media around the world when the BBC fell victim to a hoax from a man claiming to be a Dow spokesperson who claimed full responsibility for the tragedy and announcing a multibillion dollar compensation package. We play the interview and speak with "Jude Finiseterra," a member of the Yes Men, which played the hoax. [includes rush transcript] The 20th anniversary of the Bhopal gas tragedy was a day of embarrassment for Dow chemicals, the present owner of Union Carbide and the major news media around the world.
On Friday the BBC World Satellite television channel broadcast an interview with a man identified as Jude Finisterra, who claimed to represent Dow chemicals.
Dow, which bought Union Carbide three years ago, has always maintained it "has no responsibility" for the 1984 disaster when tons of lethal gases leaked from a Union Carbide pesticide factory in the city of Bhopal, India. 7,000 people lost their lives within days. 15,000 more lost died in the following years. Around 100,000 others are still suffering chronic and debilitating illnesses. It was one of the worst industrial disasters in history and for years activists have called on the firm to take full responsibility for the disaster and to clean up the contaminated site.
In the interview, Finisterra said Dow had accepted responsibility for the accident and had set-up a multibillion dollar compensation package. The hoax ran twice on BBC World and was picked up by the major news wires before the BBC determined that no man named Jude Finisterra worked at Dow and he was an imposter. The company was forced to remind the world it did not take responsibility for the disaster and said there was no compensation fund set-up for the victims.
In Frankfurt, Dow's share price fell 4.2 percent in 23 minutes, wiping $2 billion off its market value before recovering all the day"s losses three hours later. The BBC is continuing to apologize for running the interview today and says it has lunched an internal investigation. Later the man calling himself Finisterra told BBC radio he was part of the Yes Men.
* Jude Finisterra, aka Andy Bichlbaum, a member of The Yes Men. * BBC World interview with Jude Finisterra. * BBC apology for interview. * Dow Chemical statement on interview.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to turn now, before we go to that interview, to Jude Finisterra, or so he identifies himself. We welcome you to Democracy Now!
ANDY BICHLBAUM: Thanks a lot, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: First of all, can you tell us who you are with?
ANDY BICHLBAUM: Yes, Jude Finisterra is actually a made up name. Jude is the patron saint of impossible causes, and Finisterra means "end of the earth," which kind of represents the situation there, I think, in some way. I'm with the Yes Men and we have done this, sort of, what we call identity correction on a number of different targets. This represents our latest effort.
AMY GOODMAN: And what exactly did you do? How did you end up being called for an interview with the BBC?
ANDY BICHLBAUM: A couple of years ago we set up a website that looked a lot like the real Dow Chemical website but was intended to raise questions about its refusal to do anything about the Bhopal situation, you know, 18 years ago then after the catastrophe. Dow, who owns Union Carbide, refuses to clean up the site, still doesn't two years after that refuses to compensate the victims who received $500 apiece and Dow actually, the head of the Dow P.R. team went on record saying that's plenty good for an Indian, whereas in reality it only pays for a year of medical care. So with this site, we intended to explain from Dow's perspective exactly why they wouldn't do anything and we sent out a press release saying that in fact I was responsible only to its shareholders, and no Bhopali is a shareholder. So about a week and a half ago we received an email at this website Dowethics.com from somebody who hadn't read it very carefully, and she wanted Dow's official statement on the Bhopal situation, and she wanted it on December 3, the 20th anniversary of catastrophe. So we, of course, obliged and spent quite a while trying to figure out on what our approach would be and settled on this, the approach we actually took, because we figured it would result in the most media and possibly a lot of media getting in the United States, which often completely ignores the anniversary.
AMY GOODMAN: So you went into a studio in Paris?
ANDY BICHLBAUM: That's right. Yes. Because I live in Paris, and Mike's here, as well - another Yes Man -- and so we couldn't afford to go to London what with the pound and the dollar. So they set up a studio here in Paris and went in on the morning of December 3. I was hooked in with the host in London, and it was a live interview, and I announced the good news.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don't we listen to and watch what happened and right after this Dow's share price fell 4.2% in 23 minutes, wiping $2 billion off its market value. This is, well, he identified himself as Jude Finisterra, a Dow spokesperson being interviewed by BBC television last Friday.
BBC WORLD: Well, joining us live from Paris is Jude Finisterra. He's a spokesman for Dow Chemical which took over Union Carbide. Good morning to you. A day of commemoration in Bhopal. Do you now accept responsibility for what happened?
JUDE FINISTERRA: Steve, yes. Today is a great day for all of us at Dow, and I think for millions of people around the world, as well. It is twenty years since the disaster, and today I'm very, very happy to announce that for the first time Dow is accepting full responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe. We have a $12 billion plan to finally, at long last, fully compensate the victims including the 120,000 who may need medical care for their entire lives and to fully and swiftly remediate the Bhopal plant site. Now, when we acquired Union Carbide three years ago we knew what we were getting, and it is worth $12 billion. $12 billion. We have resolved to liquidate Union Carbide, this nightmare for the world and this headache for Dow, and use the $12 billion to provide more than $500 per victim, which is all that they have seen. A maximum of just about $500 per victim. It is not plenty good for an Indian as one of our spokespersons unfortunately said a couple of years ago. In fact, it pays for one year of medical care. We will adequately compensate the victims. Furthermore, we will perform a full and complete remediation of the Bhopal site, which, as you mentioned, has not been cleaned up. When Union Carbide abandoned the site twenty years ago, or sixteen years ago, they left tons of toxic waste which continues - the site continues to be used as a playground by children. Water continues to be drunk from the ground water underneath. It is a mess, Steve, and we need a Dow --
BBC WORLD: It's a mess, certainly, Jude. That's good news that you have finally accepted responsibility. Some people would say too late, three years, almost four years on. How soon is your money going to make a difference to the people in Bhopal?
JUDE FINISTERRA: Well, as soon as we can get it to them, Steve. We have begun the process of liquidating Union Carbide. This is, as you mentioned, late, but it is the only thing we can do. When we acquired Union Carbide, we did settle their liabilities in the United States immediately. And we are now, three years later, prepared to do the same in India. We should have done it three years ago. We are doing it now. I would say that it is better late than never, and I would also like to say that this is no small matter, Steve. This is the first time in history that a publicly-owned company of anything near the size of Dow has performed an action which is significantly against its bottom line simply because it's the right thing to do, and our shareholders may take a bit of a hit, Steve, but I think that if they are anything like me they will be ecstatic to be part of such a historic occasion of doing right by those that we have wronged.
BBC WORLD: And does this mean you will also cooperate in any future legal actions in India or the USA?
JUDE FINISTERRA: Absolutely, Steve. One of our non-financial commitments is to press the United States government to finally extradite Warren Anderson, who fled India after being arrested in 1984. He posted $2,000 bail on multiple homicide charges and fled India promptly. We are going to press the United States government to extradite Mr. Anderson, who is living in Long Island, to India to finally face the charges and, I believe, they may be lenient. We are also going to engage in unprecedented transparency. We are going to release finally the full composition of the chemicals and the studies that were performed by Union Carbide shortly after the catastrophe. This information has never been released, Steve, and it's time for it to be released in case any of that information can be of use to medical professionals. And finally, we're going to perform -- we are going to fund research. Any interested researcher can contact Dow's ethics and compliance office. We are going to fund with no strings attached research into the safety of any Dow product whose safety -- many competent scientists have raised doubts about many Dow products, and we do not want to be a company that sells products that may have long-term negative effects on the world. This is a momentous occasion and our new CEO, Andrew Liveris, who has been our CEO for just a month, less than a month, has decided to take Dow in this unprecedented direction.
BBC WORLD: Jude, we will leave it there. Thank you for joining us. Just to reiterate what Jude Finisterra, the spokesman for Dow Chemical has just said, he says Dow Chemical now fully accepts responsibility for the events in Bhopal twenty years ago. And they will cooperate in future legal action.
AMY GOODMAN: That was the BBC television on Friday with the anchor outro-ing Jude Finisterra, spokesperson for Dow. In fact, this was all a hoax and the real Jude Finisterra, or I should say the man who was posing as the person who doesn't exist, a member of the Yes Men, joins us on the phone from Paris where he lives and from where he did that interview. Tell us what your real name is.
ANDY BICHLBAUM: Andy Bichlbaum is my real name, and I'm with, as you said, the Yes Men.
AMY GOODMAN: Is that your real real name?
ANDY BICHLBAUM: Oh, sure. As close as it gets.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let's go to the BBC apologizing for their report.
BBC: The world's worst industrial accident is being remembered in India today. This morning at 9:00 GMT and 10:00 GMT, BBC World ran an interview with someone purporting to be from the Dow Chemical Company about Bhopal. This interview was inaccurate and part of a deception. The person interviewed didn't represent the company. We want to make clear that the information he gave was entirely inaccurate. We apologize to Dow and to anyone who watched the interview who may have been misled by it.
AMY GOODMAN: Again that was from BBC, their apology. Then there was Dow , well, correcting the apology that their supposed spokesperson had issued earlier that day.
MARINA ASHANIN: This morning a false statement was carried by BBC World regarding responsibility for the Bhopal tragedy. The individual who made the statement identified himself as a Dow spokesperson named Jude Finisterra. Dow confirms that there was no basis whatsoever for this report, and we also confirm that Jude Finisterra is neither an employee nor a spokesperson for Dow.
AMY GOODMAN: That the spokesperson of Dow. Again Dow's share price fell 4.2% in 23 minutes, wiping $2 billion off its market value before recovering all the days losses hours later. What are your thoughts today, Andy, after having done this? And how far did this news go? I mean, BBC takes it pretty far. Who else picked up the story?
ANDY BICHLBAUM: Well, Amy, it seemed to get picked up pretty much everywhere. Reuters immediately wrote about the apology by Dow and then, of course, issued a retraction itself. That was picked up by a number of places. The retraction traveled very, very far, and a lot of the articles were sympathetic and brought Bhopal and Dow into the, into the subject again and again and again, so I think probably dozens of articles that wouldn't have been written were written about it, which was the intention, really. It was unfortunate that it had to be the BBC because the BBC had been covering Bhopal rather extensively and well. We would have much rather hoaxed FOX or ABC or NBC or CBS. But it was the BBC that was covering the issue. Those other places couldn't give a rat's ass about Bhopal.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, if you had done this hoax on FOX, you would soon be heard on many more stations than even they're heard now, because FOX has just made an agreement with Clear Channel which owns over 1,200 radio stations in the country that Clear Channel stations will run FOX News headlines every hour for five minutes.
ANDY BICHLBAUM: They are clearly the correct target.
AMY GOODMAN: Is it true that you issued another press release later in the day?
ANDY BICHLBAUM: Yes, we felt that we owed Dow some public relations work so we issued an explanation by Dow that in fact the Jude Finisterra fellow in the morning had not been their representative and that in fact everything he said was incorrect. Then we proceeded to outline exactly what was incorrect. Dow was not going to remediate the site even though it wouldn't cost very much; they were not going to compensate people to more than $500, $500 was in fact enough for an Indian, plenty good for an Indian, etc., etc. Everything they were not going to do we just spelled it out for them, since all they had said was he was not their spokesperson. We thought that was insufficient.
AMY GOODMAN: So this was a press release that you put out under Dow's letterhead?
ANDY BICHLBAUM: Right, exactly. Well, we sent it from Dowethics.com and signed it Dow.
AMY GOODMAN: And how many picked up that story?
ANDY BICHLBAUM: Well, it was the top story on News.google.com, as was the original apology by Dow and the retraction of the apology. Our own retraction of our own, of Dow's apology was also for a brief time, maybe an hour or so, the top story on news.google.com, so - I don't know if it was printed in anything or broadcast on anything, but it was at least there.
AMY GOODMAN: And the feelings of giving false hope to people in Bhopal who perhaps read these reports in the Indian newspapers?
ANDY BICHLBAUM: Right, that is the most difficult thing about this. And, in fact, we didn't expect it to run as long as it would. We really thought that the BBC would catch on pretty much immediately or Dow would react even more likely immediately. They didn't react for at least an hour, so there was a much longer time when people thought it was real.
AMY GOODMAN: That would mean that Dow would have had to jump in and say, no, we are not sorry.
ANDY BICHLBAUM: Right, and they did eventually, but they took at least an hour to do that, and we thought that they would immediately contact the BBC, even perhaps as it was running. I kept hearing voices in the background and thinking I was about to get cut off during the interview. But two hours later it was still a story. So that was sad. Also, but at the same time we are talking about two hours of false hopes versus 20 years of unrealized ones. And suffering for those who are still alive and weren't killed. And all hopes are false until they are realized. So, you know, any protest sort of brings false hopes, any protest against something as maniacal as Dow. Like Dow is not likely to do anything about this, and so anytime you hope that it is, it's false in a way.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Jude, I want to thank you for being with us, or Andy Bichlbaum, or whoever you are. I want to thank you for joining us. Jude Finisterra/Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men, speaking to us from Paris. This is Democracy Now!
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Images of Fighting in Fallujah Compel at Different Levels
Blogger's Display Is More Graphic Than a Military Slide Show
Washington Post
By Thomas E. Ricks
December 5, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35955-2004Dec4?language=printer
Two photo-rich summaries of the battle of Fallujah -- one produced by the U.S. military in Iraq, the other by an anonymous American blogger -- highlight how the terrain in such counterinsurgency fights can be as much psychological as physical.
Both presentations have gained increasing Internet audiences recently and attempt to convey, among other things, the suffering imposed on Iraqi civilians in Fallujah.
That is where similarities end, however. The military's presentation depicts the fight for Fallujah as a liberation of a city from the insurgents. The Web log posts far more graphic wire service and other photos, and tends to point the finger of blame for civilian suffering at the military.
Judging by the reaction of several soldiers and military experts, a comparison of the two presentations shows, among other things, how the might of the U.S. military can be matched by a single blogger working part time.
Public affairs officers at the top U.S military headquarters in Baghdad produced the 59-page Microsoft PowerPoint presentation titled, "Telling the Fallujah Story to the World." It is the first such effort distributed by the headquarters, said one of its creators, Army Maj. Scott R. Bleichwehl.
It comes as the U.S. military is trying to step up "strategic communications" in Iraq, after being heavily criticized, internally and by outside experts, for failing to get its message to the Iraqi people and the world in general.
The military briefing, an electronic slide show that has rocketed around the Internet over the last week, can be read at Soldiers for the Truth (www.sftt.org) and other Web sites, frequently with comments such as, "Why is the DOD not getting this information to the media?" Another version of the briefing was released Friday by the Pentagon and is reachable at www.dod.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20041203-1721.html.
Charles Krohn, a former Army public affairs official who worked with the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq, said he suspects the presentation is directed at American audiences. He said the United States has failed to get out its message in Iraq, and has not even appeared to want to do so. "How we can invade a country and eject its government without letting the people who live there know what we were doing and why is a mystery to me," he said.
The U.S. military briefing focuses on violations of the law of war by the insurgents. It states that of 100 mosques in Fallujah, 60 were used to hide weapons or as defensive positions. A map shows nine locations of bomb-making factories and comments that roadside bombs are "the insurgents' principal instrument of attack on innocent civilians." It also shows a van whose side panels have been "removed and filled with PE-4," a kind of plastic explosive.
Another slide shows a photograph of bloody handprints on a wall, and blood on walls, presumably evidence of torture or murder. There also is other evidence of hostage-taking presented.
"The anti-Iraqi forces took hostage the city of Fallujah and projected terrorism across all of Iraq," it states.
The presentation ends with photos of local Iraqis "securely and calmly" receiving food supplies from Iraqi security forces.
"Overall, we've gotten positive feedback on the packaging, because it contains a lot of information and provides visuals," Bleichwehl said. An Arabic version of the presentation has been released, he said.
A competing vision of the Fallujah operation is presented by the blog titled "Iraq in Pictures" (www.fallujahinpictures.com), which Krohn says is far more similar to what Iraqis, and the Arab world, see on their satellite news channels.
The site has become one of the hotter blogs on the Internet, receiving thousands of visits a day.
In the version of the Web site that was up last week, the first image on the site showed a malnourished Iraqi baby, wide-eyed and screaming in pain, under the sarcastic headline, "another grateful Iraqi civilian."
Many of the photographs are far more graphic than are usually carried in newspapers, showing headless bodies, bloodied troops, wounded women, and bandaged babies missing limbs. One added recently shows a U.S. soldier with part of his face blown away by a bomb.
The blog also amounts to a critique of the U.S. news media. Another section of the site, under the headline, "Also not in today's news," shows a photograph of a Marine propped against a concrete wall, grimacing as he is treated for a shrapnel wound in his upper right leg.
The blogger, who in an e-mail responding to a query identified himself as "Hugh Upton," but when questioned said that was a pseudonym, explained on his Web site that one of its purposes is to show the ugliness of what he believes is really going on in Iraq. "The world sees these images and we do not," he states. "That scares the hell out of me, as it should you."
He insists that he is sympathetic to U.S. troops. "I am angry with our citizens, not our military," he writes. "If this war is unjust they are among the victims of it."
In an interview, the blogger said he started the site after the presidential election, working on it in his spare time, because he believes "there is an emotional truth to the war, and it's not being shown" in the U.S. media. Since starting it, he said, the site has had more than 800,000 hits. He also has received more than 2,000 e-mail messages, about 10 percent of them hate mail, he said.
He declined to disclose his real name or many personal details. He said he is a 26-year-old writer in New York who works for an Internet company. He originally is from the District, he said.
After being interviewed, he added more information to his Web site, insisting: "This is not an antiwar site. You can visit this site and appreciate what it's doing and still support the war. . . . We need the whole story." He added that those wanting to see "the other side" of the story should "Go to Fox News, CNN, USA Today, WSJ, the Washington Post, or any of the other outlets that has these pictures and doesn't show them."
Retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, who has advised the Pentagon on how to better fight in Iraq, said he thinks the military PowerPoint presentation does "a good job of trying to get the real story out."
But several other military experts said they found the blog more compelling.
"As far as the blog site, this is information operations at its finest," said one Marine officer who has served in Iraq. "IO is about influence, and this piece tries to influence people by depicting the human cost of war."
An Army soldier who fought in the Sunni Triangle last year and maintains a blog himself agreed. "The winner has to be the blog," he said. "There's something all too visceral about seeing the pictures of the dead and wounded, on both sides, which overwhelms static displays of weaponry" in the military presentation.
Juan Cole, a University of Michigan expert on Iraqi affairs who has a blog called "Informed Comment" (www.juancole.com), came to a similar but broader conclusion: "What the two presentations show us is that the U.S. military is full of brave and skilled warriors who can defeat their foes, but is still no good at counterinsurgency operations, and is wretched at winning hearts and minds."
Staff writer Mark Stencel contributed to this report.
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What Are We Up to – in Ukraine?
by Patrick J. Buchanan, December 6, 2004 CREATORS SYNDICATE
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=4114
In the 1940s, as Stalinists were seizing Czechoslovakia, ex-OSS agents were running bags of money to Italy and France to ensure the Communists were defeated in national elections.
In the 1950s, using a rent-a-mob, the CIA effected the ouster of an anti-American regime in Iran and the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala. In the 1980s, after Solidarity was crushed by Gen. Jaruzelski, Ronald Reagan secretly aided the Polish resistance.
Many of us applauded these Cold War means, as we believed that the ends – security of the West and survival of freedom – justified them.
But when news broke that South Africa was maneuvering to buy the Washington Star in the 1980s, this city was ablaze with indignation. How dare they seek to corrupt American media! In the 1990s, when China was caught using cutouts to funnel cash to the Clinton campaign, we were full of righteous rage.
Given this history, several question arise. Are we today using Cold War tactics in a post-Cold War era? Are we guilty of the same gross interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine, trying to fix their election, we would consider outrageous and criminal if done to us?
Are we Americans hypocrites of global democracy?
Consider what we have apparently been up to in Ukraine.
According to the Guardian and other sources, NED – the National Endowment for Democracy – and USAid, Freedom House, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and George Soros' Open Society Institute all pumped money or sent agents into Kiev to defeat the government-backed Viktor Yanukovich and elect Viktor Yushchenko as president. Allegedly in on the scheme is the supposedly objective and neutral Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The Guardian's Jonathan Steele describes how we put the fix in:
"Yushchenko got the Western nod, and floods of money poured in to groups which support him, ranging from the youth organization, Pora, to various opposition websites. More provocatively, the U.S. and other Western embassies paid for exit polls ..."
Those polls showed Yushchenko winning by 11, demoralizing the opposition and convincing most Ukrainians he was the next president.
But, on Election Day, Yushchenko, like Kerry, lost by three, as the populous eastern Ukraine delivered the same huge margins for favorite son Yanukovich as did western Ukraine for Yushchenko.
Into the streets came scores of thousands of demonstrators, howling fraud and demanding that Yushchenko be inaugurated. Engaging in civil disobedience, and backed by the West, the crowds intimidated parliament, President Kuchma and the judiciary into declaring the election invalid.
John Laughland writes in the Guardian of the double standard our media employ: "Enormous rallies have been held in Kiev in support of the prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich, but they are not shown on our TV screen. ... Yanukovich supporters are denigrated as having been 'bussed in.' The demonstrators in favor of Yushchenko have laser lights, plasma screens, sophisticated sound systems, rock concerts, tents to camp in and huge quantities of orange clothing; yet we happily dupe ourselves that they are spontaneous."
Laughland is saying the Yushchenko demonstrations may be as phony as that U.S-Albanian war in the Dustin Hoffman-Robert DeNiro film Wag the Dog. He calls Pora "an organization created and financed by Washington," like Otpor and Kmara, which were used in Serbia and Georgia to oust leaders Washington wished to be rid of. Pora's symbol, writes Laughland, depicts "a jackboot crushing a beetle."
If the United States has indeed been interfering in Ukraine to swing the election of a president who will tilt to NATO, against Moscow, we are, as Steele writes, "playing with fire."
"Not only is [Ukraine] geographically and culturally divided – a recipe for partition or even civil war – it is also an important neighbor of Russia. ... Ukraine has been turned into a geostrategic matter not by Moscow, but by the U.S., which refuses to abandon the Cold War policy of encircling Moscow and seeking to pull every former Soviet republic to its side."
Our most critical relationship on earth is with the world's other great nuclear power, Russia, a nation suffering depopulation, loss of empire, breakup of its country, and a terror war. That relationship is far more important to us than who rules in Kiev.
For us to imperil it by using our perfected technique of the "post-modern coup" – as we did in Serbia and Georgia and failed to do in Belarus – to elect American vassals in Russia's backyard, even in former Soviet republics, seems an act of imperial arrogance and blind stupidity.
Congress should investigate NED and any organization that used clandestine cash or agents to fix the Ukrainian election, as the U.S. media appear to have gone into the tank for global democracy, as they did for war in Iraq.
-------- us politics
Questions That Needed Addressing Before The Election
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
Topplebush.com
by R. J. Crane, Editor,
December 6, 2004
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/12/con04533.html
Dear BuzzFlash,
I have heard several media pundits trying to place blame on the Democrats, their party leaders, or even the primary process in Iowa as the reason Kerry lost the election in 2000. First it isn't all that certain Kerry did lose the election if we can recount all of the ballots. Joe Trippi was one of the pundits urging a better grassroots organization in order to win while faulting the Democratic party leadership. He made some valid points even if he used flawed numbers to try and convince people Kerry did worse than Gore did in 2000. The numbers from the 2004 election don't support his position on this point.
If the questions below had been addressed BEFORE the election [regardless of whose fault it was to do so] we would be celebrating Kerry's inauguration in January:
1. Why so many states, including important swing states, were permitted under HAVA to use punch card systems in this election allowing millions of ballots to be spoiled and not counted? Why Dems failed to do something to prevent 70% of Ohioans from voting on these poorly designed systems in 2004? Considering the lessons that should have been learned from Florida in 2000, these machines should have been taken out of play in Ohio. There are at least 93,000 spoiled ballots in Ohio with undervotes on them yet to be counted...more than enough with the provisional ballots to overcome Bush's margin there assuming most of these would be Kerry votes and valid votes. The worst part is that so many of these machines are used in poorer and/or Democratic precincts ensuring that so many Democratic votes won't be counted. Why didn't the Dems ensure that HAVA got rid of the punch card machines BEFORE this election?
2. What did the Democrats do to ensure that e-voting machines without paper backup ballots weren't being used in this election? From what I have learned, very little! These machines were in wide use in Florida and elsewhere. In fact Jeb Bush and Glenda Hood ensured that paper ballots would not be added to these machines in time for the 2004 election in Florida. Did anyone challenge these machines as being in violation of state election laws with regards to recounts and therefore unlawful without a backup ballot? I tried to explain to a friend and resident of Florida why she should not cast a vote on one of these machines. It took me a while before it finally sunk in that to be voting on one of these machines was casting a vote into a black hole. The subject of the security flaws and problems with these machines is well documented and there is not enough space to comment here on these. But it can be stated that in Florida, the election could easily have been stolen for Bush with e-voting machines and no one will be able to prove it, despite the exceptional efforts of Bev Harris' group.
3. What did anyone do to promote online voter registration? Again the answer is virtually nothing. I didn't see any prominent Dems in my state of Michigan show up in TV ads advising people how easy it is to register to vote online. In fact I didn't see anyone promoting online voter registration on a national scale either. Instead this task was left mostly to various web sites, online groups and the 527s, all which failed to make this a major issue during the campaign. And many of these groups even failed to promote online voter registration on their home pages. Online voter registration could have been THE ONLY thing that might have changed the election in a major way since it presented a new option to registering new people and was a cheap and easy way to do so.
4. When will Democratic politicians and party leaders stop resorting to boring political ads that try and make too many points in each ad? It has been reported that because these political ads are so uncreative it now takes way more runs and money to reach the same number of people these same ads would have reached several decades ago. In fact research has shown that political ads have changed very little since the late 1950s. Political ads are still one of the most effective ways to reach voters yet the Dems have shown absolutely no creativity in using them effectively. Despite my efforts to advise both the Kerry campaign and the DNC to fix their bad ads, nothing was done in this respect. Joe Trippi is correct that the Democratic leadership lacks creativity.
5. The Democrats as a group failed to put out actual data of military casualties in Iraq before the election. Despite several efforts to try and get Sen. Carl Levin's office to look into this under-reporting of military casualties in Iraq because of deliberately narrow definitions for them to protect Bush, they did nothing. Instead they advised me to look at the DOD's numbers, which was the problem being complained of. How many voters might have been swayed to vote for Kerry if they knew that 25,000+ personnel from Iraq had been medically evacuated? [http://www.juancole.com/2004/11/250...] How many voters might have been swayed to vote for Kerry if they had known that as many as 17,000 U.S. military personnel from Iraq have been treated by the VA for Gulf War type symptoms, probably as a result of depleted uranium poisoning as reported by Vanity Fair? [Dec. 2004, p. 208] Yes, we can all blame the media and we should. But we also need to blame the Democrats for not getting this issue into the public discourse on the war. Instead these casualty numbers had to come out by CBS and 60 Minutes AFTER the election.
6. Why don't we have uniform rules that pertain to the counting of Provisional ballots and the recounting of ballots for all Federal offices? Maybe someone should be working on this issue before the next election.
7. There have been numerous reports of voter frauds and election problems everywhere and more particularly Ohio. At least 57,000 complaints have been made to the House Judiciary Committee from this election. Who is being investigated, prosecuted, or held accountable for these? How many votes did these take away from Kerry since the overwhelming majority of these frauds favored Bush. How come not enough voting machines were placed in Democratic precincts in Ohio, creating long lines and discouraging voters? Was this a deliberate attempt by Secretary of State Blackwell to steer the election toward Bush? Why do we allow state elected public officials actively involved in a candidate's campaign [2000 in Florida with Katherine Harris and now in Ohio, with Blackwell], to take an active role in electioneering? How many Kerry votes were taken away by misleading information put out by Bush supporters and efforts to suppress voter turnout and registration in Ohio and elsewhere? Why isn't the mainstream media doing a better job of reporting on all of these election shenanigans and asking this question: Did all of these in tandem or any particular one allow Bush to steal another election?
8. No where did I find any Democrats in this campaign make the issue of Bush's failures to protect the country from 9/11, which was well documented and even part of the 9/11 Commission report, a major issue. In fact it was malpractice by omission not to have done so and to hold Bush accountable for these failures.
I have no doubt in my mind that had it not been for millions of spoiled ballots as a direct result of punch card systems, wide scale voter suppression efforts on the part of Republicans and their operatives, Democratic voter registration destruction efforts on the part of at least one company hired by the GOP, an inadequate number of voting machines in Democratic precincts in OH, voters being deliberately misled about voting rights, dates, and registration, efforts by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, OH to restrict the use of provisional ballots, and voter purging of people who would otherwise be qualified to vote in Florida, Kerry would have won this election...even despite the many mistakes his campaign and the Democratic Party made on his behalf.
One must remember that Kerry was a successful Democratic candidate in terms of the vast amounts of money he was able to raise to compete with the Bush money machine. Kerry was not outspent in this election. Also until the swift boat ads, Kerry had a decent lead over Bush. I would also claim that Kerry won this election if all of the votes had been counted and in the absence of so many deliberate voter frauds.
-------- voting
Ohio certifies Bush win by 119,000 votes
(AP) 12/6/2004
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/2004-12-06-ohio-vote_x.htm
COLUMBUS, Ohio - This battleground state on Monday certified President Bush's 119,000-vote victory over John Kerry, even as the Kerry campaign and third-party candidates prepared to demand a statewide recount.
The president won Ohio with 2.86 million votes, or 51%, to Kerry's 2.74 million votes, or 49%.
The 118,775-vote lead was closer than the unofficial election night margin of 136,000, but not enough to trigger a mandatory recount. Absentee ballots and provisional votes counted after election night made most of the difference.
"This was an election where you have some glitches but none of these glitches were of a conspiratorial nature and none of them would overturn or change the election results," said Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who, as the state's chief election official, certified the results.
The presidential election hung on Ohio, prized for its 20 electoral votes. Not until the morning after the election did Kerry finally concede - realizing there were not enough provisional ballots to erase Bush's lead.
But critics have cited numerous Election Day problems, from long lines, a shortage of voting machines in predominantly minority neighborhoods and suspicious vote totals for candidates in scattered precincts.
The Kerry campaign last week joined the presidential candidates for the Green and Libertarian parties who are asking for a recount. They planned to file their requests Monday and Tuesday. The Kerry camp is not disputing the outcome of the race, but wants to ensure that every vote is counted.
A ruling by a federal judge in Columbus on Friday rejected one county's attempt to stop a recount, avoiding a legal precedent that could have stopped other recounts. Green and Libertarian party candidates have already raised the required $113,600 for a recount.
The Democratic Party also said Monday it will examine reports of voting problems in Ohio.
Outgoing Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe said the party will spend "whatever it takes" to study complaints from Ohio voters.
McAuliffe said the study will be conducted by nonpartisan experts to be announced later, with a report issued in the spring that recommends reforms to prevent such problems in the future.
Blackwell oversaw the election process while serving as one of several statewide GOP leaders who co-chaired Bush's campaign. The 2000 Florida recount was also administered by a Republican secretary of state, Katherine Harris, who is now a member of Congress.
In a conference call with reporters, McAuliffe said the panel needs to look at the practice of secretaries of state serving as campaign officials. He said he personally thinks it's a laudable goal for election officials to be nonpartisan.
When asked if the president supports an investigation into voting irregularities in Ohio, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the election "was viewed as very free and fair."
"It was a clear victory for the president of the United States," McClellan said. "Now is the time for us to all look forward on how we can work together to get things done."
Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett said any investigation or reform should be handled by the state Legislature.
"If the Democrats want to pay for a study to help them sleep at night, that's fine," he said. "Just don't expect anyone to believe it's credible."
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
EPA Projects Hazardous Waste Sites Growing in Number and Cleanup Costs
December 06, 2004 - By John Heilprin, Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=532
WASHINGTON - At the current pace of cleanup work, it could take up to 35 years and $280 billion to fix most of the nation's existing and yet-to-be-discovered hazardous waste sites, the government said Friday.
A report by the Environmental Protection Agency described what taxpayers and private industry will be spending to fix sites contaminated with hazardous waste and petroleum products.
It estimated 77,000 such sites, with up to 9,267 more discovered each year.
"The purpose of the report is to allow us to plan and develop better strategies to meet the nation's cleanup needs," Cynthia Bergman, a spokeswoman for EPA, said.
At that rate, as many as 355,000 hazardous waste sites in the United States could have required cleanups by 2039 -- 60 percent more than the 217,000 sites that EPA's last study, in 1996, estimated might be in need of cleanups over 30 years.
EPA had estimated the cleanup cost for those cleanups at up to $187 billion.
Less than 1 percent of the projected average number of sites that would need to be decontaminated by 2033 are part of EPA's Superfund program for the worst toxic waste messes. Most of the sites, or 43 percent, are underground storage tanks that are leaking or might leak.
By spending, the Superfund sites would account for about 15 percent of the projected average. The biggest portion, or 22 percent, is EPA's program for decontaminating sites with lesser hazards, such as medical, low-grade radioactive and animal wastes.
Other sites include those belonging to the departments of Defense and Energy and other federal agencies, and ones owned by states and private companies or landowners, including low-level pollution sites known as "brownfields" being redeveloped for commercial use.
Federal agencies other than Defense and Energy, such as the departments of Interior, Agriculture and Transportation, have been spending about $200 million annually for site cleanups, but have up to $21 billion more of cleanup work to be done over 30 years.
Most of the sites have contaminated soil or groundwater, or both, and contain volatile organic compounds. Among Defense Department and Superfund sites, metals and semivolatile organic compounds are most prevalent, EPA says.
The first time the national report on the cleanup market was issued was in 1993.
EPA emphasized that the numbers are only estimates, and the projections get less reliable the farther out they go in years.
The latest figures range from 235,000 to 355,000 sites over 30 to 35 years, at an estimated cost of $180 billion to $280 billion.
Because of that, and how much the numbers have varied from 1996 to now, the report should be viewed with "extreme skepticism," said Matthew Tirman, an environmental health advocate for U.S. Public Interest Research Group, an advocacy organization.
Tirman also noted that "without continued funding, these sites are going to go uncleaned and remain a danger to the public health of communities and endanger environmental quality."
Source: Associated Press
-------- ACTIVISTS
Hiroshima to hold people's tribunal
The bombing killed about 140,000 people
Monday 06 December 2004, 11:12 Makka Time, 8:12 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/C7BFF63E-DACB-4205-ACDB-1910EC3260AA.htm
Japanese anti-war campaigners are planning a people's tribunal over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that could symbolically hold the US responsible for war crimes.
About 30 academics, lawyers and peace activists are preparing for the trial to start next year on the 60th anniversary of the bombings, with the verdict likely to be read out in Washington in early 2006.
Defendants could be key US decision-makers including late president Harry Truman, secretary of war Henry Stimson, Robert Oppenheimer - considered the father of the atomic bomb - along with other scientists and the military personnel who carried out the order.
"As the statute of limitations is not applicable to war crimes, the responsibility should lie with the present US government, too," the Hiroshima-based group said in a statement.
The group has invited international law experts to act as prosecutors and judges.
Crimes against humanity
The activists said the failure to pursue criminal charges over the bombings in the final days of the second world war led to the expansion of nuclear weapons and further wars, such as those seen in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Late US president Harry Truman decided to use the bomb "The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki typifies two kinds of crimes against humanity, indiscriminate bombing and mass killing, both common phenomena in contemporary warfare," the group said.
Citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki "bear a moral responsibility to represent the voices" of all victims of indiscriminate bombing throughout the world, the trial's preparatory committee said.
"No national government has ever tried to fulfil its responsibility by pursuing justice on this matter," it added.
Pilot alive
Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay B-29 which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima in the world's first atomic attack, would be the only person alive among those who could be accused in the tribunal.
There is no chance the US administration would take any action against Tibbets if he were found guilty, acknowledged Toshiyuki Tanaka, a group member and war crimes professor at Hiroshima City University's peace institute.
"No national government has ever tried to fulfil its responsibility by pursuing justice on this matter"
Preparatory committee for trial
"But our aim is to spur movement towards abolishing nuclear weapons," he said.
He argued that the tribunal could lead Americans to alter policy and said the group was considering an anti-war symposium in Washington to coincide with the verdict.
Radiation injuries
The Hiroshima bombing killed about 140,000 people - almost half the city population of the time - immediately, or in the months after, from radiation injuries or horrific burns.
It was followed by the dropping of a second atomic bomb three days later in Nagasaki which left more than 70,000 people dead.
Japan has long campaigned against atomic weapons, arguing that it had a special world role as the only nation to have ever suffered a nuclear attack.
In the United States, however, the debate is much more controversial, with many believing the atomic bombing brought an early end to the war.
---------
REPORT ON TRIP TO WESTERN CANADA
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
From: "Global Network"
Date: Mon Dec 6, 2004 10:42am
This report covers the period of November 25 - December 3 as I traveled to Manitoba and Saskatchewan provinces in Canada on a speaking tour. The trip was coordinated by the No War Coalition in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
As it turned out the timing for this long-planned trip could not have been better as George W. Bush made his first visit to Canada on November 30 and December 1 and dramatically increased the interest in the "missile defense" issue.
When I arrived in Winnipeg I almost did not make it out of the airport. Canadian customs discovered that I was carrying a load of videos and books and they diverted me off into a side room where they calculated the tax on the items and charged me $63. Then they asked if I'd ever been convicted of a crime, and when I said I had been arrested for non-violent civil disobedience they wanted to know how many times. They also asked me how many times I had been arrested in the last five years. Twice I replied. The immigration officer then told me to have a seat while he ran a background check on me. When he returned he told me they had a rule that if you have been convicted of a crime twice in the last five years you cannot enter Canada. Then, checking the long computer printout in his hand, he said "Oh, one of these was by the military and that does not count." He was referring to my last arrest at Vandenberg AFB in California. So they let me in.
I spent three days in Winnipeg speaking at several places including the University of Manitoba, a church Sunday school class and a public talk held at the planetarium that drew 200 people (covered by three local TV networks.) I also did a one hour live radio talk show on CBC. The show was aired throughout Manitoba and was also simultaneously broadcast on cable TV across the whole country. For the first half of the show I debated a university professor who wants Canada to join Bush's "missile defense" program. I spent my time talking about how the program was not about "defense," that Bush's up-coming visit to Canada was intended to use their good name to legitimize the program, and that Star Wars would be so expensive that Bush was out rounding up the posse to help pay for it. Of the nine people that called in, eight of them opposed Canada's participation.
Newspapers reported that recently elected Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin was saying that Bush's visit would not be dealing with "missile defense." Twenty months ago, while campaigning for the Liberal party leadership, Martin favored Canada's joining the program. But with recent national polls showing that a majority of citizens opposed Canadian involvement, Martin was trying to avoid the subject during the Bush visit. Instead Martin wanted to focus on the beef ban (due to a short bout of Mad Cow Disease) that the U.S. has imposed on Canada which is destroying their beef industry.
Before the trip I had been asked what I like to do during my free time. I replied that I'd like to see anything to do with Indian culture as I knew this region of Canada had rich roots in native traditions. While in Winnipeg my host coordinator Margie Warner and Derrick Black took me to the Aboriginal Centre of Winnipeg to meet with First Nations leaders and get a tour of the place. The Centre turned out to be a huge former railway station, built in 1905. The building had come vacant in the early 1990's and was purchased by Aboriginal leaders in 1992. Between 1993-1997 hundreds of people restored the magnificent rotunda area of the building and today it houses clinics, children's centers, healing programs, employment services, educational programs, art gallery, legal aid offices, and a restaurant that serves buffalo burgers. Wayne Helgason, the first president of the coordinating board, shared with us the joys and struggles of the long campaign to bring much needed human services to the large but neglected First Nations population in the area. The Aboriginal population, once relegated to barren reserves, has been moving into the urban areas and the Centre has proved to be a great service to the people. Just across the street, a spiritual roundhouse had also been constructed but I was not able to visit it that day.
One other great experience I had while in Winnipeg was a lunch meeting with key leaders of peace and religious groups, union leaders, and civic activists where we shared the latest on the space issue and they oriented me on key political issues in Canada. One item was the fear about "deep integration" with the U.S. A task force, consisting of government representatives from Canada, U.S.A. and Mexico, has been assigned to draft a plan to create a common border, common currency, military integration (including participation in Star Wars), and common policies on energy, law enforcement and refugees. Canadians are rightly concerned that the corporate takeover of the continent will mean a loss of sovereignty for their nation. The NAFTA-PLUS plan would lead to a loss of control over Canada's water supply and the opening up of their health care system to American insurance corporations.
My next stop was to Brandon, a farming community in western Manitoba where I was hosted by City Council member Errol Black. Errol interviewed me on local community access TV and then took me to the one commercial TV station in town where I was interviewed by the anchor person for the evening news. My speech in Brandon was organized by the District Labor Council and drew an intensely powerful and positive reaction from the audience. The question and answer period could have gone on forever as the assembled questioned why the American people allow the destruction of their democracy.
I was driven the long distance across the western prairie by veteran activist Darrell Rankin, a key leader in the Canadian Peace Alliance and the Winnipeg No War Coalition. The trip west ended up being about seven hours long as we headed through the cold and freshly snow covered land. But it was the big sky, from horizon to horizon across the flat prairie of barren wheat fields and burnt brown grasses, that filled me with soulful memories of my time living in South Dakota as a boy. As Darrell drove west we'd pick up the local paper and I'd read sections out loud about Bush's coming visit and he'd fill me in on the layers of background behind the Canadian political scene.
When we arrived in Saskatchewan I was taken to the city of Moose Jaw for a talk. First I did a community cable TV interview and then a group of us had dinner at the local truck stop restaurant owned by one of the peace group members. The evening talk at the local library was well attended and people left determined to stop Canada's participation in moving the arms race into space. After the talk we drove to Regina where I would be speaking the next day.
The next morning I woke up early to do a drive time live interview on CBC radio in Regina. It lasted about seven minutes and I was able to address all my key points. I was staying at a local Bed & Breakfast Inn and the man of the house phoned from his car on the way to work saying he liked that I reminded the audience that it was the U.S. that was the only country to have ever used weapons of mass destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I told the audience that Bush's fear mongering around the "rogue states" was intended to frighten people into supporting the weaponization of space.
This was the day that Bush made his big speech in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He had declined to speak to Parliament in Ottawa, as is tradition, for fear that members of the body would heckle him. Instead he simply had a meeting with Prime Minister Martin in Ottawa the day before, and then attended a state dinner where the Canadians were delighted to note that he ate "Mesquite smoked Medallion of Alberta beef" -- the very meat he now bans from entering the U.S. (People are watching Bush closely to see if he develops any symptoms of Mad Cow Disease, but then again how would we be able to tell the difference?)
Bush's speech in Halifax was greeted by about 5,000 protestors (about 20,000 had protested him previously in Ottawa.) Activists in Halifax only had a matter of days to organize as Bush handlers had announced the surprise visit at the last minute. During the event Bush mentioned that he hoped Canada would join "missile defense" and this set off a chain reaction of news headlines and opposition party howls. You see, Bush was not supposed to bring "missile defense" up while in Canada. According to an editorial in The Globe and Mail "a cozy little pact had been reached in advance between Mr. Bush's people and Prime Minister Paul Martin's people. The President was not, repeat not, to utter the two deadly words missile defence in any of his public utterances. To do so would complicate things for Mr. Martin, who heads a minority government and has trouble in his own caucus regarding the missile defence scheme..."
At noon on that fateful day I was taken by local activist Robin Schlaht, to the University of Regina where an event was organized in the student "pit" at lunch time. The Raging Grannies sang some songs opposing Star Wars and then I briefly spoke to students and faculty that were watching the show. We also passed out leaflets advertising my talk at the university that evening. CBC TV covered the event as did the French Radio-Canada. That evening as we watched the news on national CBC we heard Global Network board member Tamara Lorincz interviewed from Halifax during the demonstration outside Bush's speaking event. Then, following the national news, CBC switched to local coverage and the news anchor announced that "We have two Americans in Canada today speaking about missile defense. Besides President Bush we have Bruce Gagnon speaking in opposition..." and they went on to interview me and show the footage of the Raging Grannies. I later told people that I deeply appreciated George W. Bush's decision to plan his trip to Canada to coincide with my speaking tour!
That evening my talk at the University of Regina was well attended, including many students, and formerly ended my week long tour. The next morning Darrell and I made the seven hour drive back east to Winnipeg. Upon arrival in Winnipeg I was taken by Margie Warner to the First Nations roundhouse that I had not been able to visit earlier in the week. Wayne Helgason had made arrangements for his cousin, Clarence Neepinac, a spiritual leader to give us a tour.
The beautiful building, built in the shape of a Teepee, has a star in the middle of the floor and is used for Pow-Wows and other sacred events. Outside is a sweat lodge which is used each week for spiritual cleansing and prayer.
On my last night in Winnipeg a pot luck supper was held to say goodbye to me. They gave me gifts, including a book called Indian Fall, that tells of the last days of freedom for the Aboriginal peoples on the Canadian prairie. Much to my delight Clarence Neepinac also showed up and gave me sweetgrass to take home in memory of visiting the First Nations roundhouse.
A couple things of note from the media that I'd like to share in closing. One journalist satirically wrote about her four reasons why it was great having Bush visit Canada. Her number one reason was "Because it's better to have Bush visit than the 4th Mechanized Infantry Division." Another editorial writer talked about the harsh treatment of Canadian society on U.S. TV during Bush's visit. She recalled watching the "O'Reilly Factor" show on the Fox network and quoted Bill O'Reilly as saying that the reason Canada did not do well in the Olympics was because of a "culture of entitlements" (meaning they have national health service.) Unlike Canadians, O'Reilly said Americans are committed to hard work and personal achievement.
Finally, the conservative National Post had various people of note comment on sections of Bush's speech in Halifax. In justifying the preemptive invasion of Iraq, Bush told Canadians that "If, 20 years from now, the Middle East is dominated by dictators and mullahs who build weapons of mass destruction and harbor terrorists, our children and our grandchildren will live in a nightmare world of danger." The newspaper had Jack Chambers, professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto analyze this statement. He said the following: "On the phrase 'nightmare world of danger' Bush is referring to our worst fantasies, the part that comes from the deepest id. He's trying to get our worst fears into the front of our minds. He had 'weapons of mass destruction' in the same paragraph, so it comes out like little needles that get right into your mind."
And so I think I'd sum up my experience in Canada this way. I was in a country that was not fooled by the fool on the hill. Bush did not succeed with his mental manipulations and in the end he put "missile defense" on the front page of every newspaper in the country. He invigorated the debate in Canada on national sovereignty and ensured that our friends in the peace movement there will have a more receptive national audience in the coming days. It was a great honor to be a small part of their resistance to Star Wars. Canada is the one country in the world today taking on the issue front and center. We all wish them the best.
Bruce K. Gagnon
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 729-0517
(207) 319-2017 (Cell phone)
globalnet@m...
http://www.space4peace.org
--------
Bragg Deserter Seeking Refuge In Canada
NBC December 6, 2004
http://www.nbc17.com/military/3974412/detail.html
TORONTO -- The Canadian government began hearing arguments Monday by an American soldier who fled a North Carolina military base after refusing to participate in the war in Iraq and is now seeking refugee status in Canada.
Jeremy Hinzman, 25, was appearing before the Immigration and Refugee Board, claiming that the war in Iraq is illegal and he would be breaking the law by participating.
"Our whole case hinges on that," Hinzman said in July, after fleeing Fort Bragg in January. He how lives in Toronto with his wife and young son.
"If I was going to go shoot depleted uranium rounds at Iraqi children, or into the Iraqi ground and raise the cancer rates, then that is contrary to good standards of human conduct," he said.
Immigration and Refugee Board officials have said that Hinzman needs to distinguish between persecution and prosecution, the latter of which he would definitely face if he goes back to the United States.
Hinzman will also have to explain why he joined the U.S. Army when he knew combat might be a possibility. A member of the 2nd Battalion of the 504th Brigade Parachute Infantry Regiment, Hinzman could be prosecuted as a deserter if sent back to the United States.
Hinzman was serving in Afghanistan when his application to be a conscientious objector was denied. He had said he wanted to fulfill his service obligation but not to participate in combat.