NucNews - January 1, 2005 -------- NUCLEAR -------- accidents and safety Nuclear reactor used as 'therapy' IAN JOHNSTON Sat 1 Jan 2005 SCOTSMAN SECRET PAPERS http://news.scotsman.com/health.cfm?id=1772005 HOSPITAL patients were given radiation treatment at a nuclear reactor without proper authorisation or supervision by a doctor, according to newly declassified documents. Memos sent by Scottish Office officials in 1967 noted that the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) was concerned that proper procedures were not being followed when some patients were treated at the Scottish Research Reactor Centre in East Kilbride. At one point in the late 1960s, up to 30 people a day were being treated at the centre. Patients were given small doses of an iron isotope and vitamin B12 containing cobalt iron in connection with work on pernicious anaemia, while others with reduced bone marrow were given doses of phosphorus-32 in hospital. In 1974, another Scottish Office memo reported that the NII was "on the verge of losing patience" over what were described as "misdemeanours" - such as treating patients without the proper authorisation and taking extra nuclear fuel without permission. The official who wrote the latter memo - a member of staff in the Energy New Towns Division of the Scottish Economic Planning Department - joked he was not advising against "travelling downwind of East Kilbride", but trying to detail how the problems at the centre were being addressed. This note, dated 17 July, 1974, said: "I think you should be alerted to the concerns NII are expressing over the breaches of nuclear site licences which have occurred over the past year or so at the centre. "Whilst NII do not doubt the competence of the staff at the centre, they feel that the licensee is less scrupulous in fulfilling the terms of the licence than licensees at other centres in England. "The inspectorate are on the verge of losing patience and intend again to alert the centre’s director that matters must improve. "The sort of misdemeanours encountered are: taking extra nuclear fuel without permission, uprating from 100kW to 300kW but submitting the design nine months late, administering treatment to patients without the proper authorisation procedure being complied with." The reactor centre, which closed in 1995, was administered by Strathclyde University, but was used by several other universities. It also provided prescribed "in vivo" treatment for patients from the Western Regional Hospital Board. The July 1974 memo said: "The whole in vivo irradiation procedure is messy and the responsibility boundaries hazy, but we have this well in hand with NII and SHHD [the Scottish Home and Health Department]. "The purpose of alerting you to this situation is not to spread alarm and despondency, nor to prevent your travelling downwind of East Kilbride, but merely to let you know of the situation and that remedial steps are being taken." Other documents in a Scottish Office file on the reactor - which largely contains documents about which bodies would be liable if any of the patients sued - showed that the NII had been concerned about practices there as early as 1967. -------- europe French Lessons Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship With France, John J. Miller and Mark Molesky, Doubleday, 304 pages by Robert O. Paxton January 17, 2005 issue (posted 1/1/05) The American Conservative http://amconmag.com/2005_01_17/review.html The myth of eternal Franco-American friendship is fair game. John J. Miller, a journalist with National Review, and Mark Molesky, assistant professor of history at Seton Hall University, offer a counter-myth: that France has directed unstinting malice against America from the beginning. The book opens with a blood-curdling narrative of the Deerfield massacre (1704), when Indians abetted by French-Canadian authorities attacked English settlers in western Massachusetts. They killed men, women, and children, scalped some of the victims and ate some of their flesh, and abducted hostages. The writing has verve, and the reader’s face tingles with anger. But Miller/Molesky’s account is one-sided. It portrays Indian violence as something the French deliberately provoked and exploited. When the Anglo-Americans’ Indian allies commit an atrocity, as happened under the young Washington near Pittsburgh in May 1754, it seems an unfortunate accident. Miller/Molesky see the French and Indians as aggressors, the American colonists as their innocent victims. In a broader perspective, however, the Anglo-Americans were expelling the French from North America, and the French were resisting, sometimes cruelly. The French had priority—Quebec’s foundation in 1608 predated the Mayflower by a dozen years—but far fewer settlers. It seems a little forgetful to claim, “the United States does not pose and has never posed any threat to their country.” The French weren’t even the first who resisted Anglo-American expansion. Spain is really “our oldest enemy.” When the English colonists in the Carolinas pushed southwards after founding Charleston in 1670, using Indian surrogates to destroy Spanish forts and missions in what is now Georgia and Florida, the Spanish fought back (admittedly less vigorously than the French). In 1680, they raided English settlements near Charleston. For a similar book about “America’s disastrous relationship with Spain” an author could simply trawl through history for the nasty parts: frontier conflicts in late 17th-century Florida, Spain’s stranglehold on New Orleans in the late 18th century, the Alamo, the Maine, Hemingway fighting Franco in the bars of Pamplona. So why single out France? France obviously gets the goat of many Americans. German Chancellor Schroeder surpassed Chirac in the spring of 2003, rejecting any military operation in Iraq even with UN approval. But neither he nor the Russians aroused much popular anger here. Miller/Molesky show no curiosity about this difference or about whether any of the friction with France could come from this side of the Atlantic. Perhaps a clash of styles provokes a special virulence: the elegantly literary French condescending to nice Americans. A more likely cause is rivalry between two countries that feel entitled, as first democracies, to offer universal moral lessons. Still more likely is American over-expectation based on our aid to the French. We have indeed helped France with thousands of young lives, and in my experience most French admit they “owe their liberty” to the United States, as Jean-Marie Colombani, editor of the Paris daily Le Monde, wrote in his famous editorial “We are all Americans” on Sept. 13, 2001 (a passage omitted by Miller/Molesky, who denounce this article heatedly as “an anti-American diatribe of extraordinary virulence and rage”). But often we have not helped them (as in Algeria or at Suez), or helped them late (as in 1917 and 1944), or caused “collateral damage” like the 50,000 civilian dead in French cities razed by Anglo-American aerial bombardment during World War II. We helped them when we thought it was in our interest. Nothing sours a relationship faster than one side’s overdeveloped sense of largesse. So the Franco-American story is indeed replete with conflict. What Miller/ Molesky have done is furnish maximum negative spin and place most blame on the French. A good example is the famous sea battle off the east coast of England on Sept. 23, 1779, between John Paul Jones’s Bonhomme Richard and the pride of the British Navy, HMS Serapis. Every American schoolboy knows Jones’s proud response (probably apocryphal) to the British captain’s summons to surrender: “I have not yet begun to fight!” Jones’s squadron included three French ships. One French captain, Pierre Landais, aboard Alliance, inexplicably held back. Later, when Serapis and Bonhomme Richard were heavily engaged, wreathed in smoke, Landais came up and fired grapeshot into both combatants. Miller/Molesky have him fire only at Jones’s ship, in typical French perfidy. They credit later rumors that Landais wanted to sink Jones’s ship and claim the victory for himself. They omit details that don’t fit a Francophobic version. The other French captains defeated British ships, though perhaps less dashingly than Jones. No French perfidy there. As for Landais, his behavior during the trip home to Boston in Alliance was so bizarre (he threatened his main American supporter, Arthur Lee, with a carving knife during a quarrel over a roast turkey) that on return he was court-martialed and removed from service in the infant U.S. Navy. Many contemporaries considered Landais insane. Madness, not Frenchness, seems to have been the problem. Miller/Molesky portray French malevolence toward Americans as so uniform and unchanging over the centuries as to seem virtually genetic. Their French are, with occasional exceptions like Lafayette and Raymond Aron, cowardly, cynical, duplicitous, and overfed, bullies when strong and craven when weak. Their Americans are nearly always fair and well meaning. Miller/Molesky write skillfully, with a gift for pejorative shadings. Their French characters never simply “speak”; they “sneer” or “scoff.” Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin is “oily,” Marshal Pétain is “a well-groomed thug and bigot,” Napoleon a “dwarfish hero.” Count Vergennes, foreign minister in 1776, thought God “had endowed his country with a special importance.” These arrogant chauvinists all considered their country superior to others, destined to rule the world. If Americans have similar thoughts, or deal with the French in a thin-skinned, uncooperative, or self-interested way, Miller/Molesky approve. In 1917, U.S. commanding general John J. Pershing adamantly refused to let his troops come under French supreme command (as even the British accepted in the emergency of July 1918). When Charles de Gaulle takes the identical position in 1944 or 1966, he is an unreasonable chauvinist. French aid to the American War of Independence is the Francophile’s exhibit number one. But Miller/Molesky affirm that the French were only pursuing national self-interest in fighting the British—and they fought badly to boot. Afterwards, they showed their true colors by trying to block American westward expansion and preying upon American shipping. But are not governments supposed to serve their perceived national interest? “Realists” or “pragmatists” in foreign policy expect nothing else. In their view, successful diplomacy is the skillful persuasion of other countries that a desired course of action is in the mutual interest—as in the important role France plays today in the NATO peacekeeping force in Afghanistan and in sharing intelligence information about terrorists with the United States. (The latter, at least, is acknowledged in this book.) Miller/Molesky, by contrast, are idealists in foreign policy. For them, alliances rest not on interest but on affection. They divide the world into friends and foes. A friend is not “difficult to control.” Since French governments, with broad public support, pursue an independent foreign policy, France is our foe. This book evaluates as “fawning” the admiration of American realists like Kissinger and Nixon for Charles de Gaulle, whose proud and independent France they considered generally an asset in the Cold War. An idealist foreign policy sounds superficially more “moral” than the calculation of national interest, but it leads easily to self-righteous crusading. Miller/Molesky admit that de Gaulle was good for France. But since they equate alliance with subservience, a Gaullist France must be bad for the United States. Far from reaching obsessively for France’s ancient glory, as this book interprets him, de Gaulle was the quintessential realist. He understood lucidly the limits to France’s power, which enabled him to take the hard but correct decision for Algerian independence. Thereafter he was determined to use his limited power to the utmost to give the French a sense that their country still mattered. His complicated game of vigorous support for Washington during tension over Berlin, Cuba, and Czechoslovakia, alternating with quests for elbowroom during calmer periods, is simply incomprehensible to Miller/Molesky. So they falsify his language, perhaps unconsciously. They quote de Gaulle claiming to be the leader of “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals,” but that famous phrase actually offered Khrushchev “détente … from the Atlantic to the Urals.” Miller/Molesky are vulnerable to such errors because all their French quotations except one, as far as I can determine, come secondhand from someone else’s extracts in English. This flagrant misquotation of de Gaulle came from Brian Crozier, an Australian journalist who imagined that de Gaulle was a crypto-communist. Other factual errors about France mar this book, many trivial, some not. Wagram in 1806 was not France’s last victory (the Marne?), and though many French citizens applauded José Bové’s famous assault on a McDonald’s, Chirac’s government prosecuted him and sent him to prison. At least the authors cannot be accused of contamination by over-familiarity with the details of French life and history. We must admit that Miller/Molesky sometimes let France off the hook. Anti-Semitism does not bother them overly; they give it half a page. They utter not a peep about the French army’s use of torture in Algeria, or about Chirac’s nuclear test in the Pacific in the face of international disapproval. Can we guess why? The French Enlightenment, however, takes heavy fire. Its preference for theory over practice, the archetypical French vice, is accused of spawning 20th-century communism and fascism. Voltaire, astonishingly, “propped up delusions of national glory” instead of “speaking truth to power,” and Rousseau wanted “society razed to the ground before it could be built again,” an idea whose “direct outgrowth” was the violence of the French Revolution. It is surprising to see a Harvard Ph.D. in intellectual history forget that the Enlightenment flourished also in Philadelphia, Berlin, and Edinburgh (Adam Smith), and was frequently pragmatic (the first smallpox vaccinations, for example). Its principal heritage was democratic and libertarian (including the American Constitution), and only by perversion did it contribute something to modern totalitarianism. Miller/Molesky skewer deconstruction gleefully. Ironically, as other reviewers have already observed, their manifest conviction that power consists of shaping the images by which we understand our past makes them closet disciples of Derrida and Foucault. In that spirit they have constructed a wilfully one-track image of the complex history of Franco-American relations. Readers looking for reasons to hate the French, who tolerate selective and slanted scholarship, will applaud. Robert O. Paxton is Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University and author of Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order. -------- india / pakistan India and Pakistan swap list of nuclear facilities ISLAMABAD (AFP) Jan 01, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050101112014.gviwji96.html Nuclear rivals Pakistan and India exchanged lists of their nuclear facilities Saturday in line with a bilateral agreement to hand over such information annually on New Year's Day, the foreign ministry said. The two countries swapped the information under an agreement signed in 1988 on prohibition of attacks on each other's nuclear installations, foreign office spokesman Masood Khan said. "Accordingly, the information on nuclear installations and facilities of both sides was exchanged today through diplomatic channels," the spokesman said in a statement. The agreement between the nuclear rivals was signed on December 31, 1988, and came into force on January 27, 1991. The first such exchange between the two countries was held on January 1, 1992. Under the agreement both Pakistan and India are to refrain from attacking each other's nuclear facilities in the event of a war. India conducted nuclear tests in May 1998 and Pakistan in a tit-for-tat response detonated its own devices a few days later. The rivals have fought three wars, two of them over the Himalayan region of Kashmir which is divided between them and claimed in full by both. After coming close to another war in 2002 they initiated a process of dialogue to resolve all their disputes including the Kashmir issue and have been engaged in a series of fence-mending moves since last year. Last last month the two sides held inconclusive talks on ways to reduce the risk of nuclear war. A draft agreement on advance warning of ballistic missile tests was one of the key topics of the talks between top foreign ministry officials. Although the two countries normally inform each other when holding missile tests, no formal deal was signed. The two sides will meet again at a later date, officials said. ---- A gaffe, or a historic chance? PRAFUL BIDWAI K. Natwar Singh's statement in Seoul urging the two Koreas not to emulate India and Pakistan in crossing the nuclear threshold reopens a worthy debate. The UPA, instead of being defensive, should seize the regional and global disarmament initiative. AHN YOUNG-JOON/AP Foreign Minister K. Natwar Singh with his South Korean counterpart Ban Ki-moon at their meeting in Seoul on December 15. BARELY six months after K. Natwar Singh committed an indiscretion by announcing in United States Secretary of State Colin Powell's presence that India could reconsider its decision opposing the despatch of troops to Iraq, the Foreign Minister again seemingly stirred up a hornet's nest, in Seoul. In an interview to /The Korea Times /(published on December 14), he distanced himself (to a limited extent) from the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government's decision to cross the nuclear Rubicon and said: "Even though we are ourselves a nuclear power, we support complete nuclear disarmament for Korea." He also said India's previous government (of the NDA) was "responsible for the decision to enter the nuclear standoff with neighbouring Pakistan". The Korean newspaper interpreted this statement to mean that Natwar Singh was urging the two Koreas not to "follow India's example in becoming a nuclear power". Two days later, /Indian Express /(December 16) further extrapolated this interpretation and charged him with having "virtually expressed regret over India's current nuclear status". It also said that this ran counter to the United Progressive Alliance's (UPA) commitment to a "credible minimum nuclear deterrent" and minimised and denied what it called "the role that various Congress leaders had played in India's nuclear journey". The NDA seized upon the /Indian Express /story to pillory the government. The Bharatiya Janata Party, in particular, accused the UPA of "belittling the country's achievement" and beating a retreat from the country's nuclear weapons policy, on which "there is consensus". Prime Minister Manmohan Singh went on the defensive and put forward an apologetic statement in Parliament reassuring the NDA that Natwar Singh's statement did not signify a change in official policy, which remains unchanged: "India is a nuclear power and a responsible nuclear power... I categorically say there is no uncertainty in our nuclear policy." The Prime Minister offered the same solemn assurance again on December 21. In reality, it is open to doubt whether Natwar Singh committed a major breach of policy or propriety. His unembellished quote, free of interpretation, merely said that "we hadn't crossed the threshold for 50 years. And the Congress Party didn't, it was the other party". He then added: "But regret would be futile... you can't put it back in the tube, it's out." This is fully in keeping with the UPA's own stated commitment to working for complete global nuclear disarmament and updating Rajiv Gandhi's worthy and thoughtful three-stage plan to achieve this. Natwar Singh's observation about the NDA having taken the decision to cross the nuclear threshold in 1998 is factually accurate and is fully in keeping with the freedom of an individual member of the UPA Cabinet to make a personal statement. It is even more doubtful, indeed quite incorrect, if there is, as former NDA Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh alleged, a "national consensus" on the May 1998 Pokharan-II nuclear tests and the policy followed thereafter to turn India into a full-fledged nuclear weapons power, with an ambitious arsenal. As the Communist Party of India (Marxist) Member of Parliament Nilotpal Basu rhetorically asked in Parliament on December 16, is it at all permissible to call the "great divide across the polity" following the nuclear test a "consensus." To get the basic facts straight, the NDA in March/April 1998 had promised to conduct a strategic review of India's security and revise India's nuclear policy. Then, without conducting any such review, it went ahead and detonated five nuclear weapons on May 11 and 13. The decision to do so was never discussed in the Vajpayee Cabinet or its strategic affairs committee. It was taken in unseemly secrecy. India's defence services chiefs were informed of the impending tests only two days before May 11 and Defence Minister Geroge Fernandes on that very day. It is abundantly clear, however, that the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), an /extra-constitutional and publicly unaccountable body/, was privy to the decision. It was consulted, and in all probability mandated the fateful decision. As the present sarasanghachalak, K.S. Sudarshan, then the RSS's Number 3 leader, boasted in an interview, the BJP had every intention to carry out a nuclear blast in 1996 too, when it ruled for an ignominious 13 days, but there wasn't enough time to do so. The Pokharan-II tests came in for sharp criticism from the Centre-Left component of the political spectrum, as well as civil society. The Left parties were unsparing in their attack on them. At least two former Prime Ministers (H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral) deplored the NDA's capitulation to "the nuclear lobby". The Congress party was divided. Party president Sonia Gandhi had on May 11 drafted a statement criticising the tests, but this was pre-empted by senior Congress leader Sharad Pawar's premature congratulation of India's nuclear scientists for their "achievement". (For details, and a review of the Parliamentary debate which followed, in which the majority of MPs who spoke criticised the tests, see my book, co-authored with Achin Vanaik, /South Asia on a Short Fuse: Nuclear Politics and the Future of Global Disarmament/, OUP, New Delhi, 2000.) It is noteworthy that the Congress' criticism was spearheaded by none other than the present Prime Minister. In the 1998 monsoon session, Manmohan Sigh warned of the consequences of the tests and a costly arms race, which would send defence expenditure skyrocketing? to a point where "there would be nothing left to defend". Meanwhile, a broad cross-section of intellectuals, including social scientists, physicists and biologists, besides social activists, mobilised themselves to protest against the tests. In the weeks that followed, the number of groups and individuals which demonstrated in the streets vastly exceeded the minuscule mobilisation organised by the Sangh Parivar, exposing the parody of the CNN-driven image of "the people" jubilating over the nuclear blasts as the authentic representation of the public mood. Since then, the movement for nuclear disarmament and peace, although still small, has gathered momentum. The establishment of the broad-based Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace in November 2000, supported by over 250 people's movement groups and social activists' organisations, its second very successful National Convention in Jaipur in November 2004, and the holding of the Anti-War Assembly in Hyderabad in December, testify to this. Opinion polls show that more than two-thirds of Indians polled - in one case, 73 per cent - oppose the manufacture or use of nuclear weapons by India. This is reflected on the political plane too. The Left parties, now with their largest-ever presence in the Lok Sabha, demand that India must unconditionally roll back the nuclear weapons programme to the point of dismantling weapons and that New Delhi must return to the disarmament agenda. The rationale underlying the opposition to nuclearisation is unassailable. It is greatly reinforced by experience over the past six and a half years. This experience, to put it starkly, is /embarrassingly negative/. Nuclear weapons have not made India more secure. Just the opposite. Today, millions of innocent citizens are vulnerable to nuclear strikes from across the border, especially from weapons that can be carried by missiles, against which /no defence is possible/. The same is true of Pakistani civilians, who too can be reduced to specs of radioactive dust in devastating attacks by Indian missiles. Nuclearisation has failed to impart stability or maturity to the India-Pakistan strategic relationship. On the contrary, it has encouraged /rank adventurism/. The two states' leaders openly taunted and threatened each other with a nuclear attack both during the Kargil War of 1999 and during their eyeball-to-eyeball military confrontation, with a million soldiers, over 10 long months in 2002. Nuclear weapons will forever act as an enormously complicating factor in any military tension between India and Pakistan. Nuclear deterrence involves both elaborate preparations to kill lakhs of civilian non-combatants /and /the active will to do so. As earlier argued often in this column, deterrence is a fraught, indeed dangerous, doctrine on which to base security. During the Cold War, it repeatedly produced crises, generating panic reactions and bringing the globe perilously close to catastrophe - despite the colossal sums invested by the U.S. and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in command and control systems, equivalent to five times India's current gross domestic product. Given the peculiarities of the India-Pakistan situation, where there is no strategic distance worth the name between the two, and with numerous potential flashpoints and a history of rivalry breaking into war, nuclear deterrence is simply unacceptable. India and Pakistan are courting serious trouble by relying on deterrence - a /historic blunder/, if there ever was one. The pro-bomb lobby's fond hope that nuclear weapons would expand India's room for manoeuvre in world politics has also been belied. India has accepted unequal treaties and lopsided economic bargains, especially those imposed by the U.S., to ward off pressure on its nuclear weapons programme. As for the assertion that nuclear weapons enhance a nation's international standing, it is only necessary to look next door. Until the September 11 attacks, nuclear Pakistan had become a virtual untouchable state. India's global stature has admittedly risen recently. But that is because of the Information Technology business, the stability and vibrancy of our democracy, and to an extent, the perception that India has now entered the league of fast-growing economies - not because of, but despite, nuclear weapons. Therefore, the issue Natwar Singh has raised is highly pertinent. It is a timely reminder of the urgency of returning to the disarmament agenda. The UPA has committed itself to fighting for global disarmament. Manmohan Singh reiterated this on December 21 in Parliament when he said: "We are a country with a civilisational heritage for complete nuclear disarmament. We will join hands with other countries to promote complete disarmament on a non-discriminatory basis globally." The UPA has, however, fought shy of any /regional initiative /for nuclear restraint or risk-reduction. It complacently, but falsely, claims that nuclear weapons are a "stabilising" factor in the subcontinent. Recently, at the discussions on nuclear and conventional military confidence-building measures in Islamabad, the two governments blithely declared that Kashmir is no longer "a nuclear flashpoint". This is pure, unadulterated, wishful thinking. So long as Kashmir remains a contentious issue, it will trigger suspicion, hostility and military crises - with a potential for escalation to the nuclear level. It is of the utmost importance that India take the initiative for regional nuclear restraint and disarmament along with Pakistan - independently of working for the global elimination of nuclear weapons. The most important first steps in such an initiative should be self-evident: agreements not to deploy nuclear weapons, a moratorium on nuclear tests and missile test-flights for one year, extending to two, three years and more, and an accord to keep nuclear bombs/warheads /separated /from delivery vehicles. This should pave the way for longer-term agreements to stop producing fissile material, dismantle missiles and create a /nuclear weapons-free zone in South Asia/. Sage advice to this effect comes from no less the Harkishan Singh Surjeet, the CPI(M) general secretary. In a seminal article in /People's Democracy /(October 3), Surjeet argues for regional nuclear disarmament in South Asia, endorsing Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf's statement (to NBC News and CNN) that he did not rule out the possibility of India and Pakistan jointly announcing a decision to dismantle their nuclear arsenals. However, he was of the view that "this has to be initiated by India". He further added that "it has to be bilateral. It has to be between India and Pakistan." Surjeet distinguishes this from the proposal made in the 1980s by General Zia-ul-Haq, which was compatible with a U.S. "nuclear umbrella" for Pakistan, which then may or may not have had a nuclear capability. However, says Surjeet, "now that both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, the first thing is to assure the whole world that no nuclear conflagration would be allowed to take place, much less start, in this part of the world. Hence the need for both the countries to display maturity and give up all talk of deterrence and the like. The last six years are a witness to the sordid fact that deterrence has... only aggravated the anxiety of the world peoples about the fate of humanity on the earth. Then, pending a satisfactory resolution of the NPT [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty], disarmament and other such issues, the /imperative /for both the countries is that they address each other's concerns on the nukes issue, progressively get rid of nuclear weapons and together fight for general and global disarmament." Surjeet continues: "Insofar as the General's contention that `this has to be initiated by India' is concerned, there is no harm if India initiates the process. It is not only India's duty as the biggest country of the subcontinent; it will even add to India's prestige in the world and give a momentum to the fight for total and general disarmament. Committed to the cause of disarmament, therefore, the present UPA regime must think about how the subcontinent may be denuclearised and pressure mounted on other nuclear weapons states that they too must eliminate their nuclear arsenals". There is not a moment to be lost in moving towards such a sensible nuclear policy. By making his statement in Seoul, Natwar Singh has, perhaps inadvertently, opened a new, historic opportunity for course correction. All peace-loving people must seize it. -------- korea Danger of nuclear war mounting on Korean peninsula: North Korea SEOUL (AFP) Jan 01, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050101030421.xt0ddhvc.html North Korea said Saturday that the risk of a nuclear war was mounting on the Korean peninsula as the United States attempts to "stifle" it by force. It urged Washington to drop its "hostile" policy toward the communist state and demanded solidarity among all Koreans in order to drive out US troops stationed in South Korea, calling them the "very source of a nuclear war." The statement was made in a New Year editorial run in North Korean newspapers. "The danger of a nuclear war is growing on the Korean peninsula as the days go by owing to the US moves to stifle the DPRK (North Korea)," the editorial said, according to Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency. "All Koreans should stage a powerful struggle for peace against war in order to drive the US troops out of South Korea, remove the very source of a nuclear war and defend the peace and security on the Korean peninsula," it said. South Korea has been hosting US troops since the three-year Korean war ended in a tense truce in 1953. The number of these troops currently stands at 32,500 after the United States redeployed 5,000 soldiers out of South Korea, including 3,600 who were sent to Iraq in August last year. Next year 3,000 more will go, followed by 2,000 in 2006 and 2,500 in 2007 and 2008 as part of a global redeployment plan. The editorial said 2004 witnessed a "dynamic struggle against the US imperialists' evermore undisguised brigandish aggression and high-handed practices on the international arena." It urged the United States "to give up its attempt to stifle the DPRK by force of arms and make a switchover in its hostile policy toward it." Tensions between North Korea and the United States increased when a standoff erupted in October 2002 over Pyongyang's suspected nuclear weapons programme. Three rounds of multilateral talks, including the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States, have since then taken place but produced little tangible results. North Korea boycotted a fourth round of the talks scheduled for Beijing in September to wait out the November US presidential elections, according to many analysts. -------- terrorism Overblown terrorist threats Posted: January 1, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern WorldNetDaily.com http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42198 Now that President Bush has been re-elected and Franks-Bremer-Tenet awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Washington Post has apparently decided to spill the beans about the true "weapons of mass destruction" threat. In particular, Dafna Linzer spilled the beans about the nuke threat and John Mintz about the chem-bio weapons threat. You ought to read Linzer-Mintz, but you'll learn much more by reading the annual reports – beginning in 1999 – of the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction. Here are some relevant excerpts from the panel's first report. Many government officials and concerned citizens believe that "it is not a question of if, but when" an incident will occur that involves the use by a terrorist of a chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapon – a so-called "weapon of mass destruction" (WMD) – that is designed, intended, or has the capability to cause "mass destruction" or "mass casualties." [W]ith the exception of nuclear weapons, none of the unconventional weapons by itself is, in fact, capable of wreaking mass destruction, at least not in structural terms. Indeed, the terminology "weapons of mass casualties" may be a more accurate depiction of the potentially lethal power that could be unleashed by chemical, biological or non-explosive radiological weapons. The distinction is more than rhetorical and is critical to understanding the vastly different levels of technological skills and capabilities, weapons expertise, production requirements and dissemination or delivery methods needed to undertake an effective attack using either chemical or biological weapons in particular. The report explains, with some specificity, the challenges involved in each of the four device or agent topic areas – biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological – which suggests that some public pronouncements and media depictions about the ease with which terrorists might wreak genuine mass destruction or inflict widespread casualties do not always reflect the significant hurdles currently confronting any non-state entity seeking to employ such weapons. Although the collapse of the Soviet Union heightened Western fears about security at Russian military facilities, it appears that Russian strategic and tactical weapons are perhaps more secure than had been initially feared. But even if terrorists were able to steal or acquire through black-market purchase a stolen nuclear weapon, they would still face a number of significant obstacles in using or detonating it. Moreover, many tactical nuclear weapons, and most strategic nuclear devices, are equipped with permissive action links (PALs) or other protective mechanisms designed to prevent accidental or unauthorized detonation. In addition, some nuclear devices have tamper-proof seals that will disable the weapon if unauthorized personnel attempt to disassemble it. It would be extremely difficult, therefore, for terrorists to circumvent or overcome these built-in protective measures. Building a nuclear device capable of producing mass destruction presents Herculean challenges for terrorists and indeed even for states with well-funded and sophisticated programs. According to one analysis, minimum requirements include "personnel, skills, information, money, facilities, equipment, supplies, security, special nuclear materials ... and, usually, other specialized and hard-to-obtain material." That being said, it is clear that certain types of nuclear devices are easier to create than others. Two types of weapons systems, for example, can create nuclear fission: the implosion device and the "gun" type. In the former, explosives compress a sphere of HEU or plutonium into a small ball, thus achieving supercriticality and a nuclear chain reaction. Even the simplest implosion weapon, however, requires the fabrication of complex components, such as high-explosive lenses, high-performance detonation systems, and fusing and firing circuitry. The gun-type device, on the other hand, employs HEU exclusively. Using a high explosive, the system fires a subcritical HEU projectile into a subcritical cylinder of HEU to form a solid mass of critical material. Although it uses relatively scarce HEU, the gun-type device is considered technically easier to fabricate; and many analysts accordingly argue that terrorists attempting to make a bomb "in house" will build a gun-type device. Note that the panel focused – as does the Department of Homeland Security – on domestic response to terrorist acts, not on preventing them. That's just as well, since it will be virtually impossible to prevent all, or even most, high-probability low-consequence acts. However, it would have been possible to prevent a terrorist nuke attack. But then Bush accused Iraq, Iran and North Korea of developing nukes to give to terrorists for use against us. Bush launched a "pre-emptive" strike against Iraq and is currently threatening similar strikes against Iran and North Korea. Result? Stay tuned. Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico. -------- u.n. ElBaradei bids for new IAEA term By Bethany Bell BBC News, Vienna January 1, 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4137487.stm The Egyptian diplomat has frequently been in the spotlight The head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Mohammed ElBaradei has emerged as the only candidate for the post of the agency's next director general. Mr ElBaradei hopes to be re-elected for a third term, but the US does not want his mandate to be renewed. Privately, some US officials have complained that Mr ElBaradei - who has held the post since 1997 - has been too soft on both Iran and Iraq. He has led the International Atomic Energy Agency through turbulent times. Tensions The deadline for nominations for the post of director general has passed, leaving the Egyptian diplomat as the only candidate. Under his watch the agency has had to deal with several major international crises, fielding the UN's nuclear inspectors in Iraq during the run up to the war and coping with the rows over controversial atomic activities in North Korea and Iran. Mr ElBaradei's re-election is by no means a fait accompli Over the past year, Mr ElBaradei has also overseen the agency's investigations into the nuclear black market that was led by a Pakistani scientist. But Mr ElBaradei's positions on Iraq and Iran have led to tensions with the United States. The Americans have made it clear they don't want him to stand for a third term. Now, although no other candidate has applied for the position, Mr ElBaradei's re-election is by no means a fait accompli. The matter now has to be considered by the IAEA's board of governors who appoint a new head either by consensus or by a two-thirds majority vote. In light of the US position, consultations could take several months. -------- u.s. nuc weapons With a Little Boy in the back By Catherine Auer January/February 2005 pp. 6-8 (vol. 61, no. 01) Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=jf05auer In today's security-obsessed, post-9/11 era, one might think that it would be difficult to haul a convincing replica of an atomic bomb across the country. Not so, as John Coster-Mullen inadvertently proved in October 2004. "We drove a full-scale WMD 800 miles across the United States and no one stopped or questioned us," Coster-Mullen told me. "In fact, it was quite easy!" In this case, the "weapon of mass destruction" would more appropriately be called a "weapon of mass duplication"--a nearly 600-pound, shiny steel replica of "Little Boy," the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, painstakingly recreated by Coster-Mullen with help from his son Jason. Last year, the president of the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum in Utah contacted Coster-Mullen and commissioned him to create a Little Boy look-alike for the airfield's modest museum. The 509th Composite Group, which was responsible for "delivering" the atomic bombs to Japan, trained during World War II with B-29 bombers at the isolated Wendover Field. Building the imitation Little Boy--naturally without the original's inner workings--was a tremendous amount of work, Coster-Mullen said, and it gave him a "whole new appreciation for what those scientists and technicians did almost 60 years ago." With the benefit of modern metal-working tools, it took Coster-Mullen and his son a full week at a metal fabrication shop in Milwaukee to cut all the sheet metal to cover a wooden skeleton. The final assembly took the father-son team another three weeks of 12-18 hour days at what they dubbed the "Los Alamos East-Waukesha Assembly Facility"--otherwise known as the Coster-Mullens' Wisconsin garage. Building a Little Boy replica is not Coster-Mullen's first "nuclear project"; the historian is also author of Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man (reviewed in the November/December 2004 Bulletin), a book that covers the design and construction of the weapons in exhaustive detail. It's not surprising, then, that he applied the same attention to detail to his museum-bound mock bomb. "We tried to duplicate everything we saw on the actual bomb," Coster-Mullen said. He enlarged photos of the real Little Boy, taken at different angles, in order to reproduce the finer points--like the correct bolt position on the nose and the location of the pullout wires on top. "We wanted it to look as if it was just ready to be lifted into the Enola Gay," he said. Except for the bomb's antennas, which Coster-Mullen included on his replica; on the real bomb, the antennas weren't installed until after the bomb was lifted into the B-29. He wanted to match everything, right down to the shade of paint--which is harder than one might imagine, Coster-Mullen said, since there is no record of exactly what color the real Little Boy was painted. (He ended up choosing a very dark green.) When the replica was ready, Coster-Mullen loaded it into a bright yellow Penske moving truck with a forklift. As it rested on a specially made stand, he and Jason put on the finishing touches--lift lugs, safety wires, pullout wires, electrical plugs, and the antennas. The mock bomb's final destination was Wendover, but before giving his fake Little Boy to the museum, Coster-Mullen drove it to the Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas, for a surprise appearance at a 509th Composite Group reunion. During World War II, Boeing's Wichita plant manufactured hundreds of B-29 Stratofortress bombers--the kind that dropped the atomic bombs. Since 2000, volunteers at Boeing, in conjunction with the U.S. Aviation Museum, have been restoring an original B-29 to flying condition. It was in front of this partly restored bomber, Doc, that many surviving members and widows of the 509th, including Enola Gay crew and one survivor of the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, signed the replica. But before that could happen, Coster-Mullen had to get his fake bomb past Boeing security. "They knew we were coming," Coster-Mullen said. "But here's this atomic bomb inside our truck, and we were like, gulp! Our contact drove up at the right moment and greased the skids for us to get in." When the reunion attendees saw the replica, "Jaws dropped," Coster-Mullen said. "We were not quite prepared for the response we got." Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets signed the replica with a silver permanent marker--in the same place he signed the original. Coster-Mullen recounted that upon seeing the bomb, Tibbets said half-jokingly, "I've seen one of these before." After the signing and speeches in Wichita, Coster-Mullen handed the truck keys to James Petersen, president of the Wendover Airfield Museum. His son, Thomas Petersen, is the museum's historian, who told me that when he saw the replica he thought first about "how such a 'small' thing so greatly changed the course of human history," and then chuckled at the possibility of his father being pulled over while driving the bomb replica to the museum. The Wendover Airfield Museum will exhibit the Little Boy replica in a limited-access room beginning in late 2004 as part of a special display on the 509th Composite Group. "The bomb represents an important piece of world, national, and Utah history, and we wanted to be able to help the visitors be able to make the connection from this quiet airfield to the rest of the world we live in," Petersen said. "[It's] kind of like being able to see the 'shot heard 'round the world.'" The Wendover replica is finished, but the "Waukesha Assembly Facility" may have more bomb-making days ahead--Coster-Mullen says two other sites have contacted him about building Little Boy or Fat Man replicas. ---- Tell Me No Lies Edited by John Pilger Jonathan Cape, 655pp, $35 January 1, 2005 Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/news/Books/Tell-Me-No-Lies/2004/12/31/1104344979251.html?oneclick=true John Pilger gathers journalism's revelations that have shaken the world, writes Wendy Bacon. Photo - Atomic aftermath: the destruction of Hiroshima, Japan, after the bombing in 1945 http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2004/12/31/hiroshima_wideweb__430x323.jpg As Columbia journalism professor James Carey once wrote, while everyday reportage tells us the who, what, when and where of events, it usually fails to chart the deeper, less accessible level that lies below - the how and why. In Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, John Pilger presents an impressive collection of investigations, cover-ups and reports of crimes against humanity by writers who challenged these limitations. In his introduction, Pilger, an Australian who has twice been named British journalist of the year, describes his contributors as those who refuse to collaborate with "secretive power" even if it means they are loathed. They "push back screens, peer behind facades, lift rocks ... [and] alert their readers to vital, hidden truths". Their reports span a 60-year period from Martha Gellhorn's 1945 description of the skeletons of Dachau who "sat in the sun and searched themselves for lice ... like nothing you will ever see if you are lucky"; to Robert Fisk's account last year from the Baghdad mortuary on a "week's cull" of Iraqis whose relatives, waiting beside a lake of sewage, weep that "no one cares". AdvertisementAdvertisement For readers for whom the title suggests a collection of exposes, the breadth of Pilger's choices will be surprising. Alongside such famous stories as fellow Australian Philip Knightley's thalidomide scandal and Seymour Hersh's investigation of how US soldiers massacred hundreds of civilians at My Lai in 1968, there are reporters whose work simply, but no less importantly, bears witness to horrific events. These include Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya's report about the refugee mother who is alive physically but "dead to the world" because contract soldiers in a "dreadful and cynical atrocity" shot her children when she was driving them and her dead husband to his burial. Politkovskaya wrote, "You probably think I am writing all this to stir your pity ... But my notes have quite a different purpose, they are written for the future. They are the testimony of the innocent victims of the new Chechnyan war, which is why I record all the detail I can." The anthology ends with a tribute to Edward Said, who died while this book was in preparation. Said saw himself as an investigator of the way that ideas and language can obscure the truth. He declares in this extract: "The language of suffering and concrete daily life has either been hijacked or it has been so perverted as, in my opinion, to be useless except as pure fiction deployed as a screen for the purpose of more killing and painstaking torture - slowly, fastidiously, inexorably." While Said's statement reminds us that media have often hidden the truth as much as revealed it, this book is a testament to those who struggle to find words to penetrate his "screen" to communicate to their readers the humanity of victims and the injustice they witness. Australian Wilfred Burchett, the first journalist to visit Hiroshima after it was bombed, returned to a Tokyo press conference at which a high-ranking US official attempted to discredit his "Warning to the World" report by denying there was any such thing as radiation caused by the atomic bomb. Burchett's account ends with him saying that he observed fish in Hiroshima turning upside down as they entered a stretch of river and dying within seconds. "I'm afraid you have fallen victim to Japanese propaganda," said the official and sat down. T.D. Allman was paying tribute to Burchett when he wrote that genuinely objective journalism "not only gets the facts right, it gets the meaning of facts right. It is compelling not only today, but stands the test of time". It is with these words that Pilger begins his introduction to this collection. Journalists as "outsiders" and the resistance reporters and sources meet in telling their stories is a theme throughout the book. For a year after US soldiers murdered 500 women, children and older men in My Lai, a discharged soldier tried to interest US media in the disturbing events he had witnessed. His story was finally taken up not by any of the 600 accredited reporters in Vietnam but by a young freelancer, the now famous Hersh, whom Pilger describes as "an outsider who knows how to mine on the inside and is proud of his enemies". These days, radiation sickness and the My Lai massacre are accepted fact. Not so some more recent contributions that still lie in contested territory, often pushed to the margins of dominant media. Felicity Arbuthnot's account of increasing cancer among Iraqi children is a shocking reminder of an ongoing but buried story of the consequences of depleted uranium weaponry being used there. This book will serve many purposes. It is a powerful demonstration that reporting at its best may involve resisting rather than catering to prevailing orthodoxies and that the line between journalism, history, literature and powerful social analysis is blurred. As a single read, I found it overwhelming, but I will drop into and out of it in the future. There will be something memorable here for everyone interested in non-fiction. For my part, I cannot forget Fisk's horror when he realised that the barricade of muck he clambered upon in the Palestinian camp in Lebanon in 1982 was a shifting mass of massacred limbs and heads; Eric Schlosser's Salvadoran immigrant worker beheaded by an unsafe machine in a meat processing plant in Nebraska; and Pilger's shadows of children in the silence and devastation of Cambodia in 1979. As I read, I made a list of books to read in 2005 by the authors here. This seemed as good a sign as any of a successful anthology. Wendy Bacon is an associate professor in journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney. -------- u.s. nuc facilities -------- new mexico NM: State concerned about proposed cuts in number of waste tests By From The Associated Press Jan 1, 2005, 02:37 am http://www.currentargus.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=569&num=10871 ALBUQUERQUE — The New Mexico Environment Department contends proposed cuts in tests of radioactive waste being shipped to New Mexico would violate federal hazardous waste regulations. The U.S. Department of Energy wants to eliminate some testing of waste destined for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad. DOE officials believe the tests, required by the state to ensure no dangerous chemicals get loose at WIPP, aren’t needed. But in a formal response Thursday, the Environment Department concluded the proposed cuts conflict with federal law governing the waste disposal. “Accurate characterization of all wastes that are destined for WIPP is necessary to ensure that the waste will not adversely impact human health or the environment,” the NMED notice states. Energy Department officials could not be reached Thursday for comment. WIPP’s state-issued operating permit requires a gas sample from each drum to be tested for explosives or other dangerous chemicals. DOE wants that requirement removed, saying the tests are expensive and unneeded. More than 40,000 drums have been tested so far at a cost of $600 per test without a single case of dangerous chemicals being found, DOE officials have said. Because the state has regulatory authority over WIPP, eliminating the tests requires action by the state Environment Department. State officials for much of the year have been reviewing the DOE’s plan to carry out legislative direction first introduced by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., in the fall of 2003. He had included language in the annual DOE appropriation bill reducing the testing required of waste sent to WIPP. -------- MILITARY Out of Iraq, Now - When Will We Ever Learn? Weekend Edition January 1 / 2, 2005 By DAVID KRIEGER CounterPunch http://www.counterpunch.org/krieger01012005.html I believe in hope and the proposition that we can build a better world through our personal efforts. But I also believe that we must make a cold, hard appraisal of where we stand if we are to achieve change for the better. We cannot avoid the reality that we enter the New Year deeply bogged down in the quagmire of war. As with all wars, the war in Iraq is neither simple nor predictable. We are learning once again that raw military power is not sufficient to prevail, even against an opponent vastly inferior in military strength. For those of us who lived through the war in Vietnam, it is both sad and distressing that that war was not sufficient to teach this lesson to the present leadership of the United States. As with Vietnam, there is a growing unease among the people of the United States about this "war of choice" in Iraq. More than 1,300 Americans have died there and many more have been injured for life. The number of Iraqi casualties is far higher, perhaps higher than 100,000. And there is no end in sight. The Vietnam War ended when the people of the United States had enough and withdrew their support for the war. Gradually that is happening now, but the people of the United States want to believe their leaders when they say that the war is progressing. We are living in the bubble of a myth. The media has a critical responsibility for reporting on the war as it is so that the American people can make an informed choice about continuing to send their sons and daughters to die in the cities and on the roadways of Iraq. We should not forget that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that this is what the United Nations inspectors were telling us prior to the war being initiated in March 2003. If we want to understand why this war has gone so terribly wrong, we should not forget our failure to follow the law and procedures of the United Nations. Nor should we forget our tactics of "shock and awe," nor the resulting dead and injured children of Iraq. I remember Ali Ishmael Abbas, the 12-year-old boy who lost his parents and other members of his family as well as his arms in a US bombing attack. Ali was not "collateral damage." He is the Iraqi face of this war. But what is the American face of this war? Is it Donald Rumsfeld, smug and arrogant, telling American soldiers that their protective armor is insufficient because "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time"? It was Rumsfeld, along with George Bush, who chose the date and time of the war. The tragic miscalculation of consequences has not affected Bush's confidence in Rumsfeld to continue as Secretary of Defense. In war, it is generally not the leaders who are killed, nor their children. Rumsfeld and Bush remain in power, while Ali Ishmael Abbas will go through his life without his arms. More than 1,300 American parents will go through their lives without sons or daughters who have died for reasons unfathomable and subject to change. And millions of Iraqis have been personally affected by this war, with almost every family having lost someone or knowing someone who has. The full consequences of this war are unknowable, but the very least we might have learned is that war should never be a simple choice of power, nor should it ever be a first choice. There is no goal more important for Americans in the New Year than ending this war and bringing home our troops. It will not end well for the United States, but the sooner we withdraw from Iraq the sooner the Iraqis can seek the normalization of their country and we can normalize ours. We don't have the right legally or morally to try to impose democracy abroad by force of arms, but we do have the obligation to attempt to maintain our democracy at home. Should we fail to extricate ourselves from the quagmire in Iraq, we will continue to provoke international terrorism, increasing the risk to the future of our own democracy and well-being. David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and co-author of Nuclear Weapons and the World Court. -------- africa Ugandan President: War on Rebels to Resume By HENRY WASSWA Associated Press Writer Jan 1, 2002 5:18 PM EST http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/UGANDA_REBELS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME GULU, Uganda (AP) -- President Yoweri Museveni on Saturday said the army will resume all-out war on rebels in northern Uganda, charging that the insurgents rejected a cease-fire deal that had been expected to open the way for political talks on ending the 18-year civil war. The government, however, will continue negotiating with the rebels in an effort to find a political solution to the conflict in which thousands have been killed and more than a million forced from their homes, Museveni said during New Year's celebrations. The Lord's Resistance Army rebels have waged a campaign of murder, rape and abductions in northern Uganda. Led by the elusive Joseph Kony, they replenish their ranks by abducting children and forcing them to become fighters, porters or concubines. Rebels broke the truce first early Saturday, according to a government spokesman, ambushing an army supply truck in Alero, a village 2 miles west of Gulu, injuring four soldiers. "They started operations before us, this is what they have been preparing for in the past 47 days," said army spokesman Maj. Shaban Bantariza. Ugandan military "operations will not cease ever again until the Kony group irreversibly commit themselves to come out of the bush," Museveni said Saturday, after the 47-day truce expired. Museveni had declared the unilateral cease-fire in a part of northern Uganda to allow rebel commanders to discuss plans to open peace talks with the government. But on Friday, government and rebel negotiators failed to agree on the terms of a negotiated truce. Museveni blamed the rebels for the collapse. "The combination of both the military option and dialogue will bring peace in northern Uganda," he said. -------- asia How to Help From Afar Saturday, January 1, 2005 Washington Post; Page A17 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40084-2004Dec31?language=printer Here are some of the U.S.-based international development and humanitarian organizations accepting donations to help victims of the tsunami that devastated South Asia. Most groups recommend cash donations rather than supplies. • American Red Cross Contributions can be made online by going to www.amazon.com and following instructions on the home page. Donations also can be sent to the International Response Fund, P.O. Box 37243, Washington, D.C. 20013. For more information about donating, call 800-435-7669. For information about friends or relatives who might have been victims, call the State Department at 888-407-4747, Office of Overseas Citizens Affairs. Callers can expect frequent busy signals in the days after a disaster. • AmeriCares 88 Hamilton Ave. Stamford, Conn. 06902 800-486-4357 http://www.americares.org • Baptist World Aid Asia Tidal Waves 405 N. Washington St. Falls Church, Va. 22046 703-790-8980 http://www.bwanet.org/bwaid • CARE 151 Ellis St. NE Atlanta, Ga. 30303 800-521-2273 http://www.care.org • Latter-Day Saint Charities Welfare Services Emergency Response 50 E. North Temple St. Room 701 Salt Lake City, Utah 84150-6800 801-240-3544 E-mail: ldscharities@ldschurch.org • Lutheran World Relief South Asia Tsunami 700 Light St. Baltimore, Md. 21230 410-230-2700 http://www.lwr.org • Oxfam America Asian Earthquake Fund P.O. Box 1211 Albert Lea, Minn. 56007-1211 800-776-9326 http://www.oxfamamerica.org • Project HOPE Asia Tsunami Response 255 Carter Hall Lane Millwood, Va. 22646 800-544-4673 http://www.projecthope.org • Salvation Army World Service Office South Asia Relief Fund 615 Slaters Lane Alexandria, Va. 22313 703-684-5528 http://www.salvationarmyusa.org • Save the Children USA 54 Wilton Rd. Westport, Conn. 06880 800-728-3843 http://www.savethechildren.org Source: American Council for Voluntary International Action, an alliance of U.S.-based international development and humanitarian nongovernmental organizations. For a complete listing of the council's organizations, go to http://www.interaction.org. A list of organizations that are providing relief also appears on http://www.washingtonpost.com. ---- US military aid role a first in Indonesia Military personnel work to fly supplies in to the country Aljazeera By Paul Dillon in Banda Aceh Saturday 01 January 2005, 12:30 Makka Time, 9:30 GMT http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/4A0A0C42-C6C4-42A8-8B5D-5BAC00C99BA2.htm American navy helicopters and transport planes have begun ferrying aid supplies to Aceh province six days after a tsunami slammed into the coast killing tens of thousands of people. In a groundbreaking piece of diplomacy, US soldiers will for the first time touch down on Indonesian soil in an operational capacity. Australian military aircraft have been involved in relief work in Aceh since mid-week, joining small Malaysian, Singaporean and New Zealand contingents. The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is off the north shore of Sumatra where upwards of 80,000 people are believed to have died. "I can confirm that 10 US navy Seahawk helicopters will begin humanitarian operations in Aceh province today," said USAid's Michael Bok. "The helicopters were in Medan on Friday. A joint coordinating meeting between American, Australian and Indonesian military organisations was held at that time to coordinate our efforts." Aid convoy US helicopters will ferry desperately needed aid supplies to the west coast of the province which was the worst hit, Bok said. Four Australian defence force helicopters will do the same along the east coast. Dozens of communities are believed to have been wiped out when a magnitude 9.0 earthquake 25km offshore spawned a 10m-high tsunami that crashed on to the coast. "The situation on the west coast is extremely serious," says Unicef's Gordon Weiss. "We need to get aid in there as soon as possible but it is chaotic at the moment. In most areas the civil administration no longer exists; the health providers are dead." Sensitive diplomacy Eyewitnesses returning from the west coast city of Muelaboh say upwards of 80% of the city of 50,000 is now buried under mud and debris. No accurate tally of the dead there has been made but there are fears more than half the population may have perished. The presence of foreign troops on Indonesian soil is a sensitive issue. The nation with the largest Muslim population on earth, Indonesia was a staunch Cold War ally of the US. The collapse of the Suharto regime in 1999 introduced a new era of openness within Indonesia and public criticism of both the new government and the US has grown. Post-9/11 American foreign policy in the Middle East has been a lightning rod for criticism around the Muslim world and Indonesia is no exception. While many of the country's estimated 200 million Muslims practice a brand of Islam infused with pre-Islamic Buddhist and Hindu beliefs, the population is overwhelmingly opposed to the American intervention in Iraq. Frequently rocky relations with Australia reached a new low when Indonesia's southern neighbour lead a UN peacekeeping mission in the former Indonesian province of East Timor after the 800,000 residents of the former Portuguese colony voted for independence in a UN-sponsored referendum. Many Indonesians believe their southern neighbour betrayed them. A hardcore group launched a series of anti-Western attacks in Indonesia, beginning with the bombing of a nightclub on the resort island of Bali in 2002 that claimed more than 200 lives, many of them foreign tourists. Since that time, truck bombs have exploded outside an American-owned hotel and the Australian embassy in the capital Jakarta. Welcome assistance Reaction was generally positive to the news of an American presence. "Praise God, they are coming to help us," said Munajar, a Banda Aceh clerk who like many Indonesians uses only one name. "We have been waiting for the international community to assist us and now they have come." Twenty-one-year old student Marrisa, who registers newly displaced people arriving at a local mosque was hopeful the foreign assistance will stave off a humanitarian disaster. "So far the Indonesian government has not been able to deliver the aid quickly," she said. "Hopefully now we will receive the food and medicine we need to save these people." Legal requirements Not everyone was so enthusiastic. "The Americans have to understand our culture here," said Hilmy Bakar Almascaty, vice-chairman of the Jakarta-based Islamic Defenders Front, which is mobilising relief efforts of its own. "If they are not sensitive to local issues then there will be problems. If American women come to Aceh, they must wear dilbab for example. There is Sharia law in Aceh and that is what is dictated." USAid's Bok said it was unlikely US service personnel would adhere to a Muslim dresscode. "I don't think the practice of Islam in Aceh is such that it forces all people to wear dilbab," said Weiss. "This is not Saudi Arabia." In addition to the helicopters, American forces have committed six C-130 transport planes to the relief effort. Four Australian aircraft have been flying supplies between Banda Aceh since Tuesday. Both nations are flying C-130 transport planes on a regular run between Medan and Band Aceh. ---- Turkmenistan cuts gas supplies to Russia, Ukraine over price dispute 01-01-2005, 16h35 (AFP) http://www.turkishpress.com/business/news.asp?id=050101163557.kb8tx1st.xml ASHGABAT - The Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan said it had carried out a threat to cut gas supplies to Russia and Ukraine but was ready to turn the pumps back on in return for higher prices. "Turkmenistan cut off the supply of gas in the pipelines to Russia and Ukraine from midnight (Friday)," the foreign ministry said in a statement. It said price negotiations with Russian and Ukrainian energy officials had already taken place and would continue in the coming days, with a Russian delegation due to visit Ashgabat in early January. "Turkmenistan is ready to talk with the new Ukrainian authorities to agree about new prices for the supply of gas," it added, referring to the recent victory of opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko in Ukrainian presidential elections. A source in Ukraine's gas industry confirmed to AFP that Turkmenistan had cut off shipments of gas to Russia earmarked for Ukraine at 9:00 am (0700 GMT) on Saturday. "I'm sure a delegation has already flown out to Turkmenistan to negotiate a deal and the situation will be resolved in a day or two resulting in higher gas prices for Ukraine's industry," the source said. Turkmenistan wants to increase the price of gas from 44 to 60 dollars (33 to 44 euros) per 1,000 cubic meters. Inside Ukraine it is industrial consumers who are likely to be most affected. They currently pay around 55 dollars per 1,000 cubic meters of gas internally and probably face a 10-dollar hike in prices, the Ukrainian source said. "Now they will start opening underground emergency gas stocks with which they can hold out for up to a week," said the source. Ukrainian gas company Naftogaz confirmed on Friday it had held urgent negotiations with the Turkmen government, and that further discussions involving Turkmen Deputy Prime Minister Yelli Kurbanmuradov would be held soon. Ukraine depends on imports of energy, especially natural gas from Russia and Turkmenistan, to meet some 85 percent of its annual energy requirements. Turkmenistan has insisted its demands are "not political" despite the timing of the supply cut less than a week after Yushchenko's victory in the elections, a major setback for Moscow that had backed his pro-Russian rival. Analysts here said that Turkmenistan could be taking advantage of strained ties between the incoming pro-West leadership in Ukraine and Russia to extract higher prices for its gas. But in Moscow, respected political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky said Moscow was using its relationship with Ashgabat to indirectly warn Kiev of its continued dependence on energy from its giant eastern neighbor. Gazprom, the state-controlled Russian gas giant, meanwhile said it would continue to supply Ukraine but would not be able to make up the shortfall if Turkmenistan turned off the taps. -------- biological weapons Fort Detrick's hazmat truck detects gas, decontaminates December 30, 2004 (AP) http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20041229-100837-5851r.htm FREDERICK, Md. — Fort Detrick's new emergency response vehicle can sniff out sarin gas and test substances for biological or chemical agents. The $575,000 truck also contains inflatable shelters and showers for decontaminating large numbers of people. It exemplifies a new generation of vehicles, equipped for terrorism response, that the federal Department of Homeland Security is helping fire and rescue companies acquire, officials say. "It expands the capability for us to respond to an incident in Frederick County," said David Eskildsen, chief of fire and emergency services at Fort Detrick. Fort Detrick's fire department works with first responders from outside the Army post on hazardous-material (hazmat) calls. Such calls typically involve industrial accidents or spilled fuel, but the team also responds to reports of suspicious packages, unusual odors and letters containing white powder. "Hazmat has now expanded because of the way of the world," Chief Eskildsen told the Frederick News-Post. "We have to be prepared for larger events, intentional events." The Army bought the $325,000 vehicle in November and added $250,000 worth of equipment, thanks to federal appropriations. The truck is equipped with a chemical agent monitor that can recognize vapors of mustard agent and sarin gas on people and equipment. Another tool, infrared spectrometry, scans liquids and powders and compares their chemical makeup against a database of known substances. In the front is the command center, outfitted with wireless Internet access, a fax machine, telephones and radio communications. An onboard computer can create three-dimensional models of potentially affected areas, showing the team how a chemical or biological agent is likely to disperse, Chief Eskildsen said. Onboard rain gauges, thermometers, barometers and anemometers help ensure accurate computer modeling in all conditions. The Frederick County Division of Fire and Rescue Services is buying a similar vehicle for about $429,000 that will be financed with grants from the Department of Homeland Security and the Maryland Emergency Management Agency, said Lt. Dennis Wenner. He said it will be delivered by October. He said such vehicles are becoming a trend: "Everyone is looking to enhance or stabilize response methods, because of the status of the world today." ---- Technical Hurdles Separate Terrorists From Biowarfare By John Mintz Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, December 30, 2004; Page A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35011-2004Dec29?language=printer Hoping to hasten the doomsday their leader foretold, scientists who were members of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult brewed batches of anthrax in the early 1990s and released it from an office building and out the back of trucks upwind of the Imperial Palace. But the wet mixture kept clogging the sprayers the Aum Shinrikyo scientists had rigged up, and, unbeknown to them, the strains of anthrax they had ordered from a commercial firm posed no danger to anyone. Frustrated by their failure at biowarfare, they turned to a less arduous method of mass killing -- chemical attack -- and in 1995 killed 12 Tokyo subway riders by releasing sarin gas in the tunnels. The cult's experiences demonstrate just a few of the myriad technical obstacles that terrorists who might try to manufacture biological weapons could face, problems that would confound even skilled scientists who tried to help them, biological warfare experts say. Locating virulent anthrax specimens with which to brew an attack-size batch would be difficult given the medical community's caution about suspicious buyers. Smallpox could be next to impossible to obtain because it is thought to exist in only two secure sites, in Russia and in the United States. Creating aerosolized microbes also requires expertise in many arcane scientific disciplines, such as culturing and propagating germs that retain their virulence and "weaponizing" them so they float like a gas and enter the lungs easily. But specialists also say it is all but inevitable that al Qaeda or another terrorist group will gain the expertise to launch small-scale biological attacks and eventually inflict mass casualties. Information on the mechanics of creating bioweapons is easily accessible on the Internet and in technical manuals, and the equipment to do the job is readily found. Many brew pubs, for example, have fermenters that can cook up deadly germs. Advances in bioscience, and the rapid dissemination of this knowledge worldwide, are making it easier for even undergraduates to create dangerous pathogens. Creating microbe weapons is more challenging than producing the simplest implements of terrorism -- conventional explosives or chemical weapons -- but much less difficult than the most technically daunting -- nuclear weapons -- experts say. Richard Danzig, a former Navy secretary and now a biowarfare consultant to the Pentagon, said that while there are 1,000 to 10,000 "weaponeers" worldwide with experience working on biological arms, there are more than 1 million and perhaps many millions of "broadly skilled" scientists who, while lacking training in that narrow field, could construct bioweapons. "It seems likely that, over a period between a few months and a few years, broadly skilled individuals equipped with modest laboratory equipment can develop biological weapons," Danzig said. "Only a thin wall of terrorist ignorance and inexperience now protects us." Some agents are simpler than others to weaponize. Toxins such as botulinum, which is not contagious and unlikely to cause mass casualties, are the easiest to turn into weapons, particularly for a food-borne or water-borne attack. Bacterial agents such as anthrax, which also is not contagious, are more difficult to manufacture. Viruses such as smallpox, which is contagious and could kill millions, are tougher still. The most challenging are some of the new 21st-century bioweapons that scientists contemplate being created in the future -- but experts believe even these compounds are fast becoming easier to produce. In 2002, a panel of biowarfare experts concluded in a report co-published by the National Defense University (NDU) that while terrorists could mount some small-scale bioattacks, larger assaults would require them to overcome many technical hurdles. Some key biotechnologies would be achievable only three to four years from then, the panel found. "When we sent out the report for review to [hands-on] bench scientists, we got the response, 'What do you mean we can't do this? We're doing it now,' " said Raymond Zilinskas, a co-author of the report who heads biowarfare studies at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a California think tank. "It shows how fast the field is moving." Those skeptical of the prospect of large-scale bioattacks cite the tiny number of biological strikes in recent decades. Members of the Rajneeshee cult sickened 750 people in 1984 when they contaminated salad bars in 10 Oregon restaurants with salmonella. Among the few others were the 2001 anthrax attacks through the U.S. mail that killed five people. One reason for the small number of attacks is that nearly every aspect of a bioterrorist's job is difficult. The best chance of acquiring the anthrax bacterium, Bacillus anthracis, is either from commercial culture collections in countries with lax security controls, or by digging in soil where livestock recently died of the disease -- a tactic Aum Shinrikyo tried unsuccessfully in the Australian Outback. Once virulent stocks of anthrax have been cultured, it is no trivial task to propagate pathogens with the required attributes for an aerosolized weapon: the hardiness to survive in an enclosed container and upon release into the atmosphere, the ability to lodge in the lungs, and the toxicity to kill. The particles' size is crucial: If they are too big, they fall to the ground, and if they are too small, they are exhaled from the body. If they are improperly made, static electricity can cause them to clump. Making a bug that defeats antibiotics, a desired goal for any bioweaponeer, is relatively simple but can require laborious trial and error, because conferring antibiotic resistance often reduces a bioweapon's killing power. Field-testing germ weapons is necessary even for experienced weapons makers, and that is likely to require open spaces where animals or even people can be experimentally infected. Each bioagent demands specific weather conditions and requires unforgiving specifications for the spraying device employed. "Dry" anthrax is harder to make -- it requires special equipment, and scientists must perform the dangerous job of milling particles to the right size. "Wet" anthrax is easier to produce but not as easily dispersed. Experts agree that anthrax is the potential mass-casualty agent most accessible to terrorists. The anthrax letter sent in 2001 to then-Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) contained one gram of anthrax, or 1 trillion spores. In a 2003 report for the Pentagon, Danzig estimated that if terrorists released a much larger amount of skillfully made anthrax particles under optimal weather conditions in a large city, 200,000 people in an area 40 miles downwind of the release would be infected, and, if untreated, 180,000 of them would die. Smaller numbers would die as far as 120 miles away. Government officials would probably realize that an attack had occurred a day or two later, when victims began to show up in emergency rooms with flulike symptoms. Guessing the geographical spread of the attack, officials would then order emergency distribution of ciprofloxacin or other antibiotics, which would probably save many lives -- although experts agree the public health response would be likely to be chaotic and possibly ineffective. For most experts, the most frightening anthrax scenario is an antibiotic-resistant bug, which many say is not far-fetched. It is "one of the big things we're worried about," Philip K. Russell, a top bioterrorism adviser in the Department of Health and Human Services, said in an August interview in the trade journal Biosecurity. "It's my view that we have about three or four years to come up with a solution to multidrug-resistant anthrax. . . . We haven't taken anthrax off the table as a threat that can create a very big disaster." Government officials also said they accept a Danzig theory that terrorists probably would launch bioattacks against various cities simultaneously or sequentially, using a tactic he calls "reload." Danzig said it would be designed to overwhelm government responses and undermine public confidence in officials. "Our national power to manage the consequences of repeated biological attacks could be exhausted while the terrorist ability to reload remains intact," he wrote in the Pentagon report. The 2002 NDU study -- led by Zilinskas and Seth Carus, a biowarfare expert at the university -- concluded that at that time, large-scale bioweapons were less likely to be fashioned by terrorists than by nations such as Iran, or by disgruntled bioscientists. The report also detailed the skill levels necessary to accomplish various biowarfare-related tasks. A "junior scientist," for example, could use genetic engineering to weaponize both bacterial and viral pathogens. Experts say that since then, the spread of knowledge and the increasing availability of sophisticated equipment have placed more and more complex tasks within the ability of less-skilled people. Some experts expressed concern about the easy availability of inexpensive biological "kits" from commercial catalogues that streamline cloning and other once-daunting tasks. The Zilinskas-Carus report said it is "chancy" to estimate which weapons terrorists could make after 2005 because of scientists' increasing ability to synthesize and manipulate biological material such as DNA. "Novel DNA sequences are being designed and inserted into living cells by undergraduates," said Roger Brent, a biowarfare expert who is president of the Molecular Sciences Institute, a leading research group in Berkeley, Calif. Some scientists doubt terrorists will master genetically altered superbugs. But Brent and other experts raise the specter of terrorists' hiring scientists who can insert a toxin into, say, a bioengineered SARS virus, which would then be as contagious as severe acute respiratory syndrome and as fatal as the toxin inside it. Last year, Brent told a study panel convened by the CIA that current biological capability resembles the capacity of computers in 1965, or English cotton mills in the 1800s -- technologies on the cusp of explosive growth. He said the day is coming when not only terrorists but "garage hackers" will be able to assemble bioweapons. The CIA panel's late 2003 report, "The Darker Bioweapons Future," said that "the same science that may cure some of our worst diseases could be used to create the world's most frightening weapons. The know-how to develop some of these weapons already exists." Even banned viruses such as smallpox might be employed one day by terrorists who sidestep the difficulty of obtaining them by synthesizing agents that resemble them, Brent told the panel. "Once synthesized," he said, they "can be grown in indefinite quantities." "The Rubicon has already been crossed and the process of creating novel genetically engineered orthopoxviruses [diseases including smallpox] is irrevocable," Ken Alibek, a former Soviet bioscientist who defected to the United States, wrote recently in a scholarly journal. "It is just a matter of time before this knowledge will result in the creation of super-killer poxviruses." He added: "If a threat, no matter how small, of a smallpox attack exists, it must be addressed" by developing smallpox detection systems and medicines. "The alternative," Alibek wrote, "is to remain as helpless as the millions of people who died of smallpox over previous centuries." -------- iraq Saboteurs blow up Iraqi oil pipeline 01/01/2005 - 15:38:54 http://www.breakingnews.ie/2005/01/01/story182825.html Saboteurs blew up an oil pipeline south of Baghdad today, causing a huge fire. The attack was near the Musabayb electricity station in the Bahbahan area some 46 miles south of Baghdad. Explosives were used to destroy the pipeline linking the southern cities of Karbala and Hilla. A huge blaze broke out after the blast sending up thick, black billowing smoke. Insurgents have regularly targeted Iraq’s oil infrastructure, repeatedly cutting exports and denying the country much-needed reconstruction money. ---- Iraq oil ministry says foils refinery attack 01 Jan 2005 15:18:09 GMT Source: Reuters http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/OWE150307.htm BAGHDAD, Jan 1 (Reuters) - Iraqi security forces foiled an attempt on Saturday to fire Katyusha rockets at an oil refinery in southern Iraq, killing one attacker, the Oil Ministry said. Members of the ministry's protection unit also arrested two men among the group that had mounted rockets on a truck and approached the refinery near the city of Basra, ministry spokesman Assem Jihad said. The refinery was attacked several times last year, badly injuring several guards. Attacks against Iraq's oil facilities have increased since U.S.-led forces assaulted the Sunni Muslim city of Falluja, near Baghdad, in November. Suspicion has fallen on insurgents fighting to drive out U.S.-led forces and topple and American-backed government, as well as former oil industry workers sacked for membership in deposed dictator Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Most of the attacks have focussed on pipelines and infrastructure in the mostly Sunni north and centre of the country, not in the Shi'ite south. Sabotage has disrupted refinery operations and contributed to a fuel crisis in Iraq, which has the world's second-largest oil reserves. Oil exports from the north also have been interrupted, with no crude flowing to Turkey for two weeks. Jihad said the attacks have been relentless, despite the ministry's efforts to improve protection. A crude oil pipeline feeding the main 350,000 barrel per day Baiji refinery in the north was hit overnight, just after crews finished repairing damage to it from a bomb explosion a few days ago, he said. The Dora refinery near Baghdad also comes under regular attack. Mortar rounds hit the complex two days ago, starting a fire that was quickly brought under control. A bomb ripped off a section of another domestic pipeline near the city of Hilla, southwest of Baghdad, on Saturday, witness said. ---- First Iraqi Airways flight from Baghdad to Basra (AFP) 1 January 2005 http://www.khaleejtimes.com/displayArticle.asp?col=%C2%A7ion=focusoniraq&xfile=data/focusoniraq/2005/January/focusoniraq_January6.xml BASRA - Iraq’s national carrier Iraqi Airways made its first post-Saddam Hussein era flight from Baghdad to the southern port of Basra Saturday, a British military spokesperson said. About 50 people were on board the Boeing 737, which landed at Basra international airport, said British military spokesman Major David Gibb. Basra international airport in southern Iraq is due to open to commercial passenger traffic in July following extensive renovation, the US military’s engineering corps said in mid-December. Earlier in December, Basra Governor Abu Ahmed al-Rashid said that the airport would be reopened in time for the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in neighbouring Saudi Arabia that begins in January. Iraqi Airways resumed international commercial flights in September for the first time in 14 years, with flights to Amman, Baghdad and Damascus. Iraqi Airways planes were left grounded around the Middle East, in Jordan, Tunisia and Iran, after Saddam made his disastrous decision in 1990 to invade Kuwait. In 2000, Iraqi Airways resumed limited internal flights, to Mosul and Basra, despite the “no-fly zones” imposed by the United States and Britain. -------- prisoners of war Fresh Details Emerge on Harsh Methods at Guantánamo By NEIL A. LEWIS January 1, 2005 NY TIMES http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/01/national/01gitmo.html WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 - Sometime after Mohamed al-Kahtani was imprisoned at Guantánamo around the beginning of 2003, military officials believed they had a prize on their hands - someone who was perhaps intended to have been a hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot. But his interrogation was not yielding much, so they decided in the middle of 2003 to try a new tactic. Mr. Kahtani, a Saudi, was given a tranquilizer, put in sensory deprivation garb with blackened goggles, and hustled aboard a plane that was supposedly taking him to the Middle East. After hours in the air, the plane landed back at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was not returned to the regular prison compound but put in an isolation cell in the base's brig. There, he was subjected to harsh interrogation procedures that he was encouraged to believe were being conducted by Egyptian national security operatives. The account of Mr. Kahtani's treatment given to The New York Times recently by military intelligence officials and interrogators is the latest of several developments that have severely damaged the military's longstanding public version of how the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo operated. Interviews with former intelligence officers and interrogators provided new details and confirmed earlier accounts of inmates being shackled for hours and left to soil themselves while exposed to blaring music or the insistent meowing of a cat-food commercial. In addition, some may have been forcibly given enemas as punishment. While all the detainees were threatened with harsh tactics if they did not cooperate, about one in six were eventually subjected to those procedures, one former interrogator estimated. The interrogator said that when new interrogators arrived they were told they had great flexibility in extracting information from detainees because the Geneva Conventions did not apply at the base. Military officials have gone to great lengths to portray Guantánamo as a largely humane facility for several hundred prisoners, where the harshest sanctioned punishments consisted of isolation or taking away items like blankets, toothpaste, dessert or reading material. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who was the commander of the Guantánamo operation from November 2002 to March 2004, regularly told visiting members of Congress and journalists that the approach was designed to build trust between the detainee and his questioner. "We are detaining these enemy combatants in a humane manner," General Miller told reporters in March 2004. "Should our men or women be held in similar circumstances, I would hope they would be treated in this manner." His successor, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, told reporters in November that he was "satisfied that the detainees here have not been abused, they've not been mistreated, they've not been tortured in any way." Journalists who were permitted to view an interview session from behind a glass wall during General Hood's tenure were shown an interrogator and detainee sharing a milkshake and fries from the base's McDonald's and appearing to chat amiably. It became apparent to reporters comparing notes in August, however, that the tableau of the interrogator and prisoner sharing a McDonald's meal was presented to at least three sets of journalists. In addition to the account of Mr. Kahtani's treatment, the new interviews provide details and confirm some of the accounts in other recent disclosures about procedures at Guantánamo: the November report in which the International Committee of the Red Cross complained privately last summer to the United States government that the procedures at Guantánamo were "tantamount to torture"; memorandums from F.B.I. officials, most of which were released in December as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union; and another set of interviews with The Times in October in which other former Guantánamo officials described coercive and abusive techniques regularly employed there. The information from the various sources frequently matched, providing corroboration of the use of specific procedures, which included prolonged sleep deprivation and shackling prisoners in uncomfortable positions for many hours. One F.B.I. agent wrote his superiors that he saw such restraining techniques several times. In the most gruesome of the bureau memorandums, he recounted observing a detainee who had been shackled overnight in a hot cell, soiled himself and pulled out tufts of hair in misery. Military officials who participated in the practices said in October that prisoners had been tormented by being chained to a low chair for hours with bright flashing lights in their eyes and audio tapes played loudly next to their ears, including songs by Lil' Kim and Rage Against the Machine and rap performances by Eminem. In a recent interview, another former official added new details, saying that many interrogators used a different audio tape on prisoners, a mix of babies crying and the television commercial for Meow Mix in which the jingle consists of repetition of the word "meow." The people who spoke about what they saw or whose duties made them aware of what was occurring said they had different reasons for granting interviews. Some said they objected to the methods, others said they objected to what they regarded as a chaotic and badly run system, while others offered no reason. They all declined to be identified by name, some saying they feared retaliation. Lt. Col. Leon H. Sumpter, the spokesman for the military command at Guantánamo, said in a statement that officials would not comment on accusations about the treatment of any individual detainee including Mr. Kahtani, who was captured in Afghanistan. "We do not discuss specific interrogation techniques nor do we identify any specific detainee," Colonel Sumpter said in a statement. "All detainees are safeguarded and are assured food, drink, clothing, shelter, health care and basic rights, all in accordance with the Geneva Convention. The U.S. does not permit, tolerate or condone torture by any of its personnel or employees." Colonel Sumpter said that the interrogation regimen at Guantánamo had produced useful intelligence "based on trust and not out of fear or duress." The intelligence officials who spoke with The Times said that the interrogation personnel and their assigned prisoners were divided into five groups. Four were geographically based - one for Saudi Arabia, one for the Gulf States, another for Pakistan and Afghanistan and the last for Asia, Europe and the Americas. The fifth, termed "special projects," included Mr. Kahtani. There was a high confidence among military intelligence officials that Mr. Kahtani was a dangerous operative of Al Qaeda. The federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks concluded in its June report that he was denied entry into the United States on Aug. 4, 2001, at the Orlando airport, the same day that Mohamed Atta, the plot's ringleader, was there and most likely intended to meet him. The officials who spoke about the detainees' treatment said, however, that very few of the other prisoners had much value. "So much of the questioning was about Afghanistan," one intelligence official said. "Most of it was dated. Information about facilitators and recruiters was useful only in style, not in facts." The clearest indication that senior commanders at Guantánamo were aware of and supported what was occurring may be in some F.B.I. memorandums. One, dated May 10, 2003, and written by an unidentified agent, describes a sharp exchange between bureau officials and General Miller and Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who was in charge of the intelligence operations at Guantánamo then. "Both sides agreed that the bureau has its way of doing things and the D.O.D. has their marching orders from SecDef," the memorandum said, using abbreviations for the Department of Defense and the secretary of defense. "Although the two techniques differed drastically, both generals believed they had a job to do." The frustration caused by Mr. Kahtani's refusal to cooperate set off a high-level review of allowable interrogation techniques, according to documents released earlier by the Pentagon. After officials at Guantánamo asked for more leeway in dealing with Mr. Kahtani, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in December 2002 approved a list of 16 techniques for use there in addition to the 17 methods in the Army Field Manual. He suspended those approvals the next month after some Navy lawyers complained that they were excessive and possibly illegal. But after a review, Mr. Rumsfeld issued a final policy in April 2003, approving 24 techniques, some of which needed his permission to be used. None of the approved techniques, however, covered some of what people have now said occurred. Mr. Kahtani was, for example, forcibly given an enema, officials said, which was used because it was uncomfortable and degrading. Pentagon spokesmen said the procedure was medically necessary because Mr. Kahtani was dehydrated after an especially difficult interrogation session. Another official, told of the use of the enema, said, however, "I bet they said he was dehydrated," adding that that was the justification whenever an enema was used as a coercive technique, as it had been on several detainees. In order to carry on the charade that he was not at Guantánamo, the military arranged it so Mr. Kahtani was not visited by the Red Cross on a few of its regular visits, creating a window of several months, said a person who dealt with him at Guantánamo. Officials at the Washington office of the Red Cross, which makes periodic visits to each of the Guantánamo detainees, said they would not discuss their meetings with any prisoners as part of their agreement with the United States government. Two interrogators confirmed several of the complaints in the Red Cross report, including the notion that interrogators were able to obtain prisoners' medical records easily, which human rights groups say could discourage inmates from seeking medical care. The interrogators also discussed another factor in the Red Cross report, the use of a Behavioral Science Consultation Team, known as Biscuit, comprising a psychologist or psychiatrist and psychiatric workers. The team was used to suggest ways to make prisoners more cooperative in interrogations. "They were supposed to help us break them down," one said. The same former interrogator said the Red Cross report was correct in asserting that some female interrogators used sexual taunts to harass the detainees. It is unclear whether the Justice Department's new, broader definition of torture, posted on the department's Web site late Thursday, would have affected operations at Guantánamo. -------- spies Israeli spy's passport sparks row Saturday January 1, 2005 The Guardian http://politics.guardian.co.uk/politicspast/story/0,9061,1381811,00.html The use of forged British passports by Mossad assassination squads triggered a Foreign Office protest. But just as diplomats were about to call in the Israeli ambassador, it was discovered that civil servants elsewhere in Whitehall were in the process of renewing the UK passport held by a senior Israeli secret service agent. "David Kimche is... controller of Israeli intelligence service operations in western Europe," a secret Foreign Office memo said in 1974. "He is a member of the diplomatic staff in the Paris embassy. He was born in the UK and for many years had a British passport. This has expired." The murders of a Moroccan in Norway and Arab activists in Lebanon had infuriated diplomats when it was discovered that both had been carried out by Mossad agents, several of whom were using falsified British documents. The realisation that Kimche was about to get a new passport astonished officials. "This is really extraordinary," one wrote. "At the same time as the minister is about to protest to the Israeli ambassador over the misuse of British passports for Israeli intelligence operations, we are apparently contemplating issuing a British passport to a man who may well have been in charge of the operation complained of." Kimche was discouraged from applying. -------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE -------- courts / tribunals Rehnquist Offers A Historical View Fights Over Judicial Branch Are Nothing New, He Writes By Charles Lane Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, January 1, 2005; Page A03 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39656-2004Dec31?language=printer As speculation continues to swirl over his future on the Supreme Court, ailing Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist urged Americans to view the current debate over the ideological direction of the federal judiciary in historical perspective. Writing in his annual year-end report on the state of the federal courts, released to the public today, Rehnquist tackled the issue of "judicial activism," observing that criticism of judges "has dramatically increased in recent years." "But," he added, "criticism of judges and judicial decisions is as old as our republic, an outgrowth to some extent of the tensions built into our three-branch system of government. To a significant degree those tensions are healthy in maintaining a balance of power in our government." "Let us hope," the chief justice concluded, "that the Supreme Court and all of our courts will continue to command sufficient public respect to enable them to survive basic attacks on the judicial independence that has made our judicial system a model for much of the world." It was a message likely to fire up neither side in what both liberals and conservatives see as a looming partisan fight over a possible nomination of a successor to Rehnquist, 80, by President Bush -- as well as judges to the federal bench. But the above-the-fray remarks were in keeping with Rehnquist's roles as titular head of the nation's courts and as spokesman for the interests of judges -- roles that he has seemed to relish as his 18-year tenure as chief justice has advanced. The report also drew on his other abiding interest in recent years: the study of history. Rehnquist reminded readers that the court had weathered past battles involving school desegregation, a plan by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to "pack" the bench with pro-New Deal justices and even the impeachment of Justice Samuel Chase in 1805. (Chase was acquitted by the Senate and served until 1811.) Rehnquist provided no new information on his physical condition, though he did express thanks to "all of those who have sent their good wishes for my speedy recovery." In past statements, he has said that he is suffering from thyroid cancer and underwent a tracheotomy in October as a result. He has not attended oral arguments since early October and has said that he will vote in the cases argued during the first two weeks of November only if necessary to break a tie. But the court says that Rehnquist is working at home while receiving radiation and chemotherapy, and that he plans to vote in all cases argued in December. -------- homeland security / national intelligence FBI probes lasers aimed at plane cockpits 1/1/2005 Associated Press http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-12-30-lasers_x.htm WASHINGTON (AP) — Pilots from time to time encounter laser beams that stray into the cockpit on approach to an airport, but a recent rash of such incidents — at least seven since Christmas — has them worried about an organized effort to take down airliners. Though there have been no reports of accidents caused by lasers, they can temporarily blind and disorient a pilot and could lead to a plane crash. The FBI is investigating whether the incidents are pranks, accidents or something more sinister. Federal agents are looking into two incidents in Colorado Springs, and one each in Cleveland, Washington, Houston, Teterboro, N.J., and Medford, Ore., according to law enforcement and transportation officials, some of whom spoke Thursday only on condition of anonymity. Scientists discount the possibility that pilots are merely the victims of a popular new Christmas toy or jokesters toying with a $19 laser pointer from an electronics store. Loren Thompson, who teaches military technology at Georgetown University, said a piece of equipment that could do the things the FBI is investigating would be "fairly expensive and fairly sophisticated." He characterized it as a reasonably powerful visible light laser that can lock onto a fast-moving aircraft. "That's not the sort of thing you pick up at a military surplus store," he said. Law enforcement officials say they have no evidence of an organized effort to take down planes. Further, they say they've had reports of similar incidents since the technology became popular. But a memo sent to law enforcement agencies recently by the FBI and the Homeland Security Department says there is evidence that terrorists have explored using lasers as weapons, though there's no intelligence that indicates they might use them in the United States. Pilots and safety officials have long been concerned about the dangers of lasers used in light shows or to attract the public to an event. Hundreds of cases of lasers shining into pilots' eyes have been reported over the past decade; in several, the pilots sustained damage to their eyes. Most recently, a pilot for Delta Air Lines reported an eye injury from a laser beamed into the cockpit while approaching the Salt Lake City airport in September. The plane landed safely. The Food and Drug Administration, which regulates laser light shows, consults with the Federal Aviation Administration when someone wants to operate a laser outdoors near an airport. The FAA recommends the maximum safe level of laser light exposure for pilots maneuvering near airports. An FAA-commissioned study released in June acknowledged the possibility that terrorists could use a laser to attack an aircraft — and that it would be hard to detect and to defend against. "A sufficiently powerful laser could cause permanent ocular damage, blinding crewmembers and make a successful landing virtually impossible," the report said. Rob Sproc, a pilot who serves as vice president of the Airline Pilots Security Alliance, says pilots should have heard about the recent laser incidents from the government, not from the news media. Whether they're a safety hazard or terrorist threat, he said, "we're a little distressed that the information isn't being passed along the way it should be." "If it takes you down, it's kind of irrelevant what the source is," Sproc said. On Christmas night, two SkyWest pilots said they saw two laser-like rays of light in their cockpit as they attempted to land at the airport in Medford, Ore., according to FBI spokeswoman Beth Anne Steele. On Monday, a laser beam was directed into the cockpit of a commercial jet flying about 15 miles from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport at an altitude of between 8,500 feet and 10,000 feet, FBI special agent Robert Hawk said. It was determined the laser came from a residential area in suburban Warrensville Heights. Also on Monday in Colorado Springs, two pilots reported green pulsating laser lights beamed into their cockpits. Police sent patrol cars and a helicopter in a fruitless search. FBI spokeswoman Monique Kelso said the bureau is continuing to investigate. In New Jersey, the pilot of a corporate-owned Cessna Citation carrying 13 people said three green lasers were pointed into his cockpit while approaching the Teterboro airport on Wednesday night. Law enforcement officials said they were believed to have originated near a mall in Wayne, according to Passaic County Sheriff's Office spokesman Bill Maer. All the planes landed safely. ---- Several people questioned about laser beam, planes 1/1/2005 6:33 PM (AP) http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-01-01-lasers_x.htm TRENTON, N.J. — Authorities investigating two incidents in which laser beams were aimed at aircraft flying over northern New Jersey have questioned several people but made no arrests, the FBI said Saturday. The pilot of a corporate jet first reported seeing the green lasers on Wednesday as he came in to Teterboro Airport for landing. A police helicopter for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey flew over the area Friday to investigate, and also spotted the lasers. FBI Special Agent Steve Kodak said Saturday that no one was in custody. A spokesman for the Port Authority said a Parsippany resident was among those questioned. Federal agents are looking into similar incidents involving lasers and aircraft, including cases in Cleveland, Washington, Houston, Colorado Springs, and Medford, Ore. Laser beams can temporarily blind or disorient pilots and possibly cause a plane to crash. Federal law enforcement officials have said there is no evidence of a terrorist plot involving laser beams, though last month the FBI and the Homeland Security Department sent a memo to law enforcement agencies saying there is evidence that terrorists have explored using lasers as weapons. ---- Congress Resists Key Recommendation of 9/11 Panel Without Consolidation, Homeland Security Department Officials Report to 88 Panels on Capitol Hill By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, January 1, 2005; Page A04 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39658-2004Dec31?language=printer Congress has balked at consolidating committee jurisdictions when it comes to overseeing the $39 billion Department of Homeland Security and its constituent agencies, a key recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission. The commission found that homeland security officials reported to 88 congressional committees and subcommittees last year. The commission report cited an expert witness who called that "perhaps the single largest obstacle impeding the department's successful development." Instead, the commissioners recommended the House and Senate each have a single committee to review each year's budget and provide oversight for homeland security activities. When Congress comes back next week, there will be fewer panels, but not by very much, largely because House and Senate committee and subcommittee chairmen have fought off most attempts to limit their jurisdictions. The Senate in October added "Homeland Security" to the name of the Governmental Affairs Committee but gave the panel authorization authority over only 38 percent of the department's budget and 8 percent of its 175,000 employees. The floor debate at that time reflected the tension among lawmakers. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, got so frustrated as agencies within the Homeland Security Department were taken away from her panel that she told her colleagues, "We are just going to end up with jurisdiction over [then-Secretary] Tom Ridge's personal staff. That is about what is going to be left." Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), then chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and an ally of Collins, described the Senate process as "farce . . . crazy . . . stupid," during the floor debate when he lost a motion to take jurisdiction for the Transportation Security Administration away from his panel and give it to hers. McCain called it a "joke" that the Coast Guard remained in his committee. "Why don't we just stop, why don't we call it a night and say the heck with this farce?" McCain said at one point. "This is crazy. This is stupid." Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the Republican whip who with Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) negotiated the committee resolution, said during the October debate that the roughly 25 Senate committees and subcommittees that had jurisdiction over the Homeland Security Department had been cut "significantly." On the House side, the battle has not been settled. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) is trying to get approval for converting the two-year-old House Select Committee on Homeland Security into a permanent panel with some legislative authority to go with oversight responsibility. The speaker is running into opposition from his own Republican committee chairmen, much as he did on recently passed legislation to reorganize the nation's intelligence system. Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, said in an interview last week on National Public Radio, "I don't see why we need a new committee." Young said, for example, that it is not possible to separate oversight of highway construction and trains -- for which his panel is responsible -- from important security aspects of such programs. Hastert plans to bring the issue of the homeland security committee to the Republican conference as part of a package of resolutions on all committees, according to congressional sources. "We plan on moving something on the first day of the session," Hastert's spokesman, John Feehery, said earlier this week. "The speaker wants to make the homeland committee permanent, but it has got to have some teeth." Negotiations are underway among House members and senior committee staff members over jurisdictional issues, he said, adding that the issues are complex because so many committees are involved. Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee and an opponent of the intelligence bill, has objected to potentially losing jurisdiction over immigration enforcement and other security issues his panel now controls. The chairman of the Select Committee on Homeland Security, Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), has indicated he does not believe his panel would work if congressional oversight remains spread over several other committees. In a recent interview with NPR, he said that if such authority "remains balkanized, then our oversight of homeland security will be like the blind man and the elephant." Many of the same issues pending in the House also came up in the Senate. For example, one of the first decisions made in the Senate, which is now being negotiated in the House, was when Finance Committee senators made it clear they would retain jurisdiction over customs, border and immigration functions because they are matters of trade facilitation and regulation. "Large chunks of the homeland security jurisdiction -- the Coast Guard and Transportation Security Administration, now part of the Immigration and Naturalization Service -- have been taken back by the other committees," Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), the ranking Democrat on Collins's committee, said during the October debate. "That is the kind of action that encourages those who are cynical about this chamber, and I hope we can try to do better on that." ---- Top Homeland Contractors Had Gov't Run-Ins Saturday January 1, 2005 2:01 AM By MATT KELLEY Associated Press Writer http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4704658,00.html WASHINGTON (AP) - The largest Homeland Security Department contractors include two companies which paid millions to settle charges they defrauded the Pentagon, one firm which paid a foreign corruption fine and a business accused of botching a computer system for veterans hospitals, records show. About a quarter of the $2.5 billion awarded to the 50 largest Homeland Security contractors came under no-bid contracts, agency records show. That's lower, however, than the 44 percent of Pentagon contracts given under ``other than full and open competition.'' The rest of the money paid to the top contractors - a bit more than $2 billion - was for contracts awarded through competition, the records show. Some of the nation's largest federal contractors have won the new business of protecting America from terrorists, including many with a recent history of legal run-ins with the government, the records show. The two companies with the most business - nearly $700 million between them - were Boeing Co. and Integrated Coast Guard Systems, a partnership of defense giants Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Those companies have paid more than $250 million in the past three years to settle charges of improprieties with their Pentagon contracts. Homeland Security audits also have accused the two companies of overcharging, in Boeing's case by $49 million. Homeland Security officials gave Congress a list of the top contractors through July and their competition status amid criticism of the agency's management and oversight of its money. The criticism has ranged from overcharges to exorbitant employee awards that came at taxpayers expense. The department was created by pulling together 22 federal agencies with 180,000 employees and dramatically increased funding - up to $33 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Officials blame some of the problems on growing pains. ``The department recognizes it has many challenges, and from the day it stood up has taken positive steps to build and improve the department's contract management system,'' spokesman Larry Orluskie said Thursday. Analyst James Carafano of the conservative Heritage Foundation said some agencies within the department, such as the Coast Guard, have more serious contract oversight problems than others. ``In some cases, you have programs which have been created out of thin air, and in other cases, you have people managing programs which are far larger than anything they've done in the past,'' Carafano said. While the list of big contractors is dominated by well-known, large companies, there are a few lesser known players who won large contracts. For instance, Chenega Technology Services Corp., an Alaska Native corporation, got a $500 million no-bid contract to maintain and repair screening equipment at ports and border crossings under a legislative provision written by Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Homeland Security's biggest contractor this year, Integrated Coast Guard Systems, is upgrading and expanding the Coast Guard's fleet of ships, boats, airplanes and helicopters. Clark Kent Ervin, the department's inspector general, said in a report that hiring ICGS to install new engines in HH-65 helicopters would take longer and cost more than if the Coast Guard did the work itself. The original ICGS proposal for the project was a month late and included ``$123 million worth of goods and services that the Coast Guard did not ask for and could not afford,'' Ervin's report said. The Coast Guard defended the contract, telling Ervin it believes the program is properly managed. ICGS spokeswoman Margaret Mitchell-Jones said the company agreed. Another report from Ervin said Boeing - Homeland Security's second-largest contractor last year - overcharged the department $49 million on a massive contract to install and maintain bomb detection and other screening equipment at U.S. airports. Boeing spokesman Fernando Vivanco denied any overcharging and said the company met the contract's tight schedule. ``Nobody thought it could be done, and we did it,'' he said. Homeland Security's critics also questioned a $229 million contract to technology giant BearingPoint. The Department of Veterans Affairs abandoned a BearingPoint computer system for a Florida hospital last fall because it failed a nine-month testing process. The Justice Department and VA are investigating. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., wrote to DHS Secretary Tom Ridge in October questioning whether BearingPoint should be trusted with new business. ``It seems to be it's in the best interest of the taxpayers that BearingPoint be suspended until we know the facts,'' Nelson said in November. BearingPoint spokesman John Schneidawind defended the company's Homeland Security contract. ``We followed the bidding process and won the project fairly,'' Schneidawind said Thursday. The company that supplies airport bomb-detection equipment, InVision Technologies Inc., agreed Dec. 6 to pay an $800,000 fine for alleged improper payments by distributors to foreign officials. The agreement cleared the way for General Electric to buy InVision. InVision was the fourth-largest Homeland Security contractor between October 2003 and July, getting about $178 million, department records show. GE spokesman Jeffrey DeMarrais said GE has agreed to make sure its InVision subsidiary complies with anti-corruption laws. On the Net: Homeland Security Department: http://www.dhs.gov -------- POLITICS -------- us politics 'Axis of evil' top Bush's second-term agenda 1/1/2005 1:54 PM (AP) http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-01-01-bush-abroad_x.htm WASHINGTON — The three countries President Bush called an "axis of evil" in his first term are at the top of his foreign policy to-do list in the second, along with a revitalized Mideast peace process and continued efforts to repair European alliances frayed by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Iraq is the first priority for President Bush's second term, experts say. Luke Frazza, AFP War and reconstruction in Iraq are likely to continue to command more attention than any other international issues, at least for the first couple of years of Bush's new term. "The first priority has got to be getting Iraq right," said Max Boot, a conservative expert on national security at the Council on Foreign Relations. But in the short run, the Bush administration also must juggle a complicated response to the devastation from tsunamis across South Asia amid some international sniping that the rich United States is not doing enough. The massive relief effort — for which the United States increased its financial aid commitment Friday to $350 million — is drawing attention away from preparations for elections scheduled for Jan. 30 in Iraq, but the distraction will probably be brief. Bush pledged to give it plenty of attention, saying in his weekly radio address Saturday that "we join the world in feeling enormous sadness over a great human tragedy." On Iraq, the administration will get a real and perceived boost in credibility if elections scheduled there for the end of this month come off well, Boot and others said. Another round of elections is planned for later in 2005. The alternative — protracted turmoil and violence that the United States cannot control — would complicate U.S. foreign policy far beyond Iraq. "The odds are in our favor, but defeat is not out of the question," Boot said. "I think it's 60-40 in our direction." The announcement Thursday that Iraq's largest Sunni Muslim political party will not participate in the election won't help. The insurgency is believed to draw most of its support from Sunnis, who provided much of Saddam Hussein's former Baath Party membership. Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he found the security situation in Iraq worse during a trip in December than on three previous visits since the invasion. "We basically have no trouble achieving any military objective; we have considerable trouble securing it," Biden said. American patience with the war will soon wear thin, and doing the reconstruction job correctly could mean U.S. troops stay in Iraq far longer than the public expects, he said. That leaves two options for Bush as he begins his second term, Biden said. "We muddle through for the next year, declare victory after the second election and leave, and then there would be chaos," Biden said. Or, "level with the American people and tell them we're going to be muddling through for the next four years, or longer." Bush seemed to acknowledge that Iraq remains Job No. 1 during a year-end news conference. "We have a vital interest in the success of a free Iraq. You see, free societies do not export terror," Bush said. Iran and North Korea, the other two countries in Bush's famous axis, loom nearly as large as Iraq. The United States suspects both countries are on their way to possessing nuclear weapons, or already have them. Both have repressive or authoritarian governments that could interfere with their neighbors or worse. U.S. policy in all three nations is yoked to the continuing war on terrorism, since all three are potential training grounds or arsenals for terrorists. Bush must decide how much to push Iran and North Korea diplomatically; how much to cooperate with European efforts to contain the nuclear threats; and how much to listen to hawks in his own government who may press for a limited airstrike against Iranian nuclear facilities. At the same time, Bush may play a central role in the next phase of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. For now, Britain is taking that lead while all sides await the outcome of Jan. 9 elections to choose a successor to Yasser Arafat. China will probably also be a major focus of U.S. economic and diplomatic efforts during Bush's next four years, and not just because of its vast size and resources. China could help contain or confront North Korea, said Patrick Cronin, a foreign policy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Bush will also have a wary eye on Russia, the Cold War nemesis turned ally in the war on terror. The administration chose mostly to hold its tongue as Russian President Vladimir Putin consolidated political and economic power while muting independent media organizations, but may now adopt a harder line. As prominent as Iraq appears in U.S. foreign policy now, it is useful to remember that priorities can change quickly. Recall how different the world, and the U.S. perspective on it, seemed before the terror attacks of Sept. 11 2001, said Cronin. "One single act of terrorism can completely change this agenda, one huge financial crisis, one assassination" of an ally, Cronin said. "It's incredible how you can go in with one agenda and come out with another. " -------- ENERGY -------- alternative energy Researchers Alarmed by Bat Deaths From Wind Turbines By Justin Blum Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, January 1, 2005; Page A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39941-2004Dec31?language=printer Jessica Kerns thought her survey of new power-generating wind turbines on a mountaintop in West Virginia would yield the standard result: a smattering of dead birds that were whacked by the whirring blades. But the University of Maryland doctoral student turned up something unexpected amid the trees and rolling ridges of Backbone Mountain: hundreds of bat carcasses, some with battered wings and bloodied faces. "It was really a shock," Kerns said. Thousands of bats have died at Backbone and on another nearby wind farm in Meyersdale, Pa. -- more per turbine than at any other wind facility in the world, according to researchers' estimates. The deaths are raising concerns about the impact of hundreds more turbines planned in the East, including some in western Maryland, as the wind industry steps up expansion beyond its traditional areas in the West and Great Plains. The bat deaths, which have baffled researchers, pose a problem for an industry that sells itself as an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional power plants. Wind proponents already have had to battle complaints about bird deaths from the blades and about unsightly turbines marring pristine views. The white turbines in Appalachia rise more than 340 feet above the ground -- well above the tree canopy -- and are lined up close to one another to catch the wind as it blows over the mountains and ridges. The bat problem could worsen, conservationists fear, as wind developers rush to erect new turbines following the recent renewal of a federal tax break for a year. The wind industry, which had been virtually dormant since the last tax break expired a year ago, projects more wind turbines to be built around the country this year than in any previous year. In the areas near where bats have been killed in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, activists said, roughly 700 new turbines have been proposed or approved. "Take the most conservative estimates of mortality and multiply them out by the number of turbines planned and you get very large, probably unsustainable kill rates," said Merlin D. Tuttle, president and founder of Bat Conservation International, whose Austin-based group is leading the research effort in Appalachia. "One year from now we could have a gigantic problem." Bats serve an important role in nature, and their populations are believed to be in decline, scientists said. The bats getting killed in Appalachia devour insects that pose grave threats to crops such as corn and cotton. They also feast on pests that can spread disease, such as mosquitoes. On Backbone Mountain, at a facility called Mountaineer Wind Energy Center, the first dead bats were found in 2003, soon after the project's 44 turbines came online. Conservationists and the wind industry hoped the deaths were a fluke. But Kerns and other researchers returned last year and now estimate the 2004 death toll at between 1,500 and 4,000 bats. Nearby, another group of researchers, working at the 20-turbine wind farm in Pennsylvania, which came online a year ago, found a raft of bat carcasses as well. Researchers do not know why bats are flying into the turbines. Armed with radar and thermal imaging cameras, they are trying to come up with recommendations for wind power developers to avoid the problem. Researchers are uncertain whether bats are attracted to the spinning blades or if their sonar, which allows them to find food and avoid trees and other objects, fails to detect the turbines. None of the species of bats found on the two mountains is endangered, said Albert M. Manville II, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The carcasses found include those of hoary, red and eastern pipistrelle bats. The deaths appear to violate no federal laws, Manville said, but the threat is serious. Unless a solution is found, he said, the turbines could get a reputation as being "bat Veg-o-matics." The large number of dead bats caught the wind power industry by surprise, and now its leaders are scrambling to find a solution. "It was something that when we found out about it we felt we needed to respond to immediately," said Laurie Jodziewicz of the American Wind Energy Association in Washington, which also is participating in the research. "What we wanted to do this year was to get a handle on what's going on. " The wind industry confronted its biggest environmental challenge when early model turbines in Northern California killed large numbers of birds. The industry says newer turbines and more attention to site selection have dramatically cut the number of bird deaths in subsequent projects around the country, though some environmentalists say too many birds are still dying. The turbines tend to attract a lot of attention as they pop up around the country, but they are responsible for generating a tiny amount of electricity in the United States. Last year, the industry said, it provided nearly 17 billion kilowatt hours, enough to serve some 1.6 million households -- less than 1 percent of the country's electricity production. Analysts said future expansion of the industry will be tied largely to whether the tax break remains on the books. Wind power is generally more costly than generating electricity by more conventional methods -- though analysts said federal and state subsidies make the alternative more attractive. In addition, they said that as natural gas prices rise, wind becomes more competitive. An increasing number of states require that a certain amount of power come from renewable sources, such as wind. During debate over federal energy legislation in previous years, some interest groups called for a requirement that renewable sources account for a certain percentage of the nation's electricity production. In the East, wind has only recently caught on, and the most preferable areas are on mountains where wind tends to be most powerful. In West Virginia and Pennsylvania, the turbines are positioned on wide paths cleared amid maple, oak and other hardwood trees. And that may have something to do with the bat deaths. Bats appear to be attracted to the open areas cleared by the wind developers because they can more easily find insects there, researchers said. But they are unsure why the bats hit the blades of the turbines -- whether they're attracted or accidentally fly into them. Some of the bats are migrating south and others live near the wind farms, researchers said. Most of the deaths occurred between July and September, which includes the months of peak migration. The two sites where researchers have found a large number of bat deaths are operated by FPL Energy of Juno Beach, Fla., the largest U.S. generator of wind power. "There is something going on . . . that we don't fully have our arms around," said Steve Stengel, a spokesman for FPL, which has helped fund the bat research. "Our hope is that there are some suggestions based on the research of things that can be done to potentially reduce the number of collisions." Some in the industry argue that there's no evidence that the bat deaths in Appalachia will be repeated on other wooded mountaintops or ridges in the East. Bat conservationists disagree, saying the evidence gathered so far suggests the problem will recur. Several wind developers working on projects in Appalachia said they were concerned but planned to move ahead. Among them is Clipper Windpower Inc. of Carpinteria, Calif., which is planning a project on a portion of Backbone Mountain in Western Maryland, about 20 miles from the Mountaineer project. "We're hopeful that they're going to identify some of the major issues there and we'll be able to respond to those," said Kevin Rackstraw, the company's development leader for eastern North America. "I don't think it's an acceptable response . . . to stop everything until we have answers. You can't just bring everything to a screeching halt. You move forward diligently trying to respond to the concerns as best you can." The bats' deaths have caused a painful split among environmentalists. Some continue to support new wind power projects, saying any harm they cause bats would be far less severe than the environmental problems associated with mining for coal and burning it to produce electricity. The industry concurs, saying the public needs to consider the overall harm other forms of energy production cause the environment compared to wind. But other environmentalists are calling for a moratorium on development of wind projects on wooded mountaintops in the region until researchers figure out how to prevent bat deaths. Some, such as Dan Boone, spokesman of a group called Citizens for Responsible Wind Power and conservation chair for the Maryland chapter of the Sierra Club, said the amount of power generated by the windmills is not worth killing bats and birds. "We have an industry targeting that area, and it's not doing it sensibly," Boone said. "We're blowing the promise of wind as a good, renewable energy source." Some other environmentalists who disagree have launched an Internet petition calling on Boone to resign from his Sierra Club position. Kerns, who studied the problem in 2003 for a contractor for FPL and is now working with the bat conservation group, said she has started to see patterns in the deaths. She has not reached any conclusive findings. For example, before and after large storms, more bats tend to die. On warmer nights when wind speeds are lower, more have died. But researchers do not know why. Kerns feels a sense of urgency to complete the research as developers ready their plans for nearby mountains. "It's likely the same thing will occur," she said. "I look at the areas that are around here and I worry about the mortality that will occur there." -------- energy China looks to Canada as oil source THE TIMES OF INDIA Sat, Jan. 01, 2005 http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/business/10543188.htm China's thirst for oil has brought it to the doorstep of the United States. Chinese energy companies are on the verge of striking ambitious deals in Canada in efforts to win access to some of the most prized oil reserves in North America. The deals may create unease for the first time since the 1970s in the traditionally smooth energy relationship between the United States and Canada. Canada, the largest source of imported oil for the United States, has historically sent almost all its exports of oil south by pipeline to help quench America's thirst for energy. But that arrangement may be about to change as China, which has surpassed Japan as the second-largest market for oil, flexes its muscle in attempts to secure oil, even in places such as the cold forests of northern Alberta, where oil has to be sucked out of the sticky, sandy soil. "The China outlet would change our dynamics," said Murray Smith, a former Alberta energy minister who was appointed this month to be the province's representative in Washington, a new position. Smith estimated that Canada could eventually export as many as 1 million barrels per day to China out of potential exports of more than3 million barrels per day. "Our main link would still be with the United States, but this would give us multiple markets and competition for a prized resource," Smith said. Delegations of senior executives from China's largest oil companies have been making frequent appearances in recent weeks in Calgary, Canada's bustling energy capital, to talk about ventures that would send oil extracted from the northern reaches of Alberta to new ports in western Canada and onward by tanker to China. Chinese companies are also said to be considering direct investments in Alberta's oil sands, by buying into existing producers or acquiring companies with leases to produce oil in the region. In all, there are nearly half a dozen deals in consideration, initially valued at $2 billion and potentially much more, according to senior executives at energy companies. One preliminary agreement could be signed in early January. A spokesman for the Department of Energy in Washington said officials were monitoring the talks but declined to comment further. China's appetite for Canadian oil derives from its own insatiable domestic energy demand, which has sent oil imports soaring 40 percent in the first half of this year over the period a year ago. China's attempts to diversify its sources of oil have already led to several foreign exploration projects in places considered on the periphery of the global oil industry such as Sudan, Peru and Syria. In Calgary, however, the negotiations with China have focused on the oil sands, an unconventional but increasingly important source of energy for the United States. Higher oil prices have recently made oil sands projects profitable, justifying the expense of the untraditional methods of producing oil from the sands. Large-scale mining and drilling operations are required to suck a viscous substance called bitumen out of the soil. Some equipment for that process has moved through the Port of Duluth-Superior in recent years. Canada's oil production from the sands surpassed1 million barrels per day this year and was expected to reach 3 million barrels within a decade. The bulk of output is exported to the Midwest. That flow pushed Canada ahead of Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Venezuela this year as the largest supplier of foreign oil to the United States, with average exports of1.6 million barrels per day. -------- OTHER -------- health 'I Really Consider Cannabis My Miracle' Patients Fight to Keep Drug of Last Resort By Evelyn Nieves Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, January 1, 2005; Page A03 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39655-2004Dec31?language=printer OAKLAND, Calif. -- She is good for two hours. Then the pains start bullying her again. Her back, her neck, her head, her insides -- all the warring parts of her body -- rise up to beat her. If she hesitates to act, they throw her down, throttle her, make her wish she were dead. So Angel McClary Raich takes more marijuana, buying another two hours. Diane Monson is a bit luckier. She can function for up to four hours before her spine reverts to being her enemy. Then she needs another dose of cannabis. In California, Monson and Raich are not so different from about 100,000 other chronically sick people. They are users of medical marijuana, or cannabis, examples of why the state's voters passed a law in 1996 legalizing the drug for the seriously ill or dying. But the U.S. Justice Department considers all marijuana a dangerous controlled substance. To the federal government, Raich and Monson are illegal drug users. That divide is at the heart of Ashcroft v. Raich, which brought the two women to the U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 29 to plead for their right to their doctor-recommended medical marijuana, and put them in the headlines for several days. The Supreme Court arguments were the latest in a series of legal battles between the women and the federal government. In 2002, Monson and Raich sued Attorney General John D. Ashcroft after Monson's house was raided by Drug Enforcement Administration agents who seized her six marijuana plants from her patio. Monson and Raich eventually won an injunction against the raids in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which the federal government appealed to the high court. A ruling is expected sometime before July. Ashcroft v. Raich, which debates whether the federal government exceeded its authority to regulate interstate commerce by imposing national drug laws on state-sanctioned medical cannabis that is not sold, transported across state lines or used for nonmedicinal purposes, will have crucial implications for at least 30 pending federal marijuana cases. The cases all involve medical cannabis growers, patients and dispensary operators who were raided by federal agents in several of the 11 states that have legalized medical cannabis. Ashcroft v. Raich also is considered important for those watching the debate over states' rights vs. federal authority. But for Raich and Monson, the case is personal. They want to be able to live their lives. Medical marijuana, they say, makes that possible. Raich, a 39-year-old mother of two teenagers, suffers from an inoperable brain tumor, wasting syndrome, tumors in her uterus, endometriosis and other ailments. She says medical marijuana is keeping her alive. Monson, a 47-year-old accountant who lives in the Northern California town of Oroville, has suffered from a degenerative back disorder for 25 years. Without medical cannabis, she says, she would live, but in such excruciating pain that it would hardly be worth it. Raich and Monson are worried. The public is sympathetic to their situations; polls show up to 80 percent of Americans approve of medical marijuana. But the federal government has remained steadfast against reclassifying marijuana and has repeatedly rejected applications from university researchers who want to study the drug as medicine. During the oral arguments, several Supreme Court justices raised skeptical questions, concerned that even small amounts of medical marijuana, obtained for free, were part of a national market for licit and illicit drugs -- and thus subject to federal regulations. Even if the court rules that federal agents can continue to raid medical marijuana patients and growers, the women say, they will continue to use marijuana as medicine. They say they have no choice. Raich has been sick longer, with multiple ailments. As a young teen, she had scoliosis and wore a back brace. She was diagnosed with endometriosis at 16. In her twenties, as a mother of young children, she developed wasting syndrome -- doctors still do not know why -- and could not keep food down. She started having seizures, and doctors found a deep brain tumor. Eventually she became partially paralyzed on one side. In 1995, she ended up in a wheelchair. She was withering away. She was also in constant pain. Nothing her doctor prescribed touched it. In 1997, during a doctor's visit, a nurse who had witnessed Raich's suffering for years took her aside and asked her if she had ever considered medical marijuana. Sitting in her den with her husband, Robert, a lawyer whom she met when he was helping the Oakland medical cannabis cooperative that she belonged to in its legal struggles with the Justice Department, Raich recalled how reluctant she was to become a marijuana user. "I was really offended at the suggestion," said Raich, who is a pale 98 pounds on a 5-foot-4 frame. "I was very conservative. I was taught that drugs are bad. And I followed the law. I've never even gotten a speeding ticket." But one night, Raich said, her daughter approached her. "She wanted to know why I couldn't do the things that other mommies do. I promised my children that I would do anything I possibly could to get better." That night, she added, "I faced my own conservative ways and my own moral judgments and I realized that because I loved my children so much and so deeply -- they are my world -- that I would do everything I possibly could for them." She asked family members to buy some marijuana on the street. "I immediately felt relief," she said. "It didn't cure my pain, but it definitely made me feel better. It didn't make me vomit and it made me hungry, which I didn't normally feel." She asked her doctor about it, and he agreed that she should try cannabis as a therapy. She joined the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative, she said, and found that medical-grade cannabis cultivated for patients was more potent than street-corner pot. The more she smoked or inhaled, she said, the more sensations she began feeling. She could eat. She could move. Within a year and a half, she felt strong enough to learn how to walk again. After four years in a wheelchair, she put it away. "The minute I became a medical cannabis user," she said, "I became an advocate." In fact, Raich found Monson after reading about her. Monson and her husband had been raided by federal agents in August 2002. Despite being shown her doctor's note, the agents confiscated the plants she had spent so much time cultivating. "It was extremely stressful," Monson said of the raid. She had started using medical cannabis in 1998, after her doctor of 20 years recommended it. Many other painkillers they had tried had failed. For a time, Monson said, she was on Vioxx, which has since been taken off the market because of safety concerns. Monson, an avid gardener with an orchard of apple, pear, peach, apricot, cherry and fig trees, started growing marijuana. "I had some success the first year. By 2002, I had a pretty good stash," she said. "I had them in full sun, out in the open, thinking I was in full compliance with California law." Earlier this year, when her husband of 25 years was stricken with pancreatic cancer, Monson gave him medical cannabis to ease his pain and help increase his appetite. He died six months ago. "I make oils and tincture and vapors," she said. "I experiment because the government, which says it's so unhealthy to smoke it, is not studying it. We're not getting the best delivery system, so we're not getting the full benefits of a drug that can help so many people." Monson, a literacy volunteer in Oroville who also manages several rental properties she owns, said none of her businesses or passions have suffered since she began using medical cannabis. In fact, they have thrived. She plans to grow her marijuana plants again this year. Raich, too sick to grow her own, is extremely grateful that she has caregivers growing it for her. "May of this year my brain tumor specialist said that my tumor had stabilized," she said. "I really consider cannabis my miracle. I really owe my life to it, and I'm not going to let anyone, including the government, take it away from me."