NucNews - December 22, 2004 -------- NUCLEAR Fight on WMDs boasts global backing December 23, 2004 By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041223-122156-7658r.htm The war in Iraq has set the United States at odds with some allies, but the international community is strongly supporting a U.S.-led initiative to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. More than 60 nations — including Russia and France, two key opponents of the Bush administration's policy toward Iraq — are supporting the 19-month-old Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). The global effort to halt arms proliferation has also gained favor from the United Nations. So far, details about the small number of boarding operations of ships and seizures of illicit cargo under PSI remain secret, according to Bush administration officials. The one action made public was the Oct. 4, 2003, seizure of the German-flagged ship BBC China that was on its way to Libya with equipment for Moammar Gadhafi's covert nuclear-arms program. A U.S. warship forced the ship to divert to Italy. On board, investigators found containers of uranium-enrichment equipment. That discovery led to the unraveling of the covert nuclear supplier network headed by Pakistani Abdul Qadeer Khan that stretched from Germany to South Africa to Malaysia. The network had supplied nuclear-weapons materials to Libya, Iran, North Korea and others. PSI, launched by President Bush in May 2003, was an outgrowth of the administration's effort to prevent weapons of mass destruction from reaching terrorists. Its core participants include the governments of the United States, Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Thailand and Britain. But more than 40 other states have signed on to its principles and have chosen to keep their participation secret or limited. The initiative is hoped to be the first step in creating a new global system to control the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and missile systems. One key element of PSI is the landmark agreement reached with Liberia and Panama that allows PSI operations — carried out by navies or coast guards — to conduct seizures and boardings of suspect merchant ships sailing under the flags of those nations. Vessels flagged from Liberia and Panama account for about 50 percent of all shipping around the world. "PSI is an activity, not an organization," said John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for international security and one of the key officials involved in the initiative. "Our goal is based on an equally simple tenet — that the impact of states working together in a deliberately cooperative manner would be greater than states acting alone in an ad hoc fashion," Mr. Bolton said during a speech in October following a PSI ship-boarding simulation near Tokyo harbor. Another major official involved in starting PSI is Robert Joseph, until recently the White House National Security Council staff official in charge of dealing with arms proliferation. Mr. Joseph helped author a classified presidential directive on the issue that is the basis for PSI. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld also has been a key administration backer of PSI. Mr. Rumsfeld views international cooperation as the key to curbing arms proliferation. Asked about PSI, Mr. Rumsfeld said: "We've just got to put enormous energy behind it. We have to do it soon and aggressively and persuasively, and help the world understand that the world's safety depends on our having a degree of success, more success than we're currently achieving with the [nonproliferation] regimes that exist." Mr. Rumsfeld said in a recent interview that unless measures are taken to halt proliferation, as many as five additional nuclear-weapons powers could emerge. "There could be several more countries with chemical and biological programs, and there could be additional countries with the ability to deliver those capabilities long distances," he said. The growth of those armed states is made more dangerous by the fact that many of the emerging arms states are listed by the State Department as sponsors of international terrorism. "The inevitable effect of that is to make the world a more dangerous place," Mr. Rumsfeld said. A State Department official said there is a broad consensus among PSI states to stop arms shipments. However, how to identify the countries "of proliferation concern" is more difficult. So far, PSI has focused on stopping shipments at sea and on land. However, authorities also are seeking ways to stop aircraft carrying deadly arms or equipment destined for rogue states or state sponsors of terrorism. In the past year and half, Mr. Bolton, a specialist in international law, has shuttled through world capitals in Asia and Europe, in an effort to convince governments that stopping illicit shipments is an urgent need. The work has paid off. The United Nations Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change endorsed PSI. The report said that, based on the BBC China interdiction, "We believe that all states should be encouraged to join this voluntary initiative." A U.S.-sponsored United Nations Security Council Resolution passed in April also has endorsed the idea of a halt in the spread of weapons of mass destruction. The one state that is holding out as far as PSI is China, which the CIA has identified as a major supplier of equipment and material related to illicit arms. China remains "reserved" toward the initiative, a State Department official said. Several Bush administration officials said Mr. Bolton deserved to be rewarded for his role in developing PSI. Mr. Bolton is considered a candidate for several high-level posts in the second Bush administration, including deputy secretary of state and deputy White House national security adviser. -------- accidents and safety Chernobyl revisited: Living in the dead zone Martin Cruz Smith The New York Times Thursday, December 23, 2004 International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/22/opinion/edsmith.html CHERNOBYL, Ukraine Outside, a hard winter's afternoon settles on the village, but inside their cottage Nikolai and Nastia lay out a spread: apples from their orchard, pickles from their garden, mushrooms from the woods around and full glasses of samogon, otherwise known as Ukrainian moonshine. Samogon, the locals say, offers protection from radioactivity, a consideration since we are in a "black village" written off for human occupation in 1986 after the explosion of Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station a mere dozen miles away. "You grow your own food?" a guest asks. "All of it," Nastia says. The guest takes a discreet glance at his dosimeter. The village is called "black," as in abandoned. But as if to make the name literally true, the neighboring houses have turned black and tilted into a slow slide into the earth. Trees reach in and out the windows. The yards are littered with bureaus, picture frames, chairs. At the beginning of the cleanup, the authorities buried the most radioactive houses, until it dawned on them that they were doing an excellent job of poisoning the groundwater. So the contaminated houses stand. For how long? According to an ecologist at the power station: "In 250 years everything is back to normal. Except for plutonium - that will take 25,000 years." Nikolai and Nastia's cottage is basically one room around an oven with a built-in shelf to sleep on during the coldest nights. "It's home," Nastia says. She wears a sweater and shawl permanently. Her smile is bright steel, and her blue eyes shine with delight and a certain sense of collusion. Visitors are rare in the 19-mile-radius Zone of Exclusion around the reactors and, of course, she is not supposed to be there at all. Nastia and Nikolai were evacuated like everyone else, but sneaked like partisans back to their cottage in the woods. So much for zone security. Since then, the authorities have largely let Nastia and Nikolai alone among the zone's phantom population of returnees, scavengers and poachers. Almost perversely, the wildlife there is flourishing; poachers hunt wild boar, served later in the finest restaurants of Kiev and Moscow. Scavengers cut up abandoned radioactive cars and trucks to sell as parts in the chop shops of Russia. Nikolai and Nastia aren't on the run, they've just become invisible. They didn't vote in the recent presidential runoff election; there were no polling booths in the black villages. (To vote, they would have had to be bused out of the zone to cast a ballot bearing the address they had been assigned to and escaped from.) Doctors warned Nastia that if she remains in her village, radioactivity will give her cancer in 25 years. Nastia is 75 now. She says she'll take her chances. Nastia sings a traditional harvest song in a young, birdlike voice. The samogon has brought out a fine sweat on every brow. What amazes me is not that two elderly peasants have become invisible, but that Chernobyl itself has, as if it were a subject too awful to contemplate. In the rain, the sarcophagus, the 10-story steel-and-concrete box heroically constructed over Reactor 4, leaks like a radioactive sieve into groundwater that drains in the Pripyat River, which feeds the Dnepr, which is the drinking water for Kiev. Ninety percent of the core is still in the reactor, breaking down and heating up, and the station's managers say that the sarcophagus itself could collapse at any time. How dangerous would that be? Estimates of deaths from the explosion range from 41 to more than 300,000. The Zone of Exclusion is not an area of containment, no more than a circle drawn on the dirt would stop an airborne stream of plutonium, strontium, cesium-137. Seven million people live on contaminated land in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. People around the world carry in their chromosomes the mark of Chernobyl. We search in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, while a more likely danger is another explosion at Chernobyl. It may not be a meltdown, but it will be the mother of all dirty bombs. (A better sarcophagus is promised in five years, but at the site there is little sign of activity, let alone urgency.) And in all the drama of the recent election, the inspiring rallies in Independence Square, the spirited presidential debate on Monday and the apparent triumph of good over evil, the subject of another nuclear disaster rarely came up, and then mostly in nationalist rhetoric: It is an article of faith that the West forced Ukraine in 2000 to close the perfectly good reactors that remained at Chernobyl. The truth is that you have to sympathize with Viktor Yushchenko, the likely winner in the rerun of the presidential runoff on Sunday, because he will have to deal with Chernobyl. Or not. So, no wonder we're drinking samogon. The air is yeasty with it. Nastia sings, and I picture her and Nikolai plucking apples off their poisoned tree, digging potatoes from their poisoned earth, fishing in their poisoned stream. (Martin Cruz Smith is the author, most recently, of ‘‘Wolves Eat Dogs.’’) -------- australia Growing uranium demand triggers a shift in mining By Alex Fak Published: December 23 2004 02:00 Financial Times http://news.ft.com/cms/s/93ee6044-5486-11d9-a749-00000e2511c8.html When Swiss-based Xstrata made a A$7.4m bid for WMC in October, the Melbourne mining group was far from happy. The Australians said the offer grossly undervalued Olympic Dam, a copper and uranium mine in the South Australia outback. With spot prices for yellowcake oxide - the main uranium grade - having risen 49 per cent in the year to November in nominal dollar terms, and global production satisfying just 58 per cent of demand from nuclear reactors, WMC wants a better offer. WMC says it will invest some A$4bn in Olympic Dam in a move that would triple its output of yellowcake. But Xstrata says it is only interested in the copper and gold potential of the mine. The tussle between the two companies reflects the unusual nature and geography of uranium. Yellowcake packs a lot of energy, which nuclear reactors release by splitting uranium atoms. It can also be stored cheaply. During the 1970s and 1980s, the world's nuclear powers stocked up, storing the stuff in reactor warehouses and ever-proliferating nuclear weapons. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and decommissioning of Soviet nuclear weapons flooded the market with enriched uranium. By 2000, prices were a quarter of their levels in the early 1980s. Many users stopped building up inventories and began buying the sludgy yellowcake on the spot market. Mines closed and investment in those that remained virtually seized up. But with the world consuming more energy, inventories are slowly being depleted and mining is once again needed. Uranium, the heaviest naturally occurring element, is as abundant in the earth's crust as tin, but concentrated lodes are rare. Tapping new veins takes time, and so does expanding the market for uranium. "Demand has been rising by maybe 1-2 per cent per year," says Steve Kidd, director of strategy and research at the London-based World Nuclear Association. Asian governments are planning some three dozen nuclear power plants. But authorities take years to decide on a nuclear reactor and, when they do, building the plant takes even more time. Producers seem in no hurry. "The mining companies are saying, 'We haven't invested for 10 or 20 years because the price was so weak; now the price is $20 a pound, but you have got to give us some sort of security'," says Mr Kidd. This means longer-term contracts at higher prices. However, old agreements at weak prices have not yet expired. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, WMC is committed to selling uranium to some clients for as little as $11 a pound for four more years. The current spot price is $20.50. Geography has also conspired against production. Outside the former Soviet states - who tend to hold on to their uranium - Canada and Australia accounted for two-thirds of uranium production in 2003, according to Ux, the nuclear consultants. Environmental standards there are strict. "Things have become a bit problematic in recent years almost entirely due to the environmental side," says John Meyer, an analyst at Numis Securities in London. "It can take five to 10 years to get a mine up and running as it is, and another five years to get environmental permission beforehand." Besides spending on safety precautions, companies need to win over activists and hostile locals. In a presentation in Sydney last week, WMC cited eight forecasts from uranium consulting firms, predicting that current prices will hold until 2010. But analysts note that the company did not exactly trumpet its vast reserves until Xstrata came along. -------- depleted uranium Debris removed from Concord, NH polluted site Metal samples, drum remnants to be analyzed By Davis Bushnell, Boston Globe Correspondent | December 23, 2004 http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/12/23/debris_removed_from_polluted_site/ CONCORD -- A cleanup crew spent the last few weeks removing metal debris and remnants of some 60 underground drums from a small area on the Starmet Corp. Superfund site in West Concord. Samples of the material, taken from a 150-by-200-foot area near a holding basin and cooling-water pond, have been sent to General Engineering Laboratory in Charleston, S.C., for analysis, said Bruce Thompson, Starmet project coordinator for De Maximis Inc. of Weatogue, Conn. The firm is conducting an investigation on how to clean up the 46-acre property off Route 62 for the five parties cited by the US Environmental Protection Agency in June 2003 for contaminating the site. In June 2001, the property went on the EPA's Superfund list, which designates hazardous-waste sites that pose a health risk. Starmet's predecessor company, Nuclear Metals Inc., made uranium-tipped bullets for the Army from 1970 to 1999. The material removed could be uranium dust and beryllium, a lightweight metallic element, Thompson said, emphasizing that monitors installed around the property's perimeter are indicating that no contaminants have been released into the air. Concord Deputy Fire Chief Chris Kelley and James West, a member of an activist group, praised the efforts of Thompson's firm. "I'm impressed by De Maximis's professionalism," Kelley said, adding that his department has reviewed and made minor revisions to a comprehensive safety plan. West, a technical assistance coordinator for the Citizens Research and Environmental Watch group of Concord, said, "Members of our group are really pleased that the buried material has been removed" without incident. Meanwhile, the state Department of Environmental Protection has set a Jan. 22 deadline for receiving proposals to remove more than 3,700 barrels of depleted uranium that are now being stored in Starmet buildings. The Army has agreed to pay for the removal of these barrels, which contain low levels of radioactive material. -------- Bush Misguided in Use of King's Quote By david orchard Publish Date: 23-Dec-2004 http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=7238 "Evoking World War II, Bush prods Canadians", read the headlines after the U.S. president's recent visit to Canada. Bush used the keynote speech of his Canadian visit to "stiffen Ottawa's resolve", read one commentary, and, seeking to rally support for his position in Iraq, Bush quoted a 1942 speech by Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King: "We must also go out and meet the enemy before he reaches our shores. We must defeat him before he attacks us, before our cities are laid to waste." Listening to Bush use this quotation in defence of his actions in Iraq, one can only be struck by incredulity, and it is a sad comment on our national media that in the weeks since the president's visit there has been virtually no recognition of the inappropriateness of his sound bite. Mackenzie King delivered his message in response to the actions of Nazi Germany--at the time, the greatest military power on Earth. It had invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland, committing atrocities later held to be war crimes. King was urging his countrymen to stand up to the bully of Europe, to come to the aid of Great Britain, which, battling under the leadership of Winston Churchill, stood almost alone against the might of the Third Reich. Where is the parallel today? The U.S. is by far the world's most powerful nation, with an arsenal and military budget roughly equal to that of the rest of the world combined. In comparative and absolute terms, U.S. power vastly exceeds that of Second World War Germany. It is the U.S. that has invaded a succession of countries in recent decades, in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia--leaving six million killed and wounded in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos alone. Under Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, Canada said no to the U.S. request to send troops to Vietnam. And history has proved our country correct in that decision. So what exactly is it that Canadians are being prodded by Bush to do today? U.S. forces have attacked and are now occupying Iraq. Helping the U.S. in its military occupation would be the opposite of what King was urging: he was calling for resistance to a powerful, armed occupier that, in blatant contravention of international law, had invaded several countries and clearly planned to invade more, using the raw materials of each occupied nation to fuel its war machine. Can anyone suggest that Iraq in 2003, essentially defenceless--as has now been universally accepted--under sanctions for 10 years, incapable of even feeding its own people, was about to invade the U.S. or Canada to gain control of our resources? Is it not the USA that is openly seizing Iraq's oil fields? And, contrary to the prewar hype, it is the U.S., not Iraq, that possesses and is using weapons of mass destruction, waging a low-intensity nuclear war in Iraq using depleted-uranium weaponry, which will leave a legacy of radioactive contamination for generations to come. In the mid-1990s, I had the chance to visit a hospital in central Vietnam for those deformed by U.S. aerial spraying of Agent Orange and other chemical weapons. It is difficult to find words to describe the suffering involved, but Bush's policy of using depleted uranium, helicopter gunships, and B-52 bombers to bring "liberty and democracy" to Iraq brings back the full memory of their faces. Mackenzie King's invocations to resist tyranny would apply to those resisting foreign occupation and invasion, not to those advocating the conquest of small countries by larger ones. Canada played a proud and unstinting role in defeating Nazi Germany. As the son of one who gave several years of her life to the fight against Hitler's juggernaut, I find offensive the idea that Canadians need to have their resolve "stiffened" in defence of liberty. It also does not square with the historical record. Canada was on the ground in that mighty conflict, which cost more than 40 million lives, two years before the U.S., which only joined after it was attacked itself at Pearl Harbor in 1941. The U.S. invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq are in flagrant violation of international law--spelled out by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, the Charter of the United Nations, and numerous international treaties and conventions predating both--which sanctions the use of force by a country on only two grounds: in self-defence against a direct or ongoing attack, or when authorized by the United Nations Security Council. Neither applies in Iraq. The vast majority of Canadians supported their government under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien in 2003, when it refused to participate in the assault on Iraq, as they did with Diefenbaker's refusal to go to Vietnam. Both Canadians and their government stood--and stand today--clearly on the side of international law. International law is not some trifle to be overridden at the whim of any country. It is the very essence of how nations can live together without bloodshed and has been arrived at only through countless wars and untold agony. Without it we are back to the rule of the jungle. If anything, it is our resolve to defend the rule of international law that needs to be stiffened, not our willingness to sanction its breach. David Orchard is the author of The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism, and ran for the leadership of the federal Progressive Conservative party in 1998 and 2003. He farms at Borden, Saskatchewan, and can be reached by e-mail at davidorchard@s...; his Web site is www.davidorchard.com/. -------- europe France places ballistic missile order with EADS PARIS (AFP) Dec 23, 2004 http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041223134548.iq2fnufp.html The French arms procurement agency DGA has placed an order worth 3.0 billion euros (4.02 billion dollars) with the EADS aeronautics company for M51 ballistic missiles for nuclear warheads, the defence ministry said on Thursday. The M51 missile, capable of carrying six nuclear warheads, is to replace from 2010 the M45 missile on four nuclear-armed submarines in the strategic ocean force capable of launching new-generation missiles. The M51 missiles has greater range and accuracy than the M45. The order was placed with a subsidiary of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, EADS Space Transportation, which will work with the Snecma Propulsion group and SNPE Materiaux. The contracts are expected to provide work to 1,200 people for 10 years. In July French prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin justified the M51 programme, saying: "The nuclear deterrent remains the fundamental element of French independence. The M51 missiles fired from a submarine will be at the forefront of modern technology." The cost of producing the missiles is 3.0 billion euros and the total cost of developing the programme is 5.0 billion euros, the defence ministry has said. The ministry has not said how many missiles will be produced, although each submarine can be armed with 16 missiles as well as replacements. --------- France places ballistic missile order with EADS PARIS (AFP) Dec 23, 2004 http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041223134548.vzm57c7z.html The French arms procurement agency DGA has placed an order worth 3.0 billion euros (4.02 billion dollars) with the EADS aeronautics company for M51 ballistic missiles for nuclear warheads, the defence ministry said on Thursday. The M51 missile, capable of carrying six nuclear warheads, is to replace from 2010 the M45 missile on four nuclear-armed submarines in the strategic ocean force capable of launching new-generation missiles. The M51 missiles has greater range and accuracy than the M45. The order was placed with a subsidiary of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, EADS Space Transportation, which will work with the Snecma Propulsion group and SNPE Materiaux. The contracts are expected to provide work to 1,200 people for 10 years. In July French prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin justified the M51 programme, saying: "The nuclear deterrent remains the fundamental element of French independence. The M51 missiles fired from a submarine will be at the forefront of modern technology." The cost of producing the missiles is 3.0 billion euros and the total cost of developing the programme is 5.0 billion euros, the defence ministry has said. The ministry has not said how many missiles will be produced, although each submarine can be armed with 16 missiles as well as replacements. -------- iran Iran: Tehran Seen As Progressing Along Two Tracks To Develop Nuclear Weapons (Part 2) Payvand's Iran News ...12/23/04 By Charles Recknagel http://www.payvand.com/news/04/dec/1190.html The challenge for any country clandestinely seeking to become a nuclear power is how to acquire enough fissile material for such weapons. Most countries begin by starting a commercial nuclear program, a right to which any state that has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is entitled. The commercial program can then provide a cover for engaging in so-called dual-use activities, which can have either peaceful or military uses. In Part 2 of our series on the crisis over Iran's nuclear program, looks at the progress Tehran is believed to have made along two separate routes to making a nuclear bomb. (In Part 1, we look at what is known -- and unknown -- about Iran's nuclear ambitions.) Prague, 22 December 2004 (RFE/RL) -- One of the "dual-use" activities often exploited by nations who are seeking to acquire nuclear weapons is the enrichment of uranium. Enriched uranium can be used for nuclear fuel or -- at high levels of enrichment -- for nuclear bombs. The other method is the production of plutonium, a material that can be used in medical research or -- again -- for nuclear weapons. Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell reiterated Washington's concerns over how Tehran intends to use this technology. "We have to be nervous when a nation such as Iran continues to take action that, at least suggests to us, that it continues to be interested in a nuclear weapons program," Powell said. Iranian officials said Tehran will not give up its right under international treaties to produce its own reactor fuel, but said they have no interest in nuclear weapons. Iranian President Mohammad Khatami put Tehran's position this way in late October: "We are ready for complete cooperation and [to reach an] understanding with the world and also with the [International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA] to make sure that Iran's [nuclear] activities do not move toward nuclear weapons." Shannon Kile, an expert in nonproliferation issues at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in Sweden, noted that although Iran maintains that its programs are entirely aimed at civilian nuclear energy and research, there are aspects of each that are highly troubling to experts because they appear to go well beyond normal civilian activities. "Well, Iran basically has two uranium-enrichment facilities that we know about," Kile said. "They are both located at Natanz, which is south of Tehran. One is a very small-scale facility, holding about 1,000 centrifuge cascades. The other one is a much larger facility, holding up to 50,000 centrifuges. And what is striking about it is that it is built deep underground with heavily reinforced walls and roofs, which would indicate that, a) the Iranians are interested in hiding it, and b) they are concerned about the possibility of military strikes against it." Tehran did not declare the existence of these facilities to UN arms inspectors -- as required under the NPT -- until the sites were exposed by an exile Iranian opposition group in 2002. Follow-up UN inspections of the facilities raised serious questions about whether they were being used to enrich uranium to levels above that needed for nuclear fuel. "There are some specific activities that are troubling," Kile said. "The International Atomic Energy Agency has detected the presence of high-enriched uranium on some of the centrifuge components that they have examined. Now, they do accept that it is possible that some of that contamination has come, in part, from a third-country supplier, which would most likely be Pakistan. But it is difficult to accept that all of it has come from a third-country supplier. And that means that Iran might have enriched uranium. And it is difficult to know why it would enrich [uranium] to that level if it were going to simply use it for a nuclear fuel program." The UN nuclear agency's inspectors found traces of uranium enriched to 20 percent -- far higher than the usual 2 to 3 percent enrichment level required for nuclear fuel. Kile said many nuclear experts believe that unless Iran commits to abandoning its uranium-enrichment activities, it could acquire enough weapons-grade material for a bomb by 2007 or 2008. However, he said it remains uncertain whether Iran is seeking to produce a bomb immediately or is merely trying to perfect a technical capacity for future production. That would permit Tehran to "break out" as a nuclear power anytime in the future, should it feel the need. As for the second route to making a nuclear weapon, Iran has a program to produce plutonium that centers around a heavy-water nuclear reactor to be built near the central city of Arak. The project -- which was again not declared to arms inspectors until it was exposed in 2002 -- is described by Tehran as an effort to produce isotopes for medical use. But Iran's plans worry many nuclear experts because it is building what is commonly known as a "breeder reactor." Such reactors are efficient at quickly producing significant amounts of plutonium, particularly for military use. Kile said the "breeder" design exceeds normal specifications for reactors generating plutonium for civilian uses. "The 40-watt heavy-water reactor at Arak is ideally suited for producing weapons-grade plutonium," Kile said. "And, in fact, this is the type of reactor that was used by all of the [original] nuclear weapons states [United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China] in the early years of their nuclear programs." Construction of the reactor is just now getting under way, and it will be eight to 10 years before it becomes operational. Kile said there is ample precedent for countries successfully using both uranium enrichment and plutonium production as clandestine routes to nuclear weapons. He noted that Pakistan is believed to have derived a bomb using uranium enrichment, while India and Israel are thought to have taken the plutonium route. The five "nuclear-weapons nations" recognized under the NPT -- the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China -- have used both technologies to produce their nuclear arsenals. -------- israel Israel to acquire two more German submarines December 23, 2004 Kerala Middle East News http://www.keralanext.com/news/?id=80314 Middle East News, Iermany has agreed to sell Israel another two Dolphin-class submarines, They will join the three Dolphin –class submarines already operated by the Israeli navy, making Israel one of the premier maritime powers in the Arabian Sea. The new pair of submarines, like the first three, will be built at the Kiel-based Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft AG, the world’s biggest builder of diesel submarines. The new boats are more advanced in that they will able to stay submerged for longer than the first Dolphins. The reported cost for the two craft is $700 million. Berlin has overcome its reluctance to the craft being fitted with nuclear cruise missiles, in the interests of a newly adopted more aggressive defense exports policy, and out of understanding that the EU’s attempts to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program is unlikely to succeed. Israel already has a major presence in the area. It has a naval and air base at Dahlak, a small island owned by Eritrea just outside the strategic Bab el Mandeb straits, where the Red Sea enters the Arabian Sea. At least one of its three Dolphin submarines is always on patrol in the Arabian Sea. In May 2000 Israel is reported to have secretly carried out its first test launches from two German-built Dolphin-class submarines of cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. According to foreign military and intelligence sources, the missiles launched from vessels off Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean are said to have hit a target at a range of about 1,500 kilometers. The missiles reportedly carry a 200kg nuclear warhead containing 6kg of plutonium. -------- missile defense Rumsfeld Says Missile Shield Will Soon Have 'Modest Capability' Washington (AFP) Dec 23, 2004 http://www.spacedaily.com/news/bmdo-04zv.html The US missile defense system, which last week failed its first test in two years, will soon have a "modest capability," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday. "What we have here is a developmental system that is well-along," he told a press conference at the Pentagon. "There are interceptors in the ground. And at some point soon, it will have a modest capability," he said. President George W. Bush had promised during his re-election campaign that the system would be declared operational by the end of the month. The US Missile Defense Agency announced December 15 that the system had failed its first US missile defense flight test in two years. The interceptor missile shut down instead of blasting off from a launch pad in the Marshall Islands into the path of target missile fired from Alaska, officials said. Rumsfeld said the system was still "being perfected and improved." The 11-billion-dollar-a-year missile defense program still has deep support in the Republican controlled Congress, but competition for funds may increase with the rising costs of the war in Iraq. By some estimates, the Pentagon has already devoted 130 billion dollars to the program, and could still spend another 50 billion dollars on it. Target missiles have been successfully intercepted in five of eight earlier attempts. However, all tests so far have been highly scripted events and not representative of the challenges of a real missile attack. The system aims to defend the United States against a missile attack by a hostile nations such as North Korea. -------- terrorism Threat of dirty bombs is real, requires U.S. action BY LEE H. HAMILTON Posted on Thu, Dec. 23, 2004 http://www.kansas.com/mld/eagle/news/editorial/10478562.htm From time to time since Sept. 11, you may have heard experts and government officials utter words of warning about "dirty bombs," which are conventional explosives packed with radioactive materials. Once the conventional bomb explodes, the radioactive material spreads in the surrounding area. In the immediate aftermath, people in the area could be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, and chaos could ensue as they panic and try to flee. In the long term, the exposed area would be contaminated, rendering it off-limits for months, even years, with people in proximity vulnerable to cancer. If this took place in a major metropolitan area like New York City's lower Manhattan, the cost in disrupted business and cleanup could tally into the hundreds of billions of dollars. The psychological impact would be harrowing. What keeps security officials up at night is the concern that a dirty bomb is relatively easy to put together. There are hundreds of thousands of radioactive sources around the globe, ranging from weapons-grade plutonium or uranium used in nuclear bombs to more widely disseminated materials used in certain industries. Radioactive sources can be extracted from basic medical equipment or food irradiation machines. Most countries lack strict regulations or enforcement on the use of these materials. Meanwhile, we know al-Qaida has been trying to acquire these materials. So what can we do to protect ourselves? First, we must continue to work with Russia and other countries to locate and destroy dangerous materials from the former Soviet Union. Former Soviet republics are littered with a variety of radioactive sources, often poorly guarded or improperly disposed. We should increase the resources and priority that we affix to this challenge, so we can get to these materials before the terrorists do. We also need to build a global coalition committed to stricter controls on the use and transfer of radioactive sources. We should insist that all countries meet a standard set by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or be denied access to trade involving radioactive sources. We need tough measures to interdict illicit radioactive sources in transit. The Bush administration's Proliferation Security Initiative is a good start. We should work harder to tighten security at ports and develop screening technologies so that radioactive sources in shipping containers can be detected and legally intercepted. Russia's participation will be crucial. At home, local responders should know how to evacuate and seal off an area. Hospitals should know how to treat exposed patients. A dirty bomb may be one of the terrorists' preferred means of attack. A comprehensive strategy can make it one of the methods we are most prepared to prevent. Lee H. Hamilton is the vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission. -------- u.s. nuc weapons Scientists to gather for supercomputing feat Reuters December 23, 2004, 5:38 AM PT kZD Net http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5502055.html Leading nuclear scientists with top security clearances will gather next summer at a screening room east of San Francisco and witness the results of the greatest effort ever in supercomputing. Using a computer doing 360 trillion calculations a second, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab will simulate the explosion of an aging nuclear bomb in three dimensions. The short, highly detailed video produced by the world's fastest computer will attempt to illustrate how missiles dating back to the Nixon administration would perform today. "My job...is to ensure that the nuclear weapons in the stockpile are safe and reliable," said Bruce Goodwin, associate director for defense and nuclear technologies. "Safe means no matter what you do to them they don't go off when they are not supposed to. Reliable means that should the president ever have to use one, it will work exactly as it is supposed to." The United States has about 10,000 nuclear warheads as a deterrent against attack. Washington stopped real nuclear tests in 1992, a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996. That ban means that a huge windowless room at Livermore is becoming a prime testing ground to make sure nuclear weapons dating back decades have not developed fatal flaws. In a room about half the size of a football field, BlueGene/L is a series of interconnected 6-foot-high racks holding 16 modules, each packed with massive computing power. The first part of BlueGene, built by IBM, became operational in mid-December at 90 trillion calculations a second; the rest should be ready by April. Even at its ultimate 360 trillion calculations a second speed, the simulation will take two to four months, lab officials say. This same calculation would have taken 60,000 years if done on technology available a decade ago. Some analysts say that as impressive as BlueGene is, test simulations are not as vital in a post-Cold War world. "Why are we so focused on calculating or knowing the differences in performances of weapons?" asked Christopher Paine, co-director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. "Just as long as we knew we were above a certain threshold, wouldn't that be enough to provide deterrence?" Paine contrasted present U.S. defense needs with those in the Cold War, when planners needed to make sure that nuclear weapons would destroy hardened Soviet targets. "There is less reason to focus on the accuracy of our simulations," he said. "What we need to focus on from a deterrent point of view is just that we have weapons that go off." Nuclear physicist Goodwin responds that negotiated cuts in stockpiles in the years to come without newer replacements make the reliability of any one nuclear bomb more vital. "The question we are asking today is, as the stockpile changes on its own, will it continue to work and be safe?" he asked. Scientists say there is a lot they do not know about the effects of aging on the components of a nuclear bomb: plutonium, uranium, high explosives, plastic and gases. For example, will a bomb's plutonium last 50, 100 or 1,000 years? "They are made out of very corrosive materials," Goodwin said. "Yet the charge from the government is that this warhead--which is made of these materials which are not happy with each other--should remain perfectly safe and reliable indefinitely." Another question is how well the software written to simulate the atomic explosion will perform. Even the world's top software engineers routinely release flaws, and critics say nuclear scientists need more oversight. "If this were Microsoft Word, you'd have every hacker in the world trying to find the bugs," Goodwin said. "They're doing quality control for Microsoft in a pejorative sense after the fact. Well, you don't want there to be 1,000 places capable of doing nuclear weapons simulations." He said Livermore's main check came from the U.S. nuclear weapons research lab at Los Alamos in New Mexico. Engineers also do more conventional tests, including taking apart 11 atomic bombs every year, Goodwin said. When the nuclear scientists see the several-minutes-long 3-D simulation from the roughly $100 million computer next year, will it prove the most expensive animation ever? No, lab officials say, pointing to the current Hollywood film--"Polar Express"--which used computer animation in a production that cost $270 million to make and promote. -------- u.s. nuc facilities -------- delaware Exelon backs PSEG on Hope Creek Merger partner believes problems with pump should not stop restart By JEFF MONTGOMERY / The News Journal 12/23/2004 Delaware Online http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2004/12/23exelonbackspseg.html Exelon Corp. has sided with merger partner PSEG in a plan to restart the Hope Creek nuclear plant without first overhauling a damaged cooling-water recirculation pump, a company spokesman confirmed Wednesday. Exelon and PSEG's directors Monday announced a $12 billion merger deal that would create the nation's largest utility and nuclear power company. In January, Exelon's nuclear unit plans to begin managing under contract the Salem/Hope Creek nuclear generating station on Artificial Island in New Jersey opposite Augustine Beach. "We believe that pump is in proper shape to restart and we concur in the PSEG decision," Exelon chief executive John W. Rowe said in a transcript provided by Exelon on Wednesday. A nuclear power watchdog group has said the pump's problems could cause a breakdown or major cooling water leak that would set in motion emergency systems in the plant, which has a history of maintenance and management troubles. New Jersey's top nuclear oversight director also has called for replacement of the pump. At a news conference Tuesday in Chicago, Rowe said the company backs the Hope Creek restart plan, now under Nuclear Regulatory Commission review. Federal officials grilled PSEG managers on problems with the pump - including cracking and a bend in the 20-foot-high pump system's drive shaft - during a meeting Friday in Rockville, Md. PSEG has said that an inspection found the system suitable for another 18-month cycle, and committed to replace the equipment in 2006, during its next shutdown for refueling. Company managers described the decision as a business risk, rather than taking a chance on public safety. One former PSEG employee who filed a whistleblower complaint against the company questioned Exelon's position, and said that another worker had reported grave concerns about the recirculation pump 11 months ago. "I do not believe this is "proper," since Exelon clearly is relying on PSEG-supplied information - which has been skewed heavily towards supporting the company's position," said Nancy Kymn Harvin, a PSEG manager who was fired in 2003. Harvin filed a complaint with the commission last year accusing PSEG of retaliating against her for raising safety concerns. Commission spokeswoman Diane Screnci said Wednesday the agency could neither confirm nor deny the report of an earlier safety warning. Hope Creek shut down Oct. 10 after a steam pipe break. During the shutdown, workers encountered problems with one of the plant's main emergency backup systems. The commission, which has authority to block the restart, said Friday it has not placed any restrictions on the Hope Creek plan, but still has questions about the pump problem. An agency official said last week that regulators expect that "the right actions will be taken to ensure the plant can operate safely over the next cycle." Federal regulators have said they plan to hold a public meeting before the Hope Creek plant restarts. Contact Jeff Montgomery at 678-4277 or jmontgomery@delawareonline.com -------- new mexico New Mexico Uranium Enrichment Plant Comment Period Extended WASHINGTON, DC, December 23, 2004 (ENS) http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2004/2004-12-23-09.asp#anchor2 The public will have more time to comment on a proposed uranium enrichment plant to be built in Eunice, New Mexico. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has extended until January 7, 2005 the public comment period for the draft environmental impact statement for the plant because public access to documents concerning the license application of Louisiana Energy Services for the proposed facility was limited after the Commission shut down its online documents library for a security review. The agency is placing on its website redacted versions of the draft environmental impact statement, the environmental report submitted by Louisiana Energy Services (LES) as part of its application, and LES’s responses to NRC staff requests for additional information related to the environmental report. These documents will be available no later than today at: http://www.nrc.gov/materials/fuel-cycle-fac/lesfacility.html. The redactions withhold potentially sensitive information relating to the security of the proposed facility. The LES partnership is made up of Urenco, Exelon, Duke Power, Entergy, and Westinghouse. The partnership intends to use Urenco's sixth generation gas centrifuge technology that is now being used in Europe, but has not been used in the United States to date. Currently, Urenco has a capacity of about 15 percent of the world's enrichment market. Enrichment of uranium is necessary because the fuel for nuclear reactors has to have a higher concentration of U-235 than exists in natural uranium ore. U-235 is the key ingredient that starts a nuclear reaction and keeps it going. Normally, the amount of the U-235 isotope is enriched from 0.7 percent of the uranium mass up to about five percent. The environmental impact of the proposed uranium enrichment facility would be small to moderate, according to the draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in October. A final EIS is supposed to be ready by June 2005. The proposed location in the town of Eunice, is near one other major industrial facility, the Lea Refining Corporation. A working class community of about 2,500 people in which 18 percent of the population lives below the poverty level, Eunice has lost about a third of its population over the past 20 years due to its dependence on the one refinery. Many of the state and local officials and citizens want to diversify the economic base of the area. At a public meeting October 14, Eunice Mayor James Brown expressed his support for the enrichment facility, which he said would have "a positive impact and that is an increase in population and jobs." In a statement, U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat, said he supports the LES facility because it will help increase competition in the nuclear energy industry. Rose Gardner, a Eunice resident and member of the Nuclear Resource and Information Service and Public Citizen, told the public hearing that she is worried that a terrorist attack might rupture the tanks of nuclear waste produced by the plant. "A ruptured container can cause death and excessive radioactive materials are released to the air and surrounding environment. What would happen if at some point all 15,727 containers ruptured due to a possible terrorist attack? This is an item not covered in the EIS." She asked for proof that the waste would be disposed of properly, and expressed concern about the amount of the area's scarce water the enrichment plant would use. Gardner pointed out that the New Mexico Environment Department and New Mexico Attorney General’s Office had been left out of the hearing process although New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who served as Energy Secretary in the Clinton administation, had requested participation for those two offices. Read a transcript of the October 14 public meeting at: http://www.nrc.gov/materials/fuel-cycle-fac/ml043090069.pdf Access to other documents is at: http://www.nrc.gov/materials/fuel-cycle-fac/lesfacility.htmlhttp://www.nrc.gov/materials/fuel-cycle-fac/lesfacility.html Comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement should be postmarked by January 7, 2005 and sent to Chief, Rules Review and Directives Branch, Mail Stop T6-D59, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555-0001. Comments may also be submitted by e-mail to nrcrep@nrc.gov or by fax to (301) 415-5397, attention: Anna Bradford. Please note Docket Number 70-3103 on all submissions. -------- washington Vit plant work slows for review of quake design Thursday, December 23rd, 2004 By Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald staff writer http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5942865p-5848421c.html The Department of Energy has slowed the pace of construction at the $5.8 billion vitrification plant at Hanford over concerns about whether it is adequately designed to withstand a powerful earthquake. "My objective is to minimize the risk of rework," said John Eschenberg, the DOE's Office of River Protection project manager for the plant. He's asked contractor Bechtel National to stop placement of the structural concrete in the plant's largest building, the pretreatment plant, until earthquake design issues are resolved. The plant has a footprint the size of four football fields and will stand about as high as a 15-story building. He's also temporarily stopped overtime work for construction crews at the vitrification plant. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which provides independent oversight of federal nuclear weapon sites, has been discussing seismic standards for the vitrification plant with DOE for more than a year. Many studies have been done over at least two decades to determine the likelihood and effects of earthquakes at Hanford. But DOE had Pacific Northwest National Laboratory with the University of Texas drill another bore hole to measure the speed at which sound waves move through the ground in central Hanford. The study concluded in October that in some layers of sand and gravel sandwiched between basalt rock more than 500 feet deep the shear waves from earthquakes could move faster than thought, Eschenberg said. Geologists and seismologists still are working with computer models and other methods to determine what that might mean for the design basis for the vitrification plant. The plant is planned to take much of the 53 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste now held in underground tanks and vitrify it, or turn it into a stable glass, for permanent burial. The waste is left from the past production of plutonium at Hanford for the nation's nuclear weapons program. Now the two buildings at the plant that will hold tanks of waste that could include some or all of the most radioactive liquids have a design requirement that they be able to withstand earthquake movement so great that it's predicted for Hanford only approximately once every 2,500 years. But the study of the speed of sound waves indicates that design standard might need to be 20 percent to 40 percent higher. Eschenberg expects to know more in two weeks. "We're hoping the conservatism built into the design is adequate," said John Britton, spokesman for Bechtel National, adding that meeting seismic standards is critical. The pretreatment plant was built to exceed the original earthquake standards. In some cases it was built to 150 percent of the required standard, Eschenberg said. He's more concerned about whether plans are adequate for attaching tanks and other big pieces of equipment and material to the building, he said. Most of that equipment has yet to be placed. Once seismic standards are known, Bechtel engineers will need to validate the design, Britton said. Then some design changes might be needed. Steps could be taken to strengthen construction work already done, such as adding more structural steel to concrete, Eschenberg said. Construction started on the project in the summer of 2002, with much of the design yet to be done in an attempt to start vitrifying waste years sooner. Hanford is required to turn the tank waste into glass by a 2028 deadline. "We're a design-build project," Eschenberg said. "One of the leading challenges is to manage the close-coupled nature of construction." With the design 70 percent complete now, Bechtel was looking at cutting as many as 800 of 1,300 engineering jobs steadily through 2005. However, that likely will change, depending on how much work is needed to validate earthquake design or possibly do some redesign. The project is large enough that construction workers can be moved around the vitrification plant site to other work during the slowdown. "They've worked hard. There's been a lot of progress," Eschenberg said. "There's some relief over a cessation of overtime." For now, the effects on the construction schedule appear to be minimal, but more will be known when scientists finish analyzing earthquake data. Hanford is not an area where many significant earthquakes have been felt. The largest earthquake close to Hanford since data began to be recorded in the 1970s was recorded in that decade. It had a magnitude of 3.8, said Alan Rohay, a seismologist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. That's large enough that it might shake objects off a shelf but should not cause structural problems. In addition to concerns over the seismic design, some redesign is needed to reduce the unrelated risk of hydrogen generation in piping and other ancillary systems, Eschenberg said. The vitrification plan design already addressed hydrogen generation in primary systems or the areas where tank waste will be present. New concerns have been raised that water in ancillary systems such as the cooling jackets around waste tanks could generate small amounts of hydrogen. Gamma rays can break the chemical bond in water and free the hydrogen, which is an explosive gas, Eschenberg said. Although that happens at low rates and there is no known ignition source to spark a fire, the risk is not being discounted, Eschenberg said. One possible design fix is to slope secondary systems so any small amount of hydrogen generated would accumulate at high points and could be vented. Much of the plant equipment is being fabricated now, requiring the redesign to be done soon to prevent the risk of work having to be redone. The design work to address hydrogen generation also will increase the number of engineers who need to continue to work on the vitrification plant, Eschenberg said. "We're all under pressure to deliver on schedule and on cost, but we're not going to build a white elephant," Eschenberg said. Building a safe plant will take priority over schedule and cost, he said. -------- MILITARY -------- latin america U.S. Pot Calls Cuban Kettle Black By: Matthew Cardinale Published: Dec 23, 2004 YubaNet.com http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_16495.shtml Dear Cuban Kettle, You are black. Happy holidays, American Pot. The twinkling lights seemed subtle enough, and to be sure, the concern for human rights is always appropriate. But the U.S. forgot to mention its own horrendous practices, or to understand that it, as a pot, was as black as Cuba's metaphorical kettle. Two can play at this game, seemed to be the insinuation, when the Cuban government last week erected large billboards highlighting American abuses of human rights, in response to a controversial "Christmas display" outside the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba. The real winner, however, may be the increased attention to human rights abuses at the hands of both governments. And this holiday season, the people of both nations can laugh with irony together--albeit across oceans--at the hypocrisy of their respective governments. Americans concerned about human rights abuses by the U.S. government in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Gharib can laugh for a second reason, too, since we know a billboard like that wouldn't make it past the conservative Clear Channel corporation, which monopolizes the roadside media in this country. Some free speech we have. Drivers on American highways are constantly bombarded with their corporate-sponsored admonishments, such as, "September 11, 2001. Stay focused America." Whatever that's supposed to mean. But I digress. Ultimately, then, a common enemy emerges; not communism, not capitalism, nor indeed fascism, but a common enemy that is inhumanity, that is oppression and secrecy. It started when James Cason of the U.S. diplomatic in Cuba included a display in Christmas lights of the number "75" to represent the number of Cuban dissidents imprisoned without access to attorneys or having their identity or charges released to members of the public. The Associated Press reports that the Cuban government contends that the 75 Cuban prisoners were dissidents paid by the U.S. to help overthrow the government there. Hmm, it wouldn't be the first time; a certain Chilean incident involving Mr. Pinochet comes to mind. But the U.S. government denies providing money to the individuals. Not to be outdone, the Cuban government put up a massive series of billboards along the populous Malecon coastal highway, to face the U.S. Interest Section as well as ongoing traffic and pedestrians. The billboards included a swastika, and the words "Made in America," alongside huge photos of Iraqi prisoners abused by American soldiers. This week, we learned that many of the abuses of Iraqi prisoners which occurred at the hands of U.S. military officials in Abu Gharib, have been intrinsic and continuous to our operations there, not the sporadic work of a few bad apples. Not only that, but they have been occurring at the U.S.'s highly secretive detention and interrogation facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well. Moreover, over the past few years, advocates for basic civil liberties in the U.S. have been aghast at the Bush Administration's purposeful erosion even of basic standards of due process, all supposedly in the name of defeating terrorism. The War on Terrorism--this so-called "war"--has no intention of ending any decade soon, if indeed, ever. So now is a good a time as any to bring up the fact that the "War on Terrorism," readers may have noticed, is a major oxymoron. War, of course, IS terrorism. It's like saying Terrorism on Terrorism, which can only self-escalate without countervailing efforts towards peace and justice. And those individuals that we call terrorists, in turn, only accelerate their war against Americans, and tragically, it is against a terrorist enemy they see characterized by the American government. I still believe to this day--like Anne Frank said hauntingly during the Holocaust--in the ultimate good of all mankind. So, that is why, when Republican officials stand and denounce terrorists for being "killers who hate America" or "hate freedom," I know they wouldn't hate us, or anybody, without a really good reason. Understanding why the "terrorists" hate us would involve a serious look at U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan, throughout the Middle East, and indeed, the world. But to say, they're just hateful killers, is obviously to overlook to fundamental good of humanity, the real grievances at work, and to obscure the role of American soldiers as killers too--killers with cluster bombs, depleted uranium, and apparently no moral outrage against suffering and destruction and abuse at American hands. And so, against that backdrop, I read a comment by former Sec. of State, Colin Powell, regarding the Cuban billboard situation, with utter disgust. Mr. Powell told the AP, the "75" sign was an effort to show "solidarity with people who are being held and intimidated and whose rights are being denied by the Cuban government. And the Cuban government's response is to ... show the world a swastika? I don't think that is very wise." What a gross, sweeping exaggeration by an allegedly moderate Powell. Yes, there was a swastika. As if that's some kind of major defamation, given the horrendousness of American actions? Powell did not mention the substance of the billboards, which were the Abu Gharib photos. And so, that's what reminded me of the American "War on Terrorism." Our officials tell the media and the public about Cuban officials, "Oh, they just put up hateful rubbish." But without any context, without any admission of substance. I thought the boldness and honesty of the Cuban governments' billboard was refreshing. And with that, I do join America's call for Cuba to honor standards of due process and to release information about its prisoners. And I simultaneously join Cuba's call for America to end prisoner abuse, revoke the Patriot Act, end the invasion of Iraq, and stop the use of depleted uranium and cluster bombs. Not to mention ending the attack on poor and working families. Humanity defies simple boundaries of nation and government. How remarkable that a state-sponsored Cuban billboard would be able to articulate what so many Americans, silenced by the corporate media, feel, and the grievances many Americans have about our own pot, which lately is black as night, sooty, rusting, and corroded under the Bush Administration. Matthew Cardinale is a freelance writer, activist, and graduate student at UC Irvine in sociology and democracy studies. He may be reached at mcardina@uci.edu. ---- A New Poverty Draft: Military Contractors Target Latin America For New Recruits Thursday, December 23rd, 2004 Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/23/1541224 Halliburton and other private military contractors have begun advertising campaigns in El Salvador, Colombia and Nicaragua to recruit ex-soldiers to work in Iraq. [includes rush transcript] With the situation in Iraq becoming more and more deadly and the resistance gaining increasing popular support inside the country, the Bush administration has begun sending thousands more US troops to Baghdad. But many question how many more troops the administration can afford to send, or more important, how many soldiers it can send. The US military is facing an unprecedented crisis in recruiting numbers and new enlistments. Meanwhile, new Pentagon statistics show that more than 5,000 soldiers have now been charged with desertion from bases in the U.S. and overseas since the invasion of Iraq in early 2003. In some circles, there is talk of a return to the draft, though most analysts say that is unlikely in the near future. But it is not just the military that is facing difficulty in recruiting people to deploy to Iraq. Private contractors are also facing a serious personnel crisis, particularly given the danger of the situation and the fact that kidnappings and beheadings have become a regular part of the reality in occupied Iraq. Now, private US corporations have begun recruiting outside of the country. In recent months companies like Halliburton have launched ad campaigns and recruiting drives in several Latin American countries, promising huge salaries for fighting age men and women to serve in Iraq. Among the countries being targeted are El Salvador, Colombia and Nicaragua. * Geoff Thale, senior associate for Central America and Cuba at the Washington Office on Latin America. RUSH TRANSCRIPT AMY GOODMAN: A short while ago, I spoke with Geoff Thale of the Washington office on Latin America and asked him about the corporate recruiting campaigns. GEOFF THALE: Yeah. I mean there's a lot that's not known about this story, but it's pretty clear that U.S. private security firms, at least two are recruiting in El Salvador, at least one, Halliburton, in Colombia, and in Chile, Blackwater, another one of the well known security firms is recruiting former commandoes there. So, we have people -- they're probably four to five -- 4,000 or 5,000, foreign, non-U.S. private contractors working in Iraq right now, and some significant number of them are Latin American. You know, I think the general sort of context here is that after the war in Vietnam, I think the United States military learned a lesson, and that lesson was that as U.S. Casualties increased, support for war declines. And one of the -- one part of the solution to that problem is to recruit people from abroad, particularly people from Latin America, to fill those kind of jobs. AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the corporations that are doing this? GEOFF THALE: Yeah. Halliburton is obviously the best known of them in Colombia. Halliburton, you know, Vice President Cheney is the former head of Halliburton. It's got major contracts throughout Iraq. In Colombia, Halliburton is recruiting people to do -- it's recruiting officers, not just troops but officers to be in charge of guarding security installations, embassies, U.S. and other government buildings, oil pipelines and so on. In Blackwater, which is the one in Chile, has been in the news recently. It recruits a lot of retired U.S. Special forces people to work in Iraq, and Triple Canopy, one of the two in El Salvador, is one of the 35 or so companies that recruits and sends people to Iraq. AMY GOODMAN: In a piece – GEOFF THALE: All of these – AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead. GEOFF THALE: I should say, Amy, most of them are companies that trade on the New York stock exchange. They're private for-profit businesses. AMY GOODMAN: In a piece in The Washington Post, it says that military dining facilities in Iraq are typically staffed by workers from poor Asian and African countries? GEOFF THALE: Right. Fiji, I think they recruited a lot of people from. Nepal is another big place. Former -- you know, the British-trained Gorkha troops in Nepal, a lot of those people have left the service and gone on to be recruited by British corporations to work in Iraq. The Philippines, I think, has also provided a number of people for driving jobs, and military mess hall jobs. I mean, it's sort of the overall point here is that in Latin America and elsewhere in third world country, you can make four or five times working as the cook in a mess hall or the security guard for an embassy or the security for truck convoy delivering supplies, you can make four or five times there what you can make in your home country. In Salvador, as a matter of fact, people are quitting military jobs, jobs in the Salvador ran armed forces to line up for and volunteer for the jobs with private security firms, because they will make four or five times what they earn, and on the flip side, the U.S. companies involved in recruiting are going to pay them one-quarter of what they would have to pay if they were recruiting a U.S. citizen to do this work. So there's a market logic. The Pentagon privatizes this work, and saves in the budget. The employer recruits abroad, and improves their bottom line. And people in these countries are earning more than they might earn working domestically. So, if you look on the strictly sort of economic logic, everybody is making money and the free market is at work. If you ask about the morality of this, it's a kind of a frightening thing. AMY GOODMAN: We're talking about -- go ahead, Geoff. GEOFF THALE: We're paying other people to fight and die for us, is what we're basically doing, and what we're suggesting is that Salvadorians or Colombians or Nicaraguans or Chileans, or Fijians, or Filipinos don't matter as much, and the political cost of their fighting and dying for us, is far less than the cost of having U.S. citizens do it. AMY GOODMAN: Let's talk about soldiers versus those employed by companies. Because what we are talking about now are U.S. corporations going down and recruiting. What is the difference? Has the U.S. military gone down to recruit? GEOFF THALE: No. The U.S. military has not directly gone down to recruit. It's private security companies that are doing this. They're all under contract from the Pentagon. And they fill a range of jobs from sort of logistics and mess hall jobs through guard duty with security convoys, with embassies and other things. So, many of these, all of these are jobs that 20 years ago would have been carried out by uniformed U.S. Soldiers. Ten years ago, a significant number of them were being carried out by private U.S. contractor, the mess hall jobs and so on. Now what they're doing is taking things that once were clearly military jobs at one time, like serving as a guard at an embassy or diplomatic facility and turning them into private jobs. That raises a whole set of questions about who controls these people, what kind of discipline are they subject to, what kind of responsibilities do they have in terms of the -- of ethics, of human rights, the uniformed code of military justice and so on. AMY GOODMAN: And of course, the issue of U.S. casualties, which is so significant for the Bush administration, keeping those numbers down, this helps to – GEOFF THALE: Yeah. That clearly does that. I think that's one of the most -- from the point of view of democracy in the United States, the fact that we can outsource the fighting and outsource some of the deaths, frankly, you know I think that's a scary possibility. When you have -- in a democracy, when you have -- or a country that claims to operate in a democratic fashion, when people fight wars, and there are casualties and deaths, their community, their families and communities feel those casualties and feel the deaths and make political judgments about whether the fighting is worth supporting. And whether the human cost is worth the political costs. When you outsource that, and you have people from other countries doing some of the fighting and some of the dyings, we don't feel those costs, and the U.S. government and the Pentagon can prosecute wars at lower political costs at home, by having people who matter less to us, because they're foreign, do the fighting and dying. AMY GOODMAN: Geoff Thale is with the Washington office on Latin America. What role do the governments play in this? I mean, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua. GEOFF THALE: That's a good question. Clearly on one level, they permit the firms to recruit. Probably the more significant thing, though, is that all of these are countries where there's a long history of military action, large militaries that have been involved in civil wars, mostly militaries with long histories of human rights abuses of one sort or another and militaries that have recently downsized. So what you have is a pool of people with military backgrounds and military training who are very poorly paid and are ripe for the picking, as it were, for U.S. recruiters. AMY GOODMAN: How much is this known in this country right now, who is being recruited? GEOFF THALE: It's hardly known at all. I mean, this piece in The Washington Post ten days ago now came really out of the blue, and I think the reporter who covered it was astonished when he discovered the fact, and I don't think there's been any other account of this in the U.S. press. There's an account about Halliburton recruiting in Colombia that's basically a reprint of a Spanish language Colombian press. There's been mentions of the Chileans, but there's no systematic coverage of any of this, it and it's one of the frightening things about it. AMY GOODMAN: And then these people, you mentioned Chileans. Who in Chile. For example – GEOFF THALE: The Chileans are ex-commandoes and most of them were trained under the Pinochet government, a government sort of infamous for its human rights violations, for torture and disappearance and so on. So, it's -- they're recruiting people like that, and with that kind of a background and training for security jobs in Iraq. AMY GOODMAN: We hear a lot about military contractors when we're hearing about the torture scandals, for example. It's not just people in the Pentagon and in the intelligence agencies. We often hear about military contractors. Could people be being used as interrogators from Colombia and Nicaragua? GEOFF THALE: That's an interesting question. Nobody has yet made that allegation, but I think one of the questions to look at is what the Latin Americans who are being recruited are being recruited for, and what are the range of jobs that are being recruited to do. The flip side of that is -- I think you're right, there's significant number of people involved in interrogation of prisoners and involved in the prison scandals in Abu Ghraib and other places who are working for military contractors rather than for the U.S. government. And one of the questions that will be interesting to see is whether those jobs are being outsourced as well, because of the experience and background people there in Latin America have in this kind of a thing. AMY GOODMAN: Overall, how many people are we talking about? GEOFF THALE: There's -- like I say, I think the numbers run four to five, maybe four to six thousand foreign contractors working in Iraq. There are probably -- my guess is about 1,000 of them are Latin Americans, and those -- it sounds like the numbers are going up. Several of the recruiting firms, the U.S. contracting firms have said Latin America is a growth area for our industry, because there's so many military people laid off and available to them. AMY GOODMAN: And how many casualties? GEOFF THALE: That's -- I don't know is the answer. That's a good question. AMY GOODMAN: Geoff Thale of the Washington office on Latin America. And this is Democracy Now! -------- russia / chechnya No more conscripts in Chechnya from 2006: Putin MOSCOW (AFP) Dec 23, 2004 http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041223112649.6jpbps30.html All Russian army conscripts will be withdrawn from breakaway Chechnya by the end of 2005, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday. "From January 1, 2005, not a single conscript from the Russian defence ministry will be serving in Chechnya. And starting from January 1, 2006, no conscript from the interior ministry will be there," Putin told a televised annual press conference. "In an initial phase (of military reform), we have to make sure that our conscripts do not serve in 'hotspots'. And of course above all in our country. I am thinking of the North Caucasus and Chechnya," he said. Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov last month pledged that all defence ministry troops in war-torn Chechnya will be professional soldiers rather than conscripts from next year Ivanov said that already nine out of 10 servicemen in the 42nd motorized division, which is permanently stationed in Chechnya, serve on professional contracts. Some 80,000 Russian troops are based in Chechnya, drawn both defence ministry and interior ministry forces, where a guerrilla war continues to rage more than five years since the latest conflict in the breakaway republic began. -------- spies Senate Realigns Intelligence Procedures New Reform Statute Calls for Some Change By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, December 23, 2004; Page A21 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21047-2004Dec22?language=printer In the next Congress, the reorganized Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will have two fewer members but a much larger staff -- each of the 15 senators on the panel will be entitled to choose a new staff member. Those staffers were added because the committee was going to handle both legislation that authorizes intelligence activities and appropriations legislation that funds them. Having a single committee handle both those functions, as well as oversight, was one of the primary aims of the reforms recommended by the Sept. 11 commission. But having added the employees, the committee has dropped the reason for doing so. The select committee will continue to authorize intelligence programs, but a new subcommittee on intelligence within the Senate Appropriations Committee will handle the money. The select committee's additional staff members will have access to the panel's classified meetings, reports and computer databases, relieving individual senators from having to attend every closed meeting or read all the reports and other documents the panel receives from the CIA and other agencies. "We are tinkering with the oversight responsibilities of the intelligence committee, but certainly nothing substantive," Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said during the debate on the proposal to retool the committee. "We will have a status quo intelligence committee without combined authorization and appropriations power." But when the resolution was introduced on the floor Oct. 6, Rules and Administration Committee Chairman Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said, "We have allowed members to hire personal designated staff, to give them a trusted representative on the committee." Sen. Harry M. Reid (Nev.), then the ranking Democrat on the rules panel, said during floor debate that although an authorizing and appropriating committee had been proposed, "there are very strong feelings that creates too much power and too much secrecy for a handful of members, so it actually results in fewer checks and balances and much weaker oversight." A senior committee member, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that adding staff members "could create an increase in partisanship within the committee, which should not have any." Sens. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the chairman and vice chairman of the intelligence panel, have said they want to maintain a nonpartisan staff, and a senior staff member this week said, "They plan to ask members to make professional staff appointments." The addition of the staffers is just one of several new provisions of the intelligence reform law. Roberts and Rockefeller have been reappointed to their committee leadership posts, not by vote of the panel members of their respective parties but by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Reid, now the minority leader-designate. Another provision eliminated the eight-year term limit that would have forced Roberts off the panel. The makeup of the committee will change slightly. The one seat lost on the Republican side will be that of Sen. John W. Warner (Va.), but as chairman of the Armed Services Committee he will remain an ex officio member -- another reform provision. Two Democrats have dropped off -- Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), who has become minority whip, and John Edwards (N.C.), who chose not to seek reelection in order to run for vice president -- but Jon S. Corzine (D-N.J.) is joining. Roberts's agenda, which he outlined this week in a statement, includes getting the new director of national intelligence, or DNI, confirmed, "and working with that person to ensure that the new structure is effective." One reform provision may become a headache inside the Senate. It gives the select committee "final responsibility for reviewing, holding hearings and voting on civilian persons nominated by the president to fill a position within the intelligence community that requires the advice and consent of the Senate." The resolution does not specify those positions. They clearly include the new DNI and his deputy, the director of the new National Counterterrorism Center and top CIA officials -- and they apparently also include the assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, now Thomas Fingar, and even Pentagon intelligence appointees, such as the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, the post held by Stephen A. Cambone. Fingar was confirmed by the Foreign Relations Committee, Cambone by the Armed Services Committee. A legislative notice released by the Republican Policy Committee Oct. 6 says the Foreign Relations or Armed Services committees could hold hearings on intelligence nominees in their departments, but the select intelligence committee "will have final responsibility for reviewing and voting on this nomination." The language referring to "civilian persons nominated by the president" has created other ambiguities. In the reform bill, Congress said it "was desirable" that the DNI or the principal deputy be "a commissioned officer of the armed forces in active status." That nomination would probably go to select committee, but it is uncertain who would confirm nominees to run the three major Pentagon-based intelligence-collection agencies. -------- us U.S. deserters' bid for asylum has Canada abuzz December 23, 2004 By Levon Sevunts THE WASHINGTON TIMES http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041222-094932-2814r.htm MONTREAL — A U.S. paratrooper's application for asylum has set Canada's editorial pages, airwaves and Internet discussion boards abuzz with debates over whether the country should offer sanctuary to U.S. military deserters seeking to avoid serving in Iraq. Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board is expected to rule in February in the case of Spc. Jeremy Hinzman, a 26-year-old South Dakotan who fled to Canada along with his wife and 2-year-old child. "He has no grounds to remain here and should be promptly returned to his homeland," argues an editorial in Canada's conservative daily the National Post. Peter Worthington, an influential columnist with the Toronto Sun tabloid and a veteran of World War II and Korea, came to the same conclusion. "I think Canada should send him home to deal with the consequences of his decisions," Mr. Worthington wrote in a column headlined, "Deserter is not a draft dodger." But a majority of callers to the Radio Noon call-in show at CBC Radio in Quebec thought that U.S. deserters should be allowed to stay in Canada. Radio Noon producer Susan McKenzie says most of the program's listeners opposed the war in Iraq, calling it "illegal." On Internet discussion boards, Canada is often derided as "Soviet Canuckistan" and Canadians are accused of undermining the war on terror by sheltering U.S. deserters. Canadians remind their U.S. interlocutors that between 1939 and 1941, while Canada was at war with Nazi Germany, the United States accepted hundreds of Canadian deserters, no questions asked. In something of an exchange, dozens of other Americans joined the Canadian air force for reassignment to the Royal Air Force during this period. Despite the emotionally charged nature of the debate, there is no large-scale movement across the border, such as was the case during the Vietnam War, when Canada opened its doors to tens of thousands of American draft dodgers. Canadian media have reported the cases of two other deserters — Brandon Hughey of the Army's 1st Cavalry and David Sanders of the Navy — who face hearings before the immigration board in January. A fourth deserter, 23-year-old Daniel Felushko, has dual U.S.-Canadian citizenship and is automatically allowed to stay in Canada. Serge Arsenault, a spokesman for the Immigration and Refugee Board, refused on the basis of privacy laws to say how many U.S. deserters have cases before the tribunal. Unconfirmed reports have put the total as high as eight. Still, Spc. Hinzman's much-publicized case has rekindled memories of the Vietnam migration, in which an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 draft dodgers came and stayed in Canada. As with that war, the Iraq conflict is highly unpopular with large segments of the Canadian public. Unlike the war in Afghanistan, where Canadians fought alongside U.S. forces — Canada's crack anti-terrorist unit received the U.S. Presidential Unit Citation just two weeks ago — most Canadians regard the Iraq war as unjustified. A vociferous anti-war movement has grown up and has embraced U.S. deserters as a cause celebre. Spc. Hinzman and Mr. Hughey have appeared at dozens of anti-war events across Canada. Influential left-wing intellectuals and artists have called on the government to grant asylum to U.S. deserters who oppose serving in what they call the "illegal war in Iraq." The public debate is expected to have little impact on the ruling of the Immigration and Refugee Board, an independent administrative tribunal that decides on refugee claims. Mr. Arsenault says that under the Geneva conventions, all refugee claimants have to prove a well-founded fear of persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion. "But Mr. Hinzman does not fall into this category," the National Post noted in its editorial. "He is a common deserter. "He may face charges in the United States for failing to honor the oath he took as a paratrooper. But he can still expect a fair trial, due process and humane treatment." Despite its reputation for a liberal immigration policy, Canada's immigration laws have tightened considerably since the Vietnam War. Vietnam draft dodgers were allowed to stay in Canada while their applications for permanent resident status were being considered by immigration authorities. Nowadays, would-be immigrants have to wait in their home countries while their applications are processed. The United States could also apply for the extradition of the deserters, an option that was not open with Vietnam-era draft dodgers because Canada had no draft. Desertion, however, is a crime in Canada as it is in the United States, and Patrick Charette, a spokesman for Canada's Department of Justice, says it is specifically covered in Canada-U.S. extradition treaties. Canada has received no extradition request from the United States, Mr. Charette says. ---- Homeless Veterans: Soldiers Go From Fighting in Iraq to Fighting A New War At Home Thursday, December 23rd, 2004 Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/23/1541248 Two soldiers who recently returned from Iraq talk about how they faced another battle after they returned home. Nicole Goodwin, 24, only found a permanent place to live after she was profiled in the New York Times. 25-year-old Herold Noel is still looking for a place to live for his family. He talks to Democracy Now! in his first broadcast interview. [includes rush transcript] Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld remains under fire from multiple sides of the political spectrum in this country. Most significantly, several leading Republican lawmakers like Senators John McCain, Chuck Hagle and Trent Lott have voiced their opposition to Rumsfeld remaining for another term in the Bush cabinet. This week, the calls for his resignation gained more momentum after Rumsfeld admitted that he had not been personally signing letters of condolence to families of soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead, Rumsfeld used a rubber-stamp type machine to automatically place his signature on the letters. Rumsfeld already was under the gun for remarks he made in response to questions from US soldiers in Kuwait on the inadequate amount of armor on their vehicles in Iraq and other shortages facing soldiers serving in the occupation. On Wednesday at the Pentagon press briefing, Rumsfeld tried to deflect criticism that he has neglected US soldiers. * Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld speaking yesterday at the Pentagon. As the controvery continues over Rumsfeld”s future, it is not only soldiers now deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan who face serious problems. For many soldiers, another battle begins once they return to so-called civilian life in this country after leaving the war zone. It has become one of the most shameful realities in this country. The number of veterans who return home to the US and end up living on the streets or in homeless shelters. According to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, nearly 300,000 veterans are homeless on any given night, and almost half of those are Vietnam vets. Now, with the occupation of Iraq and some 150,000 troops deployed there and thousands more who have returned, a new generation of soldiers are facing the same realities experienced by their colleagues who fought in Vietnam and in other conflicts. Some of them are suffering from the effects of depleted uranium; others from posttraumatic stress disorder or mental illness sparked by their time in the zone of combat. Others find they have no place to live. Today, we are going to look at the stories of two veterans of the occupation of Iraq who came home to discover how some of the soldiers publicly celebrated by the Bush administration are forced to live. * Nicole Goodwin, former homeless veteran who retured from Iraq earlier this year. She now works with Operation Truth and lobbies on behalf of other Iraq war veterans. * Herold Noel, former Army specialist who recently returned from Iraq. He is now without a home. Related Links: The Indypendent: "Invisible Soldier: A Perilous Journey from Flatbush to Falluja And Back Leaves Herold Noel Out in the Cold" RUSH TRANSCRIPT AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday at the Pentagon press briefing, Rumsfeld tried to deflect criticism that he's neglected U.S. soldiers. DONALD RUMSFELD: I, and I know others, stay awake at night with concern for those at risk, with hope for their lives, for their success, and I want those who matter most the men and women in uniform and their families, to know that. And I want them to know that we consider them, the soldiers, the sailors, the airmen, and the marines, to be America's true treasure, and I thank them and I thank their families." AMY GOODMAN: That is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld speaking at the Pentagon. As the controversy continues over Donald Rumsfeld's future, it's not only soldiers now deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan who face serious problems. For many soldiers, another battle begins once they return to so-called civilian life in this country after leaving the war zone. JUAN GONZALEZ: It has become one of the most shameful realities in this country, the number of veterans who return home to the U.S. and end up living on the streets or in homeless shelters. According to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, nearly 300,000 veterans are homeless on any given night, almost half of them Vietnam vets. AMY GOODMAN: Now, with the occupation of Iraq and some 150,000 troops deployed there, and thousands more who have returned, a new generation of soldiers are facing the same realities experienced by their colleagues who fought in Vietnam and other conflicts. Some of them are suffering from the effects of depleted uranium, others from post- traumatic stress disorder, a mental illness sparked by their time in the zone of combat. Others find they have no place to live. Today we look at the story of Herold Noel, who is joining us in our studio right now, came home to discover how some of the soldiers are publicly -- who are publicly celebrated by the Bush administration are forced to live. Herold Noel is a former army specialist who recently returned from Iraq. Welcome to Democracy Now!. HEROLD NOEL: Thank you. AMY GOODMAN: Herold, when did you get back? HEROLD NOEL: I got back August of 2003. AMY GOODMAN: And that means that you've been home for more than a year? HEROLD NOEL: Yes. AMY GOODMAN: Where are you living? HEROLD NOEL: I'm living everywhere. Wherever I can find a place to stay, where I can lay my head, that's where I stay. I don't have a current address or nothing like that. But my family is now staying with my -- my wife and my children are staying with her sister-in-law, my sister. JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, could you tell us -- you -- the unit that you were in and when you first got to Iraq and maybe a little bit of your -- of the experiences that you had over there? HEROLD NOEL: In Iraq, when we first went into Iraq, from the beginning, it was -- I knew it was a -- a battle we could take. You understand? It was going to be a quick go-in- come-out, 'cause the weapons they had was -- was not equal to ours. You understand? Their weapons were primitive, so we found it was an easy war. But there was just a lot of slaughter and death. That's all. JUAN GONZALEZ: You were telling us earlier that you weren't even aware really that you were going to war. HEROLD NOEL: No, no. I wasn't aware. I thought when we went to -- When we were going to Iraq, first we were stationed in Kuwait for training, as they say. So, when we went to training, we didn't know what was going to happen, if we were just going to come back home or what until they told us we were going to war. And then we found ourselves sitting at the borderline of Kuwait and Iraq. AMY GOODMAN: Your family members sending you newspapers saying you were going to war, yet you were being told you were just training. What do you mean when you say slaughter, it was a slaughter? HEROLD NOEL: It was a slaughter because the people -- It was like fighting guns with -- with arrows. You understand? 'Cause those people over there, they had weapons, but their weapons wasn't -- You understand? Even the AK's they had wasn't accurate. 'Cause there be soldiers standing not, I could say, not even miles away like, close to the soldier shooting, and it wouldn't hit a soldier. And they -- and they just get taken out. Children would be on the streets getting caught in the crossfire. I see children get run by tanks. AMY GOODMAN: Run over? HEROLD NOEL: Run over by tanks. And -- and it's just sad. AMY GOODMAN: You were in Fallujah? HEROLD NOEL: Yes. I was in Fallujah. JUAN GONZALEZ: You served with what unit? HEROLD NOEL: Three seven Cav., in Fort Stewart. AMY GOODMAN: Fort Stewart, Georgia? HEROLD NOEL: Yeah, Fort Stewart, Georgia. AMY GOODMAN: And what were the other soldiers saying? What were your conversations? HEROLD NOEL: Our conversations was basically -- you understand: How we going to be looked at when we get back home? Are we going to be looked at as heroes or as people that were just, you know, fighting for Bush. You understand? And we thought we were going to come back as heroes, 'cause we thought we were helping people over there, and -- But that wasn't the case. You understand? 'Cause we seen the oil spilling through the streets. And we knew what we was fighting for, 'cause people say it's for 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction, which we didn't see, 'cause we went into nuclear plants and stuff like that, and we didn't see no such thing. So, we didn't know what we were fighting for. All we know, we were fighting for the peace of the people in Iraq. And so, we had to keep our mind on that we fighting for the peace in Iraq. JUAN GONZALEZ: How long did it take you and the soldiers in your unit to realize how unwelcome you were there? HEROLD NOEL: The minute we hit Iraq, we knew we wasn't welcome. 'Cause we were getting ambushed every day. We had even kids shooting AK's at us. We had about -- even twelve-year-olds, eleven-year-olds shooting AK's at us, rushing our trucks, trying to get food of the trucks. It was -- it's hard for me to talk about it. AMY GOODMAN: You have kids yourself? HEROLD NOEL: Yes, I have kids myself. AMY GOODMAN: How many? HEROLD NOEL: I have three kids. My twins are five and my youngest one -- son is one. AMY GOODMAN: When you were in Iraq, did you use your weapon? HEROLD NOEL: Yes. AMY GOODMAN: Did you kill people? HEROLD NOEL: It's hard -- yes. Yes, I did. It's hard for me to collect that, 'cause once -- once you take a life, you understand, you lose a piece of yourself. You understand? You don't know what's going to happen you. You take a life, or you could expect for your life to be taken next. And that's how I was living in Iraq. Sometimes the soldiers they don't even care no more. 'Cause they took so much lives, you understand, they were just sitting around waiting for their life to be taken. 'Cause bombs would go off right next to us, we wouldn't even jump. You understand? If they hit us, they hit us, if it don't, it don't. 'Cause we didn't care no more. 'Cause we went weeks and months, sometimes months, without sleeping and -- until we just finally said: "You know what? I'm gonna to sleep tonight. If I don't wake up, it was just my time to go." 'Cause we took a life. You understand? And everybody just had the thought: Well, since we took a life, our life is next. That's how everybody was living. JUAN GONZALEZ: What happened when you came back? HEROLD NOEL: When I came back, it -- it was rough. When I came back I stayed in -- 'Cause they extended me six months. What happened, they extended me six months. I tried to stay in Georgia for a while, to see if I could make it, 'cause I, you know, I was told the -- the war in Iraq -- I mean, being living in New York was going to be rough. So I came to New York 'cause I didn't have no means of transportation in Georgia. I didn't have no -- no way to get back and forth to work. So, I came to New York to see -- You know, that's where I was born and raised. So I just said, let me come back to New York and see if I can find a job. 'Cause where I stayed in Georgia, it was a military town. You understand? Everybody -- you understand? You in the military, so nobody's going to look down on you. So I -- I was thinking, well, let me come to New York where I can get away from this military stuff and get on my feet. But that's not the way is ended. I ended up on the street and nowhere to go. AMY GOODMAN: Herold Noel, a former army specialist. Came back home is homeless now. We're also joined by Nicole Goodwin. She came home from Iraq. It's great to have you with us. NICOLE GOODWIN: Good morning, everyone. AMY GOODMAN: I'm glad you could make it. NICOLE GOODWIN: Hello. AMY GOODMAN: Nicole also found herself in a similar situation. But Nicole, before you went to Iraq, you had a baby less than two months before you left. Is that right? NICOLE GOODWIN: Yes, I was -- When the war was declared, I was still pregnant, and my unit had been called up already, and they were ready for transport; so, about the time I reunited with them, most of my unit had already deployed. And I was forced to make a decision between my duty and service and being a provider for my child and -- you know, I decided that my duty would help me do that, because I think that without the military protecting the American freedom, that we -- our children won't have a future in the United States or abroad. So, I had to come to a very quick decision. Most people expected, you know, a great shock, but when you're in the military service, you are aware that you could get called up any time. And I was very aware of that, and I had made the conscious decision. I wasn't forced.I mean, I had areas to leave, but I decided that, you know, I was a soldier and I was going to serve and I wanted to contribute to the world my daughter lived in. JUAN GONZALEZ: And who took care of your daughter while you were gone? NICOLE GOODWIN: I had her with some close friends in California. The situation back in New York really didn't allow for me to try to keep her there. AMY GOODMAN: So, you went to Iraq, came home, and what happened? How did you end up in the streets with your daughter? NICOLE GOODWIN: It wasn't necessarily the streets, because there are two types of homelessness. There's the streets where most people see the homeless, they live -- they occupy the subways and the city streets, and then there's the system. And the system is actually worse than living on the streets. Most people are rejected from the system, and the only alternative is the streets. So, you know, when I had come home, the transition was very rough. It wasn't -- you know, easy. My household wasn't as stable as most households. You know, I wasn't welcomed with open arms. And here I was with a baby. And, you know, it went from staying with my mother, to staying at friends', to just in the system within a matter of four months. And, you know, most people think that, you know, the timespan from returning home, that it can happen, you know, it could take years to become homeless. And, you know, that's -- that is obviously not true. It took me a matter of months. Some people it takes a matter of weeks. Some days it could take a matter of days -- Sometimes it could take a matter of days. So, I think the biggest myth that people believe about home -- veterans is that we come home and we have this stable, occupied space that is always waiting for us, and that's not true. JUAN GONZALEZ: But let me ask you -- the military when they recruit people, always trumpet all of the benefits and that the military provides. You know, opportunity for college education, for training, that they'll provide you for skills. Did you get any support or any -- Does the military in any way assist veterans who have left service? NICOLE GOODWIN: It's not that the military -- First of all, the military doesn't assist. It's the Department of Veterans Affairs. JUAN GONZALEZ: Veterans affairs. NICOLE GOODWIN: And that's a big myth. People think -- Most people, the public, they believe that the military has, you know, authorization on what happens to soldiers who leave the service, and that's not true. Once you leave the service, you're under Veterans Affairs. You are now a veteran. You're not a soldier anymore. I think the biggest problem with that is the fact that there's a segregation once you leave, and the transition time is cut short and -- You know, people believe that there's help there, and, yes, there are benefits. I'm not going to say there wasn't. I do have a G.I. Bil. But if I don't have a house to live in, I can't get a job. If I can't get a job, I can't go back to school. 'Cause I have a child to support. Most people coming out of the military, we go in single. We come out with children. So, there are benefits there, but the benefits haven't been brought up to the -- to this now time span that we have, you know. I mean, most of our benefits deal with Vietnam vets, and it took them, you know, twenty, thirty years to get what we have now. But, it's not taking care of us in the sense of proaction and preventing this from happening. AMY GOODMAN: Nicole and Herold, I want to thank you very much for being with us. This program has come to an end, but on Monday, we'll run part two of this interview that we'll continue after the program. To talk with Herold about what it meant to come home and be with his wife and children, and the conflicts he faced there. And to talk with Nicole about what it meant to actually get a home after she was profiled in The New York Times and what a difference that made, and what she has decided to dedicate her life to. There's also a profile in the new issue The Indypendent, the newspaper of the New York Indy Media Center, you can go to indymedia.org, independent.org, or just go to our website democracynow.org and we will link to that article. It is called, "Invisible Soldier." Again, Herold Noel and Nicole Goodwin, thanks so much for being us with. -------- war crimes War Crimes Thursday, December 23, 2004 Washington Post; Page A22 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20986-2004Dec22?language=printer THANKS TO a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and other human rights groups, thousands of pages of government documents released this month have confirmed some of the painful truths about the abuse of foreign detainees by the U.S. military and the CIA -- truths the Bush administration implacably has refused to acknowledge. Since the publication of photographs of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in the spring the administration's whitewashers -- led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- have contended that the crimes were carried out by a few low-ranking reservists, that they were limited to the night shift during a few chaotic months at Abu Ghraib in 2003, that they were unrelated to the interrogation of prisoners and that no torture occurred at the Guantanamo Bay prison where hundreds of terrorism suspects are held. The new documents establish beyond any doubt that every part of this cover story is false. Though they represent only part of the record that lies in government files, the documents show that the abuse of prisoners was already occurring at Guantanamo in 2002 and continued in Iraq even after the outcry over the Abu Ghraib photographs. FBI agents reported in internal e-mails and memos about systematic abuses by military interrogators at the base in Cuba, including beatings, chokings, prolonged sleep deprivation and humiliations such as being wrapped in an Israeli flag. "On a couple of occasions I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water," an unidentified FBI agent wrote on Aug. 2, 2004. "Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more." Two defense intelligence officials reported seeing prisoners severely beaten in Baghdad by members of a special operations unit, Task Force 6-26, in June. When they protested they were threatened and pictures they took were confiscated. Other documents detail abuses by Marines in Iraq, including mock executions and the torture of detainees by burning and electric shock. Several dozen detainees have died in U.S. custody. In many cases, Army investigations of these crimes were shockingly shoddy: Officials lost records, failed to conduct autopsies after suspicious deaths and allowed evidence to be contaminated. Soldiers found to have committed war crimes were excused with noncriminal punishments. The summary of one suspicious death of a detainee at the Abu Ghraib prison reads: "No crime scene exam was conducted, no autopsy conducted, no copy of medical file obtained for investigation because copy machine broken in medical office." Some of the abuses can be attributed to lack of discipline in some military units -- though the broad extent of the problem suggests, at best, that senior commanders made little effort to prevent or control wrongdoing. But the documents also confirm that interrogators at Guantanamo believed they were following orders from Mr. Rumsfeld. One FBI agent reported on May 10 about a conversation he had with Guantanamo's commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who defended the use of interrogation techniques the FBI regarded as illegal on the grounds that the military "has their marching orders from the Sec Def." Gen. Miller has testified under oath that dogs were never used to intimidate prisoners at Guantanamo, as authorized by Mr. Rumsfeld in December 2002; the FBI papers show otherwise. The Bush administration refused to release these records to the human rights groups under the Freedom of Information Act until it was ordered to do so by a judge. Now it has responded to their publication with bland promises by spokesmen that any wrongdoing will be investigated. The record of the past few months suggests that the administration will neither hold any senior official accountable nor change the policies that have produced this shameful record. Congress, too, has abdicated its responsibility under its Republican leadership: It has been nearly four months since the last hearing on prisoner abuse. Perhaps intervention by the courts will eventually stem the violations of human rights that appear to be ongoing in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan. For now the appalling truth is that there has been no remedy for the documented torture and killing of foreign prisoners by this American government. -------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE -------- us politics Rumsfeld reiterates support for Iraq war December 23, 2004 By Rowan Scarborough THE WASHINGTON TIMES http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041223-122416-9384r.htm Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday defended his Pentagon tenure on a day when the carnage at a U.S. base near Mosul, Iraq, brought new questions about how well American troops are protected in Iraq. "Freedom is at stake in Iraq, and it's achievable," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "The only alternative to success would be to turn back to darkness — to those who kill and terrorize innocent men, women and children. And that must not happen." A U.S.-led coalition already has brought the first democratically elected government to Afghanistan — once a haven for al Qaeda under the oppressive Taliban regime — and Mr. Rumsfeld declared, "I have never been prouder to be an American." It was Mr. Rumsfeld's first appearance in the Pentagon press room since Nov. 23 and since a flurry of criticism from the press and some members of Congress over the situation in Iraq. President Bush, who has asked the defense secretary to stay on in his second term, strongly endorsed him earlier this week. Mr. Rumsfeld yesterday avoided the blunt and sometimes tart replies to reporters for which he has been known, as he and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sought to explain the administration's Iraq policy as part of the post-September 11 war on terror. "Coalition forces continue to pursue terrorists across the world," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "Thus far, more than three-quarters of al Qaeda key members and associates have been captured or killed since the war on extremism began. ... Here at the Pentagon, we're continuing to make progress in transforming for the post-Cold War period." Iraq, he said, is part of a broader strategy to bring freedom to a region that in the past has been "condemned to tyranny and violence," where those "with little hope for a better future" provided terrorist groups "a deep pool from which to draw recruits and to attack free people across the globe." Mr. Rumsfeld addressed criticism that the Pentagon was slow to add armor to utility vehicles and trucks after Iraqi rebels began targeting them with improvised explosive devices. "I am truly saddened by the thought that anyone could have the impression that I or others here are doing anything other than working urgently to see that the lives of the fighting men and women are protected and are cared for in every way humanly possible," he said. Pentagon officials said yesterday a suicide bomber apparently being able to carry an explosive device into a main U.S. base raises serious questions about security procedures in Iraq. They said the command needs to do a complete review, not only for Forward Operating Base Marez, near Mosul, but also other facilities in Iraq that rely on local workers. Asked what could be done to prevent a similar attack, Mr. Rumsfeld answered, "It is an enormous challenge to provide force protection, something that our forces worry about, work on constantly." Both Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers said Iraq's election would go ahead as scheduled on Jan. 30, saying suitable polling places had been found in all provinces except Anbar, home of Fallujah and Ramadi, centers of insurgency. "They're going to do everything they can to see that that opportunity they have succeeds," Mr. Rumsfeld said of the enemy. "And we've got to do everything to see that they fail." Gen. Myers then fielded a question on whether Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, commander of Task Force Olympia in Mosul, had been wise to allow hundreds of soldiers to congregate in a large mess tent where the attacker struck. "Any judgment that Gen. Ham is up there and not worried about force protection is lubricious," Gen. Myers said. "We know how difficult this is, to prevent suicide, people bent on suicide and stopping them. ... This was the insurgents that did this. It's not Gen. Ham that attacked his dining hall. I think he has a very good plan for force protection." Soldiers in Iraq say a new dining hall was being built in Mosul, although it would offer no protection against a suicide bomber. After a soldier on the base was killed by a mortar round near the hall last summer, commanders required diners to wear protective gear. "Think about turning that country over and letting them win, those people who are doing those things," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "It would be a terrible loss for civilized society." ---- Rumsfeld says he's 'truly saddened' by criticism By Dave Moniz, USA TODAY 12/23/2004 6:16 AM http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-12-22-rumsfeld-criticism_x.htm WASHINGTON — Looking more subdued than during most of his public appearances at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld responded to a barrage of criticism Wednesday by saying he cares deeply about the lives of U.S. troops who go in harm's way. One day after 14 U.S. soldiers and four contractors died in a suicide bombing at an Army mess hall near Mosul, Rumsfeld did something he has rarely done in four years on the job: He talked about his feelings. "I am truly saddened by the thought that anyone could have the impression that I or others here are doing anything other than working urgently to see that the lives of the fighting men and women are protected and cared for in every way humanly possible," Rumsfeld said. He said he shares "deeply" the loss family members feel when a soldier dies. And, he said, "Wherever they are stationed around the world, I want every one of the men and women in uniform ... to know that they are in our thoughts and prayers." Rumsfeld's comments mark the first time he has publicly addressed the mounting criticism of his performance during two of the most difficult weeks of his tenure. Republican leaders in Congress, including senators John McCain and Chuck Hagel, and some prominent conservative journalists have attacked Rumsfeld for comments he made during a town hall meeting with troops two weeks ago. At that meeting, a soldier asked Rumsfeld why his unit had to scrounge through junk piles to find protective armor for their trucks. Rumsfeld's lengthy reply included a statement — "You go to war with the Army you have" — that set off a series of bitter critiques. Last week, the newspaper Stars and Stripes reported that Rumsfeld has been using a machine to print his signature on condolence letters sent to the families of U.S. troops killed. He vowed to sign all such notes by hand. A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll released Monday found that 52% of respondents said Rumsfeld should resign. His job-approval rating was 41%. President Bush defended Rumsfeld, saying his Defense secretary was "doing a very fine job." On Wednesday, Rumsfeld said that he has been deeply affected by the sacrifices of Americans who've been killed and injured in combat. "When I meet with the wounded, with their families, or with the families of those who have been lost, their grief is something I feel to my core," he said. -------- voting Ohio Voting Rights Activists Call Electoral Fight The "Biggest Deal Since Selma" Thursday, December 23rd, 2004 Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/23/1541230 Ohio-based journalist Harvey Wasserman reviews the ongoing controversy surrounding the presidential vote in Ohio. Representative John Conyers - the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee - has called on The Associated Press and the five broadcast networks to turn over raw exit poll data collected on Election Day in order to investigate any discrepancies between the data and the certified election results. [includes rush transcript] Groups from across the country are in full swing with their mobilizations for mass-protests at the inauguration of George Bush next month in Washington DC. But as the White House moves ahead selling tickets for as much as $100,000 to some inauguration events, there are many people in this country that believe the celebration is premature. While Bush continues his shaping of a second term cabinet, some within Congress are increasing their calls for a closer look at the results of the November 2 election. Representative John Conyers - the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee - has called on The Associated Press and the five broadcast networks to turn over raw exit poll data collected on Election Day. The Michigan Democrat wants to investigate any discrepancies between the data and the certified election results. Early exit polls indicated that Senator John Kerry was beating President Bush in several key states including Ohio. That state has become the battleground in the fight over who won on November 2. We are joined now by a longtime independent journalist from Ohio, who has been investigating the controversy surrounding the vote in that state. * Harvey Wasserman, is a Senior Editor of the Free Press based in Ohio. Along with Bob Fitrakis and Steve Rosenfeld, he is co-author of the upcoming book Ohio"s Stolen Election: Voices of the Disenfranchised. His latest piece is called "Ohio electoral fight becomes "biggest deal since Selma" as GOP stonewalls." RUSH TRANSCRIPT AMY GOODMAN: Harvey Wasserman is our guest, Senior Editor at the Free Press, based in Ohio. Welcome to Democracy Now! HARVEY WASSERMAN: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Can you talk about the whole controversy? HARVEY WASSERMAN: I live in Columbus. I'm a registered voter in Columbus. They tried to deprive me of my absentee ballot. But we have followed this thing. I write for freepress.org, and my co-editor and I wrote a piece before the election, entitled “12 Ways Bush is Stealing the Ohio Vote,” and frankly, they came up with many, many more. The vote in Ohio was administered by Kenneth Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State, who served simultaneously as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. Prior to the elections, they pulled shenanigans playing around with the registration and the provisional ballots. During the election, on Election Day, they shortchanged many of the inner city polling places of machines so that people wound up waiting three, four, five hours in the rain. We had 11-hour waits at Kenyan College for people to vote, whereas a precinct less than a mile away, there was no wait at all. So, those are the kinds of games they played on Election Day. I could go through for a half hour of what they did, the dirty tricks, straight from the Nixon era, by the way. The overall reality is that the vast majority of votes in Ohio were cast on electronic voting machines that have no paper trail. And many of them were provided by Diebold, the Diebold Corporation, whose owner who lives in central Ohio, famously proclaimed that he would deliver Ohio's electoral votes to George W. Bush. We are now trying to get a recount. The Blackwell administration is stonewalling any recount. You would think if it was a fair election, they would be happy to have a recount. In one instance in Warren County they called out a Homeland Security Alert, and threw out independent observers during the recount. We have had instances where ballots have disappeared, where there's been tampering with the machines. As far as I’m concerned, Ohio is not a democracy. And we believe based on the exit polls that there is no way on earth that George W. Bush carried the state of Ohio, therefore, the election. If he loses Ohio, he loses the election. JUAN GONZALEZ: Harvey, one question, you said that the vast majority of votes were cast on Diebold machines? HARVEY WASSERMAN: Not Diebold. Electronic machines. Some of them were Diebold. JUAN GONZALEZ: The state claims that most of the counties are using punch card balloting, right? HARVEY WASSERMAN: Yes, but you still have the majority of votes being cast on electronic machines. The punch cards themselves are problematic, and in many cases, the punch cards are being counted on Diebold machines. We have had at least two instances of technicians going into polling places and fooling around with the machines, before they could be recounted. We had one instance in Greene County where ballots were left in an open building on a table with no guards. Our election monitors walked into the building on a Saturday. There was nobody there. The ballots were there. The recount had not been done. This is third world stuff. If we want to live in a democracy, we need to go to the Ukraine. It's not possible to do a legitimate recount in Ohio now. We're trying the best we can to see what we can find out, but the fact of the matter is we need a revote. Based on the exit polls, we have had statisticians look at the validity of the exit polls in Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio. We have had one statistician tell us that the odds on the exit polls being wrong in the three states, which they were, -- either the exit polls are wrong or the ballot count was wrong -- the odds against it are 150 million to one. There's no way that George W. Bush won this election. JUAN GONZALEZ: On the recount that the Greens and Libertarians have requested, my understanding is that some counties’ election boards have rebelled even against Blackwell’s directive to do a 3% hand recount of some of the ballots? HARVEY WASSERMAN: Yes. The stonewalling is astounding. You would think we're in Bolivia or another third world country. Kenneth Blackwell, the Secretary of State, in some cases has actually gone along with the recount. The counties themselves are rebelling. I am the requester on a Freedom of Information Act action on the 88 counties in the state of Ohio. The very first response we got from Shelby County, Ohio, indicated they had destroyed key records without which we cannot do a recount. The very first out of the 88. We got a second response from a county that said they would love to have us do a recount, but we have to write and request permission from the private company that programmed the voting machines. AMY GOODMAN: So, what happens in this case? What happens when they say they have destroyed any record of the vote. Isn't that illegal? HARVEY WASSERMAN: Yeah. It's illegal. The people should be, as far as I’m concerned, should be arrested and tried. But it's not going to happen. We cannot have a legitimate recount in the state of Ohio. There is serious doubt whether George W. Bush should be inaugurated on January 20. Thankfully Jesse Jackson has come to town. We’ve had a series of public hearings where people have talked about the harassment, the intimidation, the lack of voting machines, the playing with the provisional ballots. All of this stuff is right out of Kafka. I’ve been an activist for 40 yeas, I have never been more infuriated than hearing these people, mostly African Americans, coming forward and telling how they were deprived of their right to vote on Election Day, and we go further into it and find that the votes cannot be counted. The reality is we had tens of thousands of people in Ohio turned away at the polls on Election Day because the precincts had been shortchanged of voting machines in a systematic and strategic fashion. JUAN GONZALEZ: You know, interestingly, one conversation I had -- all of Ohio went through a redistricting of their voting precincts in 2001. I talked with a county official in Cuyahoga County who said that they had been directed to redraw and create fewer precincts so that the average number of registered voters in Cleveland went up from 600 per precinct to 1,000 per precinct. HARVEY WASSERMAN: Right. And they shortchanged voting machines. JUAN GONZALEZ: That was recommended by Blackwell. HARVEY WASSERMAN: They short-changed the voting machines. In Franklin County, Columbus, the capital where I live, at least one member of the Board of Elections requested of Kenneth Blackwell that paper ballots be made available, and if there were shortages on the voting machines, people could be given paper ballots. Blackwell refused that request, and as a result of that, people were standing in line for hours. AMY GOODMAN: We are talking with Harvey Wassermann, Senior Editor of the Free Press in Ohio, talking about the election of 2004. So, what do you think needs to happen now, and what role is the Democratic Party playing, John Kerry. What was it, $51 million he came out in the black at the end of this election? More money than any presidential candidate has ever had. He could spend it on a recount. What is happening with the Democratic Party? HARVEY WASSERMAN: You know, talk about being infuriated. November 2 was a black day -- a bad day as far as I’m concerned when Bush apparently won the election. A worse day was the next day when John Kerry conceded. His one promise above all was that every vote would be counted. We knew right away -- we knew before the election this was going to be Mississippi in the 1940's basically. They pulled all sorts of stunts. People's votes were not counted. People were not allowed to vote. People were not aloud to register. People were intimidated at the polls. It was right out of reconstruction. John Kerry basically pulled the plug on the deal. The Democrats have not been with us. He sent an 11-point letter to the counties in the state, but they're not following up on it. We have had virtually no help from the Democratic Party. I'm speaking tonight at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon, New York. We're starting to go around the country to speak about this. We need a grassroots upheaval. The fact is that we don't have a democracy. We should have learned in 2000 when they stole the election then. It was worse this year. The 2004 election was more of a travesty to democracy than even 2000. Here we have a situation that was an electronic hijacking of an entire nation's right to vote. These voting machines cannot be monitored. In key states like Florida and Ohio, they pulled more dirty tricks than could you discuss in an hour-long program to prevent people from voting. In Florida, the day before the election, people were waiting five hours to vote because of the short-changing of the voting machines. There was intimidation inside. In Ohio, they put in so-called monitors that were to stand over the shoulder of prospective voters and see if their registrations were done properly. The Secretary of State played games with provisional ballots where if you had a single building where three precincts were located side by side with three tables and you happened to get in the wrong line, wait your four hours to sign your provisional ballot, if you were at the wrong table, they send you to the back of the line at the other table and would not even let you go to the next table over. In contradiction to the way the law was written, they broke the law on Election Day repeatedly to prevent people from voting. It was extremely selective. The white suburban Republican areas had no waiting to vote. There were none of these shenanigans with the provisional ballots and the registration, and so on. It was all aimed at the inner city and college areas. The kids at Kenyan college waited 11 hours to vote. There was a precinct right next door where there was no waiting at all. This was a hijacking of the election. Thankfully, Jesse Jackson, John Conyers and other people have been on it. We are going to have a rally in Columbus January 3. There will be a rally January 6. I will tell you something, a major turning point in American democracy will happen January 6, because we have the black caucus and several other members of congress who will challenge the electoral college, which can be done under a law that was passed in the 1880's in response to another stolen election, but they require the vote of at least one senator, and as the people have saw Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2001, no senator came forward. Now, we have h