NucNews - December 16, 2004



-------- NUCLEAR 

U.S. and Russian nuclear missiles are still on hair-trigger alert

By Mark McDonald
Thu, Dec. 16, 2004
Knight Ridder Newspapers

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/10433487.htm

MOSCOW - Just after midnight, in a secret bunker outside Moscow, the warning sirens began to blare. A simple, ominous message flashed on the bunker's main control panel: Missile Attack!

It was no drill. A Soviet satellite had detected five U.S. nuclear missiles inbound.

The control computer ordered a counterstrike, but the bunker commander, a nerdy lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov, acting on a hunch, overrode the computer and told his Kremlin superiors it was a false alarm. The Soviet brass quickly stood down their missiles, saving 100 million Americans from nuclear incineration.

This brush with Armageddon happened more than two decades ago, but nuclear missiles are still on hair-trigger alert in Russia and the United States. Today, they may be even more vulnerable to an accidental or renegade launch than they were in Petrov's day.

"The security of both nations should not be dependent on the heroic act or good judgment of a single individual," said Sam Nunn, the former senator from Georgia.

Long active in anti-proliferation efforts such as the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Nunn is leading a campaign to persuade U.S. and Russian leaders to take their thousands of strategic nuclear warheads off hair-trigger alert, a status that remains in effect more than a decade after the Cold War ended.

"The chances of a premeditated, deliberate nuclear attack have fallen dramatically," Nunn said in an interview with Knight Ridder. "But the chances of an accidental, mistaken or unauthorized nuclear attack might actually be increasing."

In his 2000 election campaign, President Bush called the hair-trigger status "another unnecessary vestige of Cold War confrontation" that creates "unacceptable risks."

The first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which took effect 10 years ago this month, doesn't address hair triggering. Nor does the Treaty of Moscow, which Bush signed with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2002 to reduce the size of the U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals.

Nunn believes the hair-trigger status has become "the most dangerous element of our force posture."

A hair trigger means missiles are launched - either from land or sea - upon the warning of an attack. That is, within about 15 minutes of a confirmed warning. In theory, the assurance that a retaliatory attack would be launched before the missiles could be destroyed would deter either country from trying a nuclear sneak attack.

"This is the logic of the Cold War - Mutual Assured Destruction," said Daniil O. Kobyakov, a nuclear expert at the PIR Center, a policy studies institute in Moscow. "De-alerting requires a change in rationale. There's still a certain inertia on both sides."

Nunn and others see that inertia in the Bush administration's refusal to consider the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and its request - since defeated in the Senate - for some $500 million for research on a so-called "bunker buster" nuclear weapon and low-yield "mini-nukes."

Russia, too, has some Cold War inertia to overcome. Putin proudly announced last month that Russia was testing "the newest nuclear missile systems ... that other nuclear states do not have." He offered no further details about the weapons.

A number of political analysts believe Putin's comments - which were unprepared remarks made to a group of senior commanders at the Ministry of Defense - were intended to boost military morale and for domestic political consumption.

"I'm sure it was nothing surprising to the U.S.," said Kobyakov, noting that the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty obliges each side to provide technical data on any new nuclear weapons.

Kobyakov and others believe Putin was probably referring to the Topol-M missile, which has long been in the Russian pipeline, and a sea-launched missile that's being developed. There are rumors in military circles in Moscow that the new missile could be maneuvered in flight, unlike current ballistic missiles, to foil the Bush administration's planned national missile defense system. One senior Russian general cryptically called it "a hypersonic flying vehicle."

Government officials in both countries are keen to point out that they've stopped targeting each other with their nuclear missiles, although experts say this "de-targeting" is political hokum.

The old targeting data and missile trajectories are stored in command computers, Kobyakov said. And missiles can be re-targeted in a matter of seconds: A couple of mouse clicks on a computer would put Washington, Miami or Moscow back in the nuclear crosshairs.

But it's the danger of accidental or maverick launches that most concerns atomic experts. That danger is heightened, in part, by the decrepit state of Russian defenses.

"The Russian Early Warning System is essentially useless," said Theodore Postol, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on early warning issues and technology.

Holes in Russia's satellite and radar networks, Postol said, mean U.S. submarines in the North Atlantic can strike Moscow with a two- or three-minute warning for the Russian capital. Launches from the North Pacific could hit the city with no warning at all.

Postol also said a new Prognoz satellite warning system "may never be in place."

Stanislav Petrov, the old bunker commander, the man who saved America back in 1983, nodded his head sadly when told of Postol's assessment.

"That's right, not enough satellites," he said. "We never had enough." 

--------

Cuban missile crisis just one of at least 4 other crises

By Mark McDonald
Posted on Thu, Dec. 16, 2004 Knight Ridder Newspapers

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/10433490.htm

MOSCOW - The Cuban missile crisis erupted in October 1962 when it was
discovered that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear warheads on the
island and targeted them at the United States. After a tense, 13-day
standoff, the Soviets blinked and withdrew the missiles.

"We literally looked down the gun barrel into nuclear war," former
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said in the documentary film, "The
Fog of War."

"In the end, we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war."

The missile crisis is merely the best known of the close calls with
nuclear war. There have been at least four others.

"All four incidents were very brief, probably lasting less than 10
minutes each," said Geoffrey Forden, a strategic weapons expert in the
security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

- On Nov. 9, 1979, in what Forden calls "the training tape incident,"
three command posts showed a massive Soviet nuclear strike headed
toward the United States.

American intercontinental ballistic missiles were alerted, jet
fighters were scrambled, and an airborne command center - known as the
president's "doomsday plane" - took to the air, although without the
president aboard.

When ground-based radars showed no incoming missiles, no counterattack
was launched. It was later determined that a training tape simulating a
Soviet attack had been mistakenly inserted into the Pentagon's computer
system.

- Seven months later, on June 3, 1980, there was an alert of another
Soviet attack, although there was no discernible pattern to the strike.

"The displays would show that two missiles had been launched, then
zero missiles, then 200 missiles," Forden wrote in a study of the four
false alarms. The haphazard nature of the data quickly convinced
analysts that there was a glitch in the system.

An investigation showed that a computer chip had gone haywire.

- The so-called "autumn equinox incident" took place Sept. 26, 1983,
when the Soviet Union's new satellite warning system detected five
Minuteman missiles heading toward Moscow.

But the commander in the Soviet early-warning bunker went with his
instincts, overrode his computer and told his superiors up the line it
was a false alarm. The Soviet brass stood down their missiles.

What had the satellite really seen? Sunlight reflected off some clouds
over Minuteman launch silos in Montana.

- On Jan. 25, 1995, Norwegian scientists launched a large "sounding
rocket" to collect atmospheric data on the Northern Lights. The rocket
was headed away from Russia, but Russian radar technicians thought it
could be a U.S. Trident submarine-launched missile intending "to blind
Russian radars by detonating a nuclear warhead high in the atmosphere,"
Forden said.

Russia's early warning satellites showed no confirmation of a U.S.
attack, and the crisis was defused.

--------

Man who saved America now living quiet life in Russia

By Mark McDonald
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Posted on Thu, Dec. 16, 2004

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/10433534.htm

FRIAZINO, Russia - The man who saved America - and probably the world
- is living out his days on a measly pension in a dank apartment in a
forlorn suburb of Moscow. He has a bad stomach, varicose veins and a
mangy, spotted dog named Jack the Ripper.

Stanislav Petrov has a small life now. He takes Jack for walks, makes
a medicinal tea from herbs he picks in a nearby park and harangues his
34-year-old son about getting off the computer and finding a
girlfriend.

There was a time when Petrov, now 65 and a widower, was almost larger
than life. He was a privileged member of the Soviet Union's military
elite, a lieutenant colonel on the fast track to a generalship. He was
educated, squared away and trustworthy, and that's why he was in the
commander's chair on Sept. 26, 1983, the night the world nearly blew
apart.

Tensions were high: Three weeks earlier, on Sept. 1, Soviet fighters
had shot down a Korean airliner, killing all 269 people aboard.

Petrov was in charge of the secret bunker where a team of 120
technicians and military officers monitored the Soviet Union's early
warning system. It was just after midnight when a new satellite array
known as Oko, or The Eye, spotted five U.S. missiles heading toward
Moscow. The Eye discerned they were Minuteman II nuclear missiles.

Petrov's computer was demanding that he follow the prescribed protocol
and confirm an incoming attack to his superiors. A red light on the
computer saying START! kept flashing at him. And there was this baleful
message: MISSILE ATTACK!

Petrov had written the emergency protocol himself, and he knew he
should immediately pick up the hotline at his desk to tell his military
superiors that the Motherland was under attack.

He also knew the timeline was short. The senior political and military
chiefs in the Kremlin would have only 12 minutes or so to wake up, get
to their phones, digest Petrov's information and decide on a
counterattack.

The son of a Soviet air force pilot from Vladivostok, Petrov had had a
whiz-kid career as a military engineer trained in Kiev. He earned a
"red diploma" denoting top honors in school, then joined the army and
the Communist Party. Membership in the party was the only way to have a
full-throttled career in those days, and he was promoted right along.

He was more techie nerd than communist zealot, more scientist than
military man, and he eventually landed a job working on the Soviets'
first system of early warning satellites. In the Soviet era, there were
few positions more high-tech, more important or more secret.

As the alarms blared, 80 technicians and 40 military officers jumped
up and looked toward Petrov's command post on a mezzanine overlooking
the gymnasium-sized control room. He shouted into an intercom for them
to take their seats and attend to their work.

"I was not sweating," Petrov said, "but I felt very weak in my legs.
Like our Russian saying goes, I had legs of cotton. I was in a stupor,
but then my feeling of duty took over."

Petrov gathered himself and looked at the data coming from The Eye.
Why only five missiles? That didn't fit with either his training or his
logic. He knew that if the United States were going to launch a first
strike, it would unleash hell, with hundreds of missiles.

"Political relations with the United States couldn't have been any
worse at the time," he said. "But to launch such an attack, one would
have to be completely crazy."

So Petrov called his superiors and reported in a firm voice that it
was a false alarm, no attack.

Personally, though, he wasn't sure.

"Not 100 percent sure," he said. "Not even close to 100 percent."

The next 15 minutes, waiting for the Minutemen to possibly hit, were
unnerving.

"Yes, terrifying," he said. "Most unpleasant."

Soviet engineers eventually discovered that The Eye had sounded the
alarm when it spotted what it thought was the engine flare from five
U.S. missiles.

But what had the satellite really seen? Flashes of sunlight reflecting
off some clouds over Minuteman silos in Montana.

A military panel investigated the incident, which was kept secret
until 1993, and they found numerous other technical cataracts in The
Eye. Computer assembly technicians in Moldova were blamed. Thereafter,
all satellite assemblies were done in Ukraine.

No decorations or rewards have been given to the officers who averted
the nuclear catastrophe.

Petrov, who'd gone through the crisis with an intercom to his staff in
one hand and the telephone to his bosses in the other, was later
reprimanded for not filling out his log book as events unfolded.

He was denied further promotion, but Petrov denies that he was
persecuted by his military bosses and Soviet political commissars. He
said he continued to work command shifts in the bunker.

Petrov left the military in 1984, moved to a technical division that
worked on satellites, then retired in 1993 to care for his ailing wife.
When she died of a brain tumor, he said, "I had to borrow the money to
bury her properly."

To repay the loan, he worked as a security guard at a construction
site.



-------- accidents and safety

Port inspection exposes truckers to gamma rays

Posted December 16, 2004 Vermont Guardian

http://www.vermontguardian.com/dailies/0904/1216.shtml#article1ontguardian.com/dailies/0904/1217.shtml#article1

NORFOLK, VA — Truckers and operators of a new cargo inspection system may be exposed to unacceptable levels of cancer-causing radiation, according to a report in an industry bulletin.

When truckers pick up large metal containers unloaded from ships, they are sometimes directed to drive through a new vehicle and cargo inspection system, basically a machine that uses powerful gamma rays to inspect the sealed ocean cargo.

Most workers who operate the new scanning machines claim there’s no risk, but the long-term effects on drivers who remain in the cab of their truck is not completely clear, according to the report by William Sharp in Trucker News Alert.

Safety and protection radiographic cargo inspection systems require some “localized shielding” to minimize exposure. Operators are supposed to be trained in radiation safety, and should wear a badge to measure any radiation exposure. To date, most operators have received little or no dose.

Gamma rays cause cancer and cell mutations in plants and animals. Helen Caldicott, a pediatrician and co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, claims, “There is no safe level of exposure to ionizing radiation, it only takes one radioactive atom, one cell, and one gene to initiate a cancer.”

Scanning delays shipments and adds extra cost to port operations. Conventional x-ray scanners take up to 10 minutes to scan through metal. Gamma-ray scanners take only a few seconds or a couple of minutes to complete the same job.

To avoid hiring additional personnel, drivers at most ports are ordered to pull containers up to be scanned. At congested entry points, they are told to remain in their trucks, exposing them indirectly or directly to radiation. This can happen many times a day. Some inspectors scan not only the container but also the tractor. According to the manufacturers, this should never be done.

Soon, every U.S. port will have these devices at each exit. Unless changes are made, this could lead to serious health risks for anyone forced to drive through, according to leading scientists.

Rosalie Bertell, a scientist who directed investigations into the Chernobyl nuclear accident and Union Carbide Corp’s Bhopal Gas disaster in India, has studied the effects of low-level radiation on humans. “There is no such thing as a radiation exposure that will not do damage,” she said.

Paul Barham, a Virginia trucker who moves local containers out of the ports of Hampton Roads, VA, sometimes makes as many as a dozen trips to different terminals in a day. “I didn’t realize how bad the radiation was until one of the workers started talking about how powerful gamma rays are,” he said. “I just can’t believe why port management would ignore the health risk of all the workers and drivers out here at the terminal without even a warning.”


<a name="du"></a>

-------- depleted uranium

Other Substances, Many Possibilities

After more than a decade, there are still questions than answers about the cause of illnesses suffered by veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

CHAPTER 6: PART OF THE MIX
 
BY BOB EVANS
247-4758
HAMPTON ROADS, VA. Daily Press
December 16, 2004

http://www.dailypress.com/news/specials/dp-du6,0,4947116.story?coll=dp-breaking-news

Stress. Pyridostigmine bromide. Bug spray. Permethrin. Sarin. Sand.

Depleted uranium.

Matt Rohman was exposed to all of them.

It happened in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, after Rohman enlisted and left his home in York County.

Now he's left to wonder whether one of those suspected dangers, several of them - or none of them - are why his once-strong body has been falling apart ever since.

The pain and problems began when he was 28, just back from battle. He hasn't been able to work since age 33. Now he's 40, unable to feel anything in his hands or feet, unable to breathe without drugs and unable to play ball with his young son.

Rohman's not alone. More than 183,000 veterans of the Gulf War are on some form of disability, and many of them have no idea what made them sick.

The Pentagon and government wrote off the problem as "stress" until public complaints, a few scientists and members of Congress raised a fuss and brought a change in direction a few years ago. Since then, some serious science has taken place in labs spanning the nation, giving many people involved some hope of progress.

Researchers in Mississippi used high-tech brain-imaging equipment to identify a type of dysfunction that appears to be consistent among sick Gulf War veterans.

Scientists in San Francisco found that the veterans who had health problems had experienced reduced levels of a chemical necessary for good brain functioning.

Doctors at Duke and in Dallas learned that many of the sick veterans had naturally low levels of an enzyme that helps the body fight off the debilitating effects of nerve gas.

In New Mexico, scientists found two problems when rats breathed air containing tiny bits of depleted uranium dust. In one group of animals, the depleted uranium migrated to the brain. Tests on another group revealed genetic mutations thought to be indicative of cancer.

The particles that the animals breathed were similar to the pieces of black dust resulting from using depleted uranium "tank-killing" weapons. The dust is toxic, mildly radioactive and easily inhaled. But scientists disagree on whether it could be responsible for the neurological and physical problems suffered by so many veterans of the war.

Pentagon officials dismiss the notion that the dust can cause health problems. They say the weapons are important and give U.S. troops a big advantage on the battlefield.

Rohman suspects that depleted uranium might have played a role in the loss of his health, but he also considers exposure to nerve gas, the bug spray he was given and other chemicals issued by the Army to be possible sources of the evils he's suffered.

So do doctors and researchers.

And that's part of the problem.

According to a June report on the problems of sick Gulf War vets by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, 21 research questions remain unresolved. This is despite $247 million in research since 1994.

New technology provides a new look at vets' brains

With so many possible alternatives for what happened and so little hard evidence of who was exposed to the suspected causes, researchers are scrambling for good data, Robert Haley says. He's an epidemiologist and researcher who serves on a Department of Veterans Affairs advisory panel for Gulf War illnesses.

He and Duke University researcher Mohamad B. Abou-Donia say they don't even have an answer for simple questions, such as which drugs were given to which soldiers and where those soldiers were during the war.

Haley says a research effort to finally get a handle on the basic data of exposure is being prepared now and should begin in January. It should have been done years ago, he says.

Government officials almost started the project, but Haley and other researchers saw the questionnaire that they were going to use and recognized it wasn't adequate. It lacked a number of basic questions that will help researchers establish what hazards veterans might have come in contact with during the war.

Among the deficiencies, he says, were questions that would have helped define possible exposure to depleted uranium.

Haley is a former official at the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and now is chief of epidemiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. He says some of the most important recent research was made possible by brain-imaging equipment invented after the vets came home sick and weak from the 1991 war.

Armed with this technology, researchers now can get pictures of what's happening in the veterans' brains.

Those pictures show that veterans who had the characteristic problems that some people label "Gulf War illness" consistently have lower levels of NAA. NAA is a chemical in neurons, the switches in the brain that permit thinking and processing, including muscle movement, strength and fatigue.

NAA is an indicator of how well neurons are functioning. The sick veterans had about 20 percent less NAA than veterans who didn't have health complaints.

Anyone who'd had such low levels of NAA before the war would have been noticeably impaired and wouldn't have been allowed to serve, Haley says. So it's relatively safe to think that this change happened during their service.

That doesn't prove what caused the NAA level to go down though.

Haley and many others think the most likely candidate for the cause of the illnesses is the nerve gas sarin. The Iraqi army used it against Iran in an earlier war and had stockpiles in 1991, the Central Intelligence Agency, GAO and other U.S. government agencies reported.

After U.S. troops went to Iraq and Kuwait in 1990 and 1991, their chemical-weapons alert systems frequently indicated that sarin was present, the GAO says. But that equipment was often unreliable to prove exposure and prone to false alerts.

Government officials later found that many of the chemical-protection suits given to soldiers were also defective, the GAO says.

Even if the Iraqis didn't intend to use sarin, many experts say they're sure that it was in the air - probably because our own troops put it there.

The GAO says CIA and Pentagon officials have acknowledged that several Iraqi munitions dumps thought to contain sarin were destroyed by the U.S. military during the war. The troops involved didn't know what they were dealing with, the GAO says, and the explosions put an untold amount of sarin gas into the air each time.

'WE PUT THEM IN A BIG CIRCLE AND BLEW THEM UP'

Rohman says that he participated in operations to destroy equipment at some of the sites identified by the CIA and that he worked near others. He also spent about three months blowing up Iraqi munitions and equipment in other places.

"In one incident, we found a convoy in Iraq, several hundred vehicles filled with rockets and ammunition," he says. U.S. Air Force A-10 "Warthog" aircraft firing depleted uranium weapons had attacked the convoy and scattered the vehicles. "We put them in a big circle and blew them up."

In another operation, Rohman says, he and others lined up Iraqi rockets and other munitions in a mile-long stack like firewood and blew them up.

The effort to destroy all those munitions and equipment went too fast to examine the individual items to determine what they were, he says. His unit was moving, moving, moving - ordered to find all that it could and blow it up before the Army had to leave Iraq after combat stopped and diplomats took over.

Now he thinks it's quite likely that some of those shells contained poison gas. But he doesn't know for sure.

Some scientists dismiss the sarin theory, saying there simply weren't the deaths and classic symptoms that the chemical is known for.

But others say the expected reactions didn't happen because the chemical was dispersed in those explosions and resulted in small doses over a large area. They say the chemical still got into the soldiers' blood through the skin, nose and mouth and did its damage, then disappeared from the bloodstream before testing could find it.

The human body has an enzyme that attacks sarin and staves off the effects, Haley says. Some people naturally have more of it, and some have less, but the level that someone has in their body doesn't change over time, and it can't be added later to rid the body of a toxin that's caused damage.

If the sarin from exploded munitions went into the air, it then fell on the soldiers in minute quantities for days, Haley says. He theorizes that soldiers with lower levels of the protective enzyme started experiencing weakness and reduced neurological functions that were barely noticeable, then continued to get worse. Other soldiers, with high levels of the enzyme, went home fine.

This would help explain why veterans with nearly identical experiences came home with totally different health prospects, Haley says.

Rohman and other veterans say their problems did begin with weakness, followed by more debilitating problems as time went on.

ONE TYPE OF PESTICIDE LINKED TO PROBLEMS, IF DOSES HIGH

Sarin is a chemical known as an organophosphate, which simply means that it's an organic derivative of phosphoric or similar acids. Agent Orange, the now-infamous weed killer that caused problems for veterans of the Vietnam War, is also an organophosphate.

Organophosate pesticides were also used during the Persian Gulf War to ward off sand fleas and other biting and infectious bugs in the desert. Soldiers frequently doused themselves, their tents and the sand around them with the chemicals.

In high doses, they've been proven to cause neuromuscular disorders. Scientists aren't sure whether smaller doses cause serious harm as well.

Haley says studies have found that farmers and pesticide workers who use organophosphates have higher-than-expected rates of the neuromuscular disease ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

So have Gulf War veterans. According to the Veterans Affairs Department, they have a much higher rate of ALS at early ages than that of the general population. Haley says that gives some credence to the theory the organophosphates might play a role in Gulf War vets' problems.

Other researchers say chemicals troops used to prevent insect bites, and ate to ward off the possible effects of chemical weapons (including pyridostigmine bromide and permethrin) might be the problem. In the rush to battle after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Pentagon planners began worrying about the possibility of a chemical war and realized that they had only experimental drugs to give troops. A decision was made to give the drugs out anyway, and some caused severe reactions.

Pyridostigmine bromide pills gave many vets sudden, violent reactions.

"When I started taking those pills, my hands went completely numb," Rohman says. "I couldn't hold things. So I just quit taking them."

The U.S. government maintains that soldiers didn't get a high enough dose of any of those pills to be harmed.

Haley, Abou-Donia and others say a mounting body of evidence about toxic chemicals shows the problem might not be that simple.

Scientists have known for years that a person under psychological or physical stress is much more susceptible to illnesses of many kinds than someone who isn't under stress, Abou-Donia says.

The sandstorms and extremely fine sand of the Persian Gulf region add to that stress on the body by irritating the eyes, breathing and other bodily functions.

Add the mixture of chemicals that the soldiers were exposed to, and the result could be demonstrable neurological problems from what might otherwise be insignificant doses of chemicals, Abou-Donia and Haley say.

Abou-Donia and other researchers demonstrated that principle in a scientific paper published earlier this year. They found that the combination of several of those chemicals, coupled with stress and exposure to silica from sand, resulted in measurable changes to important parts of the brain in laboratory animals.

The study included exposing the animals to high-strength DEET, a bug repellent used by many troops in the war. Products containing DEET are the most commonly used bug repellents in the United States. In low and limited doses, DEET is recommended to prevent various diseases from ticks, mosquitoes and other pests.

Abou-Donia's experiment involving DEET and other chemicals didn't include exposing animals to depleted uranium. But he says he thinks the weapons' dusty residue on the battlefield is a likely suspect in the parade of toxins that soldiers were exposed to - and which caused them to come home sick.

"I would think it is part of the mix," he says.

Area veteran tried for years to get depleted uranium test

Even though much more is now known about the nature of their illnesses and possible causes, Gulf War veterans still are having trouble getting adequate attention to their needs, say leaders of the American Legion and the National Gulf War Resource Center Inc., a veterans rights group.

Steve Robinson, executive director of the resource center, says doctors and clinicians at military bases and Veterans Affairs hospitals all over the country haven't been properly trained or educated about possible exposure to depleted uranium. The information that those clinicians are given doesn't include research later than 1999, he told Congress earlier this year, and what they're taught is often biased. As a result, he says, many veterans' problems are being ignored.

Rohman's medical records show he's had that problem at the Hampton VA Medical Center.

He says he's been trying to get officials there to give him a test for depleted uranium for years. Many of his medical records have been misplaced, lost or destroyed by the government agencies that handled them, but his own copies demonstrate that he told VA physicians about his exposure at least as early as 1998.

Kay Reid, who runs the Gulf War program at the Hampton VA hospital, says that should have been enough to trigger an examination for exposure to depleted uranium - and, given Rohman's description of his war experiences, a urine test.

She says she's not sure why it didn't happen then. Just as she doesn't know why it didn't happen this spring, when a doctor at the hospital put a note in Rohman's medical records March 9 that said Rohman "had requested a uranium exposure test."

The medical records show that messages were supposed to be sent from the doctor, notifying Reid that Rohman was in need of evaluation. Reid says she never got that message.

Rohman says he was given Reid's name and office telephone number to set up an appointment for the test. He says he called several times and left messages but never got a response.

When the Daily Press contacted Reid in July, she said she didn't know about his calls. She promised to follow up. Reid phoned Rohman that day to begin screening him for a test. Rohman says he still hasn't been tested, however.

Rohman's problems getting testing are similar to other veterans' experiences, based on a 2000 report by the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress.

The study found that more than 14 percent of the veterans selected for a depleted uranium testing program hadn't received testing because VA officials hadn't processed the referrals and made appointments.

The steps for screening vets who want a DU test

Reid says that as of Nov. 12, 603 men and women from southeastern Virginia and eastern North Carolina had been placed in a nationwide registry of veterans who served in the Persian Gulf region from 1991 to the present. The government began the registry in the early 1990s as an attempt to track health trends among the veterans, after persistent complaints about undiagnosed health problems. Nationwide, 86,000 veterans are in the registry.

Over the years, eligibility for the registry has changed, Reid says. Now anyone who served in the Persian Gulf region since 1990 - regardless of their health or whether they were there when a shot was fired - can ask to be included. As of mid-November, five people who served in the more recent fighting there have been placed in the registry by the Hampton hospital, though others are being evaluated and tested and will likely join them, she says.

Between 20 percent and 25 percent of the local veterans in the registry have health problems that are observable but not diagnosed, which mirrors the nationwide average, she says.

When veterans enter the registry and ask for a depleted uranium test, they first see a VA clinician like Reid. She says she goes through a 10-page questionnaire with each vet to get an idea about their exposures and experiences.

Then they're examined by a nurse practitioner, who makes a referral to a doctor, if that's called for, Reid says. At the Hampton hospital, Reid is the nurse practitioner who usually does the exams.

Reid says about half the veterans from the Persian Gulf War whom she's put into the registry in Hampton have asked for a test for depleted uranium.

"They think they may have been exposed to depleted uranium," she says, "but after we go over the criteria, they change their mind."

Reid says she asks people what jobs they had in the war and what kind of contact they had with enemy and allied tanks and armored vehicles struck by depleted uranium. If they weren't on or near the tanks very soon after a weapon struck, they're not likely candidates for exposure, she says.

If they were around a tank three days later, she says, there would be no exposure or minimal exposure - unless they went in the tank for extended periods.

"It's not something that's just floating in the air," she says. "You have to be around the tank within an hour of it being hit."

The Army's Environmental Policy Institute told Congress that bits of depleted uranium have been found as far as 400 meters (1,320 feet) downwind from experimental explosions.

The Canadian military's testing found that the particles can be suspended in the air for hours after an explosion.

U.S. military training programs say anyone going within 50 meters of a vehicle struck by a depleted uranium weapon should wear protective clothing and a breather mask, no matter how long after the explosion.

Ultimately, Reid says, she decides to give the tests to only 1 percent or 2 percent of the vets. If they insist, they can get the test, anyway.

Of those tested through her office, "We have not identified anyone here who actually had depleted uranium in their system," she says.

'If you don't look, you won't find'

Pentagon officials say the vast majority of the samples that they get don't contain enough total uranium, depleted or otherwise, to warrant further examination to determine whether depleted uranium is present. The military's testing program is also incapable of identifying small quantities of depleted uranium in veterans' urine samples and can never be used as a definitive test of exposure - only a test of what the military has deemed potentially unhealthy exposure.

Labs in Britain and Germany have developed methods much more capable of detecting depleted uranium, but the U.S. military isn't interested in copying them. Robinson and other critics of the military's handling of exposure issues say this is an important part of the problem.

The military has been telling people for years that the tests showed no exposure to depleted uranium when all that can be said for sure is that the tests chosen by the U.S. government are unable to detect it.

"If you don't look, you won't find," Robinson says.

Robinson and other veterans advocates say the problem is being repeated in the current war, with inadequate testing of troops before and immediately after deployment. This means scientists will once again be lacking important data if health problems arise a year or more from now, they say.

Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., is chairman of the subcommittee on national security, veterans affairs and international relations of the House Committee on Government Reform. He says the Pentagon failed to set up the testing and health assessments that Congress demanded after realizing what happened during the Persian Gulf war.

Michael J. Kilpatrick, the Pentagon's deputy director for looking after the health of troops deployed to war, says the current system might not be perfect. But, he says, the military has made marked improvement in collecting data and keeping records that would prove beneficial to researchers if there's a repeat of the parade of ill, undiagnosed veterans from Operation Iraqi Freedom.

He says military officials routinely take measurements and test the air, water and soil of where troops are stationed and fighting. Health records are being computerized, he says, so shots, illnesses and other records can be tracked later.

But, Kilpatrick says, the realities of the modern battlefield don't make it possible to say where every soldier was and what the air, water and soil were like at that time. The equipment used for this work also isn't capable of detecting depleted uranium, except in very large quantities, he says.

One of the improvements in baseline health monitoring that Congress demanded in its 1998 law to protect servicemen and women involves a requirement that the Pentagon store blood samples taken from everyone before deployment. That's so researchers can examine the samples later to help compare before-and-after characteristics, in case there are health problems.

But the Pentagon surprised many sponsors of the bill by not doing what was expected.

Rep. Stephen E. Buyer, R-Ind., is a Gulf War vet who helped write the law. He's been critical of the military's response to the requirements. He says Congress spent a lot of time crafting a law to protect the troops and create a baseline of accurate medical information on every soldier deployed, only to see the Department of Defense, or DoD, water it down.

"We've got DoD going out there, doing their own thing," he said in a congressional hearing last year.

The most obvious deviation from the law's intent, Buyer and other members of Congress say, involves medical attention to troops before and after they deploy.

Buyer is chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. He says he and other members of Congress expected every soldier, sailor, Marine and airman to get a hands-on physical exam from a doctor when they mandated a "medical examination" for everyone before deployment.

Instead, the Pentagon decided that giving soldiers a two-page questionnaire, asking them to report any health problems, would be sufficient.

"The intent of Congress was an examination," said Rep. John R. Boozman, R-Ark., during a hearing last year. "And really, the reality is these young men and women basically got less than, you know, a cheerleader or a football player does every couple of years."

Buyer also pointed out that the law required "the drawing of blood samples to accurately record the medical condition of members before their deployment and any changes in their medical condition during the course of their employment."

The Pentagon used blood serum from the standard AIDS test, a part of the blood that doesn't allow doctors to do many before-and-after comparisons to see whether chemical exposures have affected someone.

PENTAGON BYPASSES $100 WHITE-BLOOD-CELL STORAGE

Kilpatrick says the Pentagon is doing everything the law requires.

He acknowledges that the blood serum being stored is of limited value and is only part of the blood taken in a sample. It doesn't contain parts of whole blood that would enable researchers to compare the rate of DNA mutations or many other important attributes with samples taken after the troops return from war.

Right now, he says, "there is no single blood test that would prove useful in screening all service members who have deployed." So the serum is all that's saved. Anything else isn't practical, Kilpatrick says.

Richard Albertini is a cancer researcher at the University of Vermont who's been part of the research into soldiers with depleted uranium shrapnel from the Gulf War. He says the Pentagon missed a chance to gather samples of white blood cells that could prove very important.

A few veterans with the shrapnel have shown increased rates of genetic mutations thought to be a warning sign of possible cancer, he says. To see whether this might be because of depleted uranium, researchers exposed rats to air with depleted uranium dust, and the rats showed the same type of mutations, he says. They also developed tumors.

But unless you can have a before-and-after sample of the veterans' white blood cells, you can't determine whether the change in mutations is the result of something that happened during their deployment or from some other factor, Albertini says. That would be one of the items that he'd identify as valuable, if keeping data for a baseline of health was the goal.

It isn't difficult and isn't very expensive to keep those white-blood-cell samples either, he says. "We do it all the time," he says, and it costs less than $100 a sample. Several members of Congress tried to put more specific requirements for blood samples into law this year, in response to the Pentagon's decisions. But a majority were concerned with putting too many mandates on the military in the midst of a war, so there was little specific guidance enacted for the blood-storage program.

Kilpatrick acknowledges that the system for protecting troops is evolving and isn't as good as it should be yet.

But when it comes to keeping records and data on health issues, he says, "we are light-years ahead," compared with the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

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Depleted uranium used during both gulf wars is a potent threat
Some scientists dispute Pentagon's claim weapons' component imposes no serious health risk.

Copley Press
By Helen Thomas
December 16, 2004

http://www.dailybreeze.com/opinion/articles/1146047.html

The Pentagon claims that American forces and Iraqis are not at risk from contact with depleted uranium, which is used in armor-piercing munitions and protective tank plating.

That's baloney to some scientists who insist the widespread use of depleted uranium during the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq poses a grave danger.

Despite attempts to reassure the public, the Pentagon remains on the defensive.

Depleted uranium or DU is a radioactive byproduct from the industrial process to enrich uranium. It is the leftover uranium-238 that results when scientists seek to transform naturally occurring uranium into uranium-235, which is used to produce nuclear energy.

The Army values munitions manufactured from depleted uranium because, when fused with metal alloys, they are considered the most effective warhead for penetrating enemy tanks. Also, because depleted uranium is twice as dense as lead, the Army uses DU as armor plating.

Once a depleted uranium round strikes its target, the projectile begins to burn on impact, creating tiny particles of radioactive U-238. Winds can transport this radioactive dust many miles, potentially contaminating the air that innocent humans breathe.

This inhalation may cause lung cancer, kidney damage, cancers of bones and skin, birth defects and chemical poisoning.

The 1991 Persian Gulf war was the first conflict to see the widespread use of depleted uranium, both in armor-piercing projectiles and in the protective armor of the new generation of Abrams tanks.

Studies by the Pentagon and the National Academy of Sciences established no linkage between DU and the "Gulf War Syndrome" ailments after the first Gulf war.

Some 70 people are still under study for the effects of contact with DU, with particular emphasis on what happens when people breathe the air where DU projectiles have vaporized.

Dr. Helen Caldicott has dedicated her life to warning about the hazards of nuclear war and the effects of DU.

Born in Melbourne, Australia, she first became interested in nuclear hazards when she saw the movie "On the Beach" at the age of 15. The film deals with a nuclear accident that leads to a global nuclear war.

Growing up, she led a movement in Australia against the French atmospheric nuclear tests in the Pacific and tried to win a ban on Australian uranium mining.

She became a medical doctor and later founded Physicians for Social Responsibility, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.

In her book, The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military-Industrial Complex, Caldicott claims that DU qualifies as a nuclear weapon because of its low-level radioactivity. She said that huge quantities of DU were created during the Cold War.

"Weapon researchers and developers have now succeeded in putting this toxic 'nuclear waste' to use through the creation of depleted uranium bullets and shells," she added.

Depleted uranium particles are soluble in water and the waters around the battlefields, as in Iraq and Kuwait are at risk of radioactive pollution, Caldicott said.

She warned that DU maintains radioactivity for billions of years and can concentrate in the food chain, with children and babies more vulnerable to the carcinogenic effects of ingested radiation than adults.

Medical reports from Iraq indicate that childhood malignancies are seven times greater than before the first Gulf war.

The complaints of the veterans of the first Gulf war are "surprisingly similar in pattern to the various pathologies induced by uranium exposure as described by the U.S. military," Caldicott said.

Some 50,000 to 80,000 veterans were afflicted with Gulf War Syndrome and there has been no definitive answer -- but a lot of dispute -- as to the cause.

The military use of depleted uranium is still being questioned. But one thing is certain: War is dangerous to your health.

Helen Thomas is a Washington-based columnist with Hearst Newspapers. Her e-mail address is hthomas@hearstdc.com.

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Soldier’s Heart

Thousands of Iraq War veterans face serious psychological problems and a system ill prepared to help them.

FW Weekly

By Dan Frosch and Peter Gorman

December 15, 2004

http://www.fwweekly.com/issues/2004-12-15/feature.asp

Williams: ‘I wanted to talk to someone who knew what it was like over there.’ (Photo by Scott Latham)
Matthew Williams was 19 years old when he enlisted in the Army in 2002. While he wanted to fight for freedom, he didn’t want to kill anyone, so he joined the medic corps. “I thought I might be the difference between someone dying and going home to see their family,” he said. “That was a good feeling.”

The young Arlington man never killed anybody in Iraq, and most of the time no one was trying to kill him. But he saw the carnage up close and bloody. And he and his ambulance crews were attacked as their convoys traveled the roads between the medical hospital at Al-Asad and places like Fallujah, where heavy fighting was going on. He remembers riding shotgun on a military truck one day, his M-16 at ready, when “this guy comes riding toward us on a bicycle with a baby on the back. When he gets close, he reaches one hand behind his back, and I sighted him up because I thought he might have a weapon. And as he rides by, he pulls out his hand in the shape of a gun and pretends to fire at me. The only reason I didn’t fire was because I knew the bullet would take out the baby along with the guy, and I didn’t want to do that unless I was absolutely sure it was a weapon.”

When Williams’ unit finished a year’s deployment in April, they rolled back to Fort Carson in Colorado, where they were given a battery of physical and mental tests, over $14,000 in pay, and a month’s leave, and were told to get ready to be redeployed to Iraq on their return. Williams came home thinking everything was fine. It wasn’t. His sister almost didn’t recognize him. “He was drinking excessively,” she said. “He couldn’t talk to people, would just walk away from them. Then one day our dad’s little dog jumped into the new Mustang he’d bought, and Matt just picked him up and threw him 30 feet. This was a guy who absolutely loved animals.”

When he got back to Fort Carson, Williams asked the Army for help. He was seen by a military psychiatrist. “Dr. Newman said they were short-handed and didn’t have anyone for me to talk with. He put me on a waiting list for therapy and gave me a month’s supply of an anti-depressant ... and told me they might have someone when I finished that.”

They didn’t. When Williams returned after a month he was given a three-month supply and told to come back when that was done. Then he failed a drug test for marijuana, then another, and was offered an early, but honorable, discharge. Williams, who’d been decorated with a Combat Merit Badge, an Army Commendation, and several other citations, took the discharge. He returned home, kept drinking, and finally tried to kill himself.

Joshua Peterson’s troubles took another form. The first time he hit his wife, Kristin, she was asleep in their bed. Awakened by Joshua’s fist smashing into her face, she ran, terrified and crying, to the bathroom to wipe the blood spurting from her nose. When she looked back into the bedroom, he was punching at the air, muttering how she was coming after him and how he was going to kill her. But his eyes were closed.

Peterson was appalled the next morning to realize what he’d done, but he doesn’t remember the night or the nightmares. Neither can he remember punching his wife again in his sleep a few weeks later, this time driving her front tooth through her lip, as he murmured over and over that he’d never go back.

For six months last year, Peterson helped build an oil pipeline across Iraq as a specialist in the Army’s 110th Quartermaster Company. On the same highway where Private Jessica Lynch was ambushed, he saw the rotting bodies of Iraqi soldiers dangling out of their tanks. One time Peterson’s truck broke down and he was surrounded by a group of Iraqi children, some throwing rocks, others toting AK-47s. “I kept thinking, ‘God, I can’t handle this,’ ” the 24-year-old said with a hollow laugh.

Since Peterson came back to Richmond Hill, Ga., in August 2003, these memories have turned him into a man Kristin often doesn’t recognize — a man who lashes out in anger at her and their toddler, a man whose awful dreams tell him to beat his wife because she’s an Iraqi.

There are thousands of Operation Iraqi Freedom soldiers across the country like Matthew Williams and Joshua Peterson. A December 2003 Army study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that about 16 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq were suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a psychologically debilitating condition causing intense nightmares, paranoia, and anxiety. Now, after a particularly bloody summer and fall, many military and mental health experts predict the rate of PTSD will actually run nearly twice what the study found, approximately the same level suffered by Vietnam veterans. Others think it could go even higher and note that rarely before has such a dramatic rate of PTSD manifested itself so soon after combat.

Those troubled veterans, by and large, will go knocking on the door of the Department of Veteran Affairs. And many will find that, just like the military that often couldn’t adequately equip them in Iraq, the VA, according to numerous studies, does not have many of the essential services the veterans desperately need.

“I don’t know how many people are going to be seeking treatment, or whether the demand is going to be met by available resources,” acknowledged Matthew Friedman, executive director of the VA’s National Center for PTSD. “What I am confident [of] is that people who come for treatment will get good treatment.”

Yet the VA chronically has under-funded mental health programs and currently projects a $1.65 billion shortfall in those programs by the end of 2007. “If we don’t give the VA what it needs immediately, the consequences will be lifelong and devastating,” said Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center.

The emerging scenario is that of a new generation of veterans — many of whom were psychologically unprepared for what happened to them and around them — and of an exhausted healthcare system holding its breath.

While veterans like Williams and Peterson were dealing with their personal nightmares, Dr. James Scully was testifying before Congress about a national nightmare. In March 2004, Scully, a Navy veteran and medical director of the American Psychiatric Association, testified before the U.S. House subcommittee responsible for VA funding. Scully reported a dramatic 42 percent increase in VA patients with severe PTSD in the previous five years, with only a 22 percent increase in money spent on PTSD services. The reduction was particularly startling, he said, because more vets are using the VA for psychological help than ever — nearly half a million at last count.

It was the latest blow for an institution that has struggled for decades to fulfill its mission. A mammoth, federally funded agency, the VA’s healthcare system has been treating veterans since 1930. But in the wake of the first Gulf War, pressures on the system swelled out of control. The soaring cost of civilian health insurance combined with an aging population of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam vets, pushed droves of service people toward the VA where everything was cheaper.

In 1995, the VA began realigning its healthcare system and opening hundreds of outpatient clinics. Yet by 2001, only half of the clinics provided mental health services, according to the National Mental Health Association.

Again, funding was a factor. Between 1996 and 2003, the VA noted a 134 percent jump in vets seeking care, with only a 44 percent increase in the budget.

In April 2003, as U.S. troops pushed toward Baghdad, Dr. Joseph T. English, chairman of psychiatry for St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Centers of New York, told the same House subcommittee that veterans were waiting an average of 47 days to get into PTSD in-patient programs and up to a year at some outpatient facilities.

VA Secretary Anthony Principi had commanded a Navy gunboat during Vietnam and understood PTSD. He also knew that with combat-dazed vets beginning to trickle home from Iraq, he needed to move. He commissioned a task force to upgrade the VA’s mental health services on short notice. (Principi resigned recently as part of the Bush Administration’s cabinet shuffle but remains in office until his successor is confirmed.)

In a revealing June 3, 2004, memo to VA Undersecretary for Health Jonathan Perlin, Principi wrote that the task force had discovered four major deficiencies: Mental health services were scattered, substance abuse programs had been reduced, the VA’s leadership hadn’t been diligent in overseeing the situation, and there was no coherent mental health strategy. Principi ordered VA brass to begin plugging the holes immediately.

While the VA worked on a long-term plan for implementing the reforms, the agency’s Special Committee on PTSD delivered an October report to Congress, warning that with more soldiers with PTSD arriving home, services needed beefing up. During the 1980s, the VA had recommended that teams of PTSD counselors be placed at all VA medical centers. Two decades later, the report noted, barely half of the 163 facilities had them.

The committee predicted that it would take about $1.65 billion by 2008 to fix things. Without extra funding, the committee conceded, the VA couldn’t be expected to treat psychologically troubled vets from Iraq and Afghanistan while still caring for those already in the system. “If the human cost of PTSD and its related disorders is staggering, so are the long-term medical costs to the VA associated with chronic PTSD,” the report stated.

The House Veterans Affairs Committee urged Congress to pump an additional $2.5 billion into the Bush Administration’s VA healthcare budget for 2005. But by November, with the budget poised for passage, it seemed unlikely that the warnings from veterans groups and VA doctors who sat on the PTSD Committee would be heeded.

Those VA doctors knew that, given the chance, they could treat the disorder better than anyone. They have been on the cutting edge of PTSD since it was first diagnosed in a war whose lessons now seem distant.

Sgt. Dave Durman’s girlfriend, Teresa A. McKay, noticed immediately when his behavior began to change. (Photo courtesy of Erich Allen Group)

Sgt. Dave Durman did a tour in the Mekong Delta back in 1969. He was 18 and had joined the Navy the minute he got his draft notice, even though some of his buddies had already died there. “I think it was because I just really loved the water,” Durman said.

Durman also loved working on the supply ship where he was stationed and the adrenaline that pulsed whenever his unit supported the Marines on missions around the South Vietnamese coast. He loved it all so much that he stayed in the Navy for nine years. Then in 1995 he joined the Virginia National Guard’s 1032nd Transportation Company, based 10 miles from his home in Kingsport, Tenn.

In February 2003, Durman’s unit was sent to Kuwait. He was 52 years old. Two months later, the 1032nd crossed into Iraq, charged with shipping supplies from the southern city of Talil 300 miles north to Balad. Other convoys had been attacked on the same route, so Durman and the 19-year-old soldier who rode with him slung their flak jackets protectively over the outside of both truck doors because, Durman said, “you could stab a hole through those doors with a knife.”

During one August haul, Durman came upon a group of Iraqi police who had just shot two children for stripping a car on the side of the road. He drove right by their bodies. “We’re told not to interfere with domestic affairs,” Durman said quietly.

In September, Durman’s unit shipped back to Virginia. It was then the nightmares started — about Iraq, but also about things he’d buried — his abusive childhood, Vietnam. His girlfriend, Teresa A. McKay, noticed that Durman, once confident and kind, now broke into random sweats and angered easily. He drank too much whiskey and bought a .357 pistol. Their sex life, McKay said, went “190 degrees different.”

To McKay, a former nurse who’d worked with homeless Vietnam veterans, Durman’s behavior looked disquietingly familiar. Indeed, Vietnam provides the clinical and historical framework for the PTSD cases coming out of Iraq. Before Vietnam, treatment of a soldier for the psychological effects of battle was not really treatment at all, even though PTSD had long been acknowledged under a variety of names.

In 1871, former Union Army medic J.M. Da Costa wrote about a stress disorder caused by heavy fighting. He called it “irritable heart,” a name changed shortly thereafter to “soldier’s heart.” During World War I, veterans returning home with soldier’s heart were told by military doctors that they had “shell shock” or “combat neurosis.”

After World War II, according to VA psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, tens of thousands of soldiers were hospitalized with psychiatric problems; doctors diagnosed the majority with paranoid schizophrenia. “The diagnostic spirit which prevailed was based on Plato’s idea that if you had good parentage, good genes, a good education, then no bad things could shake you from the path of virtue,” Shay said.

During Vietnam, that Platonic ideal began to shift. In 1970, 20 young vets from the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War asked former Army psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton to speak with them about the war. The vets didn’t trust the VA or the military but knew they needed to calm the devils they’d brought home.

Lifton, who had studied Hiroshima survivors, began meeting in New York with the group in what became known as “rap sessions.” He was shocked by the extent of the veterans’ traumas. “These men talked about a particular combat situation that had a level of extremity which was new, even to me,” he said.

Prompted by the rap sessions, VVAW opened up dozens of “storefront” counseling centers — places where Vietnam veterans could speak with other vets about their experiences, a crucial part of treating PTSD. Still, despite the growing number of vets clearly suffering, the VA wouldn’t accept PTSD as a diagnosis. “This was because many of them were talking about atrocities, and that process was associated with a political view of the war,” Lifton said.

Finally, in 1979, the VA opened up its own network of storefront vet centers. A year later, the American Psychiatric Association recognized PTSD as a legitimate medical diagnosis. And when the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study concluded in 1988 that 30 percent of Vietnam vets suffered from PTSD, not many were surprised. By then, Lifton (who never worked for the VA) and individual VA psychiatrists like Matthew Friedman had become leading experts on PTSD, helping push the condition into psychiatric and public consciousness.

Through group and individual therapy, and sometimes medication, the VA for some time now has been helping psychically wounded veterans to heal, though the process could take years. But by the time U.S. soldiers set foot on Iraqi soil, the VA’s failure to keep up with the enormous growth of its clientele was already causing advancements in PTSD treatment to be compromised.

A new conflict, which bore an uneasy resemblance to Vietnam, would test those advancements even further.

As Crystal Luker tells it, May 5, 2004, was the day her husband’s platoon ran into trouble.

As usual, on that afternoon, Spec. Ron Luker, 27, was patrolling a section of Baghdad with his 1st Cavalry Division platoon, whose stateside home is Fort Hood in central Texas. “There was a lieutenant in the first Humvee, Ron was in the second, and his platoon sergeant was in the third with a group of privates,” Crystal said. A 19-year-old specialist from Tulsa named James Marshall, whom Ron had been looking after, also rode in the third Humvee. As the convoy snaked through a teeming Baghdad street market, there was an explosion.

“The lieutenant was yelling over the radio for all of them to haul ass back to the base because they were coming under fire,” Crystal said. When Luker looked behind him, he was horrified. The third Humvee was gone. He flipped his vehicle around and hurtled back down the street.

Crystal said Luker told her that when they found the Humvee, the force of the blast had blown the flesh from two of the privates all over the seats. In the back, Luker found Marshall, wrapped around the vehicle’s 50 caliber gun. “When Ron tried pulling James’ body out, his hands just went right inside of him. He pulled James’ flak jacket back and his chest was gone.”

Before that day, Luker had called and written home religiously, unburdening himself to the woman he’d fallen in love with at a Mariposa, Calif., restaurant four years earlier. But when he came home to Fort Hood for a week in August, things changed dramatically.

That first night, at a welcome-home barbecue, Luker cornered his wife in the kitchen. “He asked why I’d been avoiding him and said that I didn’t want to be around him,” Crystal recalled. When Luker started cursing, some Army friends pulled him away. “You didn’t come all the way home to fight with your wife,” they told him.

As the week went on, there was more arguing. Crystal said her husband accused her of cheating while he was gone. He rifled through her purse and the bedroom drawers” and repeatedly listened to old phone messages, searching for proof. “I told him, ‘You’re scaring me! You’re not acting right, Ron!’ ” Crystal said.

Luker also seemed bothered around his three daughters. In an emotional revelation, he told his wife why. “He said he’d turned into a monster in Iraq. How he couldn’t bounce his kids on his knee when he’d shoved guns in women’s faces and busted into houses and pushed kids on the floor. He kept saying ‘I’m just trying to remember who I was before.’ ”

Ron Luker’s problems fit into a particular trend now evident among veterans of the Iraqi conflict — that of soldiers who are experiencing PTSD almost immediately upon their return from the fighting, as opposed to the usual PTSD pattern of delayed reaction. In some cases, the PTSD symptoms are even more frightening than Luker’s: At Fort Bragg, N.C., home of the elite Special Forces Command, four soldiers — three of whom had recently returned from the Afghanistan conflict — killed their wives in the space of six weeks in 2002. Two of them subsequently killed themselves. Despite the obvious, Army Special Operations Command spokesman Ben Abel was quoted by a respected French news agency as denying that there was a link between the war and the murders. “We don’t have reason to think it was stress-related,” Abel said.

In Columbus, Ohio, three soldiers from the same Fort Benning infantry battalion, which was engaged in some of the Iraq war’s bloodiest early battles, were charged in February 2004 with the murder and subsequent burning of the body of a fourth soldier from the same battalion. A San Antonio soldier from that battalion has been charged with concealing the crime. In a separate incident, another soldier from the battalion was charged with an unrelated murder outside a Columbus nightclub on the same night.

For some soldiers, the demons are closing in even before their tours end. U.S. Army Spec. Joseph Suell of Tyler took his own life two months after being deployed to Iraq and only days after the 24-year-old had e-mailed his wife Rebecca that, “Over here, you never know what’s going to happen next. So I just keep my faith in Jesus and keep my eyes open.” Suell, who’d planned on being a career soldier, was one of 24 American military people who killed themselves in Iraq between April 2003 and April 2004.

VA psychologist Scott Murray says most vets traditionally don’t feel the effects of PTSD until at least 15 months after the experiences that cause it — and it can take years for symptoms to appear. “This early on, PTSD is much higher than anything we’ve seen in previous conflicts,” Murray said. “We anticipate the numbers are only going to keep getting higher.”

Psychologist Kaye Baron currently treats some 70 active soldiers and their families in a private practice in Colorado Springs, near Fort Carson. Many of the soldiers she treats tell her they only want to get far away from their lives at home. “They just want to go off in the mountains,” she said, “and be by themselves.”

Based on clinical discussions she’s had with soldiers, Baron thinks the PTSD rate among Iraq war veterans could spike at 75 percent.

Such a rate, Robert Jay Lifton said, is inexorably tied to the character of the war itself. “This is a counterinsurgency being fought against an enemy who is hard to identify, and that leads to extraordinary stress,” he said.

According to Jonathan Shay, the issue with the most potential for psychological torment is soldiers’ doubt about whether the cause they’ve been led into battle for is a noble one. In his book, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and The Undoing of Character, Shay wrote about how the Greek hero felt betrayed by his arrogant general, Agamemnon, whose actions brought down a plague on the Greeks. The battle experiences of many Vietnam veterans caused them to feel much like Achilles, he said. “If a soldier has experienced a betrayal of what’s right by those in charge, their capacity for social trust can be impaired for the rest of their lives.”

Indeed, Dave Durman said he first began feeling uncomfortable in Iraq when it became clear there were no weapons of mass destruction. He said the soldiers in his unit were furious when General Tommy Franks retired mid-war, while the rest of the National Guard and reservists were subject to the Army’s “stop-loss” policy, which is still being used to extend soldiers’ deployments. And Ron Luker was outraged when he saw Iraqi children playing in human sewage gurgling through the streets while the Army did nothing.

That sense of betrayal translates into what Shay calls the nightmares of “complex PTSD”: nightmares, paranoia, violence, self-hate, and a crippling distrust.

Beyond the emotional stress of killing people in a goal-less war, there are additional stress-inducers being borne by the soldiers in Iraq that will certainly add to the number of PTSD cases the military and the VA will have to deal with.

According to Joyce Riley, RN, spokesperson for the American Gulf War Veterans Association and a former captain in the Air Force Reserve, the anthrax vaccine, exposure to depleted uranium, and the effects of Larium (mefloquine, used as a prophylactic against malaria) are all doing great harm to the troops. “I don’t think there’s any question of that. Anthrax vaccine can cause chronic health problems that resemble the Gulf War syndrome: fatigue, memory loss, headaches, sleep disturbance, muscle and joint pain. Larium has side effects that include paranoia, anxiety, hallucinations, suicide, violence, and psychosis. All of these things contribute to PTSD and suicide attempts. Hell, we’ve got people on death row for crimes we believe they committed as a result of these medications — to say nothing of the uppers and downers the military provides some of the troops. We’re turning these kids into emotional zombies.”

As for depleted uranium, she said, “We’ve got entire troops sick from exposure to it. The U.S. military uses it in shell casings, in 500-pound bombs, and even in the lining of tanks. We’ve used maybe 10 times more DU in Iraq than we did in the first Gulf War. A lot of those troops aren’t just sick, they’re dying. The bottom line is that they’re being affected by a number of things. And they have physical problems. And as long as the Department of Defense denies there are physical problems, they are an army left to die.”

Col. James A. Polo, a physician and chief of the Department of Behavioral Health at the Evans Army Community Hospital at Fort Carson, believes those alleged problems are mostly the product of someone’s overworked imagination. “If a kid is having bad effects on Larium, we take them off and give them something else,” he said. “And the depleted uranium — well, I’m not an expert on that, but we’ve been assured the danger is minimal.”

Time will reveal the actual effects of anthrax vaccinations and exposure to massive amounts of DU in the air. And while the military might intend to take soldiers off Larium if they are having any of its horrendous side effects, the reality is that there is not always someone in the field who would even recognize the symptoms, since they so often mimic general battle stress disorders.

One official military policy is adding immensely to the litany of traumatic stress-inducing elements in Iraq: the “stop-loss” program, whereby troops due to return home are told their tours are extended, and many are required to serve a second deployment to Iraq — the first time in modern U.S. warfare that second tours were not voluntary. Yet another stress-inducer: the lack of equipment that many soldiers are dealing with — pointed up most recently by an Army specialist’s much-quoted question to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?” he asked. Rumsfeld’s response: “You go to war with the army you have.”

In a subsequent interview, Maj. Gen. Gary Speer, the deputy commanding general of US forces in Kuwait, said that every vehicle that is deploying to Iraq from Kuwait has at least “Level 3” armor—armor for its side panels, but not necessarily bulletproof windows or protection against explosions that penetrate the floorboards, so common in convoy attacks.

Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company, was hired to help in Iraq with many of the resupply jobs traditionally done by the military, from bringing mail to the troops to supplying drinking water and spare parts. It’s a job they have not always done well.

“Don’t even get me started on that,” said Sharon Allen of Fort Worth, whose son is about to leave for his second tour in Iraq. “When my son was there the first time, the people at Halliburton said they couldn’t bring anything because it was too dangerous. They told my son’s company to come get water if they needed it. My son says the only way he kept his tank running was to steal parts. How are he and his crew supposed to support soldiers on the ground if they don’t even have an operating vehicle?”

One sergeant at Fort Hood — who asked that neither his name nor his unit be identified — said that when he’s training men he prefers to tell them the truth. “I tell them they’re not fighting to eliminate weapons of mass destruction because there were none and are none. I tell them we’re not fighting because Hussein harbored Osama, because Hussein hated Osama and would have had him killed if he’d have stepped foot in Iraq. I tell them we’re not fighting for our freedom because no one was threatening it. I tell them the truth: We’re fighting for oil so that their fellow Americans can drive SUV’s and burn gas. That’s all they’re fighting for. That and their own asses. Then I tell them to get home safe. I just can’t lie to them.”

Since reporting on this story began in October, Joshua Peterson and Dave Durman have started therapy at the VA. They’re likely getting some of the most advanced care in the world. They’re also lucky: Peterson’s mother-in-law knows a VA psychiatrist, and Durman was already enrolled, thanks to his time in the Navy.

These soldiers won’t be alone. So far, more than 10,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have sought psychological help from the VA, and there’s every indication the numbers will jump significantly.

Despite the challenges these numbers predict, Harold Kudler, co-chair of the VA’s PTSD Committee, said: “We’ve never been so prepared,” and points to unprecedented cooperation with the Department of Defense, intensified PTSD outreach, and the 206 vet centers.

But some say that preparation is not enough. “You can only provide the services for which you have the resources,” said psychologist Scott Murray. “There has to be significant improvement in an allocation of funds to make that occur.”

On Nov. 20, Congress added $1 billion to the Bush administration’s $27.1 billion VA healthcare budget for 2005. The amount fell $1.5 billion short of what was recommended by the House Veterans Affairs Committee. And while Congress earmarked an additional $15 million for PTSD, few think that money will make much difference.

“The heads of the VA healthcare networks are all trying to figure out how the hell they’re going to manage,” said Rick Weidman, director of government relations for Vietnam Veterans of America.

As for the VA’s mental health plan, which called for an extra $1.65 billion to fix things fully, VA spokesperson Laurie Tranter said: “We cannot comment on this now. The plan is still being finalized.”

Polo, at Fort Carson, claims that with the mental health evaluations done on each soldier before and after deployment, the Army is doing the best it can. “We offer group therapy for folks who have anger or stress issues, and we have individual treatment for those who need one-on-one therapy. We also have drug and alcohol abuse programs, family relations programs, and offer psychotropic medication to those who need it.”

However, Polo’s group at Fort Carson — six psychiatrists and a total of 35 primary therapeutic caregivers — is dealing with 15,000 men and women coming through the base at a given time, most of them readying for deployment or just returning, which doesn’t allow for much time per soldier.

Polo, who has already been deployed once to Iraq and will go back there soon, is proud of what the military is doing for soldiers therapeutically, but he also admits that among soldiers there are steep emotional barriers to even seeking help. “No one wants to be the weak link,” he said, “and soldiers often feel that if they admit to stress or emotional problems, their fellow soldiers will look down on them, see them as weak. Most studies show that there are a large number of soldiers who won’t come forward to say they need help. They want to tough it out” — like Matthew Williams, who even after his suicide attempt doesn’t admit to having PTSD.

Polo couldn’t say why Williams didn’t get the help he needed. “We [evaluate] a lot of soldiers,” he said. “We’re not perfect. But while I can’t comment on specific cases, I will say that if this fellow had really asked for help, he would have gotten it.”

Williams disagrees. “Soon as you walk in, they’re looking to give you pills,” he said. “I didn’t want pills. I wanted to talk with someone who knew what it was like over there.”

Cathy Wiblemo, deputy director for healthcare at the American Legion, says a veteran’s chances of getting mental help are vastly greater with the VA than with the military itself.

“The military is an infant in this sort of treatment. It’s easier to put those people out and let the VA take care of them,” she said. “The military has had a situation where it’s taboo to even talk about mental issues,” much less treat them.

But while the VA doctors are leaders in treating PTSD, she said, the agency’s funding is “hopelessly inadequate.”

“You’re looking at kids being extended or sent back involuntarily, and the effect of that on these soldiers is very different than the first Gulf War vets,” she said. “Those PTSD figures are going to soar much higher ... and the VA simply won’t have the space, the physicians [or] the psychiatrists ... to provide what they need.”

Peterson’s dream-induced violence, Williams’ suicide attempt, Durman’s drinking, Luker’s accusations about his wife are powerful examples of a similar dynamic. According to the VA, veterans with PTSD are more apt to be jobless, impoverished, homeless, addicted, imprisoned, without a stable family and three times more likely to die younger than the rest of us.

One of the other men with whom Williams served was also put on a waiting list for therapy. He got drunk and wrapped his car around a pole before anyone was free to see him. He was also given an early but honorable discharge. “He’s living on the streets in Dallas now,” Williams said. “Homeless.”

Meanwhile, Williams has met with VA, and said the doctors think “they might be able to fit me in” for counseling. Ron Luker is back in Iraq, and Crystal Luker says she’ll drag her husband to the VA if she has to when he gets home.

Still, all the money and services in the world couldn’t heal the ravages of PTSD for some.

In 1968, a young soldier named Lewis Puller came back from Vietnam minus his legs and parts of his hands, which had been blown off by a Viet Cong land mine. Puller, the son of the most decorated Marine in American history, soon became a veterans’ rights advocate and later a Pentagon lawyer. He married a politician, had two children, and, in 1991, wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book called Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet. Popular on Capitol Hill and among veterans, Puller had seemingly risen above the physical wounds and the depression and alcoholism that haunted him for years, to live a remarkable life.

But on May 11, 1994, more than a quarter-century after he came home, Puller shot himself. In the end, the soldier’s heart hurt too much.

Amidst an outpouring of grief, one Vietnam vet wrote an e-mail to Jonathan Shay, which Shay published in one of his books. “I get real tired of hidin’ and runnin’ from the demons,” the vet wrote. “Am I the only one? Has it crossed anyone else’s mind? You think maybe Lew was right? Is it the only real escape? I got questions. I’m out of answers.”

Dan Frosch is a New York-based freelance writer for The Nation, In These Times, and other publications. Peter Gorman writes frequently for Fort Worth Weekly. Barbara Solow with the Independent Weekly in Durham, N.C., also contributed to this story. 


-------- india / pakistan

‘Time to work on N-energy plant’

orissa.net (India)

16 Dec 2004

http://www.orissa.net/news/default.asp?NewsID=17252
 
 	Predicting that fossil fuel sources of the country would be exhausted by the middle of the century, Chairman of Atomic Energy Commission and Secretary, Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) Dr. Anil Kakodkar has said it is time to start working on replacing thermal plants with thorium-fuelled reactors so that nuclear generation through fast breeder reactors by 2050 can be achieved.

Addressing the second convocation of National Institute of Technology (NIT), here on Saturday, Kakodkar dwelt on the need to look for alternative sources of energy.

Cautioning that the energy resources within the earth are rapidly getting depleted, he said it is necessary that all non-carbon emitting resources become an integral part of energy mix - as diversified as possible - to ensure energy security to the world in the present century.

Available sources are low carbon fossil fuels, renewable and nuclear energy and all these should be subject of increased level of research and development, he added.

Quoting DAE forecasts, Kakodkar revealed that 50 years from now, per capita electricity generation would reach about 5300 kwh per year with a total generation of about 8000 billion kwh. He said from the perspective of fuel resource position, study reveals that cumulative resource expenditure will be about 2400 EJ by 2052.

Power generation in India which was only 4.1 billion kwh in 1947-48 has increased to more than 600 billion kwh in 2002-03.

Kakodkar said considering the past records, the future economic growth scenario and likely boost to captive power plant sector due to changes in Electricity Act 2003, the target of generating 8000 billion kwh per year by 2052 is achievable.

And it is here that nuclear energy will play a vital role during the next five decades, he claimed.

He said that considering India’s uranium resources and physical characteristics of metallic fuel-based fast reactors, even after tapping full potential of hydro and other renewable energy resources, it would be necessary to meet significant portion of demand from fossil fuels.

But keeping in view our fossil resources, and their projected usage, these will get exhausted by the middle of the century unless additional resources are found, he observed.	 
	

-------- korea

[Year-End Review] Unhappy Memoiries of South Korea's Nuclear Past

By Ryu Jin, Hankooki.com 12-16-2004

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/nation/200412/kt2004121617321811950.htm

The international controversy over Seoul’s undeclared nuclear-related experiments in the past were brought to an end with the IAEA chairman’s statement last month, but the three-month hullabaloo left South Koreans with a couple of valuable lessons in the process.

It was early in September when the surprising revelations about the controversial lab tests first hit South Korea, not the nuclear-ambitious North. Just after lunch on Sept. 2, a rumor shattered the languid atmosphere that a ``bombshell’’ announcement from the government was coming.

The rumor proved to be true at 5 p.m. when the science and foreign ministries admitted in turn that a group of U.N. nuclear inspectors was investigating the nation’s past lab tests that used uranium _ one of the two key ingredients for building atomic bombs.

Further disclosures ensued, including one about another significant experiment in the early 1980s based on plutonium _ the other element necessary to create nuclear weapons _ and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) conducted three special inspections in the 12 weeks before the issue was brought to a close in its board meeting on Nov. 26.

In the initial declaration submitted to the U.N. nuclear watchdog in August, Seoul said it discovered in June that laboratory-scale experiments involving the enrichment of uranium using laser devices had been carried out in 2000. Stressing they were one-off tests conducted by some unauthorized scientists, Seoul stated that only about 200mg of enriched uranium were produced.

But some reports from foreign news media started to overstate Korea’s past nuclear activities with speculations that the uranium enrichment level in the test reached weapons grade, which they argued showed systemic efforts to develop nuclear arms.

Relevant ministries’ poor response in the initial stage even firmed up the growing speculations as South Korea later had to make another acknowledgement. In the early 1980s, it said, laboratory-scale tests had been performed at the now-defunct TRIGA Mark III research reactor in Seoul to irradiate 2.5kg of depleted uranium and to study the separation of uranium and plutonium.

With the six-party talks aimed at dealing with North Korea’s nuclear crisis stalled for months, South Korea’s nuclear issue became another diplomatic problem as major powers, including the United States, France and Britain, wanted the case to be brought to the U.N. Security Council.

Seoul’s diplomatic pitch in Vienna, Washington, Tokyo, Ottawa and other parts of the world to counter the move were commendable, while its efforts to prove Korea’s innocence and obtain nuclear transparency by cooperating with the IAEA were also noteworthy.

After the two-day IAEA board of governors meeting in Vienna, Ingrid Hall of Canada said in the chairman’s statement that the failure of the Republic of Korea to report these activities in accordance with its safeguards agreements is of ``serious concern.’’

At the same time, however, the statement said the quantities of nuclear material involved have not been significant, and welcomed the corrective actions taken by Seoul and the active cooperation it has provided to the agency.

Critics say the 12-week agitation clearly showed that yesterday’s friend may not be today’s ally. While Japanese media took the lead in feeding speculations, the Japanese government supported South Korea in the board meeting. Some U.S. hardliners were known to prefer strict measures, but officials say Washington’s role in dissolving the tense atmosphere was vital.

The nuclear fuss also taught the lesson that more stringent measures should be taken in order to ensure transparency in the country’s peaceful atomic activities.

``How can the government be left totally ignorant of such important experiments by scientists,’’ a government official retorted, asking not to be named. ``Scientists should know how their acts could harm national interests.’’

With the world’s sixth-largest civilian nuclear industry, South Korea has 19 nuclear power plants that produce 40 percent of its electricity _ one of the highest ratios in the world.

``Atomic energy is like life itself for our country,’’ Chang In-soon, head of the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI), said. ``It is an economical, stable and large energy supply resource for South Korea, which depends on foreign countries for 97 percent of its energy consumption at an expense of $30 billion per year.’’

The father of South Korea’s nuclear research program stressed that the peaceful use of nuclear energy by pursuing efficiency and effectiveness must be an inevitable orientation for national policy for the continued and stable development of the economy, ranked 12th in world-class economic activities.

Bound by the South-North Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in 1991, South Korea voluntarily gave up its right to enrich uranium even for peaceful purposes. And it costs the country about $370 million a year to import enriched uranium to be used for fuelling the power plants.

Based on its nuclear transparency, experts and officials suggest South Korea should expand the extent of its peaceful atomic activities when it successfully resolves the North Korean nuclear crisis.

Science and Technology Minister Oh Myung said research activities by South Korean scientists should not be restricted because of the IAEA inspections. ``I’ll foster a favorable atmosphere in which scientists can keep studying actively, while ensuring transparency of the activities.’’

South Korea launched the National Nuclear Control Agency (NNCA), an independent watchdog, in late October to enhance the country’s nuclear transparency. 


-------- missile defense

Missile-defense shield fails test launch of interceptor

THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Guy Taylor
December 16, 2004

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041215-112508-3243r.htm

The first test in two years of the multibillion-dollar U.S. missile-defense shield failed yesterday when an interceptor missile set to launch from a remote island in the central Pacific suddenly shut down, defense officials said.

    The test, which cost the Pentagon nearly $85 million, broke down when the ground-based interceptor at the Ronald Reagan Test Site in the Marshall Islands "shut down due to an unknown anomaly," the Missile Defense Agency said.

    Although one former senior missile tester called it "a serious setback," Pentagon officials and analysts downplayed the failure, saying it did not indicate deeper problems in the system, which administration officials have pledged to declare "operational" by year's end.

    "The start of operations is not dependent on a single test event, whether successful or unsuccessful," said Chris Taylor, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, the Pentagon unit in charge of designing and fielding missile defenses.

    "Whether we can get a rocket to launch correctly, that's a matter of time," added Michael O'Hanlon, an analyst with the Brookings Institution, who co-authored a 2001 book on missile defense.

    Mr. O'Hanlon said the administration no longer faces political pressure regarding the missile shield because the presidential election has passed. "There's no particular urgency to declare operational a system that clearly has some major glitches," he said.

    The United States already has a system in place to stop one or more long-range missiles fired by North Korea. The system runs from missile interceptor bases in Alaska and California.

    Yesterday's test involved the interceptor at the test site in the Marshall Islands, formally known as Kwajalein Atoll. The Missile Defense Agency said a target missile carrying a mock warhead successfully launched from a site in Kodiak, Alaska. About 16 minutes later, the Kwajalein Atoll missile — designed to intercept the target missile — was preparing to launch when it "automatically shut down."

    "We don't yet know why," said Mr. Taylor, who added it "remains to be determined" whether the failure will cause a delay in the Pentagon's declaration of the system as "operational."

    Philip Coyle, who served as the Pentagon's chief weapons tester under President Reagan, said in an e-mail to Reuters News Agency the failure was "a serious setback for a program that had not attempted a flight intercept test for two years."

    Mr. O'Hanlon, however, said he was "not worried," as the United States has successfully launched rockets in the past. The biggest problem, he said, is getting the rocket to work effectively with a "hit-to-kill vehicle" — a body of sensors designed to ensure that the interceptor demolishes its target — mounted on top.

    The Pentagon has contracted Boeing Co. as the "lead system integrator" for the National Missile Defense Program. With funding for missile defense deployment at about $10.5 billion for fiscal 2005, the goal is to develop a system that can protect the United States from an attack involving missiles topped by nuclear, chemical or biological warheads.

    Although the modern framework was conceived during the tail end of the Cold War under the Reagan administration, the United States has been implementing the system since June 2002 when President Bush officially withdrew the United States from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Russia withdrew from the treaty days after the United States.

-----

U.S. Missile Defense Test Fails
Latest Setback in Pacific Fuels Doubts About System's Future

Washington Post
By Bradley Graham
December 16, 2004

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A700-2004Dec15_2.html

The Bush administration's effort to build a system for defending the country against ballistic missile attack suffered an embarrassing setback yesterday when an interceptor missile failed to launch during the first flight test of the system in two years.

Pentagon officials could not immediately explain the reason for the failure. They said some kind of anomaly prompted the automatic shutdown of the launch sequence just 23 seconds before the interceptor was due to take off from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. Plans had called for the interceptor to soar into space and knock down a mock warhead fired from Kodiak Island in Alaska about 16 minutes earlier.

The aborted test cast fresh doubt over when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld would decide to put the new system on alert. That decision had been expected earlier this fall, after the installation of an initial set of six interceptors at a launch facility near Fairbanks, Alaska.

For weeks, Pentagon officials have described the facility as going through a "shakedown" phase and have insisted that the decision to declare it operational would be made independent of the outcome of the flight test. Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's top spokesman, reiterated yesterday that "the test was not connected to any decisions about operational capability." He said Rumsfeld had been "given a very cursory description of the test and the results."

But until the root cause of the test failure is determined, the Pentagon cannot be sure of the reliability of the interceptors that have already been installed or what might be required to prevent a similar occurrence in the future.

Whatever the operational impact of the test, Pentagon officials clearly had been mindful that the event would carry considerable political significance given the high priority placed on the program by President Bush. The Missile Defense Agency, which manages the development effort, had gone to extraordinary lengths to try to ensure a successful test, delaying it repeatedly since the spring to scrub the interceptor and other parts of the system of defects.

Those in Congress and the scientific community who have criticized the missile defense program seized on yesterday's failure to press their case that the administration is rushing deployment on the basis of too few tests.

"I think it points out the inherent complexity of the system and underscores the need for rigorous testing before any deployment," said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Armed Services Committee. "I've been making that argument for months now."

The interceptor system is just one of a number of antimissile weapons that the administration is pursuing. Officials envision ultimately erecting a multilayered network that will target enemy warheads using land- and sea-based missile interceptors, airborne lasers, and space-based weapons.

Since 1999, the Pentagon has conducted eight flight tests of the interceptor system, five of which resulted in hits. Yesterday's test incorporated for the first time the actual interceptor designed for the mission; previously, surrogate interceptors were used.

The interceptor consists of two main parts -- a booster rocket and a "kill vehicle," a 120-pound package of sensors, computers and thrusters that rides atop the booster. Once in space, the kill vehicle is supposed to separate from the booster and close in on an enemy warhead, destroying it in a high-speed collision.

The script yesterday did not call for an intercept but for what defense officials refer to as a "flyby," meaning the kill vehicle would at least pass near its target. An intercept had been a possibility if everything had gone off as planned.

The previous flight test, in December 2002, also flopped when the kill vehicle failed to separate from the booster. Pentagon officials suspended further flight testing until a new booster could be developed, but that effort took longer than expected.

By spring of this year, the new booster was ready, but the discovery of a faulty circuit board in the kill vehicle prompted Pentagon officials to order a lengthy bottom-up review of all components.

  In mid-August, the missile interceptor was again set to go when technicians found a glitch in the booster's flight computer. Replacing the computer created another delay.

In September, program officials announced yet another postponement after discovering modifications that had been made to the interceptor without thorough ground testing.

With everything in place again Dec. 8, the test was put off five more times in the past week as a result of bad weather, first in Alaska and then in the Marshall Islands, followed by problems with a range radar in the Pacific and with a battery in the target missile, according to Rick Lehner, spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency.

"There's obvious disappointment," Lehner said when asked about the reaction at the agency. "We'll identify the anomaly and fix it. But I wouldn't want to speculate on how that might affect operation of the system. I guess that will depend on what the anomaly turns out to be."

Lehner also said it is too early to predict when the next flight might be attempted. The Pentagon had planned to conduct an intercept test in the spring.

In addition to the six interceptors in place in Alaska at Fort Greely, a second launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California received its first interceptor last week and is due to get another later this month. Next year, 10 more are scheduled to be installed at Fort Greely and two more at Vandenberg.

In Canada, meanwhile, Prime Minister Paul Martin said in television interviews Tuesday night that his country will participate in a U.S. missile defense system only if it does not have to contribute money, no missiles are based in Canada, and Canada has a say in how the system is run.

Martin was pressured two weeks ago by President Bush to end his government's wavering and commit to supporting the system.

Martin spelled out a strong Canadian position. He said he would insist that the United States guarantee in writing that no weapons will be put in space.

The National Post, a Toronto newspaper, predicted that Martin's demands would be seen by the U.S. administration as "arrogant and unrealistic." Public opinion polls in Canada have shown that joining the missile defense system is highly unpopular.

Correspondent Doug Struck in Toronto contributed to this report. 

----

Bush Reaffirms U.S. Missile Defense Plans

By REUTERS
Published: December 16, 2004
Filed at 4:02 p.m. ET

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-missile-usa.html?oref=login

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush remains
intent on deploying a multibillion-dollar shield
as an ``important deterrent'' against ballistic
missile attack, the White House said on Thursday,
a day after the system's first flight test in two
years ended in failure.

Scott McClellan, Bush's spokesman, did not address
a delay in activating the first parts of the
planned shield. It appeared to have slipped into
next year, partly because of technical
difficulties.

``The president remains firmly committed to moving
forward on a missile defense system,'' he told
reporters. ``Given the threats that we face in
this day and age, missile defense is an important
deterrent.''

In December 2002, Bush ordered the Pentagon to
have the ground-based component up and running no
later than this year. Boeing Co. is the Pentagon's
prime contractor on the project, which would be
stitched into a multilayered defense.

The latest test went wrong when an interceptor
rocket shut down in its silo on Wednesday in the
Marshall Islands in the central Pacific because of
``an unknown anomaly,'' the Defense Department's
Missile Defense Agency said. A target missile
carrying a dummy warhead had been fired 16 minutes
earlier from Kodiak, Alaska.

The Missile Defense Agency had no comment on
future test plans or any new target for declaring
the system operational ``since we don't know the
cause of the anomaly we experienced,'' spokesman
Richard Lehner said late on Wednesday.

The Pentagon has already suggested its schedule is
slipping.

``I'm not constrained by timing, exactly,''
Michael Wynne, the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer,
said last week in reply to a question about
switching the system on. ``But we'll see how
(Wednesday's test) goes and then we'll see from
there.''

In eight attempted intercept tests, five have
succeeded in highly controlled conditions that
critics say bear no resemblance to any real-world
situations.

Initially, the system is designed to defend
against North Korean missiles that could be tipped
with nuclear, chemical or germ warheads and fired
at U.S. soil.

The Pentagon plans to spend more than $50 billion
in the next five years on a wide range of related
projects, including sea-based interceptors, a
modified 747 jumbo jet airborne laser and what
could become the first weapons in space.

Boeing's key subcontractors on the ground-based
component are Northrop Grumman Corp., for command
and control; Raytheon Co., for a ``kill vehicle''
meant to obliterate a target by colliding with it;
and Lockheed Martin Corp. and Orbital Sciences
Corp., which build booster rockets.


-------- russia

Putin urges to protect atomic energy from criminals

16.12.2004, 16.57 (Itar-Tass)

http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=1568690&PageNum=0

UDOMLYA (Tver region), December 16 - The atomic energy industry should be absolutely safe in terms of the protection from criminals, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a session of the State Council presidium on Thursday.

“The first requirement is tough security requirements to the whole technological process. They should correspond to the highest international standards,” he emphasized.

“Meanwhile, atomic energy facilities should be reliably protected from any criminal demonstrations,” the president pointed out. “Finally, we should consistently minimize the negative impact of nuclear productions on environment, particularly introducing modern technologies of the disposal of nuclear materials.” 

--------

Putin arrives at Kalininskaya N-station to inspect new reactor

16.12.2004, 14.22 (Itar-Tass)

http://www.tass.ru/eng/level2.html?NewsID=1567510&PageNum=0

UDOMLYA, Tver Region, December 16 - Russian President Vladimir Putin came for the first time to a nuclear power station – Kalininskaya. The new, third power unit was put into operation at the station early on Thursday morning.

The Kalininskaya nuclear power station is situated in the city of Udomlya, Tver Region, some 350 kilometers north of Moscow. Putin inspected the station and then held a visiting session of the Russian State Council presidium on the development of international cooperation in nuclear and radiation security.

The third set of the station has been under construction for around 20 years. Its commissioning was repeatedly put off in the 1990s. Following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the so-called post-Chernobyl syndrome emerged when the development of the nuclear power industry virtually ground to a standstill, and construction of new nuclear station was discontinued. Then, this syndrome was overcome, but financial difficulties popped up. Construction of a power unit at a nuclear station is estimated at 1.5-2.5 billion US dollars on the world market.

Two units, which were commissioned in 1984 and 1986, now operates at the Kalininskaya station. Under the project, the station is to consist of four blocks.

Incidentally, the Russian leader visited the turbine hall of the third unit and inspected the control board.

The officer on duty told the president that the present unit capacity is now 180 mW while the design capacity is 1,000 mW.

The control board was manufactured only by Russian producers and with the use of only Russian technologies. The nuclear power station has over 5,000 people on its payroll. The station contributes the main part of revenues to the city and district budgets as well as produces nearly 66 percent of electricity, generated in the Tver Region.

Speaking at the meeting of the State Council presidium on Thursday, the president said that Russia stockpiled over 70 million tonnes of solid radioactive waste. “The infrastructure of their processing has been insufficiently developed so far,” the Russian chief executive emphasized.

“The volume of processed waste more than doubled as against 2001, but absolute rates of processing are still very low,” the head of state emphasized. 



-------- u.s. nuc facilities

Nuclear argument ignored key fact

December 16. 2004 Christian Science Monitor 
8:00AM, EARL C. KLAUBERT, Northwood - Letter

http://www.cmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041216/REPOSITORY/412160349/1029/OPINION03

Re "Fight global warming by . . . nuclear plants,"ConcordMonitor, Dec. 10: I agree with Professor Berg's argument for building more nuclear power plants. However, his argument is incomplete.

Much of the public opposition to nuclear power stems from the generation of massive amounts of depleted nuclear fuel rods that are stored above ground, and the questionable adequacy of the nuclear waste dump in Yucca Mountain, Nev., on which we have spent (wasted?) billions of dollars. The problem is the long half-life, up to a quarter million years, of some wastes.

The public generally does not know that a complete and short-term solution to this problem, without long-term storage, exists.

It has been known and ignored from the time of President Carter's moralistic high-horse refusal to build breeder reactors. It was published in ScientificAmerican at that time and has been confirmed to me by military officers and others trained in nuclear power. Carter's objection was that breeder reactors could be used to create more plutonium. France has been using them for this purpose for decades.

However, breeder reactors can be used, if operated off-optimum, to transmute and destroy any and all radioactive elements in a reasonably short time. The ultimate products would be non-hazardous, non-radioactive materials. No long-term storage of dangerous materials would be involved.

Professor Berg must know this. Why didn't he buttress his argument for more nuclear reactors by pointing out that this short-term solution exists?

Admittedly, I don't believe this solution applies to the disposal of the radioactive components of such power plants after their useful lifetime, but these are massive integral metal components that cannot be used by terrorists to reclaim and create nuclear weapons. They can be buried or encased in concrete. They are not readily subject to being dissolved and disseminated by groundwater.

Build one or more breeder reactors, operate them off-optimum and consume all the nuclear wastes. That is the answer the public doesn't hear of. Solve the problem, don't store it for millennia.

EARL C. KLAUBERT

Northwood 


-------- colorado

State rejects radioactive soil

Disposal plan is scuttled

By Kim McGuire
Denver Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 16, 2004

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~2600594,00.html

State environmental regulators on Wednesday once again derailed Cotter Corp.'s plan to accept radioactive waste from a New Jersey Superfund site at its Cañon City mill.

In renewing the company's operating license, state officials authorized the mill to continue processing uranium and vanadium ores. But the five- year license prohibits the firm from accepting proposed shipments of thorium-laced soil from a lantern parts factory in Maywood, N.J., for disposal at the mill.

Many Cañon City residents opposed the Maywood plan, arguing that it would open a floodgate for more toxic trash to be dumped at the Fremont County mill, about 95 miles southwest of Denver.

"For two years, we've been like the boy with his finger in the dike trying to hold this thing back," said Jeri Fry, co-chairman of Colorado Citizens Against Toxic Waste, a Cañon City-based opposition group. "We've always said we were concerned that Maywood would set a dangerous precedent, so we consider this a major victory."

Unless Cotter requests a hearing, the five-year license will go into effect in 60 days.

Responding to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment ruling, Cotter officials said they were disappointed the state had once again denied their plan to accept more than 400,000 cubic yards of the thorium-laced soil.

Thorium has been shown to increase cancers of the lung, pancreas and blood in workers who inhale high levels, according to federal health officials.

In July, state health officials denied Cotter's request to accept the first Maywood shipment of 24,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil, ruling that the company had failed to prove it had "adequate procedures" to safely handle the toxic material.

Cotter appealed that decision, and the matter is currently before a Denver judge. While the judge may permit the initial shipment, the new license forbids anything beyond that.

"This is a very complex, multi-faceted process, and there has been extensive involvement from local and state government and by a large sector of the public," said Howard Roitman, the state health department's director of environmental programs. "The licensing process has been both highly interactive and diligent."

Additional requirements or operational changes also were set in the new license, including:

# Improving environmental and worker safety.

# Continuing the evaluation of the primary impoundment liner's effectiveness.

# Monitoring operations for possible groundwater contamination.

Staff writer Kim McGuire can be reached at 303-820-1240 or kmcguire@denverpost.com. 


-------- connecticut

Report: environmental impact of Millstone plants is negligible
	
Associated Press
December 16, 2004

http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/local/state/hc-16074355.apds.m0700.bc-ct--nrc-dec16,0,4641428.story?coll=hc-headlines-local-wire

WATERFORD, Conn. -- A report by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has found that there has been some impact on the fish population near the Millstone nuclear power complex, but overall, the environmental impact is negligible.

The NRC has concluded that the number of female winter flounder near Millstone Power Station in Niantic Bay has reached "critically low levels."

However, ad part of its research into whether two nuclear reactors here should continue operating for another 20 years, the NRC could not definitively link the effect of plant operations to the recent decline in the number of flounder.

The agency said it found a "moderate" effect on survival of fish that get caught in reactor equipment which warrants continued efforts by Dominion Nuclear Connecticut, to improve the flounder survival rate.

The NRC environmental report tentatively found the adverse effects of renewing two reactor licenses are negligible or can be lessened through steps the company is already taking.

The report says a number of factors contributed to the decline in flounder, including overfishing and regional temperature changes. Also playing a role is the trapping and killing of the fish in the equipment that draws water for cooling purposes into the Millstone 2 and Millstone 3 reactors.

The NRC will seek public comment on Jan. 11 at 1:30 and 7 p.m. at Waterford Town Hall.

Information from: The Day, http://www.theday.com


-------- ohio

The deregulation myth

Thursday, December 16, 2004 Toledo Blade

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041216/OPINION02/412160381

IF THERE was any lingering feeling that competition in electricity prices would emerge in Ohio, it was erased last week when an auction held by FirstEnergy Corp. failed to beat the utility's current price.

The result is that FirstEnergy's existing rate structure will remain in place through 2008, rather than 2005. The action isn't a rate freeze, however, since the utility, parent to Toledo Edison, still can ask state regulators to pass on increases in fuel costs. With the price of coal at record highs, customer bills are likely to get larger.

The lack of a bidder that could beat FirstEnergy's price of 4.6 cents per kilowatt hour is more proof that the competition envisioned by Ohio's electric deregulation law is a mirage. The bid closest to FirstEnergy was 5.45 cents.

The conservative ideologues who championed the deregulation law in the Ohio General Assembly in 1999 claimed that removing the regulatory shackles from electricity costs would result in competition from many power suppliers and, ultimately, lower rates.

It hasn't happened, and it won't unless the Public Utilities Commission allows the rates to float freely, producing prices so high that suppliers swarm into the market. But the PUCO has been unwilling to do so because consumers would scream bloody murder, and justifiably so.

Instead, the PUCO has been content to let FirstEnergy float along with a rate freeze, in effect for its Toledo Edison residential customers since 1995. The downside of the freeze, now softened by the possibility of fuel price increases, is that Edison rates already were some of the highest in the country.

While PUCO officials gamely continue to contend that rate-tempering competition is just around the corner, FirstEnergy customers will, for 2006, 2007, and 2008, continue to pay surcharges on their bills for the utility's expensive nuclear power facilities, including the Davis-Besse plant near Oak Harbor.

Never mind that those surcharges, considered excessive by consumer advocates when they first were levied, were supposed to expire at the end of 2005. Why they should be continued for another three years is a scandal, as is the statement by William Schriber, PUCO chairman, that the FirstEnergy rate plan is "an OK deal."

It may be OK for FirstEnergy, but it's a cruel joke for the utility's long-suffering customers. They're being told that the competition that will reduce what they pay for electricity is out there on the horizon when the reality is high rates year after year after year.

Rather than continue to allow the PUCO to perpetuate the deregulation myth, the Ohio General Assembly should get busy on a plan to re-regulate utilities, giving them a guaranteed fair rate of return in exchange for reasonably stable rates. The ideologues in the legislature wouldn't like it, but the customers surely would.


-------- washington

Government Locks Horns with Washington State Over Nuclear Waste

All Things Considered, December 16, 2004

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4231902

The federal government is suing the state of Washington over a voter initiative banning the transport of new waste to the Hanford nuclear site. The federal government argues that it controls the former nuclear weapons facility, but Washington citizens say it has done a poor job cleaning up. NPR's Christopher Joyce reports.

-------- 

250 downwinders added to suit

This story was published Thursday, December 16th, 2004

By Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald staff writer

http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5918690p-5825850c.html

The number of people suing over illnesses they believe were caused by radiation releases from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation increased to a little over 2,000 this week.

Federal Judge William Fremming Nielsen in Spokane agreed to add about 250 downwinders to the suit against early Hanford contractors.

During World War II and the early years of the Cold War, radioactive iodine was released into the air during production of plutonium at Hanford for the nation's nuclear weapons program. The radioactive iodine drifted downwind and fell to the ground to be ingested by residents in fresh fruits, vegetables and milk from cows that grazed on contaminated grass.

The new plaintiffs in the 1991 case include people who have learned only recently about the lawsuit or who have recently developed a medical condition they believe is linked to the radiation releases, said Richard Eymann, a Spokane attorney. His firm represents 208 of the new plaintiffs.	

When Nielsen took over the lawsuit in 2003, downwinder attorneys said there were a little over 3,500 claims. The contractors' attorneys estimated the number of plaintiffs to be at least 1,000 more.

The numbers dropped as plaintiffs with illnesses that could not be clearly linked with radiation or who likely had received slight or no exposure were moved to an inactive list. Nielsen did not close the suit to new plaintiffs, however.

Many of those filing suit have thyroid disease, including cancer. Radioactive iodine concentrates in the thyroid. The suit also includes people who have other cancers they believe were caused by radiation releases to the air or Columbia River.

In another development in the case, defense attorneys have asked to challenge Nielsen's ruling last month that downwinders will not have to prove early Hanford contractors were negligent to win their lawsuit. That leaves only whether radioactive releases caused plaintiffs' health problems to be decided at trial.

"There are lots of errors that we think mount up to (the need for) reconsideration of the court," said Kevin Van Wart, attorney for the defense.

The court should have held a full hearing on the matter, he said. He also said that contrary to what the judge wrote in his order, it was not clear in the 1940s that radioactive iodine could cause thyroid cancer.

Although Nielsen indicated he is not likely to change his ruling, he said he would allow defense attorneys to file a motion for reconsideration. To keep the case moving, Nielsen has ruled that motions cannot be filed without his approval.

A trial date for 11 bellwether plaintiffs has been set April 18. Nielsen hopes a jury decision on a few of the cases will give attorneys guidance to settle the remainder.


-------- us nuc waste

Utah's Gov.-elect Huntsman stresses: No hotter N-waste

By Joe Bauman
Deseret Morning News
Thursday, December 16, 2004

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,595112718,00.html

      Gov.-elect Jon Huntsman Jr. emphatically reiterated his stance on nuclear waste disposal Wednesday: No Class B or C radioactive waste is to be disposed of in Utah while he is in office.

      "I will commit to you — it won't happen under my watch," Huntsman told the Deseret Morning News on Wednesday.

      Anti-nuclear activist Jason Groenewold has called for Huntsman take action to prevent any material from coming in that is hotter than the Class A waste Envirocare of Utah disposes at its Tooele County site. Although B and C are considered low-level radioactive, they are more dangerous than Class A waste.

      Charles Judd, president of Cedar Mountain Environmental Inc., a planned disposal facility in Tooele County, has said the company might seek to import B and C waste. The property, where no construction has yet taken place, is adjacent to Envirocare, about halfway between Salt Lake City and Wendover.

      B and C waste may not be disposed of in Utah without state permits and specific approval from the Legislature and governor. In a Nov. 17 press release, Huntsman took a strong stand against importation of waste hotter than Class A.

      Groenewold, director of Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, called for Huntsman to sign an executive order once he is in office to prevent that importation.

      "Utah's going to be continue to be targeted as a nuclear waste dumping ground as long as we leave the door open," he said.

      Once he is sworn in, he said, Huntsman will have the power to prevent the waste arriving here for disposal. "All it takes is his signature" on an executive order.

      "Huntsman gets the key to the office on Jan. 3. He could kill this thing on day one," he added.

      Groenewold is concerned about the issue because Class B and C wastes are "hundreds to thousands of times more radioactive than Class A waste," he said, citing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He said the NRC estimates that a 20-minute exposure to Class C material without proper protection "is enough to cause a lethal dose of radiation. . . . It gives you a sense of how hot we're talking."

      He worried that a mishap could cause harm.

      Huntsman made it clear Wednesday he is not backing down on the waste issue. His position is the same as it was during the campaign, he said in a Morning News telephone interview.

      "That is, I will use whatever force of office I have to keep B and C waste out of the state," he said.

      A law is already in place with safeguards, he noted.

      If he needs to take action to "effectively nullify" any attempt to bring B and C waste into the Beehive State, Huntsman added, he will. Meanwhile, he needs to review options to accomplish that, checking his legal tools.

      "I would want to understand what I had at my disposal," Huntsman said.

E-mail: bau@desnews.com

---------

Yucca security clearances being expanded

By Benjamin Grove <grove@lasvegassun.com>
Las Vegas SUN December 16, 2004

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2004/dec/16/517995009.html

WASHINGTON -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Wednesday announced that it would accept applications for security clearances to classified Yucca Mountain documents.

The agency is expanding the types of people who could obtain the clearances under a new regulation published in the federal register Wednesday. The regulation is set to take effect Feb. 28.

The security clearance applications would be accepted from Yucca project "stakeholders," such as Clark County and other Nevada officials, the agency announced.

The NRC will grant the clearances to people who meet "need to know" criteria determined by the agency, NRC spokeswoman Sue Gagner said.

That was good news for Nevada officials who have sought to obtain the clearances, said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency. The NRC has not indicated that it would refuse access to state officials, he said. "At least right now, for us, this hasn't been a big problem," he said.

At issue are thousands of Yucca documents that the Energy Department plans to submit to the NRC as part of its application for a license to construction Yucca.

Some of the documents may contain sensitive information, such as transportation information for the highly radioactive waste that would be shipped on roads and rails to the underground repository at Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The documents might also include information about security at Yucca, or military waste, including plutonium, said Joe Egan, the lawyer who is leading legal battles against Yucca for the state.

State officials believe the NRC should grant key people access to relevant documents from the beginning of the application review so that they are not constantly thwarted in their efforts by blanket refusals of access to all classified documents, Egan said.



-------- MILITARY 



-------- africa

Orbital Completes Third Flight Test For US Navy's 'Coyote' Target Missile

File photo of Orbital Sciences GQM-163 Coyote.
Dulles VA (SPX) Dec 16, 2004

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/missiles-04zzzl.html

Orbital Sciences announced Wednesday that it successfully flight-tested the U.S. Navy's GQM-163A "Coyote" Supersonic Sea-Skimming Target (SSST) system for the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) on December 14, 2004.

The flight test was conducted at the Navy's missile test range at Point Mugu in southern California and was the third consecutive successful flight in a series of progressively demanding missions that Orbital has carried out during the last two years.

Orbital was awarded a development contract in 2000 to meet the Navy's requirement for an affordable SSST to simulate high-speed anti-ship cruise missiles for fleet training and weapon systems research, development, test and evaluation.

Yesterday's flight test of the GQM-163A Coyote had several primary objectives, all of which were achieved, including the verification of booster ignition and stable first stage flight, the transition of the ducted-rocket ramjet from booster separation to started inlets, and the ducted rocket ramjet ignition and powered flight performance.

In addition, the missile was flown through a series of demanding medium-G vertical and horizontal maneuvers, as well as high-G horizontal weave maneuvers.

Finally, the performance of the vehicle's laser altimeter was verified by a descent to a 30-foot cruise altitude and successful completion of the mission through the intentional activation of the flight termination system.

Captain Richard Walter, the U.S. Navy's Program Manager of Aerial Target and Decoy Systems, said, "We are very satisfied with yesterday's flight test results. The capabilities of the GQM-163A Coyote are impressive and will provide a threat representative target for testing of new weapon systems being developed by the Navy. We expect to complete the development phase and award low rate production in early 2005."

Mr. Keven Leith, Orbital's Vice President of Naval Programs, said, "We are pleased with the progress of the GQM-163A flight test program. This latest test flight success represents another step towards making the SSST system ready for operational status and limited fleet deployment in the coming months."

The GQM-163A Coyote target missile design integrates a four-inlet, solid-fuel ducted-rocket ramjet propulsion system into a compact missile airframe 18 feet long and 14 inches in diameter.

Ramjet supersonic takeover speed is achieved using a decommissioned Navy MK 70 solid rocket motor for the first stage.

Rail-launched from Navy test and training ranges, the highly maneuverable GQM-163A Coyote achieves cruise speeds of Mach 2.5+ following the separation of the MK 70 first-stage booster.

The range of the target vehicle system is approximately 50 nautical miles at altitudes of less than 20 feet above the sea surface.

The GQM-163A Coyote program represents a significant milestone for the American aerospace industry by achieving multiple successful flights of a U.S.-built solid-fuel ducted-rocket ramjet.

It is also the first successful development and flight test program of a new domestic ramjet missile configuration in over a decade.

Orbital is the only U.S. Department of Defense prime contractor to be both developing and operating ramjet-powered missile systems. In addition to developing the GQM-163A Coyote, Orbital provides the Navy with launch services for the MQM-8 VANDAL SSST.

The MQM-8 VANDAL is based on the liquid-fuel ramjet-powered Talos missile and provides the Navy with a legacy SSST until the more capable GQM-163A Coyote is determined to be operational for fleet use.

Orbital is developing and manufacturing the GQM-163A Coyote at its launch vehicle engineering and production facility in Chandler, Arizona. Orbital's major subcontractors include Aerojet Corporation in Gainesville, Virginia and Sacramento, California, for the solid-fuel ducted-rocket motor and Cei, Inc. in Sacramento, California, for the vehicle's avionics system.

------

Mediators go to DR Congo hotspot
The renegade soldiers have control of the dusty, deserted streets

Thursday, 16 December, 2004 (BBC)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4094929.stm

A government delegation has gone to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to try to halt an outbreak of fighting.

More than 20,000 people in the small town of Kanyabayonga, now controlled by dissident Congolese troops, have fled fierce clashes between rival factions.

Interior Minister Theophile Mbemba said the mediation team wanted to establish the motives of the fighters.

In a BBC interview, Rwandan President Paul Kagame has again denied deploying soldiers inside Congo.

Mr Kagame added that Rwanda had no involvement in the fighting in Kanyabayonga, despite COngolese government claims.

The Congolese war officially ended in 2002 after some three million deaths.

QUICK GUIDE

The war in DR Congo

This fighting raises fears that the war, which drew in at least six other African armies, could reignite.

The United Nations said it had repulsed an attempt by armed men to cross from Rwanda into DR Congo in three dug-out canoes, near Bukavu, to the south of Kanyabayonga.

A spokesman said the boats turned round after an exchange of fire.

Rwandan-speaking

Kanyabayonga's inhabitants have fled alongside the defeated forces of the Congolese government, reports the BBC's Arnaud Zajtman from the town.

He says pro-Rwandan soldiers are deployed in the town and have also set up camps on the surrounding mountains, 160km (100 miles) north of the North Kivu provincial capital, Goma.

This allows them to monitor the movement of government troops near the frontline, some 8km north.

Captain Kabakuli Kennedy, who is in control of the town, says he is a former Congolese rebel who received support from Rwanda during the war, but that he is now fighting without any external support.

He says he is protecting the rights of the Congolese minority who speak Kinyarwanda, the language also spoken in Rwanda.

Military and government officials said two Rwandan soldiers had been captured in the fighting in Kanyabayonga. Each side also allege they have killed at least a dozen enemy soldiers, but neither figure can be verified.

There have been many recent reports that Rwandan troops crossed the border but the UN said last week that there was no conclusive evidence.

A mission of UN peacekeepers is going to investigate the fighting.

Kids and Kalashnikovs

Rwanda has denied there are any Rwandan forces in DR Congo.

However, confidential UN documents seen by the BBC and made public last week said Rwanda retained a "Rwandan military structure of control" over parts of DR Congo through the use of proxy Congolese forces.

Under the power-sharing agreement set up to end the five-year war, North Kivu was awarded to the former RCD rebels backed by Rwanda, who are supposed to have been integrated into the national army.

Some reports suggest these soldiers mutinied and were fighting the regular Congolese army.

The situation in eastern DR Congo is extremely complex, with many rival armed groups and very little control from central government.

Rwanda has threatened to send troops into DR Congo to hunt down the ethnic Hutu rebels accused of carrying out the 1994 genocide. 



-------- arms 

Election results threaten U.S. arms agreement

December 16, 2004
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041215-101444-3184r.htm

U.S. officials say they may have to scale back a landmark arms agreement with Taiwan after legislative elections in which parties opposing the deal kept control of the island's legislature.

    The Bush administration previously had described the $18 billion arms sale, first announced by President Bush in 2001, as a "litmus test" of Taiwan's willingness to defend itself.

    The deal, strongly opposed by China, calls for the sale to Taiwan of weapons systems, including guided-missile destroyers, P-3 anti-submarine aircraft, diesel submarines and Patriot PAC-3 anti-missile systems.

    The Pentagon is still pushing for the full package, but officials there and at other agencies said that may be difficult after opponents of President Chen Shui-bian, who campaigned against the deal, retained their majority in the Legislative Yuan.

    "We still think that Taiwan needs to step up its commitment to its own defense, and if it doesn't approve the deal, that commitment would be in doubt," a Pentagon official said.

    A senior State Department official said it may be necessary to find a way to reduce the $18 billion price tag to get the deal through the Yuan.

    "When the political situation in Taiwan settles down, we'll sit down with other agencies and decide what the best way forward is," the official said.

    The opposition's strong showing in Saturday's elections was seen as an attempt by the island's voters to ease tensions with mainland China over Mr. Chen's pro-independence agenda. Opposition parties won 114 of the parliament's 225 seats.

    The arms deal has been a sore point in U.S.-Chinese relations since it was announced early in the Bush presidency. The Beijing government, which considers Taiwan a wayward province of China, argues that arms sales to the island are an obstacle to the peaceful reunification of the two Chinas.

    The United States counters that Taiwan needs the weapons to defend itself from a Chinese military buildup and that it is obligated to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself under the terms of the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act.

    According to press accounts, China already has targeted more than 600 missiles at Taiwan, and is adding about 75 ballistic missiles each year to its arsenal.

    Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense waged an unprecedented public-relations campaign to win public support for the deal, opening up one of its three Patriot missile bases for the first time to the media.

    But critics have said the $18 billion would be better spent on public welfare projects.

    Lai Shih-bao, an opposition candidate, made the plan one of the main issues in his election campaign.

    "The arms sale is a hot issue," he said. "We are against this. We don't need this expensive budget. We are not against national defense, but we oppose this special budget."

    Richard Lawless, the U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense for Asian and Pacific affairs, had said in October that "the passage of this budget is a litmus test of Taiwan's commitment to its self-defense."

    "We believe that a vote against the budget risks sending the message that Taiwan's democracy has not matured to the point where national security trumps partisan politics," Mr. Lawless said.

    He predicted that future threats from China would "range from computer-network attacks to compromising Taiwan's public utilities, communications, operational security and transportation." 



-------- iraq

Mass Graves: Are We There Yet?

Antiwar.com
by Mark Drolette
December 16, 2004

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/drolette.php?articleid=4174

Question: How many people does it take to fill a mass grave?

No, this is not a joke, because although I don't know the "official" answer, the one thing I do know about mass extermination is that it's typically not a subject that lends itself well to humor.

The question stems not from some ghoulish curiosity but rather from the ongoing slaughter in Iraq, and the reply is also crucial to answering the following (and, really, main) query: Since the Bush administration has reminded us many times that Iraqis no longer need fear being used as filler for Saddam Hussein's mass graves, might the U.S., by virtue of the number of civilians it's killed, be in danger of replicating Hussein's dark deeds?

Sticklers for such things may insist that the combat in Iraq is a "Coalition" operation. Sorry, but in my book, America, Great Britain, and then a handful of other countries hard-pressed to scare a gaggle of geese hardly qualify as a coalition. Need it be pointed out there would be no war-related deaths at all if the U.S. hadn't led the charge?

Certainly, it's no secret Hussein racked up an incredibly ghastly body count. Although genuinely accurate numbers are impossible to know, Human Rights Watch (HRW) pegs its best guess at "290,000 'disappeared' and presumed killed [in Iraq, including] the following: more than 100,000 Kurds killed during the 1987-88 Anfal campaign and lead-up to it; between 50,000 and 70,000 Shi'a arrested in the 1980s and held indefinitely without charge, who remain unaccounted for today; an estimated 8,000 males of the Barzani clan removed from resettlement camps in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1983; 10,000 or more males separated from Feyli Kurdish families deported to Iran in the 1980s; an estimated 50,000 opposition activists, including Communists and other leftists, Kurds and other minorities, and out-of-favor Ba'athists, arrested and 'disappeared' in the 1980s and 1990s; some 30,000 Iraqi Shi'a men rounded up after the abortive March 1991 uprising and not heard from since; hundreds of Shi'a clerics and their students arrested and 'disappeared' after 1991; several thousand marsh Arabs who disappeared after being taken into custody during military operations in the southern marshlands; and those executed in detention – in some years several thousand – in so-called 'prison cleansing' campaigns." (Per George Black, Iraq's Crime of Genocide: the Anfal Campaign against the Kurds [New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press], and Human Rights Watch, Justice for Iraq: A Human Rights Watch Policy Paper, December 2002.)

By any standard, a gruesome legacy. But note the last year of known mass killings: 1991 or thereabouts, years before the U.S. rather incongruently began killing Iraqis to (allegedly) stop Hussein from killing them.

Not to be glib or dismiss Hussein's barbarity in the least, but even with mass murder, timing is everything. The Bushies have always glossed over the fact that Hussein's large-scale butchery had been quiescent for years, a tidy little omission with which the American corporate media have never appeared too concerned.

It's also important to note that halting Hussein's murderous rampages (even had they been ongoing) was never presented by the White House as principal grounds for attacking Iraq. Instead, Americans were repeatedly and grimly warned of Iraqi-generated "mushroom clouds" over Main Street, USA, and how Hussein's devil drones gravely threatened us all.

When this tall tale inevitably came a cropper, the administration trotted out one phony ex post facto excuse after another until finally settling on a couple of "justifications" for the invasion that have been proffered for some time now: instilling democracy in Iraq and stopping Hussein's slaughter.

The book is still open on whether anything resembling real democracy will ever emerge in Iraq, but it is closed on Hussein's barbarism. So, in trying to ascertain the number of bodies needed to constitute a mass grave, let's do some simple math:

According to HRW, "By February 2004, the Combined Forensic Team of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) had collected information on 259 mass graves in Iraq." Dividing HRW's highest estimated number of deaths (290,000) by CPA's total of confirmed mass graves (259) equals approximately 1,120 bodies per site.

No one would be surprised if more victims of Hussein's madness are unearthed later, thus likely driving that rough guesstimate even higher. But the "average" of 1,120 corpses per mass grave allows us to address the primary question:

When it comes to producing mass graves, is America giving Hussein a bloody run for his money?

A study by Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published in The Lancet in October concludes the number of U.S.-precipitated civilian deaths in Iraq since the war began is approximately 100,000.

If this seems too hard to believe, let's turn to Iraq Body Count (IBC), a Web site that has meticulously been documenting war-related deaths since America fired its first missile into Iraq in March 2003. As of this writing, IBC's total is 14,619 civilian deaths.

Even if we disregard altogether the Johns Hopkins study estimate of an astounding 100,000 dead and instead opt for the much lower number of IBC's 14,000-plus, this is still far more than would be needed to fill our now-established standard of 1,120 bodies per mass grave. (True, those 14,000-plus dead Iraqis are not all buried together, but excluding them from the discussion because of semantics would be a tad gauche, while still leaving them just as dead no matter how or where they've been buried.)

There is no end in sight, of course, to Iraq's carnage. Whether brought about by military action, car bombings, assassinations, depleted uranium shell-generated illnesses, contaminated water, inadequate medical care, or countless other ways in the violent hell that is today's Iraq, civilian deaths are guaranteed to climb significantly. When the suffering will stop is an open question.

But even if by some miracle the bloodshed were to come to a screeching halt immediately, there's certainly no doubting the answer if we ask if America is now filling mass graves of its own.


-------- israel / palestine 

Arafat: No way to die

Yasser Arafat's death last month in a French hospital was shrouded in mystery, accusation and acrimony. While a nation mourned, those nearest to him found themselves struggling for access, battling to find out the truth - and even, after he had died, fighting over his few possessions. Suzanne Goldenberg talks to those closest to the Palestinian leader to piece together the real story of his death

Thursday December 16, 2004
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1374609,00.html

There were perhaps a dozen men by the grave, and they did their work in silence and in secrecy, hidden from possible onlookers by four strategically parked fire tenders. They worked swiftly, breaking up the large flat stones that had been placed there only hours before, and lifting out a heavy, locked coffin: Yasser Arafat's coffin.

In Muslim tradition, the dead are buried in a simple white shroud, returning to earth the way they were born. In the wake of the afternoon funeral it had gnawed at the chief religious authority in Palestine, Sheikh Taissir Tamimi, that the Palestinian president had not been laid to rest in accordance with religious rites.

The burial on November 12 beside the ruined compound in Ramallah that had been Arafat's home and his prison was a tumultuous affair, a people's salute to a fallen warrior, with the ululations of women and the crackling of rifles fired into the air. The outpouring of grief as the body was carried from helicopter to grave was so forceful that officials, fearing they could not contain the crowds, hurriedly placed the Palestinian leader in the concrete-lined grave without removing him from his coffin.

For Tamimi, who had been called to Arafat's deathbed in Paris to oversee arrangements for his burial back in the West Bank compound, the lapse was unconscionable. So in darkness, at about 2am on November 13, Arafat was reburied. "We returned to the grave to bury him according to our religion," the cleric told the Guardian. "We broke the cement and the stones, and we took the coffin out. I saw him, touched him and prayed over him, and I was able to bury him properly."

The guards returned the body to its place, a cement container that was built to line and preserve the gravesite in the hope that one day Arafat would be borne to Jerusalem following the creation of a Palestinian state.

Throughout his years as guerrilla leader, his brief interlude as peacemaker and statesman, and his slow twilight amid the ruins of his headquarters compound, Yasser Arafat was a man whose life and intentions were threaded with ambiguities, secrets and confusions.

And so it proved with the manner of his decline, his death, and his burial. Why was it that a parade of doctors - from Palestine, Jordan, Tunisia, Egypt and France - could produce no definitive diagnosis? Was the Palestinian leader really (aspopular rumour quickly had it) the victim of foul play, poisoning even - or did he, at the relatively ripe age of 75, simply succumb to a devastating illness? Why the sudden helicopter departure from Ramallah to a hospital in Paris? And then there were the bizarre deathbed squabbles between his wife, Suha Arafat, and Palestinian officials: did the officials, as Suha charged, try to hasten Arafat's death? Or were her allegations part of a bid to obtain Palestinian funds? Even now, a month after he was pronounced dead in a military hospital on the southern outskirts of Paris on November 11, the cause of Arafat's death remains unknown.

Those who hope to take their place in the emerging power structures are eager to put the Arafat era behind them. That may not prove so simple. While there is an eagerness among the powerful in Ramallah to lay Arafat to rest, there is a competing need on a popular level to explain how a man who lived on such an epic scale, surviving multiple assassination plots, a desert plane crash, the hostility of Arab regimes and the enmity of Israel's rulers, could die such a diminished, disorderly death.

"People wanted a heroic death," says a man who had been a member of Arafat's inner circle for 20 years. "Everyone expected that Israel would try to kill him, by F-16s, by a rocket, in a direct manner, but no one expected that he would die in this way."

In the muqata

On the ground floor of the headquarters of the Palestinian administration in the West Bank, the British mandate era compound known as the muqata, there is a small, windowless room with a single camp bed. This was Arafat's room, purposely spartan quarters for a man famous for going through life with only two sets of clothes - both olive green uniforms.

The room is locked nowadays. Palestinian officials say there is a plan to turn it into a museum, but there is a raging debate about how Arafat's most intimate surroundings should be preserved for posterity. Do they leave the quarters as they are, with dingy walls and scuffed furnishings, or apply a bit of polish to their leader's home? It is in this room that the story of Arafat's final days begins at the start of the holy month of Ramadan - which this year fell on October 15.

Around this time, members of Arafat's inner circle noticed that he had come down with what appeared to be stomach flu. On its own, a brush with illness was not surprising. Since May 2002, Arafat had not set foot outside the muqata. He had withstood a seven-week siege there in the spring of that year, holed up with his loyalists and dozens of wanted Palestinian militants while Israeli tanks roared around the streets of Ramallah. "Of course, this was not a healthy place at all," remembers Tawfiq Tirawi, the chief of Palestinian intelligence in the West Bank. Like many in the inner circle, he had joined Arafat years before, coming on board in Beirut in 1973, while still a student. "There was no fresh air, no clean water. You're talking about 300 people in a 200m space. Imagine, 20 people using one toilet with no water. Everyone was getting sick."

When the siege was lifted in mid-May 2002, Arafat went out to survey his shattered domain in a helicopter tour of Bethlehem, Nablus and Jenin, where he was heckled by refugees. Then he returned to his muqata, ravaged like the rest of the West Bank by Israeli tanks and bulldozers. He would never again step outside outside the headquarters, and he resisted all efforts to clear up the wreckage left by Israel. Until the end, his muqata looked out on a 16ft mound of car wrecks, rubble and debris.

The man whose horizons had once spanned the world, who delighted in jetting around to meetings with world leaders, was definitively grounded. Arafat's Palestine had become little more than a cell: a small room on the ground floor of the compound, with a single camp bed.

In the beginning, at least, the confinement did not appear to chafe; Arafat delighted in telling visitors that he had survived one siege by Israel's Ariel Sharon - of Beirut, in 1982 - and that he would live to survive another. But the bars of the cage began to bear in on the Palestinian leader.

Although the Israeli prime minister at first allowed Arafat freedom of movement within Ramallah, he became hesitant to step outside his front door to see off visitors, joking that he would get hit by an Israeli missile. He was also mindful of the other men in the muqata, and of his responsiblities as father-protector for the dozens of militants who had taken shelter there. Arafat was convinced that should he go outside, Israel would take the last steps to destroy the edifice, both to seize the wanted men and to level what it saw as a symbol of Palestinian statehood.

Over time, Arafat's suspicions proved true, as it became clear that Israel had no intention of allowing him to roam beyond the muqata. In late 2003, after 23 Israelis were killed in a Jerusalem bus bombing, Sharon's closest aides spoke openly for the first time about assassination. "Arafat can no longer be a factor in what happens here," the deputy Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told Israel Radio, on September 14 2003. "Expulsion is certainly one of the options," he added. "Killing is also one of the options."

The isolation had a terrible effect. Intimates describe a man who grew increasingly discouraged by a political situation which most of the world saw as his own disastrous creation. "He started to become seriously worried about the political future of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people," said the man who has been a member of Arafat's inner circle for two decades.

"He started to be convinced that America would never move in the right direction to broker peace in the region. The situation was stuck and practically there was no way out," this colleague said. "It was similar to the catastrophe of 1948," the year the Jewish state was created.

Arafat's psychological state also deteriorated. Dorgham Abu Ramadan, a German-trained cardiologist from one of Gaza's leading families and one of the more recent entrants to Arafat's circle of intimates, took to visiting the muqata at weekly intervals after the doctor moved to Ramallah in 2000. "His psychology was really difficult. He was many times afraid. He wasn't concentrating. He forgot a lot - people's names - and he forgot the words for things. Sometimes he would try to explain something, and he could not. The last year, very often Arafat was not normal. His emotions and psychology were very different. He was a changed man." The account is confirmed by others who say that often Arafat would not speak for days.

At times, the bouts of listlessness were punctuated by extreme agitation, Abu Ramadan said. "He was all the time angry, agitated, and afraid of a lot of people - that the people who worked with him were out to kill him."

The inner circle

It was an acknowledged fact in the Palestinian Authority that all paths to power lay through Arafat. Those admitted to the inner circle knew membership was granted only after years of fealty. At the muqata, as in Beirut and Tunis before, the inner circle was almost exclusively male, a core of about 30 people who were a constant presence in Arafat's life.

Although graced with the title of presidential advisers, the officials of the muqata were essentially camp-followers and political operatives, not friends. "He was surrounded by a lot of - you'll forgive me - assholes, and a lot of opportunistic people, incompetent people, so if you like you can even say he was lonely," says the longtime colleague.

The so-called intimates were far less qualified than the doctor-newcomer, Abu Ramadan, to chart the signs of Arafat's decline, let alone embrace the idea that their leader had a diminished mental capacity. Even those who may have been privately worried were disinclined to intervene too strenuously with Arafat about his health. After all, there wasn't the slightest chance that he would listen.

As the advisers well knew, the late Palestinian leader was a man with supreme confidence in his own abilities, and mortally suspicious of others. He was convinced, beyond all reason, that he could perform the basic tasks of administration better than his advisers, and he was also fairly confident that he could take care of himself without recourse to modern medicine. Although Arafat had never suffered high blood pressure or other cardiac-related ailments, he delighted in chatting to Abu Ramadan about heart disease and its prevention, fancying himself something of an expert.

Officially, Arafat did have a medical attendant on call 24 hours a day, Omar Dakka, a Palestinian GP who had joined the entourage when the Palestinian leader was based in Tunis from 1983 to 1994. Arafat was also in regular communication with Ashraf Kurdi, a Jordanian neurologist who first treated him in 1992 after he survived a plane crash in the Libyan desert. But as even his doctors will admit, Arafat had a villager's suspicion of modern medicine and its practitioners, much as he liked the status of having doctors as friends. "Arafat didn't trust many people," Kurdi admits. "This was his nature. He didn't like to see doctors in general because each one tried to give him a different medicine, and he was afraid to take the wrong one, because of poisoning." He was even reluctant to take the medicine prescribed for his tremor, a condition that was often mistaken for Parkinson's disease. His only compromise was vitamins, B complex and E, which he would pop with abandon. He also had a weakness for herbal treatments.

For years, the regimen had worked. Despite his pasty complexion and what Kurdi calls a benign essential tremor, Arafat had no serious health concerns. While he followed a punishing schedule, with a work day that began at 8 or 9am and did not end until after midnight, he showed little sign of tiring. His heart was healthy, his blood pressure and blood sugar low, and his diet was exemplary: no red meat, lots of vegetables, and chicken or fish for protein. He did not drink or smoke; he even gave up caffeine, substituting camomile tea for the tiny cups of muddy coffee that Palestinians traditionally drink.

The abstemious lifestyle did not ward off all sickness. On September 25 last year - by a sad coincidence, on the same day that Arafat received a visit from the parents of Rachel Corrie, the American peace activist crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza - he became ill. Aides said he complained of a severe headache, high fever and upset stomach. A team of doctors appeared, including Kurdi and a poisoning expert, and diagnosed a gastric upset. During that episode, Arafat was treated with common antibiotics, and recovered within a fortnight. But some of the men who saw him daily in the muqata believe that illness precipitated a steady decline.

And in the autumn of this year, that slow descent into old age and illness accelerated dramatically. Two or three days before the October 15 start of Ramadan, Arafat became very ill. His associates in the muqata describe the sudden and violent onset of a flu-like illness with vomiting and diarrhoea, and a slight fever, perhaps 1C above normal. Arafat also complained of sharp and constant pain in his abdomen. At first, aides attributed the symptoms to a stomach upset as Ramadan fasting began, and for a few days Arafat tried to cling to his work routine, putting on his military uniform and sitting at the desk in his office. He also insisted on keeping the daytime fast. But it soon became clear that this was no ordinary case of the flu. Arafat was unable to keep any food down, and he began losing weight at an alarming rate.

On October 17, he attended a meeting of the national security council. "He thought he could make it through the meeting, but it was really too much for him," said another veteran from Arafat's circle, an administrator who was at the meeting. Arafat managed to stay upright for just 10 minutes before he staggered to his private quarters.

Alarm signals

Arafat was famous for his platonic kisses. He kissed the hands of foreign dignitaries, the cheeks of his officials - sometimes six or seven times - and the injured legs of Palestinian militants. But once he retreated to his room, the kisses stopped. The visitors who queued outside his door to pay their respects were warned not to get too close for fear of catching what he thought was a bug. "He was telling everyone, 'I've got the flu, and I don't want to kiss you'," recalls Tamimi, the cleric. Arafat was still unwilling to admit he had anything more serious than bad flu.

But his inner circle was truly alarmed. On October 17, a team of doctors was summoned from Egypt, including an internist, a cardiologist, an anaesthetist and a neurologist. A day later, a team of Tunisian doctors appeared, and began working furiously to establish the source of Arafat's illness, taking daily blood, stool and urine cultures for analysis at the Ramallah hospital and in Tunisia. They also subjected their patient to an endoscopy and a spinal tap at the rudimentary clinic that had been installed about a year earlier in the compound. But while the doctors were taking Arafat's condition seriously, their patient was still proving uncooperative, according to Abu Ramadan, refusing their entreaties to visit Ramallah hospital for an MRI scan.

The Palestinian leader was also adamant about demonstrating that he was still in charge. On October 24, he rose from his sickbed for another charade intended to persuade any rivals that he was still at the helm, by attending a meeting of the PLO executive council. "When we met with him, he hardly recognised who was speaking," says one of the men in attendance. "His eyes were wandering, and they were not focused. They were going astray all the time."

By October 25, doctors were growing desperate about Arafat's chances of survival. His platelet count continued to drop, evidence that his body was succumbing to infection or disease. Over successive days, he was given four units of platelets to try to regenerate his system, but the treatment had little effect. By October 27, the platelet-count had plunged to 40,000, well below the normal range of 150,00 to 500,000. The medical team sought - and obtained - permission from Israel for Arafat to be transferred to Ramallah hospital.

The reality was also beginning to sink in on the Palestinian leader, as he lay propped on pillows on the single bed in his windowless room. He was weak, shrunken from rapid weight loss, and deathly pale, except for fiery red cheeks caused by the cortisone that he had been prescribed to bring his platelet-count up. On October 27, Tirawi filed in to pay his respects. Arafat was withdrawn. "He said: 'I hope I'll get better, but I am in a lot of pain'," the intelligence chief remembers. "He was not unconscious, but he wasn't able to concentrate, and he was forgetful."

Tirawi was overwhelmed with unease. "We should have moved him sooner," he says. "By the time he went for treatment, it was too late. It is possible that if he had gone earlier he may have recovered."

By October 28, Arafat's platelet-count was down to 26,000, and it was apparent to all his attendants that his life was in danger. Kurdi, who had been left out of the earlier medical deliberations, was summoned to Ramallah from Jordan, and the doctors decided what to do next. The facilities at Ramallah were no longer an option; Arafat's illness was too advanced. He needed treatment abroad. By that evening, Arafat's wife, Suha, had also made her way to Ramallah from her home in Tunis. It was her first reunion with her husband since she had left the Palestinian territories at the start of the intifada in 2000. She, too, wanted Arafat to be sent abroad for treatment.

But the notion was immediately quashed by Arafat, who feared that if he left Ramallah, Israel would never let him come back. "He refused to leave because he thought they wanted to drag him out of the muqata to erase a symbol of Palestinian presidency," Leila Shahid, the Palestinian representative in Paris, told the Guardian. Trying yet again to show he was in control of his faculties, Arafat had his picture taken by his official photographer. The image was hardly reassuring: instead of the olive uniform, he was wearing a powder blue tracksuit and, in place of his trademark black and white keffiyeh, a woolly hat.

But for once, at the 11th hour of their leader's illness, the entourage refused to be intimidated by Arafat. Ahmed Queria, the Palestinian prime minister, began to make discreet inquiries about treatment abroad, approaching the French consul-general in Jerusalem, Regis Koetschet, to gauge whether Paris would be prepared to send a medical plane for Arafat. In Paris, Shahid was instructed to pursue similar contacts.

For Palestinian officials, France was the obvious choice. Arafat had a good relationship with the president, Jacques Chirac, and the French were likely to respond harshly to any attempt by Israel to destroy the muqata in the Palestinian leader's absence, or to bar his return. This faith in the French authorities was rewarded: according to Shahid, Paris announced within 12 hours that it was prepared to send a plane to Amman to collect Arafat and bring him to a medical facility in France.

There was only one remaining snag: an assurance was needed from Israel that it would not use Arafat's illness as an excuse to make good on its threat to expel the Palestinian leader. On October 28, Queria got on the telephone once more, this time to Sharon, who gave his word that Arafat would be allowed to return. Queria, still unconvinced, then persuaded the Egyptian leader, Hosni Mubarak, to phone Sharon for a similar guarantee.

Thus reassured, Arafat gave his assent to his medical evacuation. Advisers felt, they later told the Guardian, that the Palestinian leader knew he was close to death and his only hope was treatment abroad. The departure from Ramallah was set for Friday, October 29, with Arafat to travel by Jordanian military helicopter to Amman, where he boarded a French medical plane for the journey to Paris.

Arafat left at daybreak on a rainy morning, with only a few hundred supporters at the muqata to watch their frail and failing leader be loaded from a black Mercedes into the waiting helicopter. At that point, he still had the strength to blow kisses to the crowd, but by the time he arrived in Paris he was too weak to face the cameras.

The flight to France

The Percy military hospital in the southern suburbs of Paris is a sprawling affair, part brand-spanking new hospital, part relic from the Indochina war. That afternoon on the last Friday of October, it was practically deserted because of a bank holiday weekend. Hospital authorities allotted the entourage a bloc of four rooms: one for Arafat, one for his wife, and two others for his chief security officer and faithful retainer Ramzi Khoury, and his on-call GP, Dakka. In another section of the hospital, the entourage, which had followed Arafat in two separate planes, was duly installed in doctors' quarters. Nasser Kidwa, Arafat's nephew and the Palestinian representative to the United Nations, arrived separately from a family holiday in France.

Arafat was put on an IV drip, and for the next five days, until the evening of November 2, his life became a battery of tests. He was regularly wheeled out of his room for procedures, and Shahid and hospital spokesmen provided regular updates to the media on his progress. In that brief period after arrival at the Percy hospital, Arafat's condition appeared to stabilise - some in the entourage even began to hope that it had improved, including Shahid, who had been shocked at Arafat's appearance when he landed in Paris. "He looked like a bird, because he had shrunk," she says. "His face was as if he had been burned by the sun. It was red, red, red, and his skin was peeling."

As the days went by, Arafat managed to eat small amounts, mainly protein shakes and yoghurt. Within 24 hours of his arrival, the Palestinian leader had felt well enough to begin to request specific flavours of protein shake, Shahid recalls. Forty-eight hours after his arrival, he had a telephone conversation with his daughter, Zahwa, aged eight, who had been left in Tunis, and with Chirac. Within 72 hours, Arafat was taking calls from Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Queria. He also took a call from Salam Fayad, the Palestinian finance minister, and asked him if he had paid that month's salaries. On November 2, after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed four Israelis in Tel Aviv, he telephoned his aides in Ramallah to instruct the Palestinian Authority to issue a condemnation. In Paris, nobody had the heart to tell him that the communique had already gone out in his name. For the entourage, the intervention was a good sign; Arafat was getting better.

But French physicians - and specialists in toxicology and biological warfare - had made little progress in determining the cause of his illness. After four days of tests, they were confident that he did not suffer from leukaemia, but they had been unable to locate the cause of the blood disorder. And they knew that unless they identified the reasons for it, Arafat's chances of survival were slim. In the early hours of November 3, Shahid and the others camped at the hospital were woken by Arafat's guards with the news that the Palestinian leader had slipped into a coma. By the time the officials reached his room, Arafat had already been moved to the intensive care unit in the basement of the hospital, set apart behind a large plate glass window. The doctors, realising that time was running out to locate the cause of his illness, put him under a general anaesthetic and carried out a liver biopsy. The next day, still unconscious, he was visited by the president of France, who spent half an hour at the hospital.

In Shahid's version of events, Arafat's sudden decline fractured what had until then been a cooperative arrangement between his wife Suha and the officials of the Palestinian Authority. The first sign of discord was Suha's refusal to allow further information on Arafat's condition to be made public, a ban she was able to enforce under French privacy laws which favour the wishes of the immediate family.

"From the day he went into a coma, Mrs Arafat said: 'No, don't speak to the press any more'," says Shahid. "It was a mixture of many things, including a psychological reaction of possession." (Requests to interview Suha Arafat went unanswered.)

Other Palestinian officials had a far less charitable version of events. In their view, Suha was trying to secure payments from the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian first lady had been under investigation for a year by the French authorities for €11.5m (£7.9m) in transfers made from Swiss accounts to her accounts in Paris. But full-on hostilities were soon to commence.

On November 7, hospital authorities announced that Arafat's coma had deepened; senior officials from the Palestinian Authority announced plans to come to Paris. The combination of events sent Suha over the edge. In a fury, she rang up the television station al-Jazeera, and accused the Palestinian Authority of willing her husband's death. "Let it be known to the honest Palestinian people that a bunch of those who want to inherit are coming to Paris trying to bury Abu Ammar [Yasser Arafat] alive," she said. So far as Shahid was concerned, that outburst was the final break. "It shattered everything," she says. "That was the point of rupture and it would remain the major rupture between her and the Palestinian people."

The continuing lack of a diagnosis also got some Palestinians speculating that Arafat had been poisoned, presumably by Israel. The notion was reinforced by the confused and contradictory behaviour of Palestinian officials during his final days. On the day Arafat died, Kurdi announced in Amman that he had been blocked by Palestinian officials from visiting his patient for 13 days. (In Ramallah recently, a courtier who had fallen out of favour in recent years, Bassam Abu Sharif, also produced a letter he had sent Arafat in December 2002 warning of a plot to poison him. The information, he told the Guardian, came from "Israeli friends".)

The 558-page report on Arafat's final illness assembled by French doctors describes a complex disorder, known as disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC), the main causes of which are malignancy and infection. The blood vessels are blocked by small blood clots, depleting the platelets and clotting factors needed to control bleeding, and leading to haemhorrage and death. (In Percy, Arafat was given heparin, an anti-coagulant which is the normal treatment for DIC, helping to prevent the consumption of platelets. However, it can also exacerbate any bleeding.)

But DIC is always a secondary condition. The doctors have never ventured an opinion on the underlying causes and, according to the physician Kurdi, there was a refusal by the man who later went on to succeed Arafat as president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to contemplate an autopsy.

"They didn't want to do it. When you talked to them about an autopsy they would get fits," says Kurdi. "He [Abbas] said it would disturb relations with France."

Even those who discounted the idea that Shin Bet agents had at last carried out the threats of some Israeli officials to kill the Palestinian leader, put the blame on Ariel Sharon for, in effect, keeping Arafat a prisoner in his Ramallah compound, the muqata, for three years. "Israel is responsible for the condition in which he was living - the atmosphere, the location, were poisonous. But it's not as if someone put poison in his food and he died," says Tirawi.

Speaking of the popular wish for a hero's death, the long-time colleague expresses a similar view: "If we are to consider it a heroic death we should agree with the popular consensus that he was poisoned by the Israelis . . . but we don't have the evidence."

But neither speculation about the causes of Arafat's illness, nor Suha's outbursts, could stop the inevitable: Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Queria, whose stated plans to visit the hospital had so angered the first lady, began to make quiet arrangements in the event of their leader's death. Written instructions were given to the hospital about how the body should be handled so that religious and burial rites would not be compromised. Tamimi, as chief cleric, was summoned from Jerusalem. The Palestinian delegation also discussed funeral arrangements after a meeting at the Elysée palace on November 8 between Chirac and four members of the entourage: Abbas and Queria; Rawhi Fattouh, speaker of the Palestinian assembly; and Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian foreign minister. It was at this meeting that Chirac suggested a ceremonial airport farewell.

The discussions were held not a moment too soon. Barely 24 hours later, on the night of November 9, Arafat suffered a cerebral haemhorrage. Tamimi held a vigil at his bedside. "It was a very painful scene," he says. "There was blood everywhere on his face. The blood was coming from every possible place. My first reaction when I saw the scene was that I didn't understand what was going on. I closed my eyes, and I started reading from the Koran . . . I looked only at Arafat's body. I couldn't face his face."

By that point, Arafat had only hours to live. At 3.30am on the morning of Thursday, November 11, as Suha and Tamimi watched over him, his heart stopped beating. Arafat was dead.

He had died, as he would have never wished, as an exile, and all that could be done for him now was to return his body to Palestine in a dignified way. As promised by Chirac, the French provided a fitting send-off at the Coublay military airport. To the strains of La Marseillaise, an honour guard carried Arafat's flag-draped casket to the waiting Airbus 319. The remains were flown to Cairo, first for an elaborate state funeral, and then later on that last Friday of Ramadan, home to Ramallah for the emotional burial that Arafat would have wanted.

After days of struggle for control over the leader, all that remained for the entourage was to squabble over his pitiful belongings. As his widow, Suha felt entitled to his uniform. After a tussle, the security detail got the trademark keffiyeh. But the war of rumour and accusation over the manner of Arafat's death, and its meaning for his political heritage, carries on. 


-------- spies

U.S. accuses Israeli defense officials of spying

December 16, 2004
By Joshua Mitnick
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041215-101444-5836r.htm

TEL AVIV — Israeli defense officials in the United States have been accused by the FBI of industrial espionage, the second spying complaint leveled against Israel in four months, Israel's Army Radio has reported.

    In another sign of stress in bilateral relations, Channel 2 television news reported yesterday that Washington was demanding the resignation of the top official in Israel's Defense Ministry, Director-General Amos Yaron, for failing to disclose a weapons transaction with China.

    Israel's Defense Ministry denied that its envoys had been accused of industrial espionage, but acknowledged that the Bush administration had complained about overly insistent information-gathering by Israelis at military-equipment exhibitions.

    "These are not accusations, but rather claims about 'aggressive collection,' " Rachel Naidek Ashkenazi, a Defense Ministry spokeswoman, told Israeli radio. "And this regards information that isn't classified."

    But she acknowledged that some of that information still is protected by U.S. officials, creating a gray area that has become the source of friction.

    Israelis failed to appreciate that repeating questions about the protected systems would arouse the suspicions of the Americans, Mrs. Naidek Ashkenazi said.

    "For us, unclassified is unclassified," she said. "But if an [Israeli] asks in a different way a second time, it's like he's crossed a red line. For us, it's legitimate. For them, it's breaking the codes of behavior."

    The Army Radio report said Israeli officials were questioned by FBI agents on several occasions about their behavior. The problem prompted Israel to convene all of its defense envoys in New York earlier this month to discuss new guidelines.

    The FBI already is probing suspicions that Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin passed classified information to Israel via the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel lobby.

    The FBI searched AIPAC's offices earlier this month and served subpoenas as part of an investigation into whether Israel improperly obtained information about Iran. AIPAC has denied any wrongdoing.

    The U.S. demand that Israel dismiss its top Defense Ministry bureaucrat stemmed from accusations over a "sensitive" weapons system supplied by Israel to China, Channel 2 television said.

    The United States complained that Israel first failed to report that the weapons system had been returned to Israel for more work, Channel 2 said. Then Israel lied about the purpose of the project, saying the equipment was being repaired when it was upgrading the system.

    Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Ze'ev Boim denied that the United States had demanded Mr. Yaron's dismissal, but he did say a dispute had opened between Israel and the United States over the weapons transaction. 

----

Senate Democrats Protest Top Secret Spy Satellite Project

Thursday, December 16th, 2004, Democracy Now!

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/16/1444255

The Justice Department is reviewing a request for a criminal investigation into recent disclosures about a highly classified satellite surveillance program. We speak with a stealth satellite expert from the National Security Archive. [includes rush transcript] The Justice Department and the FBI are reviewing a request for a criminal investigation into recent disclosures about a highly classified satellite surveillance program.

The request from the National Reconnaissance Office comes after reports in the Washington Post and other publications about a stealth satellite program under debate in Congress, which has reportedly risen in cost from $5 billion to $9.5 billion over the past few years.

The project was debated in closed hearings on Capitol Hill, but some lawmakers took the unusual step of voicing their concerns publicly while trying to abide by classification constraints. Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said the program was "totally unjustified and very, very wasteful and dangerous to the national security."

Rockefeller added "Because of the highly classified nature of the programs contained in the national intelligence budget, I cannot talk about them on the floor." He said the Intelligence Committee had voted to terminate the program for the past two years only to be overruled by the appropriations committees.

Rockefeller and three other Senate Democrats refused to sign "conference sheets" related to the 2005 intelligence authorization bill, reportedly to protest the program.

    * Jeffrey Richelson, senior fellow at the National Security Archive. The stealth satellite program at issue was first described publicly in his book, "The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology."

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: We are joined by Jeffrey Richelson, who is a senior fellow at the National Security Archives. He has written the book, The Wizards of Langley: Inside the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Science and Technology. Welcome to Democracy Now!

JEFFREY RICHELSON: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what we're not supposed to know?

JEFFREY RICHELSON: Well, this program had its most immediate origins during the Reagan administration when there was great concern about soviet anti-satellite capabilities, as well as Soviet denial and deception measures. In other words, the things they did to hide secret aircraft or other military activities from U.S. reconnaissance satellites as they passed overhead. And these were satellites that were certainly track-able by the Soviet Union, so they know when they would be over a particular target. This particular system started at that period of time and it was originally named Misty. The idea was to put it in an orbit that the Soviets would not expect it to be in, so that when it wouldn't necessarily be looking there and to give it some stealth capabilities so that it would be much harder to detect, so that rather than if it showed up on radar, appearing to be a full-sized satellite, it might appear to be some sort of a debris. So, they weren't -- they would -- therefore not take protective measures when the satellite was in range of a particular target, say, an airbase outside Moscow where we might want to photograph something going on. It resulted in the first launch of the satellite in 1990 called Misty, and then a follow-on launch in 1999, and what's under debate is whether to approve funding for a follow-on program, for which the cost has grown from $5 billion, the projected cost from $5 billion to almost $10 billion.

AMY GOODMAN: In the New York Times today Douglas Joel writes that an alternative to the new highly classified $9.5 billion stealth satellite program is the subject of a Congressional dispute, which relies much more heavily on high-flying unmanned aircraft to take pictures of critical targets around the world. That alternative is part of a classified proposal endorsed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has tried since September, 2003, to kill the new satellite program. Can you comment on that?

JEFFREY RICHELSON: Sure. Well, there's always trade-offs. You can collect intelligence in a lot of different ways, and aircraft versus satellites is always a trade-off that has to be considered. And with higher performance, unmanned aerial vehicles like global hawk or follow-on systems there's the possibility of buying a lot of those and replacing some of your satellite capability and still saving money. And there are certain advantages to satellites in that they are continuously operating, and that they are not subject to air defense. So, the question would then come up whether you can fly the U.A.V.s over targets that would not be defended, and therefore get your imagery. That's something that certainly requires an analysis, and you can prejudge one way or the other.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Jeffrey Richelson, who has written a book, The Wizards of Langley: Inside the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Science and Technology. I was watching when the senator of West Virginia, Jay Rockefeller went to the floor and said he was going to do something very unusual, that everything he said had already been approved by, I don't know, intelligence, even what he was going to refer to saying that he was objecting to the satellite program, though he didn't say specifically the satellite program. How significant is it that this is coming to light?

JEFFREY RICHELSON: Well, there have been other cases where a senator has objected to a particular acquisition program. Senator DeConcini years ago made some objections to a satellite program without going any details, but it's something that doesn't happen on a regular basis. And senator Rockefeller’s description was very vague in the sense that -- in the sense of saying a major acquisition program without specifying it that it was a satellite, although that was probably fairly deducible, but not also saying what particular type of satellite.

AMY GOODMAN: And, shouldn't this be a public discussion? I mean, we're talking about $9.5 billion?

JEFFREY RICHELSON: Yes. I mean, that's one of the problems with the whole -- with the secrecy and concerning the intelligence budget and both -- both for the community as a whole and specifically agencies, is that you can have enormous expenditures of public funds without any real public oversight, and you can see in this case the difficulty even of a major oversight committee in getting a proposal killed if there -- if there are significant forces supporting it who can do so sort of under a veil or behind a veil of secrecy.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, any comment, Jeffrey Richelson on this test that failed yesterday of the U.S. fledgling missile defense system. An interceptor rocket failed to launch on queue from the Marshall Islands.

JEFFREY RICHELSON: Well, I think the only thing that comes to mind is that in developing new technology systems, you run into a whole lot of failures up front. The question is whether the country considers a system like this something worth persevering in developing. I certainly can't say that I know that the technology that they're working on will work, but I can also say that you have had cases in the past with the satellite systems and other high-technology systems where you have had a run of failures at the beginning, and ultimately you do have success if you persevere. Whether that will happen in this case or not is something, you know, I don't know and I don't know that anybody knows.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeffrey Richelson, I want to thank you for being with us, senior fellow at the National Security Archive, The Wizards of Langley: Inside the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Science and Technology is his book. 

----

CIA Agent Says Bosses Ordered Him To Falsify WMD Reports

Thursday, December 16th, 2004 Democracy Now!

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/16/1445203

An undercover intelligence officer, who is suing the CIA, says his managers asked him to falsify his reporting on weapons of mass destruction and retaliated against him when he refused. We speak with his attorney. [includes rush transcript] We turn now to the story of how a senior intelligence officer was targeted by the CIA after he refused orders from his superiors to falsify his reports on weapons of mass destruction.

The senior CIA operative charges in a lawsuit made public last week that a co-worker warned him three years ago that "CIA management planned to 'get him' for his role in reporting intelligence contrary to official CIA dogma."

Although the word "Iraq" does not appear in the heavily redacted version of the suit, the Washington Post reports that "the remaining language and context make clear that the officer's work related to prewar intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction."

Accusations of intelligence officers being pressured on their Iraq findings in the lead-up to the war has long been alleged, but no CIA official has come public before with such claims.

According to the undercover agent, the CIA management retaliated against him by launching investigations of allegations that he had a sexual affair with a female asset and that he stole money meant to be pay off for sources.

    * Roy Krieger, DC-based lawyer representing the undercover CIA operative filing the lawsuit. He specializes in national security cases and has represented scores of people in the CIA.

Related Links:

    * PDF Copy of the lawsuit (from Secrecy News)

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: Roy Krieger is with us. He’s a D.C.-based lawyer representing the undercover CIA operative who’s filing the lawsuit. Welcome to Democracy Now!

ROY KRIEGER: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, can you explain exactly what happened?

ROY KRIEGER: Well, actually, I'm very limited in what I can say because, as you can see, and as you said from the -- rather on the complaint, it is heavily redacted. I can only comment on the unclassified or un-redacted portions of the complaint. The CIA has pulled down the veil of secrecy on this case and classified the enormous amount of information that in my experience in the past seven years of dealing with the CIA, I have never filed a lawsuit in which they have redacted this much of the material out of it. They took out over 400 words from a 2,400-word document. I'm quite limited in what I can say. I cannot even confirm or deny that we're talking about Iraq or any other country other than to say that it involves weapons of mass destruction in the Near East during the pre-war period. And our client, as you commented was retaliated against after he refused a request from his supervisors in the counter-proliferation division on several different occasions to falsify or misstate intelligence that had been collected by him.

AMY GOODMAN: Is he still employed by the CIA?

ROY KRIEGER: No, he is not. He was in September of 2003, he was placed on paid administrative leave after these two investigations of him were launched. He was kept on paid administrative leave for one year, and then he received a letter notifying him that his services were being terminated. One of the investigations, the inspector general investigation, we know, is still ongoing. We met with investigators from CIA's inspector general's office just last week in my office with my client for nearly -- probably about 30 or 45 minutes. They asked him a series of questions related to the financial fraud investigation. The counterintelligence investigation that was launched of him for allegedly having a sexual affair with an asset, I think has probably been terminated simply because his employment has been terminated, and we have received no information that the investigation was handed off to the FBI, which would be normal procedure in this case. But he is no longer employed at the CIA, and he is still the subject, or I should say the target, of a criminal investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: Why did the lawsuit go forward now? We're talking about something that took place three years ago?

ROY KRIEGER: Well, we're talking about events that occurred three years ago, but the harm really occurred just a few months ago. That's in fact when he was fired from the CIA, and the lawsuit is actually -- we filed it fairly quickly after he had been officially notified of his termination. First we had to submit it to the CIA so they could make all of their redactions that you see in it. And then as soon as we got it back, we filed it with the federal court here in Washington D.C., and we had to file it along with a motion seeking permission to proceed in pseudo, that is, not in true name because ordinarily when you file a suit in federal court, you can only sue in your true name and true address, and here his true name is classified. Ordinarily, what we do in order to protect someone's true identity is we use their true first name, which is fairly ubiquitous, of course, and then either Doe for a last name or the first initial of their true last name. In this case, if you have got the complaint before you, you can see that the CIA was so sensitive about this case that they even redacted out the true first name of our client. So, he is proceeding simply as Mr. Doe. The chief judge issued the order last week, and as soon as the order was issued, the suit became officially filed. That's when the media got a hold of it.

AMY GOODMAN: Roy Krieger, I want to thank you very much for being with us, representing the undercover CIA operative who has filed the lawsuit marking the first public instance in which a CIA employee has charged directly that agency officials pressured him to produce intelligence to support the administration's prewar position that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and suppressing information that ran counter to that view. Roy Krieger has represented scores of people in the Central Intelligence Agency. 



-------- un

U.N. worth the investment

Letters to the editor
December 16, 2004 Washington Times

http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20041215-085728-6475r.htm

    What are people who dislike the United Nations thinking? Some, such as Cal Thomas ("Getting out," Commentary, Sunday), say the United Nations doesn't serve our interests. I guess it's true: We seem to find it against our interests to sign the treaties the rest of the world has on torture, land mines, creating biological weapons, the rights of women and children, the environment and international law.

    And no, the United Nations' interests were not the same as ours, as evidenced by its warnings against a war with Iraq after U.N. inspectors destroyed most of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

    Yes, the United Nations is weak — it was, unfortunately, created that way on purpose. The necessary solutions to strengthen it into the strong and effective organization we need are well-known and just require its member countries to exert the will to empower it to deal with world problems.

    And yes, there is a U.N. scandal, and, as with the United States' Halliburton scandal, it will be addressed. Keep in mind that the United Nations costs each American a tiny fraction compared to our military budget.

    If we put more resources into the United Nations and share more of the financial and military burden, we could make a secure, healthy and profitable investment for all the world's citizens.
    
    DEBBIE METKE
    Milwaukee 


-------- us

The pattern of discontent in US ranks

By Brad Knickerbocker | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
December 16, 2004

http://csmonitor.com/2004/1216/p01s01-usmi.html

Griping among the troops is as old as armed conflict, illustrated most memorably by cartoonist Bill Mauldin's "Willie and Joe" characters during World War II. But something more than that is happening now in Iraq with what appears to be growing resistance from the troops.

Evidence includes numbers of deserters (reportedly in the thousands), resignations of reserve officers, lawsuits by those whose duty period has been involuntarily extended, and a refusal to go on dangerous missions without proper equipment. There's also been a willingness at grunt level to publicly challenge the Pentagon - as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld found out recently in a trip to the war zone, where he got an earful about unarmored humvees.

While some don't see much defiance - and, in fact, have been surprised by the depth of solidarity - others see an unusual amount of tension surfacing for an all-volunteer military force.

"What is driving the resistance is the same thing that drove it during Vietnam - a lack of trust in the civilian leadership and a sense that the uniformed leaders are not standing up for the forces," says retired Army Col. Dan Smith, a military analyst with the Friends Committee on National Legislation in Washington. Colonel Smith doesn't expect the kind of "fragging" incidents that occurred in Vietnam where soldiers attacked their own officers. "This force is too professional," he says. "But the lack of trust and the inequity of the tours will very likely be reflected in the numbers of Guard and reservists who vote no-confidence with their feet."

That already appears to be happening. The Army National Guard is short 5,000 new citizen-soldiers.

"Although generally successful in overall mission numbers, we continue to experience difficulty in attracting and retaining qualified individuals in certain critical wartime specialties," Army Reserve chief Lt. Gen. James Helmly told the House Armed Services Committee earlier this year.

The number of officers wanting to resign from the Army Reserve has jumped as well. And according to a recent report on CBS's "60 Minutes," the Defense Department acknowledges that more than 5,500 service personnel have deserted since the Iraq war began.

While the complaints and the resistance to following some military policies may pattern earlier conflicts, the fighting in Iraq has a unique context, experts say.

It's the first large-scale 21st-century conflict against an aggressive insurgency, causing thousands of US casualties; the first war in more than a generation in which homeland security and the threat of domestic terror attack seem so real; the first "semi-draft," with the Guard/reserve component approaching 50 percent of combat and combat support troops (and already taking more casualties than they did in Vietnam); and it's the first time in many years that soldiers have been ordered to serve beyond their commitments.

Legal challenges to military authority appear to be increasing as well, with more use of civilian attorneys than was seen in Vietnam. "It's very much in evidence," says Eugene Fidell, a former military lawyer who heads the National Institute of Military Justice. Mr. Fidell just finished teaching the first course on military issues at Harvard Law School since 1970.

All this is happening in an age when CNN brings live war coverage to the trenches and barracks, when troops are more aware of the successes and debacles on the battlefield than ever before. At the same time, reporters embedded with combat units, as well as e-mail and Internet access, make it easier for families and others back home to be heard by the soldiers - and for the soldiers to complain to them. This is especially true, perhaps, of citizen-soldiers, who are not only older than the average GI but more used to speaking out.

Since the fighting began in Iraq, the number of Guard and reserve troops on active duty has more than doubled. Critics say this is an indication that US forces are stretched too thin. One such critic is Senator John McCain (R) of Arizona, a supporter of the war who declared this week that he had "no confidence" in Secretary Rumsfeld.

At this point, much of the data is scattered and anecdotal, like the doubling of desertions at the Army's Fort Bragg in North Carolina last year to about 200. It may be too early to draw exact comparisons with earlier wars, experts agree.

But they also note a growing trend for GIs to speak out and to find leverage points to protect their interests - including personal safety. "I am amazed that it is not greater," says retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner. "The war continues to go badly. Their equipment is in bad shape. Supply problems continue. Tours are extended. Many are on a second or third deployment to a combat zone. I would expect a louder voice."

A key issue for war planners is whether any of this adversely effects individual morale and unit performance. That remains an open question, particularly as the war goes on and its original rationale (weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda) fades.

"Soldiers always gripe, and often with good reason," says Loren Thompson, head of security studies at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. "But I don't see much evidence that the enemy in Iraq is eroding the will of US forces to fight. As long as US forces are well led, the gripes aren't likely to lead to more serious problems."

Others aren't so sure.

"When you are risking your life on the battlefield, the importance of knowing why you are doing so cannot be underestimated," says Ivan Eland, national security analyst at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. "If soldiers don't know why they are fighting there or believe they've been hoodwinked, we may see the same phenomenon happen in Iraq as occurred in Vietnam."

-------- 

When Mom Goes to War...And Dies

By LISA HOFFMAN
Scripps Howard News Service 12/16/04 

http://207.44.245.159/article7496.htm

"Scripps Howard News Service" --Army Pfc. Lori Piestewa was not only the first female American soldier killed in combat in Iraq, she was also the first U.S. military mother to die in the war. 

In all, six mothers in uniform have died in Iraq between the start of the war in March 2003 and the end of November, leaving behind a total of 10 children. Overall, 27 women troops have died in the war. 

Among the mothers were: 

Piestewa, 23, who died in the March 23, 2003, ambush in which Pfc. Jessica Lynch was captured in Nasiriyah. She had two children, Brandon, 4, and Carla, 3. Both now are being raised by their grandparents in El Paso, Texas. 

Another single Army mother, Spc. Jessica Cawvey, joined the Illinois National Guard to build a better life for her daughter, Sierra, 6. In Iraq since February, Cawvey, died Oct. 6 when a roadside bomb exploded as her convoy passed near Fallujah. 

Cawvey, 21, "wasn't the military type," her mother, Sandra Cawvey, told a local newspaper. She enlisted in the Guard simply to help pay for college so she could get a decent job. Before she deployed to Iraq, Cawvey had been living with her parents and Sierra, and working on a bachelor's degree in accounting at Illinois State University in Normal, Ill. 

The impact of Cawvey's death on Sierra was somewhat cushioned by the fact that the child is continuing to live with her grandparents in Mahomet, Ill. "She's doing just fine," said Clarence Cawvey, Jessica's uncle. "It's more like she lost a sister." 

Less than a week after Cawvey died, Army Sgt. Pamela Osbourne was killed by shrapnel from a rocket attack on her camp in Baghdad. A native of Jamaica, Osbourne, 38, came to America when she was 14 with two dreams _ to become a U.S. citizen and to serve in the military. 

A medical condition could have kept her out of Iraq duty, but Osbourne was determined to serve her country, her husband Rohan Osbourne told a local newspaper in Hollywood, Fla. 

While she was deployed, her husband tended to their three children, ages 9 to 19. A supply specialist, Osbourne managed to call home al most every day, between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. 

She made her husband promise not to hide anything from the kids if the worst happened. 

"Even if I come home in a box, you should know that I did it for (all of) you. Take care of the kids. Stay strong," Osbourne told her spouse. 

--------

Army says it's spending $4 billion on armor
Officials reject criticism that shortages reflect poor planning
	
The Associated Press
Updated: 12:05 a.m. ET Dec. 16, 2004

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6718744/

WASHINGTON - The Army says it is spending more than $4 billion to make sure vehicles used in Iraq have the armor to protect troops against insurgents’ bombs.

Officials rejected criticism that shortages reflect poor war planning and said they’ve been working as fast as possible to give troops what they need.

“This is not Wal-Mart,” said Brig. Gen. Jeffery Sorenson, asserting that it takes time to study, develop and produce equipment needed against what commanders say is a sophisticated and ever-adapting enemy.

Defense officials declined to say how much has already been spent. But they said that in the next six to eight months, they will have spent $4.1 billion to try to make sure that vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan are those already manufactured with full armor or have had armor added to them. The vast majority are in Iraq.

No ‘silver bullet’ against bombs

“I don’t know that we’ll ever find a silver bullet” against the insurgents’ homemade bombs, said Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy commander of Central Command, which is responsible for U.S. military operations throughout the Middle East.

Smith said insurgents may use doorbell mechanisms today and remote controls from toys tomorrow to detonate the bombs that have become the major source of U.S. casualties in Iraq.

“As we adapt, they adapt,” he said.

Smith and Sorenson spoke to Pentagon reporters in two separate press conferences Wednesday, a week after a soldier’s question to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ignited a firestorm over why troops lack proper armor 21 months into the Iraq campaign.

Critics of Bush administration policies in Iraq blame what they say was a rosy picture the administration held before the war. The campaign was meant to be fought at rapid speed by a limited-size force with international help to disarm Saddam Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction. Instead, no weapons were found, the international community largely refused to participate and officials have been forced to increase the size of the force there to 150,000 troops as scheduled Iraqi elections draw near.

There was too little advanced body armor and were too few armored vehicles to deal with what the Pentagon has since acknowledged is a far stronger and longer insurgency than expected, critics say. Smith said all troops now have the body vests, but that only 60 percent of vehicles there have needed armor.

Insurgents sophisticated and adaptable

Defense officials say it wasn’t a matter of planning but that insurgents have proven very smart, sophisticated and adaptable.

Officials say troops also have changed tactics — changing the way they patrol, driving faster in convoy and so on.

“Its not just armor ... but a holistic approach” to the threat, Sorenson said.

Officials also said this week that the Air Force has started making more cargo flights over Iraq to keep Army transport trucks off the country’s dangerous roads when possible.

During the last month, the Air Force reorganized the operations of its cargo lifters and is now flying about 450 tons of cargo around Iraq daily, said Lt. Col. Mike Caldwell, an Air Force spokesman. That’s an increase of about 100 tons a day over its previous average, Caldwell said.



-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE


-------- courts / tribunals

Inuits to Sue U.S. Over Global Warming

Thursday, December 16th, 2004

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/16/1444247

Inuit leaders are seeking a ruling from an international court that the U.S. government's position on global warming is threatening their existence as a people. We speak with the managing attorney at Earth Justice. [includes rush transcript] The Inuit, about 155,000 seal-hunting peoples scattered around the Arctic, plan to seek a ruling from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the United States, by contributing substantially to global warming, is threatening their existence.

The Inuit plan is part of a broader shift in the debate over human-caused climate change evident among participants in the 10th round of international talks taking place in Buenos Aires aimed at averting dangerous human interference with the climate system. The commission is an investigative arm of the Organization of American States and has no enforcement powers. But a declaration that the United States has violated the Inuit's rights could create the foundation for an eventual lawsuit, either against the United States in an international court or against American companies in federal court.

Last month, an assessment of Arctic climate change by 300 scientists for the eight countries with Arctic territory, including the United States, concluded that "human influences" are now the dominant factor.

    * Martin Wagner, managing attorney for international programs at Earth Justice.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined right now by Martin Wagner, who is managing attorney for the international programs at Earth Justice. Welcome to Democracy Now!

MARTIN WAGNER: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what the Inuit are charging?

MARTIN WAGNER: Well, as you suggested, the Inuit -- the Inuits' entire lives and culture, their ability to continue to survive, depends upon the ice that has existed in the Arctic for thousands of years, and has supported their culture and their way of life. And scientists are now in agreement that climate change caused predominantly by human influences is causing that ice to melt and causing other impacts to the Inuit way of life. The Inuit can no longer depend upon the ice to get to seals that they depend on for sources of food. They can no longer travel on that ice from place to place to communicate between villages. They can no longer use the ice to build igloos that they depend on when they're out hunting. Just a whole slew of impacts that have already occurred and are going to continue to get worse. So, the Inuit are recognizing these impacts, and looking at them and saying these impacts violate our fundamental rights, recognized in international law, to maintain our culture, to health, to have a means of subsistence that we can depend on, and other rights. And they are now seeking recognition of those violations at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

AMY GOODMAN: So, how does this proceed forward?

MARTIN WAGNER: Well, we are putting together a petition that will go to the Inter-American Commission. The Commission will receive the petition. It will forward it to the United States, which is the respondent, the Inuit are arguing that because the United States is responsible for 25% or more of the greenhouse gas emissions that are contributing to this climate change, that the United States has an international obligation to prevent these human rights violations. So, the Commission would forward the petition to the United States, and they would then begin a period of hearing testimony from the Inuit and from lawyers speaking on their behalf, hearing responses from the United States and then ultimately leading to some sort of a determination by the Inter-American Commission about whether this constitutes a violation of human rights. And you rightly noted that the Commission then does not have the authority to order the United States to take any particular action. But the finding by this Commission, which is one of the world's most authoritative bodies on the question of human rights, can have great impact. You mentioned some of them in terms of potential support for lawsuits that would be based on international law, but further than -- beyond that, diplomatic efforts by governments around the world are frequently based upon concerns about human rights. So that the many governments around the world now that are -- that have already expressed frustration with the United States for failing to participate in global negotiations, and taking action globally to reduce climate change.

AMY GOODMAN: Not signing on to Kyoto.

MARTIN WAGNER: For example, right. Those governments will be strengthened and empowered by an authoritative conclusion about human rights implications of climate change to be able to take stronger action with respect to the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Martin Wagner, I want to thank you very much for joining us. Martin Wagner is managing attorney for international programs at Earth Justice. Again at democracynow.org, we will link to information about Earth Justice and the Inuit's case. 


-------- human rights

Unocal Settles Landmark Human Rights Case with Burmese Villagers

Thursday, December 16th, 2004 Democracy Now!

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/16/1444238

A ground-breaking settlement was reached in the long-running human rights case brought by Burmese villagers against the energy giant Unocal. We speak with the executive director of the Center for Justice and Accountability. [includes rush transcript] A ground-breaking settlement has been reached in the long-running human rights case brought by Burmese villagers against the energy giant Unocal.

A dozen Burmese villagers sued Unocal in the California courts, claiming that the company was aware of and supported slave labor, murder, rape and forced relocation of villagers by the Burmese military during the construction of an oil pipeline from Burmese oil fields to Thailand.

The allegations were taken up by EarthRights International, the Centre for Constitutional Rights and the International Labor Rights Fund, which brought the case on the villagers' behalf, using the alien tort claims act.

Human rights activists have hailed the settlement as a landmark test in holding multinational companies responsible in the United States for atrocities committed abroad.

    * Sandra Coliver, executive director of the Center for Justice and Accountability based in San Francisco.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

AMY GOODMAN: We are joined by Sandra Coliver, executive director of Center for Justice and Accountability, based in San Francisco. Welcome to Democracy Now!

SANDRA COLIVER: Pleased to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the significance of this case? Who brought the lawsuit? We're just hearing drips and drabs. It hasn't been discussed in full what the settlement is.

SANDRA COLIVER: That's right. The actual settlement has not been confirmed, but the case has been brought on behalf of the villagers in Burma that had been living along a gas pipeline built by Unocal and its partners. The organizations involved are the Center for Constitutional Rights, Earth Rights International, and the International Labor Rights Fund.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the people that they brought the lawsuit on behalf of, these 15 Burmese villagers?

SANDRA COLIVER: The suit is brought by these villagers who were among those who were enslaved by the Burmese military as the Unocal and its partners were building this pipeline. In addition to being enslaved and conscripted into clearing the dense forest around which the pipeline had to be built, the Burmese military also terrorized the villages if the young men refused to work for free, under very harsh circumstances. The terror included raping the women, killing people, and insuring that the men could not run away from this enforced labor. Now, none of this is directly attributed to Unocal employees. Rather, what the district court found is that there was substantial evidence that Unocal knowingly assisted the perpetration of these crimes. That was the key issue -- was Unocal as a corporation aiding and abetting the commission of human rights violations.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, when exactly was this lawsuit brought?

SANDRA COLIVER: It was filed in 1996. The pipeline was finally completed in 1998. Unocal has been sort of trying to remedy what it realizes was a bad deal from the start. They have been saying, well, that by being in Burma, they have improved the economy around the gas pipeline, but indeed, with this settlement, they have undertaken to provide education and assistance for the community and reparations for those who were most hideously injured.

AMY GOODMAN: So, it's been about eight years. What do you think made Unocal decide right now to settle?

SANDRA COLIVER: There was scheduled to be a hearing at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this last Monday. That would be a hearing on the theory of aiding and abetting. The US government had filed a brief in this case arguing that corporations should not be held liable pursuant to a theory of aiding and abetting because this theory would discourage foreign investment. If corporations could be held responsible for aiding and abetting human rights violations, they would be less inclined to invest overseas, and that would interfere with the discretion of the US government to promote its foreign policy objectives by encouraging robust investment. So, what the US government was saying is that they needed to have the flexibility to tolerate the commission of human rights abuses by corporations in order to promote their foreign policy. Well, a bankrupt argument at best. It's frightening to think that the government would argue that they need the flexibility to authorize human rights violations in order to conduct their foreign policy. It's very clear that the government has a wide range of methods available to it to conduct foreign policy, but it's also very clear that certain activities are simply beyond the pale. One of those that the courts have clearly established is that US corporations cannot engage in corruption, in this country or overseas. The US government has made very clear that companies in the US, and US actors, cannot engage in terrorism. Why should human rights violations be different? This was the argument that was going to be advanced Monday, and my interpretation is that Unocal realized that was a bankrupt argument.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, can you talk about the Alien Tort Claims Act, what this act is, and the significance of its use in this case?

SANDRA COLIVER: The basis of this lawsuit is the Alien Tort Claims Act, which was adopted in 1789. The law provides that non-US citizens are entitled to sue in US federal courts for violations of the law of nations. That law was little used until 1980 when the Center for Constitutional Rights used it in a lawsuit brought by the family of a Paraguayan man who was tortured to death by a Paraguayan official found in the United States. The courts condoned that use of the law, and just this year in June, the Supreme Court further emphasized that that law can be applied for modern-day human rights violations. What the court said is that originally it was anticipated that the law would be used against piracy and attacks on ambassadors and slave trading, and that in the modern day, the same law could be used for torts in violation of the law of nations that had received the same degree of consensus and definition as had those three torts in 1789. So, as long as there's a tort that has the same degree of consensus as the court of piracy and the same degree of definition, that tort can be the basis of a civil lawsuit. I want to make sure that since Unocal was the first lawsuit filed against a corporation under this theory, and since 1996, about 40 cases have been filed. Now, the corporations have argued that this law opens up a floodgate. I want to make clear that the courts have been very responsible in kicking out these lawsuits if they don't meet a very high standard of legal and factual proof. So, the courts have kicked these cases out for forum non-convenience, meaning inconvenient forum, that the lawsuit should be filed in the country where the violations occurred, in Burma or Nigeria, but there has to be an effective legal system in order to dismiss on that basis. The courts have kicked out cases for statute of limitations, for political questions, for act of state, meaning that the lawsuit would interfere with the US foreign policy interests in the narrow way. And they have kicked out these cases just saying that the allegations are not sustained by even a sufficient degree of proof for them to go forward to a jury. So, out of the 40 cases that have been filed, Unocal was the first one to get this far along, and there are only six others that have so far survived an initial motion to dismiss. That's a very small percentage of cases against corporations for their activities in foreign countries.

AMY GOODMAN: Isn't it true that one of the cases that's still going forward is the case against Chevron for the involvement in the killing of villagers in the Niger delta.

SANDRA COLIVER: That's right.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Sandra Coliver, in this groundbreaking case, in this settlement that we're just hearing about right now, how much are the victims going to get, the plaintiffs going to get?

SANDRA COLIVER: The terms of the settlement are confidential. And they are still being worked out through next February. We're assuming, I’m assuming it's in the millions, and millions will go far. It could be tens of millions. I really don't have any information.

AMY GOODMAN: The Guardian of London is reporting that Unocal's legal costs alone are estimated to be $25 million.

SANDRA COLIVER: That's right.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us, Sandra Coliver, a groundbreaking settlement has been reached in the long running human rights case brought by Burmese villagers against the energy giant Unocal. 



-------- POLITICS

Yushchenko Sure Gov't Poisoned Him

By YURAS KARMANAU
Associated Press Writer
	
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/UKRAINE_ELECTION?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko said Thursday that he was sure he was poisoned by the Ukrainian government and believes it most likely happened at a dinner he had with the country's top security service officials.

Yushchenko's comments, made in an interview with The Associated Press, were the first time he pinpointed when and where he believed he was poisoned with dioxin. He said it likely happened at a Sept. 5 dinner with the head of the Ukrainian security service, Ihor Smeshko, and his deputy, Volodymyr Satsyuk.

"That was the only place where no one from my team was present and no precautions were taken concerning the food," he said. "It was a project of political murder, prepared by the authorities."

A parliamentary commission that investigated Yushchenko's mysterious illness in October said he had complained of pains - including a headache about three hours after the meal and an acute stomach ache the next day - after meeting with Smeshko. The commission, however, also listed other places he ate or drank that day.

Yushchenko, who was disfigured by poisoning, told The AP that Ukrainian prosecutors were looking into the case and said he was confident the official culprits would be punished.

"I have no doubt that within several days or weeks, this path will lead to the authorities, to specific people representing the government - who administered the poison, who was involved, from whom the poison was procured," he said. "Who blessed it on different levels of government?"

Members of Yushchenko's campaign team had spoken of the security dinner as a possible site of the poisoning, but Yushchenko himself had until now refrained from pointing the finger at specific officials.

Experts say it is impossible for Yushchenko to have naturally acquired such high levels of dioxin. New tests reveal the level in his blood is more than 6,000 times higher than normal and is the second highest ever recorded in human history, said Abraham Brouwer, professor of environmental toxicology at the Free University in Amsterdam, where blood samples taken in Vienna were sent for analysis.

Brouwer's team has narrowed the search from more than 400 dioxins to about 29 and is confident they will identify the poison by week's end.

Poisoning experts say those who spiked Yushchenko's food may have aimed to kill him or may simply have tried to debilitate him during the election campaign.

What constitutes a lethal dose of dioxin has never been established, because nobody has ever been known to die from it.

It's possible that Yushchenko did not eat all of the poisoned meal and so escaped death by accident, but it's also possible that dioxin was chosen because it is recognized as a crippling poison that normally doesn't kill, scientists say.

Speaking on other subjects, Yushchenko criticized Russia's involvement in the Ukrainian campaign as "interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine."

"This is debasing for Russia, it debases its authority, its policies, the entire state. It's not a policy that should be conducted between neighbors," he said.

He said, however, that if he wins the Dec. 26 presidential rerun, he would make efforts to turn a new page in relations with Russia, which heavily backed his rival, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.

"Russia is our eternal neighbor, a strategic neighbor," he said. "We must always have excellent relations with it. My government will do everything possible, everything I can, to achieve this."

At the same time, he said Ukraine would move to integrate more closely into European structures and possibly aim at an associate membership in the European Union in three to five years.

He voiced confidence that Ukraine would not split, but reaffirmed the need to punish regional officials in mostly Russian-speaking eastern provinces who had pushed for self-rule as part of their efforts to support Yanukovych.

Early Thursday, Yushchenko warned that "provocations" allegedly being planned by his opponent could jeopardize the Dec. 26 rerun, which the Supreme Court ordered after ruling the Nov. 21 second-round vote fraudulent.

"There is not a 100 percent guarantee that the election will take place," he told reporters at a news conference in the capital. "I know of provocations being prepared in the eastern regions."

Yushchenko did not elaborate on what sort of provocations could be planned.

Yushchenko has been working hard in recent days to expand his base of support from western parts of the country, where Ukrainian nationalism is strong, to the eastern areas, which have strongly backed Yanukovych.

Yushchenko told The AP that allegations he had received campaign financing from the United States were "nonsense."

"Neither I nor my political partners have received or will receive any money from America, from the government or from non-governmental organizations," he said.


-------- propaganda wars

Army blacklists Denver newspaper

Posted December 16, 2004 Vermont Guardian

http://www.vermontguardian.com/dailies/0904/1216.shtml#article1ontguardian.com/dailies/0904/1217.shtml#article2

COLORADO SPRINGS — In the wake of an article in The Denver Post on military medical holds, the Army has denied the newspaper access to Fort Carson army base and information on its military activities.

“We have temporarily suspended relations with The Denver Post as a direct result of Fort Carson not being given fair and balanced treatment in a story that appeared on Dec. 5, 2004,” said Lt. Col. David Johnson, public affairs officer at the base.

The front-page article examined claims from mentally and physically ill National Guard and Army Reserve members who say they are being denied access to quality care and are being shoved out of the military without disability pay.

----

New 'Bin Laden' tape posted on website

James Sturcke and agencies
Thursday December 16, 2004 UK Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,1375032,00.html

An audio tape purported to be of Osama bin Laden, in which the speaker refers to last week's attack on the US consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was today posted on an Islamist website.

The speaker delivers a lengthy message about the conflict between the rulers and people of Saudi Arabia.

Although the voice could not be immediately verified as Bin Laden's, agency reports said it sounded similar to that of the al-Qaida leader. The tape was posted on a website acknowledged as a clearing house for militant Islamist comment.

The speaker said that, while Saudi leaders blamed "holy warriors" for trouble in the kingdom, "the truth is that the whole responsibility falls on the shoulders of the regime".

In calm and even tones, he accused Saudi rulers of "violating God's rules" - a common theme of statements from Bin Laden, who has accused Saudi rulers of being insufficiently Islamic and too close to the "infidel" US.

"The sins the regime committed are great ... it practised injustices against the people, violating their rights, humiliating their pride," the speaker said. He also accused the Saudi royal family of wasting public money while "millions of people are suffering from poverty and deprivation".

Reports also said he blessed a group of militant gunmen who attacked the US consulate in Jeddah on December 6, killing five staff and security guards.

While calling for change, the speaker scorned recent initiatives such as promised municipal elections and a national dialogue recently initiated by Saudi rulers to open public debate on democratisation and other issues.
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"This hasn't changed anything ... the best they can do is that they will go into the elections game as happened before in Yemen and Jordan or Egypt and move in a vicious circle for dozens of years ... this is regardless of the fact that it is prohibited to enter the infidel legislative councils," the speaker said.

The main statement was preceded by verses from the Qur'an - a rhetorical device typical of Bin Laden.

Saudi Arabia cracked down on Muslim extremists after bombings of three residential compounds in Riyadh in May last year brought terrorism to the kingdom, but has not been able to contain the violence.

Bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, last reached out to his followers in October, with a videotaped message aired on the Arabic television station al-Jazeera.

In that statement, he took responsibility for the September 11 attacks on the US for the first time, saying the US could avoid another such strike if it stopped threatening the security of Muslims.


-------- us politics

Inaugural Events to Salute Armed Forces
Balls to Be Held at Fewer Sites Under Tightest Security Ever, Officials Say

By Timothy Dwyer and Maureen Fan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 16, 2004; Page B09

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2114-2004Dec15?language=printer

The Sept. 11 attacks and the combat in Iraq and Afghanistan weighed heavily on planning for President Bush's second inauguration, from the theme announced by organizers yesterday to the choice of venues for inaugural balls.

The Jan. 20 inauguration will be the first since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and comes while U.S. troops are fighting on two fronts. Law enforcement officials said security will be the tightest of any presidential inauguration.

Six of the nine inaugural balls will be at the Washington Convention Center, and D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said that will ease security demands. "The fewer the sites, the better," he said. "Six in one place make it a lot easier."

Ramsey said having fewer sites was a consideration in planning the balls and would simplify how his department approaches traffic control. But he said he would still need a large contingent of officers to provide protection for the center because it is so large.

The theme of the inauguration, "Celebrating Freedom, Honoring Service," said Jeanne Phillips, chairman of the Presidential Inaugural Committee, "is an extension of the character and courage Americans have shown since September 11, 2001." She said it is intended as "an important display of gratitude to the armed forces serving abroad. We recognize . . . we are a nation at war."

Bush has described himself as a wartime president and stressed that theme during the presidential campaign. The second inauguration reflects that soldiers are being wounded or killed every day on foreign soil, organizers said.

In two previous instances, presidents curtailed some inaugural events in times of war. Franklin D. Roosevelt canceled three of his inaugural balls because of the Depression and World War II. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson canceled the inaugural ball.

The amount of money being spent on Bush's second inauguration doesn't seem to suggest similar reserve, said Lorenzo Morris, a political science professor at Howard University who has researched electoral behavior and inaugurations.

"We're not in a world war, so a certain degree of celebration is understandable," Morris said. Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural parade in 1861 included floats and 34 women representing each of the 34 states. "Lincoln was concerned about maintaining some degree of celebration as a symbol of national unity."

The inauguration with the most military muscle was Dwight D. Eisenhower's in 1953, when he included about 20,000 members of the military, more than anyone else before or since, Morris said.

Two of next month's inaugural events will honor the military. The first, "Saluting Those Who Serve," is scheduled for Jan. 18 at MCI Center and will be "part concert, part multimedia presentation," said Tracey Schmitt, spokeswoman for the committee. She said those attending will not be exclusively from the military.

But on Jan. 20, the Commander-in-Chief Ball will be held at the National Building Museum. About 2,000 soldiers who have just returned from Iraq and Afghanistan or are about to be deployed there will be invited and may attend free, organizers said.

Committee officials said they are working with the Department of Defense to identify soldiers who will receive invitations to the ball. "We are just beginning the dialogue with them [the Presidential Inaugural Committee] to determine how we can provide the support they require," said Navy Capt. Curtis Reilly, a spokesman for the Joint Task Force-Armed Forces Inaugural Committee.

Phillips, a Texas businesswoman, served as chairman of the inaugural committee in 2001. She said in a phone interview yesterday that she learned one big lesson the first time around. "I learned it is better to do it in 60 days than 17 days," she said, referring to the short planning period four years ago caused by the delay in the presidential election results.

Greg Jenkins, the inaugural committee executive director who runs the group's day-to-day operations, comes to the job uniquely qualified as an event planner. For the past two years, he was in charge of advance planning for the president.

"Our theme and itinerary reflect on the historic times we live in," Jenkins said in a conference call with reporters, "and will make this inaugural celebration historic and symbolic."

Jenkins said 400 to 500 people will be working for the inaugural committee. Last week, published reports put the cost of the inauguration at about $50 million. Yesterday, Jenkins said the official estimate of the cost is $30 to $40 million, which does not include security.

Three events will be held Jan. 18. In addition to the salute to the military at the MCI Center, there will be a chairman's reception at Mellon Auditorium and a youth concert at the D.C. Armory. Details, including times and names of entertainers, have not been released by the committee.

On Jan. 19, "A Celebration of Freedom" is scheduled for the Ellipse and will include fireworks and three candlelight dinners with the president and Vice President Cheney. Last week, the committee sent invitations to prospective donors asking for contributions of $100,000 and $250,000 in return for access to events such as the candlelight dinners and most of the balls

At 11:53 a.m. Jan. 20, Bush will recite the oath of office and then begin his inaugural address at noon, according to inaugural planners. The three-hour parade is scheduled to begin at 2 p.m.

Staff writer Del Quentin Wilber contributed to this report. 

-------

Different targets, same tactics

Bush's slash and smear campaign is trying to bring all disparate elements under US control

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday December 16, 2004
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1374671,00.html

Though it is early days since Bush's re-election, the way in which he will handle the difficulties of imperial management which so vex him is already apparent.

No sooner was the election over than the administration began the finger-pointing at the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, who had called the invasion of Iraq "illegal". News was leaked that his son had been a consultant to a company involved with the UN oil-for-food programme, though Annan said he knew nothing about it. The outgoing US ambassador to the UN, John Danforth, was sent out to declare that Annan's resignation was a live issue.

The relevant facts about the oil for food programme were pushed to one side. James Dobbins, the former US ambassador to Afghanistan, wrote in the Washington Post: "First, no American funds were stolen. Second, no UN funds were stolen. Third, the oil-for-food programme achieved its two objectives: providing food to the Iraqi people and preventing Saddam Hussein from rebuilding his military threat to the region."

Then the Post published a story that the US was wire-tapping Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, in an operation to discover that he was secretly aiding Iran in hiding its nuclear weapons programme. In fact, ElBaradei was working with the Europeans in negotiating a resolution with the Iranians. It was this diplomacy that neoconservatives were seeking to discredit. Compliance with internationally monitored nuclear development of Iran isn't the objective of the neocons; they want regime change, Iraqredux.

The techniques of the permanent campaign, especially negative attacks, recently applied in the re-election contest, are being transferred seamlessly and shamelessly to international relations.

In part, the slash-and-smear campaign against Annan and ElBaradei is the Bush administration's effort to subjugate international civil servants and organisations to its central command. But this episode also reflects the rolling coup of the neocons as they struggle for power, position and policy in a second Bush term.

In the wake of catastrophe in Iraq, they are trying to foster a new conflict with Iran. Even Karl Rove, Bush's political strategist, plays in this arena, with his very own Iran adviser - Michael Ledeen, a sleazy operator on the fringes who was involved in the Iran-contra scandal in which even Oliver North suspected him of skimming money.

At the least, the attacks on the UN serve as a political distraction from Iraq, where 178 US soldiers have been killed since the election. But frontline troops have not been distracted from the reality of carnage. On December 8, they asked secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld about the failure to provide sufficient armour.

Rumsfeld said: "You go to war with the army you have. They're not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." He said the soldiers, who were rigging their armour, might be killed anyway. "It's interesting... you can have all the armour in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up."

Never before has a defence secretary been rebuked by the troops; never has a defence secretary insulted them. Two Republican mavericks, senators John McCain and Chuck Hagel, called for his resignation, but they were whistling in the dark. Rumsfeld's disasters are Bush's. They are of such monumental dimensions that to lose him is to admit failure: he cannot be thrown overboard.

On Wednesday Bush gave honours for failure, with his bestowal of the presidential medal of freedom on Tommy Franks, the former CentCom commander, who allowed Osama bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora; on George Tenet, former CIA director, who jumped on the bandwagon for the Iraq war, informing Bush that the WMD claims were "a slam dunk"; and on L Paul Bremer, former chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, who disbanded the Iraqi army, among other blunders. Failure will be celebrated as success in the second term.

The farcical unravelling of the nomination of former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik as secretary of homeland security further illuminated the administration's methods. The fact that Kerik neglected to pay taxes on a nanny who was an illegal immigrant was a convenient alibi. Beyond his extramarital affairs, secret marriage and love nests, he appears also to be married to the mob - on the take from the Gambino crime family. Yet Bush had been attracted to Kerik's Rambo-like aggression; the White House vetting process seems to be as credulous as the Mickey Mouse Club; and the impulse to cover up instant.

The fall guy is former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Kerik's patron. Inadvertently, Giuliani's tainting eliminates him as a moderate Republican pretender to the throne. If only Kerik's foibles had passed beneath the radar, he might have been honoured for any calamity. Thus the risks and rewards in Bush's imperial capital.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is Washington bureau chief of salon.com

sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com 


-------- ENERGY 


-------- alternative energy

US Plant to Make Clean Power from Turkey Droppings

Story by Timothy Gardner

REUTERS USA: December 16, 2004

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/28600/story.htm

NEW YORK - Turkey leftovers will take on a whole new use after a Minnesota company finishes construction of a power plant fired by the birds' droppings.


It may not be the total answer to relieving the United States' addiction to foreign oil, but the plant will burn 90 percent turkey dung and create clean power for 55,000 homes.

Three poultry litter plants have already been built in England, but the Benson, Minnesota-based facility will be the first large-scale plant of its type in the US and the largest in the world, according to operator Fibrominn, a subsidiary of power plant builder Homeland Renewable Energy, LLC of Boston.

Turkey dung is prized over pig excrement and cow chips.

"Poultry litter is drier material, so it burns better, and there's a lot of it," said Charles Grecco, of HH Media, LLC, an investment bank that helped arrange $202 million in financing for the plant.

The 55-megawatt plant will burn 700,000 tons of dung a year and produce fertilizer as a by-product, a process that will keep phosphorus and nitrates found in the raw litter from seeping into water supplies, said Grecco.

No extra amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide would be emitted than would be naturally emitted as the dung decomposes, said Grecco.

Utility Xcel has agreed to purchase the turkey power, said company spokesman Ed Legge. Under 1994 Minnesota state legislation, Xcel is required to buy a small amount of power made from biomass in exchange for clearance to store spent nuclear fuel outside its Red Wing nuclear plant in Minnesota.

Fibrowatt, LLC, a Philadelphia-based developer, which is mostly owned by Homeland Renewable Energy, is pursing other plants in poultry-growing US states.


-------- energy

With Few Options Left, Big Oil Pushes Deeper into Gulf of Mexico

Story by Deepa Babington
REUTERS USA: December 16, 2004

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/28607/story.htm

ABOARD GENESIS OIL PLATFORM, Gulf of Mexico - Ninety miles off the swampy coast of Louisiana, a towering maze of pipes and metal juts out of the sea, reaching down a half-mile -- twice the height of a skyscraper -- to crank out oil.


Anchored to the seabed with mooring lines, ChevronTexaco Corp.'s Genesis oil platform is one of many cropping up in deeper and deeper waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

While the region is the lifeblood of the US oil industry, easy discoveries in the shallow waters have been tapped out.

Indeed, analysts say the future of oil and gas output in this crucial area hinges almost entirely on discoveries in waters that barely 10 years ago would have been too deep to even consider.

In particular, geologists have identified a 350-mile zone off the coasts of Texas and Louisiana notable for its lack of drilling wells and preponderance of potentially oil-rich waters, US Minerals Management Service regional director Chris Oynes said.

"There's still a lot of unexplored territory, and you could be looking at some pretty big discoveries," said Oynes, whose federal agency oversees the nation's offshore oil and gas production in the region. "The Gulf is alive and well."

Of course, searching for oil thousands of feet below sea level is much more expensive and fraught with logistical problems.

On the other hand, operating in US waters -- even very deep ones -- spares oil companies the adventure of, say, wrangling with striking Nigerian oil workers or coping with Kremlin politics in Russia.

"At least here they know what the rules of the game are," Oynes said.

If that, coupled with a dramatic surge in oil prices this year, wasn't enough of an incentive, the US government last month threw in some new royalty relief -- effectively waiving taxes on certain drilling projects in deep waters.

So now energy giants are drilling to depths of as much as 25,000 feet, enough to stack New York's Statue of Liberty 165 times to the top, the Minerals Management Service says.

RAPID-FIRE GROWTH

Although output from recent discoveries at great depths may not come on line for years, deepwater Gulf production has already shot up dramatically in recent years.

The amount of oil plumbed from deep waters -- more than 1,000 feet -- has nearly quadrupled since 1996 and accounts for 62 percent of total production in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the Minerals Management Service.

Over the next decade, the federal agency expects deep water production to double, representing nearly 80 percent of the region's output.

Exploring at ultra-deep water levels -- below 7,500 feet -- is likely to become the next big frontier, Oynes said.

So far, big companies like ChevronTexaco and Exxon Mobil Corp.-- with the size and scale to foot steep start-up costs -- have led this hunt for oil, but now smaller players have begun moving in, said analyst Brian Ferguson of energy research firm John S. Herold.

Houston-based Anadarko Petroleum Corp., for example, earlier this year decided to sell off its properties in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico and bank on its deepwater fields to hit production targets over the next five years.

"The changing face of the industry is that the dominance of the majors and supermajors is starting to wane, and new companies are moving in, really steering the new direction," Ferguson said.

Not a US phenomenon alone, deepwater exploration is demanding greater attention in many areas of the world, especially as oil prices hover at high levels -- racing up to a record $55 a barrel in October before sliding back.

The run-up has been spurred by unprecedented demand from countries like India and China, coupled with worries about tight supplies and instability in regions like the Middle East and Russia.

PURIFYING SEAWATER

Despite the current enthusiasm, many sobering facts about exploring in uncharted waters remain.

Erecting a comprehensive production platform out in the middle of the ocean can easily cost between $1 billion to $3 billion, compared with $100 million or less along the coast, analysts say.

Add to that higher rates to hire rigs, often running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars each day. This may delight drilling contractors like Transocean Inc. and GlobalSantaFe Corp., but not the oil companies that employ them.

Then there are the technological complications. Engineers must deal with multiple ocean currents as they lay pipes at the bottom of the seabed, where remote-controlled robots construct and repair the drilling equipment, the Minerals Management Service says.

On Genesis, the platform is so far from the coast that it makes more sense to purify seawater for use on board rather than fly in potable water from the mainland. Even a miniature underwater ecosystem of sorts, from algae to fish, sets itself up around the platform.

"We are nearly self-sufficient," boasted a ChevronTexaco worker on the platform on a drizzly December afternoon, noting that the platform even generates its own electricity.



-------- ACTIVISTS

Saudi protests apparently thwarted

Thousands of Saudi forces were deployed in Riyadh and Jedda 

Thursday 16 December 2004, 16:36 Makka Time, 13:36 GMT  Reuters

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/DC611AD1-D5B5-4311-A64A-3B6B95D463F9.htm

Hundreds of Saudi security forces kept an iron grip over central Riyadh on Thursday to thwart protest marches planned by an exiled dissident against the kingdom's absolute monarchy.

Riot police with helmets, batons and shields lined a main street in the Saudi capital while a helicopter hovered above the area where London-based opposition figure Saad al-Fagih had called for tens of thousands of people to assemble.

At 4pm (1300 GMT), three hours after Fagih had promised the demonstrators would begin their march, there was no sign of any organised protest in the Saudi capital. In the Red Sea city of Jedda, no march took place but police made three arrests.

Demonstrations are banned in Saudi Arabia.

"This is an Islamic country which does not permit protests. There is no need for it," said a middle-aged Saudi man outside a mosque in central Riyadh.

"Everything is provided for these people. They are just outlaws with strange ideology. We do not agree with them."

Ready for clashes

Special forces wearing balaclavas and bullet-proof vests surveyed the area. At least one had a gas mask. Vehicles with water cannon were also on standby.

The streets of Riyadh were quiet, with no signs of demonstrations

In Jedda, a Reuters correspondent saw one man being chased and arrested after he shouted slogans outside the Jafali mosque where Fagih had asked demonstrators to gather. The other 30 worshippers left the mosque peacefully after midday prayers.

Two other people were arrested nearby. There were about 20 to 30 police cars outside the mosque.

London-based Fagih, who heads the Movement of Islamic Reform in Arabia, said this week the planned demonstrations aimed to overthrow the Saudi royal family. Police last year broke up a small street protest in Riyadh organised by Fagih.

Fagih broadcasts his calls for change into Saudi Arabia from Britain by radio, satellite TV and the Internet.

On the eve of the planned marches, 35 religious scholars issued a statement condemning Fagih and warning Saudis against supporting him.

"It is our duty and responsibility to advise you, because of our concern for the stability and security of the country ... to reject this act, and we warn against participating in it," said the statement, signed by prominent religious figures including leading Sunni cleric Salman al-Awdah.

--------

Israeli on trial for manslaughter says peace activist was unarmed

Soldier who shot Briton admits lying

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Thursday December 16, 2004
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1374851,00.html

The Israeli soldier on trial for killing the British peace activist Tom Hurndall in the Gaza Strip has admitted he was lying when he said his victim was carrying a gun, but said he was under orders to open fire even on unarmed people.

Sergeant Idier Wahid Taysir is charged with manslaughter for shooting Mr Hurndall, 22, as he tried to shelter children on the edge of Rafah from Israeli army gunfire in April last year. He died of his injuries in January.

The sergeant told the military court that after shooting Mr Hurndall he had reported it to his commander.

"I told him that I did what I'm supposed to; anyone who enters a firing zone must be taken out. [The commander] always says this," he said.

The army has already been accused of carrying out an unwritten policy of shooting unarmed civilians who enter a closed security zone in Rafah, which led to the killing of a 13-year-old girl.

Sgt Taysir told the army investigators he had opened fire at Mr Hurndall because the Briton was on the edge of the security zone, carrying a weapon and wearing camouflage clothing.

In fact, he had not entered the closed zone, had no gun and was wearing a bright orange jacket.

The prosecutor asked the sergeant if Mr Hurndall had a weapon.

Sgt Taysir replied: "No. That's the truth."

"So you gave a false report to the company commander?" the prosecutor asked.

"I did not give a false report. He might have had a weapon under his clothing. People fire freely there. The [Israeli army] fires freely in Rafah."

The prosecutor continued: "But you told him that you saw a weapon?"

"Right."

"So you lied?"

"I said it."

The prosecutor then asked: "After that, you also reported that the man fired in the air and at you, right? Why did you report that he fired at you?"

The sergeant replied: "Because I had already fired without getting approval [from the company commander]. Everything was under pressure and a result of fear. They tell us all the time to fire; that there is approval. All the troops [in Rafah] fire without approval at anyone who crosses a red line."

Sgt Taysir has also been charged with obstruction of justice.

He told the court that he did not know details of the army's rules of engagement. "I don't know them. No one ever explained anything to me about these documents."

The military investigation initially cleared Sgt Taysir but was reopened under pressure from Mr Hurndall's family and the Foreign Office after the army's account of the shooting was shown to be false.

Mr Hurndall's mother, Jocelyn, welcomed the soldier's testimony, saying it confirmed the family's belief that Sgt Taysir was not a rogue element but operating under a military policy that permitted the shooting of unarmed civilians.

"We remain extremely concerned about the culture in which the soldier was functioning," she said. "It seems from what he's said that he was following orders, that he was doing what he was told to do and what other soldiers are told to do."

But Mrs Hurndall said that it was difficult to discover exactly what the orders were, because the court sessions on the rules of engagement were held in secret. "The problem is we don't have access to the closed-door sessions at which the rules of engagement are discussed," she said.

"The Israelis say it is because we are beyond their jurisdiction and not governed by their secrecy laws. They know we will speak out publicly and they can't prosecute us."