NucNews - January 6, 2005 -------- NUCLEAR -------- accidents and safety Keeping the numbers in perspective - some unwholesome figures From: FoE Sydney - Nuclear Campaign Date: Thu Jan 6, 2005 11:35pm Total number of deaths from the Tsunami so far: 150,000 Upper limit of deaths from the Tsunami: 300,000 (assuming massive mortality from disease) Number of immediate fatalities at Hiroshima: Appx 200,000 Estimated number of fatalities for a SINGLE 15-30Kt warhead strike on Bombay (Mumbai) 150-800,000 Estimated number of fatalities from a 'limited' India/Pakistan nuclear exchange: 15 million Estimated number of fatalities from a larger scale (use of all warheads) India Pakistan exchange, resulting in the complete destruction of Pakistan and the destruction of most Indian cities, with the fallout from the destruction of Pakistan falling back over India as it will any time other than monsoon: --Up to 150 million, complete destruction of both countries as functioning entities. (Assumes use of 75 Pakistani warheads and over 100 Indian warheads, and wind direction from Pakistan to India) Estimates for the results of a major US/Russian exchange, such as that which Colonel Stan Petrov prevented on Sept 26 1983, range from 100million casualties each in the US and Russia (ie most of the population), to the deaths of up to 50% of all humans. This assumes that roughly 30,000 megaton sized weapons are used. The nuclear winter effect is said to become evident after the use of anything over 500 Megaton sized weapons for 'city busting'. The 30,000 warheads cited (roughly 15,000 each for the US and Russia) is about sixty times the number required to bring about the 'nuclear winter' effect. I believe that the Tsunami contains lessons for us all, including lessons in how to remove the mutual distrust of each other that might result in the far grimmer scenarios sketched above. I observe that it contains moving lessons in human kindness that has often bought out the very best in people. Perhaps this is the best lesson of all. I have tried to help by distributing the FOE-Indonesia/FOE-Australia appeal widely. I hope that has helped. But what these ghastly diabolical numbers show is that so far the Tsunami has merely managed to equal the Hiroshima body - count. Let us hope that the goodwill engendered by the recovery effort makes more terrible events less and less likely. John Hallam -------- britain Wind farm plan for nuclear plant Thursday, 6 January, 2005, 09:37 GMT BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/4151005.stm An energy company is investigating the possibility of an onshore wind farm near Bradwell-on-Sea in Essex. The proposal by Npower Renewables is at an early stage and no application for planning permission has been submitted. Currently the design is for up to 26 wind turbines, providing enough electricity to power approximately 29,000 typical UK homes. This would be enough electricity for the needs of the Maldon district where the wind farm is proposed. Vicky Portwain, development manager for Npower, said: "This would offset the emission every year of around 117,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide that would otherwise have been released by power stations burning fossil fuels like coal, oil or gas. This is one of the few potential sites in the east of England suitable for a scheme of this scale which would contribute significantly towards meeting renewable energy targets Vicky Portwain "Carbon dioxide is the gas which is the main contributor to global warming and climate change. This is equivalent to removing around 38,500 cars from the roads of Essex for the life of the wind farm. "This is one of the few potential sites in the east of England suitable for a scheme of this scale which would contribute significantly towards meeting renewable energy targets." A full consultation process will be undertaken with local representatives and residents, along with local and national groups. A public exhibition is due to take place at Bradwell Village Hall on Saturday 5 February, from 1200 GMT to 1600 GMT, and on Sunday 6 February, from 1000 GMT to 1600 GMT. The proposed site is on farmland between the villages of Bradwell-on-Sea and Tillingham. ---- ITALY ASKS UK TO KEEP ITS N-WASTE FOR 20 YEARS Published in Whitehaven News on Thursday, January 6th 2005 http://www.cumbria-online.co.uk/viewarticle.asp?id=167638 WEST Cumbria’s possible future as home to foreign nuclear waste was highlighted again this week with news that Italy wants BNFL to retain nuclear waste for up to 20 years. Italian operator Sogin is seeking bids on reprocessing of 235 metric tonnes of spent nuclear fuel. Sogin’s Ugo Spezia said the company would seek to have the reprocessor, British Nuclear Fuels or Cogema, keep the final waste products in storage until the availability of a final repository in Italy, or for up to 20 years. It would also ask to receive only vitrified high-level waste (HLW) back from reprocessing, with the reprocessor keeping other waste categories, he said. Uranium and plutonium from past reprocessing of Italian spent fuel is now in storage at BNFL Sellafield, Spezia said. That material should return to Italy under the utility's contracts with BNFL, and future reprocessing contracts would theoretically follow the same principle. But there is today no facility in Italy that could use the nuclear fuel materials, so "of course we are trying to leave all fresh nuclear material [from reprocessing] at BNFL," Spezia said. Italy is facing political resistance to its own moves towards a nuclear waste dump or repository. The announcement that the small community of Scanzano Ionico in southern Basilicata province had been chosen for construction of a deep geologic repository triggered weeks of demonstrations by the public and massive political opposition, leading eventually to the withdrawal of the site as a repository candidate. Asked about the Italian announcement, a BNFL spokeswoman Ali McKibbin said: “Clearly as we are in the reprocessing business, we are keeping a close eye on the developments in Italy. However, we have not had a formal approach from Italy on additional reprocessing business. Any new business for Thorp will depend upon the wishes of our customers, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which will assume ownership of the site in 2005, and ultimately the sanction of Government. “As with all reprocessing contracts signed since 1976, any potential future contract would include return of waste obligations in accordance with UK government policy. If waste substitution was to be implemented, then additional ILW would be retained in the UK, however a radiologically equal greater volume of HLW would be returned to customers. Title to the products of reprocessing (the uranium and plutonium) would remain with the customer”. CORE’s campaign co-ordinator Martin Forwood said: “The whole point of reprocessing is that the materials are repatriated for re-use as new fuel by the customer. Impotent Italy can’t do this and we view the plan as a blatant Italian attempt at dumping via the back door. We will fight it all the way and believe that any investigation by UK authorities will reveal the plan to be an outright scam” Copeland councillor, Kevin Young, added: “I am all for protecting the jobs at Sellafield, but not at the expense of turning West Cumbria into a bigger and bigger nuclear dump.” -------- depleted uranium What About the Children of Iraq? By Jack Dalton POAC Co-Editor 06/01/2005 Islam Online http://www.islamonline.net/English/In_Depth/Iraq_Aftermath/2005/01/article_02.shtml Wasaen, a 3 -year-old Iraqi girl displaced from Fallujah (Reuters) This past week has shown how people of various religions, nationalities, and ethnic backgrounds are able to come together to help in a crisis—the victims of the Tsunami in this instance. Tens of thousands of children are now orphans, with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, now refugees, to say the least. The death toll—over156 ,000—is still rising. No one knows what it will be in the end, but one thing is certain: it will be a huge number. It is good to see the outpouring of the world’s people coming to the aid of the Tsunami victims. My question is simply this, where is the world’s concern for the tens of thousands of Iraq’s children that have been so completely decimated by the US invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq? - War, Tsunamis, and God: The Philosophy of Our Times - The Silent Victims—the Children of Iraq In the 12 years of US sanctions on Iraq prior to the invasion, over 500 , 000children died as a direct result of those sanctions. Where were the care and concern of the world then? Where were the so-called “compassionate conservatives” of the US then? Oops! Forgot for a moment; they are the ones supporting the Iraq war. Currently in Iraq, over 100,000 (and the number is growing rapidly) Iraqis have been killed by US bombs, “smart” bombs—that keep going to the wrong address and killing more children—and handheld weapons—for up close and personal killing. It has been estimated that well over half of that number have been women and children. The “collateral damage” the US keeps referring to is the Iraqi children, in large part. Where is the compassion for them? Or is it that they deserve to die simply because they are the children of Iraq? The sanctions that were in place on Iraq, then the invasion, have been directly responsible for the wholesale slaughter of Iraq’s children. The infant mortality rate in Iraq is now higher than it was 40 years ago. This also is a direct result of US actions in the country. Then there are the children that will die a slow death due to exposure to depleted uranium (DU)—over4 , 000tons of it to date. Iraq has been contaminated by US weapons made of DU. This has been a type of nuclear warfare, pure and simple. I have yet to see or hear reports by US corporate media, the White House, the Department of Defense, or the Pentagon about the children of Iraq who have been killed in the tens of thousands by the Bush administration “policies” and its war on Iraq. What I do hear coming from that bunch and its talking heads is, “bomb them all in the name of the Lord.” Not long ago, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked, “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And—and you know, is the price worth it?” She took about ten seconds to mull it over, and then said, “We think the price is worth it.” That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? So while Bush and company go about the business of politicizing the horrific disaster the Tsunami caused, the wholesale slaughter of children born out of the invasion of Iraq will continue; it is the children of Iraq that have, and will continue to pay, the ultimate and highest cost—their lives. As a footnote, next month Bush will be asking his Republican cheerleader Congress for $ 100billion dollars more so that he may continue the slaughter in Iraq for another year. His war-profiteering corporate sponsors will benefit greatly; everyone else will pay the cost—especially the children of Iraq who will continue to be the recipients of the US “smart” bombs made of depleted uranium. Jack Dalton is a disabled Vietnam veteran and the Co-Editor of the Project for the Old American Century web publication. ---- A lot of people are paying now for Bush’s excesses 06 Jan 2005 By Robert C. Koehler, Tribune Media Services http://www.oscnewsgazette.com/index.php?option=news&task=viewarticle&sid=9887 For our exalted leader: a “military-themed” inaugural extravaganza likely to cost more than $40 million. For the rest of us: post-traumatic stress disorder. Blue America looks on appalled as George Bush’s excesses spill fore and aft, boding hell to pay one of these days even for his shockingly loyal supporters. A lot of people are paying for it now. UPI reporter Mark Benjamin, for instance, wrote recently about the phenomenon of homeless Iraq-war vets beginning to show up at shelters, bringing their anger and clinical depression with them. “They put us in a warehouse. They treated us like cattle,” one of these vets told Benjamin, describing his handling by the military after he got home, nursing a mangled thumb and a mangled psyche. The thanks he received from a grateful nation amounted to $100 a month disability pay. The more the scandal-that-is-Bush builds without breaking, the scarier it gets. Where’s our tsunami warning system? A compartmentalized media seem unable to remain focused on the danger signs, or even the ironies. Thus we read straight-faced accounts of how the Pentagon will select a certain number of active-duty troops and their families to take part in the Commander-in-Chief Ball - part of a three-day pre-inauguration shebang dubbed “Celebrating Freedom, Celebrating Honor” - even as outrage still hovers in the air over the secretary of defense’s ersatz signature on condolence letters to the families of the dead. Celebrating honor? Donald Rumsfeld’s hollow grief is only the latest in a series of insults to U.S. troops, some of whom are now being called on to do duty as photo ops for the war president before they ship out. Lest we forget, this is the administration that cut $28 billion in veterans’ benefits the day after it launched the invasion of Iraq; that banned photos of the flag-draped caskets off-loaded from cargo planes; that implemented “stop-loss” orders keeping GIs on active duty past their discharge dates; that failed to provide adequate protective armor for the troops and wantonly exposed them to such toxic substances as depleted uranium; that saw no reason for a presidential presence at GI funerals. How many ways does it need to demonstrate that it regards the troops as throwaways, mere fodder to the cause? Yet some of them will be allowed to dance with their spouses at the inauguration. Ah, glory. Perhaps they’ll be celebrating Rumsfeld’s promise to personally sign all subsequent condolence letters, including, if necessary, theirs. Forgive the gallows irony. None of this is funny. What we’ve got are powerful people with a callous disregard for anything but their own ideological mission. They have control over the most sophisticated weapons technology the world has ever known, and the arrogance to use it. And they are milking a post-9/11 climate of fear in which, for their alleged razor-thin majority of supporters, they can do no wrong. Ever get the feeling you’ve suddenly been locked out of your own country? The war on evil is taking hold of the popular imagination, like a Schwarzenegger blockbuster, and America is being appropriated for its purposes. This is the future the media can’t quite bring itself to piece together from the clues. “I am one to agree with W.T. Sherman that total evil must be stopped by total war,” one of these supporters wrote to me recently. “It is inevitable that innocents will be killed. That is what war is all about. It is how evil is eliminated.” And thus do human beings turn into collateral damage. It happens only for the best of causes. Far from eliminating evil, we are making common cause with it. “That was the hardest part,” one of the homeless vets, Lance Cpl. James Brown, told reporter Benjamin. “Not only were there men (who were shot at checkpoints), but there were women and children - really little children. There would be babies with arms blown off. It was something hard to live with.” Perhaps at some point the folly will burst with sharp clarity and the country will come to its senses. But maybe it will just continue leaking out, in passing scandals - Rumsfeld’s fake condolences, homeless vets trapped in emotional hell - that never get linked. Meanwhile, the president continues to prove that there’s no failed policy, no moral bankruptcy, with a stench so great that $40 million-plus in corporate donations can’t mask it, at least for three days. Let the music play. Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com. -------- europe Nuclear elements arrive for reprocessing in France January 6, 2005 3:50pm (AEDT) Australian Broadcasting Corporation http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200501/s1277677.htm Two-hundred-and-seventy-six spent nuclear fuel elements have made the journey from Sydney to a facility in France, where they will be reprocessed. The elements, which left Sydney in November, were packed in reinforced casks and transported on a cargo ship designed to carry nuclear material. The spent fuel comes from seven years worth of work at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation's (ANSTO) research reactor operations. ANSTO is located 40 kilometres south-west of the Sydney CBD. ---- Bulgarian nuclear plant may cost 4 bln euro-report Thu Jan 6, 2005 03:33 AM ET (Reuters) http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=E4UE1JZLFUPKMCRBAEKSFFA?type=topNews&storyID=7251985 SOFIA, Jan 6 - The construction of Bulgaria's planned Belene nuclear power plant may cost up to 4 billion euros ($5.3 billion), daily 24 Chasa reported on Thursday, citing a report from financial adviser Deloitte and Touche. Bulgaria relaunched the nuclear project in May to secure its position as the leading Balkan power exporter after it shuts down two Soviet-made nuclear reactors ahead of EU entry in 2007. The Deloitte and Touche report reviews seven options for the plant, depending on the type and the number of reactors needed, the newspaper said. The first three options vary in cost from 2.7 billion euros to 3.6 billion euros and consider using an existing site in which Bulgaria sank $1.0 billion in an original project started in the 1980s but later stopped due to lack of funds. The most expensive scenario envisions building two new 1,000 megawatt reactors for 4.0 billion euros, the daily said. The centrist government of Simeon Saxe-Coburg had earlier estimated the cost of the project, located some 250 kilometres northeast of Sofia in the Danube-river town of Belene, at around 2 billion euros. Three consortiums have shown interest in the deal, including one comprised by Czech engineering firm Skoda Praha, Citibank, Italy's Unicredito and the Czech Republic's Komercni Banka. Another group vying for the contract includes France's Framatome and Russia's Atomstroiexport. The third consortium, which has said it may pull out of the process, groups Canada's Atomic Energy Canada Ltd. with Italy's Ansaldo Nuclear, Bechtel of the United States and Japan's Hitachi Corp. The newspaper said construction on the project should begin by Dec. 31 of this year. -------- iran Iranian delegation headed to Vienna to discuss military site inspection TEHRAN (AFP) Jan 06, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050106121635.7kih8wjn.html An Iranian delegation is to meet with UN atomic agency officials in Vienna on Friday to discuss the modalities of a inspection visit to a military site that the US charges is involved in nuclear weapons work, IRNA reported Thursday. The report said the inspection of the Parchin could take place "within a few days" of the discussions. On Wednesday International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director Mohamed ElBaradei announced that the Islamic republic had finally given the green light for his inspectors to probe Parchin, a huge complex 30 kilometresmiles) southeast of Tehran. The United States, which accuses Iran of having a secret weapons programme, has said the Iranians may be working on testing "high-explosive shaped charges with an inert core of depleted uranium" at Parchin as a sort of dry test for how a bomb with fissile material would work. The IAEA has been seeking access to Parchin since July. Tehran has strongly denied carrying out any nuclear-related work at the site, and insists its nuclear drive is merely aimed at generating electricity. Parchin is an example of a so-called "transparency visit," where the IAEA is going beyond its mandate under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to check to see if nuclear materials have been diverted away from peaceful use. -------- japan Flawed communication systems found at 76% of Japan's nuclear plants Thursday, January 6, 2005 at 07:10 JST http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=4&id=323895 TOKYO — Thirteen of the 17 commercial nuclear power plants in Japan have defects in their communication systems that could delay the first safety measures following earthquakes or in other emergencies, according to a Kyodo News survey released Wednesday. At the 13 plants, liaison officials have to handle crises from their employees living quarters and not from within plant facilities that are equipped with proper communication systems if disasters occur during nighttime or holidays. (Kyodo News) -------- korea North Korean nuclear facilities are examined 05:08 2005-01-06 Pravda.RU http://newsfromrussia.com/world/2005/01/06/57729.html Iran has agreed to allow nuclear inspectors from the United Nations into a major military complex that the United States has long suspected is a secret site for its nuclear weapons development, officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency said today. The decision by Iran's leaders comes after several months of foreign pressure and internal debate in Teheran about whether to permit the agency into the military base, which Iran has long insisted had nothing to do with its nuclear programs. American officials have long suspected that testing on high explosives in one area of the military site, called Parchin, could be part of a program to develop a nuclear warhead. Iran has insisted that all of its nuclear work is for civilian purposes, tells the NYTimes. According to Reuters, the crisis caused by North Korea's refusal to abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions is deepening and needs to be resolved as soon as possible, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Wednesday. "This has been a pending issue for 12 years, and frankly it is getting worse," International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei told Reuters in an interview. "We need to address the whole question and bring it to a resolution," he said. "I would certainly hope that by the end of the year we should be there." Communist North Korea has been locked in a stand-off with its neighbors and the United States over its nuclear program since 2002. Pyongyang has refused to return to six-country talks on dismantling its nuclear programs unless Washington drops what the North says is a "hostile policy." ElBaradei said he hoped 2005 would see a return of IAEA inspectors to North Korea to conduct rigorous inspections that would provide guarantees to the world that all North Korean nuclear facilities and activities are under U.N. safeguards. The IAEA team was expelled on Dec. 31, 2002 and has not been allowed to return. Since that time, North Korea has produced enough plutonium for half a dozen nuclear weapons, the IAEA and a number of security think-tanks estimate. -------- mideast Egyptian paper: Israel-India nuke test caused tsunami By JOSEPH NASR Jan. 6, 2005 Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1104981578311 The earthquake that struck the Indian Ocean on December 26, triggering a series of huge waves called tsunami, "was possibly" caused by an Indian nuclear experiment in which "Israeli and American nuclear experts participated," an Egyptian weekly magazine reported Thursday. According to Al-Osboa', India, in its heated nuclear race with Pakistan, has lately received sophisticated nuclear know-how from the United States and Israel, both of which "showed readiness to cooperate with India in experiments to exterminate humankind." Since 1992, the magazine argued, leading geological centers in Britain, Turkey and other countries, warned of the need "not to hold nuclear experiments in the region of the Indian Ocean known as 'the Fire Belt,' in which the epicenter of the earthquake lies. Geologists labeled that region 'The Fire Belt' for being "a dangerous terrain that can move at anytime, without human intervention," Al-Osboa' wrote. Despite warnings not to carry out nuclear experiments in and around the 'Fire Belt', "Israel and India continue to conduct nuclear tests in the Indian Ocean, and the United States has recently decided to carry out similar tests in the Australian deserts, which is included in the 'Fire Belt', the Egyptian weekly magazine wrote. "Last year only, Arab and Islamic states have asked the United States to stop its nuclear activities in that region, and to urge Israel and India to follow suite," Al-Osboa' reported. Although Al-Osboa' does not rule out the possibility that the tsunami could have been caused by a natural earthquake it speculates however that, "while it has not been proved yet, there has been a joint Israeli-Indian secret nuclear experiment [conducted on December 26] that caused the earthquake." The Egyptian weekly magazine concludes in its report that "the exchange of nuclear experts between Israel and India, and US pressure on Pakistan which is exerted by supplying India with state-of-the-art nuclear technology and preventing Islamabad from cooperating with Asian and Islamic states in the nuclear field, pose a big question mark on the causes behind the violent Asian earthquake." Incitement against Israel and Jews in Egyptian media is usually limited to the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict yet exceptions are known to occur. In August 2002, the Paris Supreme Court summoned Ibrahim Naafi', editor of the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram, for having authorized the publication of a controversial article entitled 'Jewish matza is made from Arab blood' in the October 28, 2000 edition of the paper. Naafi' was charged with incitement to anti-Semitism and racist violence. -------- missile defense Missile defense: what role in era of terror? As a multibillion dollar program pushes ahead, supporters argue that the complex shield is more needed than ever. By Brad Knickerbocker | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor January 06, 2005 http://csmonitor.com/2005/0106/p03s01-usfp.html In an age when weapons of mass destruction can be slipped into the United States in a cargo container or even a suitcase, is Ronald Reagan's 1983 dream of building an umbrella against long-range enemy missiles passé? Or is it a necessary screen against the possibility of North Korea or another rogue state tossing a nuclear-tipped rocket our way? As the US moves ahead with testing and deployment of the system, new questions are swirling about the merits of pursuing such a costly program in a time of war and increased demand for defense dollars. The debate comes amid enduring skepticism about the technological feasibility of erecting an effective shield. In December, the US missile defense program suffered another test failure when the rocket carrying the "kill vehicle" meant to destroy an incoming mock enemy warhead shut down before launch from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Pentagon officials, who attributed it to an "unknown anomaly," downplayed the failure. But critics point out it is part of a pattern - four of the system's nine major tests have been unsuccessful. Yet the Bush administration doggedly keeps pushing the program. The administration has steadily increased funding for missile defense, although the Pentagon may trim that in coming years in order to pay for the expensive ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it's pushed ahead with deployment in Alaska and California even though some experts say key components are far from finished. Early in his first term, Mr. Bush also pulled the US out of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty. The ABM Treaty restricted such defenses on the theory that this would slow down the nuclear arms race by maintaining a kind of standoff known as "mutual assured destruction." Technology pushes the pace The geopolitical landscape and the threat environment are very different from when Mr. Reagan launched his Strategic Defense Initiative (quickly dubbed "star wars"), startling allied nations as well as potential adversaries. "Missile defense is gradually outgrowing the ideological disputes of the past," says national security analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. The threat has become more diverse and less predictable, he says. At the same time, he adds, having to deal with a handful of relatively primitive weapons from a few rogue states, rather than masses of multiwarhead missiles from the former Soviet Union, means "this mission looks doable." "The scale of likely threats is so modest that even the thin defense being built in Alaska and California may be sufficient to dissuade some problem-states from pursuing long-range ballistic missiles," says Dr. Thompson. Others see an even greater need. "China has developed a whole new generation of mobile ICBMs capable of hitting the US," says Baker Spring, a national security analyst at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. "And hostile governments, such as North Korea and Iran, continue to develop and produce ballistic missiles capable of inflicting real damage upon American soil." Failure to counter such threats militarily, some advocates say, could undercut this country's military and diplomatic position in a dangerous world. Sen. Jon Kyl (R) of Arizona, a leading congressional proponent of missile defense, warns of "blackmail intended to freeze us into inaction by the very threat of missile attack." Mistakes made in battle No one underestimates the difficulty of "hitting a bullet with a bullet," which describes the technological challenge of missile defense, especially when split-second decisions need to be made during the fog of war. As the invasion to oust the regime of Saddam Hussein got under way in March 2003, shorter-range US Patriot missiles nailed several Iraqi rockets headed for advancing coalition forces. But Patriots also mistakenly shot down a US Navy jet and a British fighter, killing the allied pilots. And countering ICBMs, which can reach US targets from halfway around the world in just 30 minutes, is far tougher - especially if an attacker also launches a bunch of decoys, as expected. Critics liken the rush to deploy expensive ballistic missile defenses at a time when the threat as well as technology is changing to rewriting architectural plans in the middle of building a house. And they say the nine tests so far (five of which succeeded) were set up - "rigged," some say - to virtually assure success. "A system is being deployed that certainly doesn't have any credible capability," says retired Air Force Gen. Eugene Habiger, former head of the Strategic Command, which includes all US nuclear forces. "I cannot recall any military system being deployed in such a manner." Other critics point out that the system being deployed in Alaska and California lacks certain crucial elements, including the necessary radar, the proper satellite constellations, and the ability of the "kill vehicle" interceptors to discriminate between potential targets at a closure rate of more than 15,000 miles per hour. "This is like deploying a new military jet fighter with no wings, no tail, and no landing gear," says Philip Coyle, the Pentagon's former head of weapons testing, now an adviser to the private Center for Defense Information in Washington. Weapons proliferate worldwide Whether the administration's relative optimism about the potential for a US missile-defense system will continue to apply to this country's old communist adversary is another matter. Russian military officials announced earlier this year that they are developing a "revolutionary" intercontinental weapon. Rather than being ballistic (unpowered once it's left the booster rocket), this new type of warhead would be powered by a supersonic combustion ramjet allowing it to maneuver to the target. This design may be as untested as the more fanciful aspects of star wars, such as space-based lasers. But even proponents of ballistic missile defense say there are other things to worry about. The Bush administration, says missile defense supporter Thompson at the Lexington Institute, "has been nearly blind" to the danger of low-flying cruise missiles proliferating around the world. According to the Pentagon, nine countries will be producing land-attack cruise missiles over the next 10 years, many of them for export. "The nation needs a balanced defensive posture, which means taking the growing cruise-missile danger seriously, even as we move to counter the more visible threat of ballistic missiles," says Thompson. -------- u.s. nuc facilities Our daily tsunami Each day we pour thousands of people - including New Mexicans - into maintaining a flood of nuclear weapons. When will we stop this folly? By Greg Mello January 6, 2005 Albuquerque Tribune http://www.abqtrib.com/albq/op_commentaries/article/0,2565,ALBQ_19866_3447769,00.html The latest is the south Asian tsunami will claim 150,000 or more lives. It is by any measure a terrible disaster. U.N. and private relief officials say famine, thirst and disease could claim as many lives as the sea if basic needs are not quickly provided. Many nations are pledging aid; President Bush has increased the initial U.S. offer from $35 million to $35 million and then jumped the figure to $350 million. Let us imagine, if we can, a catastrophe of this scale caused by human negligence. It would be a great crime. Unspeakably worse in our scale of value, however, it would be a planned catastrophe. Who could contemplate creating such a catastrophe or put the machinery in place to make it happen? Actually, thousands of people in the United States do so every day. These are the men and women who lead and work in the government's nuclear weapons industry, including several thousand in New Mexico. Their job is to produce the threat of great danger to others through awesome weapons. It has been done already. On Aug. 6, 1945, an atomic bomb with an explosive yield of 15 kilotons of TNT was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Before Japanese authorities could digest this event, a second 20-kiloton bomb was detonated above Nagasaki on Aug. 9. By the end of that year, 210,000 people had died from these two explosions; roughly another 90,000 have prematurely died as a result of these bombs since then. Those deaths were fully premeditated. Even before a full-scale test was conducted in July of that year in New Mexico, there was little practical uncertainty about the blast, heat and radiation effects of these bombs. What uncertainty might have remained was thoroughly dispelled by the Trinity test near Alamogordo. Like the invasion of Iraq, which has also caused civilian casualties comparable to this week's tsunami, the atomic bombing of Japan was a clear crime under existing law. So let's call a spade a damn shovel. Our two nuclear labs, Los Alamos and Sandia National laboratories, are the world's foremost facilities for the production of mass death on demand. Their weapons are like portable death camps; instead of laboriously bringing victims to gas chambers and ovens, the ovens can be brought to the victims in a matter of minutes - once all the preliminary work is done by so many willing hands. These labs help provide our rulers a way to inflict on as many others as possible the most extreme opposite of what we would like others to do to us - the most extreme opposite, in other words, of the Golden Rule. Evangelicals take note: This arguably makes nuclear weapons the central exemplar and metaphor for all that is upside down in our scale of values today. If it's OK to threaten complete annihilation for millions, surely far lesser forms of violence, both overt and structural, are also justified. Over the past 60 years, our country has spent $7 trillion of its citizens' labor and money to generate 70,000 nuclear warheads at an average cost of about $100 million apiece. We retain 10,400 such weapons today in our nuclear arsenal. The $35 million promised in initially in relief for hard-hit Asian nations represents about one-third of what it historically has cost us for a single nuclear weapon - the casualties from which would likely exceed those from this week's tsunami. Morality, and even law, are somewhat out of fashion in the hallowed halls of the national security state, and so we ask only this: Which of what follows is the better national security investment? This year, Los Alamos Lab will spend about $200 million to produce plutonium bomb cores ("pits"). After spending about $1.7 billion over a decade-long period, the lab hopes to start manufacturing pits in earnest in 2007 in order to augment the 23,000 pits the U.S. already has. If the lab slowed down these grotesque efforts to build that 23,001th pit by just 20 percent for just one year we could double our aid to the hundreds of thousands of people who are now in mortal danger. Which is the better security investment? This year's budget for Los Alamos Lab is more than twice as much as will be spent on all the programs of the World Health Organization for the entire world. And the Iraq war costs more than 100 times as much. Which is the better security investment, aggressively creating hatred against us while killing and maiming thousands of our own people in an unprecedented invasion of a foreign country? Or providing clean water, child immunization programs and increasing food security all over the world? It is pathetic and tragic that any of this has to be asked, and asked in a guest article like this one. It is too obvious. If editors could find the courage in their hearts to speak up clearly and reporters to ask obvious but embarrassing questions, we would not be in Iraq, nor would Los Alamos be making plutonium pits. Hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid would be flowing to these stricken countries, and you and I need not cry out in shame for what our country has become. Where will those editors find the courage to speak for basic human values? Dear reader, from our own, from our own. Mello is director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a nuclear weapons monitoring group based in Albuquerque. -------- colorado Flats whistleblowers to speak By RICHARD VALENTY, Colorado Daily Staff Writer, January 6, 2005 http://www.coloradodaily.com/articles/2005/01/04/news/news03.txt The book "The Ambushed Grand Jury" paints a tale of alleged environmental crimes and high-level government cover-up of said crimes at Rocky Flats in the late 1980s. Two of the main characters from in the book will hold a press conference Wednesday at the state capitol to begin to tell the rest of the story. Wes McKinley, a rancher from southeastern Colorado and "Ambushed" co-author, served as foreman of a special grand jury formed to complete a report about federal investigations into alleged Flats violations. The grand jury finished the report in 1992, but large portions of the report were not made public. McKinley could not release the details himself due to grand jury secrecy laws. McKinley was elected to the Colorado House of Representatives in District 64, a multi-county district in the southeastern corner of the state, in 2004. According to a Monday press release, McKinley plans to introduce unspecified new state legislation about Rocky Flats during the 2005 legislative session. Jon Lipsky, a former FBI Special Agent, participated in a 1989 FBI raid of the Flats facility. Lipsky said he has been "muzzled for over a decade" by the federal government to keep him from speaking about Rocky Flats, and Wednesday's event will be his first public discussion of the Flats investigation. Caron Balkany, the other "Ambushed" co-author, said Wednesday's press conference will introduce new information not found in the book, but said the speakers will probably not focus on alleged federal obstruction of justice. "We're focusing on a very specific thing right now, which is what might have happened or what information there is that would impact the ongoing plans to open Rocky Flats up to recreation," said Balkany. Parts of the Flats site could be open to hikers or bikers after a multi-billion dollar cleanup conducted by Kaiser-Hill Company and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is complete. According to the press release, Lipsky has offered to meet with Flats cleanup regulators, including the DOE and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), to volunteer additional Flats-related information. Karen Lutz, DOE spokesperson, said she could not confirm if a meeting has been arranged between Flats regulators and Lipsky. "DOE has a process in place to meet with any citizen who has information that could enhance the cleanup," said Lutz. "If Mr. Lipsky can avail himself to that process and if he has information, we would like to obtain the information, meet with him, and find out if it's pertinent information that we haven't already addressed." Balkany said "Ambushed," released in March 2004, is already in its second printing and has been sold nationally outside of the Denver area and internationally. Still, she said the average everyday local citizen needs to learn more about the history and present status of the former plutonium trigger plant. "It's one of the reasons Wes and I wrote the book, because we respect the average citizen," said Balkany. "We think it's everybody's obligation to participate, and it's our obligation to get the information out. The message we're supposed to use under our system of government to inform the people has been co-opted." McKinley could not be reached for comment Tuesday, but one simple sentence illustrates his feelings about future recreation on the Flats site. "I don't want my children playing in plutonium-laden dust," said McKinley in the press release. Lutz along with other DOE and CDPHE officials insist the site will be safe for casual visitors and full-time employees when the cleanup is complete. "The community is going to get a very safe, protective and conservative cleanup that far exceeds what the law requires us to do," said Lutz. "We have multiple layers of conservatism built into this cleanup, and there are a lot of people who have worked over the last 15 years to get to where we are today." ---- Nuclear Weapons Site Still Unsafe, Says Ex-FBI Agent The man who led the raid on Rocky Flats calls plans for a national wildlife refuge there irresponsible. Officials deny the allegation. By David Kelly, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer January 6, 2005 http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-rocky6jan06,1,7906106.story?coll=la-headlines-nation&ctrack=1&cset=true DENVER — The FBI agent who led the raid on the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in 1989 charged the federal government Wednesday with deceiving the public about cleanup efforts at the facility and said plans for a national wildlife refuge there were irresponsible. "Public recreation at Rocky Flats is a foolish idea driven by politics, not by facts," said Jon Lipsky, who took early retirement from the FBI to speak out against the refuge. "It's dangerous and scientists say they can't make it safe." Lipsky and other critics held a news conference Wednesday where they said the U.S. Department of Energy and the Justice Department had minimized the extent of radioactive contamination at the site to save money and not alarm local residents. Lipsky said radioactive ash, contaminated soil and water still posed hazards but were being ignored by the government. The 6,420-acre site is just west of Denver. Federal officials deny the allegation. Wes McKinley, former head of the grand jury that investigated Rocky Flats and now a Democratic state legislator, will introduce a bill requiring future wildlife refuge managers at Rocky Flats to warn visitors about potential dangers. "If you go horseback riding, you get a warning. You can't even drink a beer without a warning label," he said. "I am proposing that information be given to the children and adults about what happened there and what dangers they face going there." Rocky Flats began making plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons in 1952. The FBI raided the facility in 1989 after reports surfaced of widespread radioactive contamination on the property. The FBI found numerous violations of federal antipollution laws including massive contamination of water and soil. The Department of Justice investigated but did not prosecute anyone from Rockwell International, which operated the plant for the government. Rockwell was fined $18.5 million. Since then, a $7-billion cleanup effort has been underway and is scheduled to conclude next year. "These allegations are absurd," said Karen Lutz, Department of Energy spokeswoman. "We have interviewed hundreds of former workers, examined tens of thousands of pages of documents and have done extensive sampling. Every aspect of this cleanup has been under a microscope for the last 15 years. When you look at the involvement of the community and oversight of regulators, it's hard to think how there could be a cover-up." David Abelson, who heads the Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments, a group of communities near the site that monitors the cleanup, said much of what Lipsky said might be true but was old news. "I have no qualms about 99.9% of what he said but the leap he made, that the cleanup was dangerous, I can't go along with," he said. "He needs to look at new data. The local governments feel highly confident in the cleanup. There is no bit of information we have asked for that has been turned down." Lipsky said the FBI muzzled him when he tried to discuss Rocky Flats and punished him with a transfer from Denver to Los Angeles after he testified before Congress in 1992 about the nuclear facility. He retired last week. A spokesman for the Justice Department was unavailable for comment. "It would be a grave mistake for anyone to rely on what Justice or the Department of Energy said about the level and extent of contamination at Rocky Flats," he said. "The public needs to ask for a congressional investigation. Maybe we will save a life." ---- Flats cleanup critics peddle needless fear Cover-up claims aren't obviously linked to safety January 6, 2005 Rocky Mountain News Editorial http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/article/0,1299,DRMN_38_3448087,00.html To write to the Rocky Mountain News Editor about this story - http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/text/0,1299,DRMN_38_26141,00.html When federal and state regulators craft a cleanup plan for an old mine or industrial site, they don't judge what needs to be done solely on data supplied by the company that ran the operation. They take samples of soil, air and groundwater. Lots and lots of samples. Officials naturally did precisely this at Rocky Flats, the site northwest of Denver where plutonium was once processed into parts for nuclear bombs, before they started cleaning it up, too. Which is why it was odd to hear a former FBI agent and a newly elected state representative claim at a press conference Wednesday that the Rocky Flats cleanup is jeopardized by an alleged cover-up of crimes there 15 years ago. Former agent Jon Lipsky, who was part of a Justice Department probe into possible environmental violations at Rocky Flats that began in 1989, and Rep.-elect Wes McKinley, who served as Rocky Flats federal grand jury foreman, both decried the possibility of sending children onto a wildlife refuge slated to open on much of the old Rocky Flats grounds. Lipsky in particular argued that allegedly incomplete or deceptive information provided long ago by Rockwell International and the Department of Energy helped shaped the current cleanup plan in ways that leave the public vulnerable to contamination. We're not in a position to declare with certainty whether Justice and Energy officials covered up environmental crimes that may have occurred at Rocky Flats in the 1970s and '80s, but this much is clear: The present cleanup is based upon a vast amount of data gathered in recent years. "We are not basing this cleanup on data that was produced 15 or 20 years ago," explains the Energy Department's Karen Lutz. Moreover, she notes, the data have been reviewed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Public Health and Environment. It's one thing for the two groups that called Wednesday's press conference, the Ambushed Grand Jury Citizens' Investigation and the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, to argue that the cleanup standard at Rocky Flats is too lax. Reasonable people can dispute, we suppose, whether ensuring that soil down to three feet emits no more than 50 picocuries of radiation per gram is safe enough, even though the standard would allow no significant boost to the radiation we experience in everyday life. But it's inflammatory to suggest a few hours' visit to a wildlife refuge a few years from now could put children at risk of cancer. As U.S. Rep. Mark Udall - whose environmental credentials are not in dispute - said in a press release Wednesday, "I remain confident that the site will be cleaned up to the highest standard and will be safe for public use. I wouldn't have sponsored the legislation if I thought otherwise." Lipsky and McKinley feel passionately that the Rocky Flats probe was mishandled and the plea bargain with Rockwell was a travesty. Any new information they provide needs to be carefully reviewed. As long ago as 1993, we urged that grand jurors be given immunity to testify before Congress; in 1997, we said jurors should be free to release their own report. But we've also been skeptical of a cover-up, in part because it was the Justice Department itself that initiated the probe and because of how many people would be implicated in any such conspiracy. Why would then-U.S. Attorney Mike Norton and his staff initiate an unprecedented probe of a nuclear facility and then risk their reputations by whitewashing the behavior of their original target? It doesn't seem to make sense, and Lipsky and McKinley were no help Wednesday in clarifying the mystery. ---- Udall opposes idea of radiation warning signs, consent forms By Peggy Lowe, Rocky Mountain News January 6, 2005 http://rockymountainnews.com/drmn/legislature/article/0,1299,DRMN_37_3448839,00.html A Colorado congressman on Wednesday came out against a fellow Democrat's plan to inform people of the radioactive dangers at Rocky Flats. U.S. Rep. Mark Udall said newly elected Colorado Rep. Wes McKinley's idea will only create confusion over cleanup efforts at the site. McKinley, who was foreman of the federal grand jury that tried to indict private and federal officials with environmental crimes at the former nuclear weapons plant, is worried about the government's plan to turn it into a wildlife refuge. He will introduce a bill when the legislative session begins Wednesday that would require the posting of signs or an informational video telling visitors that plutonium triggers for nuclear warheads were made there and that contamination still exists on the grounds. Then, he wants people to sign a statement saying they are aware of the risks but choose to visit anyway. "People do have a right to make a choice," McKinley said. "There are a lot of dangerous activities like horseback riding and rafting, and people do it, but they know it's dangerous before they do it." Udall, who sponsored the bill creating the refuge with Republican U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, issued a statement saying that he doubts the need for McKinley's legislation. The law requires that Rocky Flats must be cleaned up so it's safe for future visitors, employees and surrounding communities, Udall said. The cleanup also will require certification from the state of Colorado and the Environmental Protection Agency, he said. "Mandating the state to require people to provide a consent form if they want to recreate on the site may be well-intentioned but is largely unnecessary," Udall said. -------- south carolina SC nuclear facility says some contaminated material left site Associated Press Thu, Jan. 06, 2005 http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/10581466.htm SENECA, S.C. - Low-level contamination has been found on some equipment used to replace a steam generator at the Oconee Nuclear Station. Workers at a nuclear plant in Arkansas and a contractor in Texas found the contamination on heavy lifting equipment used to replace the steam generator in the Oconee plant's Unit 3, which was returned to full power Wednesday after a refueling and maintenance outage, said Oconee spokeswoman Dayle Stewart. The equipment has been cleaned, Oconee officials said. Duke Power, which owns the Oconee plant, and the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the contamination was minor and posed no health risk. But a nuclear watchdog group said it was "unneeded radiation exposure." "It doesn't mean it's going to cause mass illness, but even those kinds of levels have the potential to cause some harm," said Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Nuclear Information Resource Service. The contamination was "a very small fraction of a typical dental X-ray, so there was never any safety threat to the workers or the public," Stewart said. "We take it very seriously and are doing a detailed investigation of our processes to insure that this does not occur again in the future." The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will try to determine how the contamination happened and if it could have been avoided, but no disciplinary action is being considered at this point, said commission spokesman Ken Clark. "This kind of thing does happen from time to time," Clark said. "It is not a major health or safety concern." -------- tennessee BWXT gets $25 million for managing Tennessee nuclear weapons plant January 6, 2005 Associated Press http://www.whnt19.com/Global/story.asp?S=2770166 OAK RIDGE, Tenn. The Department of Energy has given a top rating and nearly 25 (M) million dollars in performance fees for 2004 to its managing contractor at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant. B-W-X-T, a partnership of B-W-X Technologies and Bechtel National, was graded "excellent" in its management of the Y-12 complex. The contractor was cited for improvements in security, safety, project management and environmental activities. The plant produces parts for every warhead in the country's nuclear arsenal and is the nation's major storehouse for bomb-grade uranium. -------- MILITARY -------- biological weapons BioWar: Rethinking Biodefense Budgets by Dee Ann Divis Washington DC (UPI) Jan 06, 2005 http://www.spacedaily.com/news/terrorwar-05a.html Over the remaining nine months of the U.S. government's 2005 fiscal year billions of dollars will spent on biodefense and more billions likely will be agreed too. What will emerge, however, is an ever louder debate over whether the money is being well spent. The Bioshield bill signed into law last summer allocated $5.6 billion to the purchase of vaccines with the objective of establishing a market the large pharmaceutical companies would be willing to pursue. The bill was not sweet enough, however, and now proponents on Capitol Hill are drafting new legislation aimed at drawing firms to the table. This bill's backers are almost certain to propose liability protection for the drugmakers and likely will propose an extension on patents such that regulatory review does not cut into patent life. More intriguing is an idea being floated for a wild card patent provision. Should a firm develop a winning vaccine or treatment, it would be allowed to select one drug it already has on the market and extend its patent life for a year or two. The latter two ideas, if passed, could have a substantial impact on the pocket books of patients and social programs forced to wait longer for lower-cost generic drugs. Meantime, over at the Defense Department, billions are flowing into efforts to enhance detection, develop counter measures and find preventatives like vaccines. Even so, contractors have been griping over the past year the money Congress put on the table is not being spent and they do not have a clear way to connect with potential customers. Though not a new spending program, AVA or Anthrax Vaccine Absorbed is the biggest issue for Defense Department biodefense at the moment. Critics say the vaccine makes people ill and Defense had to halt a mandatory program of vaccinations with AVA after a federal judge agreed the drug was not fully approved. A 90-day public comment period on AVA is now running and the matter is certain to come to a head this year. In a surprise move Defense has asked the Department of Health and Human Services to approve emergency use of AVA under its new Bioshield authority. This does not appear to be the intended use of the provisions of the Bioshield bill, however, and -- should HHS agree to do it -- the move is likely to cause a sharper look at any new Bioshield legislation. On the non-defense side, money is flowing through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to researchers looking at a range of bioterror agents, and to institutions to build new labs for further research. The Department of Homeland Security has more money to expand the BioWatch monitoring network and money is flowing to states to help the m improve their communications systems and make other biodefense preparations. Questions have begun to emerge, however, over whether it is practical or desirable to follow the current course. For example, it no longer appears practical to try to devise a vaccine for every possible virus or bacteria that could be used in a bioterror attack. David Franz former head of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., told an audience this fall the current system isn't "even close to being agile enough" to deal with genetically engineered organisms and a new approach was needed, with novel vaccines that could be assembled like tinker toys. A report issued in October by ANSER, a defense think tank, laid bare the strains and compromises being forced on the public health system by biodefense. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the today's biodefense programs is what appears to be a lack of specific planning. It isn't that the Defense Department, NIAID and Homeland Security haven't figured out how to move intelligently step by step down the paths they have set for themselves. The worry is they may be on the wrong road. After Sept. 11, 2001, and anthrax attacks, the Bush Administration reacted with a show of money and a limited amount of planning. BioWatch sensors were put into place without talking to state or local officials about how to actually respond to an alert. Construction was planned (and continues) for expensive research laboratories to be built within hours of each other without agencies coordinating with each other. Money was thrown at communities for preparedness without standards being set to help them spend it effectively. An excellent example of "plan later" is the Biodefense Knowledge Center. This organization is designed to help Homeland Security judge the real-world risk of different types of bioterror attacks by combining information from the intelligence agencies with scientific expertise. Better risk assessments should make for better planning - but the center was only dedicated four months ago. Whether it is concern about the direction of vaccines research, questions on duplicative infrastructure or the negative impact on public health policy, questions are being raised over whether money is being wisely spent. It hasn't even been a year, and Congress already has filched some $5 million from the Bioshield account. With the financial strains of the war in Iraq, faltering social programs and tsunami relief, it is a good bet Congress will further rethink, and perhaps reprogram, the huge amounts of money being spent on biodefense. -------- business War Profiteers The Center for Corporate Policy's Ten Worst War Profiteers of 2004 PO Box 19405, Washington, DC 20036 1.202.387.8030 V. 1.202.234.5176 Fax Email: info@corporatepolicy.org http://www.corporatepolicy.org/topics/topten2004list.htm (Note: The companies are listed alphabetically, based on our own subjective judgement. This is not a quantitative ranking.) 1) AEGIS In June, the Pentagon's Program Management Office in Iraq awarded a $293 million contract to coordinate security operations among thousands of private contractors to Aegis, a UK firm whose founder was once investigated for illegal arms smuggling. An inquiry by the British parliament into Sandline, Aegis head Tim Spicer's former firm, determined that the company had shipped guns to Sierra Leone in 1998 in violation of a UN arms embargo. Sandline's position was that it had approval from the British government, although British ministers were cleared by the inquiry. Spicer resigned from Sandline in 2000 and incorporated Aegis in 2002. The Aegis contract has stirred up considerable controversy, even in the shadowy world of private military contractors. A protest by rival bidder Dyncorp - whose bid was deemed unacceptable by the Army - was dismissed by the General Accountability Offfice, which concluded that Dyncorp "lacked standing to challenge the integrity of the awardee (Aegis)." Spicer's defendants point out that there is no provision in contract law to deny a contract based on a bidder's "colorful" past. Critics say that's just the problem. U.S. and international law have failed to address the role of PMCs in Iraq, resulting in a near-total lack of accountability that epitomizes what's wrong with the corporate takeover of Iraq. "Who gives the orders? Where do contractors fit in the chain of command? Who is responsible if things go wrong?" Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) asks. Not only do PMCs fall outside the Military Code of Justice but, thanks to another order passed by Paul Bremer (CPA order #17), it's not clear that they could be prosecuted under Iraq's own laws. That's because the order grants foreign contractors, including private security firms, full immunity from Iraq's laws, even if they injure or kill an innocent party. 2) BearingPoint Critics find it ironic that BearingPoint, the former consulting division of KPMG, received a $240 million contract in 2003 to help develop Iraq's "competitive private sector," since it had a hand in the development of the contract itself. According to a March 22 report by AID's assistant inspector general Bruce Crandlemire, "Bearing Point's extensive involvement in the development of the Iraq economic reform program creates the appearance of unfair competitive advantage in the contract award process." BearingPoint spent five months helping USAID write the job specifications and even sent some employees to Iraq to begin work before the contract was awarded, while its competitors had only a week to read the specifications and submit their own bids after final revisions were made. "No company who writes the specs for a contract should get the contract," says Keith Ashdown, the vice president of Washington, DC-based Taxpayers for Common Sense. "BearingPoint was selected through a transparent and competitive bidding process to undertake the challenging Economic Governance project in Iraq," says BearingPoint's John LaPlace. "We were pleased to be selected to lead this work, just as we were pleased to be selected through competitive bids to lead similar large reform efforts in Afghanistan, Montenegro, Kosovo and other countries around the world." Neither Crandlemire nor other critics have ever said that BearingPoint broke the law. But the company's ties to the Bush administration (according to the Center for Responsive Politics, BearingPoint employees gave $117,000 to the 2000 and 2004 Bush election campaigns, more than any other Iraq contractor) is an example of "crony contracting" that undermines the legitimacy of those who might claim to be working to establish competitive markets in the "newly liberated" country. 3) Bechtel Schools, hospitals, bridges, airports, water treatment plants, power plants, railroad, irrigation, electricity, etc. Bechtel was literally tasked with repairing much of Iraq's infrastructure, a job that was critical to winning hearts and minds after the war. According to the company's contract, "the U.S. government envisions a post-war reconstruction effort as a highly visual symbol of good faith toward building trust for economic, social and cultural efforts as well as for political stability in the region." To accomplish this, the company hired over 90 Iraqi subcontractors for at least 100 jobs. Most of these subcontracts involved rote maintenance and repair work, however, and for sophisticated work requiring considerable hands-on knowledge of the country's infrastructure, the company bypassed Iraqi engineers and managers. Although Bechtel is not entirely to blame, the company has yet to meet virtually any of the major deadlines in its original contract. In October, according to AID, the CPA had restored only 4,400 MW of electrical generating capacity target, falling short of its goal of 6,000 MW by end of June (AID's goal was 9.000, a level that existed in the country before the first gulf war). According to a June GAO report, "electrical service in the country as a whole has not shown a marked improvement over the immediate postwar levels of May 2003 and has worsened in some governorates." Some of the delay is obviously due to the difficulties of getting employees and materials safely to project sites. 4) BKSH & Associates Chairman Charlie Black, is an old Bush family friend and prominent Republican lobbyist whose firm is affiliated with Burson Marsteller, the global public relations giant. Black was a key player in the Bush/Cheney 2000 campaign and together with his wife raised $100,000 for this year's reelection campaign. BKSH clients with contracts in Iraq include Fluor International (whose ex-chair Phillip Carroll was tapped to head Iraq's oil ministry after the war, and whose board includes the wife of James Woolsey, the ex-CIA chief who was sent by Paul Wolfowitz before the war to convince European leaders of Saddam Hussein's ties to al Qaeda). Fluor has won joint contracts worth up to $1.6 billion. Another client is Cummins Engine, which has managed to sell its power generators thanks to the country's broken infrastructure. Most prominent among BKSH's clients, however, is the Iraqi National Congress, whose leader Ahmed Chalabi was called the "George Washington of Iraq" by certain Pentagon neoconservatives before his fall from grace. BKSH's K. Riva Levinson was hired to handle the INC's U.S. public relations strategy in 1999. Hired by U.S. taxpayers, that is: Until July 2003, the company was paid $25,000 per month by the U.S. State Department to support the INC. BKSH has also represented other foreign governments, including Columbia and Equatorial Guinea. In July, O'Dwyer's, the public relations industry trade publication, reported that BKSH would represent the new government of Haiti (established after a U.S.-supported coup that had thrown Jean Bertrand Aristide out) "on a pro bono basis." "We're not looking to make any money off these people," Black explained. "It's a very poor country. We're just trying to do what we can to help out." O'Dwyer's has also reported that Levinson is now representing Radio Sedaye Iran (Radio Voice of Iran), a Beverly Hills-based network that advocates regime change in Iran. 5) CACI and Titan Although members of the military police face certain prosecution for the horrific treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, so far the corporate contractors have avoided any charges. Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba reported in an internal Army report that two CACI employees "were either directly or indirectly responsible" for abuses at the prison, including the use of dogs to threaten detainees and forced sexual abuse and other threats of violence. Another internal Army report suggested that Steven Stefanowicz, one of 27 CACI interrogators working for the Army in Iraq, "clearly knew [that] his instructions" to soldiers interrogating Iraqi prisoners "equated to physical abuse." The Army says it has referred cases involving unidentified employees of CACI to the Department of Justice. Through his attorney, Stefanowicz denies any wrongdoing. "The CACI personnel performing services in Iraq were at all times subject to the military chain of command and took their orders from military personnel," CACI officials responded to intense scrutiny of its involvement in the atrocities in a statement released in July. "While these advisors provide valuable insight and advise to the military intelligence officers they serve, they do not issue orders or exercise operational control of interrogation activities." "Titan's role in Iraq is to serve as translators and interpreters for the U.S. Army," company CEO Gene Ray said, implying that news reports had inaccurately implied the employees' involvement in torture. "The company's contract is for linguists, not interrogators." But according to Joseph A. Neurauter, a GSA suspension and debarment official, CACI's role in designing its own Abu Ghraib contract "continues to be an open issue and a potential conflict of interest." Nevertheless, the GSA and other agencies conducting their own investigations have yet to find a reason to suspend the company from any new contracts. As a result, in August the Army gave CACI another $15 million no-bid contract to continue providing interrogation services for intelligence gathering in Iraq; In September, the Army awarded Titan a contract worth up to $400 million for additional translators. The companies' apparent success in waging an aggressive damage-control campaign has been aided by heavy-hitting lobbyists. For CACI: former representatives Vin Weber (R-MN) and Vic Fazio (C-CA), as well as Edward Kutler, an aide to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. In addition, CACI has retained a firm managed by former House Speaker Bob Livingston (R-LA), among others. Titan's impressive stable of lobbyists includes Michael Herson and Van Hipp, who once worked at the Pentagon under then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. "It is patently clear that these corporations saw an opportunity to build their businesses by proving they could extract information from detainees in Iraq, by any means necessary. In doing so they not only violated a raft of domestic and international statutes but diminished America's stature and reputation around the world," says Susan Burke, an attorney who joined with the Center for Constitutional Rights to file a RICO lawsuit against CACI and Titan in June. Another national security concern has snagged at least one Titan employee already. One of Titan's translators, Ahmed Fathy Mehalba, was arrested after visiting his family in Egypt with classified information contained on computer disks that he had taken with him from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Mehalba has been in jail, awaiting trial ever since. Meanwhile, allegations of bribery association with Titan's operations in Saudi Arabia and other countries have wrecked an anticipated $2 billion buyout by Lockheed Martin. 6) Custer Battles At the end of September, the Defense Department suspended Custer Battles (the name comes from the company's two principle founders - Michael Battles and Scott Custer) and 13 associated individuals and affiliated corporations from all federal contracts for fraudulent billing practices involving the use of sham corporations set up in Lebanon and the Cayman Islands. The CPA caught the company after it left a spreadsheet behind at a meeting with CPA employees. The spreadsheet revealed that the company had marked up certain expenses associated with a currency exchange contract by 162 percent. Robert Isakson, a company employee, drew attention to the problem by filing a false claims action against the company. Isakson also alleged that Custer's "war profiteering ... contributed to the deaths of at least four Custer Battles employees." In a prepared statement, company attorneys suggested that the government's decision to not participate in Isakson's case is evidence that the charges are baseless, and that "the individuals [involved] filed this claim solely as a last ditch effort to achieve a competitive edge over CB." The suspension was the first for any company in association with its work in Iraq. The FBI and the Pentagon inspector general's Defense Criminal Investigative Services are both conducting ongoing investigations. 7) Halliburton In December Congressman Waxman (D-CA), announced that "a growing list of concern's about Halliburton's performance" on contracts that total $10.8 billion have led to multiple criminal investigations into overcharging and kickbacks. In nine different reports, government auditors have found "widespread, systemic problems with almost every aspect of Halliburton's work in Iraq, from cost estimation and billing systems to cost control and subcontract management." Six former employees have come forward, corroborating the auditors' concerns. Another "H-bomb" dropped just before the election, when a top contracting official responsible for ensuring that the Army Corps of Engineers follows competitive contracting rules accused top Pentagon officials of improperly favoring Halliburton in an early-contract before the occupation. Bunnatine Greenhouse says that when the Pentagon awarded the company a 5-year oil-related contract worth up to $7 billion, it pressured her to withdraw her objections, actions that she said were unprecedented in her experience. Halliburton spokesperson Beverly Scippa says that while she cannot comment on the allegations until specific charges are filed, any suggestion that the company's involvement made it difficult for other companies to fairly compete are "absolutely untrue," pointing to a earlier GAO report that found that Halliburton/KBR was "the only contractor DOD had determined was in a position to provide the services within the required time frame given prewar planning requirements." But others, including Waxman, believe that Greenhouse's version of events corroborates existing evidence that the contracting process was biased toward Vice President Dick Cheney's old company. Pentagon officials referred the matter to the Pentagon's inspector general, a move that critics say effectively buried the issue. (For everything you want to know about Halliburton and more visit Halliburton Watch). 8) Lockheed Martin Lockheed Martin remains the king among war profiteers, raking in $21.9 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2003 alone. With satellites and planes, missiles and IT systems, the company has profited from just about every phase of the war except for the reconstruction. The company's stock has tripled since 2000 to just over $60. Lockheed is also helping Donald Rumsfeld develop a new tech-heavy integrated global warfare system that the company promises will change transform the nature of war. In fact, the large defense conglomerate's sophistication in areas as diverse as space systems, aeronautics and IT will allow it to play a leading role in the development of new weapons systems for decades to come, including a planned highly-secure military Internet, a spaced-based missile defense system and next-generation warplanes such as the F-22 (currently in production) and the Joint Strike Fighter F-35. When it comes to defense policy, Lockheed's network of influence is virtually unmatched. E.C. Aldridge Jr., the former undersecretary of defense for acquisitions and procurement, gave final approval to begin building the F-35 in 2001, a decision potentially worth $200 billion to the company. Although he soon left the Pentagon to join Lockheed's board, Aldridge continues to straddle the public-private divide: Rumsfeld appointed him to a blue-ribbon panel to study advanced weapons systems. Former Lockheed lobbyists and employees include the current secretary of the Navy, Gordon England, secretary of transportation Norm Mineta (a former Lockheed vice president) and Stephen J. Hadley, Bush's proposed successor to Condoleeza Rice as his next national security advisor. Lockheed is not only represented on various Pentagon advisory boards, but is also tied to various influential think tanks. For example, Lockheed VP Bruce Jackson (who helped draft the Republican foreign policy platform in 2000) is a key player at the neo-conservative planning bastion known as the Project for a New American Century. 9) Loral Satellite In the buildup to the war the Pentagon bought up access to numerous commercial satellites to bolster its own orbiting space fleet. U.S. armed forces needed the extra spaced-based capacity to be able to transmit huge amounts of data to planes (including unmanned Predator drones flown remotely by pilots who may be halfway around the world), and guide missiles and troops on the ground. Industry experts say the war on terror literally saved some satellite operators from bankruptcy. The Pentagon "is hovering up all the available capacity" to supplement its three orbiting satellite fleets, Richard DalBello, president of the Satellite Industry Association explained to the Washington Post in 2003. The industry's other customers - broadcast networks competing for satellite time - were left to scramble for the remaining bandwidth. Loral Space & Communications Chairman Bernard L. Schwartz is very tight with the neoconservative hawks in the Bush administration's foreign policy ranks, and is the principal funder of Blueprint, the newsletter of the Democratic Leadership Council. In the end, the profits from the war in Iraq didn't end up being as huge for the industry as expected, and certainly weren't enough to compensate for a sharp downturn in the commercial market. But more help may be on its way. The Pentagon announced in November that it would create a new global Intranet for the military that would take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build. Satellites, of course, will play a key part in that integrated global weapons system. 10) Qualcomm Two CPA officials resigned this year after claiming they were pressured by John Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for technology security to change an Iraqi police radio contract to favor Qualcomm's patented cellular technology, a move that critics say was intended to lock the technology in as the standard for the entire country. Iraq's cellular market is potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues for the company, and potentially much more should it establish a standard for the region. Shaw's efforts to override contracting officials delayed an emergency radio contract, depriving Iraqi police officers, firefighters, ambulance drivers and border guards of a joint communications system for months. Shaw says he was urged to push Qualcomm's technology by Rep. Darrell E. Issa, a Republican whose San Diego County constituency includes numerous Qualcomm employees. Issa, who received $5,000 in campaign contributions from Qualcomm employees from 2003 to 2004, sits on the House Small Business Committee, and previously tried to help the company by sponsoring a bill that would have required the military to use its CDMA technology. "Hundreds of thousands of American jobs depend on the success of U.S.-developed wireless technologies like CDMA," Issa claimed in a letter to Donald Rumsfeld. But the Pentagon doesn't seem to be buying the argument. The DoD's inspector general has asked the FBI to investigate Shaw's activities. (For an excellent, in-depth investigation of Qualcomm see Michael Scherer, "Crossing the Lines," Mother Jones, Sept./Oct. 2004 - http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/09/09_801.html ) -------- spies Changing of the Guard at the CIA Goss's Shake-Ups Leave Some Questioning Agency's Role By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, January 6, 2005; Page A03 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51579-2005Jan5?language=printer With the departure next month of the CIA's deputy director for intelligence, Jami A. Miscik, CIA Director Porter J. Goss will have largely completed the replacement of top agency officials that his aides had predicted to colleagues when they took control in October. About 20 senior CIA officials have resigned or retired since Goss, the former chairman of the House intelligence committee, left Congress to become director of the agency, bringing with him to Langley four GOP aides from Capitol Hill. Only one member of the leadership team put together by former CIA director George J. Tenet remains -- Donald M. Kerr, deputy director for science and technology. The uproar at CIA headquarters caused by the personnel moves, which some saw as partisan in nature, has died down for now, and the pace of departures has slowed. That is partly because case officers and analysts are waiting to see whether Goss remains at the CIA or moves up to the new position of director of national intelligence (DNI), created last month by legislation aimed at reorganizing the U.S. intelligence system. Meanwhile, officials say Goss has selected John Kringen, a longtime CIA officer, to become Miscik's replacement. The move may signal that Goss has "turned inward" for new appointments, "rather than going outside as once appeared to be the case," a former senior agency official said this week. Kringen is head of the CIA's crime and narcotics center, and had served in several geographical areas as a CIA analyst and manager. Goss went outside the CIA for a new public affairs chief, choosing Jennifer Millerwise, who starts Monday. She was deputy communications director of the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004, for several years before that was press secretary for Vice President Cheney and earlier worked in Goss's office on Capitol Hill. Intelligence officials say Goss and his emerging leadership team -- including the former Capitol Hill aides -- have not made clear how they intend to change CIA policies and programs. But there may be clues in the work Goss and his aides did last summer on the House Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee's report on the fiscal 2005 intelligence authorization bill included two particularly controversial recommendations for changing the way the CIA does business. The first was to have analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence put less emphasis on writing short, often overnight, spot reports to the president and other policymakers on intelligence. Rather, the report said, analysts should focus on writing longer-range, broader strategic estimates. As the report put it, "Instead of {grv}'chasing CNN,' as the committee has observed in the past, the DI should be devoting much more of its resources to doing the kind of all-source, in-depth analysis that cannot, and is not, being done elsewhere in government or through media outlets." A former senior intelligence official questioned that approach in an interview last week: "The president, who is CIA's primary customer, is more worried about 2005 than he is 2020." If analysts "don't get things like today's threat from terrorism nailed down in the near term," he added, "it won't matter how they look at matters in Russia or China that are five, 10 and 20 years off." Tenet, then CIA director, reorganized the daily morning intelligence report given to President Bush and his top advisers around quick summaries of one or two pages each. They were designed to leave time during the president's regular half-hour Oval Office meeting for discussion or questions about items that caught the president's interest. Goss, who now does the White House morning meeting when the president is in town, has not had time to develop the same background on intelligence issues that Tenet brought to those sessions after five years on the job, and he has not had the same rapport with Bush, administration and intelligence sources said. Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy CIA director who once ran the DI, said in a recent interview that there is "too much" emphasis on overnight reporting of current intelligence. But he said good analysts could handle both the short- and long-term work. He also recalled that during the Cold War and afterward, intelligence collection, primarily by technical means such as satellites, would focus for a week on a single strategic problem. That would yield valuable information that analysts could use to shed new light on issues. "We used to 'blitz' a target such as who was developing what missiles years ago and learned a lot we were not previously aware of," Kerr said. The second significant but difficult-to-enact change that the Goss team promoted on Capitol Hill was getting analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence much more involved in recruiting and directing agents as well as choosing targets for intelligence collection. Those decisions have traditionally been made by the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO), which conducts the agency's spying and collection efforts, and is separate from the DI, where information is analyzed. "Senior DI managers still do not have the ability to drive collection priorities, despite past committee exhortations about the urgency of fixing this problem, and the CIA's own stated goals," the committee report said. With the departure late last year of the DO's two top officials, who left after clashing with the Goss team, the way may be open to get the DI more involved in setting collection priorities. Kerr said that "analysts should be much more involved driving the collection," including decisions about recruitment of sources. "The DO needs to be more intimate with analysts, but good analysts in the past have found a way to worm their way into the [collection] system," he added. -------- space Ball Aerospace Completes Assembly And Integration On NPP Boulder CO (SPX) Jan 06, 2005 http://www.spacedaily.com/news/eo-05c.html Ball Aerospace & Technologies has completed assembly and integration of the spacecraft for the National Polar-orbiting Operational Satellite System (NPOESS) Preparatory Project (NPP). Spacecraft performance testing is completed, and environmental testing, including vibration and thermal vacuum, have begun. NPP, the mission precursor for NPOESS, has a twofold purpose: it will provide data continuity between the Earth Observing System (EOS) Terra and Aqua missions and NPOESS, and provide technical risk reduction for NPOESS. Under contract to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to provide the spacecraft, Ball Aerospace will deliver a modified Ball Aerospace Commercial Platform (BCP 2000), and perform integration of the government-furnished instruments and satellite-level testing. Ball Aerospace is also providing one of four instruments selected for the flight, the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS). "We are on target to meet NPP's aggressive schedule and cost profile with bus completion by March 2005, followed by instrument integration during the summer of 2005," said Don Hood, NPP program manager. "Our past experience in building the BCP 2000 has allowed us to successfully meet schedule and perform to expectations." The BCP 2000 is part of a line of spacecraft built by Ball Aerospace that can accommodate Earth-sensing instrumentation requiring precision pointing control while maintaining the flexibility needed for rapid target selection. Several BCP 2000s are currently operating on-orbit, including NASA's Quick Scatterometer (QuikSCAT), ICESat, the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite and DigitalGlobe's Quickbird satellite. In addition, the Ball Aerospace-built bus will be employed on NASA's CloudSat satellite, scheduled to launch later this year. OMPS is the next-generation ozone monitoring system designed to collect total column and vertical profile ozone data and continue the daily global data produced by the current ozone monitoring systems, the Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet radiometer (SBUV)/2, built by Ball Aerospace for NOAA POES spacecraft and Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS), built by Ball Aerospace for Nimbus 7. The NPP is a joint effort of the NPOESS Integrated Program Office, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA. Scheduled to launch in 2006, NPP will be in orbit prior to the expected end-of-life of EOS Aqua and provide overlap with the NPOESS spacecraft. -------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE -------- justice "Free the 6th Amendment, The Right to Counsel": Attorney Lynne Stewart Blasts Gv't. Terror Case Against Her Democracy Now Thursday, January 6th, 2005 http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/06/152255 The defense continues closing arguments in the trial of civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart. She is accused of conspiring to assist terrorists in a case that is being watched closely by lawyers around the country. She faces up to 45 years in prison. Lynne Stewart joins us in our firehouse studio. [includes rush transcript] Closing arguments in the trial of human rights lawyer Lynne Stewart continued yesterday in a packed New York courthouse just blocks from our firehouse studio. Stewart is accused of being part of an international conspiracy to provide support to terrorists, of conspiring to defraud the United States and making false statements. She is being tried with two co-defendants, the Arabic translator Mohammed Yousry and a Staten Island resident Ahmed Abdel Sattar. But the focus of the trial centers on a man already in jail, the Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, also known as the blind sheikh who is serving a life sentence on terror-related charges. While he is still in jail, the government is accusing Stewart, who is the sheikh's attorney and her two co-defendants of conspiring to sneak messages into the sheikh and then to sneak his words out. Most notably the government claims the three conspired to release a press release announcing that the sheik no longer supported a cease fire in 2000 between the militant Islamic Group and the Egyptian government. The case is being closely watched by defense attorneys around the country who fear the government aims to limit their freedom to fight for unpopular clients. The 6-month trial featured very few witnesses as the government's case was based primarily on transcripts from more than 85,000 secretly recorded audio and video clips of meetings between Stewart and her client as well as the home phone of Ahmed Abdel Sattar. If convicted, Stewart faces up to 45 years in prison. Stewart is being defended by the acclaimed attorney Michael Tigar who is best known for representing Terry Nichols during the Oklahoma City bombing case. On the first day of his closing arguments, Tigar said the case against Stewart was a "house of cards," and that prosecutors presented no evidence that Stewart knew of any conspiracy or even if one existed. He argued that Stewart is being prosecuted on hyped-up terror charges to destroy her career of defending unpopular clients. Tigar said "If a lawyer is sworn to represent someone who is despised and neglected and hated, it is a mark of pride and badge of honor to pay attention to that client's needs." * Lynne Stewart, human rights attorney, arrested in April, 2002 on charges that she helped her client Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman deliver messages from his Minnesota prison cell to his followers in Egypt. RUSH TRANSCRIPT This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution. Donate - $25, $50, $100, more... AMY GOODMAN: Lynne Stewart will be headed to the trial right after this program. Your response so far, Lynne Stewart. Your lawyer calls you courageous, brash and feisty. The thousands of tape recordings that have been made, did this number surprise you? What is it now, 8,500? LYNNE STEWART: No, 85,000. AMY GOODMAN: 85,000. LYNNE STEWART: They were mainly made of Mr. Sattar's telephone, and then laterly Mr. Yousry's telephone. I was never tapped. I was never a target until John Ashcroft decided to make me the centerpiece of this particular prosecution. But it is notable that with all of these calls, and supposedly a conspiracy, that we question, I'm not on any of those calls. I'm just not there. It's just not -- my name is not mentioned. There's no reference to the female lawyer who's going to help us out with this or anything else. So, the absence of evidence is also supposed to count for something, I think. So, we're a winding down, in answer to the first question, I guess. The six month-trial. I was on the witness stand for three weeks, which Michael will be commenting on today. At least at this point it will be in the hands of the jury, and as I have said to you before, Amy, I have great faith in the jury system. I'm not saying it works perfectly, because of course, it brings inherently all of the prejudices of the society. AMY GOODMAN: The prosecutors have raised a lot of questions, and in the summary arguments as well, about why you went and visited the sheikh in prison. I mean, they say it's a life sentence, no chance of getting out. Raised questions, and of course, focusing on that 2000 release that you were trying to communicate with his supporters in Egypt, when the government was trying to cut off all communication to say -- end the cease-fire? LYNNE STEWART: Well, of course, we do. As Michael said yes, we lawyers do this kind of pro bono work for people who are despised or thought little of, we wear that as a badge of honor. It wasn't me alone, of course. That's one of the big points of our case. It was me. It was Ramsey Clarke, Abdean Jabar. We were all doing this. The tapes show we all dealt with him in pretty much the same way. It was mainly done because you want to keep pressure on the government so the conditions don't worsen. You want to bring up a lawsuit if the time is right to make a lawsuit. You cannot let the government dictate how you practice law. Lawyers being autonomous is really to some degree the backbone of the entire legal system when it does work well, and lawyers making decisions based on the rules of ethics. So, those things are all in the case, but I always like to say, there's absolutely no proof that I'm linked to any terrorist conspiracy. That they have to prove. The second thing is, everything I did Ramsey Clarke did, Abdean Jabar did, and I'm sure the jurors are going to say, why aren't they arrested and why aren't they part of this? JUAN GONZALEZ: Why do you think that Ashcroft decided to target you specifically, and to go after you in this way that even most defense lawyers, no matter what their political persuasion cannot believe happened? LYNNE STEWART: Yeah, I think that. well, Ashcroft, as we know, has a certain viewpoint, and a certain viewpoint towards women, I think is clear also. So, my friends do say, if you don't think this has to do with your being a woman, you're crazy. But I also think that one of the things they said in their summation was something like, if it's a revolution, Stewart's for it. She will back any revolution. Like I'm some wingnut -- left wing -- wingnut out there, espousing soapbox violence for everything. They sort of wanted to commingle my personal politics with my work as a lawyer. They are really, very, very separate. I'm hardly a fundamentalist. But I think Ashcroft saw me as an easy target. I hope he now knows that he was wrong. AMY GOODMAN: They also accuse you of covering up political conversations that your translator was having with Sheikh Abdel Rahman, putting out words that might cover as they were having a conversation, since you weren't supposed to have political conversations, but only legal conversations. They knew this because they were recording your conversations. LYNNE STEWART: Exactly. You know, when you visit someone in a jail, when the guards seem to get too interested, we now realize they were so interested because the F.B.I. was in the next room taping all of this. It was a different scenario, but we couldn't understand why they were leaning in, why they would turn around and look at us. We said, let's deal with this. I know that I have the right as a lawyer to protect my client's confidences, whatever they may be. If he says, I'm having trouble with my teenage son, I'd like you to tell my wife to do this and that. He has to have confidence in saying that to me, confidence in me and also a confidence. So, when we whisper, we lawyers, when we talk in somebody's ear, whatever way we do it, even Patrick Fitzgerald, who was their first witness, the government's first -- the sinny qua non prosecutor, said there are things that lawyers do that are secret and we are bound to protect them. Thats all we were doing. There was no big secret. When they recorded it, we were equally protecting conversations that are totally innocuous to those which might have had political content. JUAN GONZALEZ: In other words, they are prosecuting you for being too good at preventing them from being able to listen in on what should be confidential conversations with your clients? LYNNE STEWART: Exactly, Juan. As Michael Tiger likes to say, they were not supposed to be listening in, but you're wrong for preventing them from listening to what they're not supposed to listen to. It's a little convoluted, but it is sort of the hallmark of the entire case. AMY GOODMAN: We will continue to follow this case, again closing arguments continue today in New York at 40 Foley Square. It is open to the public. We went down yesterday afternoon to hear the beginning of these closing argument, and we will continue to follow your case, Lynne Stewart, the attorney who faces 45 years in prison. To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359. -------- torture Has the Government Come Clean? As Gonzales begins his confirmation hearings, new FBI documents suggest that abuse of Guantanamo prisoners was more widespread than previously acknowledged—and that Director Mueller may be in the hot seat By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball Newsweek WEB EXCLUSIVE Jan. 6, 2005 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6790916/site/newsweek Jan. 5 - While senators prepare to grill attorney general nominee Alberto Gonzales Thursday about his role in crafting policies that allegedly led to the abuse of detained terror suspects, a fresh controversy is brewing about previous testimony on the issue from another senior U.S. government official: FBI Director Robert Mueller. In the past few weeks, a stack of newly disclosed and startling FBI documents recording agents’ reports about serious abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been released largely as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union in New York. The newly available documents have prompted some senators to question whether Mueller may have misled the Senate Judiciary Committee when he was questioned closely about the subject in an appearance last May. At least some of the internal FBI documents indicate that, for nearly a year prior to Mueller’s testimony, top FBI officials were strongly objecting to unorthodox practices—such as hooding and slapping prisoners, sleep deprivation and the use of dogs for intimidation by U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. One internal FBI e-mail in December 2003 even calls them “torture techniques.” Moreover, as early as the spring of 2003, according to another document, a senior FBI lawyer was pressing the Pentagon to investigate specific instances of abuse reported by bureau agents assigned to Guantanamo. One case, eerily reminiscent of the scenes from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, involved a report by an FBI agent that a female U.S. military interrogator stroked and applied lotion to a shackled male prisoner, yanked his thumbs back, causing him to grimace in pain and then “grabbed his genitals,” according to a later account of the incident contained in a letter to the Pentagon written by T.J. Harrington, deputy assistant FBI director for counterterrorism. Yet when Mueller appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 20, 2004, just a few weeks after the Abu Ghraib scandal had broke, he gave little hint of the concerns by his own agents about the mistreatment of prisoners—much less the apparently intense dispute between the FBI and the Pentagon over the propriety of the “aggressive” interrogation techniques that had been authorized by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to be used on prisoners at Guantamamo Bay. Mueller, staffers say, appeared uneasy and unusually hesitant, at the hearing. He was pressed—in some cases, repeatedly—to explain whether FBI agents were aware of mistreatment of prisoners by the U.S. military or the CIA. “He gave me a kind of gobbledygook answer,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, told NEWSWEEK this week about the FBI director’s response to her questions on whether he had “received any reports” about abuses similar to those in Abu Ghraib. “At best his answer was confusing and at worst it was obfuscatory.” (Feinstein added she is especially “disappointed” in Mueller’s responses because he is “generally straight as an arrow,” adding that she has recently sent the FBI a letter demanding an explanation.) A transcript of the May 20 hearing shows that Mueller did acknowledge in response to one of Feinstein’s questions that there were instances where FBI agents “on occasion … may disagree with the handling of a particular interview.” In those instances, he said, FBI agents have brought it to the attention of “the authorities who are responsible for that particular interview.” But he described the entire matter, benignly, as reflecting “differing points of view” about the “most effective way to obtain information”—not about concerns among agents about the abuse of prisoners. An even more problematic exchange took place earlier in the hearing when Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy pressed Mueller about whether any FBI agents had “encountered objectionable practices involving the treatment of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan or Guantanamo?” Mueller gave a lengthy answer that ended with his saying that an internal FBI investigation concluded that none of the bureau’s agents “witnessed abuses” in Iraq similar to those that had been revealed in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Leahy then followed up: “Is the FBI conducting any investigations involving handling of prisoners in Guantanamo?” Mueller: “No.” Leahy: “It’s not?” Mueller: “We are not conducting any investigations into the handling. Leahy: “Have you—have you conducted any? Mueller: “No.” FBI spokesman Michael P. Kortan said that Mueller had not misled the committee in his responses. “Some of Leahy’s questions were very specific and Mueller was being very careful to give very specific responses and not go beyond that,” he said. When Mueller denied to Leahy that the FBI was investigating abuses at Guantanamo Bay, he was being strictly accurate. “We were not investigating per se,” Kortan said. What the FBI was doing, the newly released documents show, was pressing the Pentagon to investigate the abuses that had been documented by the FBI’s own agents on the scene. Kortan also said this week that, at the time of his testimony, Mueller “was not aware of the detail” of the incidents recorded in Deputy Assistant Director Harrington’s letter documenting the case of the female military interrogator who had allegedly grabbed the genitals of the male detainee—as well as two other cases reported by FBI agents. (One involved a October 2002 case in which a detainee’s head had been gagged with duct tape—apparently to stop him from chanting from the Qu’ran. Another case, about the same time, was said to involve “extreme psychological trauma” after a detainee was found crouching in the corner of his cell hearing voices and talking to nonexistent people following three months of total isolation in which his room was “flooded with light.”) Harrington’s letter to Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder of the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Command documenting these cases is dated July 14, 2004—nearly two months after Mueller’s testimony to the Senate. But the letter was written apparently as a result of the FBI’s frustration that no action had been taken by the Army to investigate the cases in the past: the letter reports that the cases were first documented by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit in a May 30, 2003 “electronic communication” to FBI headquarters and “around the [same] time” the FBI’s top national-security lawyer, Marion (Spike) Bowman, had raised the cases with senior Defense Department lawyers. A DoD official told NEWSWEEK that the U.S. military had originally investigated the case of the genital-grabbing female interrogator at the time it occurred, resulting in a monthlong suspension for “sensitivity training.” More recently, the official said, the case has been reopened. The Pentagon's Southern Command, which oversees operations at Guantanamo, today announced a broad new investigation into all the reports of abuse contained in all the newly released FBI documents. "The Command wants to establish the facts and circumstances surrounding all credible allegations," a spokesman said. After Mueller’s testimony, Kortan said the FBI general counsel’s office began a more systematic effort to document the abuses that had been recorded by its agents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. The result was a flood of alarming reports that have now been turned over to the American Civil Liberties Union in its Freedom of Information lawsuit seeking the release of government documents on the treatment of prisoners. The release of these documents has exacerbated tensions between the FBI and the Pentagon over the issue. Defense officials have privately complained that bureau officials affirmatively decided to turn over the documents in the lawsuit in order to protect itself from charges that it was complicit in the improper treatment of prisoners. “This is cover you’re a-- at its finest,” one Pentagon official told NEWSWEEK. (Kortan said the bureau had no choice: the federal judge in the case ordered the documents to be produced.) In any event, the new documents clearly suggest that the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo was far worse than the government has ever publicly acknowledged: in one e-mail, dated July 16, 2004, an FBI agent (whose name is deleted) reports seeing one detainee at Guantanamo “sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a strobe light flashing.” In another especially hair-raising e-mail, dated Aug. 2, 2004, another unidentified FBI agent reports “on a couple of occasions” entering interview rooms at Guantanamo and finding one of the detainees “chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defacated on themselves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. When I asked the MPs [military police] what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment.…" “On another occasion,” the e-mail continues, “the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.” [Read the full text of the e-mail here. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6790534/site/newsweek/ ] Without discussing any case in particular, a Pentagon spokesman, Air Force Lt Col. John Skinner, said the Defense Department has investigated more than 300 cases of detainee abuse in all theatres (Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo) and more than 100 U.S. military personnel have been “held accountable for misconduct,” either through courts martial, administrative actions or other forms of nonjudicial punishment. “Any forms of detainee mistreatment is unacceptable,” Skinner said. “We aggressively investigate all credible allegations and we hold people accountable when mistreatment is found.” But clearly, the inquiries—and the controversies—are far from over. A broad review of U.S. military interrogation practices conducted by Navy Inspector General Vice Adm. Albert Church is now in its final stages, Skinner said. In the meantime, said Kortan, the FBI has prepared a detailed 300-page response to follow-up questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee about Mueller’s earlier testimony that will address many of the matters raised in the newly released FBI documents. But that response has been sitting at the Justice Department for review since October; apparently neither it, nor the Church report, will be publicly released any time soon—at least not before the nomination of Gonzales, who played a central role in creating the policies that governed the treatment of prisoners, is voted upon by the Senate. ---- Alberto Gonzales' Role in Torture Memos Like "Mafia Lawyer Whose Job it is to Help the Don Stay Out of Jail" Democracy Now Thursday, January 6th, 2005 http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/06/153201 Senate hearings begin today on the nomination of the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, as attorney general. He faces tough questions on the torture of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba. We speak with journalist Mark Danner of the New Yorker, author of the new book, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror. [includes rush transcript] The Senate Judiciary Committee will begin hearings today on the confirmation of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales as the next attorney general of the United States. In a New York Times Op-Ed today, journalist Mark Danner of the New Yorker and the author of the new book, "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror" writes: "At least since Watergate, Americans have come to take for granted a certain story line of scandal, in which revelation is followed by investigation, adjudication and expiation. Together, Congress and the courts investigate high-level wrongdoing and place it in a carefully constructed narrative, in which crimes are charted, malfeasance is explicated and punishment is apportioned as the final step in the journey back to order, justice and propriety. "When Alberto Gonzales takes his seat before the Senate Judiciary Committee today for hearings to confirm whether he will become attorney general of the United States, Americans will bid farewell to that comforting story line. The senators are likely to give full legitimacy to a path that the Bush administration set the country on more than three years ago, a path that has transformed the United States from a country that condemned torture and forbade its use to one that practices torture routinely. Through a process of redefinition largely overseen by Mr. Gonzales himself, a practice that was once a clear and abhorrent violation of the law has become in effect the law of the land." * Mark Danner, New Yorker staff writer and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. He is also the author of the new book "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror." RUSH TRANSCRIPT This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution. Donate - $25, $50, $100, more... AMY GOODMAN: Mark Danner joins us in our studio. JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, let's begin in terms of what are the key acts of Alberto Gonzales to promote what the current situation of this sort of rampant pattern of torture by American troops of prisoners. MARK DANNER: Well, Mr. Gonzales, as White House counsel, was essentially point man at the top of the administration in carrying out their determination to change how the United States deals with prisoners. Early on, right after 9/11, it was recognized within the administration that we have to take the gloves off, which is the phrase that Kofer Black, the counter insurgency official in the C.I.A. used. Mr. Gonzales pushed through a couple of very important changes. One was the idea that we will withhold, the United States for the first time will withhold Geneva Convention protection from prisoners in Afghanistan. That's not only Al Qaeda prisoners but Taliban as well. The second change was a redefinition of torture. Torture, of course, as your listeners know is illegal. It's illegal under American domestic law. It's illegal under the Torture Convention, the international agreements that the United States is party to, and in this administration, torture was essentially redefined in very, very narrow terms. Torture has to be pain under this memorandum that the justice department drafted at Mr. Gonzales's instigation. Torture has to be the infliction of pain equivalent to major organ failure or death. So, the level that pain must exceed in order to constitute torture under the law, according to this administration is a very, very, very high one. If you use that standard, then things that most people will recognize as torture, water boarding for, example, in which the prisoner is submerged and made to think he's drowning and are brought to the point of drowning. That suddenly becomes poof, like magic, not torture. A key part of what Mr. Gonzales supervised was taking procedures that everyone in the world recognized as torture and saying ha, they're not torture. They're interrogation techniques but they do not rise to the level of illegality. That's what he will be remember the for as counsel to the president. JUAN GONZALEZ: Interestingly, in terms of the leaks that have come out of the administration debate over the issue. It's clear that Secretary of State Colin Powell, the chairman of the joint chiefs, the central command of the military opposed these formulations of Gonzales and Secretary Powell actually gave a stinging memo rebuking them and challenging them, and yet Powell's on the way out and Gonzales is rising up. MARK DANNER: That's right. One of the fascinating things about this story is the fight within the administration. And you see it in the collection of documents in this book. You see that the State Department and also many military officials, many military officers, were the ones who really fought this redefinition. Secretary Powell -- I think partly because of his background as a military officer, obviously, believed that this kind of redefinition would really end up hurting terribly, not only America's place in the world, but American troops. Because military commanders tend to look at these sorts of policies very clearly as something that will affect their people, their troops. The Geneva Convention is there not simply to protect prisoners Americans take, but Americans when they become prisoners, and military officers have this kind of thinking drummed into them. They also think that the use of torture is going to affect good order and discipline. The troops who do this to prisoners are in the end not going to be very good soldiers. Not effective soldiers. You see in these memos. Now we have them. You know, they're published in this book. They're available. You see this argument within the American government about whether or not to do this. Powell and many in the military are on the side of saying, look, we cannot go forward along this road. Much of what they predicted would happen has in fact come to pass. AMY GOODMAN: You have this unprecedented letter that has been sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee of a dozen top generals, brigadier generals retired, including the former chair of the joint chiefs of staff. Yesterday we had on James Cullen Retired Brigadier General. We asked him, do you think that Alberto Gonzales endangered the troops? And this is a Brigadier General, and he said yes. Yet, he also raised the issue of people like New York Senator, Charles Schumer and others saying that Bush has a right to appoint his Cabinet, his Attorney General, and his fear that the Democrats will not seriously question, and that the questions are coming from outside, from generals, from brigadier generals, from military lawyers. MARK DANNER: That's right. I think there is a general feel, a fear that the Democrats, like Senator Schumer of New York, will assume, you know what? The republicans have the vote. This guy is going to get through so why do we fight him, particularly on an issue that the general perception is that most americans don't necessarily care about. This is thought politically to be essentially defending terrorists rather than defending the human rights of people. So, on the other hand, I think over the last several days, there's been a palpable change of attitude in Washington. I think people have suddenly realized there's going to be a fight on this issue. You see it in the statement yesterday by President Bush supporting his nominee, affirming that he stands firmly behind him. I think they have had more opposition than they expected. Critical are the dozen military officers, admirals and generals that you mentioned, who include not only former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Shalikashvili, but General Joseph P. Hoor, who was the successor of General Schwarzkopf. He ran the Middle East command, a very distinguished officer, and has been very vocal in his arguments against what Gonzales did. Basically, pointed out as I quote in The New York Times op ed that the French in Algeria used torture in a very widespread systematic fashion to fight an insurgency that's very like what the United States is fighting in Iraq, and as he said, it led to immediate successeses in the battle of Algers but it eventually dishonored the army and lost them the war. I think this is a very useful point that we're talking here - not simply about a human rights issue, although it is primarily a human rights issue, but also in the end, a practical issue about whether you can win a war when you let your army torture, when you let your people slip below the standards of human rights that they are claiming to be in Iraq, and to be in other parts of the world to promote. Whether or not you believe that, the key point here is that by using this technique, you undermine your own position. AMY GOODMAN: Explain Alberto Gonzales's direct involvement. The Times yesterday, the front page piece, said that he directly intervened in the August, 2002 memo. People hear this memo, that memo. What is Gonzales's responsibility here? MARK DANNER: It's very good question. There are two very clear things he did. One was he spearheaded the effort to deny Geneva Convention Protections to prisoners that the United States took in Afghanistan. Point one. That's clearly the seed, kind of the bad seed at the beginning of a lot of these abuses. The second thing he did was solicit from the Department of Justice, from their office of legal counsel, which is kind of their think tank, an opinion on torture. An opinion that essentially torture actually is a very narrow phenomenon, intense pain, severe pain, the level of debilitation or death or organ failure and things that fall below that level of pain, they're not torture. They may be abuses, but they're essentially allowed. They are legal. And apparently, what we learned in the Times yesterday was that Alberto Gonzales as White House counsel essentially went to the Justice Department. He went beyond or by, below, I guess would you say, Attorney General Ashcroft and the Deputy Attorney General, and asked directly the people in the think tank to give him a memo that implied very strongly in the Times piece, he essentially led them on about what he wanted. In the questions he asked, it was very clear that he wanted this result. And they gave him the result. That result, which was all of these things that you wanted to do to prisoners, though they look like for torture, sound like torture, feel like torture, are not torture under the law. That was spread throughout the government and in the end dominated how the military has treated prisoners. JUAN GONZALEZ: One of the prime authors of that memo was John Hew, a frequent commentator on the Lehrer Newshour. MARK DANNER: A colleague of mine when I teach at the Berkeley, University of California Law School. JUAN GONZALEZ: Apparently in the A.P. release of the prepared statement that Gonzales is going to make today, Gonzales tries to distinguish between what his role was as White House Counsel, where he was basically giving advice to the president, and what he understands his role will be as Attorney General, where he has to stand for the law and justice for all of the American people. Now, that sounds to me like a strange dichotomy that he's making between his role as top law enforcer. MARK DANNER: It's a common distinction that they make. When you become Attorney General you take an oath to protect the laws of the United States. As White House Counsel, you are essentially the president's lawyer. My view of this is rather simple. In his position in the White House, rather than helping the president do what he needed to do while following the law, he gave him advice that let him circumvent the law. And my colleague, Anthony Lewis in a piece a while back in the New York Review of Books, compared reading these memos to reading the documents of a mafia lawyer, whose job it is to help the don stay out of jail. This is how we can reinterpret these laws. So that in effect, you're breaking them, but we can claim that you're not. You know, I was looking at it on the way down here at this editorial in the Wall Street Journal today, their lead editorial, entitled "Torture Showdown". You see them actually, they say, as for Al Qaeda, let us describe the most coercive interrogation technique that was ever authorized. It's called water boarding. It involves strapping a detainee down, wrapping his face in a wet towel and dripping water on it to give the sensation of drowning. Is that torture? We are told it is used to train U.S pilots in case they are shot down and captured. They're trying to argue essentially that because these procedures are used to train Americans, and how they will be tortured, that in fact, it's not torture. Which is a quite ridiculous argument. Water boarding, going to Algeria, was one of the favorite techniques of the French when they tortured in Algeria in the late 1950's. In Latin Amerca it's called el submarineo. There is no question that this is torture. You're essentially convincing somebody that you're drowning them. We have the major national newspaper essentially arguing in here, very close to the terms in which the White House did, that actually this may be abusive, this may be pushing the line but it's not torture. And I think that this is a very less than credible line of argument. It's corrupting all of us, I believe. They make a second argument here which is that, well, you know, the idea behind these techniques of interrogation is to prevent another attack. If there's another terrorist attack on the United States, that may lead to a crackdown that will really remove all civil liberties. So, in fact, this is a way to support civil liberties. People used to use this argument about the Salvadorian war, for example, by saying, yes, there are the massacres and the rest of them, but think if the communists take over, that will be a humen rights catastrophe. In other words, it's always an abuse of humen rights that's used to prevent a larger one. I feel as if that sort of reasoning is a snare and a delusion, and a trap into which this country and its public life and civic life cannot fall. In the end, this is why the title of the op-ed was "We Are All Torturers Now." It corrupts all of us. AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us. Mark Danner is the author of Torture and Truth:America, Abu Ghraib and The War on Terror. And he has written an op-ed in the New York Times today called "We Are All Torturers Now" To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359. -------- torture Gonzales to back anti-torture policy January 06, 2005 By Jerry Seper and Charles Hurt THE WASHINGTON TIMES http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050105-105125-4507r.htm Attorney General-designate Alberto Gonzales is expected to tell a Senate committee today that the Bush administration has not authorized, ordered or directed the torture of prisoners detained by the U.S. military — a position that he will support if confirmed. Criticized by some Democrats, civil rights groups, activist organizations and retired military officers for his role in writing White House policy regarding prisoners held in Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Gonzales will tell the Senate Judiciary Committee at the opening of his confirmation hearing that as attorney general, he would follow international treaties and the government's policies against torture. According to a prepared statement, Mr. Gonzales will say that the United States had "fundamental decisions to make" after the September 11 attacks on how to apply treaties and U.S. law "to an enemy that does not wear a uniform, owes no allegiance to any country, is not a party to any treaties and — most importantly — does not fight according to the laws of war." "As we have debated these questions, the president has made clear that he is prepared to protect and defend the United States and its citizens and will do so vigorously, but always in a manner consistent with our nation's values and applicable law, including our treaty obligations," he said. "I pledge that, if I am confirmed as attorney general, I will abide by those commitments." His statement is similar to comments he made in June, when he told reporters during a White House briefing that President Bush was aware of his duty to "protect this nation" against terrorist attacks, but that in the war against al Qaeda and its supporters, the United States would "follow its treaty obligations and U.S. law, both of which prohibit the use of torture." Some Democrats and others have sought to turn the Gonzales confirmation hearings into a referendum on abuses of U.S. military detainees. Although his approval by the committee and the Senate as the country's 80th attorney general — and the first Hispanic in the post — seems assured, Judiciary Committee Democrats will press him to explain the administration's policy on torture that they say led to well-documented abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and elsewhere. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the panel's ranking Democrat, warned Mr. Gonzales in a letter on Tuesday that his refusal to turn over memos outlining those policies would result in a "contentious issue" — a not-so-veiled threat in the confirmation process. "I am disappointed that contrary to your promises to me to engage in an open exchange and to answer my questions in connection with your confirmation process, you have not answered my letters," Mr. Leahy wrote, adding that the requested information — eight White House memos and documents — was "relevant to your nomination." Key among the requested documents is a Jan. 25, 2002, memo suggesting that Geneva Convention protections for prisoners of war did not apply to Taliban fighters detained in Afghanistan or suspected al Qaeda members held worldwide as part of the war on terrorism. In that memo, Mr. Gonzales said the United States was fighting "a new type of warfare — one not contemplated in 1949 when Geneva was framed — and requires a new approach in our actions toward captured terrorists." Critics have charged that Mr. Gonzales oversaw the development of Bush administration policies used in the handling of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, despite warnings by U.S. military leaders that they would undermine respect for the law in the military. The critics have said those policies led to the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison. But partisans on both sides say, at least privately, that Mr. Gonzales likely will be confirmed with support from Democrats. Introducing and testifying on behalf of Mr. Gonzales today will be Sen. Ken Salazar, the newly elected Democrat from Colorado. Mr. Salazar's introduction, which came as a surprise to some Democrats, signals some bipartisan support for Mr. Gonzales. Another Hispanic Democrat — former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros — wrote a column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal voicing his support for Mr. Gonzales. "Judge Gonzales is better qualified that many recent attorneys general," Mr. Cisneros wrote. "His confirmation by the Senate can be part of America's steady march toward liberty and justice for all." Mr. Cisneros also noted the growing influence of Hispanic voters in national politics, saying that as "an American of Latino heritage, I also want to convey the immense sense of pride that Latinos across the nation feel because of Judge Gonzales's nomination." Mr. Gonzales, 49, was born in San Antonio, the son of migrant workers who never finished elementary school. He graduated from Rice University, and later attended Harvard University Law School. After private practice in Houston, he was named in 1995 as Texas Gov. George W. Bush's general counsel, later serving as Texas secretary of state and as a member of the Texas Supreme Court. He was appointed White House counsel in 2001. -------- ACTIVISTS Televise the funerals and flag-draped coffins by Vincent L. Guarisco (Thursday 06 January 2005) Media Monitors Network http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/12380/ "I refuse to be hypnotized -- desensitized by the state to prevent me from putting a human face on what is happening all around me. It's the media's duty to report it. I demand to know everything. It's within my right to harness that energy, to use that same energy to prevent any further bloodshed." So, another traumatic year has come to pass. Since 2004 was a Leap Year, we were hit with 366 nauseating days of unnecessary suffering, death, and destruction ceaselessly searing the hearts and minds of millions with the war in Iraq. Like many others, I am too listless and "war-weary" to even attempt to imagine what new destruction this administration is cooking up for this new calendar year. Who could ever forget Christmas 2004! Earthquakes and Tsunamis aside, last year for many, Uncle Sammy morphed into a military uniformed "Chris Kringle." He became a new kind of special delivery, a "War Santa" of cheap tin thrills; one who gave folded flags to replace lost loved ones. Can you imagine? Hearing a rap on the door, answering it, and after doing so -- being handed a colorful piece of cloth to replace a vibrant, treasured life. Nothing like having your heart ripped out for eternity over an oil well and out-of-control greed! Disaster comes in many forms, be it natural or unnatural. And media sensationalism (in the battle for market shares) can sure keep you reeling. It's amazing how the media outlets decided to show the graphic loss of life from the killer tsunami waves -- the bodies washed ashore, many bloated as they piled up in numbers that far outdistanced the ability of loved ones to identify and bury them. I'm truly amazed the media deemed it proper and appropriate, since televising dead service-members arriving home at Dover Air Force Base in the dead of night, in neat flag-draped coffins is still not allowed. Obviously, the same standards do not apply. Who in Sam-Hell makes these decisions? Certainly not anyone with any shred of honor! But there it was in all it's undaunted glory, in big screen, plasma screen and wide screen -- media executives giving the thumbs-up to show bloated bodies decomposing bodies, floating bodies and even bodies hanging in trees, on television -- dumped them all squarely in my living room. Strange, isn't it, that they still refuse to televise one single American funeral at home honoring our heroes who have died in the line of duty, while bravely serving their country in a time of war. What the hell is wrong with this picture! Can you believe this crap? Wow. We really have some screwed-up priorities! I suspect there is an underlying explanation for this. Is it bad for the selling points of war to show such images? Is our society purposely being shielded from such upsetting details of homebound fatalities because the Makers of War want us to have a more pleasant, picturesque impression of war without the imagery of loss and death? Is it a full-blown media blackout, acting as a nerve block for the masses? Is that why they say, "out of sight, out of mind?" If so, we better consider the price -- because our loss is very real. Otherwise, becoming a casualty of war is not the final sacrifice; it is merely an insult before closing the last cryptic page -- a dead handshake, a zipper bag and a silent homecoming so as not to scare away future recruiting efforts and replacements. Yeah, sign me up! Not. Suffering is widespread American soldiers are not the only ones suffering and dying out there without getting public attention. The New Year began just like the Old Year ended -- with Iraq's landscape continuing to be smeared with glossy red puddles of spilled blood oozing from the many scattered dead. An Iraqi civilian population worn thin, battle fatigued, being relentlessly extinguished while reeling in agony with the putrid scent of death floating all around them, fouling the very air they breathe. And don't forget about that U-235 depleted uranium (DU) dust they are forced to inhale and ingest in their lungs along with that foul stench. Can you imagine it? Try it sometime -- it's a poisonous sobering experience of life in a hellhole.However, through it all, the Iraqi people unceasingly continue to pray for God's help. Yep, enemy and civilians alike, regardless of who is fighting or not fighting, they are all God's people too. They pray to their prophet daily for spiritual salvation, for redemption in the wake of wanton destruction. They pray to God to save them from the so-called "liberators" who have invaded their sovereign holy land.Some may call it religious sectarianism, but don't be fooled by the terminology. If there is an Allah, he must be listening, because he seems to have given the insurgents (acronym for freedom fighters), a Mount-Zion sized amount of tenacity to resist. They certainly are in a motivated Jihad mode for who and what they hate -- American occupation, American style democracy, American run elections and any form of American puppet government we may feebly attempt to instill. To them, we are godless infidels who have come thousands of miles to steal their natural resources and to destroy their sacred way of life. Still think we can win? In Las Vegas we call that long-shot a "sucker bet."Does God answer some prayers and not others? Bush has publicly stated that God whispers in his ear (his approval) on whom Bush decides to attack in war. However, if you remember, that pithy wisdom didn't jive very well with the Pope in Rome. In fact, just before we invaded, the Pope warned the United States -- "If you go to war in Iraq, you go without God."Okay, I'm a little confused on this. Who are we supposed to believe? Who is God's agent -- Bush or the Pope? Hummm, let me see. It's either the guy who resides in Washington D.C. on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue -- the same guy who blundered into a war-profiteering crusade, and likes to brag he's a "war president," -- or it's the guy from the Vatican in Rome who unwaveringly promotes world peace. Gee, I'm so undecided. The questions keep coming Here at home, with a much more peaceful landscape at our disposal, many of us continue to worry about how long our soldiers will remain in foreign battlefields fighting this unsanctioned, illegal and quite possibly, "Godless" war. In fact, just the other day surprisingly, a Bush-supporting coworker sarcastically asked me how much longer I thought we would be in Iraq. I paused for a brief moment (knowing he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer after confessing that he had voted for the village idiot), before responding, "Hey ace, that's simple! Your man GW has an exit plan! You betcha -- we're gonna stop pillaging and dying over there and will bring the troops home just as soon as each and every one of those oil wells starts pumping seawater! I knew it would only confuse him to mention the real reasons -- profiteering spoils of war, no bid open-ended contracts for nation building, the construction of military bases, privatized troop support, the arms race, just to name a few. Perhaps I shouldn't have said it, but the look on his face was truly a Kodak moment. Pro-war supporters love to boast that the colors of true patriotism -- red white and blue -- are the colors that never run. On the contrary, watch what happens to a mother's make-up after being told that her son or daughter has died in war. Or perhaps a wife receiving the same news about a husband, or a child about a parent. Yeah, watch the colors "run" then; they literally bleed with sorrow and, sometimes, with rage so strong that it creates a river of mournful tears. Am I being cynical? Perhaps. But that's what happens when one gets continually fogged with media-induced bullshit and bombarded with official lies without end. After getting traumatized and betrayed so often, you become a little more "cynical" with each dying day. Five killed here, 12 lost there...every day more body bags pile up; more innocents lie unattended in the streets, mutilated by foraging packs of dogs... After a while it chips away at your very soul. I call cynicism my own personal safety feature. It's better that I am cynically safe than stark raving mad. It's time for the killing to stop Bottom line -- I refuse to be hypnotized -- desensitized by the state to prevent me from putting a human face on what is happening all around me. It's the media's duty to report it. I demand to know everything. It's within my right to harness that energy, to use that same energy to prevent any further bloodshed. In September of 2003, I wrote an article published on Veterans for Peace website ( http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Body_bags_filled_092903.htm ) titled: "Body bags filled with GI Joe and Jane." This essay was written in the early stages of the Iraq war. At the time it was published, approximately 300 soldiers had been slaughtered. Currently, a thousand more (and counting) have died since then. I said it then and I'll say it again: On the surface, it may seem cruel to advocate this, but for the love of life, we must immediately start televising dead and mutilated sons, daughters, uncles, aunts, husbands, wives and friends arriving home in gift-wrapped body bags. Only then will the appeal of the selling points of war and hostile occupation diminish. The injured and dead must appear on television. The media must televise the reality of what this war is about: the flag draped caskets, the funerals, the grieving, the pain, the crying, and the destruction. It must be shown immediately. It must. As long as Bush's mandated media blackout is allowed to remain in place, his self-serving wars will continue non-stop. A quick philosophical question -- if a crime has been committed, and no one hears about it, has a crime been committed? Without media attention, there will be no cause and effect, no sense of loss, and therefore no public backlash for accountability. Remember this: During the Vietnam War, when the Mothers of America marched in the streets in Washington D.C., the media coverage afforded that event was crucial, even instrumental, in ending that war. Bush lied and our soldiers have died and continue to die, every hour, every day. I do not believe for one minute that they will mind being exploited in the name of peace. After all, it was a falsely propagated war that killed them in the first place. Other lives are depending on us -- not the media, not the administration -- so, for the love of God, please demand that the funerals and flag-draped coffins be put before the American public. Let us demand an end to the killing.