NucNews - December 14, 2004 -------- NUCLEAR -------- accidents and safety Physicist Lauriston S. Taylor Dies; Leader in the Science of Radiation By Joe Holley Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, December 14, 2004; Page B05 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62410-2004Dec13?language=printer Lauriston S. Taylor, 102, a radiation physicist and a pioneer in the field of radiation safety, died Nov. 26 at the Collington Retirement Center in Mitchellville of Alzheimer's disease. Except for a period of time overseas during World War II, he lived in Bethesda from 1930 to 1990, when he moved to the retirement center. Mr. Taylor joined the National Bureau of Standards in 1927 as the first federal employee to work in the rapidly growing area of X-ray applications in medicine and other sciences. His work led to the establishment of the first national standard for X-ray exposure. For the next seven decades, he studied the health effects of long-term exposure to low levels of radiation and other issues of radiation science. He also was founder and for 48 years president of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements. "Lauriston Taylor combined a solid physics background with amazing talents as an administrator and politician," Thomas Tenforde, the council's current president, said in a statement released by the Bethesda-based organization. "He was able to attract leading scientists in physics, medicine, biology and public health to work as volunteers on the expert committees that produce [the council's] reports." As a 26-year-old researcher at the National Bureau of Standards, Mr. Taylor found out firsthand about radiation exposure. He was calibrating clinical radiation meters in an X-ray beam and forgot to replace a lead panel, thereby receiving several minutes of full-body exposure to radiation. "He seemed to have suffered no ill effects," his son Nelson Taylor said, noting his father's longevity. He used the mishap to construct a portable battery-operated meter to measure exposure rates. He also used the experience years later as a government witness in a number of court cases involving workers exposed to small amounts of radiation. He argued that small doses were not dangerous. At a time when doctors, nurses and medical technicians were badly burned by overdoses of high-level X-ray radiation, Mr. Taylor became the principal author of the first workplace radiation standards, established by the Bureau of Standards in 1934. "We didn't know anything really about body-organ response to radiation," he told the Boston Globe in a 1994 interview. "The evidence we had wasn't very much." He also organized the U.S. Advisory Committee on X-Ray and Radium Protection in 1929. His work with these groups and with the Council on Radiation Protection was integral to establishing definitive standards for X-ray shielding and for safe X-ray exposure limits for radiation workers and the public. The teams of scientists that created the first atomic bomb used the council's standards, which Mr. Taylor helped develop. Lauriston S. Taylor -- known as Laurie -- was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and grew up in Maplewood, N.J. As a grade school student, he visited Thomas A. Edison at his laboratory in nearby South Orange, N.J. He attended the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., to study engineering but dropped out after a year to earn money for tuition. He then received a bachelor's degree from Cornell University but left shortly before finishing his doctorate in physics to join the Bureau of Standards. In 1940, the National Defense Research Committee commissioned Mr. Taylor to organize a new proximity fuse for antiaircraft ammunition. The British relied on the fuse to defend themselves against German air raids. In 1943, he set up an operations research program for the Army, first with the Army Air Forces' 8th Fighter Command and then with the 9th. Based in England, he was scientific adviser to Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg. As the war ended, he became director of the U.S. Continental Air Command's operations research division. He was awarded the Bronze Star and the Medal of Freedom for his work with the military. In 1946, he returned to the National Bureau of Standards as chief of the X-ray section (where he was known for his outlandish bow ties almost as much as his scientific accomplishments). In 1948, he took a year's leave of absence to organize and direct the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's biophysics branch. His projects included early work on the long-range evaluation of strontium 90 from nuclear fallout. In 1962, he became associate director of the Bureau of Standards, retiring in 1965. He then moved to the National Academy of Sciences as special assistant to the president and executive director of the academy's advisory committee on emergency planning. He retired from the National Academy of Sciences in 1972, while continuing as president of the National Council on Radiation Protection until his third retirement, in 1977. He also continued consulting and writing until his late nineties. He wrote about 160 papers and all or part of 20 books, the last one at age 97. -------- australia Australia WMC says suitor Xstrata lowballs uranium Dec 14, 2004 By James Regan (Reuters) http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7093335&pageNumber=1 SYDNEY, Dec 14 - Xstrata Ltd. (XTA.L: Quote, Profile, Research) has underrated the importance of WMC Resources Ltd.'s Australian uranium mining operations with its A$7.5 billion ($5.7 billion) takeover bid, WMC Chief Executive Andrew Michelmore said on Tuesday. Michelmore said Mick Davis, his Xstrata counterpart, "would certainly lowball it" in hopes of cheaply acquiring WMC (WMR.AX: Quote, Profile, Research) , the world's third-largest miner of nickel and Australia's second-largest copper miner. The comments at a media briefing come less than a week after Xstrata threatened to abandon its offer if the Australian company goes ahead with a plan to pay investors up to A$1 billion in cash. "If I was in his (Davis') shoes I would want to pick it (WMC) up as cheaply as possible," Michelmore said. Xstrata company officials in Australia were not immediately available to comment. WMC has rejected Xstrata's A$6.35-a-share offer, launched on Oct. 23 at a 24 percent premium to the share price at the time. WMC shares have since traded as high as A$7.39, closing Tuesday at A$7.03. Analysts said Xstrata likely factored uranium mining into its bid, but differed with WMC on the divison's future value, based on projected increases in uranium prices. NOT TO BE IGNORED "Uranium's not something they could just ignore," said one analyst, who asked not to be named. Michelmore earlier told Reuters the company's uranium arm was worth about A$1.6 billion. "That's based on current uranium prices, and our production of 10 million pounds per year," he said, after delivering a presentation to analysts at a uranium conference. Industry heavyweights Rio Tinto Ltd.Plc (RIO.AX: Quote, Profile, Research) (RIO.L: Quote, Profile, Research) , BHP Billiton Ltd./Plc (BHP.X: Quote, Profile, Research) (BLT.L: Quote, Profile, Research) , Anglo American Ltd. (AAL.L: Quote, Profile, Research) and Phelps Dodge Corp. (PD.N: Quote, Profile, Research) have been named by analysts as potential countersuitors, though no rival bids have emerged. Xstrata is readying a bidder's statement that will later be matched by a target statement from WMC, providing more precise details of WMC's operations. "If I put my feet in the shoes of a particularly interested party, then I would wait until WMC puts out its target statement," Michelmore said adding that would be late December at the earliest. "Uranium has been totally dismissed as byproduct (to copper), and it's not," Michelmore told Reuters. The uranium unit's annual revenue of around A$110 million is dwarfed by the much larger copper arm, which has revenue of around A$900 million annually. Depletion of the world's stockpiles of uranium, a new generation of safer nuclear power plants and high oil prices were providing a positive outlook for uranium producers after years of depressed conditions, Michelmore said. Spot market prices for the metal had doubled to $20 a pound in the last year, he noted. A further $5 per pound rise in uranium prices would boost the unit's value to $2 billion, Michelmore said. Olympic Dam, in the South Australian outback, was developed at a time of low uranium prices is better known for the 220,000 tonnes or so of copper and 100,000 ounces of gold it yields each year. The concentrate, or ground ore -- also contains uranium, which is segregated from the other metals, processed and shipped out in sealed drums. With no nuclear industry in Australia, WMC exports all of what it mines, mostly to Europe and Asia. -------- china China aims to quadruple nuclear power 27 new reactors by 2020 are planned Reuters Dec. 14, 2004 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5886720/ BEIJING - China has big plans for nuclear power, hoping to build 27 new reactors at a cost of $1 billion each in order to quadruple capacity by 2020. That should take China to 36,000 megawatts, according to Zhang Huazhu, chairman of the China Atomic Energy Authority. “It is not easy to realize the target of 36,000 megawatts by 2020. It means we should build 27 nuclear power generators each with a capacity of 1,000 megawatts by then,” said Zhang, also vice minister of the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense. With nine nuclear power generators in operation, China had a total nuclear power capacity of 7,010 megawatts by the end of July, he said. Capability would reach 9,130 megawatts by the end of 2005 when the Tianwan plant in the eastern province of Jiangsu came online, Zhang said. Pillar 'of the power structure' He said the goal is for nuclear power to account for about 4 percent of China’s total output by 2020 compared with just 1.7 percent at present. The new plants would be concentrated in the thriving but energy-thirsty eastern and southern coastal areas, Zhang said, though inland provinces had also drawn up plans. “Nuclear energy will become one of the pillars of the power structure in the booming coastal areas,” he said. All China’s existing nuclear power plants are along the east and south coast. In July, Beijing approved to two nuclear power projects, the first in over five years. Each plant, one in Zhejiang and one in Guangdong, will have two 1,000 megawatt reactors. Two other plants in the same provinces were in the approval process, Zhang said. Foreign firms would be invited to tender for construction of two of the four plants, while the other two would rely mainly on China’s own technology, he added. China’s government had attached great importance to the safety of nuclear power plants and its safety supervision and management system proved to be effective, Zhang said. “Radiation dosage of employees in our nuclear plants are below one percent, much lower than the government’s limit,” he said. Coal and hydropower Three-quarters of China’s 400,000 megawatts of installed power capacity, the world’s second largest after the United States, are fired by coal. The country has suffered from its worst power crunch in 20 years this summer due to a galloping economy and a coal squeeze. Engineers blocked the Yangtze at the Three Gorges Dam in June last year, filling the reservoir for a $25 billion hydro-electric project, the world’s largest, that is a point of national pride. -------- depleted uranium After $247 Million, What Is There to Show? Chapter 4: The battlefield at home. Daily Press BY BOB EVANS December 14, 2004 http://www.dailypress.com/news/specials/dp-du4,0,4816042.story?coll=dp-breaking-news For 20 years and two days, Steve Robinson was a soldier. He jumped from airplanes, trained to fight and prepared to die for his country. He was tough and resourceful enough to win the beret of an Army Ranger. Now he fights in Washington, D.C. Often against the same outfit that trained him. For the past few years, Robinson has been executive director of the Gulf War Resource Center Inc., a small-budget nonprofit group devoted to working on issues important to veterans of the 1991 war and active-duty troops in the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The center operates out of the offices of the Vietnam Veterans of America organization near Washington. Robinson's last assignment in the Army was at the Pentagon, working for the officials in charge of looking out for the veterans of the 1991 war. He says their willingness to put the Pentagon's public-relations ratings ahead of veterans' health prompted his career switch. For the past few years, he's been one of the most public and persistent critics of the Pentagon's insistence that depleted uranium weapons are not a significant health risk to troops on the battlefield. Robinson says he doesn't know whether depleted uranium weapons should be banned. But he says the Pentagon is so enamored with them and so concerned about its image, officials won't pay attention to the mounting evidence that they might be more harm than good. The ultra-effective anti-tank weapons are crucial aspects of the U.S. arsenal, and Pentagon officials say it would be a huge loss if they were deemed too dangerous. Every time that the weapons hit a hard target, they create thousands of particles of mildly radioactive toxic dust, small enough to be inhaled. A growing number of scientists are finding that the dust - even in small quantities - can cause genetic damage that they think might lead to cancer and other problems. Early research also indicates that the dust can migrate to the brain of rats forced to breathe small quantities of the dust, raising the possibility that some veterans' neurological problems are linked to the weapons. Robinson says one of the most important ways that the Pentagon has tried to sweep the issue out of sight involves its handling of millions of dollars used to investigate the cause of the illnesses suffered by Gulf War vets. Instead of pursuing the cause of the veterans' health problems, he says, Pentagon officials have put the bulk of their efforts and money on studies that would discount the problem or show that the illnesses are mental, not physical. Robinson isn't alone in that criticism. AFTER $247 MILLION, A CAUSE HAS YET TO BE FOUND According to Congress' Government Accountability Office, $247 million has been spent in the past 12 years to research the causes and possible cures of Gulf War vets' illnesses. Most was spent on work that would demonstrate or augment the Pentagon's original theory - that stress and people unable to handle it are the problem, not any of the weapons, pills or chemicals that the Pentagon produced, according to congressional testimony in June. The Pentagon has controlled 74 percent of that $247 million, with the Department of Veterans Affairs and other federal agencies spending the rest, says the accountability office, commonly known as the GAO. The military and U.S. government also controls the availability of depleted uranium for use in experiments by outside researchers, though there are chemical substitutes that can be used. Pentagon officials have rebuffed attempts to give experts at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, and other agencies a bigger role in researching the possible effects of depleted uranium, even though those agencies are more experienced in that work, according to congressional testimony. Several Nobel Prize winners have told Congress that researchers who might be interested in getting involved have been discouraged by the military's stranglehold over the money to finance the work and the way it controls other information about Gulf War veterans. Some of the $247 million went to explore legitimate theories that proved invalid - a natural and unavoidable result of that kind of work, many researchers say. For instance, government officials in July ended years of research into whether a bacterial infection could be causing the neurological problems the veterans suffer. Other expensive efforts were doomed from the beginning because they were poorly designed or set out to do the impossible, the GAO says. POOR PLANNING, EXECUTION MEANS $13.7 MILLION WASTED One recent example is an investigation into how many troops were possibly exposed to chemical weapons and other dangers as a result of a fire at an Iraqi munitions depot in Khamisiyah in 1991. According to the most recent official government account of the incident, the CIA warned the military before the war that chemical weapons were stored there, but the word never filtered to commanders in the field. Military officials ordered the depot destroyed, and a potentially lethal cloud of debilitating chemicals might have been launched into the air. In 1993, the Pentagon and CIA said no one was exposed. In 1996, after news-media and congressional investigations, they acknowledged that there might be a problem, albeit a small one. At first, the two government agencies said hundreds of troops might be affected and that the amount of chemical poison was so small as to be inconsequential. Then a copy of a classified document was leaked, and the government called a news conference and announced that it was really thousands of troops, congressional testimony said. Finally, in 2000, the government's official estimate was upped to 101,752 troops, the GAO says. But even that number was suspect. So to get a better handle on the facts, the Pentagon paid consultants $13.7 million to develop computer models and do other work. It also spent untold dollars and man-hours on the project with its own staff, so the true cost of this study can't be established, the GAO reported in June. What resulted was a study so poorly conceived and done, it's worthless, the GAO says. Part of the problem is that some of the data necessary to do it right just isn't obtainable because no one was keeping reliable records on weather and wind conditions in Iraq at the time of the explosion. As a result, no one can say how far - or in what direction - the windborne chemicals might have gone. And there's no reliable information on exactly what was in the depot when it was blown up. A similar incident occurred at the Blackhorse Army base in Doha, Kuwait, on July 11, 1991. In that case, more than 7,000 pounds of depleted uranium weapons were destroyed in smoke and flames, along with four Abrams tanks and millions of dollars of other equipment and armaments. The heater for a munitions truck malfunctioned, caught fire and caused a series of explosions and fires in the base motor pool, the Pentagon's report on the incident says. As recently as last year, microscopic bits of depleted uranium could be found in the sand and debris there, other studies found. TROOPS HAD NO WARNING OF DANGER AFTER 1991 FIRE Pentagon records show that within hours of the fire, officers in the chain of command at Doha received the first of several notices about potential health hazards from the burning depleted uranium. The warnings contained specific directions about precautions that should be taken in the cleanup. None of those precautions were taken. The soldiers on the ground weren't told about the problem until 1998. The Army says the commanding officer didn't recall getting the warnings. The Pentagon offered no explanation for why soldiers involved in the four-month cleanup after the fire were allowed to handle materials with their bare hands and no precautions. After 1998, a government-maintained laboratory studied the situation. Despite the lack of adequate data and that "large uncertainties exist," it concluded none of the troops incurred a significant health problem by inhaling the depleted uranium dust created by the fire. That lab used many of the same techniques employed in the Khamisiyah analysis. No GAO examination of Doha has been requested. The Doha base is still used by U.S. troops today, though the site of the fire is a restricted area. Troops from Fort Eustis deployed to the region visit there frequently. Doha is one of the major embarkation points for U.S. troops entering the Iraqi theater of war. It also has an amusement park and post exchange, making it a popular spot for off-duty troops to visit when they have a day off. The Army says the site, which is near a refinery, is safe. BASIC FACT-FINDING WASN'T DONE, EPIDEMIOLOGIST SAYS Critics of the government's efforts to find the cause of Persian Gulf War veterans' health problems say these examples aren't the most important oversights or missteps. Despite all the research spending, the military and government have yet to do a responsible epidemiological study that includes some of the fundamental data necessary to unravel the problem, says Robert Haley, a former CDC official. Haley is now chief of the department of epidemiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and author of important studies on Gulf War veterans' health problems. A good epidemiological study would give researchers a handle on how many veterans are ill with undiagnosed problems, where they were during the war, what vaccinations they were given, what they did while deployed and other data, Haley says. It should have been done more than a decade ago as one of the first steps after they realized a problem existed, he says. Haley's criticisms are echoed by a number of scientists, but his background in tracking down the causes of high-profile illnesses sets him apart. At the CDC, he helped lead the investigation into toxic shock syndrome in the late 1970s, showing how women were getting critically ill because of the new generation of tampons they were using. He got involved in looking at Gulf War veterans' illnesses in the mid-1990s, after Texas businessman Ross Perot asked the dean of the Dallas medical center how much money it would take to start looking at reasons for the maladies that so many veterans were suffering. Perot said he'd been hiring former military personnel for years and just wasn't buying the Pentagon's line that these men and women were merely weak of body, will or mind, Haley recalls. The first thing that Haley did was look at the available data on the disease. He says he was surprised to find out that the basics of figuring out an epidemiological puzzle hadn't been done, despite all the money and time the government had spent. Instead of starting by spending a lot of money to prove one or two possible theories for the cause, he says, a good epidemiologist will start gathering some basic facts. Those facts would include who's involved (the sick people and people just like them who aren't sick), what they did during the war, where they were and other factors. That way, the epidemiologist can see what's common among the people who are sick and the people who aren't. Usually, he says, there will be only one or two things that the sick people have in common that turn out to be statistically significant and worth pursuing with research money. EPIDEMIOLOGY 101: THE CASE OF SUSPICIOUS POTATO SALAD A classic example is figuring out why some people got sick at a church picnic, he says. A good epidemiologist would interview the people who went to the picnic (those who got sick and those who didn't). She'd find out what games they played, what food they ate and where they were at the picnic. Then all that data would be compared, and you'd typically find a common thread - for instance, all the sick people ate potato salad and none of the well people ate it. Only then would you spend the money to take the potato salad to the lab to examine it, he says. But the government didn't do that - and still hasn't done it - Haley says. Instead, it did three studies that said the vets weren't really sick or, at least, they were no worse off than most people their age. The only difference it found was a slight increase in accidental deaths among the Gulf War vets. "They were so convinced that they would find nothing that they found nothing and published the data," he says. Haley took the numbers the government-sponsored epidemiologists used in those studies to demonstrate just the opposite. He showed where researchers made questionable assumptions and how the same data could point in the opposite direction if other, more logical assumptions were used. A big mistake here, he says, is the government studies assumed that military personnel deployed for the war were just as healthy as anyone else in the military or the general public. So after the war, when they were found to be just as likely to die or get sick as other people, the government concluded that there was no problem. But the deployed soldiers were probably much healthier than those other groups to start with because they had to pass a rigorous physical exam to be considered for deployment overseas, Haley says. In that war, many troops were deemed not deployable because they were HIV-positive, were injured or otherwise in questionable health. Well before the Gulf War, epidemiologists had a stock phrase to describe this phenomenon: the "healthy warrior effect." The government's researchers should have been familiar with it, Haley says. There were other problems, too. Haley and others noted that the data the government used in claiming only normal rates of death, cancer, infant deformities and other problems among Gulf War veterans came solely from military and VA hospitals. That left out most of the people who'd served in the war, Haley says - people who were reservists or got out of the military and weren't eligible for treatment in government hospitals. It wasn't surprising that data collected about active-duty military personnel using military hospitals showed they weren't sick; the sick ones had been forced out of uniform, Haley says. Members of Congress and others have latched onto that work and similar studies to force changes in the way the Defense Department, VA and other government agencies handle research, Haley and others say. SOME NEW FACES, SOME OLD PROBLEMS In 2002, Haley, Robinson and other critics of the government's handling of the research were appointed to a new panel of experts that advises the head of the VA on the research that should be conducted to find the cause of the vets' illnesses. Haley says he's encouraged that the government is slowly turning around to face the problem. In the past couple of years, he says, meaningful research has begun to trickle in, and the research is becoming better focused. A proper epidemiological study is scheduled to begin in January, he notes. There are still problems from within government agencies that have fought an honest approach to the problem, Haley, Robinson and others on the advisory panel say. Some of the bureaucrats who have thwarted progress are gone or shunted aside, they say, but others remain. The GAO reported in June that the advisory panel was having problems getting reliable information from the Pentagon and even from officials within the VA. Panel members aren't consistently being told about research being considered for financing, so they can help ensure that money is directed to the greatest needs, the GAO said. The panel also wasn't even being told about research when it was finished, the agency said. As of Sept. 23, 2003, about 80 percent of the 240 federally financed medical research projects for Gulf War illnesses had been completed, the GAO said in June. Yet the last time the VA reviewed this research to determine whether there were gaps and where there were opportunities that needed to be pursued was in 2001, the report said. The VA's inaction is important because it's responsible for coordinating the government's Gulf War illness research, even though it's not been given the bulk of the money to do that work. The VA has also been slow to act in other ways. In June, VA officials admitted to Congress that they had allocated only $450,000 of the $20 million budgeted for Gulf War illness research for the year. By then, three-fourths of the budget year was over. VA officials acknowledge that they need to do a better job. The government's Gulf War research coordinating group (a separate panel from the advisory committee) hadn't met since August 2003, the GAO said in its June report. The GAO said that when it checked with the coordinating group in April 2004, it found that there were no plans to meet again. Jim Binns, chairman of the VA secretary's Gulf War advisory committee, told Congress in June that he was concerned that the Defense Department had no plans to spend money on new Gulf War illness research in coming years. He said that meant total government research spending on Gulf War illnesses would drop from $35 million a year to $11 million, just as promising developments in research needed to be followed up. Most of the $11 million will have limited scope, too, because VA administrators can't spend money for research that isn't directly related to VA patients. The work on depleted uranium research that many scientists say is necessary thus isn't eligible. Michael E. Kilpatrick, the Pentagon's deputy director for health issues involving deployed forces, says that doesn't mean the Pentagon is putting a halt to all this research. He says the military will continue to pursue the studies that are underway until they're concluded. With money tight, he says, the Pentagon must use more of its healthcare budget to benefit soldiers fighting current and future wars, not those of the past. RESEARCH MONEY BECOMING HARDER TO FIND THESE DAYS That decision was made in 2002, Kilpatrick says, when only one in six vets of the 1991 war was still in uniform. None of the active-duty troops from the 1991 war have the health problems targeted by Gulf War illness research. With a war on, members of Congress pushing veterans' issues say it will be hard to beef up money for research in the VA or other budgets. VA medical centers are starting to feel the effects of caring for troops from the continued fighting overseas. Binns notes that the VA, even in recent years, hasn't been very good about making sure that the money it has for research in this area is well spent. "As recently as 2003, the VA budget in that year - according to the most recent report to Congress - provided for about $4.1 million in Gulf War illness research. Of that amount, 57 percent went to study stress and other psychological causes, 17 percent went to study things like Web-based training for VA physicians and bioterrorism events," he says. Only 17 percent of the money went to things that the advisory committee thinks are directly linked to the soldiers' suffering, Binns says. Alexandra Miller is a government scientist who's carried out some of the most important research into the health effects of depleted uranium. She says Pentagon money for pursuing the results of that work has started to dry up in recent years. "There's not enough money to complete the research," she says, just as science is close to closing the loop on whether depleted uranium is dangerous. She and Vernon Walker - a cancer biologist in New Mexico who's conducted experiments linking inhaled uranium to cellular mutations in rats - say completing the research would take only $5 million if the right projects were financed. That could truly determine whether, once and for all, inhaled depleted uranium is a hazard on the battlefield, they say. "We could be answering these questions, and we wouldn't have to have these kinds of conversations four years from now," Miller says. Richard Albertini, one of the nation's leading cancer researchers, says access to money isn't the only thing that hampers research. He's one of more than a dozen doctors and scientists involved in a continuing medical study assessing the effect of depleted uranium shrapnel in veterans of the 1991 war. The Pentagon has called this study "the gold standard" of whether adverse health can result from exposure to depleted uranium on the battlefield and frequently points to its findings as support for its arguments that the weapons are safe. In the most recently published version of the study, Albertini says, three veterans showed an increased rate of mutations in a gene that doctors think is a "marker" for cancer. A marker for cancer isn't cancer itself but a warning signal that something might be wrong. In this case, the genes were in the white blood cells of the soldiers. Based on that finding, Walker exposed rats to air with very small particles of depleted uranium, to see whether the same kind of mutations would develop. The rats did develop these mutations, which supports the idea that inhaling depleted uranium dust can cause cancer, Albertini and Walker say. The mutations in the marker become less pronounced over time, Albertini says, so it's important to have blood samples from veterans of the more recent war to see whether these mutations continue and to do more research. So far, he says, the military and VA say samples aren't available, even though obtaining them isn't difficult and costs less than $100 apiece, he says. This isn't an idle academic exercise, Albertini says: Researchers might be close to finding a chemical that can halt the mutations, which might mean development of a pill or drug soldiers could take on the battlefield to reverse or arrest the mutations soon after their exposure. Experiments using chickens have been successful in halting the mutations in a test tube, Albertini says. He and Walker say that work could lead to antidotes to "dirty bombs," - explosives made of low-grade nuclear materials such as depleted uranium. Government officials have repeatedly said the nation's urban areas are vulnerable to such attacks if terrorists can obtain a sufficient quantity of the right radioactive materials. A LEGACY OF MISTRUST FROM PREVIOUS WARS Robinson and other veterans' advocates say they're afraid that the Pentagon's attitude toward soldiers' health and the failure to properly address illnesses from the 1991 Gulf War will be equaled in the new war. They say a pattern has developed that will make it difficult for any veteran to believe what the government says. Soldiers, sailors and civilians were often used as guinea pigs in experiments of how nuclear blasts might affect human beings in the years after World War II. The government never told them what was happening, then denied it - then denied that they were at risk until recently. "It took 40 years for them to get treatment and care, " Robinson says. Then came the Vietnam War and Agent Orange, a chemical used to kill acres and acres of jungle foliage, to make it easier for U.S. troops to find and kill the enemy. The government insisted for years that the chemical wasn't a problem, then finally admitted it was. Documents show that U.S. leaders knew the truth in 1972 - maybe earlier - but continued using it anyway, Robinson says. He says the same thing might be happening with depleted uranium and other possible causes of the Gulf War vets' ill health. Part of the problem of getting to the truth of Gulf War veterans' illnesses is that too many people use the issue for ideological purposes, he says. Critics of the weapon on the left use the radiological properties of depleted uranium "to scare people: Depleted uranium is the holocaust," Robinson says. "Then you have the Department of Defense on the right," saying there's no problem and questioning the motives and patriotism of critics, he says. A week before launching Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, the Pentagon briefed reporters to reiterate the safety of depleted uranium weapons and note the failure of anyone to conclusively link them to any of the health problems from the Persian Gulf War. Col. James Naughton, then the Army's director of munitions, was brought out to speak. According to a transcript issued by the Pentagon, he talked about how much of a battlefield advantage the weapon is. "So we don't want to give that up," he said, "and that's why we use it." One of the reporters asked him why giving up the weapon was even being raised, if the weapon was so safe. "Well, you need to look at the environment of the context where people are asking us questions - who's asking the question?" Naughton replied. "The Iraqis tell us, 'Terrible things happened to our people because you used it last time.' "Why do they want it to go away? They want it to go away because we kicked the crap out of them - OK?" Later in the briefing, Naughton made it clear he thought that Iraq "and other countries that are not friendly to the United States" were behind criticism of the weapon. With those kinds of extremes, not much has happened in the middle, Robinson says. "In the middle," he says, "is the science that has not been conducted." -------- korea Crucial new year for North Korean nuclear standoff Tue Dec 14, 11:59 PM ET - AFP http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041215/wl_asia_afp/yearnkoreanuclear_041215045907 SEOUL, (AFP) - Pressure will grow for more diplomacy to end the nuclear standoff with Stalinist North Korea (news - web sites) as the dispute enters a third calendar year which experts agree will prove decisive for any settlement. North Korea has said it will take no steps until it is sure what shape US policy will take under the second administration of George W. Bush. Initially they may be pleasantly surprised. Some analysts see a softer US line early in the year as the White House tries to deflect charges that it made no progress whatsoever in 2004 because it was unable to compromise with Pyongyang. That softening may not last, however, and will not fundamentally change Washington's demand for the complete and verifiable scrapping of North Korea's nuclear weapons programmes. "US officials have made it clear that their bottom line, the scrapping of North Korea's nuclear weapons programmes, has not shifted," said Park Soo-Gil, an international relations professor at Seoul National University. But the new flexibility could affect how Washington handles North Korea. Recent signals from the White House, that Washington is not interested in regime change but more interested in "transformation", could be the beginning of its new charm offensive aimed at negotiating away the Stalinist regime's weapons of mass destruction. Analysts say the number one goal of the North Korean leadership is to hold on to power and it fears a US attempt to overthrow the regime more than anything. "Basically, the regime's goal in nuclear negotiations is 99 percent about regime survival," said Kim Taewoo of the Korean Institute for Defense Analyses. Indications are emerging that leader Kim Jong-Il's grip on power may be slipping. These include reports that his portraits have been taken down from some locations and unconfirmed accounts of anti-Kim posters and leaflets appearing in some locations as well of as an exodus of unspecified officials and military officers. The reports are met with scepticism from officials here and in China, who see no substantive changes in the political structure of North Korea. On the nuclear standoff, Pyongyang has scarcely budged since Washington accused it in October 2002 of running a secret programme based on enriched uranium in violation of the Agreed Framework -- a 1994 bilateral accord to control the North's nuclear program. That agreement has since unravelled as North Korea has boasted of producing nuclear weapons in an "unbroken chain" after kicking out international inspectors and pulling out of the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. US intelligence estimates say North Korea had enough plutonium for up to two nuclear bombs before the current standoff erupted and may have enough for six more now. North Korea has demanded security assurances from Washington, as well as economic and diplomatic concessions in advance, for scrapping them. But it continues to deny running a uranium enrichment scheme. Three rounds of talks bringing together the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States have failed to narrow the differences. But at the last round in Beijing in August Washington indicated flexibility by saying it would not oppose North Korea obtaining some benefits before it scrapped its nuclear programmes. North Korea boycotted a fourth round of talks scheduled for September. Edward Reed, the Seoul representative of the Asia Foundation, said getting Pyongyang to attend a new round would not be enough now. "If those talks make no real progress, like the last ones, that would be the end of the six-party process," he said. Washington, despite opposition from allies including South Korea (news - web sites), may then feel emboldened to try pressure tactics that could include tightening efforts to isolate the regime and urging the UN Security Council to take action. "If a breakthrough doesn't come in the first part of the year, then the situation can get out of control," said Park, a former UN ambassador. -------- latinamerica Cuba braces for worst, US says no justification for invasion charge HAVANA (AFP) Dec 14, 2004 http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041214135624.u29i6evx.html Cuba pressed on Tuesday in its biggest military exercises in almost 20 years, with hundreds of thousands of troops and millions of civilians taking part, with the communist government arguing the wargames can help deter a US invasion. "The only way to stop aggression is to make it abundantly clear that, in this case, Cuba will become from one end to the other an enormous wasp's nest that no aggressor, however powerful, will be able to overcome," Defense Minister Raul Castro, number two in the Cuban hierarchy, said as the week-long wargames launched Monday. "In the end, (the aggressor) will have to withdraw, bloodied and defeated, because this would be a war of all of the people," Castro, a younger brother of President Fidel Castro, warned. In Washington Monday, asked about the emphasis on repelling a theoretical invasion, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said: "We don't think there is any justification, or any particular foundation for this kind of charge." "The United States has repeatedly called for a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba. We think that's what the Cuban people deserve, and we think they deserve it in a peaceful fashion," Boucher said. These "exercises are just, I would say, one or more of the many things that the Cuban government does to try to distract people from the problems that they face in their daily lives," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters. General Leonardo Andollo told reporters on Sunday that MiG-29 jets, anti-aircraft batteries were to be deployed during the weeklong exercises meant to be a warning to Washington that Cuba would vigorously defend itself against US agression. The mass war games started Monday and are due to run through to December 19. Senior military and Communist government officials here warned that the administration of US President George W. Bush should take note of the island's war footing. "The determination of the US administration to destroy the (Cuban) revolution however they can, including militarily, determines the necessity of conducting these exercises," Andollo, the deputy chief of Cuba's Armed Revolutionary Forces (FAR), said. His comments came days after Raul Castro, Fidel Castro's designated successor, warned Washington should closely observe Cuba's military prowess and civil defenses during the manoeuvres. Raul Castro is the head of the Caribbean island's armed forces. Operation "Bastion 2004" will involve about 100,000 soldiers, sailors and air force personnel as well as some 400,000 reservists. Air force MiG-29s, anti-aircraft units and elite troops will also support the operation, billed as Cuba's biggest military exercises since 1986. Officials said the exercises would also involve several million civilians who will participate in two days of civil defense exercises, including a simulated aerial assault. The Communist-run island sits some 90 miles (145 kilometers) off the coast of Florida. -------- u.n. Australian FM will not head UN nuclear watchdog: PM AFP Dec 14, 2004 http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041214/ts_afp/australiausnuclear_041214083137 SYDNEY (AFP) - Australian Prime Minister John Howard dismissed talk of Foreign Minister Alexander Downer taking over as head of the UN nuclear watchdog, amid reported US pressure for him to do so. "I have no desire to see Alexander Downer leave his present position, none whatsoever," Howard told national radio. "He's doing an excellent job where he is now." The Washington Post reported that the adminstration of US President George W. Bush (news - web sites) would like Downer to replace Mohamed ElBaradei as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The newspaper said the Bush administration thought ElBaradei had been too soft on Iran's suspected nuclear program and had tapped phone conversations between him and Iranian diplomats in an attempt to gain evidence. However Washington had failed to persuade Downer to run to replace him, the newspaper said. Australia has been one of Bush's closest allies on the war against terror and the war in Iraq (news - web sites). Howard said he did not think Downer would take over the job. "I do know that some people have spoken about the possibility of it but I don't think it's going to come off," he said. Downer's office has refused to comment on the report, which comes weeks after he hosted ElBaradei at a leading conference on nuclear proliferation. On Tuesday Downer flew to Papua New Guinea at the start of a Pacific tour. -------- u.s. nuc weapons American Diplomatic Drive Comes Up Short Associated Press BARRY SCHWEID Dec. 14, 2004 http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/10412006.htm WASHINGTON - Bush administration persistence in using diplomacy to solve a nuclear weapons crisis with North Korea is coming up short as the insular regime bobs and weaves away from resuming negotiations. The faltering effort is having a divisive effect on U.S. relations with South Korea and Japan, which have blamed U.S. inflexibility for North Korea's refusal to halt its atomic weapons program. American diplomats are trying to smooth over those differences, while looking to China to make the case to Pyongyang that it would be wise to denuclearize the Korean peninsula in exchange for security assurances and economic benefits. Rose Gotemoeller, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, tends to agree with the criticism from South Korea and Japan. "The way in which the administration has relied on diplomacy is to take a very hard line and stick with it, and not be willing to explore possible avenues of resolution," the former Clinton administration official said Monday. "That's not diplomacy, that's standing tough," she said. An offer by the administration last June of security assurances and economic cooperation in exchange for a total halt to the nuclear weapons program was a "decent starting point," she said, and should now be improved. But Danielle Pletka, vice president for defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute, said the impasse is not the fault of the Bush administration. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il is not going to agree to complete, verifiable dismantling of his nuclear weapons program and will not negotiate "unless we take steps to prop up his regime, which is anathema to us," Pletka said. The answer, she said, is to convince China that "playing both sides is not in their interest." Accusing China of not being an honest broker, Pletka said: "The Chinese think they can play with fire and it will not come back and burn them. It will." The long-term issue is regime change in Pyongyang, "and we have got to bite the bullet," she said. A third view was offered by Robert Einhorn, a former assistant secretary of state for nuclear proliferation issues who is now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Having a situation in which the North Koreans can be blamed for not coming back to the negotiating table may suit the Bush administration while it has its hands full, especially in dealing with Iraq," Einhorn said. "The administration may see itself in a decent tactical position for the moment." Negotiations were supposed to have resumed in September, but not even low-level talks are anticipated as the year runs out on what appears to be one of the biggest security issues confronting the Bush administration. The most recent reason North Korea gives for not resuming negotiations with the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia is that the Bush administration is trying to topple Kim Jong Il and his government with a "frantic smear campaign." A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman was quoted Monday by KCNA, the state-run news agency, as saying the campaign was reminiscent of U.S. "aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq." However, from the outset, President Bush has followed a different course with North Korea, even while bracketing it with Iraq and Iran as an "axis of evil." While North Korea generally was understood to have a more vigorous nuclear program than Iraq, the president opted for diplomacy in Korea while going to war against Iraq. He authorized American negotiators to offer security assurances to North Korea and said publicly, "We have no intention of invading North Korea." Even so, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other critics suggested before the war with Iraq that North Korea posed a bigger threat than Saddam Hussein's government in Baghdad. Writing two years ago, after North Korea had reopened its plutonium reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, Christopher said North Korea was within six months of being able to produce sufficient weapons-grade material to generate several nuclear bombs. "Contrast that with Iraq," Christopher said. "Not only is North Korea much further along than Iraq in building nuclear weapons, but by virtue of its longer-range missiles it has a greater delivery capability." On Monday, a U.S. official who keeps close watch on North Korea said it definitely has produced at least two atomic bombs. Some analysts in the administration believe it has made even more. ----- U.S. Presses for New Director of the U.N.'s Atomic Agency The New York Times By STEVEN R. WEISMAN December 14, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/politics/14baradei.html WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 - The Bush administration said Monday that it would continue to press for Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei to be replaced next year as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, but European diplomats and some administration officials said they could not rule out his staying on if no suitable alternative emerges. Officials at the White House and the State Department repeated in nearly identical language on Monday that the administration adhered to the so-called Geneva rule, named after a group of 14 wealthy countries that subsidize the United Nations, that leaders of international organizations should serve only two terms and then retire. Dr. ElBaradei, an Egyptian lawyer who has tangled with the administration on Iraq and drawn criticism from conservatives for his failure to declare that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, began running the I.A.E.A., the United Nations nuclear monitoring agency, in 1997. His second four-year term ends next fall, and he has said he would like a third term. "Our view has always been, two terms is enough," said Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, adding that no decision had been made on who might replace Dr. ElBaradei. "With regard to any specific agency, we'll have to see who the candidates are. We'll make our decisions at that time." The administration's comments were prompted by a report in The Washington Post on Sunday that secret negotiations conducted by Dr. ElBaradei with Iran had been intercepted by American intelligence services, but that they did not reveal anything incriminating to strengthen the hand of conservatives in the administration seeking his ouster. Bush administration officials said they could not confirm that his conversations had been monitored, but several said they would not be surprised if that were the case. In August, Lt. Gen. Mike Hayden, head of the National Security Agency, testified before Congress that electronic surveillance was often carried out to give "tactical support to State Department negotiators." Despite the American position that Dr. ElBaradei should not have another term, European and other diplomats said he had proved effective in recent negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. He repeatedly criticized the Tehran government for failing to disclose all its nuclear-related activities. He has also declared that Iran still needed to dispel doubts about its programs. Last month, Iran acceded to a request by Britain, France and Germany to suspend a major part of its nuclear program in return for discussions on possible future economic incentives. Talks with those countries are to resume this week. Bush administration hard-liners, led by John R. Bolton, under secretary of state for arms control and international security, have criticized Dr. ElBaradei's performance publicly and privately, particularly because of his refusal before the Iraq war to endorse the administration's view that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. Since the war and the failure to find evidence of such a program, Dr. ElBaradei has said many times that he has been vindicated by the facts, a statement that, while difficult to deny, rankled many throughout the administration. But others in the administration say Dr. ElBaradei, as a Muslim with a reputation for impartiality, has served American interests well on Iran and might well be the best person to help negotiate a resolution of the dispute over Tehran's nuclear program. "There are a lot of views in this administration, but frankly we could do a lot worse," said an American official, explaining that resentment of the Bush administration might well cause the nations that support the international agency to rally around someone even more skeptical of American claims. A European diplomat said that Dr. ElBaradei, who has called for a negotiated settlement to the Iran impasse, had played a constructive role and that the Geneva rule was "more of a habit than a rule." In addition, both France and Germany, for example, have not endorsed the American call for him to be replaced, officials from those countries said. Another Western diplomat involved in discussions at the United Nations said any overt attempt by the United States to push Dr. ElBaradei out would backfire among countries resentful of the war in Iraq and other American actions. "It's always dangerous for the United States to openly push for someone to get out of a job like this one, unless you're 100 percent sure you've lined up someone who is better," the diplomat said. According to the rules of the International Atomic Energy Agency, two-thirds of the agency's members must ratify the selection of a new director. The schedule calls for a decision to be made by next summer. A senior administration official said it was not impossible that Dr. ElBaradei would end up with a new term. "I don't think we've boxed ourselves in," the official said. "We're waiting to see who emerges between now and the time we have to decide." Another senior administration official said the sparring over Dr. ElBaradei was a sideshow, because the real problem in confronting Iran is the lack of support for such an approach by Europeans, Arab nations, Russia and China. Without their support for a tough approach, the administration's demands for an end to Iran's program cannot succeed, he said. ---- The Revolt Against the Bush Administration's Nuclear Double Standard by Lawrence S. Wittner December 14, 2004 Lew Rockwell http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/wittner6.html In late November, when Congress refused to appropriate money to fund so-called "bunker busters" and "mini-nukes," this action represented not only a serious blow to the Bush administration's plan to build new nuclear weapons, but to the administration's overall nuclear arms control and disarmament policy. That policy has been to prevent the development of nuclear weapons by nations the Bush administration considers "evil." The military invasion of Iraq, like the gathering confrontation with Iran and North Korea, reflects, at least in part, the administration's obsession with preventing nations potentially hostile to the United States from acquiring a nuclear capability. This focus upon blocking nuclear weapons development in other countries has some legal justification for, in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, non-nuclear nations agreed not to develop nuclear weapons. But the NPT also calls for nuclear nations to rid themselves of the nuclear weapons they possess. Indeed, in the meetings that fashioned the treaty, the non-nuclear weapons states demanded a commitment to nuclear disarmament by the nuclear powers. And they received it – not only in the form of the treaty's provisions, but in the formal pledges made by the nuclear powers at the periodic treaty review conferences that have been held since the NPT went into effect. It is in this area that the Bush administration has revealed itself as the proponent of a double standard. At the same time that it has assailed selected nations for developing nuclear weapons, it has withdrawn the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, effectively destroyed the START II treaty, and refused to support ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It has also raised the U.S. nuclear weapons budget to new heights and proposed the building of new U.S. nuclear weapons, including the "bunker busters" and "mini-nukes." As Senator Kerry pointed out during the recent presidential campaign, this is not the kind of policy that will encourage other nations to abide by their commitments under the NPT. The surprising congressional move to block the Bush plan for new nuclear weapons is but one of numerous signs that this double standard cannot be sustained. As a special high-level U.N. panel has just warned: "We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation." Nor is the breakaway from the NPT limited to the non-nuclear nations. Just the other day the Russian government announced its development of a new nuclear missile. Appropriately enough, the U.N. panel condemned the nuclear powers for failing to honor their commitments, and called upon them to restart the nuclear disarmament process. Furthermore, of course, terrorists have been actively seeking nuclear weapons, and might well obtain them. Thousands of tactical nuclear weapons – many of them small, portable, and, therefore, ideal for terrorist use – are still maintained by the U.S. and Russian governments. No international agreements have ever been put into place to control or eliminate them. In fact, it remains unclear how many of these tactical nuclear weapons exist or where they are located. In Russia, at least, they are badly guarded and, in the disorderly circumstances of the post-Soviet economy, they seem ripe for sale or theft. The revolt against the Bush administration's double standard could come to a head in May 2005, when an NPT review conference opens at the United Nations, in New York City. Nuclear and non-nuclear nations are sure to exchange sharp barbs about non-compliance with NPT provisions. Furthermore, more than a hundred mayors from the Mayors for Peace Campaign, which has drawn together the top executives from 640 cities around the world, are expected to come to the U.N. to lobby for nuclear disarmament. They will be joined by United for Peace and Justice, the largest peace movement coalition in the United States, and over 2,000 organizations in 96 different countries. Together, they have launched Abolition Now, a campaign calling on heads of state to begin negotiations in 2005 on a treaty to eliminate all nuclear weapons. Ultimately, then, the Bush administration might be forced into accepting a single standard for dealing with the threat posed by nuclear weapons – one designed to lead to a nuclear-free world. Certainly, there are plenty of signs that people and nations around the globe believe that what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. Lawrence S. Wittner [send him mail - mailto:wittner@albany.edu ] is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press). This article originally appeared on the History News Network. Reprinted with permission of the author. -------- u.s. nuc facilities Produce electricity while eliminating nuclear warheads Statesman Journal JOHN C. RINGLE December 14, 2004 http://159.54.226.83/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041214/OPINION/412140301/1049 Nuclear-weapons proliferation is a serious danger. But an incoming missile is not the only threat. Terrorists might not have the capability yet to assemble a crude nuclear weapon and transport it in a suitcase, but that could soon be a reality. Plutonium is the material from which many nuclear weapons are made. Russia's huge nuclear-weapons stockpile contains some 200 tons of plutonium, but only a few pounds are enough to make a crude nuclear bomb. Russia's nuclear-weapons stockpile is kept in poorly secured facilities, and experts say that terrorist groups -- and rogue states -- would like nothing better than to obtain some plutonium on the black market. The best way to make ourselves less susceptible to nuclear terrorism is to eliminate the plutonium altogether. That's already being done with Russia's surplus highly enriched uranium, which is another ingredient of nuclear weapons. In a remarkable development, more than 200 tons of highly enriched uranium that came from the Soviet Union's nuclear warheads no longer can be used as weapons of mass destruction. This fissile material has been diluted into reactor fuel and burned at U.S. nuclear power plants to produce electricity for American families and businesses. So far, the equivalent of 9,000 Soviet warheads -- many of which had been aimed at U.S. population centers -- have been destroyed, preventing the highly enriched uranium from falling into terrorist hands. Amazingly, this has received very little media attention, even though it has been a huge success. It came about as a result of a U.S.-Russia nonproliferation agreement in 1993, which called for the elimination of 500 tons of the weapons-grade uranium over a period of 20 years. To date, 40 percent of the contract goal has been met. Think about it: At a time when preventing another Sept. 11 is uppermost in people's minds, the results of this agreement -- known as the Megatons to Megawatts program -- are very impressive. Nearly every commercial reactor in the United States has been fueled at some point in the past decade with fuel derived from Soviet warheads. The program costs U.S. taxpayers hardly anything because the sale of electricity pays for the highly enriched uranium. More needs to be done, however. Even greater stores of nuclear-weapons materials -- 800 tons of highly enriched uranium and the surplus plutonium -- remain in Russia's stockpile. France, Japan and several other countries with nuclear power programs blend plutonium with uranium to produce a so-called mixed-oxide fuel for nuclear power plants. Here in the United States, we're planning to use some of our own surplus plutonium for electricity production. A small amount of plutonium from the Los Alamos National Laboratory will be blended into mixed-oxide fuel and burned at a nuclear power plant in South Carolina. The U.S.-Russia partnership could be used to destroy both the plutonium and much more of the weapons-grade uranium by burning the fissile materials in a new generation of nuclear plants. These commercial reactors could generate thousands of megawatts of electricity while eliminating thousands of nuclear warheads. It's a goal that should be high on the agenda of the new administration and Congress. John C. Ringle of Corvallis is professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at Oregon State University. He can be reached by e-mail at ringlejc@ne.orst.edu ----- DOE eyes moving plutonium work Los Alamos Monitor ROGER SNODGRASS, roger@lamonitor.com, December 14, 2004 http://www.lamonitor.com/articles/2004/12/14/headline_news/news01.txt After years of making do with various widely scattered production lines for small, very long lasting nuclear power sources, the Department of Energy is beginning a process to rationalize bringing it all together in one location. Timothy A. Frazier of DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy conducted a public scoping session Monday night at the Los Alamos Golf Course. He sounded out the basic idea and invited public comment in case there is a better alternative than the ones under consideration. The current process requires a total of five transfers of nuclear material that travel 8,000 miles between Savannah River Site, S.C., Oak Ridge, Tenn., Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Idaho National Laboratory. The Los Alamos task involves several dozen employees at PF-4 in the Plutonium Facility at Technical Area 55, who purify and encapsulate plutonium-238. The heat-producing packets they produce are then used in thermoelectric heating systems known as radioisotope power systems (RPS) that have space and national security applications. The plutonium that is purified and encapsulated at LANL arrives after a circuitous route that begins as neptunium-237 in the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, is turned into targets at Oak Ridge, and then irradiated in Idaho. The targets are backtracked to Oak Ridge for processing into plutonium, before heading to New Mexico. After LANL's input, the encapsulated energy source will now go back to Idaho to be assembled and tested. Clearly, Frazier suggested by the preferred alternative he described, a more effective, safer and less vulnerable alternative would be to focus the whole operation in one place, namely the Idaho National Laboratory, the newly named consolidation of the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory and the Argonne National Laboratory - West. Although significant radiological releases causing personal injuries occurred in the production process at Los Alamos in 2003 and 2002, Frazier said the new facility contemplated for Idaho would build in lessons learned and corrective actions that have since been adopted at LANL. "The beauty of a new facility," said Doug Outlaw, a contractor with SAIC, who is writing the Environmental Impact Statement, "is that we'd be able to engineer the safety." A driver for the current push is a plan to use an RPS on NASA's New Horizon voyage to Pluto, departing in 2006. The space applications are fairly well known. The Apollo Moon-landing expeditions used an early version of RPS and more advanced designs now power Voyager's exit from the solar system and the Cassini spacecraft's survey of Saturn. A future return to the moon and a manned mission to Mars are also likely to need RPSs. But Frazier was unable to specify the national security uses that are under way or contemplated. He was able to say that these unspecified uses are "by other federal users," and that they are not related to nuclear or space-based weapons or missile defense. Gregg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group objected to the classified aspects of the project "This is a pig in a poke because we don't know the scope," he said. "We don't know the inventory of plutonium-238. We don't know where it is, what alternative missions there are, or how they can be changed." The DOE officials with the Office of Space and Defense Power Systems received initial comments in Idaho and Wyoming last week and will now move on to Tennessee and Washington, D.C. The public has until the end of January 2005 to send comments to: Timothy A. Frazier, EIS Document Manager, Ne-50/Germantown Building, U.S. Department of Energy, 1000 Independence Ave., S.W., Washington, D.C. A draft EIS will be issued next and after that a final EIS, with further opportunities for public comment, before a Record of Decision concludes the process. -------- new jersey Closed by Delaware River Oil Spill, Nuclear Reactors Restart NEWARK, New Jersey, December 14, 2004 (ENS) http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2004/2004-12-14-09.asp#anchor1 Operators of the Salem 1 and 2 nuclear reactors Monday began the process of bringing the units back online after they were shut down for more than a week because of fears that a massive oil spill upstream in the Delaware River might disrupt plant operations. Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG) Nuclear decided on December 2, that, based on Delaware River conditions and the potential for oil from the Athos I oil tanker spill, to reach its nuclear plant water intake structures, it has decided to take off line both units at the Salem Nuclear Generating Station. Operators began restarting Salem 2 Monday and the company expected to start sending out electricity to the regional power grid late Monday. Salem 1 is set for startup later this week. PSEG Nuclear is continually monitoring river conditions. "Our first ground rule is to ?Be Safe,? and this is the right thing to do to ensure the safety of the stations," said A. Christopher Bakken, PSEG Nuclear president and chief nuclear officer. The Athos I began spilling oil into the Delaware River on November 26. The U.S. Coast Guard found a gash cut into her hull, and several days later, found a 15 foot curved piece of pipe in her path that is believed to have caused the gash. PSEG Nuclear placed booms around the water intake structures at both Salem and Hope Creek nuclear generating stations to protect against the spilled oil. Since the oil spilled in the Delaware was crude oil, it is expected that heavier globs of oil might be suspended in the river at varying depths, making the booms less effective. The ATHOS I is at the Marcus Hook Anchorage awaiting favorable weather conditions for transit to the Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia. Recreational boaters are now allowed to transit the Delaware River at a no-wake speed to their winter moorings and haul-out. The unified command continues oil clean-up and recovery efforts. The incident is still under investigation. The U.S. Coast Guard says that the final results of the investigation could take several months. Oil has impacted approximately 126 miles of shoreline leaving of patches of oil ranging from a very light sheen to tarballs. Currently, 70 miles of the affected shoreline have patches of very light sheen. Experts report 198 captured birds have survived, 126 of which have been cleaned. A total of 129 birds have died. PSEG Nuclear is tracking costs the company may incur associated with the oil spill with full expectation of recovery of those costs from responsible parties, said Bakken. -------- Nuclear reactor's pump generates a safety dispute Hope Creek's operator said the faulty equipment would last till 2006. The state wants it replaced now. Associated Press Posted on Tue, Dec. 14, 2004 http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/state LOWER ALLOWAYS CREEK, N.J. - The operator of the Hope Creek nuclear reactor in Salem County wants to put off replacing a problem recirculation pump for 11/2 years despite concerns about its safety. The 18-year-old recirculation pump, one of two that push water through the core of the reactor, has a damaged shaft and a history of premature seal failures, and it vibrates so severely it sounds like a freight train, according to a report prepared last month for plant owner PSEG Nuclear. New Jersey regulators have urged its replacement, but do not have jurisdiction over the plant. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which does, is reviewing the report and plans to meet with PSEG officials before deciding whether to allow the delay. Jill Lipoti, assistant director for radiation protection for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, said state officials had urged Hope Creek to replace the pump now. "The shaft is bowed, based on their own independent assessment," Lipoti said yesterday. "It seems prudent to replace it, but we'll rely on the NRC's decision on the matter." PSEG officials say the pump, which dates to the 1986 opening of the plant, is stable enough to continue operating and will not be replaced during Hope Creek's current shutdown. Skip Sindoni, a PSEG Nuclear spokesman, said yesterday that the 62-page report, by consulting engineers Sargent & Lundy, acknowledged the need to replace the recirculation pump, but he said its continued operation was not a safety risk. Sargent & Lundy "came back and said there's vibration issues but that the vibrations are stable, the conditions in the pump are not degrading, and the vibrations are below the vendor limit. This is safe to go for another operating cycle," Sindoni said. Replacement can wait until the reactor's next outage in 18 months, he said. The plant had been scheduled for an outage but was shut down prematurely Oct. 10 after a pipe ruptured, releasing radioactive steam into an area to which workers do not normally have access. No date has been set for Hope Creek to go back online. Diane Screnci, an NRC spokeswoman in King of Prussia, said it would have to wait for federal regulators to weigh in on whether the recirculation pump's replacement could wait. In the meantime, plant operators are installing new sensors to help monitor the vibrations, Sindoni said. Critics want quicker action. In a letter to PSEG Nuclear chief executive A. Christopher Bakken, the Union of Concerned Scientists urged immediate replacement, saying anything else would be "a gamble far larger than anything wagered in Atlantic City." David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Washington-based watchdog organization, told Bakken in the letter that the vibrations from the pump's bent shaft had damaged safety equipment at the plant. A New Jersey group also wants the problem fixed immediately. "It doesn't make any sense to take these kinds of risks for 18 months," said Norm Cohen, coordinator of Unplug Salem, a nuclear watchdog group. "It seems the prudent thing to do is just fix the damn pump." -------- new mexico Senator frustrated Yucca project not moving faster Las Vegas Review-Journal By KEITH ROGERS December 14, 2004 http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Dec-14-Tue-2004/news/25474102.html Sen. Pete Domenici, the powerful Republican from New Mexico who wants to get the ball rolling on burying nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, said Monday he's frustrated the project doesn't get more funding, because it leaves expansion of U.S. plants mired while other countries are becoming more reliant on nuclear power. "The frustration is why has it taken so long? Why does it seem elsewhere to be so easy and here to be so tough?" he said before signing copies of his book, "A Brighter Tomorrow: Fulfilling the Promise of Nuclear Energy." Domenici, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee who also chairs the subcommittee that writes funding bills for energy and water projects, attended the book-signing at the Atomic Testing Museum on the Desert Research Institute campus. Earlier in the day, he met for several hours with officials at the Energy Department's Office of Repository Development after first meeting with a group on water desalination in Las Vegas. The senator noted that although the United States relies on nuclear power for 20 percent of its electricity, France has an 80 percent reliance and China has ordered 20 new power reactors. "So my frustration is, `Why not in America?' " he asked. Currently, the $58 billion project to build a maze of tunnels inside Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, and entomb highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies there is creeping along at a $577 million annual funding pace. Despite the fact there's $12.6 billion in a ratepayers' fund to finance the effort, the Department of Energy has missed its target to submit a license application for review this year, and it's questionable if plans and methods to begin hauling the waste will be in place by 2010. Among the apparent roadblocks is an appeals court ruling this summer that the Environmental Protection Agency's 10,000-year radiation protection standard needs to be extended to hundreds of thousands of years in the future. Asked if he intends to pass legislation next year to keep the current standard intact, Domenici said, "We're looking very carefully at what that court decision means." He said legislation to skirt the court's ruling might not be needed, but "we'll see." In his book, Domenici urges the United States and other countries to rely more on nuclear power and to follow through on the government's commitment to dispose of spent fuel in a permanent site where it can be retrieved for reprocessing and reduction in the amount of waste as technology permits. In essence, Yucca Mountain is an interim solution to a long-term problem that eventually will be resolved through reprocessing and transforming the waste, he said. "But we're late in the game because of past executive orders by presidents like Carter." -------- vermont NRC probing alert system by Susan Smallheer published Dec 14, 2004 Rutland Herald http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041214/NEWS/41213004/1003Article The Nuclear Regulatory Commission accepted a formal complaint Monday from New England Coalition alleging that Vermont Yankee?s emergency alert system is close to inoperable and puts the public living around the plant at serious risk. The New England Coalition, a nuclear watchdog group, petitioned the NRC last week on the matter, and the complaint was accepted for further testimony and study, according to NRC spokeswoman Diane Screnci. Screnci said the NRC invited the New England Coalition to provide additional information about its allegations that many of the emergency alert radios in private homes surrounding Vermont Yankee are faulty and don?t work reliably, perhaps because of a faulty alert signal. The coalition also has alleged that the current sirens in Brattleboro and Vernon are faulty to a lesser degree. Business and residents in a 10-minute radius of Vermont Yankee are notified during a plant emergency either by sirens or emergency alert radios, which advise residents to tune their radios to local stations broadcasting emergency information. The alert must be completed in 15 minutes of an emergency, according to federal law. The emergency alert system has been a source of problems this year for Entergy Nuclear, the owner of Vermont Yankee. In October, the NRC found that Entergy ?wasn?t making its best effort? to maintain the radio network and had in essence lost control of the radio alert network. Raymond Shadis, senior technical adviser for the watchdog group, said that the NRC had rejected his group?s request to shut the plant down until there was a working emergency alert system in place. Entergy Nuclear has ?an extremely poor record in the area of emergency response with wholly inadequate quality assurance, root-cause analysis, and corrective action following procedural, human error and system failures,? the petition stated. Shadis said that Rick Ennis, NRC project manager for Vermont Yankee, called him at the close of business Monday and told him that the petition had been accepted. Shadis said that Ennis told him that the towns surrounding the reactor had agreed to a ?route alert system? where town officials drive the roads and alert residents by loudspeakers that there is an emergency at the plant. Shadis said that Ennis told him that such a method wouldn?t meet the 15-minute rule, but that shutting the plant down wasn?t warranted. Route notification ?relies on volunteers driving door-to-door to spread alarm, saying ?run for it, run for it.? It takes considerably longer than 15 minutes,? Shadis said. Shadis said that radio reception was intermittent, and that there appeared to be a problem with the radios themselves. The newer radios are worse than the older radios,? he said, citing reports from several area residents. Towns that rely on the radios include Guilford, Halifax, Marlboro and Dummerston and a portion of Brattleboro, plus the New Hampshire towns of Chesterfield, Hinsdale, Winchester, Richmond and Swanzey, and the Massachusetts towns of Leyden, Bernardston, Gill, Northfield, Warwick, Colrain and Greenfield. Robert O. Williams, Entergy Nuclear spokesman, said the company had acknowledged that it lost track of who has the 5,000 emergency alert radios it distributed during the past two decades. On Monday, all Williams would say was that the company was ?working on it.? Earlier in the day, before the NRC?s petition review board had accepted the coalition?s petition, Williams said that the coalition was ?free to express their views. Our focus is the task at hand ­ upgrading the notification system.? In addition to the radios, the company is working on improving the sirens? signal strength, he said. ?We?re working with the state and the National Weather Service on the tone alert radios,? Williams said. He said that despite the problems pointed out by the NRC earlier this fall, Vermont Yankee had a ?workable system.? Williams said that Entergy was upgrading its database on which residents had the emergency alert radios. He said the company had sent letters to all the households and businesses in the 10-mile evacuation zone asking for information. Emergency notification information also is included in the annual Vermont Yankee calendar, which is sent to all area households, he said. Screnci, in a telephone interview Monday night, noted that the NRC inspectors had found fault with Entergy?s handling of the emergency alert radios earlier this fall, but that Entergy was taking appropriate actions to fix the problems. In addition to the radio problems, Entergy staff revealed problems during a June transformer fire, when staff abandoned the emergency notification telephones in favor of traditional phones. Also this summer, a linesman for Central Vermont Public Service disconnected part of the emergency alert system by accident when he disconnected the power supply lines. The backup generator ran until it exhausted its fuel supply. Neither problem was detected by Entergy. We believe that the perennial and widespread nature of these many failures would lead any competent reviewer to reasonably conclude that the origin of these failures is systemic,? the petition stated. Contact Susan Smallheer at susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com. ---- NRC will consider review of alert system By CAROLYN LORIÉ Tuesday, December 14, 2004 - Brattleboro Reformer Staff http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102~8860~2596600,00.html BRATTLEBORO -- The Nu-clear Regulatory Commission has accepted for review a petition on the emergency alert system used by Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. The petition was filed by the New England Coalition, a nuclear power watchdog, on Dec. 9. The advocacy group requested that the NRC require Entergy to correct the problematic system and, if it does not, that the plant be shut down immediately. According to Raymond Shadis, technical advisor to the coalition, of particular concern are the tone alert radios used in the towns within the emergency planning zone. In the event of an emergency at the nuclear power plant, the radios sound an alarm letting people that they should tune to the radio for further instructions. While some towns, such as Brattleboro, have a siren that alerts residents about emergencies, there are parts of town outside of its range. In that case, households are supposed to be equipped with the radios, as are those residents where there is no siren in place. The problem, according to the coalition's petition, is that the radios do not always receive the signal correctly and often times do not work. Also of concern, said Shadis, is that personnel do not appear to be prepared to deal with emergencies, as illustrated with the transformer fire in June. In the petition, Shadis pointed out that personnel at the reactor struggled with the alert system, causing a delay in notifying the state of the situation. Though the NRC accepted the petition for review -- which means that NRC staff will consider the concerns and possibly take action -- regulatory personnel, according to Shadis, did not think it was necessary to shut down the plant while the review was under way. This is not the first time that concerns about the plant's notification system have surfaced. In November, the NRC cited Vermont Yankee for its failure to keep records on the distribution of the radios. The lapse was considered a low to moderate safety threat. In the report, NRC staff wrote that the company was in violation of NRC regulations "because you did not have the means to provide early notification to the entire populace within the plume exposure pathway...." According to Entergy spokesman Rob Williams, the company is addressing the problems. "We are working to upgrade the notification system and that includes the data base for the radio distribution," said Williams. "We offer additional radios to anyone who wants one in the [emergency planning zone]. We are also working to improve the signal strength." Williams added that in addition to the sirens and tone alert radios, emergency personnel from the towns have agreed to use a public address system on emergency vehicles. How an emergency at Vermont Yankee would be handled has been a cause of concern for many residents. In addition to complaints about the tone alert radios not working properly, many feel that the current evacuation plan cannot be implemented. Most of the towns in the planning zone have not approved the plan, including Brattleboro. The Brattleboro Selectboard is in the process of reviewing and updating it, in conjunction with the Vermont Emergency Management Agency. Parents with children in area schools have also voiced their concerns recently that the plan is unclear about evacuating students during school hours. About 50 people attended a November meeting in Brattleboro about the evacuation plan for school children. Once the NRC sends out a formal letter accepting the petition, the regulator will have 120 days to take action. Another coalition petition was filed earlier this year, asking that the NRC require Vermont Yankee personnel to conduct a full inventory of its spent fuel. The petition was in response to fuel rods that were said to be missing from the reactor, although they were later discovered in the spent fuel pool. The petition is still under review. Shadis expressed frustration that the NRC is allowing the nuclear reactor to continue running, while the effectiveness of its emergency alert system is in question. "It is a whopping dangerous mistake to allow an emergency planning system to fall into decay hoping that you won't have an accident," said Shadis. -------- washington 'bulk vitrification' tri-cityherald.com By Annette Cary December 14th, 2004 http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5912673p-5819836c.html A new test facility could be turning radioactive wastes into glass a year from now, using a process that officials hope will save millions of dollars and shave years off Hanford's environmental cleanup. On Monday, the state agreed to allow up to 300,000 gallons of the waste to be vitrified, or turned into glass, to test a new method for stabilizing radioactive waste. Under the permit, the Department of Energy may test so-called "bulk vitrification" at a full-scale pilot plant in central Hanford. The permit allows the test facility to operate for up to 400 days. "The key thing about this is vitrifying actual tank waste by this time next year and collecting the data we'll need to make a decision with the regulators on using this technology, along with the Waste Treatment Plant," said Roy Schepens, director of DOE's Office of River Protection in Richland. Hanford has 53 million gallons of radioactive and chemical wastes now stored in huge underground tanks. The wastes date back to the 1940s and are a legacy of making plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program. DOE is building a $5.8 billion vitrification plant to turn much of that waste into glass for permanent burial elsewhere. But the Waste Treatment Plant will be able to treat only up to two-thirds of the waste by a 2028 deadline. DOE wants to test bulk vitrification as one of two alternate methods being investigated for handling the remaining wastes. It might treat up to 26 million gallons of waste, and like the vitrification plant, it would turn radioactive and chemical waste into glass. But while the vitrification plant would produce logs of high-level radioactive waste and logs of low-activity waste, bulk vitrification would be used only for low-activity radioactive waste. In the process, waste would be dried, mixed with silica-rich dirt and packed into insulated boxes up to 24 feet long. Electrodes would be inserted into the mixture to heat and melt it into a huge brick of glass that would be permanently buried -- container, electrodes and all. The state will continue to have substantial regulatory control at the test plant. DOE contractor CH2M Hill Hanford Group has subcontracted with AMEC to make up to 50 blocks of glass from waste drawn from one of Hanford's 177 underground tanks, Tank S-109. The process will be varied slightly to produce each block to determine the best way to make the glass. CH2M Hill projects that using bulk vitrification to treat some of the waste would cost about 35 percent less than extending the life of the vitrification plant past the 2028 treatment deadline or expanding the vitrification plant with a second low-activity waste treatment facility. The bulk vitrification project would cost about $1.4 billion. The state must approve each test based on how parameters would be varied and what would be contained in off-gases and secondary waste produced by the tests. If the tests show bulk vitrification cannot safely produce a high-quality glass, other options will be considered. Those could include expanding the Waste Treatment Plant or using the second alternate technology being considered, steam reforming. That would use high-pressure steam to turn a mixture of clay and waste into BB-sized particles. During the public comment period before the bulk vitrification demonstration permit was issued, the state heard concerns about whether gases produced when the waste is heated would be adequately captured. The state is satisfied that the off-gas system has redundancies that will protect the environment, said Suzanne Dahl, tank waste disposal project manager for the Washington State Department of Ecology. The state also is satisfied that the proposed method to separate low-activity waste from high-level radioactive waste in Tank S-109 should work well, Dahl said. DOE plans pretreatment within the tanks and then will use a second separation method to remove more high-level waste when the waste is out of the tank. If bulk vitrification is approved after tests are completed as a way to treat large amounts of radioactive waste, the waste would be separated into a low-activity stream at the vitrification plant that's under construction. Construction on the pilot plant will begin in January. By July, AMEC should be ready to do tests with simulated, nonradioactive waste, Schepens said. The first block of glass should be made from actual tank waste in December 2005. Bulk vitrification has been used by others, including a Texas project to treat some commercial waste with low levels of radioactivity contaminated with PCBs. But Hanford's tank waste is chemically different than most forms of waste, requiring a rigorous testing program to determine the ability of the glass to capture waste and prevent it from reaching the environment. "(The state permit) is a significant step in our process to evaluate bulk vitrification," Ed Aromi, president and general manager of CH2M Hill Hanford Group, said in a prepared statement. "This technology holds great promise to safely and effectively treat Hanford tank waste." ----- Hot waste returns tri-cityherald.com By Annette Cary December 14th, 2004 http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5912677p-5819844c.html A shipment of waste from Hanford to a permanent repository in New Mexico was stopped Friday in Colorado because one of the drums of waste may have been too radioactively hot. It's the first time any shipment has had a drum with a radiation reading too high to be accepted at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant -- a permanent underground repository for transuranic waste in the New Mexico desert, said Kerry Watson, the Department of Energy director for the office of characterization and transportation in Carlsbad, N.M. The drum had been measured at Hanford with a combined beta and gamma radiation reading at the surface of the drum of 200 millirems per hour. No neutron radiation reading was detected. But because instruments cannot detect radiation below 0.2 millirems per hour, there could have been a neutron dose of up to 0.2 millirems, Watson said. That would have put the overall radiation dose slightly above the maximum allowed of 200 millirems per hour. "We couldn't say it would. We couldn't say it wouldn't," Watson said. The possible problem was discovered when paperwork was being inspected in New Mexico as the shipment was already en route, Watson said. A truck carrying two shipping containers that hold up to 14 drums each was stopped near Fort Collins, Colo. The truck returned Saturday to Hanford. Another survey of the drum's radiation levels on Sunday again found 200 millirems per hour of beta and gamma radiation and an undetectable level of neutron radiation, said Colleen French, spokeswoman for the Department of Energy in Richland. The drum contains transuranic waste, which typically is used equipment, protective clothing or other debris contaminated with plutonium. The waste in the drum came from the Plutonium Finishing Plant and the PUREX reprocessing plant at Hanford. The PUREX plant was used to extract plutonium from fuel irradiated in Hanford reactors for the nation's nuclear weapons program. The Plutonium Finishing Plant turned the plutonium into metal buttons to ship to the nation's weapons production plants. Officials at Hanford and WIPP, the New Mexico repository, are discussing what to do with the rogue drum and how to prevent the problem from occurring again, French said. The drum may be repacked, or it could be encased in an overpack to reduce the radiation dose at its surface, she said. Before being loaded onto trucks, the drums are packed into a shipping container, called a TRUPACT-II, that has substantial radiation shielding, she said. "There was never any health or safety concern" for the public en route, she said. At the surface of the shipping container, 0.5 millirems per hour of beta and gamma radiation was detected. That's far below the U.S. Department of Transportation limit, which also is 200 millirems per hour. The returned shipping containers are being held at Hanford, awaiting approval to ship them again. Hanford has shipped 3,838 drums in 124 shipments to WIPP since 2000. The returned shipment would have been the 125th. "Two more shipments are scheduled this week, so it's even more important to get this resolved," French said. -------- MILITARY -------- africa Amnesty: Two-thirds of Liberians suffered sexual violence during '99-'03 war Tue Dec 14, 2004 11:37 AM ET Canadian Press http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1856&ncid=723&e=4&u=/cpress/20041214/ca_pr_on_wo/liberia_sexual_violence MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) - Some two-thirds of Liberia's population may have suffered sexual abuse during the west African nation's 1999-2003 civil war, with women and girls the main targets but men and boys also falling prey, a human rights group said Tuesday. Fighters often drugged by their commanders used sexual violence to shame and subjugate communities in Liberia, where rape carries a deep stigma, and Amnesty International estimated that 60 to 70 per cent of Liberia's three million people suffered sexual abuse during the war. "Women and girls have described being repeatedly raped during the same incident. Others have been raped on several different occasions during Liberia's successive - and almost continuous - armed conflicts since December 1989," the London-based rights group said in a report. Amnesty said "findings indicated that some men and boys had also been subjected to sexual violence" in the latest round of fighting, but the group didn't provide any figures. "Rape and other forms of sexual violence have become endemic in Liberia," Amnesty said. Rebels battled ex-president Charles Taylor's forces from 1999 until 2003, when an insurgent siege of the capital, Monrovia, and international pressure forced Taylor from office and paved the way for a peace deal. "While it is impossible to establish with any degree of accuracy the exact numbers of women and girls - of all ages - who have been affected by sexual violence, it has been pervasive throughout the conflict," said Amnesty. Taylor first launched Liberia into conflict in 1989, leading an insurgency that resulted in an eventual stalemate and his 1997 election as president. But civil war broke out again in 1999, when rebels took up arms against Taylor. A peace deal was signed following Taylor's departure in August 2003, and a 15,000-strong UN force now secures the peace. Some 70,000 fighters - including thousands of children - have been disarmed. Elections are set for October 2005, with a postwar government led by a popular businessman, Gyude Bryant, governing until then. -------- business Protecting people or profit? By Max Jourdan BBC Reporter, Private War Tuesday, 14 December, 2004 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/4079691.stm America's privatised military machine is at the heart of the war on drugs in Colombia. Defence corporations hired by the US government enjoy extremely lucrative contracts, but who is responsible when something goes wrong? A Colombian journalist was recently allowed access to the hostages Last year, I came across some dramatic footage of three US contractors held hostage by members of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), a 17,000 strong, left-wing guerrilla group who live deep in the jungle. Why were these apparent "civilians" kidnapped and held captive for nearly two years? I began my investigation by contacting one of the hostage's mothers, Jo Rosano. She told me about the crash of a tiny single-engine plane, which led to her son Marc's kidnapping. Marc Gonsalves was employed by Northrop Grumman - the fifth biggest multinational defence corporation in the US - to help fight the war on drugs in Colombia. The job involved dangerous aerial cocaine-eradication missions above the jungle, and on 13 February, 2004, the Cessna plane that Marc and four others were in experienced engine failure and crash-landed. Two of the crew were killed and the other three - including Marc - were taken hostage. Unanswered questions Jo Rosano campaigns tirelessly for something to be done for her son Jo Rosano has a mother's rage and wanted answers. She believes more would have been done for her son Marc if he had been a soldier, not just an employee. This is something the US ambassador to Bogota strongly denies. He told me: "The United States has no higher priority than the safe return of the American hostages in a manner consistent with US law and policy." The official US position is that they refuse to negotiate with terrorist organisations like Farc, a group now viewed by the Bush administration on a par with al-Qaeda. I approached Marc's employer, Northrop Grumman, for some answers. They stonewalled me, just as they had done Jo. Outsourcing I did, however, come across some letters written by two disgruntled employees and former pilots working for this company in Colombia. Doug Cockes had 30 years' professional experience flying on drug missions. He was one of the "whistleblowers" who had alerted Northrop Grumman's vice-president to the fact that the single-engine planes used to fly out on the dangerous coca surveillance missions over guerrilla-controlled territory were not adequate. Doug Cockes was accused by Northrop Grumman of having a negative attitude I flew to Colorado to interview him. He told me: "If I could just talk to one of the people that could have made the change from single to twin engine, I would ask them how they sleep at night." He explained that his written warnings of imminent disaster to Northrop Grumman and the US State Department - who had issued the contracts - were ignored. Two months after his prophetic letters were sent, two planes had crashed in the Colombian jungle, resulting in deaths and hostage-taking. So why outsource foreign conflicts to multi-billion dollar private military corporations, if there are concerns about the safety of hardware? Political heavyweights, both in Colombia and the US - including Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - suggest that it is more economical to use contractors, rather than regular troops, because the army is stretched beyond capacity. An alternative opinion held by other US politicians is that "corporate soldiers" make it possible for the government to avoid responsibility. Accountability The 40-year narcotic-funded conflict in Colombia between US and Colombian government troops, Farc guerrillas, and more recently, right-wing paramilitaries, is far from simple. Perhaps this is even more reason to stop private companies acting on matters of foreign policy. I met the widow of Tommy Schmidt, a Vietnam war hero and one of the Northrop Grumman pilots killed in the second crash. She is filing a lawsuit against Northrop Grumman and the US Defence Department, accusing them of negligence, gross mismanagement and the death of her husband. "Northrop Grumman offered me $350,000 (Ł180,000)," Sharon said, "but in taking that money I had to agree not to ask any more questions, and the whole point of all of this is that I want answers to our questions. I refused their offer." Across the US and in Colombia I began to uncover a multi-layered world of military contracts, sub-contracts and brass plate subsidiaries. It seemed that profits, not patriotism, prevail in the business of war. Interviews with US and Colombian politicians, contractors on the ground and big players in the military corporate world made me question whether American taxpayers were getting value for their $1.1bn annual funding for private war. However, UN and US drug officials I spoke to were keen to point out that the cocaine eradication policy is successful, with a drop in production of around 20%. So, should the emphasis be on whether private companies have a place in foreign conflict, or on what can be done to offer them a higher level of protection? I spoke to former Congressman Bob Barr, who advocates a complete ban on contractors, in favour of a massive regular army presence. This view is echoed by Congresswoman Janice Schakowsky. "Are we outsourcing in order to avoid public scrutiny, controversy or embarrassment?" she said. Northrop Grumman refused to be interviewed, but issued a statement saying it regretted the plight of the hostages and the deaths of its employees. And the desperate situation of the men held hostage in the Colombian jungle, continues indefinitely. Private War was broadcast on Tuesday, 14 December, 2004, at 1930 GMT on BBC Two (UK). ---- Eurofighter partners sign contract for second tranche BERLIN (AFP) Dec 14, 2004 http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041214142419.pfchn1md.html Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain have signed a contract to build a second batch of Eurofighter aircraft, a spokesman for Eurofighter in Germany told AFP on Tuesday. The contract, which was signed in Unterhaching, near Munich, on Tuesday, covered the construction of 235 Eurofighter aircraft, the spokesman said. The aircraft would be ready for delivery from the beginning of 2008. The German airforce alone would receive 68 aircraft. ----- Computer Sciences Sells DynCorp Units Washington Post By Renae Merle December 14, 2004 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62259-2004Dec13.html Computer Sciences Corp. is selling parts of Reston-based DynCorp it acquired last year, saying the units, which provide security to foreign leaders and train international police, do not fit with its information technology focus. Veritas Capital of New York, a private equity group that has bought and sold defense contractors, agreed to pay CSC $775 million in cash and $75 million in preferred stock. CSC will keep DynCorp's information technology business, which links computer systems, builds communication networks and modifies software. The units being sold, DynCorp International, DynMarine, and some DynCorp Technical Services contracts, had $1.6 billion in revenue in the year ended in October, CSC officials said. The units employ about 900 people in the Washington area. They provide primarily low-profit-margin services, and their contracts include protecting Afghan President Hamid Karzai and training Kuwaiti and Iraqi forces. "It's critically important work and while it's a very successful business, it's not a business that we have synergy" with, said Paul M. Cofoni, president of CSC's federal business. "Even at the time of acquisition, many of our customers wondered why we would keep that business." "They were sort of orphaned at CSC [with] not a lot of attention paid to them," said Robert B. McKeon, president of Veritas Capital. "CSC is really an IT company not interested in these types of businesses." One of Veritas's previous investments, Vertex Aerospace, had government contracts to maintain planes and competed with DynCorp. Veritas sold Vertex this year and is comfortable with the market, McKeon said. "It has to be managed very carefully; a lot of controls and discipline have to be in place," he said. Veritas bought the DynCorp units at a discount, something common among services companies, which earn smaller margins and face more competitors, industry analysts said. "The concern was that they would drag down CSC's margins," said Stuart McCutchan, editor of Defense Mergers & Acquisitions. CSC of El Segundo, Calif., bought DynCorp in March 2003 for $950 million but had always questioned whether it would keep the non-IT parts, company officials said. For CSC, the deal will likely mean slower growth in the short term. Operations supporting the military in the Middle East, many of them conducted under DynCorp contracts, are the fastest-growing part of CSC's business, the company has previously acknowledged. The company, which reported revenue of $11.3 billion in fiscal 2003, said yesterday that it would take a $400 million gain related to the deal. The transaction strengthens the company's financial position and gives the firm more financial flexibility, Van B. Honeycutt, CSC'S chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. "This transaction will allow us to continue concentrating on our core competency of providing information technology, engineering and professional services," Honeycutt said. The deal, which still needs regulatory approval, is expected to close in April. CSC stock closed yesterday at $57.25, up 2.7 percent. -------- pakistan / india Pakistan questions Indian arms shopping spree The News International By Mariana Baabar December 14, 2004 http://jang.com.pk/thenews/dec2004-daily/14-12-2004/main/main1.htm ISLAMABAD: As the second round of expert-level talks on nuclear confidence building measures (CBMs) between Pakistan and India starts today, the government says that the recent statements coming from New Delhi are "disturbing" and sound "paranoid". Islamabad has also expressed apprehensions about India's buying spree from world weapons market. "Statements made by the Indian defence and external affairs ministers are disturbing (regarding Pakistan's efforts to buy conventional weapons). You have to be objective. India has a very ambitious weapon acquiring programme," Foreign Office spokesman Masood Khan told a weekly briefing here on Monday. New Delhi has sent strong signals to Washington and Islamabad that their defence agreement, which sees Islamabad acquiring conventional weapons, could cloud Indo-US and Indo-Pak relations. Khan pointed to international websites and data available from world institutions, which say that India's shopping list is non-exhaustive as it plans to buy massive weapons with sophisticated technology from world markets. "India is buying weapons from Israel, France, the US and the UK and this buying spree is worth $ 95 billion stretching for the next 15 years. Compare this to Pakistan's modest acquisition which will fill up gaps which emerged in the 90's when huge US sanctions crippled our capability," said the spokesman. He emphasised that Pakistan would not try to match India gun-for-gun as New Delhi's shopping list was non-exhaustive. "We must have symmetry as this would contribute to stability in the region," Khan added. He said the Indian ministers sounded paranoid with their statements about Pakistan and were not grounded in facts. "As far as the F-16s are concerned, India has to sort out its relations with the US and making such statements are misleading their own public and misinforming the international community," said the spokesman. Khan was not apologetic about the new US bill, which has now become law and entitles Pakistan to buy weapons from Washington. "The law has a section on Pakistan and we welcome it as it gives an enabling environment in all areas of defence," he added. The government says that it is optimistic about talks on nuclear CBMs to discuss the draft agreement on advance notification of missile tests. Progress was made in June and efforts would continue to build and expand on the MoU related to this. Khan said both India and Pakistan are nuclear states and they have to be responsible as they are also neighbours. For this a reliable link of communication is essential and if the foreign secretaries have a hot line this would also help in stopping accidental launch of nuclear weapons. Pakistan, he said, was serious about nuclear risk reduction measures. The spokesman shrugged off criticism of both the countries "ambitious plans" to discuss CBMs related to nuclear and conventional weapons and said they were in no way "ambitious". "By meeting we will be trying to understand each others aspects and it is important for nuclear states to be in communication with each other. We will try to see how far we can go. We shall discuss each other's perspectives," he said. Responding to a question, Khan said efforts were under way to raise the staff strength of India and Pakistan's High Commissions to 110, as it existed in 2001. He said appointments were being made but did not specify a date as when it would be completed. The spokesman said there should be no passports for the Srinagar-Muzzafarabad bus service as the LoC was a temporary line and could not be given permanent status. "Passports should be out with India clearing the way for interaction of the people of Kashmir. This is a test for our perseverance," he added. Pakistan is not stating publicly as to how long it will wait for India to respond to its demands for holding talks to solve the Baglihar Dam issue. "I cannot be specific about how long Pakistan will wait before going to a neutral expert. We have shown patience and respected diplomatic norms. We wanted to exhaust all avenues," he added. Agencies add: Masood Khan said Pakistan has said it wants the United States to sort out its disputes with Iran through dialogue and would object to any US assault on Iranian interests. The spokesman said he thought there would be no US strikes against Iran but Pakistan would be in opposition to such moves if they were ever made. He denied that the ongoing dialogue between Pakistan and India had collapsed. He said solution to all the bilateral problems would be found through composite dialogue, for sure. Talking to a television channel, the spokesman underlined the need of further strengthening Pak-China economic, trade and strategic relations. He said with the passage of time Pak-China political and strategic integration would further strengthen. Khan said it would only be possible when Chinese investment in Pakistan increases, joint ventures were undertaken and private sectors of both the countries come nearer. As part of the ongoing composite dialogue process, the defence officials of India and Pakistan will be holding talks on Tuesday (today) in the Ministry of Defence on issues related to Sir Creek. The Pakistani side will be led by Major-General Jamil-ur-Rehman Afridi, Surveyor General of Pakistan, while the Indian side will be headed by Brig Girish Kumar, Deputy Surveyor General of India. The two sides will discuss various modalities regarding the joint survey of the boundary pillars laid in the Sir Creek area in the past. ----- Pakistan turns up no signs of bin Laden Associated Press By Munir Ahmad, December 13, 2004 http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2004/12/13/pakistan_denies_cia_has_bases_on_its_soil/ ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Pakistan said Monday there was no evidence Osama bin Laden is hiding in the country, and denied it allowed CIA agents to set up bases along the border to search for the al-Qaida leader. Pakistani and American generals agree the trail for bin Laden has gone cold, more than three years after the Sept. 11 attacks. Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan said bin Laden had not been seen anywhere, and scoffed at reports he might be hiding in Chitral, in the country's scenic north. "Osama bin Laden has not been sighted in Chitral or in any other part of Pakistan," Khan said, adding, "there are no operations being conducted by U.S. forces inside Pakistan." President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has previously acknowledged that a small number of American experts were working with Pakistani troops in operations against al-Qaida militants. But he has denied that U.S. forces -- deployed in neighboring Afghanistan -- are actively hunting bin Laden in Pakistan. A report in Monday's New York Times, citing anonymous U.S. officials, said the CIA had set up small bases along the border in late 2003, but the operatives were being hampered by uncooperative Pakistani minders. It said the CIA had concluded bin Laden was being sheltered by tribesmen and foreign militants in northwestern Pakistan, and that he could be aiming to launch a "spectacular" attack on the United States. The issue is a sensitive one for Musharraf, who is under pressure at home from hard-liners opposed to his strong ties with Washington. "There are no CIA cells in Pakistan ... in our tribal areas, and there is absolutely no truth in this New York Times report," said army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan. Some believe bin Laden is hiding along the rugged border. In an interview televised Sunday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said bin Laden was "definitely" in the region, but didn't say where. A senior Pakistani counterterrorism official said Monday U.S. officials had not found intelligence on bin Laden's whereabouts, although their information had helped nab some al-Qaida suspects in Pakistan. "Whenever U.S. intelligence and communication experts come up with some specific information, and they need our help, we organize things, act on their tips, but the operations are conducted by our own security forces," he said on condition of anonymity. The Times said Pakistani military officials have strictly supervised the CIA personnel at the alleged bases in Pakistan, limiting their effectiveness. A senior official of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency denied the report's claim that militants in tribal regions may be getting help from some its operatives. The agency helped build the Taliban militia before Pakistan switched allegiance to support the U.S.-led war on terrorism. Earlier this month, President Bush met with Musharraf in Washington and defended Pakistan's cooperation in the bin Laden hunt, saying its forces had been "incredibly active and very brave" in the South Waziristan tribal region -- a suspected hiding place of the al-Qaida chief and his top deputy Ayman al-Zawahri. The forces have killed or arrested hundreds of alleged al-Qaida sympathizers and busted terror training bases. On Monday, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Afghanistan said he couldn't comment on CIA operations. He said American forces were relentlessly searching for clues to bin Laden's whereabouts. "No matter where he is, whether he is in Afghanistan, whether he is in Pakistan or wherever he is, I think we share President Karzai's sentiment that some day ... he will be brought to justice," Maj. Mark McCann told a press briefing in Kabul. A spokeswoman at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul also said she couldn't speak for the CIA. -------- prisoners of war C.I.A. Order on Detainees Shows Its Role Was Curbed nytimes.com By DOUGLAS JEHL December 14, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/politics/14intel.html WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 - Concerns about harsh techniques used by Special Operations forces prompted the Central Intelligence Agency last year to bar its officers in Iraq from taking part in military interrogations where prisoners were subjected to duress, intelligence officials said. A classified directive issued by the agency's headquarters on Aug. 8, 2003, to all its personnel in Iraq advised that "if the military employed any type of techniques beyond questions and answers, we should not participate and should not be present," according to an account provided by a senior intelligence official. In telling C.I.A. personnel to keep away from interrogations where military personnel were using harsh techniques, the directive was more restrictive than was previously known. Officials first disclosed the agency's order last September, saying that it had barred C.I.A. officers from interviewing the military's prisoners unless military officials were present. The new disclosure is the latest sign of longstanding unease in intelligence circles about the military's interrogation techniques in Iraq. Complaints by the Defense Intelligence Agency about the rough treatment of prisoners by the same Special Operations units were made public last week in a document disclosed by the American Civil Liberties Union. But the C.I.A. guidelines imposed for Iraq did not affect interrogations of prisoners in C.I.A. custody, including leaders of Al Qaeda being detained in secret locations around the world, officials said. Legal rulings by the Bush administration have granted the C.I.A. greater flexibility in conducting interrogations of suspected terrorists, including the use of harsh methods. The C.I.A. issued its directive on the military's prisoners in Iraq shortly after the agency's station in Baghdad complained in a July 16, 2003, cable about the use of noise, bright light and other techniques by Special Operations forces who were working in joint teams with C.I.A. personnel. The agency also barred its employees last year from entering a secret interrogation facility in Baghdad used by Special Operations forces. The restrictive C.I.A. guidelines remain in effect, intelligence officials have said. Army documents first obtained by The Denver Post show that an Iraqi prisoner was found dead in June 2003 at the classified interrogation facility used by Special Operations forces in Baghdad after being restrained in a chair for questioning and subjected to physical and psychological stress. An autopsy determined that the prisoner died of a "hard, fast blow" to the head, the newspaper reported last spring. In recent interviews, intelligence officials have declined to say whether the C.I.A. complaints were related to that incident. But one intelligence official did say that the agency had become aware early in the campaign in Iraq, in June 2003, about "a significant incident of abuse involving military personnel of a detainee." The joint military-intelligence teams have operated under various names in Afghanistan and Iraq, including Task Force 121 and Task Force 6-26. Their main focus has been to track down and capture leaders of Al Qaeda and members of Saddam Hussein's inner circle. The Aug. 8, 2003, cable from the C.I.A.'s headquarters noted that all prisoners in Iraq were the responsibility of the military, and that while the C.I.A. might have an interest in questioning them, it should recognize that "we do not own, control or have custody of them," one intelligence official said. Abu Ghraib near Baghdad, the site of the worst known prisoner abuses in Iraq, is run by American military forces. The cable said that the C.I.A. should not suggest, condone or concur in any interrogation techniques beyond questions and answers with prisoners in military custody in Iraq, the intelligence official said. It is not clear how the C.I.A. directive and the complaint a year later by the Defense Intelligence Agency have affected relations between those intelligence services and the Special Operations forces. The C.I.A. continues to take part in the joint military-intelligence task forces in Iraq, but it is unclear if it is taking part in interrogations, one senior government official said. -------- us Army Guard now says its Iraq troops figure was inaccurate By Dave Moniz, USA TODAY 12/14/2004 http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-12-13-guard-deaths_x.htm WASHINGTON — The Army National Guard said Monday it had given USA TODAY an inaccurate count of the total number of Guard troops in Iraq since the beginning of the war in March 2003, but still could not provide a precise count. USA TODAY used the inaccurate Guard numbers to construct an analysis that showed part-time troops from the Army National Guard were more likely to die in Iraq than their counterparts in the active-duty Army. Without more precise figures, there is no way to accurately compare death rates between various branches of U.S. military forces during the Iraq war. The Guard said last week that 37,000 Guard troops had set foot in Iraq since the start of the war. On Monday, Guard spokesman Scott Woodham said 90,972 Guard troops had been ordered to Iraq, but he could not say how many had actually gotten there, and how many were in mobilization stations or on their way. Woodham gave two explanations for the error. In a telephone interview with USA TODAY mid-afternoon Monday, Woodham said the National Guard Bureau made "an internal mistake" in compiling the numbers. He said that personnel at Guard headquarters had misread a series of numbers on a spreadsheet and that accounted for the lower figure. In a second conversation about two hours later, Woodham said he "misunderstood the question" when asked how many Army Guard troops had deployed to Iraq since the beginning of the war. On Monday, the active-duty Army also revised one of the numbers it had given USA TODAY. Army spokesman Dov Schwartz said 659 Army soldiers have died in Iraq since the start of the war, up from the 622 the Army cited last week. Battle deaths for part-time troops from the Army Guard and the Army Reserve — who typically drill just a weekend a month and two weeks in the summer unless there is a war — are still significantly higher than for part-time troops in past conflicts, Woodham said. Throughout the 12-year Vietnam War, for example, fewer than 100 Guard troops were killed, compared with the 145 who have died in less than two years in Iraq. Army Guard and Army Reserve soldiers are assigned some of the most dangerous missions in Iraq, including convoy duty and guarding facilities. And Guard and Reserve soldiers are being counted on heavily to support the U.S.-led occupation. Part-time troops now make up about 40% of the U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq. Several other military branches told USA TODAY last week that they could not determine how many of their troops had served in Iraq since the war began. The Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force could not provide troop numbers. -------- Skelton urges temporary use of older APCs Tuesday, Dec 14, 2004 Jefferson City News Tribune http://www.newstribune.com/articles/2004/12/14/news_state/1214040016.txt U.S. Rep. Ike Skelton this week asked the Pentagon to provide soldiers in Iraq with some Vietnam era armored vehicles at least until improved humvees can be supplied. The Missouri Democrat is the top minority party member of the House Armed Services Committee. "Armed with multiple machine guns behind gun shields, the M-113 (Armored Cavalry Assault Vehicle) proved itself an especially effective vehicle for close combat against enemy forces armed with RPGs and AK-47 rifles," Skelton said in a letter Monday to Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I understand that the M-113 may not provide the same level of protection as some other armored vehicles currently in use, but they certainly provide better protection than soft-skinned vehicles." Skelton also noted that some humvees are having problems with the additional weight of the supplemental armored kits being provided for better protection to U.S. forces in Iraq. "As you know," Skelton told Myers, "broken-down up-armored HMMWVs provide no protection at all." Noting reports that about 700 M-113s had been shipped to nearby Kuwait, Skelton asked Myers to see if any of the armored vehicles could be sent to Iraq as a possible "solution to the Army's challenge in supplying armored transportation to protect our soldiers." -------- war crimes Iraq War Crimes Trials to Begin Next Week Associated Press By NICK WADHAMS December 14, 2004 http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_TRIALS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Trials against the top figures in Saddam Hussein's ousted regime will begin next week, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said Tuesday, but Saddam will not be among them. Many of Iraq's former Baath Party members have been in jail for more than a year, and few have been able to meet with counsel. Saddam's Jordan-based lawyers say they have not seen the former dictator, arrested a year ago Monday, and said holding trials so soon would be illegal. "The Iraqi court will be in violation of the basic rights of the defendants, which is to have access to legal counsel while being interrogated and indicted," Ziad al-Khasawneh said. Officials had given conflicting accounts about when the trials before the Iraqi Special Tribunal would begin, and have also suggested that Saddam would not be tried first. The Associated Press learned Tuesday that the proceedings next week would not involve Saddam. "I can now tell you clearly and precisely that, God willing, next week the trials of the symbols of the former regime will start, one by one so that justice can take its path in Iraq," Allawi told the interim National Council, without saying who would be tried. Allawi had previously said they would take place in October or November, while others have said they would begin no earlier than 2006. An Allawi spokesman later said he had no information about who would be tried first and said more details would be released Wednesday. "There is a court process that involves investigative judges and a hearing for some of the former regime officials that is under preparation that we would expect to be held next week," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. "At that point, the accused and their attorneys do go to court, although that's not the actual trial." Iraq's human rights minister, Bekhtiar Amin, said from Geneva that work was under way to bring some of Saddam's lieutenants to trial before him. "I don't know for sure when Saddam Hussein in particular will be tried, but the trial is scheduled to start sometime next year, the first quarter of next year," Amin said. "I doubt that Saddam will be the first one to be tried, there are others whom they will start with and the work is ongoing right now." Allawi also announced the arrest of a cousin of Saddam's, Izzi-Din Mohammed Hassan al-Majid. Al-Majid, who fled Iraq in 1995 and was granted indefinite leave to remain in Britain in 2000, was arrested in Fallujah and will be put on trial as soon as possible, Allawi said. Government leaders have said recently the Special Tribunal is not yet prepared to begin the trials. They need to train judges and prosecutors, and sort through stacks of evidence, all under the pressure of a deadly insurgency that has been able to strike at will. "The prosecution team, the defense counsel, the investigative judges, the documents are not ready," National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie told the AP last week. "It will take time. If you want to get it right, it will take time." But leaders have come under new pressure recently. On Monday, the U.S. military acknowledged that eight of Saddam's 11 top lieutenants went on hunger strikes over the weekend to demand visits in jail from the International Committee of the Red Cross, but they were eating again by Monday. A lawyer for former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said they were protesting the legality of their trials and their detention. A U.S. official in Iraq had said Monday that one detainee had met a lawyer Sunday, the first time such an announcement had been made. Saddam's Jordanian-based lawyer, al-Khasawneh, said the trials wouldn't be able to take place even next year because there was so much work to be done. "I think that Mr. Allawi is dreaming," he said. "He cannot make such a bold announcement before consulting with his boss - President Bush." Younadem Kana, a member of the interim National Council, said Monday the body wants a speedy trial for Saddam and his lieutenants because the detainees are giving hope to insurgents in Iraq. "Punishing them would be a deterrent," he said. Some Allawi critics have claimed he is politicizing the trials ahead of Jan. 30 elections. Salem Chalabi, the tribunal director, was ousted abruptly in September and accused Allawi of pushing for show trials to boost his popularity before the vote. American officials with the Justice Department's Regime Crimes Liaison Office are advising the Iraqi Special Tribunal on the process. The Americans paid the tribunal's budget of $75 million for 2004-05. U.S. Embassy officials said they had no prior information on Allawi's statement and learned of his plan only through media reports. The Bush administration has repeatedly said the trials must be legitimate and could take some time. Saddam and his 11 top lieutenants have been held for months in an undisclosed location, believed to be near the Baghdad International Airport, west of the capital. They appeared before the Iraqi Special Tribunal in July to face preliminary charges from the former regime. Allawi also said a mass grave believed to hold about 500 bodies was found near the city of Sulaimaniyah, 162 miles northeast of Baghdad. It appeared he was referring to grave site reported last week by an official in the region, who had initially announced a mass grave had been found possibly containing 500 bodies; when pressed later, he said two skeletons had been found so far. Saddam was presented with seven charges that included gassing thousands of Kurds in 1988, the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the suppression of 1991 revolts by Kurds and Shiites, the murders of religious and political leaders and the mass displacement of Kurds in the 1980s. -------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE -------- courts / tribunals U.K. court backs inquiry into death of Iraqi The Associated Press 12/14/2004 http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-12-14-britain-iraq_x.htm LONDON (AP) — A court ruled Tuesday tha the British government should hold an independent inquiry into the death of an Iraqi civilian who was allegedly beaten to death by British troops. The High Court ruled in favor of the family of Baha Mousa, 26, a Basra hotel receptionist who died in Sept. 2003 after being arrested and taken to a British military base. But judges Lord Justice Rix and Mr. Justice Thayne Forbes rejected applications from the families of five other Iraqis allegedly killed by U.K. soldiers. Mousa's family had asked the High Court to rule that European and British human rights laws applied to British soldiers in Iraq and that there should be an independent inquiry to determine whether he was unlawfully killed. Government lawyers had argued that British troops serving in Iraq weren't subject to the human rights laws because they were outside European jurisdiction. Officials say all allegations of death and mistreatment by British forces are investigated by the military. But the judges ruled that Mousa's death came within U.K. jurisdiction because he was in British custody when he died, unlike the other five Iraqis. They also criticized the Royal Military Police investigation into Mousa's death, saying it was not "timely, open or effective." A lawyer acting for Mousa's family welcomed the court ruling. "Today is a historic day for human rights and the rule of law in the U.K.," attorney Phil Shiner said. No one was immediately available for comment at the Ministry of Defense. A spokeswoman for Prime Minister Tony Blair's office said the government would be studying the judgment. All six victims in the High Court case died in British-occupied southeastern Iraq after major combat was declared over on May 1, 2003, and before the handover of power to an Iraqi administration on June 28 this year. Five victims allegedly were shot — two in their homes, one while driving, one at a funeral and one while working as a police officer. Mousa was the sixth. While British troops in Iraq have not been accused of prisoner abuse on the scale uncovered at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison, there have been several reports of ill-treatment of detainees, and British officials have investigated almost 800 claims for death, injury or property damage by British troops. -------- homeland security / national intelligence T-Rays Detect Chemical, Biological Weapons, Find Cancers ADELAIDE, Australia, December 14, 2004 (ENS) http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2004/2004-12-14-02.asp Forget hiding contraband, explosives or bioweapons. T-rays are here. New devices that use T-rays, or terahertz rays, to see through clothing and packaging as never before can identify chemical and biological weapons, explosives, or conventional weapons such as guns and knives with pinpoint precision. Even cancers cannot hide from T-rays. Scientists from America, Europe, Asia and Australia will share the latest advances in T-ray technology at a two day international workshop on TeraHertz for Defence and Security, at Adelaide University. Opening Thursday, the meeting is sponsored by Australia's Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO). Terahertz or T-rays are emissions between infra-red and microwaves. T-rays are 1,000 times higher in frequency than microwaves, which are used in cell phones and ovens, and 100 to 1,000 times lower than visible light. Until recently, this had been an unexplored part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Now scientists are using T-rays to analyze the composition and density of things the rays contact, as well as to image them. "Most molecules vibrate in the terahertz frequency, so if you can detect them with T-rays, you can get a very good fingerprint," explains conference organizer Professor Derek Abbott of Adelaide University. "T-rays pass through things like food packaging, clothing, plastic and cardboard enabling us to analyze what's inside. This means they can be used to detect and identify weapons of metal or plastic, illicit drugs or biological hazards like anthrax, even if they were hermetically sealed," Abbott says. "You can find out much more about the substance than you would with optical, infra-red or x-ray imaging, and this helps to identify it precisely." Because T-rays are low energy, they are also safe to use around people - unlike X-rays, Abbott explains. "One of the most important recent discoveries is that T-rays can also be used to detect cancer," Abbott says. "Australia is part of the big scientific race to find out why." Due to their low penetrating power of the human body, T-rays would probably be used to scan the outer skin or, on endoscopes, to scan the bowel and other organs for early signs of cancer, he predicts. Scientists at the University of Delaware (UD) are working with the Russian Academy of Sciences on a project to develop novel devices that emit terahertz signals for applications in cancer research, biochemical identification, and medical diagnostics. The research is being conducted at laboratories headed by Dr. James Kolodzey, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UD, and Miron Kagan, director of the Russian Academy?s Institute of Radioengineering and Electronics, with funding provided through the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation (CRDF). ?This CRDF program achieves synergy by combining the scientific strengths of the groups in St. Petersburg and Moscow in Russia with the experimental abilities of the University of Delaware,? Kolodzey said. The UD research team is recognized as an international leader in the development of terahertz nanotechnology, last year announcing it had discovered a means to harness the power of the terahertz frequencies in a palm sized device using a semiconductor nanostructure. Research is preliminary, but Kolodzey says the palm device might one day detect cancers in the body, determine from a distance the chemicals in a hazardous waste spill, or find victims trapped under rubble. The new imaging technology came to life in September 2002 when the European Space Agency?s (ESA) StarTiger team captured the world's first terahertz picture of a human hand. "When we started last June we set an ambitious goal: to build in four months the first compact submillimetre wave imager with near real time image capturing using state of the art micro-machining technology," said Peter de Maagt, ESA?s StarTiger project manager, "we reached this goal when the first terahertz images were taken in September." This breakthrough in terahertz imaging opened up the possibility for a new generation of applications, not only related to space but also in many non-space fields, including medicine, pharmaceuticals, security and aeronautics, said de Maagt. Unlike radio waves, which travel through objects, terazhertz frequencies are partially absorbed by objects or by the human body. But terahertz frequencies are not harmful to humans the way X-rays are because they vibrate at lower energy levels. Abbott says that the potential applications of T-rays are huge, from food safety and quality monitoring, to disease detection, airport security, postal scans for drugs, explosives or bioweapons, military threat detection and medical diagnosis. T-rays can also penetrate poor weather, dust and smoke far better than infrared or visible systems, says UK researcher Dr. Roger Appleby. "Imaging in this band offers the opportunity to navigate and perform surveillance in poor visibility." T-rays will also provide forensic analysts with new tools in the fight against crime, says Dr. Robert Miles of the University of Leeds. The ability of terahertz radiation to pass through different substances and differentiate between them on the basis of their composition will lead to much more precise identification of different types of glass, fabrics, lubricating oils and paper. The father of T-rays, Professor Xi-Cheng Zhang of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, says T-rays offer the opportunity for transformational advances in defense and security. "Recent work shows that T-rays have promise as a means of identifying explosive compounds, Zhang said. "Unique features in THz frequency have been obtained. Examples of such applications to identify terrorist threats include terahertz spectroscopy of biomaterial identification with fingerprint in terahertz range, and remote sensing and imaging of explosive targets." Zhang says that T-rays also offer promise for the emerging science of nanotechnology. "Although some people don't realize it, you can actually analyze things which are smaller that the wavelength of T-rays itself. You can break the wavelength of light by passing it through a tiny pinhole," Abbott explains. "This means we will soon be able to use T-rays to study human cells at below the cellular level." At the Adelaide workshop, the focus will be on warfare applications. U.S. Army scientist Dr. James O. Jensen will give a presentation on U.S. Army research in terahertz sensing science and electronic technology for effective battlefield deployment. Dr. Sandra Biedron from the U.S. Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory, will discuss the use of T-rays for homeland security with a focus on compact electron beam based sources. Dr. Anthony Thomas of the Jefferson Lab in the United States will discuss power and portability issues associated with the use of high power T-ray generation for concealed weapon detection and battlefield communications. Jefferson Lab is managed and operated by Southeastern Universities Research Association for the U.S. Department of Energy. -------- justice 9/11 Intel Bill Expands Powers of Patriot Act and "Politicizes Intelligence" Tuesday, December 14th, 2004 Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/14/1458259 The intelligence reform bill passed by Congress includes little-discussed provisions that would greatly expand the government's policing power and centralizes the intelligence community's surveillance powers which civil liberties advocates say increases the likelihood for government abuses. We speak with Robert Dreyfuss of Mother Jones and Timothy Edgar of the ACLU. [includes rush transcript] In the weeks following President Bush's reelection, the White House lobbied hard to push through a sweeping bill to reform to the country's intelligence community. The legislation won congressional approval last week and is expected to be signed by the President within days. The 9/11 intelligence bill, which creates a national intelligence director that will be in charge of the budgets of the country's 15 spy agencies, is being touted as the biggest overhaul of the country's intelligence community in half a century. Key House Republicans held up the legislation until a compromise was reached that ensured the Pentagon retained control of much its own intelligence operations including the National Security Agency which is the country's largest intelligence unit. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, one of only two Senators to vote against the measure, chastised his colleagues for voting before reading the final version of the massive bill and said "no legislation alone can forestall a terrorist attack." After the bill was approved, reports emerged that it included a number of little-noticed provisions that would greatly expand the government's policing power and in effect broaden the USA Patriot Act. The Washington Post reports that the new intelligence bill loosens standards for FBI surveillance warrants and allows the Justice Department to more easily detain people without bail. The bill will allow the FBI to obtain secret surveillance and search warrants of individuals even if the individual has no connection with a foreign government or established terrorist group. * Robert Dreyfuss, investigative reporter and contributing editor at Mother Jones, the Nation and American Prospect. He is the author of The Dreyfuss Report - a new blog on TomPaine.com. * Timothy Edgar, Legislative Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. RUSH TRANSCRIPT AMY GOODMAN: We're joined right now in our Washington studio by Robert Dreyfuss, investigative reporter and contributing editor of Mother Jones, The Nation, and The American Prospect. He's the author of a new blog at tompaine.com. ROBERT DREYFUSS: Good to be here. AMY GOODMAN: Good to have you with us. Can you talk about your concerns about the bill that President Bush is about to sign? ROBERT DREYFUSS: Well, I think first of all, you need to put it in context. After 9/11, and since then, there's been a stampede toward creating a surveillance society, toward creating a larger and more powerful intelligence community and merging the CIA and the FBI. We saw that in the PATRIOT Act that passed 99-1 in the Senate. We saw it again with this latest intelligence bill, which comes, by the way, after a tremendous expansion of the U.S. intelligence community. The budget -- and of course these figures are somewhat in doubt because they're so secret -- but the budget apparently for the intelligence community has gone from something like $26 or $27 billion before 9/11, to about $40 billion today. So, there's been a gigantic expansion of the intelligence community already. Now, as sort of part of a political football debate in Congress, the 9/11 commission recommendations have basically, with some changes, been enacted into law, which leads to yet another expansion, not only of the size of the intelligence community, but of the scope of the intelligence community. It creates, just like the PATRIOT Act did, new powers for the federal government, creates a centralization of the intelligence community under what they're calling a National Intelligence Director. And it was basically rushed through Congress with almost no voice being raised about the kind of concerns that I have about this bill. In fact, all of the opposition to it, at least if you read the newspaper accounts of this, was coming from the Pentagon, which feared that this new Intelligence Director would agglomerate too much power, reducing the Pentagon's control over its share of the intelligence community activity and budget. Once that was resolved through a compromise, there was nobody, I think, with the exception of Senator Byrd from West Virginia, who even blinked about the dangers in this bill. I'm -- I frankly -- I'm shocked that no Democrats have gotten up to scream about this. In fact, they all saw it as some sort of a perverse triumph over the White House to have enacted this bill. Meanwhile, I think it's just yet another part of the pendulum, which is continuing still to swing away from civil liberties, and toward a surveillance state because of the alleged threat of terrorism since 9/11. AMY GOODMAN: Robert Dreyfuss, we're also joined on the telephone by Timothy Edgar, who is legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. Timothy Edgar, what are the major provisions that you are most concerned about specifically? TIMOTHY EDGAR: Well, some of them were talked about in that Washington Post story. The expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to include individuals -- for now, this is just non-citizens, but we're worried it could be expanded in the future -- who are not acting on behalf of a foreign power or government. That's the basic limit on foreign intelligence surveillance that's been in place since the late ?70s, that you can only get these secret warrants that operate outside the normal probable cause standards of the criminal world when you can show to a secret court -- that's what the secret court does is it looks to see whether someone's connected to a foreign power or government or organization -- and that's been wiped away. The other is the pre-trial detention. the government, Justice Department has detained numerous terror suspects after 9/11 with little or no evidence that they are involved in terrorism. Now under the bill, by charging someone with a terrorist offense they can get an automatic presumption that there should be no bail. Now, this is a presumption can be rebutted, but it's going to be up to the defendant to prove essentially that they're not dangerous, and that they can be let out on bail. So, these are the kind of provisions that we had been urging them to keep out of a bill about restructuring the intelligence community. There were many more even more radical provisions that had to do with penalizing legal immigrants as well as asylees and refugees. Sensenbrenner, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was adamant about including these provisions. One reason I think -- Bob is right that the Democrats supported this bill with the lone exception of Senator Byrd and a couple of members of the House. One reason they did is they were so focused on fighting to keep the even more extreme provisions out that I think that they just felt like they had won a victory by keeping those anti-immigrant provisions out of the bill. Certainly, that was, at least a tactical victory, but you know, we feel, we opposed the bill because we feel that Congress shouldn't pass a flawed bill simply because it could have been much worse. AMY GOODMAN: Could you talk about the standardized driver's license? How that would change? TIMOTHY EDGAR: Sure. I mean, one problem with the bill is that it creates what amounts to, in effect, a national ID. It does this by taking the existing state driver's licenses and federalizing them. It basically puts the federal government in charge of the standards for issuing and designing driver's licenses. This became a huge political football in the debate, because some conservative Republicans wanted to use those federal standards to prohibit those states that don't link immigration status to driver's licenses, from issuing driver's licenses to many immigrants -- undocumented as well as some legal immigrants. The larger issue is that we're really going to create a federalized driver's license that could be used to, in the future at least, track people. There's all sorts of new technologies that could be incorporated into the driver's license to link it to all sorts of public and private-sector databases. And you could also imagine putting an RFID chip in the license that would allow it to be tracked remotely. So, this is something the 9/11 commission had actually recommended be done, that the driver's license should be something like an internal passport of the sort that we?ve seen in the Soviet Union in the past, and although the Congress wasn't willing to explicitly go that far, they have laid the groundwork for that kind of checkpoint society in the future. AMY GOODMAN: Timothy Edgar is the legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. Bob Dreyfuss, as you listen to this and you are just talking about the Democrats not opposing this, can you explain the state of the Democratic Party right now? I mean, you have everyone from the nominees -- people like Alberto Gonzales wrote some of those memos that laid the groundwork for the torture at Abu Ghraib or the detentions at Guantanamo and the Democrats not challenging them -- to this bill, without Robert Byrd saying, ?Hey, we just got this a day ago. Why is everyone voting for this so quickly?? You have almost no opposition. ROBERT DREYFUSS: Yeah. I'm not as charitable as Tim Edgar towards the Democrats. In fact, you can make the case that the Democrats are chiefly to blame for this bill, because they pushed for the creation of this 9/11 commission in the first place. They joined with these wives of the victims of 9/11 to accelerate its work and to demand the conclusions that resulted. The Democrats then pressed for the legislation, and were really the main cheerleaders in Congress for the bill in the first place. And the fact that they managed to head off some of the crazy right-wing proposals that some of the Republicans wanted to include in it doesn't take away from the fact that the Democrats have been really totally unable since 9/11 to come up with a strategy to neutralize Bush on the so-called war on terrorism. I mean, I could speak at length about why I think the Bush administration is wildly exaggerating both the threat from terrorism, which I think is you know, significant, but not at all requiring a -- even the creation of a Homeland Security department. I think that was an extreme overreach in terms of what's necessary in this country. So, I think the Democrats have completely and utterly failed to grapple with the issue of the war on terrorism, and you have leading Democrats like Senator Schumer and Clinton from New York, Joe Lieberman and others, becoming almost rabid attackers of Bush for being too soft on the war on terrorism. So, perversely, the Democrats have become sort of, you know, table-pounders, demanding that the Bush administration be more extreme than it already is in the war on terrorism. I think that this is a political issue that certainly resonated during the 2004 election when Senator Kerry, kind of flailing around for some way to grapple with this, started demanding that the 9/11 commission recommendations be implemented, and all of the political pressure to pass this bill, you know, came on the White House from the Democrats. Initially, the White House resisted because of military pressure, the idea of centralization of intelligence. I cannot stress enough how important that is, because what you are going to have now with this National Intelligence Director, is a central figure, a highly political position, effectively under the control of the President directly, who is now going to be supervising the entire $40 billion-plus intelligence community for political purposes. One of the good things about intelligence is it's grounded in reality. That's why the CIA, for all of its flaws, resisted the war in Iraq. Because they were more aware than the political people that the terrorism links to 9/11 from Iraq were non-existent and even questioned some of the WMD charges that the Pentagon was pushing. So, when you have an intelligence system grounded in reality that's now being subverted by political purposes, I think really, all bets are off. AMY GOODMAN: Bob Dreyfuss, two quick questions. Ralph Nader is waiting right there in the wings. One has to do with not the Democratic Party, but the media's coverage of this, before and after the intelligence bill was passed. Then I want to go to a completely different topic, which is, you're one of those who is blogging most extensively about Iran and I wanted to get your comment on that. But first, the media coverage. ROBERT DREYFUSS: Well, I mean, I think the media, unfortunately, followed the Democrats. Instead of, you know, doing their own digging and investigating and so forth, they really just went along with this human interest story about the 9/11 wives and how they were fighting to pass this bill, and it was all ridiculous. I mean, I don't know what the families? wives know about intelligence, but you know, Tim mentioned the Washington Post story that came out. That story came out after the bill was passed in Congress. The media finally got around to saying, ?Well now, there's some provisions in the bill that we ought to look at more carefully.? But, you know, of course, the horse was not only out of the barn, but over trampling the people of the town already. So, that was too late. AMY GOODMAN: On the issue of Iran, our latest story today in headlines, there's a U.S. military base being built on the Afghan border with Iran, and then the Atlantic Monthly revealing Pentagon planners recently carried out simulated attacks on Iran. ROBERT DREYFUSS: Well, I think that despite everything, the chances are fairly high that the Bush administration, within the next two years, will get into some sort of military confrontation with Iran. One of the things that's holding them back is there's zero legal justification for that attack. If you remember with Iraq, they trumpeted the fact there were the UN resolutions that allowed the United States to somehow aggregate to itself the power to invade Iraq unilaterally. Of course, Kofi Annan said that the war was illegal; nevertheless, they had the debate. With Iran, they have no justification for an attack. So, I think they're scrambling to figure out one or maybe they'll try to provoke a military confrontation. But it's clearly -- now with the neoconservatives back in the saddle, of course none of them have been fired. They're the only people who haven't been ousted for the bungling in Iraq. They're all still in place. They're now beginning to drum up the same kind of charges against Iran -- terrorism and nuclear threat and so forth -- that justified the attack on Iraq. So, I'm blackly pessimistic about what's going to happen there. I don't think that the European negotiations are going to succeed beyond sort of delaying the confrontation enough for the Bush administration to get its ducks in a row. I do think that, you know, sometime by 2006 we're going to see some sort of a serious military crisis developing there. AMY GOODMAN: Robert Dreyfuss, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Investigative reporter, author of the new blog at tompaine.com. Also Timothy Edgar on the line, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. -------- terrorism Radical youths being trained in Iraq The Associated Press 12/14/2004 http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-12-14-iraq-youth-camps_x.htm BRUSSELS (AP) — Radical youths from Europe and the Arab world are being trained in Iraq, Europe's anti-terror chief said Tuesday, warning that such clandestine camps could multiply in unstable or failed states anywhere in the world. "There are some who have gone to Iraq, as indeed there have been youngsters from outside Europe, from Arab countries, who have gone there to receive military training," EU counterterrorism coordinator Gijs de Vries said in an interview with The Associated Press. De Vries refused to elaborate on the specifics, such as the numbers or countries of origin of those training in Iraq, saying the information was classified. But he warned that action had to be taken to stop instability breeding terror. "This is incidentally not just the case in Iraq," he said. "Instability elsewhere in the world, in Africa for example, always makes it more difficult for the law to be upheld, for democracy to function, and therefore makes it easier for terrorists to hide and train." In other comments, De Vries said Europe should not become complacent in spite of a lull in attacks since the March 11 train bombings in Madrid and the foiling of plots in several countries. "Overall, we can say that the threat of terrorism in Europe remains high," De Vries said. "We should take it very seriously indeed." Spanish and British authorities say they have averted major terror attacks in recent months. In October, 30 people were detained on suspicion of planning to drive an explosives-packed truck into Madrid's National Court. British police said last week they had prevented an attack in London on the scale of the Madrid bombings. "There have been other instances," De Vries said, but refused to give details. -------- POLITICS Canada, Nationalism, and Empire Justin Podur interviews David Orchard zmag.org by David Orchard and Justin Podur December 14, 2004 http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=102&ItemID=6866 David Orchard ( http://www.davidorchard.com ) and his colleagues created the “Campaign for Canada.” He was co-founder in 1985 of Citizens Concerned About Free Trade and one of the most visible leaders of the fight against the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in the 1980s and its extension to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1990s, on the grounds that these agreements would destroy Canadian sovereignty and the chance for Canada to develop differently from the United States. His book, The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism, is a re-interpretation of Canadian history from a unique perspective. David Orchard is a conservative, but not in the sense of George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Brian Mulroney, Stephen Harper, Mike Harris, or Ralph Klein. He argues that these figures have hijacked the good name of conservatism to enact a reactionary agenda. In 1998 and again in 2003, Orchard ran strong campaigns for the leadership of country’s oldest political party, the Progressive Conservative party of Canada. He is also a Canadian nationalist and a patriot and is on tour all over Canada to raise awareness of the risks to Canada’s sovereignty of the ongoing “deep integration” agenda between Canada and the United States. He makes his living as an organic farmer in Saskatchewan. His farm celebrated its 100th anniversary this year and next year will be his 30th as an organic producer. He’s a busy political campaigner who answers his own phone and email. I interviewed him in Toronto. Justin Podur: You consider yourself a nationalist and a patriot. I guess you don’t think much of the saying that “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” David Orchard: It can be. But it is important to differentiate between different nationalisms. They are not all the same. Most of what people react to when they react against “nationalism” is actually imperialism. If you look at the United States or earlier imperial powers, the flag waving nationalism, the rallying support for invasions and occupations of other countries, that is certainly something that has to be opposed. But if you look at the nationalism of smaller countries you’ll see that historically it has often been a response to imperialism. Canadian nationalism has been largely a reaction of self-defence against American encroachment on our country and it has usually been anti-imperialist in that it has not sought to raise its flag over other countries. We need more patriotism of this type, if Canada is to survive. JP: Canada is one of the small group of wealthy countries and on an international stage it acts to try to preserve these inequalities with the poor countries. Does protecting national sovereignty imply preserving these inequalities? In this context, shouldn’t Canadians be more internationalist in orientation, rather than nationalist? DO: Gandhi once made a famous statement on this topic. He said that in order to be an internationalist, one must first be a nationalist. There is no place where that is more relevant than in Canada. If you don’t have a nation, a country of your own, you have no platform from which to act in the world. I am an internationalist. I want Canada to be much more oriented towards the Third World, to countries all around the globe, but these international relations are becoming more restricted now because of our growing integration into the US. I have opposed all of the American wars since I was old enough to do so. I had a friend, Claire Culhane, a courageous woman who went to Vietnam as a nurse with Canada’s mission during the war. (1) After spending time in Vietnam, she offered to stay there and use her skills as a nurse to help the Vietnamese in their war of independence. The Vietnamese told her that it was more important that she go back to Canada and fight for her own country’s independence from the U.S. Help or solidarity with other countries is to be applauded. But in order for us to truly live up to our potential in the world, and this includes reducing international inequalities, Canada must have its own sovereignty, its own freedom to move. If not, we will act more and more as a messenger boy for Washington, as for example, we are doing in Haiti today, where the U.S. forcibly “escorted” the democratically elected president out of the country and Canada is supporting and helping consolidate that coup d’état. JP: But how do you think that the inequality between a rich country like Canada and poor countries could be addressed? Would you be in favour of trade on terms that were more favourable to the poor countries? DO: Yes. But it could be favorable to us too. We eat a lot of fruit, for example, and there is no need for it all to come from Florida. I advocate more exchanges between Canada and the rest of the world, including the Third World, but today the opposite is happening. With the FTA and NAFTA Canada is trading less with the rest of the world and more simply with the U.S. Over 85% of our exports now go to the United States. That is a dangerous situation for a business to be in and doubly so for a nation. As the great Latin American patriot José Marti put it: “The nation which is eager to die sells to a single country.” As far back as the 1960s, Robin Hood, the flour company in Western Canada, wanted to sell flour to Cuba. The U.S. parent company wouldn’t let the Canadian subsidiary send Canadian flour to Cuba based on their Trading With the Enemy Act. There are lots of other more recent cases. The point is we have to have our sovereignty in order to act as real internationalists in the world. And when we do, we can make a difference, as I think Canada has in several countries, in Cuba, for example. Canada’s trade with Cuba has helped to reduce the pressure of the U.S. blockade. We could play that kind of role much more effectively if we had greater control of our economy. However, today, roughly 70% of Canada’s international trade is handled by U.S. corporations and that figure is rising. These corporations trade with countries of their choosing, which may or may not benefit Canada. Canada is the most foreign owned of any of the industrialized countries and under the FTA and NAFTA we agreed to never screen or restrict U.S. investment. Since signing these agreements well over 10,000 Canadian companies have been taken over by U.S. owners. There are now fewer than a dozen major, widely held, Canadian companies left listed on the Toronto stock exchange. Over $40 billion annually flows out of Canada to pay for this foreign ownership – in service charges, interest and dividends. Some of that money could and should be used to build our nation. We were promised greater prosperity and secure access to the U.S. market with the FTA and NAFTA. We got neither. Our standard of living has fallen since we signed them. Norway, which has stayed out of the European union, has replaced Canada at the top of the U.N. list of best countries in the world in which to live. It trades widely around the world as it sees fit, yet guards its independence carefully. In spite of all that we gave up in terms of our sovereignty, we have less secure access to the American market than when we traded with the U.S. under the GATT/WTO rules before we signed the FTA/NAFTA. JP: There are a group of countries that have suffered far worse at the hands of the U.S., have a long history of resistance, and could certainly use the solidarity of people in a country like Canada. Why does it seem that Canada officially, and perhaps Canadians also, are so lukewarm towards movements for independence in Latin America? DO: One of Canada’s best known writers, Farley Mowat, once said that Canadians are the house slaves of the American empire and Latin Americans are the field slaves. That sums up the relationship of much of official Canada, with its lack of any vision for our nation and its eyes glued to the south. But there is also what Pierre Trudeau called “the other Canada,” those Canadians who dream of, and struggle for, something higher and better for their country and who strongly support the right of other nations to be independent as well. One of Canada’s predominant Conservative philosophers was George Grant, who wrote an important little book called Lament for a Nation. He pointed out that Canada will either follow its own way or it will be the American way. We live next door to the most powerful nation the world has ever seen and if we don’t have our own vision, our sense of direction and national identity, we face assimilation by the sheer centrifugal force of the U.S. I have never seen a greater disconnect between what you call official Canada with its plans for deeper integration on all fronts – including military – with the U.S. and the desires of the majority of Canadians, French and English speaking, to follow a different path than Washington’s. JP: Isn’t there another problem with agitating for Canadian sovereignty though, in that Canada, like the United States, is founded on tremendous, and ongoing, injustice against the indigenous? DO: Aboriginal people themselves see a huge difference between Canada and the United States and always have. The Native leader Tecumseh, who was one of the greatest generals in Canadian history, saw a huge difference, which he described very eloquently and followed with action to repel the American invaders in 1812. He gave his life in defense of the border. Louis Riel had U.S. citizenship but he came back here to fight and spoke often and powerfully about his loyalty to both Canada and the Crown. Without his loyalty all of his western Canada would probably be part of the U.S. today. Some years ago I was adopted into the Tootoosis family in Saskatchewan and once went with my adopted brother to a convention on nuclear waste in Las Vegas. When we got back to Canada he said he felt so relieved he wanted to kiss the ground. This is not to whitewash the injustices, some of which I set out very clearly in my book. But it is important to recognize the differences. Anthony Hall, professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge, has recently published an enormous book about these issues. (2) He presents the history of the difference in attitude of traditional conservatism toward Aboriginal people, including the conservatives who were defeated in the American Revolution, and the position of the victorious American revolutionaries. The United States became a classical, liberal laissez-faire system. The conservatives came north and contributed to a uniquely Canadian type of conservatism. They, allied with the Aboriginals, played a major role in defeating the U.S. invasion of Canada in 1812-14. The British needed the indigenous people, and Canada’s Tories needed them, and that was reflected in the relationship, whereas the American revolutionary government tried continually to exterminate them. Sitting Bull, who defeated Custer, came north and saw that the relationship was different. He saw no possibility for his people to survive in the United States, but he did see possibilities here, and his descendants still live in Saskatchewan. It was the Progressive Conservative (PC) party in Canada under John Diefenbaker that finally gave Aboriginal Canadians full rights of citizenship and the right to vote itself. Canadian Aboriginals retain a strong sense of connection with the British Crown and fight to have the treaties they negotiated with the Crown honoured. Not so long ago, they used that connection effectively in their successful battle to entrench Aboriginal rights when our Constitution was repatriated from England in 1981. JP: Canada has made a number of very anti-immigrant and anti-refugee moves, most notably the Safe Third Country’ agreement, which means the opposite of what it sounds: that if you are denied asylum in the US you can’t get asylum in Canada and vice-versa. What should Canada’s policy towards immigrants and refugees be? DO: I’ll tell you what it should not be. It should not be this North American security perimeter they are planning, the NAFTA-Plus agreement that is being discussed behind closed doors, which will put Canada inside the U.S. immigration policy and effectively erase the borders in North America. I strongly oppose people being turned away simply because they have been rejected by the U.S. Canada has historically taken refugees from all countries, but of course the biggest source of refugees has been the United States: loyalists escaping the revolution, slaves who were fleeing, youths escaping the Vietnam War draft. And we now we seem to have a wave fleeing Mr. Bush. This “Safe Third Country” legislation betrays that history, the obligation we have to the rest of the world, and the dream people like Louis Riel had that Canada could be a haven for the worlds oppressed. The Refugee Immigration Board recently ruled that U.S. war resisters seeking asylum in Canada could not argue their case based on the illegality of the war against Iraq. That’s a very bad precedent. In the mid-1990s I had a chance to visit a hospital in Vietnam for those deformed by the U.S. aerial spraying of Agent Orange and other chemical weapons. The suffering is painful even to describe, but watching President Bush talk about bringing “liberty and democracy” to Iraq with depleted uranium weapons, napalm, helicopter gunships and B-52 bombers brings back the full memory of their agony. In parts of central Vietnam the U.S. dropped nine tones of bombs per square meter. Six million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians were maimed or killed, something almost never spoken about today. Canada under John Diefenbaker said no to John Kennedy’s request to send troops to Vietnam and he was correct in that decision. Under Jean Chrétien in 2003, Canada also stood for international law, refusing to send troops to invade Iraq in what is a blatantly illegal action. Remember the U.S. and Britain telling us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? It turns out Iraq had none. It is the U.S. and Britain that are today using their weapons of mass destruction against the population of Iraq — waging a low intensity nuclear war on the ground. The legacy of depleted uranium they are using will be one of death and suffering for generations to come, yet the official response to the slaughter in Iraq is largely a deafening silence. Under international law a nation is allowed to use force in only two circumstances: self-defence when under direct and ongoing attack or when authorized to do so by the U.N. Neither applies in Iraq. The Nuremberg Tribunal ruled – I believe it was U.S. Justice Robert Jackson speaking – that attacking another country constitutes a crime against the peace, the supreme war crime, he called it. Michael Mandel, the Osgoode Hall law professor in Toronto who was a wonderful, eloquent colleague in our battle against the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, has written a powerful book on this subject, How America gets away with murder: illegal wars, collateral damage and crimes against humanity. If we allow ourselves to become integrated into a “North American” military command which is being negotiated as we speak – it’s called NORTHCOM – and we join a North American security perimeter and the so called U.S. missile defence project, it will be the end of Canada’s ability to take an independent position on the world stage, including our policies on immigration and refugees. This is not what I want for the nation. It betrays the hard won legacy our founders bequeathed to us and what many Canadians fought and gave their lives for in the past. JP: You are not a “social conservative”: there is nothing homophobic or anti-choice or anti-women’s rights in any of your materials, your book, or your public talks. You are not an economic “conservative” — you are in favour of expansive social programs, a strong public sector, environmental protection, and worker’s rights. You are against imperialism and for upholding international law and norms. You are to the left of most “left” politicians. For example you are much more openly against the Iraq war than Jack Layton of the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), who refused to mention Iraq during the recent Bush visit to Ottawa. How can you call yourself a conservative? DO: This business of left and right is not so clear-cut. It depends on what issues you are talking about. I appreciate the NDP taking a strong position today against missile defence, but in the 1980s, when Brian Mulroney was preparing to implement the FTA, I went to Ottawa and knocked on the doors of the NDP. Nothing moved. I couldn’t understand why the “party of the Left” wouldn’t come out publicly against the FTA. Then a senior advisor to the NDP told me why. One of the NDP’s main donors at that time was the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), which is a union of both Canadian and American workers, dominated by the Americans, and USWA wanted to avoid what it called the “Bob White syndrome.” Bob White was the union leader who broke off the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) from the United Auto Workers of America (UAW), arguing the need for a national, Canadian union. The Steelworkers didn’t want the same thing to happen to their union. These large American controlled unions were not against the Canada-U.S. FTA in the 1980s. They changed their tune when NAFTA was being negotiated in the 1990s, and the NDP followed suit. So in the end the 1988 FTA fight for Canadian sovereignty was led by someone who rarely gets the credit he deserves, a corporate Bay St. lawyer, the Leader of the Liberal Party, John Turner — not the NDP. So, left-right labels are not that helpful. I take a practical, rather than an ideological, approach to issues. Traditionally it was the Conservatives who fought against our integration into the United States — including in the free trade elections of 1891 and 1911. The Bank of Canada, the Canadian Wheat Board, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the national railways -- all these important national institutions, were built before the CCF (3) existed, and they were built by Conservative governments. A good book, readable book on this is by Charles Taylor — journalist and the son of prominent Canadian industrialist E.P. Taylor — called Radical Tories: the Conservative tradition in Canada. He documents his journey, starting out in 1978, wondering why liberalism went astray and was unable to solve the nation’s problems. He was surprised to discover the conservative heritage in our country and how different it is from the so-called conservatism of today that seeks to dismantle the very institutions built by earlier Conservative leaders. Stephen Leacock was a Conservative writer and economist and a leader in the successful battle against the free trade agreement of 1911. Diefenbaker, the Prime Minister who took a strong stand against the U.S. invasion of Cuba, probably the strongest of any of the western leaders, was a Progressive Conservative. JP: Diefenbaker got “regime-changed.” DO: He said later that JFK sent hundreds of CIA agents to intervene on Lester Pearson’s behalf in the 1963 election that defeated Diefenbaker after the Cuban missile crisis. JP: To be honest, it sounds to me that your definition of conservatism” is unlike what most everyone thinks “conservatism” is. When I read your book I read it with great skepticism and suspicion because you say you are “conservative.” Maybe it would help if you could describe how you see conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism or leftism. DO: If words mean anything, “conservatism” means to conserve – our environment, our sovereignty, and the institutions that have been built to serve society over the years. Edmund Burke coined the classic definition of conservatism in the late 1700s as “a disposition to preserve and an ability to improve.” The father of modern conservatism was a Jewish writer in Victorian England, named Benjamin Disraeli. His party, the British Conservative party, campaigned in the mid-1840s against free trade and once in power reversed itself. Disraeli split with his leader on this issue and rebuilt the party. He said that power has only one duty – to secure the social welfare of the people. And the duty of Conservatives, he said, was two-fold: “to elevate the condition of the people" and "maintain the institutions of the country." Disraeli was a contemporary and very much an inspiration for the founders of both Canada and our Conservative party, John A. Macdonald and Georges-Etienne Cartier. It was a Progressive Conservative Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker, another admirer of Disraeli, who took the Saskatchewan CCF model of universal medicare and made it a national programme. Saskatchewan voted for the CCF provincially and the Diefenbaker Conservatives federally, and saw no contradiction. This conservatism is a far cry from the Thatcher-Reagan-Klein-Harris model of cutting infrastructure, slashing institutions and throwing people on the street. It is this usurping of traditional conservatism that has given the word “conservative” the odour that makes you suspicious, and for good reason. Now the question is, are we going to allow the legacy of Disraeli, Macdonald, Cartier, Borden and Diefenbaker to be simply usurped or will we restore the original meaning of conservatism and put it back on its feet? JP: And you see liberalism as being “free markets.” DO: Classical liberalism stood for wide-open markets. Governments should be reduced, should stand aside and let the market rule. When Disraeli and his friend Lord Shaftesbury fought for the 10-hour working day in industrial England, there were no restrictions on the hours and conditions of work. They were opposed by the free-trade Liberals who argued that restricting the hours of work would hurt the work ethic. The work ethic of eight-year old kids! JP: So you view the “social conservatism” of the United States, with its homophobia and its anti-women’s rights agenda, as being a usurpation? DO: It is out of keeping with the Canadian tradition. Canada was early to abolish slavery — in 1793. Diefenbaker was a leader internationally against apartheid in South Africa. Joe Clark — the last leader of the PC party before it was destroyed last year in what PC Senator Lowell Murray called a “coup d’état” — supported a woman’s right to choose. He took a strong stand, and it was really a consensus in the PC party. The PC party was the most progressive of the major parties on the environment in the 2000 election. That so called “social” conservatism, the attempt to bring the church back into politics hurt Stephen Harper in the last election, because Canadians won’t go there. Everyone was saying that if the Conservative Party and the Alliance Party merge, add up the votes, they will beat the Liberals. They didn’t. Because Canadians don’t want that attitude, nationally the extreme right has never been electable. The Progressive Conservative party did well when it was progressive. JP: John Ralston Saul, the husband of Canada’s governor-general, I believe sees himself as a liberal. What did you think of his book on Canada, Reflections of a Siamese Twin? It has some analysis that is similar to yours. DO: I enjoyed and was inspired by Reflections. It is an important book for all Canadians to read to better understand our country and its history, how we have developed one of the world’s oldest democracies — older in many ways than the U.S. and with far different roots. It always comes as a revelation that more of our history took place before 1867 than since. The process leading to Confederation, how it was accomplished, and without civil war or violence — that’s no small achievement. Doubly so given the sabre rattling and threats of annexation coming at the same time from south of the border. Saul also wrote a piece about a year ago about the need for people to get involved in political parties and in the electoral process. He took on groups that condemn partisan political activity. Maude Barlow, of the Council of Canadians for example, denounced me for going into the Progressive Conservative party. She said she opposed partisan political activity. When we succeeded in getting the party to do a review of the FTA and NAFTA, it was she, from the left, and Tom d’Aquino, head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, from the right, who attacked me the next morning in the national media. I would never denounce people for being out on the streets, brave people getting out and making their message heard. But Martin and Bush aren’t only, or even mainly, afraid of thousands of people on the streets. They have plenty of tear gas. However, Martin is afraid of a couple of opposition seats in the House of Commons. Those who discourage people from political activity are in my view demobilizing the population and leaving the political stage open for the status quo and those who would govern in their own interests. JP: But people are disillusioned with the political process. DO: Apathy is usually a product of bad leadership. People become apathetic when all the options seem the same. If real leadership emerges, people get interested and things can change. No party is more righteous than the others in Canadian politics. All of our parties have done good things and all have made major mistakes. You have to look at the specifics of the programme and the context. It’s true that some people, and some young people are disillusioned, and with good cause, but they are certainly not disinterested. I just spoke at Caledon College in Toronto and took questions for almost an hour. The students complained to their teachers afterwards that it wasn’t long enough. They were hungry for information on these topics and they asked very good questions. That has been my experience on campuses across the country. One of my disagreements with the left is that it often acts as if we are already Americans. In the US it is very difficult to get a different voice heard in the political process. But Canada has a different system, and many of the leaders on the left don’t seem to recognize that. Participation is more open and more possible in Canadian politics than in the United States where the two-party system is so strongly entrenched. In Canada we have a law that no corporate or union donations can be made to political parties. That too makes a big difference. The role of money is greatly reduced. It costs $5 for a young person to join a political party. In many countries you take your life in your hands when you engage in political activity. Here you can pay $5 and participate. Roughly 12,000 people joined the Progressive Conservative party to support my leadership bids and we had a major impact on party policy. We could have won with 40 or 50, 000 participating actively and we would have an alternative that, in my view, could change things for the better in the country. So, becoming disillusioned or apathetic, is not, in my opinion, an option. JP: I’ve given a few talks on Canadian foreign policy to audiences of young people and to immigrant communities. When I argue that Canada should take an independent, anti-imperialist foreign policy, people inevitably ask: “Won’t that get us in trouble? Can we afford to anger the US?” I answer that if a country like Venezuela, with fewer options, resources, wealth, and privileges can be independent; it is craven of us to make those arguments. DO: That is the moral side and it is of course true. The practical side is also important. We can get into just as much trouble by being a doormat. Historically, Canada has never gotten much out of trying to be “nice.” This “Harper party” (4) is arguing that we have to be nice to the U.S., that one outspoken backbencher, Carolyn Parrish (a Liberal MP who criticized the U.S. foreign policy and was expelled from the Liberal caucus) has upset the mighty U.S. and now they won’t want to buy our beef. Well that’s just not true. Superpowers do not have friends. They have interests. They don’t trade with countries because they are nice. They follow their interests and we should follow ours. Diefenbaker did not join in the blockade of Cuba. Lester Pearson questioned the bombing of Vietnam. Trudeau condemned the invasion of Grenada. Trade continued with the U.S., which buys because it needs our goods and resources. If anything, Canada does better when we stand up for ourselves. We’ve lost more in the bargaining after the battles than we have in the battles themselves. Who could have been nicer to the U.S. than Brian Mulroney? The U.S. imposed its tariffs on our softwood lumber under Mulroney. JP: What do you think of militant tactics, like those used by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP)? They do “direct action casework,” where they will do things like occupying an office or picketing a workplace to ensure that someone gets his or her welfare check or back pay or housing. DO: Direct action is often an effective course and, depending on the circumstances, by and large I support it. I don’t want people to die in the streets. But I do have a problem with leaders who say that is all you can do. I believe that change can and must also be made through the political process. If the NDP had a few more seats in Parliament they could derail this missile defence, which is really connected with putting the entire Canadian military under US command. JP: But elected politicians don’t use the power that they do have. DO: If people are de-mobilized, politicians will do what they can get away with, or follow the line of least resistance. They can plead helplessness, because of “our trade obligations.” But that’s not something fixed. For example, Mulroney in 1983 said “don’t talk to me about free trade, that’s a threat to Canadian sovereignty.” Then in power he negotiated and passed the FTA. It went to the Senate. The Senate said they would pass it as a piece of ordinary legislation. We put out a call asking everyone to phone the senators to ask them to block the deal. I went on the radio open line shows and we put the Senate’s toll free phone number out everywhere. The left said, Orchard, you’re crazy, those fat cats in the Senate won’t do anything, they aren’t even elected, it’s the house of privilege. The NDP chose that exact moment to call for the abolition of the Senate — the one institution left that could stop the deal at that time. Some prominent Canadian nationalists pointed out that the Senate had never blocked an important piece of legislation in the past, so they wouldn’t support our campaign. We persevered and the people responded. The senators got thousands of calls and went on to block the legislation forcing the issue to a general election in which the majority of Canadians voted for parties opposed to the FTA. We got it anyway – even though Mulroney had said the vote would be a referendum on free trade — because our antiquated first-past-the-post voting system allowed him to impose a deal most Canadians opposed. But the point I’m making here is, the senators responded to the public. Citizen participation can work. JP: Leftist strategy isn’t oriented towards the parliamentary system but towards increasing agitation and eventually some kind of general strike followed by collective, democratic control of the economy. It’s clear that you’re against imperialism, but many radicals see capitalism itself as the problem and wouldn’t be satisfied with a country that was independent but capitalist. DO: For Canadians, the battle right now is, as it has been so often in the past, to keep the border between the U.S. and us. Once that is gone we are inside the U.S. and we will have no chance to decide what we want for the future. Traditionally we have had a mixed economy, with public and private sectors coexisting. All of those possibilities are foreclosed if we become part of the U.S. Graham Spry and the leaders of the fight for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the 1930s had a slogan: “The State or the United States.” They knew that without the state, there would be no national railways, no Trans-Canada highway, no national airline or public broadcaster. In a country like Canada the state has to be involved. You can’t open your arms to your neighbour when your neighbour is the world’s only superpower. Unless Canada has a different vision, the center of power will just drift south by the very force of that superpower and its economic strength. By design or inertia, we will drift. Our system of public health care, the vital east-west lines of communication in a far-flung country like Canada, a viable public sector, will all disappear when up against the reach of private U.S. corporations, backed of course by these trade agreements and the U.S. state itself. First we have to make sure we have a future as a nation, and then we can decide and debate what that future should be. JP: You just came back from doing a CBC program called “What’s next for David Orchard?” What’s the answer? DO: It was an Alberta wide programme. People phoned in. Some said the Orchard forces should form a new party. Others advocated joining an existing party, like the Liberals, NDP or Greens. A third group said we should continue with the new Conservative Party and make the case for Canadian conservatism rather than let those now in charge redefine and remake conservatism on a right-wing U.S. Republican model. Some said we should eschew partisan politics and concentrate on speaking, writing and touring. Not many said we should create a new party. Without proportional representation, creating a new party would be very difficult. JP: The Harperites are just part of a global right-wing onslaught that includes Australia, Israel, Europe, the Islamic world, India, and of course the United States. Do you think your brand of conservatism can help in the fight against that? DO: Yes, because it is based on conserving the best of what our ancestors have bequeathed us though their blood, sweat and tears. But the only way we will get anywhere is if thousands of people help to make it happen, with their presence, their support, financial and otherwise – and in any other way they can. I am in politics because I don’t want my country to cease to exist – to be assimilated into our neighbour. I have a vision for what Canada could be, a vision inspired by our founders, who created the world’s second largest nation and saw our potential as boundless. I want Canada to be a powerful nation that stands on its own two feet and is a force for good in the world. Our country is one of miracles, the greatest of which, as someone put it, is that we exist at all. My work is dedicated to keeping it so. However, most of us in Canada don’t know our history. That is why I wrote my book, The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism. It has become a bestseller, despite being largely ignored by the mainstream press. Readers, however, have responded in wonderful and moving ways. The acclaimed U.S. historian Howard Zinn, who I believe is a friend of yours, generously referred to it as “devastatingly accurate…a fine piece of research and written with the kind of clarity that makes it accessible to a large public, which it deserves.” Pierre Trudeau called it “a masterful treatment” of Canada’s early history. But we have not had as much success as we need. We have moved thousands of people, but we need to do much more. Things can be transformed. The world is not a static place. Very few English speaking Canadians are aware that Canada was the very first country in the world to be invaded by the new United States of America in 1775. Benjamin Franklin arrived in Montreal after the Americans troops occupied the city and declared that Canada was to be the “14th American colony.” He set up his printing press and told Canadians, “you have been conquered into Liberty if you act as you ought.” When the American soldiers stormed the stone walls of Quebec City on New Year’s Eve of that year, they wore the slogan “Liberty or Death” pinned to their hats. The walls held however, and a combination of Aboriginals, French-Canadians and British soldiers drove the Americans out at a cost to them of over 5,000 men. The same thing happened when the U.S. invaded in 1812-14. Canada was outnumbered in population 16 to 1 then and in military terms even more than that – although many American soldiers and residents refused to participate in their government’s attack on our country. Nevertheless it seemed impossible that we could survive, but thanks to good leadership and brave citizens we did. But now we are just outnumbered 10 to 1! So there’s no need or excuse for Canadians to give up today. Justin Podur is a writer and activist based in Toronto. His blog is www.killingtrain.com -------- us politics The Rise of the Amerikan Nazis. Part I of III: Birth of Despotism Into the Vortex of Incalculable Consequences Bellaciao by Manuel Valenzuela 14th December 2004 http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=4779 The rise to power of the Amerikan Nazis, and the subsequent dive into the cesspool of fascism the nation is now experiencing, was assured with the ascension to the White House of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in November 2000. Through the well-conceived, methodical fraud committed against the American people, the Amerikan Nazis were now free to unleash their devastation upon the world. They were now free to release the demons of war on humanity, destroying innocent human life, tearing flesh apart, devastating environments, endangering freedoms and rights, eviscerating democracy and decimating entire peoples and nations. Stealing the election through the disenfranchisement, intimidation, manipulation and blatant racism against tens of thousands of Florida blacks, the Amerikan Nazis regained the seat of power and immediately began preparations for their ideologically inspired, pre-ordained world agenda of imperial hegemony, pre-emptive offensive wars, natural resource control, geopolitical military allocation, proxy wars in defense of foreign nations, corporate profit and pillage, American treasure plunder and grip on absolute power. With the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 an amalgam of corrupt, warmongering, greed-addicted, delusional, unscrupulous and ideological criminals, fascists, religious fundamentalists, profit over people capitalists and Zionist neocons fused to create the most damaging cocktail of immoral human malfeasance since similar vermin rose to power in 1930’s Europe. Thus began the reign of the Amerikan Nazis, indiscriminately escalating the momentum of Earth’s descent into the dark abyss of self-annihilation and helping steer civilization closer towards nuclear midnight. Conceived through fraud and deceit, developed through secrecy and intimidation, secured in lies and delusions, and birthed by the horrors of 9/11, thereafter cementing a national psychosis in the American mind that has yet to dissipate, the Amerikan Nazis have thrust upon the entirety of the planet a parallel universe not seen in 70 years. Since usurping power, the Amerikan Nazis have created nothing but negative energy, retarding the existing goodness in humankind and exposing the worst in the human condition. Misery, suffering, death, destruction, economic frailty, violence, mass murder, war crimes, fear, hatred, racism, ignorance, xenophobia, homophobia, division, perpetual war, corruption, exploitation, the bankruptcy of the nation, the pillaging of our treasure, greed, indifference and immorality have flourished since the era of the Amerikan Nazi was birthed. They have made millions of Americans carriers of hatred, fear and racism, infecting in the American psyche a collective ignorance based on the exploitation of fundamentalist theology. They have attached lead chains on our rights, freedoms and on democracy herself. They have succeeded in dividing the nation like never before, making enemies of progressives and conservatives. They have expanded the power of the corporate world, making us the serfs of yesterday and the automatons of the future. They have turned We the People into We the Sheeple, the land of the free and the home of the brave into the land of greed and the home of the slave. Has anything good occurred since November 2000? Has anything positive manifested itself since the coup d’etat of late 2000? Of course not. The last four years have been nothing but a steep decline into a toxic canyon, with nothing seemingly able to stop our continued fall. America is degenerating into an entity being pulled apart by its appendages, imploding right in front of our eyes. The thing to remember is that the sudden collapse has coincided with the rise of the Amerikan Nazis. At no other time since has the security of the planet been so compromised. At no time has so much gone so wrong, from pre-emptive wars to criminal and illegal wars of invasion to the scapegoating of an entire Arab population to conflict between allies to the end of multilateralism to the rise of imperial conquest to the chess match between nations for natural resource and geopolitical possessions to the cancerous unilateralism and arrogance of Empire to the dwindling capacity of exploitative resources to the growing competition between state powers to the malignant and ever-pervasive battle of religions to the rise to power of fundamentalist extremists to the continued dumbing down, ignorance and xenophobia of the people living inside the belly of the Evil Empire to the searing world hatred and anger brewing against the Great Satan to the rise of Amerikan fascism to the ceaseless exploitation and subjugation of peoples and lands spawned by the disease called capitalism and its virus market colonialism. Into the vortex of incalculable consequences have we entered, paralyzed and made blind to the powers of the Amerikan Nazis, captivated by their hypnotizing propaganda, seeing only individual trees in an enormous forest, ensnarled by the short-term and not wiling to accept or see a most ominous long-term. The pieces of the malice puzzle are falling into place, yet the world remains mute to the returning sands of history that have reappeared over the horizon. As if captured by fear, unable to sound the trumpets of alarm, unable to gallop our horses through fog to sound warning bells, Americans, it seems, fatefully vegetate in indifference and stupor, fatalistically determined to accept their destiny, seemingly waiting in vain for the worst possible nightmare to become reality. Before long, with continued complacency and conformism, reality will be even worse than what our subconscious dreams are able to imagine. Like a potent concoction of flammable chemicals, the amalgamation of combustibles the planet is presently witnessing amassing throughout the globe is mixing and fizzing, bubbling and gassing, its energy growing in power, its potency becoming an uncontrollable manifestation of the human condition. Slowly it is rising, ready to explode in a massive eruption whose tremors will be felt by 6.4 billion humans. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are patiently being put together, much like in the world of 70 years ago, by human wickedness resurrected, by fascism reincarnated, by the rise of the Amerikan Nazis. A Plague Upon the World Like the German Nazis of old, who were ignored until they had firmly cemented their campaign of terror, their momentum as ferocious as it was unstoppable, the Amerikan Nazis are likewise being disregarded both in the United States and abroad. Their assault on the world, and the United States in particular, as good people stand idle, doing nothing, has magnified their power, their addiction to greed and their grandiose sense of self. They validate their mission as blessed by a delusional destiny endeared to all rising empires, believing all their frivolous lies, embarking on a road guided by the Almighty itself, content that its powerful yet invisible hand is assenting to the incredible levels of mass murder, suffering, destruction, violence and human wickedness their actions have spawned. With each day that the people of the United States and the world ignore the gathering storm, the Amerikan Nazis’ confidence grows, sure of their power, bolder in their actions, steadfast in their belief that what they do is right. Their corruption of power and of self shields them away from the realities and truths of the world, the delusions of their narcissism and the bubble of their perched existence. Arrogance runs through their veins, replacing the cold-blood most were born with, allowing for greater apathy and malice. They bully dissent and other sovereign nations into submission or silent acquiescence, threatening regimes and politicians with the vast array of financial, international, military and political tools endowed to empires. Callously they run amok, eviscerating global alliances as they please, unilaterally dictating the future course of the planet, triumphantly knowing they have the world by the collective balls. Unchallenged and unrepentant, the Amerikan Nazis now possess, through the hijacking of America, the cockpit of the most powerful nation the world has ever been witness to, holding the seat of power from where all their wickedness derives. They are using everything at their disposal to push their ideological agenda of delusion and empire building, succeeding, slowly but surely, in the destabilization of the entire world order. They seek to crush nation-state competitors such as China, Europe and Russia, steaming ahead in a race for the ultimate prize in the geopolitical chess match: the lands and resources of central Asia. It is here where resource wars will be fought, it is here where the world’s insatiable thirst for oil will see powerful nation’s collide, for it is the next black reservoir to be exploited and tapped by a species dependent on the devil’s excrement, that black blood whose necessity curses the entire planet. The Amerikan Nazis are preemptively moving their pieces into geostrategic states, invading lands such as Iraq and Afghanistan, using them as launching pads for further military escalations, garrisons protecting newly conquered natural resources, and as watchtowers surveying rivals. The Pax Americana now has a foothold on the Middle East, a growing presence in central Asia, and a sniper scope aimed at those nations bordering Russia, such as the Ukraine, as well as those near China. These lands are being molded to suit the Amerikan Nazi construct of Empire. Supporting emerging dictators, financing puppets, destabilizing nations, controlling pseudo-democracy and establishing crony capitalism assures the Amerikan Nazis of domination and supremacy on the global scale. Rivals are still years away from threatening the Pax Americana, yet to ensure the continued flow of oil and gas from the Eurasian land mass, for now and into the future, the Amerikan Nazis have embarked on a campaign of imperial reincarnation, retrofitting nations and peoples unlucky to live in lands infected by oil with a new breed of colonization. For the Amerikan Nazis know that he who controls the flow of energy controls the world, and to them, this is all that matters, the ultimate prize in an ever more dangerous game. Hence, Afghanistan was invaded for its geopolitical position and its access to American controlled natural gas pipelines, thereby leading the Pax Americana into the collection of Stans littering the Caspian Sea basin. Iraq, on the other hand, was invaded for its rich oil wealth, to make extinct a threat to Israel, to control the larger Middle East and to establish offensive military bases in Eurasia, forever planting a presence signaling to rivals the seriousness of American intentions. Already in the crosshairs is Iran, another oil rich nation of vital strategic importance in Eurasia. War against it is already in the works, and the Amerikan Nazis, foaming at the mouth at the thoughts of an invaded and conquered Iran, compliant to America and Israel, see this trophy as the bounty needed for absolute hegemony in the region as well as the world. Under the rubric of the war on terror the Amerikan Nazis have invaded two nations seen as strategic and of utmost importance in the escalating cold war between one superpower and various emerging powers, all eyeing the vast wealth available in central Asia, as well as the dwindling world supply of the one source of energy needed for continued power and growth. With a third nation already in the Amerikan Nazi crosshairs, the game of geopolitical chess will continue to unfold, making our world a much more dangerous place, our future less assured and the balance among states and peoples more polarized than ever. Humanity is today crossing the threshold of danger, and the Amerikan Nazis have made sure, through their harvesting of hatreds, divisions, animosities, violence and exploitations, through their invasions, conquests, mass murder and utter destruction of land and man, of a world less secure thanks to the mutating evil residing in the human condition that is getting ready to erupt. And so, with reality beginning and ending with the Amerikan Nazis, seeing themselves free to alter history, create fictions, orchestrate our future and manipulate a most gullible public, the seeds are being planted for a most ominous future, full of war (what else is new?) and division and competition and violence and death and suffering. Controlling the American sheeple, molding us like easy to manipulate clay, using both the tools of government and the corporate world, they are free to achieve their most sinister policies, seeking Empire, glory and the addiction of power, failing to learn from history, failing to understand the human condition. Nothing, it seems, besides the valiant resistance movement in Iraq, can stop their drive onwards, not even the will of the American people, whose voice no longer exists, becoming as inconsequential as the annoying buzzing of the occasional fly looking for fecal matter to sit on. It is the passivity of those residing inside the belly of the beast that sustains them, becoming the fresh and invigorating air circulating inside their lungs. It is the silent acquiescence of the masses that energizes them, becoming their lifeblood, that cold plasma flowing through their body that grants them the mandate needed to destroy democracy at home and export human wickedness abroad. For human evil to succeed all that is needed is for good people to do nothing, and this is exactly what is happening, with America’s voices ominously submissive and silent, with Washington having become the hornet’s nest of Amerikan Nazi enterprise and operation, and with the world passively waiting for the next chess move made by warmonger leaders and delusional policymakers. 9/11, Birth of Despotism Granted such a fortuitous commencement to their long-sought offensive with the tragic events of 9/11, the Amerikan Nazis have since exploited every single angle and opportunity of that horrific day. The new Pearl Harbor burst open a collection of colorful fireworks inside the minds of the Amerikan Nazis, now free of the populace’s free-thought and reason. Bolts from the gods of war came crashing down onto two mammoth towers, turning a once-questioning American citizenry into a militarized behemoth marching to the tunes of war, hatred and vengeance. The land of plenty was filled with the red, white and blue, filling every street corner, every business, every car, every single inch the profiteering claws of Wal-Mart reached, transforming the United States into a nation on the path to perpetual war. To those not mesmerized by raging nationalism, searing jingoism or blinded by the omnipresent envelopment of the flag, America after 9/11 paralleled images of Nazi Germany, with flags draping every building and every street, with rage searing and fear captivating, with an entire population’s psychology devastated, fragile, and ripe for the picking by those exploiters and criminal entities for years seeking the monstrosity that now, rather miraculous, presented itself. The American Nazis finally had what they wanted, a cataclysmic event that transformed an entire population. They had the catalyst for war, for imperial conquest and corporate despotism. They had a new Pearl Harbor, a rather convenient excuse to begin their journey towards imperial hegemony, corporate domination, Israeli security, an American police state and an emerging fascist Empire. For if you stop and think about it, who has benefited most from the horrific events of 9/11? Who has profited the most, whose power has increased, whose agenda has and continues to be fulfilled, whose success continues to grow, who has exploited 9/11 to further long sought goals, now able to control an entire population of nearly 300 million people, steering it in the direction of Arab hatred and perpetual war? Who profits from perpetual war, from feudal control of oil, from a schizophrenic and fear controlled populace and from a militarized, police state devoid of social programs, rights and freedoms? It certainly isn’t Arab bogeymen, who, though as smart as they might be cannot in common sense accomplish the supermen actions that are attributed to them. The time has arrived to at the very least begin questioning the official story of 9/11, as inconceivable as it now appears, with lie built upon lie, fantasy built upon fantasy. Why do we know so little, why has so much about that day been covered up, how did 19 so-called hijackers circumvent the greatest technology, infrastructure, aerial defense and military in the history of the world, plowing in two direct strikes into two towers without so much as a hiccup from the government? Whether involved or not, whether knowing or not, the Bush administration must begin answering questions, especially when it continues to emerge that it was recklessly incompetent and criminally negligent at best and horrifically complicit at worst. What did it know, what had it been told by a cluster of foreign intelligence services in the days before 9/11, did it purposefully allow the tragedies of that day to come into fruition so that excuses could be made for already planned wars against Afghanistan and Iraq? In the sacrifice of 3000 souls, whether known or not, the Amerikan Nazis assured themselves of almost 300 million trance-like zombies hypnotized by fear and rage, transformed into an obedient, drone-like army of followers ready to obey the dictates of warmongers and greed addicts. It only took 3000 deaths and the destruction of two towers to mobilize the world’s most powerful nation towards war, boots marching onward, weapons pointing straight, our thirst for vengeance blinding rational thinking, our quest for Arab blood enslaving our collective brain. In months, America was ready to unleash the next Corporate Crusade. The assembly lines manufacturing instruments of death were started, the conveyor belts spitting out America’s indigent were warmed up, sending cannon fodder to their premature death and physical and mental maiming. For profit, for greed, for the Almighty Dollar, dropping bombs, dropping napalm, dropping depleted uranium, as usual pitting poor versus poor and young versus young, all for the ever-expanding pockets of the Establishment, all for the gluttonous appetite for destruction of the military-industrial complex and all for the conquest and usurpation of resources, land and labor by the psychopathic corporate Leviathan. With an entire nation searing and in control, the Amerikan Nazis could do as they wished. They fed us a surplus of patriotism to make us blind. They injected nationalism into our veins to make us rabid. They created and marketed the image of a war president out of putrid fecal matter. They provided dark-skinned enemies so that we could hate and scapegoat, concocting story after story to make our blood boil. They used the media to brainwash and condition us, using government and journalist vermin to concoct lies and deceits. Somewhere, the German Nazis of the past could not be prouder. In the months and now years after 9/11 they have exploited our fears and insecurities, our emotions and passions, our need to feel safe and protected. The tools at their disposal – corporate media and its prostitute journalists – are used to control us and our emotions, all done to better suit their particular needs, all done to make acquiescent and obedient sheep of us. If war is needed, fear is re-introduced, Arab bogeyman are said to be living under our beds, ready to terrorize, color-coded alerts are raised to breed mass schizophrenia. If excuses and reasons for war are called for, lies and deceit are used, government agencies and officials are paraded to the world with false information and bogus intelligence. They have abused our ignorance, our blind trust in government and leaders, our faith in the system. In return, they have declared war on the American people, robbing us of rights and liberties, freedoms and democracy, reputation and morality, our treasure and our loved ones. They continue pilfering America’s treasure, gutting social programs, destroying education and healthcare, devastating the economy, dumbing down our children, leading us down the ominous path to a police state. Billions of dollars are being stolen by their friends and cronies, their lobbyists and contributors. The military-industrial complex and the corporate Leviathan are profiting from death and destruction, suffering and violence, contributing to the mass murder of 100,000 Iraqis, 10,000 Afghanis, more than 1,200 American soldiers and the maiming in body and mind of countless more. It has been the horrific events of 9/11, with the subsequent collective paranoia, blind patriotism, raging jingoism, fear-induced ignorance and easily-controlled thought processes of the masses that have allowed the Amerikan Nazis unfettered control over the minds of tens of millions of citizens. It was twin towers collapsing and airliners crashing that assured the Amerikan Nazis of absolute power to do as they please, without accountability and transparency, without interference or dissent, without protest or debate, without an American citizenry enraged at what is being done in its name. Today, on the road to despotism do we find ourselves in, unable or unwilling to extricate ourselves, surrounded on all sides by malevolent men and women who, with each day that passes, take possession and control of more American minds, transforming the country into a land riddled with a complicit army of mass murdering apologizers, warmongers and torture legitimizers. Using Arab scapegoats, marketed to be feared by the ignorant, alien in culture and religion, seen as sub-human barbarians, this army of crazed purveyors of violence and suffering is extricating long held inner demons of bigotry, fear and boiling hatred. Moral values are given precedence at home, scapegoating gays and progressives, while rapes of Iraqi women are condoned, destruction is allowed, death of untold women and children is sought and the devastation of an entire culture is welcomed. Other Nazis of times past used the same techniques on other minorities to unleash hell on Earth. This easily-controlled and manipulated army of ignorance and hypocrisy are the same millions who in a few years will claim ignorance and outrage, much like the German population at the end of World War II, for the human evil they allowed upon the lands of planet Earth. This army of Arab haters loathe simply because their government tells them to, simply because they wish it so, simply because an enemy was concocted from which to wage perpetual war against. They fear and hate because their false prophets condone such sin, because the red, white and blue demands it. Because they are ignorant they fear; because they are made to fear they hate; because they hate 100,000 innocent human beings lie dead, untold more lie maimed and psychologically destroyed, and an entire nation lies in ruins. This is the army of the American Nazis, this is the Army of Unenlightenment. This is the danger of a dumbed-down population, of an education system being gutted even as the defense budget surpasses those of all industrialized nations, combined. This is what happens when drones are created, unthinking and unenlightened, devoid of analytical and logical thought, conditioned to believe anything and everything told them by a government for years acting as The Evil Empire. This is what happens to Empires whose people no longer are capable of rational thought, whose brain lacks the precepts to think on their own. This is what happens when a population fails to question authority, seek accountability or hold leaders responsible. This is what happens without protest, dissent and debate. This is what happens in the absence of bravery and selflessness. If November 2000 is a date that will live in infamy, then 9/11 is the date the gates of human hell opened onto the world, releasing the demons called the Amerikan Nazis to once more wreak havoc over the lands and skies of the ever-tempestuous species called humanity. Shaking the Foundations Is it so hard to imagine our government and our leaders as liars, criminals and terrorists? Is it so hard to imagine that we are being led into a moral abyss whose black hole is eroding the humanity naturally endowed to us? Is it so hard to see past the lies, the deceit, the propaganda, the exploitation of our psychology, the obvious criminal elements running the government? Is it so hard to question authority, to seek accountability, to return power to the People? Is it so hard to escape the clouds of 9/11 and see, if only for a second, the incredible amount of coincidences and growing evidence pointing to complicit criminality within the Bush Administration and the neocons in the death of 3000 humans? Our failure to question the official ‘truth’ of 9/11 arises because of our fear of knowing the truth, our uncertainty of what to do if what the government says is false. We fear knowing that perhaps our government and leaders, our policy makers and corporate elite were involved in the greatest terrorist act to ever devastate American soil, and so we meander in purposeful ignorance, unwilling to open the doors to a storm that would shake our foundations to the ground. Our ego’s refusal to believe in the criminality of the government, even if only negligent, even if criminally complicit, is the ally of the Amerikan Nazis, for it strengthens their grip on power and their confidence that they can do with us as they please. Our mind’s defense mechanism of not wanting to stir normalcy, of refusing to ever know the truth, of never wanting to molest our normal life with the devastation of knowing what, if anything, the Bush administration, the corporate Establishment, the military-industrial complex and the neocons had to do with 9/11 and its aftermath is our own worst enemy, for to allow the Amerikan Nazis the freedom to continue their rapacious ideology is to help seal our own fates. Our refusal to let go of years of government brainwashing, implemented in our educations and through years of ceaseless television watching, that America can do no wrong, that its leaders are the epitome of good, that our government is altruistic and honorable, that our military is only in existence for defensive purposes, that the Almighty always blesses us and no other, that our nation only helps the world, that our history is full of noble intentions, has conditioned in us an inability to ever question the legitimacy of elected leaders or the foundation of government itself. Like a tree bountiful in fruit we must shake the branches of our existence, thinking beyond the box we have been trained never to deviate away from. We must shake the foundations of what we have been inculcated with, as well as the ego that refuses to open our eyes to a most ignoble truth. We have to accept the belief that those elected and anointed to take care of us could also be doing us massive harm. Our constructs must be altered, as well as the perceived reality implanted in our minds through years of brainwashing. We must question authority, seek accountability and demand truth and justice. The government is responsible to the People, after all, the People are not responsible to government. The American government is the People’s government, it does not belong exclusively to the small junta of criminality basking in the warmth of power. Perhaps 9/11 was as they tell us, perhaps it was worse, perhaps its truth is too unbearable to pursue. Yet we must open our eyes to all possibilities, because our future depends on it. Our minds must be made clear, our voices made loud, our ears made to hear, for somewhere out there the truth of it all exists, waiting to be found by an American people ready to exorcise the demons of what was done to us on 9/11. This the Amerikan Nazis fight to prevent, which is why it is desperately needed. Out there, somewhere, our foundations are waiting to be shaken and rattled, waking us from the nightmare wrought by the rise of the Amerikan Nazis. Out there the memories of 3000 innocent people wait to be found, finally freed to roam the great expanse of the universe, finally given the burial they have yet to fully receive. Only the truth will set them, as well as millions more living, free. The clouds that have hovered over us since 9/11 are beginning to dissipate. Our minds are once more seeing the plethora of colors created with the birth of each new sunrise. We can see clearly once again. It is time to shake the foundations of what is known, and what is yet to be found. Coming Thursday: The Rise of the Amerikan Nazis Part II: Death of Democracy Mr. Valenzuela’s new novel is now on sale through Authorhouse.com at Echoes in the Wind Sales Page. A philosophical, educational and spiritual story on humanity and our civilization, as relevant as today’s headlines, this book is almost 600 pages in trade paperback form on sale internationally through secure web page transaction. Additionally, the novel is now available on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, as well as other online book sellers. If preferred, the novel can also be ordered at any local brick and mortar bookstore worldwide through the book’s ISBN number, 1418489905. Manuel Valenzuela is social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. A collection of essays, Beyond the Smoking Mirror: Reflections on America and Humanity, will be published in early 2005. His articles appear regularly in alternative news websites including informationclearinghouse.info. His unique style and powerful writing is read internationally and seeks to expose truths and realities confronting humanity today. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net. A collection of his work can be found visiting his archives and by searching the Internet -------- OTHER -------- health Some Kids May Have Autism Risk From Mercury Story by Maggie Fox REUTERS USA: December 14, 2004 http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/28556/newsDate/14-Dec-2004/story.htm WASHINGTON - Some children may have an inherited weakness that may predispose them to develop autism when exposed to mercury from fish or other sources, an environmental group said on Monday. New research shows that some children may lack sufficient levels of glutathione, an amino acid involved in several cell processes, including the metabolism of toxins, the group said. "When compared to normal, healthy children, autistic children showed a significant impairment in every one of five measurements of the body's ability to maintain a healthy glutathione defense," the Environmental Working Group said in its report. "Reduced antioxidant defense may characterize a group of individuals who are demonstrably more sensitive to the effects of a range of toxic chemical exposures, and shed light on increasing rates of related learning and behavioral disorders." The group said the findings by former Food and Drug Administration senior research scientist Dr. Jill James, now of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, reopened the debate on whether vaccines containing a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal may cause autism. "The implications of these findings extend well beyond thimerosal and autism," the report reads. Autism includes a range of symptoms including an inability to socialize normally, often repetitive behavior, and sometimes speech difficulties. There is no known cause or cure. Autism rates have increased recently in the developed world by many different measures, and health officials, parents and advocates alike are frantic to know why. Many studies have shown no link between routine immunizations and autism, including a report from an Institute of Medicine Committee earlier this year that reviewed the published research. A member of the Institute of Medicine committee that wrote the report said the EWG report provided no strong evidence of any cause for autism. "This is a very small piece in a very, very big puzzle," said Dr. Steven Goodman of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. "This doesn't remotely establish what is cause and what is effect here," Goodman added in a telephone interview. "If we don't have an infinite amount of money to study autism, which we don't, we should be focusing on understanding the disease, understanding when the disease starts, genetic and environmental contributors, of which there could be many." -------- imf / world bank / wto (economics) W.T.O. to Consider Iraq and Afghanistan The New York Times By FIONA FLECK December 14, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/business/worldbusiness/14wto.html GENEVA, Dec. 13 - The 148 member states of the World Trade Organization agreed Monday to start membership talks with Iraq and Afghanistan, in a move that could help rebuild the two countries after years of war and isolation. At the same meeting, however, Iran's longstanding request to begin talks about joining the W.T.O. received broad support, but was blocked by the United States. Iraq and Afghanistan will be added to a list of more than 20 other candidates, including Russia and Saudi Arabia, in talks to join the trade body. Talks for Iraq and Afghanistan would begin in 2005, diplomats said, with the Iraq talks unlikely to start before the elections scheduled there in January. Last month, the Paris Club, an informal group of wealthy creditor nations, agreed to cancel 80 percent of Iraq's $39 billion debt, a factor that no doubt helped the country's effort at the W.T.O. In Afghanistan, voters elected Hamid Karzai president in October. "It's the first step in a very long process," one diplomat said of the talks, adding that it would take "at least two years and as long as five or six years depending on how soon they are prepared for this step" before the two became full members. Once they become members, Iraq and Afghanistan would gain access to other member states' markets and receive equal treatment for their goods in those markets, as well as become more attractive to foreign investors. The decision to embrace Iraq and Afghanistan and reject Iran was widely expected. Iran had been given a glimmer of hope in February, the first positive sign since Tehran first applied to join in 1996. Diplomats said most of the 16 trade officials from the W.T.O.'s 148 member states that addressed the meeting on Monday supported Iran's bid. American diplomats, however, blocked the proposal, as they have done over the last few years, saying they were "still studying" the request. Washington has accused Tehran of building nuclear weapons and has imposed sanctions against the country. Some trade diplomats argue that it is unreasonable to bar Iran while welcoming Iraq and Afghanistan, contending that W.T.O. membership should not be decided on political but on trade grounds. One diplomat said, "There was a strong feeling that this can't go on," and that some candidate nations currently in talks to join the W.T.O. were in much worse economic shape than Iran. -------- poverty BALTIMORE — Plan seeks end to homelessness (AP) December 14, 2004 http://www.washingtontimes.com/metro/20041213-103103-7803r.htm City and state officials are putting together a plan to eradicate homelessness within the next decade — aiming to provide permanent housing to about 4,000 people who sleep in city parks and shelters each night. The action follows a decision four years ago by the Bush administration to end chronic homelessness among the disabled within 10 years, and follows in the footsteps of cities such as Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Denver. City and state officials will hold a two-day conference beginning today to kick off the planning process. "Maryland has never engaged in anything like this before," Gregory D. Shupe, director of the Office of Transitional Services at the Maryland Department of Human Resources, told the Baltimore Sun. "For a long time, the planning around homelessness has been more about shelters and soup kitchens. The focus now is not how to manage homelessness but what we need to do to end it." A comprehensive plan could be ready for review by state lawmakers by June, Mr. Shupe said. Local advocates and service providers for the homeless say they can meet the goal by increasing the number of affordable housing units, providing immediate access to the housing, and expanding services targeted at drug addiction, mental health and job training. "It's time to stop managing the crisis and end the disgrace," said Philip F. Mangano, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, who will share success stories from across the nation with conference participants. More than a dozen states and 169 cities and counties have created plans in hopes of accessing federal funds to pay for new housing and medical aid, he said. Baltimore, which has the largest homeless population in the state, will prepare its own plan, but a city representative will coordinate efforts with the state's plan. Leading Baltimore's planning process is Laura M. Gillis, the city's recently appointed president and chief executive of the quasi-public agency Baltimore Homeless Services Inc. Miss Gillis manages a staff of 25 and an annual budget of $24 million, most of it federal money. The restructured office of homeless services, which moved from the housing authority to the Health Department in August, has applied for nonprofit status and will have a board led by city Health Commissioner Dr. Peter L. Beilenson. Some who work with the homeless in the city say that whatever plan Baltimore devises must include drug treatment as a core element. "Drug dealers are getting a lot of people out of their homes," said David Shepard, resident manager of the Frederick Ozanam House, a transitional home at 400 S. Bond St. for men recovering from addiction. "We can't stop homelessness in the city unless we address these issues." Under the housing-first model, homeless people get their own rooms or apartments almost immediately, rather than staying at shelters until after they receive medical, drug-addiction or mental-health treatment. The problem with shelters, Miss Gillis said, is that many homeless people don't like living in group settings. Some don't feel safe. Others don't want to follow the rules. Many return to the street, making their recovery more difficult. "The housing-first model allows homeless individuals to claim something as their very own," Miss Gillis said. "It's a very important first step." It is not clear how Baltimore will provide housing for the homeless, but with a 10-year plan in hand, the city will be better positioned to compete for federal funds, said Mr. Mangano and other experts. The federal budget sets aside $3 billion for the homeless, but not all the money is earmarked for the "chronic homeless" initiative. Federal budget pressures are expected to keep funding flat for the next several years, Mr. Mangano said. For Miss Gillis, the time to act is now, while the federal government has a spotlight on the issue. "Let's end homelessness," she said. "Let's stop managing it and end it." -------- ACTIVISTS Building Peace in a Time of Perpetual War by Medea Benjamin Monday, December 13, 2004 Common Dream http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1213-20.htm Immediately after George Bush declared victory on November 2, 2004, his administration gave the green light for an all-out attack on the Iraqi rebel town of Fallujah. The town was virtually leveled, hundreds of civilians were killed, and over 150,000 became desperate refugees suffering from hunger, cold and disease. And all this after Bush supposedly won the election because of his strong moral values! During the first debate between George Bush and John Kerry, Bush made a pointed comment about moral values. "What distinguishes us from the terrorists," he said somberly, "is that we believe that every life is precious." But according to an October 2004 report in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, the U.S. occupation of Iraq has cost the lives of over 100,000 Iraqis, mostly women and children. While the Bush administration rarely acknowledges the death toll among U.S. soldiers, it flatly refuses to talk about Iraqi casualties. When asked about Iraqi deaths, then U.S. Central Command chief General Tommy Franks responded tersely, "We don't do body counts." The Iraqi government also suppresses casualty figures. Dr. Nagham Mohsen, an official at the Iraqi Health Ministry, was ordered in December 2003 to stop compiling data from hospital records, and journalists were prohibited from entering the morgues. The Lancet study, which is the first scientific study of the human cost of the Iraq war, was done by US and Iraqi researchers led by School of Public Health in Baltimore. The team surveyed 1,000 households in 33 randomly chosen areas in Iraq. They found that the risk of violent death was 58 times higher in the period since the invasion, and that most of the victims were women and children. While their final horrifying calculation of over 100,000 civilian deaths made front-page news in many parts of the world, the U.S. press barely mentioned it. A United Nations report released in November 2004 found that severe malnutrition in Iraqi children had almost doubled since the U.S. invasion. This translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein. Iraq's child malnutrition rate now roughly equals that of Burundi, a central African nation torn by more than a decade of war. It is far higher than child malnutrition rates in Uganda and Haiti. And this in a country where, just a generation ago, the biggest nutritional problem for young Iraqis was obesity! While Iraqis have certainly suffered the most from this war, the cost in lives of U.S. soldiers continues to mount, nearing 1,500 by the end of 2004. Another 10,000 US soldiers have been wounded in action, and thousands more killed in accidents. With attacks on US soldiers now reaching 100 a day, more and more families will be getting that tragic "We regret to inform you…" visit. For those who fear that a removal of U.S. forces would result in chaos and civil war, what is Iraq today but a country plagued by chaos and violence? If the U.S. occupying forces that gave rise to the insurgency were to leave, the insurgency would lose its purpose. Certainly there is the risk of internal power struggles, but as many Iraqis have told us, the destruction by Iraqis fighting each other would pale in comparison with the destruction by the U.S. forces, as evidenced in the recent attack on Fallujah. Moreover, the withdrawal of U.S. troops would open up the possibility for the entry of UN or other peacekeeping forces. The presence of U.S. forces also sets back efforts at reconstruction, since those who work with the U.S. forces are putting their lives at risk and often quit because of intimidation by insurgents. Buildings bombed in the initial invasion of Iraq have yet to be rebuilt, electricity is still intermittent, and oil production is plagued by sabotage. The lack of basic services and employment opportunities in turn leads to more animosity against the U.S. presence. There are many good reasons to oppose the occupation of Iraq, from the mounting casualties to the bankrupting of our economy to the increased anti-American feelings it has engendered. But there is one really compelling reason to call for the withdrawal of our troops: the Iraqis want us to leave. A survey of Iraqis sponsored by the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2004 showed that most Iraqis say they would feel safer if U.S. forces left immediately. An overwhelming majority of 80 percent also said they have "no confidence" in either the U.S. civilian authorities or military forces. If we really believe in democracy, then we should listen to the desire of the majority of the Iraqi people. Our demands as a peace movement should be for the U.S. government to make a commitment to withdraw our troops by the end of 2005 at the latest; pledge that we will not maintain permanent bases in Iraq; and commit to ending the war profiteering by U.S. companies so that Iraqis have the opportunity to rebuild their own country. So how do we build a peace movement that can put forward these demands in an effective way? Here are some practical things we can do. 1.Make real the human cost of the war on both U.S. and Iraqi lives. Since the US invasion in March 2003, the public in most countries throughout the world has seen the horrible pictures of Iraq war victims. The big exception is the US public, which has seen a sanitized version of the war. CNN International regularly shows footage of war victims in its worldwide broadcasts but not on domestic CNN. The world community demands to know the truth, and we should too. Write letters, call and email your local media demanding that they cover the victims of war. If they fail to respond, organize a community delegation to visit them. If they fail to respond to that as well, organize protests at their offices. Invite an Iraqi-American to come speak to your community about the effects of the occupation. Contact Global Exchange Speakers Bureau for a list of Iraqi and American speakers on the war (http://www.globalexchange.org). Regarding the cost of war for US soldiers, ask your local media to read or print a daily casualty toll. Do screenings in your school, church or houseparty of videos about US casualties. Two forceful videos are Arlington West (http://www.arlingtonwestfilm.com) and The Ground Truth (http://www.thegroundtruth.org). If the public were able to see, on a sustained basis, the gory reality of this war-the children without limbs, the wailing mothers, the shivering refugees, the US soldiers coming home in body bags or incapacitated for life---support would plummet and the war would end. 2.Support military families who are speaking out against the war, and soldiers who are speaking out and refusing to fight. Military Families Speak Out (http://www.mfso.org) is a group of over 1,000 families with loved ones in the military. Help get their voices out on the media or invite one of them to speak in your community. Some of them are parents of fallen soldiers, such as Fernando Suarez or Lila Lipscomb of Fahrenheit 911 fame, and their testimonies are heart-wrenching and compelling. In the case of Vietnam, dissent within the armed forces itself was critical in ending the war. There is now a new group of soldiers called Iraq Veterans Against the War (http://www.ivaw.org) that deserves our support. So do the soldiers who are refusing to serve. Over one-third of some 4,000 combat veterans have resisted their call-ups. One of the most public soldiers who refused to return to fight in Iraq is Camilo Mejia (see http://www.freecamilo.org), who is serving a one-year prison sentence after being convicted of desertion. "I witnessed the horror of war," said Camilo at his trial, "the firefights, the ambushes, the excessive use of force, the abuse of prisoners. Acting upon my principles became incompatible with my role in the military. By putting my weapon down I chose to reassert myself as a human being." We also need to support counter-recruitment efforts, efforts that provide young people-particularly in poor communities-with a truthful picture of the risks of joining the military and of their other options for employment and education. See http://www.objector.org for a list of groups doing counter-recruitment, general support for soldiers (including a GI Rights Hotline), and advice for those who want to apply for conscientious objector status. 3. Pressure Congress to stop further funding, investigate war profiteering and cut Halliburton and other contractors from the government dole. A December 8, 2004 Associated Press poll found that the majority of Americans don't believe there will be stable, democratic government in Iraq and disapprove of George Bush's handling of the situation. More and more Americans are recognizing that this war is unwinnable and don't want to see billions more of our tax dollars wasted. We must now convince our Congressional representatives. In February, the Bush administration is expected to request an additional $70 billion for the military. This massive request includes money for building dozens of military bases in Iraq and the most expensive U.S. embassy in the world, as well as money for more troops. We must demand that our representatives oppose funding that further entrenches the U.S. presence in Iraq. We must also call on Congress to stop government agencies from giving contracts to U.S. companies for "rebuilding" Iraq. Iraqis have some of the best engineers and builders in the world, and are totally capable of rebuilding their own country. The U.S. contractors in Iraq are plagued by incompetence, waste, corruption, cronyism and lack of accountability. They also take jobs away from Iraqis, contributing to the catastrophic unemployment rate of about 70% and the increasing Iraqi bitterness against Americans. We must demand that Congress stop giving new contacts to U.S. companies and that it investigate more fully the charges of war profiteering against companies that have been awarded high-dollar contracts, particularly Halliburton. In fact, there is an on-going FBI probe of Halliburton for war profiteering. We should demand that Congress stop all monies to Halliburton while charges are pending and if found guilty, ban Halliburton from receiving any future government contracts. We should also demand a freeze on contracts to companies whose employees are accused of being involved in human rights abuses, such as CACI and Titan in the case of the Abu Ghraib prison. 4. Strengthen local peace work and bring the cost of the war home. The anti-war coalition must reach out to broader sectors of the community, especially religious groups, labor, communities of color and students. We must make clear the connections between the $200 billion squandered on Iraq and the cuts that communities across the US are facing in health care, education and vital social services. The amazing website http://www.nationalpriorities.org will give you an estimate of the cost of the war for your city and state. Get local churches, labor unions, student governments and city councils to pass resolutions against the occupation. Hundreds of such resolutions were passed before the war began; we need to revive that energy in the call to bring the troops home. In November 2004, the city of San Francisco had a "Bring the Troops Home" measure on the ballot, and it passed by an overwhelming 63 percent. Similar ballot initiatives or resolutions could be passed in cities all over the country. For the text of the resolution, see http://www.smartvoter.org/2004/11/02/ca/sf/meas/N/. It is also time to ramp up the anti-war activism with non-violent civil disobedience. This could include sit-ins at the offices of military recruiters or congresspeople or military contractors, blockades at military bases, or "sleep-ins" at schools or libraries to demand money for books, not for war. A great model is the "sleep-in" staged by students at the Boulder High School until they secured a meeting with their congressional representative to express their concerns about a draft (see http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1105-21.htm). Another great example is when the Kensington Welfare Rights Union took over their local Army Recruiters Office calling for "Money for Housing, Not for War!" (see http://www.kwru.org). Local peace coalitions should work closely with the national umbrella group United for Peace and Justice (http://www.unitedforpeace.org). This is the organization that put together the largest anti-war rallies, including the massive February 15, 2004 rally that took place in New York City and hundreds of cities around the country-and the world. 5. Build the global coalition February 15, 2004 was indeed an amazingly powerful day when "the world said no to war." We need to strengthen the global anti-war coalition and not just organize joint rally days, but joint campaigns. These could be campaigns against companies profiting from war, or campaigns to get countries that are still part of the "coalition forces" to withdraw (by the end of 2004, at least 15 of the original 32 members of the coalition had either left Iraq or had announced their intention to leave). Another possibility is to set up a Global Peace Camp on the Jordanian/Iraqi border. Since it is so dangerous for foreigners to travel inside Iraq, the border is an alternative site for Iraqis and international activists to meet, educate each other, and exchanges ideas. In stark contrast to the violence inside Iraq, the Peace Camp would be a real-life symbol of how people from different countries, religions and ethnicities can come together to build the kind of world we'd like to live in. If you are interested in this idea, contact peace@globalexchange.org. We should consider a global campaign to push the United Nations-both at the Security Council and the General Assembly-to call for a swift timeline for the withdrawal of foreign military forces from Iraq. 6. Support efforts to decrease our dependence on oil. While the U.S. invasion of Iraq was not solely about oil, it is certainly true that if broccoli were Iraqi's main export, we would not have invaded. It's also true that until we get off our dependence on oil, we will continue to have policies in the Middle East that tie us to undemocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia or push us to invade countries like Iraq to control their oil. There are plenty of ways to start breaking our oil addiction, including investing significant resources in solar and wind power (see http://www.appolloproject.org), promoting fuel efficient vehicles (see http://www.jumpstartford.org), and focusing on conservation and efficiency (see http://www.rmi.org). George Bush took the 2004 election as a mandate to continue this illegal, immoral war in Iraq. It is up to us, the American people, to rebel against Bush's arrogant empire-building. It is up to us-as caring, compassionate Americans-to force the Bush administration to stop the killing, start respecting international law, and assume our rightful place as one among many in the family of nations. Medea Benjamin is cofounder of the human rights group Global Exchange (http://www.globalexchange.org) and the women's peace initiative Code Pink (http://www.codepinkalert.org). She has led numerous delegations to both Iraq and Afghanistan, and started the International Occupation Watch Center (http://www.occupationwatch.org).