NucNews - January 28, 2005
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Heads Roll At The Veterans Administration: Mushrooming Depleted Uranium (DU) Scandal Blamed
By Bob Nichols, Project Censored Award Winner
Jan 28, 2005, 10:42 Axis of Logic
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/printer_15334.shtml
January 24, 2005 -- The Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter today charged that the reason Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi stepped down earlier this month was the growing scandal surrounding the use of uranium munitions (DU) in the Iraq War.
Writing in the Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter # 169, Arthur N. Bernklau, Executive Director of the Veterans For Constitutional Law Center in New York, stated that "The real reason for Mr. Principi’s departure was really never given, however a special report published by eminent scientist Leuren Moret’s naming depleted uranium as the definitive cause of the ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ has fed a growing scandal about the continued use of uranium munitions by the US Military.”
Bernklau continued "This malady [from uranium munitions], that thousands of our military have suffered and died from, has finally been identified as the cause of this sickness, eliminating the guessing. The terrible truth is now being revealed."
He added that "Out of the 580,400 soldiers who served in GW1, of them, 11,000 are now dead. By the year 2000, there were 325,000 on Permanent Medical Disability. This astounding number of “Disabled Vets” means that a decade later, 56% of those soldiers who served have some form of permanent medical problems. (Author’s note: The "Disabled" rate for the wars of the last century was 5%, and 10% in Viet Nam.)
Bernklau added "The VA Secretary (Principi) was aware of this fact as far back as 2000. He and the Bush administration have been hiding these facts, but now, thanks to Moret’s report, [it] ... is far too big to hide or to cover up!"
"Terry Jamison, Public Affairs Specialist, Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, Department of Veterans Affairs, at the VA Central Office, recently reported that “Gulf Era Veterans” now on medical disability since 1991, numbers 518,739 Veterans," said Berklau.
"The long-term effects have revealed that DU [uranium oxide] is a virtual death sentence," stated Berklau. "Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist, who retired from the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, and was also involved with the Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies in the soldiers (from the 2003 Iraq War) as 'spectacular … and a matter of concern.'”
When asked if the main purpose for using it was for “destroying things and killing people,” Fulk was more specific: “I would say it is the perfect weapon for killing lots of people.”
Mr. Principi could not be reached for comment prior to deadline. A follow-up article will strive to obtain a response from Mr. Principi or from the VA.
Notes:
1. Depleted uranium: "Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets. A death sentence here and abroad." by Leuren Moret.
http://www.sfbayview.com/081804/Depleteduranium081804.shtml
2. Veterans For Constitutional Law, Ltd, 112 Jefferson Avenue, Port Jeff. L.I. NY 11777. Arthur N. Bernklau, Executive Director. Tel: 516-474-4261, Fax 516-474-1968.
3. Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter. Email Gary Kohls at in Deluth
gkohls@cpinternet.com with "Subscribe" in the "Subject:" line.
----
Customs service seizes depleted uranium in Russia region
28.01.2005, 13.28 (Itar-Tass)
http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=1688320&PageNum=0
MOSCOW, January 28 - The customs service in a Volga region has seized more than 37 kilograms of depleted uranium.
A spokesman at the Federal Customs Service told Itar-Tass on Friday that workers of the Orenburg customs service spotted the dangerous cargo on Wednesday during examination of a car with a radiation detector.
The radiation-emitting object was a cylindrical protective container intended for remote manipulation with radioactive substances.
It contained 37.5 kilograms of uranium-238, which is a depleted form.
An owner of the container described it in a customs declaration as a "dumb-bell". He said he had found it at a dump and used it for exercise and sometimes straightened nails with it.
Specialists are looking for the origin of the container.
A criminal case on an attempt of contraband of a radioactive substance has been opened.
Specialists of the Russian Agency of Atomic Energy told Itar-Tass that neither a conventional nor "dirty" bomb could be made from the confiscated amount of uranium.
Uranium-238 is one of the most available elements in the earth crust. About 60,000 tonnes of uranium a year is extracted in the world.
-------- europe
France Worried About Terrorism at Home
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 28, 2005
Filed at 12:37 p.m. ET
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apeurope_story.asp?category=1103&slug=France%20Iraq
PARIS (AP) -- The ongoing violence in Iraq ``encourages terrorism,'' has created instability and has pushed some French youths toward holy war, France's defense minister said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie appeared eager to rebuild frayed French-U.S. ties, but expressed deep concern about the insurgency ahead of Sunday's election in Iraq.
She pointed to arrests this week of 11 French youths as part of an investigation into a network suspected of dispatching Islamic combatants from France to Iraq. One of the youths was later released.
``France cannot be satisfied with the situation in Iraq,'' she said in Thursday's interview. ``What's happening in Iraq is bad for everyone. It encourages terrorism and creates a zone of instability that can spread.''
Alliot-Marie expressed concern that the young French fighters ``could one day carry out suicide attacks elsewhere ... that worries us.'' France itself could be targeted, she said.
France's DGSE spy agency, which works for the Defense Ministry, was active in helping counterintelligence agents ahead of the arrests, providing information on ``routes of passage'' to Iraq, the minister said.
She said she did not know how many French citizens were involved in the Iraqi insurgency but said that radical imams can play a key role, indoctrinating youths ``until the day when they are moved into the stable of candidates for suicide bombings.''
At least three French Muslims are known to have been killed in the insurgency in Iraq. While the number of French-born fighters in Iraq appears small -- perhaps a dozen or more -- officials in France worry that some of the men of mostly North African descent will return home with combat skills to wage jihad, or holy war.
With Iraq elections set for this weekend, Iraqis most of all need to feel a sense of sovereignty -- and the eventual withdrawal of foreign troops could foster that sentiment, Alliot-Marie said.
``The less foreign military uniforms there are, the more they will have this feeling,'' she said.
The longtime alliance between France and the United States ran aground over Paris' vocal opposition to the war. Alliot-Marie stressed the need for ``organized dialogue'' between Europe and the United States.
Paris and Washington have shown a desire for a fresh start.
Alliot-Marie said President Bush's new administration has ``extended its hand'' to France and Europe ``and we wish to extend our hand.''
She also expressed worry about the prospects of a nuclear-armed Iran. The European Union -- led by France, Germany and Iran -- is using its diplomatic influence in an effort to make sure that Tehran does not develop nuclear weapons.
Bush said last week his administration won't exclude the possibility of using military force against Iran over its nuclear program.
Tehran insists it wants nuclear technology for civilian purposes only, something the United States and some European countries doubt.
``What we want is to control very closely so that it does not transform (nuclear capacity) into nuclear weapons,'' she said. ``From the start, to hypothesize the failure of diplomacy is to ensure that we will fail.''
Alliot-Marie, 58, who has been in the defense post for two years, is considered a rising star in French politics and there has been media speculation she could one day be prime minister. She will host France's first meeting of NATO defense ministers Feb. 9-10 in Nice.
-------- india / pakistan
U.S. Report Questions Pakistani and Bush Claims on Khan Nuclear Proliferation Network
By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire January 28, 2005
http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2005_1_28.html#DEA105B8
WASHINGTON — A new report by the research arm of the U.S. Congress questions official claims that former Pakistani nuclear weapons laboratory director Abdul Qadeer Khan provided nuclear technology to other nations without his government’s permission (see GSN, Jan. 4).
Questions about government responsibility in the technology transfer to Iran, Libya, and other countries — as well as its commitment to eliminating al-Qaeda terrorists — raise concerns about whether Pakistan can be trusted not to share nuclear weapons technology in the future, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) report says.
“While Pakistani leaders have proclaimed that their nuclear weapons are secure and that Pakistan has not been involved in selling or transferring nuclear weapons technology, this claim is cast into doubt by the activities of Dr. A.Q. Khan over more than a decade,” the report states.
Khan confessed in February 2004 to coordinating nuclear transfers for years to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Top Pakistani leaders maintain, however, that they were not complicit. The Bush administration appears to have accepted that explanation, at least publicly, portraying Khan as the greedy head of a black-market operation.
A senior Bush administration told reporters on Dec. 4 that Khan was “a traitor to Pakistan” and that President George W. Bush had thanked Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, then visiting the Oval Office, “for a decisive move he made to work with us to roll up the A.Q. Khan network.”
A senior U.S. official last year told reporters that while Khan’s activities probably involved some Pakistani government and military officials, they were not believed to have been approved by top Pakistani leaders (see GSN, March 31, 2004).
Apparently concerned about preserving antiterrorism cooperation, the report says, the Bush administration has not triggered sanctions against Pakistan for the proliferation and U.S. officials’ statements “appear designed to minimize American concern about the light treatment given” Khan by Musharraf. Pakistan also apparently has not given the U.S. government access to Khan.
The CRS report quotes a statement by now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last year that “national humiliation is justice” for Khan, who received a conditional pardon from Musharraf but remains under house arrest.
Full disclosure could give the United States a better understanding of North Korean and other countries’ nuclear weapons capabilities, said one of the authors, CRS nonproliferation expert Sharon Squassoni, in an interview today.
“We know so little about the North Korean program. … Without direct access to Khan, it’s very difficult to know the truth [about the] role of the Pakistani government and what he provided to whom,” she said.
The report finds, though, that the United States has few good options for compelling greater Pakistani nonproliferation cooperation.
‘Claim is Cast Into Doubt’
The analytic report by the Congressional Research Service, published Tuesday and circulated publicly by Federation of American Scientists analyst Steven Aftergood, argues it was improbable that top Pakistani authorities were unaware of Khan’s activities.
Beginning in the 1980s, it says, Khan reportedly provided a range of technology to Iran, Libya, North Korea, and other countries, including blueprints, components, and full centrifuge assemblies, uranium hexafluoride feedstock, and nuclear weapon designs.
While Pakistan previously had denied that any proliferation occurred to North Korea, the U.S. position was that it occurred, the report says. The U.S. intelligence community knew of multiple times Khan visited North Korea beginning in the mid-1990s, it says.
Khan “could not have functioned without some level of cooperation by Pakistani military personnel, who maintained tight security around the key nuclear facilities, and possibly civilian officials as well,” the report says.
Khan’s celebrity status and “the degree to which he enriched himself,” including millions of dollars channeled through foreign banks, have been cited as evidence that his activities were not government policy, the report says. The scientist’s reputation as a national hero, though, “appears to be manufactured” at the expense of other leading scientists who also solved key problems to give the country a nuclear capability, it says.
“Whether President Musharraf’s delicate treatment of Khan following his reported confession reflects some level of official culpability is arguable,” the report says, noting reports that Khan was allowed to keep “millions of ill-gotten dollars.”
Khan in a televised statement in February 2004 said he took full responsibility for the proliferation activities and said Islamabad “never ever” authorized them. Nevertheless, Musharraf the next day decided that Khan would not be prosecuted for any proliferation-related activities, the report says.
The report also cites a February 2004 Washington Post story that Khan told a senior Pakistani investigator that Musharraf and other former army chiefs had known of and approved his work with North Korea.
It notes Musharraf in a 2004 statement said he had long been suspicious of Khan’s activities, and asks, “Why Musharraf had not followed up on his own alleged suspicions has not been explained.”
Pakistani officials “at a very minimum,” were “incredibly lax in responding to rumors of his activities,” the report says.
The report appears to support criticisms raised by U.S. nongovernmental experts regarding the Bush administration’s positions.
“We have long held to the belief that Khan was not a rogue operator,” says Joseph Cirincione, director of the Nonproliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“It is inconceivable that Khan conducted his vast, multinational business operations for two decades without the knowledge and support of military and political leaders. Khan himself says that one of the reasons for his trades was to finance the Pakistani missile program. He used military planes to ferry cargo from, and presumably to, North Korea. Khan was not a ‘nonstate actor,’” Cirincione said.
“This was — and may still be — a state-sanctioned black market operation run by A.Q. Khan,” he added.
Future Proliferation Concerns
The report suggests that the Bush administration may be reluctant to confront Pakistan over nuclear proliferation to avoid undermining its support for operations against the al-Qaeda terror network.
It says, however, some analysts suspect that Pakistan’s apparent unwillingness to allow U.S. access to Khan may signal a reluctance to restrain nuclear proliferation.
Pakistan began to unravel the Khan operation after U.S. officials presented it with intelligence evidence implicating Khan and other scientists in a proliferation ring, the report says.
Pakistan’s commitment to eradicating al-Qaeda is also a concern, according to the report. “Although Pakistan has captured or facilitated the capture of hundreds of alleged terrorists, including some very high level al-Qaeda figures, persistent reports question whether Pakistan has given as much assistance as it could, and they suggest ongoing relationships between Pakistan’s military intelligence officers and some key Taliban leaders who are thought to live openly in northern Pakistan,” it says.
The report lists several policy options for U.S. future relations with Pakistan, though noting there are “more constraints than options:”
— Make support to Musharraf fully conditioned on continued counterterrorism support;
— Rather than penalizing Pakistan or demanding a full accounting of Khan’s activities, pursue measures to eliminate global supply networks, which it says the administration appears to be attempting;
— Condition high-value assistance such as Pakistani-sought F-16 fighter aircraft on access to Khan, full cooperation on rolling up the network, and a full halt to proliferation and nuclear testing; and
— Re-impose nuclear proliferation sanctions.
-------- iran
Schroeder urges Iran to renounce military use of nuclear power
Fri Jan 28, 2005 (AFP)
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050128/wl_mideast_afp/forumdavosirannuclear_050128180857
DAVOS, Switzerland - German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder urged Iran to completely renounce military use of nuclear power, but emphatically ruled out the use of force to ensure that Iran complies with international demands.
"We are most decisively in favour of the fact that Iran completely gives up military use of nuclear power, forever if at all possible," Schroeder told global political and business leaders at the World Economic Forum (news - web sites).
"But we are just as convinced that has to be achieved through diplomatic and political means," he added.
Schroeder's comments came amid reports that the European Union (news - web sites) had hardened its stance over Iran's controversial nuclear plans, by urging Tehran to completely dismantle its nuclear fuel programme in order to guarantee that it does not seek atomic weapons.
Iran has denied that crucial negotiations with Britain, France and Germany for a long-term solution to the issue were deadlocked.
But Schroeder reiterated his rejection of the use of force, a week after US President George W. Bush (news - web sites) said he could not rule out military action if Iran could not be persuaded to abandon its nuclear energy program.
Washington suspects Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons.
"This is a hotbed region, the last thing we need is a military conflict in that region," Schroeder said.
"I'm very explicit and outspoken about this because I want everybody to know where Germany stands," he added.
According to a report on a closed-door meeting in Geneva this month, representatives of Britain, France and Germany told Iran that "nothing short of full cessation and dismantling of Iran's fuel cycle efforts would give the EU3 the objective guarantees they need that Iran's nuclear program is peaceful."
Senior Iranian government officials were also attending the forum's annual meeting in Davos this week.
Iran suspended nuclear enrichment, the key process that makes fuel for nuclear reactors but also the explosive core of atomic bombs, under a deal clinched in November by the three EU states.
----
UN Nuclear Chief Urges U.S. to Join EU on Iran
By REUTERS
January 28, 2005
Filed at 5:19 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-davos-nuclear-iran.html?pagewanted=print&position=
DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog on Friday urged the United States to join forces with the EU to persuade Iran to give up atomic processes that could be used to make weapons.
France, Britain and Germany are leading a European Union initiative to push Tehran to abandon its work on producing nuclear fuel in exchange for economic and political incentives.
Washington, which accuses Iran of developing nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian atomic energy program, says this effort is doomed and has called for U.N. Security Council sanctions to be imposed on the Islamic republic.
Asked if recent U.S. statements that military action could be used to stop Iran from getting a bomb, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei said he hoped the United States would opt for diplomacy.
``I would hope that the U.S. eventually would be actively engaged with the Europeans in the dialogue with Iran,'' ElBaradei told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in this Alpine ski resort.
Iran denies wanting weapons and insists its nuclear ambitions are limited to the peaceful generation of electricity.
The IAEA has been investigating Iran's program for more than two years. It has found no clear evidence that Iran is trying to get atomic weapons, but did find that Iran concealed potentially arms-related activities for nearly two decades.
ElBaradei said Iran has been cooperating with IAEA inspectors, though the agency has more work to do there.
``So far, we are getting good cooperation and I think we still have work to do. But I'm optimistic that we're getting good positive cooperation.''
He added that it was up to Iran to build confidence that its nuclear ambitions did not include the bomb.
``There is still a lot of concern about the Iranian program,'' he said. ``The more Iran cooperates the better for them and for the international community.''
----
U.S. Warns EU Firms to Stay Away from Iran - Diplomats
By REUTERS
January 28, 2005
Filed at 11:45 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran.html?pagewanted=print&position=
VIENNA (Reuters) - The United States, determined to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons, is piling pressure on European firms to stop them doing business with Tehran, diplomats say.
In turn this is making it harder for Europe to offer Iran economic incentives to persuade it to abandon nuclear processes that could be used to build weapons.
``They're being pressured by Washington. Major European companies are unwilling to deliver,'' an EU diplomat said. ``This means we really have no incentives to offer Iran at this point.''
Iran denies U.S. charges it is seeking a nuclear bomb and says its nuclear program is purely for civilian purposes.
Although publicly the United States is saying it wants to stop Iran acquiring equipment for a military nuclear program, it is interpreting this very widely to cover any ``dual use'' goods which could be used for either civilian or military purposes.
In November, U.S. ambassador Jackie Sanders told the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, that selling even small items with potential military use would be punished.
``We want any proliferators, from multinational conglomerates to small exporters of dual-use machine tools, to understand that the U.S. will impose economic burdens on them, and brand them as proliferators,'' Sanders said.
The pressure seems to be working, diplomats say, by deterring European companies wary of damaging their business in the United States from trading with Iran.
Among firms that have told their governments they will stay out of Iran for now are German engineering giant Siemens, French state-controlled nuclear giant Areva, German steel firm ThyssenKrupp and British oil major BP, industry sources and diplomats say.
COMPANIES SAY NOT CONSULTED
Senior officials from some companies -- such as BP and ThyssenKrupp -- have already discussed these issues publicly.
Areva has told its government that it did not want to do anything to harm its U.S. sales, a French source familiar with the case told Reuters.
French electricity group EDF and the French Atomic Energy Commission are also concerned, the source said.
The same applied to Siemens and other German firms, diplomats said. ``German industry told the government that it will not get involved in Iran,'' one source said.
The new reticence of European companies in turn is blunting efforts by France, Britain and Germany to persuade Iran to abandon nuclear processes that could be used to build weapons in return for economic incentives.
Among these incentives, the EU's ``big three'' have promised to help Iran cut deals with EU firms in civilian nuclear, aeronautic, telecoms and other industries.
European diplomats complained about the U.S. increasing pressure on trade just as the European governments were trying to persuade Iran to accept economic incentives.
``We were surprised by this,'' one European diplomat said.
But diplomats said European companies had also complained they had not been consulted before their governments promised Iran goods and equipment that they would be unable to provide.
``The politicians should have talked to industry before starting negotiations with Iran, not after,'' one said.
One of the items promised to the Iranians was a light-water reactor of the type that does not produce large quantities of plutonium. But no European company is willing to build it.
Iran, under pressure to give up its uranium enrichment program, is also getting frustrated that the European governments are unable to offer it anything.
``Iranian expectations are too high. We can't order our companies to do business with Iran. All we can do is create a political atmosphere to build confidence,'' an EU diplomat said.
Germany and France were the top exporters to Iran in 2003, accounting for 11 and 8.6 percent respectively of Iran's $25.26 billion of imports.
On Friday, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency urged the United States to join forces with Europe to persuade Iran to give up nuclear processes that could be used to make weapons.
``I would hope that the U.S. eventually would be actively engaged with the Europeans in the dialogue with Iran,'' Mohamed ElBaradei told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Washington wants the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran to stop it developing nuclear weapons.
----
Military rumblings on Iran
International Herald Tribune
Friday, January 28, 2005
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/01/27/opinion/ediran.html
President George W. Bush began his second term with speculation rising about future military moves against Iran. Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney placed Iran first on the list of world trouble spots and darkly hinted that unless tougher measures were taken to curtail Iran's nuclear program, Israel might launch its own pre-emptive air strikes.
Earlier this month, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that secret reconnaissance operations were under way inside Iran, as the Pentagon prepares target lists of nuclear sites that could be attacked from the air or by ground-based commando units.
Thus far, Bush has kept his own counsel. But these hawkish rumblings eerily recall the months before the American invasion of Iraq when some of the same officials pressed hardest for military action, while the president remained publicly uncommitted. Given that experience, it would be foolhardy to dismiss the current rhetorical buildup. We hope that this time, wiser heads in the administration will intervene before it is too late.
There is no question that Iran has been covertly developing the capacity to build nuclear weapons, and that diplomacy has so far failed to end these efforts. But precipitate American military action would almost certainly do far more harm than good. No major American ally, including Britain, favors such an approach. American planes and missiles alone cannot knock out all of Iran's many secret nuclear sites.
An invasion of a country almost three times as populous as Iraq is well beyond the means of America's depleted ground forces. And an American military attack is probably the one thing still able to unite Iran's restive but nationalist population behind the unpopular clerical dictatorship.
The most effective leverage available to Washington is international economic sanctions. If American diplomacy can line up traditional European allies, there is a fair chance that the Iranian nuclear program can still be stopped.
Iran's nuclear ambitions predate the 1979 Islamic revolution. With crucial help from Pakistan and perhaps other countries, Iran now has centrifuges capable of enriching uranium to weapons grade. It also has considerable supplies of uranium ready to be enriched. Iran has promised not to enrich any of that uranium for now, under the terms of an agreement recently negotiated with Britain, France and Germany, and some experts believe there are still technical hurdles to overcome. Even if it mastered enrichment, Iran would still have to design, build and test a usable weapon. The best guess is that Iran remains at least three to five years from having the bomb.
A nuclear-armed Iran is an alarming prospect, given the radical nature of the Iranian regime, with its long and continuing record of sponsoring international terrorism, its undiluted hostility to the United States and Israel, and its intense regional rivalries with Iraq and Saudi Arabia. So effective crisis diplomacy needs to move into high gear.
The freeze on uranium enrichment that Iran agreed to is only temporary. Its duration depends on the results of talks in which the Europeans are seeking a more definitive renunciation of nuclear enrichment. The Iranians, in return, want economic and trade rewards.
Expanded commercial ties with America and Europe are very appealing to Iran's ruling mullahs. Having marginalized the reformist political parties, they now see economic sluggishness and high unemployment as the only remaining threat to their continued grip on power. But the mullahs are unlikely to give up their nuclear weapons efforts, which are popular among Iranians of all political persuasions, unless they are plainly told that refusing will bring punishing economic isolation in the very near future. European leaders have not been willing to send that firm message yet, and need to do so.
The next step should be a unified European-American stand that forces Iran to make a clear choice. Either fully renounce its nuclear enrichment programs and win significant trade and economic incentives or fail to do so and suffer severe economic penalties.
The Iranian nuclear challenge could not be more dangerous or more pressing. It is time to put aside unilateral American military bluster and European wishful diplomacy and get serious.
----
UN Nuclear Chief Urges U.S. to Join EU on Iran
Fri Jan 28, 5:20 AM ET
By Knut Engelmann (Reuters)
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050128/ts_nm/davos_nuclear_iran_dc_3
DAVOS, Switzerland - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog on Friday urged the United States to join forces with the EU to persuade Iran to give up atomic processes that could be used to make weapons.
France, Britain and Germany are leading a European Union initiative to push Tehran to abandon its work on producing nuclear fuel in exchange for economic and political incentives.
Washington, which accuses Iran of developing nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian atomic energy program, says this effort is doomed and has called for U.N. Security Council sanctions to be imposed on the Islamic republic.
Asked if recent U.S. statements that military action could be used to stop Iran from getting a bomb, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei said he hoped the United States would opt for diplomacy.
"I would hope that the U.S. eventually would be actively engaged with the Europeans in the dialogue with Iran," ElBaradei told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in this Alpine ski resort.
Iran denies wanting weapons and insists its nuclear ambitions are limited to the peaceful generation of electricity.
The IAEA has been investigating Iran's program for more than two years. It has found no clear evidence that Iran is trying to get atomic weapons, but did find that Iran concealed potentially arms-related activities for nearly two decades.
ElBaradei said Iran has been cooperating with IAEA inspectors, though the agency has more work to do there.
"So far, we are getting good cooperation and I think we still have work to do. But I'm optimistic that we're getting good positive cooperation."
He added that it was up to Iran to build confidence that its nuclear ambitions did not include the bomb.
"There is still a lot of concern about the Iranian program," he said. "The more Iran cooperates the better for them and for the international community."
-------- iraq / inspections
Scientist: Gulf War Stopped Iraqi Nukes
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 28, 2005
Filed at 12:19 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Norway-Iraq-Nuclear.html?pagewanted=print&position=
OSLO, Norway (AP) -- A scientist considered the father of Iraq's nuclear program said Thursday that his nation would have developed atomic weapons in the early 1990s had Saddam Hussein not ordered the invasion of Kuwait.
The invasion sparked the U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm in 1991, which drove Iraq out of Kuwait and marked the end of Baghdad's nuclear and biological weapons program, said Jafar Dhia Jafar, the scientific head of Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
``By the end of 1990, about 8,000 people were involved directly or indirectly in the nuclear program,'' said Jafar, presenting his new Norwegian-language book, ``Oppdraget'', which means The Assignment, describing the program.
``We were three years away, give or take a year,'' said Jafar, who fled Iraq during the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
In the book, Jafar describes being picked up in 1981 after 18 months in jail and brought to see Saddam, who, standing behind a desk in military uniform, instructed him to build an atomic bomb.
``From today, that is our goal,'' Jafar recalled Hussein saying.
The British-educated scientist, with a doctorate in physics from the University of Birmingham, said the quest for nuclear weapons began with Israeli warplanes bombing the legal Iraqi nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha, near Baghdad, where he had worked, in June 1981.
``It was not illegal because it did not violate the NPT (the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons treaty),'' he said. He said the program became top secret in 1986, when nuclear efforts moved beyond the terms of the treaty.
Jafar said Iraq sought to build all industrial and technological equipment needed to develop weapons on its own, sometimes importing equipment through oil or other industries.
-------- korea
S. Korea to Stop Calling North Main Enemy
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 28, 2005
Filed at 7:31 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Enemy.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- South Korea's Defense Ministry said Friday it will stop calling North Korea its ``main enemy'' in defense guidelines, a symbolic change apparently aimed at reducing tension between the decades-old archrivals.
The decision is subject to approval by the full Cabinet next week. The revised Defense White Paper to be released next Friday will refer to North Korea as posing a ``direct military threat,'' ministry officials said.
The symbolic change will not influence South Korea's defense readiness against the North, the ministry said. ``The fact remains that North Korea is our main enemy,'' a ministry spokesman said, speaking on customary condition of anonymity.
South Korea began calling North Korea a ``main enemy'' 10 years ago, after North Korea threatened to turn Seoul into a ``sea of fire'' in a dispute over the North's nuclear weapons program.
North Korea has remained a mortal enemy of South Korea since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, leaving the Korean Peninsula technically at war. Their border is the world's most heavily armed.
North Korea has cited the ``main enemy'' terminology as a key example of what it calls South Korean hostility and has refused to start a military dialogue on easing tensions.
Critics, however, have condemned South Korea's changing attitude as coddling the Pyongyang regime, which is suspected of building nuclear weapons in defiance of international pressure while suppressing human rights of its hunger-stricken people.
South Korea has not released its annual defense white paper for four years, partly because of the controversy over whether to continue calling North Korea a ``main enemy.''
The main opposition Grand National Party have accused President Roh Moo-hyun and his predecessor, Kim Dae-jung, of pampering North Korea.
The opposition and Roh's ruling Uri Party also disagree over whether to abolish the National Security Law, by which people convicted of sympathizing with communism can get a lengthy prison term.
Uri says the law is outdated and should be repealed. The opposition says the 57-year-old law should only be amended.
The Koreas have moved toward better ties since holding a historic summit in 2000.
-------- mideast
Egypt admits atom report 'errors'
Friday, 28 January, 2005 (BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4216395.stm
Egypt has said it failed to disclose the full extent of its nuclear activities to the UN's atomic watchdog.
Egyptian officials said the failure arose because of a misunderstanding over exactly what had to be disclosed.
They insisted that Egypt was fully co-operating with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and its nuclear programme was peaceful.
Western diplomats recently said IAEA inspectors in Egypt had visited a laboratory used to reprocess plutonium.
A senior official from Egypt's atomic energy programme said on Friday that the IAEA had asked it to "take some corrective steps in declaring research activities".
-------- missile defense
US Missile Shield Finds Few Takers in Canada
by Mark Bourrie January 28, 2005 (Inter Press Service)
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/bourrie.php?articleid=4611
OTTAWA - With Canada's governing Liberal Party clinging to power by a shaky minority in Parliament, Washington's controversial North American missile defense program may create a crisis that will force the country into a snap election.
Even within the Liberal Party, many MPs are opposed to the missile defense system and the George W. Bush administration's reported use of strong-arm tactics to get Canada to sign on to the scheme.
In a Dec. 27 appearance on Canadian television, Prime Minister Paul Martin insisted that "we are against the militarization of space. We're against the weaponization of space, and we will not participate in it today nor will we tomorrow."
Much of the pressure is coming from U.S. ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci, who said earlier this month that he expects Canada to sign onto the missile defense system by the end of March.
Canada's leftist New Democratic Party, which supports the government in most parliamentary votes, opposes missile defense, as does the nationalist Bloc Quebecois, the second-largest opposition party in parliament.
The pro-U.S. Canadian Alliance party, the largest opposition bloc, supports the program and would likely provide the government with enough support to survive a vote on the issue. However, it could cause the New Democrats to withdraw support for other government measures, including the federal budget.
In the Canadian system, a lost budget vote automatically causes the government to fall. The budget will be presented within the next two months.
"We're pushing the government very hard for a parliamentary vote. The government had already gone halfway down the road last summer when it agreed to amend the NORAD agreement," New Democrat leader Jack Layton said in an interview Wednesday.
The amendments to the North American Air Defense agreement, accepted in mid-2004 by both countries, place the joint Canada-U.S. air defense command in charge of monitoring the missile system.
"The Canadian public is very opposed to missile defense and the weaponization of space. We hear it every time we go door to door or talk with Canadians on the street," Layton said.
"If we accept this, we'll in effect be giving a Canadian imprimatur to George Bush's arms race. It would add legitimacy to Star Wars, but it would erode Canada's reputation in the world as an independent country, an honest broker, and a peacekeeper. Paul Martin says it won't cost anything, but I don't think Americans will sit there forever and let us 'get' this for free. Even if we end up paying just 1 percent of the cost, that's 10 billion of the $1 trillion cost."
Prime Minister Martin and his officials had been assured by the White House that missile defense would not be on the agenda when Bush made his first visit to Ottawa as president last November.
But, according to a Washington Post article published earlier this week, Bush pressured Martin at the Nov. 30, 2004 meeting, going so far as to suggest that the future of the Canada-U.S. defense relationship may be at stake.
Close Canada-U.S. military cooperation goes back to 1940, when the two countries reached a defense agreement at Ogdensburg, N.Y. In effect, the U.S. promised to protect Canada from attack by Nazi Germany or any other power.
An unnamed official quoted in the Washington Post said Bush "leaned across the table and said: 'I'm not taking this position, but some future president is going to say: Why are we paying to defend Canada?'"
Canadian officials, according to this account, told Bush the Martin government might have trouble selling missile defense to this country's parliament and people.
Bush supposedly "waved his hands and remarked 'I don't understand this. Are you saying that if you got up and said this is necessary for the defense of Canada,' it won't be accepted?"
Amy Butcher, a spokesman for Martin, said the government would not comment on the substance of the report.
"Our position is clear on BMD [Ballistic Missile Defense]," she said. "The government will make a final decision based on Canadian interests and Parliament will have an opportunity to express its views on the issue."
Canadian opponents of the project say this country's government should avoid missile defense because it violates the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, to which Canada is a signatory. As well, they say, the technology still isn't proven to work.
Several tests of the system have failed, including one last month that the Pentagon blamed on a minor glitch in computer software. The Pentagon, however, says they may never publicly declare when the shield is fully ready.
-----
Missile threats
January 28, 2005 Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
We obtained a copy of the latest report by the National Air and Space Intelligence Center on ballistic and cruise missile threats. The report concludes that the missile threat is growing "in number and variety."
"The availability of weapons of mass destruction for use on ballistic missiles vastly increases the significance of this threat," the report states.
The report notes that Russia, despite U.S. aid to reduce its nuclear arsenals, has or is building four new types of ICBMs, including 30 SS-27s that are deployed with "countermeasures to ballistic missile defense systems."
Another new ICBM is in the works that will be deployed in both silos and road-mobile launchers, the report said.
Russia's other new long-range missiles include two new submarine-launched ballistic missiles known as the SS-N-23 Sineva and the Bulava-30, which will be deployed in a new missile submarine known as the Dolgoruky class.
The report also notes that China is building up its long-range missile forces with two new ICBMs, the 4,500-mile range DF-31 and the 7,000-mile range DF-31A. "The number of warheads on Chinese ICBMs capable of threatening the United States is expected to expand to 75 to 100 over the next 15 years," the report said.
The report also warns that work on North Korea's ICBM, the Taepo-Dong-2, is continuing, and the missile "may be exported to other countries in the future."
Iran's missile program was described in the report as "ambitious" and includes the 800-mile range Shahab-3 and plans for two longer-range missiles, the Shahab-4 and Shahab-5.
"Iran could have an ICBM capable of reaching the United States before 2015," the report said.
As for land-attack cruise missiles, the report states that the threat is growing, with at least nine nations building the ground-hugging, hard-to-detect systems.
Both China and Russia are building new cruise missiles that can be armed with nuclear or conventional warheads. "The majority of new [land-attack cruise missiles] will be very accurate, conventionally armed and available for export," the report said. "U.S. defense systems could be severely stressed by low-flying, stealthy cruise missiles that can simultaneously attack a target from several different directions."
----
Russia upgrades missile defenses
MOSCOW (AFP) Jan 28, 2005
http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050128115529.onz32tf1.html
Russia plans to install next generation air defense and powerful tactical missile systems later this year, strongly upgrading the country's defenses, Interfax reported Friday.
Russia plans to procure two missiles which have been in developing stages for years: the S-400 anti-missile weapon with a range of up to 400 kilometers (240 miles) and the Iskander system which is an upgrade of the Soviet-era Scud used in the Gulf War.
The Iskander came under attention earlier this month amid unconfirmed reports that Moscow was willing to sell the weapon to Israel's arch-rival Syria, with Russia denying the charges.
Oleg Belousov, Russia's deputy defense minister, said the armed forces would purchase six S-400 systems this year. He did not disclose the price, where these would be stationed or whether they might be put up for sale.
The Iskander -- also known as the SS-26 -- is the updated version of the Soviet-era Scud missile used by Saddam Hussein's Iraq against Israel during the Gulf War.
It was first tested by Russia in 1996, has a range of just under 300 kilometers (180 miles), and reportedly can easily overcome existing air defense systems.
Each missile has two 480-kilogram (1,055-pound) warheads that in tests hit targets with an accuracy of 20 meters (yards).
The missile has no NATO equivalent. It is extremely effective because its launch pad is mobile and the missile can be guided through bad weather by satellite or plane radar, according to the Federation of American Scientists arms watchdog group.
-------- russia
Senate Bill Would Boost Nonproliferation Measures
By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire January 28, 2005
http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2005_1_28.html#86EB9091
WASHINGTON — U.S. Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.) proposed this week to re-establish U.S. efforts to convert Russian nuclear weapons production sites to civilian use (see GSN, Jan. 14).
The proposal was contained in a massive counterterrorism bill introduced Wednesday by Biden, the Targeting Terrorists More Effectively Act of 2005. The bill would re-establish the U.S. Energy Department’s Nuclear Cities Initiative, which once sought to reduce the Russian nuclear weapons complex but was allowed to expire in 2003, according to a Biden press release. His legislation would authorize $60 million to be appropriated to the Energy Department for the effort (see GSN, Sept. 22, 2003).
The bill also would require the Defense and Energy departments to work with Moscow to consolidate and dismantle Russian tactical nuclear weapons. Each department would be authorized $25 million for the effort.
In addition, the bill would authorize an additional $40 million for the Defense Department in fiscal 2006 for the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which seeks to secure and dispose of Soviet-era weapons of mass destruction. Of that money, $15 million would support efforts to accelerate security upgrades at nuclear weapons sites located in Russia and other former Soviet states; $10 million would be used to accelerate security upgrades at warhead storage sites outside the former Soviet Union; and $15 million would go toward accelerating biological nonproliferation efforts in Kazakhstan, Georgia and Uzbekistan.
The bill would also enact into law a measure proposed by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) to remove restrictions placed on aid provided through the CTR program to both projects within the former Soviet Union and in other countries (see GSN, Nov. 15, 2004).
Last year, the CTR program deactivated more than 300 Russian nuclear warheads, bringing the total deactivated since the effort began in 1991 to more than 6,500, Lugar’s office announced yesterday.
The program last year also resulted in the destruction of 41 Russian SS-18 ICBMs and 22 SS-18 missile silos, 18 Backfire strategic bombers in Ukraine; 93 AS-4/KH-22 long-range nuclear air-launched cruise missiles; 81 SS-N-23, SS-N-20 and SS-N-18 submarine-launched ballistic missiles; and nine SS-24 ICBM mobile launchers.
Pakistan
Biden’s bill would authorize $10 million in fiscal 2006 aid to Pakistan for nonproliferation programs. The assistance would be part of a broader $800 million aid package.
Under Biden’s bill, however, the president would be required to certify that no U.S. economic or military aid to Pakistan was being passed on by the Pakistani government “to a person that is opposing or undermining the efforts of the United States government to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons.”
Pakistan’s commitment to nonproliferation has come into the question following the confession in early 2004 of former top nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan to having orchestrated the transfer of nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
The bill contains a finding of Congress that “Pakistan’s maintenance of a global missile and nuclear proliferation network would be inconsistent with Pakistan being considered an ally of the United States.”
----
Russian nuclear industry earned $3.5 billion on export in 2004
The head of Russian nuclear agency Alexander Rumyantsev informed about the last year results and mentioned that the export revenues were $0.5 billion higher than in 2003 at a press-conference last year, daily Kommersant reported.
BELLONA 2005-01-28 15:32
http://193.71.199.52/en/international/russia/nuke_industry/36991.html
According to Rumyantsev, it can be explained by the higher prices for the nuclear fuel and uranium products in 2004. The Russian-American HEU-LEU contract generates a stable annual income equal $450-470m, TVEL corporation earned $1 billion, he added. HEU-LEU contract was signed about 11 years ago and stipulates down-blending of the weapon grade plutonium into the low enrichment uranium, which could be used as fuel at the US nuclear plants.
Alexander Rumyantsev complained that no new contracts for nuclear power plants construction abroad has been signed in 2004, but in 2005 China might announce a tender for construction of two reactor units. The head of Rosatom also mentioned that all the technical problems (cracks on the steam generator pipes) at the first reactor unit of Tianwan nuclear power plant, are solved. “The first reactor is practically ready for start-up” he added. Rosatom representatives are hoping to launch the second reactor at the Tianwan nuclear power plant in the end of this year, Kommersant reported.
Concerning India, Rumyantsev said there are “factors for delay in the construction schedule” again due to the equipment faults, but it could be solved as well. Cooperation with Iran did not raise big concerns and reactor in Bushehr is to be launched in the end of this year, and connected to the grid in 2006, Rumyantsev said. ”It goes well with foreign cooperation as we manage to build five units simultaneously, but we are building to little home” complained the head of the Russian Nuclear Agency.
On December 16, 2004, unit no.3 was launched at the Kalinin NPP. The completion of the resumed reactor’s construction turned out to be more expensive than construction of a new reactor abroad – the price-tag for the new third reactor at the Kalinin NPP reached $1.3 billion. Rosatom specialists have not decided yet which unit should be completed next. There are three unfinished reactors in Russia: the unit no.2 at the Volgodonsk NPP, unit no.5 at the Balakovo NPP, and unit no.5 at the Kursk NPP, Kommersant reported.
----
United Kingdom to Provide $20 Million to Aid Shutdown of Russian Plutonium-Producing Reactors
By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire, January 28, 2005
http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2005_1_28.html#2D95F609
WASHINGTON — The United Kingdom agreed this week to provide $20 million to a U.S. effort to shut down three nuclear reactors in Russia that produce weapon-grade plutonium (see GSN, Jan. 26).
The British aid would be provided through a memorandum of understanding signed Wednesday in London by representatives from the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration and the British Trade and Industry Ministry. The funding would be used in the design and construction of a new fossil-fuel energy plant to replace one of the three Russian reactors, located in the closed city of Zheleznogorsk.
“The signing of this MOU is a major step in our collaborative efforts to address our mutual nonproliferation objectives,” NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks said in a statement. “When the Zheleznogorsk reactor is finally shut down, there will be one less source of nuclear weapons-grade plutonium in the world.”
“I am delighted that the U.K., in collaboration with our U.S. and Russian partners, can contribute to this vital program and play a full part in addressing these crucial issues,” British Trade and Industry Minister Nigel Griffiths said in a separate statement.
The Zheleznogorsk reactor and two reactors in the closed city of Seversk have been estimated to produce up to 1.2 metric tons of weapon-grade plutonium annually — enough to create as many as 300 nuclear weapons. Russia has agreed to shut down the three reactors once replacement facilities are in place to continue to provide electricity and heat to the 215,000 combined residents of the two cities.
Construction of the new fossil-fuel plant at Zheleznogorsk is expected to be completed by the end of 2011.
Late last month, the Nuclear Security Administration awarded a $285 million contract to the U.S. firm Washington Group International to refurbish an existing coal-fired electric plant at Seversk to replace the two reactors there. That project is expected to be completed by 2009, though early progress could result in one of the two reactors being shut down in 2007, according to the U.S. Energy Department.
The cost to shut down all three reactors has been previously estimated at more than $460 million.
The British aid to the reactor shutdown project is being provided as part of the United Kingdom’s contribution to the G-8 Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction. The world’s top eight economic powers — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — launched the effort in 2002 to provide $20 billion over 10 years for nonproliferation projects, primarily in Russia.
Since the effort began, 13 additional countries have joined as donor nations. In addition, Ukraine has been selected as the next formal recipient country.
-------- terrorism
Nuclear Terrorism Greatest Threat, Ashcroft Says
NTI Friday, January 28, 2005
http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2005_1_28.htm
The greatest terrorist danger to the United States is that an extremist group would gain access to a nuclear weapon, outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft said yesterday in an interview with the Associated Press (see GSN, Jan. 3).
“If you were to have nuclear proliferation find its way into the hands of terrorists, the entire world might be very seriously disrupted by a few individuals who sought to impose their will, their arcane philosophy, on the rest of mankind,” Ashcroft said.
U.S. officials “from time to time” find indications of terrorists trying to acquire nuclear weapons, he added. It remains unclear, however, whether they have progressed in that effort, he told AP.
Authorities have prosecuted more than 375 people in terrorism-related cases in the United States since the Sept. 11, 2002, attacks. Those cases so far have resulted in 195 convictions or guilty pleas, AP reported (Curt Anderson, Associated Press/Billings Gazette, Jan. 27).
----
U.S. Security Chief Tom Ridge: Another Attack Inevitable
By REUTERS
January 28, 2005
Filed at 7:19 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-ridge.html?pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Departing Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said on Friday he believed another attack on the United States was inevitable, and warned that America should not focus just on al Qaeda, but also on similar groups that could carry out attacks.
``I have accepted the inevitability of another attack or attacks,'' Ridge said in an interview on the eve of his departure from the department launched two years ago to guard against another attack like that of Sept. 11, 2001.
``It could be al Qaeda or it could be al Qaeda-like organizations,'' said Ridge, who departs on Feb. 1. ``I do think, when we talk about global terrorism, (it is) better ... that America doesn't focus just on al Qaeda.''
``There are a lot of al Qaeda-like organizations and there are quite a few (Osama) bin Laden wannabes out there -- you've got one of them operating in Iraq right now,'' he said, referring to al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Ridge said the other groups he views as possible threats are driven by the same ideology as al Qaeda and they would use ``terrorist attacks'' as their means to that end.
When asked what type of attack he viewed as the biggest threat, Ridge said a biological or nuclear attack were of concern since they could involve ``catastrophic'' loss of life.
``I'm convinced that if they had a nuclear weapon they'd use it,'' he said in a joint interview with Reuters and the Associated Press.
Although there were no new attacks during Ridge's tenure, the administration was criticized for not giving him enough leeway or resources to properly set up an effective department.
Ridge was assailed for the five-tiered, color-coded terror alert warning system he created.
Some charged that he timed the raising of security alerts, particularly during last year's presidential campaign, to boost support for Bush. Ridge said politics had no place in his department.
Others complained about vague or incomplete information that accompanied changes in the alert level.
The department was also criticized for a program to photograph and fingerprint most foreign visitors entering the United States as part of the effort to toughen border security.
IMPERFECT WORLD
Ridge said the new department was still overcoming problems, including sharing information and analyzing intelligence.
He urged Michael Chertoff, the man President Bush has nominated to succeed him, to keep pressure on the agencies that share information with Homeland Security to ensure the flow continues and improves.
The ``no-fly'' list of foreigners who are prohibited from entering the country or boarding a plane to the United States was an example of how the FBI and CIA help Homeland Security decide who should be allowed in the country, Ridge said.
But ``it's an imperfect world,'' he said, and the agencies needed more work on the list to ensure the right people are stopped and the right people are allowed in.
The U.S. government has on several occasions ordered a passenger detained or requested an airplane not land because it was carrying someone on the ``no fly'' list. In a widely publicized incident, Yusuf Islam, the pop star formerly known as Cat Stevens, was taken off a flight and deported because his name was on the list.
Ridge urged some changes to U.S. immigration law in order to ensure the country remained open, even while it was trying to prevent potential attackers from getting in.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
The Silence of the Nuke Protesters
Christopher Helman, Chana R. Schoenberger and Rob Wherry, 02.07.05 Robes
http://www.forbes.com/global/2005/0207/024.html
Atomic power is making a comeback in the U.S., with only muffled squawks from the usual opponents. Could that have something to do with the price of oil? Or maybe global warming?
Sandra Lindberg and her husband, Samuel Galewsky, intended to start a ruckus. She, a theater professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and he, a biology prof at Millikin University, entered the Vespasian Warner Public Library one night in April 2003 to discuss a proposal by Exelon Corp. to add a brand-new nuclear reactor to its existing plant in Clinton, Illinois.
Lindberg and her group, No New Nukes, drew inspiration from three decades of protests. Like other towns where an outraged public defeated plans for new plants, Clinton, she hoped, would reject this one. No new reactors had been proposed in the U.S. since the Three Mile Island disaster. Outcry over the proposed repository for radioactive waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain showed that America wanted nothing to do with nuclear power.
Or so she thought. By the time of the second meeting, in December, the town-once split 50-50 on the new reactor-now overwhelmingly supported the project. Economics, not environmentalism, seemed to be swaying this rural community. With unemployment at 8%, Exelon, Dewitt County's largest employer, said that if the plant were built there would be 3,200 construction jobs, 600 new full-time positions to operate the plant and a big jump in the county's tax take. With backing from the industry's powerful lobby, the Nuclear Energy Institute, Exelon had spent weeks meeting with leaders and heading off the very concerns about health, safety and the environment that Lindberg hoped would galvanize the crowd against the plan.
Yes, nuclear power is back, after a quarter-century of suspended animation in the U.S. The industry has avoided confrontations that might arouse the wrath of an American public that still doubts the safety of reactors and is spooked about terrorism. Over the last five years fans of atomic power have quietly lined up the support of federal and municipal governments and have cozied up to General Electric and Westinghouse Electric (now part of the British BNFL Group) in service to an ambitious agenda: building perhaps 5 new reactors by 2015, a dozen by 2020 and 50 by midcentury.
The U.S. nuclear construction industry was presumed dead. It is anything but. If oil prices stay high, if people worry about carbon dioxide causing global warming, if the Middle East stays violent, nuclear power may make a huge comeback in the U.S.
Six weeks before the last Clinton library meeting, Marilyn Kray, an Exelon vice president, had gathered 11 executives from the largest nuclear operators and reactor vendors at a private room in Olives, a tony Washington, D.C. restaurant three blocks from the White House. As the dominant player, with 17 of the U.S.' 103 commercial reactors, Exelon of Chicago took the lead in discussing the future of the industry. Sitting next to Kray was Dan R. Keuter, her counterpart at Entergy, the number two operator. As diners nibbled their salads, the two led them through a 23-page report. Kray asked, Why not band together to help each other build new plants-and usher in a new dawn of nuclear power?
Two meetings followed in conference rooms at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The result was a consortium called NuStart Energy-comprising utilities with 30.5 million residential customers and $97 billion in annual revenues, as well as GE and Westinghouse. Its goal is to choose two of five sites by September, then go after the permits. By 2007 NuStart expects to see certification of GE's reactor design and to have its financing, at $1.5 billion per plant, in place-so a utility could put a plant out for bid the following year. On that schedule groundbreaking should be in 2010. Assuming construction goes well, the first new reactor could be hooked up to the grid five years later.
Fifteen years agon no one even considered building new reactors. There was still a bad hangover from the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979 and the Chernobyl explosion in 1986. The economics of the business stank. Far from being "too cheap to meter," as promoters predicted at the dawn of atomic power a half-century ago, nuclear energy was a lot more expensive than energy from coal and natural gas. Many small nuclear-power operators couldn't even turn a profit on their old reactors.
A big problem was the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, known for being unpredictable and fatally slow. In 1997 it had 14 plants on its "watch list" and fined others for such trivial non-safety violations as recording maintenance records on the wrong form. Howard Bruschi, former chief technology officer at Westinghouse, recalls that a regulator asked him to provide additional specs on an exhaust fan for a men's locker room.
It's usually a mistake to attack the bureaucrats that run your life, but at a certain point the nuclear power industry decided it didn't have much to lose. The utilities complained to Senator Pete V. Domenici (Republican-New Mexico) and the industry's patron saint on Capitol Hill. In 1998 he faced down NRC chief Shirley Ann Jackson and gave her an ultimatum: Fix the agency or see its funding cut by $50 million a year. Jackson (now president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) concedes that shutting down so many plants was a mistake, but insists that reforms Domenici takes credit for spurring were already in the works for two years. She says the new set of risk-based regulations-which focus on safety, not men's room fans-"was my baby."
----
The Ancient Archrivals
Rob Wherry, 02.07.05 Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/global/2005/0207/024sidebar.html
It's not as nasty as the "war of the currents" in the 1880s, when Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse bitterly debated whether electricity should travel over power lines in direct or alternating current. But the stakes are just as high today, with General Electric and Westinghouse engaged in a global contest to see whose new nuclear reactor will win out. At stake are orders and servicing contracts for 120 private and public plants, worth upwards of $200 billion, over the next 20 years.
Westinghouse appears to have a slight edge. Left for dead after its CBS merged with Viacom in 1999, the $700 million nuclear unit seemed headed for the same fate as the abandoned coal mines and steel mills that surround its offices outside Pittsburgh. "We thought our business would be decommissioning plants-and then no business," says Stephen Tritch, chief executive. But with utilities buying up old reactors, the company found new life in plant training, refueling and maintenance.
GE's nuclear division, headed by Andrew White, is half the size but picking up steam. White is predicting double-digit annual top-line growth for the next three years. For now his remains a small but well-performing part of GE Energy, the $18 billion unit that faltered recently when turbine sales tanked. "We believe there is a nuclear renaissance," says White.
The battle will heat up now that the two are shopping rival reactors-Westinghouse's AP-1000, approved last fall by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and GE's ESBWR, which expects approval in two years. Chief difference: Water in the AP-1000 is heated by the core but kept liquid at high pressure before generating steam in a nearby exchanger. The steam that runs the turbines is never exposed to radiation. Sixty percent of the world's reactors use this method. The ESBWR has 40% more capacity than the AP-1000, but water is boiled directly in the reactor core, so the steam brings some contamination into the turbines.
Other distinctions are more subtle. Gone from both designs are miles of redundant pipes, pumps and valves, several costly backup generators and thousands of square feet of earthquake-proof structures. The new reactors use gravity to flood overheating cores with thousands of gallons of water, then circulate condensation back through the system. They are safer, smaller and cheaper to build. Price tag: around $1.5 billion. (France's Areva makes a pressurized water reactor similar to the AP-1000.)
On sales calls GE can use its powerful brand name and claim that its predecessor reactor-the ABWR, approved by the NRC in 1997-is already in use in Japan. Still, boiling-water reactors have been a tough sell. They make up 92 of the 439 nuke plants that dot the globe. There are 263 pressurized water models; the remaining 84 are gas-cooled and heavy-and light-water reactors.
Nowhere is this shortcoming more evident than in China, which has daunting energy needs and intractable pollution problems from coal. China expects to commission 30 nukes over the next two decades, all of them pressurized water reactors like the AP-1000, supplied by one contractor to start. China already has 15 such nuclear reactors and wants to enjoy economies of scale.
That's put GE out of the running. While Westinghouse has jumped to the front of the pack of potential contractors, Areva is a contender. Westinghouse has been in China since the Nixon Administration and has a long history of servicing reactors there. Tritch and his lieutenants frequently fly to Beijing to oversee a six-person office. (The company may have gotten a boost from outgoing Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, who pushed the Chinese to purchase U.S. reactors during a meeting last year.) Bids are due this spring; the winner will be announced within a year.
While Westinghouse has been concentrating on China, GE has been picking off projects in other parts of the world. It's building two boiling-water reactors in Taiwan. Japan will probably give it more business. And because the ESBWR produces more electricity than the AP-1000, it's a natch for U.S. consortia.
-------- alabama
NRC chief - Nuclear project in (Alabama) state going well
Friday, January 28, 2005
KENT FAULK
Birmingham News staff writer
http://www.al.com/business/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/business/1106907447249070.xml
ATHENS - The $1.8 billion project to refurbish and restart a dormant reactor at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant is going well, the head of the nation's nuclear plant oversight agency said Thursday.
"The NRC believes the modifications are on track and according to plan," said Nils Diaz, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "We have performed a significant amount of oversight before the project was begun and continue to conduct a significant amount of oversight during the modifications."
Diaz toured the plant near Athens and met with officials with the Tennessee Valley Authority to discuss the federal utility's refurbishment of Browns Ferry's Unit 1 reactor - the largest and most expensive nuclear plant construction project in decades.
About 2,400 construction contractors are working on the Unit 1 restart, which is planned by TVA for May of 2007. Another 900 work to operate the other two reactors around the clock.
Unit 1 along with the plant's other two reactors were shut down in 1985 in the wake of problems. The Unit 2 and Unit 3 reactors were modified and restarted during the 1990s.
Browns Ferry has four resident NRC inspectors - two for Unit 2 and Unit 3 reactors and the other two for the Unit 1 restart project, Diaz said. Those inspectors and NRC officials from Atlanta and the agency's headquarters who also have helped in reviews have spent thousands of hours overseeing the Unit 1 project, he said.
Since the project is the largest nuclear construction project since the nuclear plant construction boom in the 1970s the NRC is using it as a training opportunity, Diaz said. "We need to train the new generation of engineers and inspectors," he said.
Therefore, the Browns Ferry Unit 1 restart is probably getting more attention from NRC inspectors, Diaz said.
TVA has satisfactorily addressed concerns raised so far by the NRC inspectors on the Unit 1 reactor project, Diaz said. "My distinct impression is that Browns Ferry has been transformed into a very good operating plant," including the Unit 1 restart project, he said.
E-mail: kfaulk@bhamnews.com
-------- nevada
Yucca foes may have DOE on ropes
Columnist Jeff German: January 28, 2005
german@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4067
(1/29-30/05 Las Vegas Sun)
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2005/jan/28/518202523.html
Back in November I was convinced that President Bush's re-election would take the wind out of Nevada's epic fight against Yucca Mountain.
Bush is the president who, without having the scientific facts, concluded in 2002 that it was safe to store 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain repository, 90 miles from Las Vegas. Congress then voted to send us the nation's radioactive garbage by 2010.
If anything, however, the spirit of the undermanned Nevada forces is surprisingly optimistic. There is a feeling that victory is at hand.
Bob Loux, Nevada's top nuclear waste watchdog, believes the state won the fight in July when a Washington appeals court panel tossed out a 10,000-year radiation safety standard for Yucca Mountain that had been developed by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The three-judge panel ruled that the Energy Department should have followed the law and set a stricter standard recommended by the National Academy of Sciences. The academy says Yucca Mountain should be designed to protect Nevadans for hundreds of thousands of years.
It's a standard, Nevada forces say, the government, after two decades of studying the mountain site, simply can't meet.
Only through an act of Congress can the Bush administration circumvent the court's ruling and change the law to allow a much looser standard. That's turning out to be a big hurdle for the administration, with Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, who's as politically savvy as anyone on Capitol Hill, entrenched as the Democratic minority leader.
"I think the fight is over," Loux says. "But I don't think they've recognized it yet."
Joe Egan, Nevada's lead lawyer on the legal front in Washington, isn't willing to proclaim victory like Loux.
But Egan, who persuaded the appeals court to issue its pivotal ruling in July, says the Energy Department and the nuclear industry are definitely on the run.
"The entire Yucca Mountain program is in mass chaos," he says. "Every single phase of the program is in trouble."
For one thing, the complicated Yucca Mountain licensing process has been set back.
Without a safer radiation standard, there's no way the Energy Department can win approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to open the underground dump.
Department officials also have acknowledged that they're way behind in reviewing the mass of scientific documents expected to be contained in the application. More than 2 million documents still need to be studied.
And last week the Energy Department sent out mixed messages as to when it will submit its application, which was supposed to have been filed a month ago.
Energy Secretary nominee Samuel Bodman informed Congress that the application would be submitted at the end of the year.
But then word surfaced that the department only planned to request about $650 million for its budget this year, which is about half of what it needs to move forward with the application process.
"I think they're moving backwards, not forward," says Peggy Maze Johnson, the executive director of Citizen Alert, an anti-Yucca Mountain group. "These people have absolutely no clue what they're doing."
The latest reason for optimism, according to Egan, is talk within the nuclear industry itself that a centralized location to store high-level waste at Yucca Mountain no longer is essential to the industry's desire to build more power plants.
Some utilities, Egan says, already have filed permits to build new nuclear plants and are working on plans to increase waste storage at existing plants.
It's a fundamental change in ideology that buys Nevada more time to fight Yucca Mountain.
It also buys the country more time to find either another waste storage solution or a site that actually is suitable to store the deadly waste -- far away from Nevada.
----
DOE unveils details of above-ground storage plan at Yucca Mountain
Up to 21,000 metric tons of nuke waste could sit at Yucca for years
By Benjamin Grove
WASHINGTON BUREAU
Las Vegas SUN
January 28, 2005
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2005/jan/28/518200750.html
WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department today unveiled new plans for a 500-foot-by-500-foot "aging pad" where nuclear waste would be stored above ground at Yucca Mountain until it was ready for placement in the underground repository.
The department has long planned to collect waste at a surface holding facility at Yucca, where waste could be sorted and stored, in some cases for years. Some of the waste could be relatively fresh from nuclear plant reactors and more radioactive, or "hotter," than waste that would have been cooling for far longer in pools at the plants.
The department had considered an aging pad with storage for up to 40,000 metric tons of waste -- over half the planned 70,000-metric-ton capacity of Yucca's repository tunnels, Energy Department repository systems engineer Paul Harrington said today at a nuclear waste issues conference here. But that plan was scaled back, he said.
Design plans now call for a pad with capacity for 21,000 metric tons of waste. Waste would be stored in roughly 2,000 above-ground casks, Harrington said.
It's hard to know how long a typical waste package would sit there, but it could be five, 10, even 15 years, he said. The pad likely would be used for about 50 years -- about the amount of time it would take to fill Yucca.
The aging pad would allow the department to accept waste at the Yucca site before construction of the repository is complete, Harrington said. Energy Department officials aim to begin accepting waste at Yucca by 2010, although critics say that target is unlikely to be met.
Nevada lawmakers have battled back proposals in Congress to construct a "temporary," or interim, waste site at the Nevada Test Site until Yucca is complete.
Harrington said the aging pad is not defined as a temporary storage facility because the waste would not be stored temporarily -- it would be held awaiting placement in the permanent repository.
"Interim storage doesn't have a disposal component," Harrington said.
Yucca critics have said that is a matter of semantics. They note that federal law prohibits interim waste sites in Nevada if the state is to be home to a national permanent waste repository.
Such a large pad would enable the department to ship hotter waste earlier than planned, said Kevin Kamps, a nuclear waste specialist with Nuclear Information and Resource Service.
"That really increases transportation risks," Kamps said.
Nevada officials plan to challenge the Energy Department's attempt to construct such a large aging pad. They say that a pad that size should be licensed separately by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
"We think that a facility that holds that quantity of waste is an independent fuel storage facility," said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency.
Yucca critics also have been critical of plans to store so much waste above ground because it would be vulnerable to aircraft accidents or even terrorist attacks.
"If you have waste sitting there for 10 or 15 years -- that's a long time," said Michele Boyd, an analyst for Public Citizen who tracks Yucca issues. "That's one of the most dangerous aspects of Yucca Mountain."
Nevada officials are keeping a close eye on the NRC, which has raised questions about the security of "temporary" waste sites. The NRC has delayed licensing a temporary above-ground waste site in Utah in large part due to concerns about aircraft crashes. That case may have implications for the aging pad at Yucca, Yucca critics said.
The Yucca pad could be surrounded by a 300-foot barrier that would offer protection from, among other things, aircraft "skid-ins," Energy Department officials say. But Harrington today said that for security reasons, officials could not offer details about security measures that would be taken at the site.
"There would be security, certainly," he said.
----
Rep. Berkley urges withholding bonus pay for Yucca work
By STEVE TETREAULT
STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Friday, January 28, 2005 Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Jan-28-Fri-2005/news/25753732.html
WASHINGTON -- The management company for Yucca Mountain should collect no awards after missing a deadline to finish a segment of the nuclear waste project, incoming Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman was told on Thursday.
Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., wrote to Bodman criticizing the Energy Department's $1.8 billion contract with the firm, Bechtel SAIC Co., LLC. The contract included a series of payments tied to the company meeting specific deadlines and performing to quality standards.
Bechtel SAIC would have qualified for a $15.3 million "performance based incentive" by handing DOE a completed license application for the Nevada nuclear waste repository by Nov. 30. But the department announced in November the application would be delayed.
Yucca Mountain deputy director John Arthur said some of the causes were not the company's fault, and the parties continue to negotiate a partial payment, a DOE spokesman said this week.
Berkley urged Bodman to reconsider any payment to Bechtel SAIC.
"It is especially egregious that this company may receive bonuses, even though the company has failed to meet basic contract obligations," Berkley said.
DOE spokesman Allen Benson said he could not comment on the matter.
-------- south carolina
Plutonium Plant Nears Agency's Approval
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 28, 2005
Filed at 5:01 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Plutonium-Plant.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government moved a step closer Friday to gaining approval to dispose of 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium by turning it into a less dangerous fuel for commercial power reactors.
The staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommended that the commission approve licenses for building a plant at the federal Savannah River complex in South Carolina where the plutonium would be processed into a mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel.
Some environmentalists and nuclear nonproliferation advocates have opposed the conversion plans, arguing plutonium should not be used to make commercial reactor fuel and that, instead, the weapons-grade material should be encased in glass and buried.
While the NRC staff acknowledged a severe accident at the proposed facility could cause additional latent cancer fatalities among workers and the public, it said ``the likelihood of such an accident occurring is expected to be very low, highly unlikely.''
``The overall benefits of the proposed MOX facility outweigh its disadvantages and cost,'' the NRC staff concluded in a final environmental impact report on the proposed project. The commission is expected to decide in the coming months whether to issue a construction license -- and later, an operating permit -- for the facility.
The conversion to mixed-oxide fuel is a key part of the Bush administration's effort to safeguard the tons of excess weapons-grade plutonium held by both the United States and Russia and reduce the risks of the material being obtained by terrorists or a rogue state.
Under an agreement with Russia, the United States plans to blend 34 tons of U.S. plutonium no longer needed for warheads with depleted uranium so it can no longer be used in a bomb and can be used in a commercial power reactor. Russia would also build a conversion plant for 34 tons of its excess plutonium.
The Energy Department had hoped to begin building the conversion plant at Savannah River later this year, but construction has been held up because of complications that have delayed construction of a facility in Russia.
Tom Clements, an adviser to Greenpeace International on nuclear issues, called the NRC staff report ``woefully inadequate'' and criticized its dismissal of health and environmental risks should there be a release of radiation.
``They have to plan for the eventuality that there is some kind of accident,'' said Clements. ``Basically the have just waved it off as something being acceptable.''
The NRC staff report said the primary benefit of the conversion program would be the reduction in the amount of excess plutonium under storage. It concluded that converting the material to a reactor-suitable mixed-oxide fuel is safer than continued storage of surplus plutonium.
The report said the routine operation of a conversion plant and proposed support facilities would pose virtually no radiological risk to people or the environment within 50 miles of the complex.
But it acknowledged an accidental release of radioactive tritium from a plutonium disassembly facility to be built as part of the project could cause between three and 100 additional latent cancer fatalities, with higher estimates if contaminated food is eaten.
``However, it is regarded as highly unlikely that such an accident would occur and the risk to any population, including low-income and minority communities, is considered to be low,'' concluded the NRC staff report.
On the Net
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/staff/sr1767/
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Nearly 100 people killed in Darfur air attack, U.N. says
1/28/2005
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-01-28-darfur_x.htm
CAIRO (AP) — A Sudanese air force bombardment of villagers in Darfur this week killed or wounded almost 100 people, a U.N. spokeswoman said Friday, calling the bombing a major violation of a fragile ceasefire in the conflict-torn region.
The bombardment at the village of Shangil Tobaya, which took place Wednesday, forced "thousands" of people to flee, spokeswoman Radhia Achouri said in a phone interview from Khartoum.
Achouri said African Union observers at the scene had reported "almost 100 casualties" but did not specify how many were dead and how many wounded.
"But 100 casualties is 100 too many, be they wounded or dead," she said. "It is definitely one of the most serious violations of the cease-fire" signed by the government and the Darfur rebels last year.
The United Nations mission in Khartoum spoke to Sudan's Foreign Ministry about the bombardment, but has received no reply.
NGO field workers based in Shangil Tobaya, 40 miles south of El Fasher, reported witnessing bombs exploding on the ground and an air force Antonov circling overhead on Wednesday afternoon. Later the same day, the African Union, which has 1,400 cease-fire monitors and protection troops in Darfur, confirmed there was an aerial bombardment and called it a "major violation" of the cease-fire.
The Sudanese government has issued no statement on the report. On Thursday its deputy information minister declined to comment, saying a call from The Associated Press was the first he had heard of the matter and he was on vacation.
"The Government of Sudan always says aerial bombardments are not government policy and that President Omar el-Bashir has issued firm instructions that there should be no use of Antonovs for aerial bombardment," Achouri said.
The Sudanese government has often been accused of employing its air force against civilians in Darfur, and it has usually denied the allegations. It is rare that an aerial bombardment is confirmed by the African Union.
The Darfur conflict, which the United Nations describes as the world's worst humanitarian crisis, began in February 2003 when the Sudan Liberation Army and allied Justice and Equality Movement took up arms against what they saw as years of state neglect and discrimination against Sudanese of African origin.
The government responded with a counterinsurgency campaign in which the Janjaweed, an Arab militia, committed wide-scale abuses against the African population. An estimated 1.8 million people have been displaced in the conflict.
-------- asia
Vice President receives Lao military delegation
01/28/2005 -- 23:20(GMT+7) (VNA)
http://www.vnagency.com.vn/NewsA.asp?LANGUAGE_ID=2&CATEGORY_ID=29&NEWS_ID=137338
Ha Noi, Jan. 28 - Vice President Truong My Hoa on Jan. 28 received a visiting military delegation from Laos headed by Lieut. General Douangchai Phichith, Minister of Defence.
The Vice President stressed that the Vietnamese and Lao People's Armies were side by side during their past struggles for national independence and they have continued cooperating in protecting peace and national independence of each country.
Minister Douangchai Phichith, who is also Politburo member of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party Central Committee, said his Viet Nam visit aimed to present Lao orders and medals to 42 army units and 284 officers of the Vietnamese National Defence Ministry occasioned the 60th founding anniversary of the Viet Nam People's Army.
These awards were made in recognition of the awardees' great assistance to Laos, the Lao Minister stressed at the presentation ceremony which was attended by Vietnamese Sen. Lieut. General Nguyen Van Duoc, Deputy Defence Minister.
Earlier, Minister Douangchai Phichith was received by General Pham Van Tra, Politburo member of the Communist Party of Viet Nam Central Committee and Minister of Defence.-Enditem
-------- business
Lockheed Martin wins presidential helicopter contract
Associated Press
1/28/2005
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-01-28-presidential-helicopter_x.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) — Lockheed Martin will build the new presidential helicopter fleet, the Navy announced Friday, putting an end to a fierce competition that had both political and international overtones.
The White House had pushed for a new Marine One fleet. The president "needs a more survivable helicopter while the nation engages in the global war on terrorism," said John Young, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, in making the announcement.
The $6.1 billion contract to buy 23 high-tech, high-security aircraft, is relatively small in the military budget. But it is emblematic of two important issues: the outsourcing of American jobs and the question of how open the U.S. military market is to foreign contractors.
Maryland-based Lockheed and its European partners had waged a major public relations campaign, with the help of political leaders from England and Italy.
The decision was a blow to Connecticut-based Sikorsky Aircraft, which has built the presidential fleet since 1957, and saw the contract as a point of pride.
"The US101 will provide the president of the United States with a state-of-the-art-helicopter ... an Oval Office in the sky," said Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.
But Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. who was at the Sikorsky plant in Stratford, Conn., expressed disappointment.
'"Made in America' should mean something," she said. "The Defense Department has some explaining to do."
For the winner the contract means millions of dollars in federal research funds, and a potential edge when the Pentagon looks to replace hundreds of search and rescue helicopters in coming years.
It also gives Lockheed the bragging rights to one of the most photographed helicopters in the world: the president's green-and-white aircraft often shown as it lifts off from the South Lawn of the White House.
Lockheed's winning entry, the US101, is based on a British-Italian AgustaWestland aircraft, now owned by Finmeccanica. The helicopter has several key components, including the main transmission and rotor blades, that will be built overseas.
Sikorsky, a unit of United Technologies Corp., and its backers argued that the VH-92 Super Hawk's all-American parts provided greater security than a helicopter built in part in other countries.
But the Navy went with the longer, wider, more powerful aircraft, with its three engines, built by General Electric in Lynn, Mass. Sikorsky's Super Hawk has two engines.
Plans to replace the Marine Corps' aging presidential squadron took on greater importance after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Last year the White House pressed for an expedited bidding process because of security concerns, but Navy officials later delayed a decision, saying they needed about a year to get more information.
The companies submitted bids last February, and have waged a massive public relations campaign, complete with billboards, demonstration flights, ads and radio commercials.
Friday's loss is the second major defeat for Sikorsky is a little less than a year. Last February the Pentagon canceled the $39 billion Comanche helicopter program, which was a joint venture with Boeing Helicopters.
The company still builds one of the military's workhorse helicopters, the Black Hawk, which is being used broadly in the Iraq war. The Pentagon is expected to order hundreds more in coming years to replace current models.
-------- europe
Europeans 'ignorant' of EU treaty
Indecision is high in states where referendums are planned
(BBC) Friday, 28 January, 2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4216323.stm
Nine out of 10 European Union citizens know little or nothing about the new EU constitution, a study suggests.
But half of the 25,000 people polled by the EU said they would vote in favour of the treaty, which faces referendums in 10 of 25 member states.
The UK was the only country where more of those questioned were against the constitution than in favour.
More than a third of respondents remain undecided, with doubt highest in states planning to hold a referendum.
The EU-wide poll, conducted by Eurobarometer in October last year, found that only 11% felt they knew the content of the European Constitution "globally".
Some 56% said they knew a little, while 33% had never heard of the constitution.
'Connect with citizens'
Despite their apparent ignorance, 49% said they would vote in favour with only 16% firmly against - mainly because they feared a loss of national sovereignty, the survey indicated.
The new constitution, approved by the EU last month, faces a plebiscite in 10 countries, including the UK, Ireland, Portugal and Spain.
More than 33% of those questioned said they had yet to make up their minds on whether they supported the constitution, with hesitation particularly high in the 10 countries where a vote will be held.
Parliaments in Lithuania and Hungary have already ratified the constitution, but a single "No" vote could stop the treaty in its tracks.
A European Commission spokesman said the more people knew of the constitution, the more they were likely to approve of it.
The treaty is an attempt to streamline EU decision-making, replacing vetoes with majority voting in many areas though not in foreign affairs, defence, social security, taxation and culture.
Margot Wallstroem, European Commission vice-president, said: "The data for countries which will hold referendums shows a high level of indecision.
"It may mean that there is a clear risk of a low turnout if campaigns are not able to connect with citizens."
The poll suggests the UK government faces the toughest campaign of all, with 30% of citizens opposed to the European constitution and only 20% in favour, according to the sample.
----
Bulgaria Signs Deal for Military Copters
Associated Press
01.28.2005, 09:58 AM
http://www.forbes.com/work/feeds/ap/2005/01/28/ap1789793.html
The government on Friday signed a deal with France's Eurocopter SAS for 18 military transport helicopters as part of the country's drive to upgrade its armed forces.
Eurocopter, a unit of European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co., will deliver the first helicopter within 18 months and all 18 within three years, said Eurocopter's Senior Vice President Luc Barriere, who signed the deal with Defense Minister Nikolai Svinarov.
Svinarov and Barriere refused to disclose any financial details about the deal. Svinarov said that the contract is guaranteed by the governments of Bulgaria and France.
Bulgaria is buying six Panther helicopters for Bulgaria's navy and 12 Cougar helicopters for the air force, Barriere said.
The helicopters' purchase is part of a 1.5 billion leva (euro766.9 million; US$999 million) program aimed at upgrading Bulgaria's armed forces to bring them in line with NATO standards.
The government adopted the program shortly after the Balkan country joined the military alliance in April along with six other eastern European countries.
-------- latin america
Nicaragua seeks stash of missiles
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published January 28, 2005
http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20050127-115828-8242r
The State Department said yesterday it has asked Nicaragua to investigate whether its military is hiding stashes of SA-7 missiles capable of downing commercial airliners.
The Nicaraguan government later announced it was conducting a "thorough investigation."
The statements came the same day The Washington Times reported that Nicaraguan police seized one of the Soviet-made missiles from black marketeers during a U.S.-assisted sting operation in Managua, Nicaragua.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher yesterday confirmed to reporters that Nicaraguan authorities seized the missile.
"There are allegations or suspicions that there might be some stockpile that's held by the military or other parties," Mr. Boucher said. "We have asked the government of Nicaragua to look into that and to investigate and find out whether indeed there might be some of these that have gone missing or might be in the wrong hands."
Of the missile seizure on Jan. 11, Mr. Boucher said, "We commend Nicaraguan authorities for successfully recovering one of their Manpads [man-portable air defense systems], in this case a Russian-made SA-7, during a criminal investigation that culminated this month. Our Drug Enforcement Administration assisted them with that investigation."
Salvador Stadthagen, the Nicaraguan ambassador to Washington, told The Times yesterday that "this is an extremely serious matter and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has informed me that the president has ordered a thorough investigation."
The Times reported that the United States has intelligence that indicates elements of Nicaragua's military have hidden about 80 SA-7s for possible sale on the black market to terrorists.
The arrested men believed they were selling missiles, for several hundred thousand dollars each, to Colombian terrorists and were willing to provide them to Islamic militants, a Bush administration official told The Times.
The seizure has set off alarm bells among Bush administration officials because, to them, it confirms intelligence reports that elements of the Nicaraguan military have stashed SA-7s and that some could already be in terrorists' hands.
The seized missile did not match the serial number of any of the 1,000 SA-7s in Nicaragua inventoried by the Organization of American States. The non-match is further evidence of a secret stash, an administration official said.
The official said it is not hard to imagine what terrorists could do with SA-7s procured in Nicaragua. From there, the missiles could be smuggled through Central America into Mexico and then across the porous border into the United States.
The heat-seeking SA-7s have a maximum range of about 15,000 feet, or three miles. Terrorists could use them to down aircraft on airport approaches or takeoffs.
Pro-U.S. President Enrique Bolanos of Nicaragua's ruling Liberal Constitutional Party has pledged to the Bush administration to destroy the country's inventoried stock.
"In Nicaragua, we have worked with the government of President Bolanos," Mr. Boucher said. "He gave assurances to President Bush and former Secretary of State [Colin L.] Powell in 2003 that Nicaragua would destroy all of its man-portable air defense systems."
But some Bush officials believe Mr. Bolanos is being double-crossed by officers loyal to the opposition Sandinista National Liberation Front, which opposes destroying the weapons. The Sandinistas are re-emerging as a powerful force in Nicaragua after losing the elections in 1990. The left-wing Sandinistas have loyal officers well-placed in the army.
The Bush administration official said intelligence agencies have identified one particular officer as being linked to a secret stash of SA-7s and the Jan. 11 aborted sale.
The sting occurred at an air conditioner repair shop, with Nicaraguan police and U.S. officials present. A Nicaraguan general appeared at the scene and asked for the missile, but the police retained custody of the weapon.
The Sandinistas acquired thousands of SA-7s from the Soviet Union in the 1980s to battle the U.S.-supplied Contras.
In 2002, terrorists fired two SA-7s at an Israeli airliner taking off in Kenya. Both missiles missed.
Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda and other terror groups are actively seeking acquisition of SA-7s, especially now that new security procedures make it difficult to execute a September 11-style hijacking.
"Worldwide, the United States has been very concerned about the issue of Manpads and we've had a number of programs, whether it's with individual countries or in organizations like [the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation], where we're looking to control these missiles that can be used against aircraft," Mr. Boucher said.
-------- mideast
Iran says 10m martyrs ready to fight US
Pakistan News-International
Friday January 28, 2005
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/jan2005-daily/28-01-2005/world/w8.htm
TEHRAN: A top Iranian military chief warned on Thursday that he has 10 million volunteers ready to fight the United States to the death as Tehran denied its talks with the EU over its nuclear programme were at an impasse. "Iran is the biggest military power in the region (with) 10 million volunteers for martyrdom operations ... to turn Iran into a terrible nightmare for the United States," General Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, deputy commander of Iran’s hardline Revolutionary Guards, told the Kayhan newspaper.
His comments came against a backdrop of an escalating war of words between Iran and the United States, which has hinted at possible military action over Tehran’s nuclear programme, which it alleges, is a cover to build an atomic bomb.
"If the United States wants to attack the Islamic republic, it must know that Iran has no limits to defend itself and will be capable of delivering fatal blows against the aggressor wherever it decides," Zolghadr said. "We will not welcome war but if the United States commits an error, we will give them such a lesson that they will never recover."
In recent days US officials have hardened their tone against Iran, which US President George W. Bush has already lumped into an "axis of evil". Earlier this month, Bush said he could not rule out using force if Tehran failed to rein in its nuclear plans, and US Vice President Dick Cheney said Iran was "right at the top of the list" of global trouble spots.
While Iran insists its nuclear activities are strictly peaceful, Britain, France and Germany are engaged in diplomatic efforts to secure long-term guarantees that the clerical regime will not seek the bomb.
Iran denied that its negotiations with the three major European powers are at an impasse after reports the EU was hardening its stance and calling on Tehran completely to dismantle its nuclear fuel programme in order to guarantee that it does not seek atomic weapons.
"The publication of such reports is aimed at overshadowing the constructive nature of the negotiations and demonstrates the discontent of those who are not satisfied with their progress and are trying to prevent their success," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said, according to press reports on Thursday.
Iran has suspended uranium enrichment as a confidence-building measure but the EU now wants it to definitively abandon enrichment as well as any activities for making plutonium. According to a report on a closed-door meeting in Geneva this month, representatives of Britain, France and Germany told Iran that "nothing short of full cessation and dismantling of Iran’s fuel cycle efforts would give the EU3 the objective guarantees they need that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful."
Iran insists its nuclear activities are peaceful and that the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty guarantees a right to peaceful enrichment activities. The Geneva meeting was the second round of talks on a potentially lucrative trade pact after a deal clinched in November by the Europeans for Iran to suspend uranium enrichment, the key process that makes what can be fuel for nuclear reactors but also the explosive core of atomic bombs. The trade deal forms part of a package of incentives for Iran if the talks produce "objective guarantees" that the country is not seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
But top nuclear negotiator Hossein Moussavian said, "the question of halting Iran’s nuclear activities has never been a part of the negotiations" with the EU. "The objective that has been fixed is for Iran to deliver objective guarantees to the other side so that they can be certain the Iranian nuclear fuel cycle will always stay peaceful and never be used to make an atomic bomb," he was quoted as saying by the Shargh newspaper.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- torture
Michael Ratner: Gonzales "Has His Hand Deep in the Blood of the Conspiracy Of Torture"
Friday, January 28th, 2005 Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/28/1521255
A contentious senate debate for the confirmation of Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales is expected next week, we speak with Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Michael Ratner about Gonzales' role in laying the legal groundwork for torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. [includes rush transcript]
* Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is the author of Guantanamo: What the World Should Know and his writings appear in a new book by Seven Stories press titled America's Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees, and the "War on Terror." Last week he was awarded the Columbia Law School's Medal for Excellence, the university's highest award to its alumni.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: We talk to now the Center for Constitutional Rights president Michael Ratner about the latest news of torture and how it relates to the man who could be Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Michael.
MICHAEL RATNER: Thank you for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Why don't we start off with these hearings and what you think was raised and wasn't, what's important to understand about Alberto Gonzales?
MICHAEL RATNER: I think the clip you played of President Bush being asked: “What about cruel, inhuman degrading treatment, isn't there a loophole where you can still do that basically inhumane treatment to foreigners overseas?” and he answers, “We have a policy against torture,” really says a lot of it because what Gonzales said here is that, “Yes, I'm against torture,” -- and we can talk about that in a second – “but I don't think the prohibition of the torture convention prohibiting cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment applies to foreigners held overseas.” Well, you can drive a huge truck through that. That's basically saying if you are a non-citizen held outside the United States, you can be treated inhumanely. What does it mean? It's defined in the law. All this kind of stuff, stress positions, stripping, hooding, all that kind of stuff is considered cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, violates international law, violates treaty agreements of United States. This is not just about Gonzales and what the government has done in the past. This is about what they're doing right now and currently. So that is the first thing I want to say about Gonzales. The second thing is we're putting in someone who really has his hands deep in the blood of the conspiracy of torture in this country. He is the one who wrote the memo saying the Geneva Conventions shouldn't apply. He is the one who asked for the memo, redefining torture so narrowly that the worst abuses we've seen would not constitute torture under his definition. Here's what they've done to this guy. Not only has he basically said he agreed with those conclusions, but they put him in as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. That means that it is now a conspiracy to continue the cover-up so that this does not go to the higher ups at all, so that nobody, not Rumsfeld, not Cambone, not Gonzales will obviously ever be investigated. These are the people responsible, these are the people who lower level soldiers are really angry at because they're the ones who got led into this by these guys at the top.
AMY GOODMAN: What about these guys who have been released from Guantanamo? Four men from Britain have just returned home and in Australia as well.
MICHAEL RATNER: You know, I got called just as Mamadou Habib arrived in Australia, and I have to tell you it was incredible to me and incredibly moving. After three years in a prison where this man Habib where first he was sent to Egypt and tortured for six months in Egypt, electro-shock, the whole thing and then recent revelations by Mr. Habib about the use of women and even, whether it was real or fake, menstrual blood, rubbing it on his face as a way of making him unclean, taking away water from him so that he couldn't wash himself and that therefore he couldn't communicate with God in any sense at all. These are recent revelations that have come out. In fact, recently the last couple of days there are some revelations about one of the people who was in Guantanamo, one of the interrogators, a soldier, trying to write a book about this and revealing how women were used in this way. That’s Mr. Habib’s story. Torture in Egypt, women being used in a sexual way.
AMY GOODMAN: Women interrogators?
MICHAEL RATNER: Right. These are women interrogators who either stripped in front of the men or in this case it was menstrual blood, whether it was real or not, we don't know. But they certainly, the Muslim men may have thought it was real, and it was done specifically, specifically to make the Muslim man feel unclean so that he could not pray in the Muslim way.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Michael, there's also been reports in the past week that conditions at Guantanamo got so bad for some of the detainees that there were attempts at a protest in terms of suicide hangings. Do you have any information on that or any speculation about –
MICHAEL RATNER: There's been attempts at suicide throughout the Guantanamo period and serious ones, and the United States decided they don't like the word “suicide” so they called them self-injurious behavior or, you know, words that don't use that. This one happened about a year ago, it was 23 people who attempted to commit a mass suicide. Got stopped. Some of them had to be hospitalized. But that is about the conditions. When we talk about Alberto Gonzales, we cannot separate him from Guantanamo. Guantanamo is where the stuff began. It's where -- it is an experiment in torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and it is not just Habib in Australia. The other people who were released, the other four British people also subject to all of this kind of stuff from dogs to stripping to the whole range of stuff. The sad thing is it's still going on. It's still going on, whether it's in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But it seems that the more revelations come out about how systemic this kind of treatment was, the less attention it is getting in the U.S. corporate media compared to obviously when the Abu Ghraib scandal first broke. You are getting less and less actual coverage or even outrage about how systemic this has been.
MICHAEL RATNER: You know, I don't get it. It's not only systemic, you had Gonzales essentially admitting it, essentially saying this is the way we do it. This is what we're willing to do and these guys are going to confirm this guy. I think almost anybody who votes for him could conceivably be, if this were Germany, part of a conspiracy to commit and cover-up war crimes that are being committed at the highest level of officials. We’re having that vote next week, we have a Senate that’s 55-45 in favor of the Republicans. I don't know what the vote will be like. That eight Democrats finally voted against him -- I think had there been a screaming outcry in the beginning against Gonzales by all these -- all human rights organizations, all the Democrats, it's possible the guy could have been beaten. But I agree with you. The media has been a disaster here. I'm saying to you right now no one is complaining in any of the major media about the fact that we are saying we can inhumanly treat people right now as we speak who are non-citizens all over this globe.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of Germany, Michael Ratner, you went to Berlin. We spoke to you when you filed suit against Donald Rumsfeld, the war secretary, the Defense Secretary. He is now not going to a conference in Germany in February because the German government did not quash this suit. Can you explain?
MICHAEL RATNER: There is actually a lot going on here in Germany right now. There was an article in the Washington Post today that said that the Pentagon denies that he isn't going because of the lawsuit. What I think is really happened here is floated a – it’s not a rumor, it may be true he’s not going – but floated it as a way of putting pressure on the German government to say: “Get rid of this lawsuit.” This is serious business, we're considering not sending Rumsfeld there. But on the high -- on the level of calling them, “No, no, no, this isn't what this is about.” And I think what the conferences February 11 and 12, it is the major security conference for Europe, the Secretary of Defense has been going for 40-some years. My view is we're reaching a point in this lawsuit in Germany where something is going to give. We're filing major new papers, actually, today and Monday. One of them, of course, names Alberto Gonzales now as an additional defendant in the case. His testimony is one that really they could have put into a war crimes trial in Germany and said, “You're convicted.” Someone told me this incredible story about Germany and what happened with torture. One of the key people, Keitel, who got a death sentence in Germany was the man who scrawled on a memo to the high command about Russian soldiers that said, “Geneva Conventions? Obsolete rubbish.” Remember the word that Gonzales used to describe Geneva, “obsolete”. And when they sentenced Keitel to death, what they said was one of the reasons we're giving you the death penalty is for basically saying the Geneva Conventions are obsolete. So this is a very serious issue in Germany. We hope to have some really big news about this case in terms of our filing next week. But one of the things we've done is add Alberto Gonzales. Again, this is crunch time. I mean, if there's listeners out there who want to support this case or oppose Gonzales, go to the center website, it’s ccr-ny.org. Send a letter to the German prosecutor, send a letter to your Senator about Gonzales. It’s just critical. I mean, we should not be implicated, as Americans, in what our government is doing right now.
-------- POLITICS
-------- propaganda wars
Journalists in line of fire as Iraq's election nears
By Sharon Behn
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published January 28, 2005
http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20050127-103012-4456r
BAGHDAD -- Iraq's first free election on Sunday will be a day both of testing and of triumph for the corps of independent journalists that has rushed into the democratic space created by Saddam Hussein's fall.
More than 200 newspapers and a handful of TV and radio stations have played a critical role in the campaign, offering the only access to voters for many candidates who dare not go out in person because of the insurgency.
That campaign continued yesterday, even as the first votes were scheduled to be cast by overseas Iraqis, more than a quarter-million of whom are registered to vote over three days beginning today.
Doing their best to depress the turnout, terrorists bent on wrecking the election killed a total of 11 Iraqis and a U.S. Marine and bombed polling stations across Iraq's Sunni heartland.
It has been dangerous for the journalists too: Terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi has branded reporters as U.S. collaborators, and several have been killed in the past months. One young reporter for a local newspaper said he never travels without a gun.
"It is very dangerous, because a journalist can get killed anytime," said television anchorman Ahmed al-Hamdani, 24, who works for the Kurdish-owned Al Hurriya channel.
Top candidates heading electoral lists in Sunday's vote for a new parliament -- such as Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shi'ite; President Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer, a Sunni; Ibrahim Jaafari of the Islamic Daawa Party; and Sunni figure Adnan Pachachi -- all have taken to the airwaves to get their messages out.
Those Iraqis fortunate enough to own a television set -- about 10 percent of the public according to a 2003 survey -- have been treated to a robust airing of the issues as interviewers go after the candidates with tough questions during talk shows and debates.
Mr. al-Hamdani, a budding actor when Saddam was in power, said he loves challenging the politicians and that the Iraqi people were enjoying the coverage. "It's new, it's very good," he said, smiling.
But many have paid a dire price for that opportunity.
"In my station, they killed my friend Dina, a female journalist," Mr. al-Hamdani said. "I was in my car when I heard gunfire and when I got out of the car I saw her on the ground," he said, combing both hands back through his hair.
"Half her face was missing. I carried Dina in my arms and go into hospital, and they say Dina is dead," he said. Angry, he went to talk to people in the predominantly Sunni area of Baghdad called Aramiya to ask why they had killed his colleague.
"They say, this woman work with U.S. army. They say shut your mouth, get in your car, or we will kill you."
More could die on Sunday, as reporters are being asked not only to cover the voting for their employers but also to serve as an independent monitoring force.
Farid Ayar, the spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, said journalists have been asked to report back to the commission on any irregularities they observe at polling places around the country.
Serious doubts remain about how many Iraqis will turn out to vote in the face of an unremitting campaign of intimidation. But whatever the outcome, most Iraqi journalists are proud of the role they have played.
"The journalist makes the story. The danger is not in the problem covered, because the problem will be gone, but in the telling of it," said a 28-year-old reporter who asked that his name not be used.
On the air and in the newspaper pages, the political debates have focused on security, democracy and rebuilding the country -- but there have been few concrete proposals on how all this will be achieved.
Both at the national and regional level, candidates have been preoccupied with the role that American forces should play in their country, though there is little disagreement. Almost all say they are anxious for the Americans to leave -- but only after security is established.
Mr. Allawi was quoted as telling a gathering of religious and provincial leaders during a visit to Saddam's hometown of Tikrit on Wednesday that he did not want to extend the stay of the American troops.
"But," said Abdullah Hussein, deputy governor of Iraq's northern Sallahadin province, "with the current situation, he said he cannot ask for, or permit, the withdrawal of U.S. troops because it would affect the fate of the whole country."
Mr. Hussein -- a former officer in Saddam's military and now a candidate for provincial office -- told reporters he didn't like having foreign forces in Iraq but that the country couldn't do without them.
"I followed my duties as an officer and I fought the American troops until the last day of my service, but after the fall of the regime, the chaotic situation was so aggressive [it] necessitated the presence of the multinational force," he said.
"And when we can really run ourselves completely, I will be the first to ask the foreign troops to leave Iraq, and I have told the coalition forces that I will be the first to fight you if you do not respond to the request of a sovereign government of Iraq."
One young woman in Baghdad said she enjoyed seeing the candidates present their views and comparing the way they carried themselves. But others were less impressed.
Of the more than 100 party slates, each with anywhere from 15 to 150 names, "people only know the first one, two or four," said one older Iraqi man on the street, who asked that his name not be used.
"This is the first secret election in history, because you have to elect people you don't know," he said.
"I am a Sunni, I will not be voting, and what I hear from my neighbors, more than 80 percent will not be voting, not because they are afraid but because they don't believe in this voting -- it is a picture made by the Americans."
-------- us politics
Hersh Exposé Hits Cheney Cabal Like Political Tsunami
by Jeffrey Steinberg January 28, 2005 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2005/3204hersh_cheney.html
The Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz cabal that runs the Bush Administration's military and national security agenda, was hit with the political equivalent of a tsunami on Jan. 17, with the publication of a story by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the Jan. 24-31 issue of The New Yorker. Hersh revealed that the Administration is working on plans to launch missile and commando attacks against as many as three dozen of Iran's suspected nuclear and chemical weapons facilities, perhaps as early as Summer 2005. While the Administration's wanna-be imperialists, led by the Vice President, fantasize that such military strikes will trigger a "velvet revolution" of Gap Jeans-wearing young Iranians, who will peacefully overthrow the mullahs, in yet another Bush-induced outbreak of spontaneous Western democracy, experts warn that such an action would deepen the grip of the Islamic Revolution, and trigger regional chaos.
In his keynote address to an international symposium in Berlin, Germany on Jan. 12, Lyndon LaRouche warned that chaos is what Cheney and his neo-con minions are out to detonate in the Persian Gulf, as part of their imperial raw-materials grab. LaRouche warned that, in the insane world of Cheney and the neo-cons, the chaos gripping Iraq does not represent a policy failure, but rather, the successful opening shot of a campaign aimed at triggering a Thirty Years' War of religious and ethnic genocide throughout the oil-rich region. If Cheney and company have their way, over the course of the second Bush Administration, much of the world will be thrown into the same Dark Age; what George Shultz and Henry Kissinger call the "post-Westphalia System."
Hit Teams and 'Pseudo-Gangs'
Hersh's story also revealed, for the first time, that President Bush, beginning in the Summer of 2002, signed a series of secret Executive Orders, giving Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld carte blanche to dispatch Special Forces assassination squads around the world as part of the "global war on terror" (GWOT). These teams, Hersh reported, are already operational in at least ten countries, and their activities are conducted behind the backs of Congressional oversight committees, the American ambassadors, CIA station chiefs, and defense attachés.
The transfer of paramilitary covert operations from the CIA to the Pentagon's Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and the recently established Office of Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, according to Hersh, eliminate the requirement that the President issue a formal Intelligence Finding, and inform the appropriate Congressional bodies, before launching covert operations. In Cheney-Rumsfeld doublespeak, these covert operations are now referred to as "black reconnaissance," to further conceal the fact that these death squads are run by the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal, with no oversight, and to reinforce the idea that they are being deployed as part of normal U.S. military deployments in support of combat operations.
American diplomats are up in arms over this scandalous violation of international law, which among other things jeopardizes the safety of American embassy officials, who will be the first targets for retaliation, now that the existence of these death squads has been revealed.
With the departures from Foggy Bottom of Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, both retired military officers, there is no reason to expect that Secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice will lift a finger to defend the integrity and safety of the U.S. diplomatic corps. It was Rice's hysterical defense of every foreign and national security policy blunder of the first four years of the Administration, that led Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to vote against her confirmation, in hearings of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee on Jan. 19. Senator Boxer all but called Dr. Rice a liar, for placing the defense of the Bush Administration's indefensible pre-Iraq-war intelligence fabrications above the truth. Senator Kerry, for his part, directly cited the Hersh article and the planned military attacks on Iran in his questioning of Rice. He had just returned from a tour of Southwest Asia, which brought him to Iraq and Syria.
In his detailed New Yorker account of the Bush-Cheney forced march to new war and mayhem in Iran, Hersh mooted that the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz Pentagon would also be pursuing a favorite strategy of the British Empire: the creation of controlled terrorist cells, dubbed by the famous British counterinsurgent Gen. Frank Kitson as "pseudo-gangs."
Hersh reported that one of the architects of the new Pentagon strategy, John Arquilla, a professor of defense studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, Calif., had written a widely studied piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, which drew upon the British imperial counterinsurgency lessons from the 1950s Kenya campaign of General Kitson: "When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s," Arquilla wrote, "the British formed teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists. These 'pseudo-gangs,' as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists' camps. What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today's terror networks. Forming new pseudo-gangs should not be difficult."
Of course, Arquilla failed to acknowledge that such "pseudo-gang" operations have been a cornerstone of Israel's "Terror Against Terror" program, which has failed, over the past 35 years, to quell the Palestinian uprising, instead recruiting whole new generations of insurgents.
The Covert War Has Already Begun
The Hersh story made it clear that the covert war against the so-called "axis of evil" state of Iran has already begun. Indeed, in her Senate confirmation testimony, Condoleezza Rice flashed the latest Bush-Cheney propaganda slogan, dubbing Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe, and Myanmar the "bridgehead of tyranny." According to the New Yorker account, reconnaissance teams of U.S. Special Operations personnel have been working inside Iran since the Summer, and are targetting Iran's suspected nuclear weapons sites, chemical weapons sites, and missile sites, preparing for U.S. rocket attacks, bombing raids, and commando assaults.
The U.S. effort, according to Hersh, is being backed by both Pakistan and Israel. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, one of the leading Pentagon neo-cons, who co-authored the 1996 "A Clean Break" geopolitical strategy paper for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—the paper which first targetted Iraq, Syria, and Iran for regime change, is coordinating the anti-Iran insurgency campaign with Israeli intelligence and military planners, according to Hersh. Furthermore, Israeli commandos have been involved already in some of the on-the-ground operations, according to the New Yorker story. It is, in fact, the Ariel Sharon government's policy of "preventive assassinations" that Cheney and Rumsfeld have adopted, in grabbing control over the covert paramilitary operations formerly housed in the CIA, and dispatching their own death squads to countries such as Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, Syria, and Malaysia—five of the countries named in the Hersh story.
Feith has reportedly assembled a team of Iran-Contra veterans to join in other aspects of the anti-Iran covert program. According to EIR's sources, one of the Irangate criminals tapped by Feith is self-professed "universal fascist" Michael Ledeen. Ledeen is already under investigation for his role in peddling forged documents from the African state of Niger, which purported to show that Saddam Hussein was illegally pursuing acquisition of enriched uranium to build a nuclear bomb. Cheney and Rice exploited the fear of Saddam possessing a nuclear bomb to ram through the Iraq invasion, with scare propaganda about "nuclear mushroom clouds." Ledeen has been a longtime proponent of all-out war to oust the mullahs in Tehran, and has called for the United States to tap the Mujahideen el-Khalq, a group on the U.S. State Department's list of International Terrorist Organizations, as part of the effort. In a speech at the Willard Hotel in Washington on the eve of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Ledeen gloated that, after Iraq, the Bush Administration would next be compelled to fight the "GWOT" battle on Iranian soil.
Promoting Terrorism
The involvement of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the United States' anti-Iran covert effort, according to Hersh, comes at a very high price. The Bush Administration has reportedly agreed to drop any efforts to shut down the nuclear material black-market operations of Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan, in return for Dr. Khan's providing information on Iran's alleged illicit nuclear weapons program. As Hersh wrote, "It's the neo-conservatives' version of short-term gain at long-term cost. They want to prove that Bush is the anti-terrorism guy who can handle Iran and the nuclear threat, against the long-term goal of eliminating the black market for nuclear proliferation."
EIR's own sources in the intelligence community in India, who usually have a precise reading on the situation in Afghanistan, confirmed the essentials of Hersh's account of the U.S. deal with Pakistan, but added some further disturbing details. They charge that the Bush Administration used proof that officials of Pakistan's ISI had advance knowledge about the kidnapping and murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl, and wanted to extract Pakistani help in infiltrating Iran, through the Balochistan region of Afghanistan. In return for silence on the ISI links to Pearl's murderers, Pakistan agreed to provide assistance in the infiltration of Iran.
The recent ouster of Ismael Khan, Governor of Afghanistan's Herat Province, bordering Iran, was intended, the Indian intelligence sources say, to clear the way for American covert operations teams to infiltrate eastern Iran from bases in Afghanistan, including a clandestine air base just a few miles from the Iranian border. Another price that the United States has been willing to pay for the Afghan secret basing: Washington has given Pakistan the green light to reintegrate the Taliban into the Afghan government. According to Indian sources, 81 Taliban prisoners have been released in recent weeks, and 400 more are soon to be freed. All of the Talibani held in the U.S. facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are also reportedly being released because they "failed to provide any useful intelligence" on al-Qaeda's operations.
In other words, if the Hersh and Indian reports are accurate, the Bush Administration has struck a deal with one of the world's leading nuclear weapons black-marketeers, and with the very Taliban regime in Afghanistan which the United States ousted from power as the opening shot in the GWOT.
Behind the Hersh Revelations
The Bush-Cheney White House responded to the publication of the Hersh story with an instant series of official denials. U.S. intelligence community sources say that two aspects of the Hersh story have top White House officials—led by Dick Cheney—especially spooked. First, the story is seen as a particularly damning leak, originating from the legions of recently purged intelligence community veterans, particularly CIA veterans, who would like nothing better than to bring down the Bush-Cheney Presidency in a replay of Watergate—or worse. Second, the Hersh story was constructed in such a way that the Administration has been unable to pin down any of Hersh's key sources.
Yet, at the same time that Team Bush was engaging in frantic damage control over the Hersh revelations, Vice President Cheney was telling TV host Don Imus that the United States and Israel are, indeed, on the verge of launching unprovoked attacks on Iran. Appearing on the "Imus in the Morning" show just hours before he and President Bush were sworn in Jan. 20, Cheney delivered an open threat to Iran: Dismantle your nuclear program or we will give Ariel Sharon the nod to bomb Iran. Using his best Orwellian prose, Cheney told Imus: "Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.... We don't want a war in the Middle East, if we can avoid it."
Even the Washington Post, the next day, got it right about Cheney's invitation to Sharon to bomb Iran. Political columnist Al Kamen, reporting on Cheney's threats that Israel "might act first" to take out the alleged Iranian nuclear and chemical weapons sites, wrote: "In June 1991, during a visit to Israel after the Persian Gulf War, then-Defense Secretary Cheney gave Maj. Gen. David Ivri, then the commander of the Israeli Air Force, a satellite photograph of the Iraqi nuclear reactor, Osirak, which the Israelis had taken out in an airstrike 10 years earlier.
" 'For General David Ivri,' Cheney wrote on the photo, 'with thanks and appreciation for the outstanding job he did on the Iraqi Nuclear Program in 1981, which made our job much easier in Desert Storm'.... So was Cheney concerned? Or was this diplo-speak to the Israelis to 'do the right thing'?"
Cheney's Fascist Fit
Cheney's war talk aside, the Hersh revelations, and the Democratic Party's recently found spunk in challenging the Administration's non-existent "mandate," have made for some frayed nerves at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—despite Bush and Cheney's efforts at appearing triumphalist. Thus, for example, when Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) dared to publicly chastize Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales, for outright refusing to respond to a number of questions submitted by his Committee members, as part of the confirmation hearing process, the White House practically bit Specter's head off, demanding that he toe the White House line or face losing his chairmanship. And when the powerful GOP chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), described the Bush-Cheney scheme to loot the Social Security Trust Fund by turning it over to Wall Street "private accounts," as "a dead horse," he, too, was inundated with harassing calls from top White House officials. The New York Times reported on Jan. 19 that Cheney is actually the driving force at the White House, pushing the Social Security ripoff, a scheme long embraced by Cheney's guru, ex-Secretary of State George Shultz.
The psychological strains have been building since the beginning of the year. According to a well-placed Republican source with close ties to the Bush Administration, Cheney nearly had a meltdown on Jan. 6. Attending a White House strategy session just hours before the historic Joint Session of Congress to ratify the Electoral College vote, the Vice President was informed that Senator Boxer had joined Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio) in formally challenging the Electors in Ohio, a state that decided the outcome of the Nov. 2, 2004 election by just over 100,000 votes, amidst massive reports of voter suppression and GOP fraud, heavily implicating Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who also happened to chair the state Bush-Cheney re-election campaign.
According to the source, Cheney told White House attorneys that, when Boxer and Tubbs Jones formally challenged the Ohio vote, triggering mandatory two-hour debates and votes in the two Houses of Congress, he would rule them out of order and quash the debate. Shocked White House attorneys reminded Cheney that he could not unilaterally override the U.S. Constitution and the procedures set forth in an 1877 Act of Congress governing the formal process for an Electoral College challenge.
After a heated back-and-forth, the Vice President reportedly relented, and, hours later, did preside over the historic Joint Session, in his capacity as President of the U.S. Senate. As one eyewitness in the House Gallery reported, Cheney's anger at the proceeding was palpable. During the Senate vote on the Ohio vote irregularities, following two hours of historic debate, Cheney stood near the door of the Senate chambers, alone, quietly fuming. The New York Times the next day editorially called the debate a serious challenge to the Bush-Cheney claims of an electoral mandate.
A Raging Bull
It was a classic Cheney performance. The Vice President, who was the architect of the Bush Administration's disastrous Iraq war, its post-9/11 doctrine of "preventive nuclear war," its mammoth tax cuts for the super-rich, the Halliburton no-bid government contracts worth billions of dollars for the Veep's old firm, and the leak of the identify of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, has no use for the U.S. Constitution, particularly its General Welfare clause, when it stands in the way of his radical agenda. In a recent interview for The History Channel, Cheney spoke of his vision of an imperial Presidency, totally out of sync with American historical precedents. For Cheney, the Presidency encompasses absolute monarchy and papal infallability. He candidly boasted that, as Secretary of Defense in 1990, he had urged President George H.W. Bush not to go to the Congress to seek authority, under the War Powers Act, to invade Iraq.
The question on the minds of many Americans today, particularly many leading traditional Republicans, is: When will Cheney's antics cause the Administration and the Republican Party to crash-land?
The Jan. 12 issue of the widely read newsletter The Big Picture, published by long-time Republican Party campaign strategist Richard Whalen, took up the Cheney issue in the following terms:
"Vice President Dick Cheney is behaving more like the de facto Chief Executive each day. He is focussed and intense, taking charge inside the White House more firmly and thoroughly than ever before." The new National Security Advisor, Steve Hadley, whom Whalen describes as Condi Rice's "docile successor," now allows Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, "to run the 7 a.m. White House senior staff meeting." Cheney, Whalen wrote, has moved against two old guard allies of Bush, Sr.—Brent Scowcroft and James Baker III—by dumping Scowcroft as head of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and blackballing several Baker nominees to be Rice's State Department deputy. According to Whalen, early in January, Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz held a private sit-down with President Bush, "with Condi Rice conspicuously absent. They urgently laid out what a top-level source calls 'a breathtakingly comprehensive plan' to centralize in the Pentagon control over all Iraq-related intelligence, cutting out CIA, DIA and the military service agencies."
But Whalen also observed that Cheney is moving at such breakneck speed in order to consolidate his position before the scheduled Jan. 30 Iraqi elections, which are expected to be a fiasco. Cheney knows that a disaster in late January could "trigger a Congressional GOP revolt against Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his Iraqi policy." Whalen named Sens. John McCain (Ariz.), Richard Lugar (Ind.), and John Warner (Va.) as three prospective Republican leaders of a move to oust Rumsfeld, and perhaps Cheney. "A debacle and soaring U.S. casualties in a bloodbath" in Iraq "could spell both Rumsfeld's and perhaps Cheney's downfall."
And not a moment too soon.
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Cheney urges facing up to evil
Washington Times
From combined dispatches
Published January 28, 2005
http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20050127-103009-4274r
OSWIECIM, Poland -- Joining with 30 heads of state in commemoration of the Holocaust, Vice President Dick Cheney declared yesterday that the mass murder that went unanswered until Nazi death camps were liberated 60 years ago is a reminder that evil must be challenged in the world today.
"The story of the camps remind us that evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted," Mr. Cheney said at a forum in Krakow, where he spoke before attending an anniversary program at the former concentration camps here. "We are reminded that anti-Semitism may begin with words but rarely stops with words and the message of intolerance and hatred must be opposed before it turns into acts of horror."
While he didn't draw the comparison directly, Mr. Cheney's message melded with the theme of President Bush's Inauguration Day speech about freedom versus tyranny as well as one of his previous State of the Union addresses when he called Iraq, North Korea and Iran the "axis of evil."
Within sight of the ruins of crematoria, Mr. Cheney listened as dignitaries, heads of state, and religious leaders from all faiths spoke solemnly about the large number of deaths at Auschwitz and Birkenau, the larger of the two camps.
Candles were lit along the snow-covered rail tracks used during the war to take Jews and others in cattle trains to the camp, where many were gassed on arrival.
Elderly survivors, many accompanied by younger relatives, and some wrapped in blankets to keep warm, walked slowly past the rusting barbed-wire fences under a dark gray sky and heavily falling snow toward a monument to the victims.
Pope John Paul II in a message to participants said yesterday that the Nazi bid to exterminate the Jewish people had forever darkened the history of mankind and left a "shadow on the history of Europe."
"There must be no yielding to ideologies which justify contempt for human dignity on the basis of race, color, language or religion," he said in a message read out by the papal nuncio in Poland, Jozef Kowalczyk. "I make this appeal to everyone, and particularly to those who would resort, in the name of religion, to acts of oppression and terrorism."
British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned that the Holocaust began with small acts of hatred.
"The Holocaust did not start with a concentration camp. It started with a brick through the shop window of a Jewish business, the desecration of a synagogue, the shout of racist abuse on the street," he said.
Aging Holocaust survivors, some wearing tags displaying their prison number, huddled under blankets at the outdoor ceremony to ward off heavy, blowing snow and freezing temperatures. Mr. Cheney, wearing a heavy olive parka with a white fur-edged hood, sat between his wife, Lynne, and Israel's president, Moshe Katsav, who in his remarks, delivered in Hebrew, said, "It seems as if we can still hear the dead crying out."
The Soviet Army freed prisoners at the camps on Jan. 27, 1945 as the war neared its end. Between 1 million and 1.5 million prisoners -- most of them Jews -- perished in gas chambers or died of starvation and disease at Auschwitz. Overall, 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
Mr. Cheney reminded his listeners, many of them young people, that the cruelty of the death camps did not happen in a faraway corner of the world, but in the "very heart of the civilized world."
"The death camps were created by men with a high opinion of themselves -- some of them well-educated and possessed of refined manners -- but without conscience," he said. "And where there is no conscience, there is no tolerance toward others ... no defense against evil ... and no limit to the crimes that follow."
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Jeb, Marvin & Neil - 3 Profiteering Bush Brothers
January 28, 2005
By: Evelyn Pringle
Independent Media TV
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NucNews/pending?view=1&msg=16043
Its time to take a closer look at First Brothers, Jeb, Neil, and Marvin Bush, and see how much they stand to benefit from W's presidency and his perpetual war on the world.
First, there's brother Marvin. He's the quietest member of the Bush clan. Marvin is co-founder and partner in Winston Partners, a private investment firm. In turn, Winston Partners is part of a larger firm called the Chatterjee Group.
Here's where it gets complicated. Marvin is obviously the family member with a sound criminal mind. He has managed to bury almost all the evidence of his profiteering profits inside a host of corporations and entities, with many being located offshore. Its not easy to track the money through such a tangled web. But it can be done.
SEC filings show that the Chatterjee Group consists of Winston Partners, LP; Chatterjee Fund Management, LP; Winston Partners II LDC, a Cayman Islands-based company; Winston Partners II LLC; Chatterjee Advisors LLC; Chatterjee Management Company; Mr. Chatterjee himself; and Furxedown Trading Limited, a company organized under the laws of the Isle of Man. The address for Winston Partners II LDC is in the Netherlands Antilles. The other subsidiaries were organized in Delaware
Marvin is not the only family member plugged into the group. Brother Jeb is also an investor in the Winston Capital Fund, which happens to be managed by Marvin's firm.
Profits From Iraq
Following the tangled web of Winston this and Winston that, is difficult in itself, but tracing the links to Iraq is even more difficult. A good place to start is with a company known as Nour USA. According to the Sept 30, 2003, issue of Mother Jones, an $80 million Iraq contract was awarded to Nour, a company with ties to Winston Partners.
Nour set up shop in May 2003, right in time to cash in on the war in Iraq. When it opened for business, the firm's website described the company as an "international investment and development company" with more than 100 employees based in Iraq, and listed expertise in telecommunications, agribusiness, internet development, recruitment, construction materials, oil and power services, pharmaceuticals and fashion apparel."
Nour had ties to several companies, backed or owned, by Marvin's Winston Partners, including Hobart West, a Fortune 500 personnel-services company; LogoTel, a clothing company; and Axolotl, a computer-services company in medical care.
In January, 2004, Nour was awarded another contract, worth a whopping $327 million, to equip the Iraqi armed forces and Civil Defense Corps. However, not long after it was awarded, Nour came under heavy scrutiny because of a financial scam involving the company's president and Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the US appointed Iraqi Governing Council (the neocon's all time favorite fellow until they booted him out of the club).
Newsday reported that Chalabi received a $2 million "fee" for helping to arrange a $80 million contract, that was actually awarded to a firm called Erinys International to begin with. The problem arose, according to Newsday, because "within days" of being granted the contract, Erinys became a joint venture operation with Nour.
Next, the $327 million contract came under investigation after it was revealed that Nour had no prior experience whatsoever in providing military equipment. When confronted with that fact, Nour claimed that it planned to subcontract its weapons procurement to the Polish firm, Ostrowski Arms. However, the army soon determined that Ostrowski didn't even have a license to export weapons.
Soon thereafter in March 2004, there was a sad turn of events for the First Brothers, when the Army decided to terminate the contract after six of the 17 firms that bid on the project, complained that Nour's winning bid was ridiculously low.
It seems a review of all bids revealed that some bids were as much as $700 million apart. "That was a pretty clear indication that the industry did not have a good understanding of the procurement," said an Army official.
During a House Government Reform Committee hearing on Iraq contracts on March 11, 2004, some members of Congress tried to raise questions about private connections behind some of the contracts. However, committee Chairman Tom Davis, (R-Va), cut off the questions before the witnesses could answer.
But at least the Bush gang lost control of the profits from the next contract. The first Nour contract was awarded by Bremer and the CPA in Baghdad, but the process of re-bidding was turned over to the Army Material Command.
Iraq Not Sole Source Of Profits
But not to worry, the First Brothers profits are by no means limited to Iraq. They have irons in the fire all over the map.
For instance, Winston Partners' portfolio includes another military contractor, the Amsec Corp. In 2001, Amsec was awarded $37,722,000 in contracts from the Navy. Marvin's long-time business partner, Scott Andrews, sits on the Amsec board of directors, and the firm's CEO in the relevant time-frame was Michael Braham, who used to work for none other than Paul Bremer, the top dog with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which was then responsible for awarding contracts in Iraq.
In addition, the Chatterjee Group also owns 5.5 million shares in a security company known as Sybase. SEC filings show the shares as being divided up between, Winston Partners LP with 1,036,075 shares; Winston Partners LDC holding 1,317,825 shares; and Winston Partners LLC owning 1,221,837 shares.
And thanks to brother George W, there would be plenty of profits for this security company. Obviously armed with insider knowledge from the White House, Sybase geared up to make big money off the Patriot Act long before it was passed.
The Act was designed in part, to prevent money laundering by terrorists. As soon as news of the pending law became public, all kinds of companies began developing new products that would soon to be a requirement for financial institutions that had to comply with the Patriot Act.
However, to no one's surprise I'm sure, the most aggressive marketer out of the box, was probably Sybase, with a product called the "Sybase PATRIOT Compliance Solution." In fact, the company was so quick on the draw that it already had a deal with the People's Bank of China, and the Sumitomo Mitsui Bank, by the time the October 2002 compliance deadline rolled around.
Which proves there's much to be said for benefits derived from a direct link to information about what the US government is up to and how much it plans to spend.
In addition, according to Progressive Populist, the PATRIOT Act is not Sybase's only federal conduit. The company is also a significant government contractor, with contracts from the Agriculture Department, the Navy ($2.9 million in 2001), the Army ($1.8 million in 2001), the Department of Defense ($5.3 million in 2001), Commerce, the Treasury and the General Services Administration, among others. The federal procurement database lists Sybase's total awards for 2001 as $14,754,000.
But then, making money off wars in the Middle East is nothing new for Marvin. Back in 1993, after the first gulf war, he joined his father (3 months out of office), on a trip to Kuwait. Where, according to the March 16, 2001 Austin Chronicle, "Marvin was representing U.S. defense firms selling electronic fences to the Kuwaiti Defense Ministry."
From 1993 to 2000, Marvin was also a major shareholder in the Kuwait-American Corp, which had holdings in a wide variety of US defense, aviation and industrial security companies.
No doubt about it, W's perpetual war on terror, is very profitable for the Bush Boys.
Almost Forgot Romeo
How could I ever forget little brother Neil? Until recently, he was best-known for his role in the collapse of the Silverado Savings and Loan which left a bill of $1.3 billion for tax payers to repay, as the culprit, Neil, walked away without ever seeing the inside of a police station, much less a jail cell.
I say until recently because last year, his testimony in a divorce deposition revealed a $2 million consultant contract between Neil and a Chinese computer chip company, which apparently came with perks consisting of women showing up at his motel room door wanting to have sex.
I've since nicknamed him Romeo.
But all kidding aside, the guy has really come along way since the Silverado days, thanks to his brother in the White House. According to the Nov 28, 2003, Financial Times, "Neil Bush, a younger brother of US President ... has had a $60,000-a-year employment contract with a top adviser to a Washington-based consulting firm set up this year to help companies secure contracts in Iraq," it reported.
Neil disclosed the contract during the deposition. He said he was co-chairman of Crest Investment Corporation and received $15,000 every three months for working an average three or four hours a week.
The Times went on to report, "The other co-chairman and principal of Crest is Jamal Daniel, who is an advisory board member of New Bridge Strategies, a company set up this year by a group of businessmen with close links to the Bush family or administrations. Its chairman is Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush's campaign director in the 2000 presidential elections."
On December 11, 2003, the Times reported that "two businessmen instrumental in setting up New Bridge Strategies, a ... firm designed to help clients win contracts in Iraq, have previously used an association with Neil, the younger brother of President Bush, to seek business in the Middle East," an FT investigation has found.
Daniel's investment fund, Crest, also helped fund Neil's educational software company, Ignite!, which was no doubt set up as a conduit to funnel tax dollars through public schools via W's No Child Left Behind Act. In fact, according to the Times, Daniel sometimes introduces himself as a founding backer of Bush's company, and has persuaded the families of prominent leaders in Middle East to invest, it notes.
Daniel, Neil and Howland have also been directors of Silvermat, a Swiss company controlled by Crest, that supplies the hospitality industry and has had financial and industrial relations problems.
When asked the specifics of his position with Crest, Neil testified that he was responsible for "answering phone calls when Jamal Daniel, the other co-chairman, when he called and asked for advice."
However, Neil's is not merely a receptionist at Crest. He can obviously type as well, because three people contacted by the Financial Times have seen letters written by Neil that recommend business ventures promoted by New Bridges in the Middle East. So here again, we have Brother Neil being paid to "help companies secure contracts in Iraq," the Financial Times reports.
Neil & Marvin Hit The Jackpot In China
On still another front, many people were alarmed when W came down in favor of the People's Republic of China, against a democratic referendum in Taiwan. But his support of China became suspect after it was discovered that well-connected Chinese firms were funneling huge amounts of money to his brothers, Neil and Marvin, according to Margie Burn in the Dec 16, 2003 Online Journal.
Soon after Neil's deposition, the media began reporting that the computer chip company, Grace Semiconductor had entered into a $2 million contract with Neil.
The world business press reported that by hiring Neil, Grace hoped to influence US limits on exporting technology to China and repeal restrictions designed to keep gear from being used by the Chinese military.
And who knows, Neil may have come through, because on Oct 29, 2004, Electronic Engineering Times, reported that Grace was in the final stages of negotiating a technology transfer for a manufacturing process from a US manufacturer, which if "brought about ... would signal the further erosion of a post-Cold War-era pact - known as the Wassenaar Arrangement - set up to limit the dissemination of technology that could have potential military use."
The Wassenaar Arrangement is a real headache for Grace because in order to make advanced semiconductors, it has to rely on imports that require prior approval.
So exactly who is this US manufacturer, and what, if any, connections does it have to Neil Bush? According to EET, Grace refuses to disclose the name of the company, which leads me to wonder why the secrecy, and as usual where is the US media?
Of course EET had to remind the world of the connection between Neil and his foreign buddies, and that he was paid $2 mill. "In the U.S., it has reportedly agreed to pay $2 million for consulting services from semiconductor neophyte Neil Bush, the younger brother of President George W. Bush. In China, one of Grace's founders is Jiang Mianheng, the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, and in Taiwan, its other founder is Winston Wang, scion of a powerful petrochemical magnate.
This deal would have never been disclosed if not for Neil's divorce. But while everybody was paying attention to Neil, an even bigger Chinese company was making deals that would benefit that quiet little mouse Marvin, and almost nobody noticed.
Cheung Kong Holdings, is a gigantic real estate and investment company in Hong Kong. How big is it? Well, according to the company's own estimates, "combined market capitalization of the Cheung Kong Group amounts to HK$515 billion," or better yet picture this, "approximately 11.5 percent of the total market capitalization of the Hong Kong stock market." That is big with a capital B.
Cheung Kong's expanded its portfolio, which now includes a company known as Critical Path, Inc, a software and Internet-messaging service firm. And guess who the company's SEC filings list as a major shareholder in Critical Path? Mr Purnendu Chatterjee, acting for Winston Partners LP, owned by none other than Marvin Bush and Scott Andrews.
SEC filings show the Chatterjee's group, including Winston Partners, owns approximately 5.5 million shares in the company. Which means, Cheung Kong's investment had to boost profits for Winston Partners.
Thanks to the US Media, and to the fact that none of the Bush brothers are named Roger Clinton, few Americans seem to know about these deals. But the international business community sure does. Cheung Kong and Grace are both major players in China's entangled economy made up of public and private partnerships.
For W to allow his brothers to profit from deals with these firms is bad enough. But to follow up with a major shift of support to China, and discourage a democratic referendum in Taiwan, is worse. The whole world cannot help but view this turn of events as one big Bush payoff.
Whenever I write about the profiteering First Family, I like to remind readers of what Bush told reporters when the Clinton pardon scandal hit the headlines with charges that brother-in-law Hugh Rodham had accepted $400,000 to lobby for clemency for two felons. When reporters asked George W what advice he would give to his own family members, he said: "My guidance to them is, 'Behave yourself.' And they will."
Yea right.
(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for Independent Media TV and an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government)
By Evelyn Pringle e.pringle@sbcglobal.net
Original Link: http://www.independent-media.tv
-------- OTHER
-------- imf / world bank / wto (economics)
Libya plans to shed old and begin a new era
By Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune
Friday, January 28, 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/01/27/news/libya.html
Qaddafi son sets out economic reforms
DAVOS, Switzerland Libya on Friday will unveil its most sweeping proposals for economic reform in 35 years as part of a new national strategy aimed at ushering the country into the modern economic era, Libyan officials said Thursday.
The multi-pronged initiative would streamline government, speed up privatization and liberalize the media sector in a bid to begin a transition from what remains essentially an authoritarian regime to a more liberal economy that is competitive in the region, Seif el-Islam el-Qaddafi, son of the country's ruler, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, and Abdulhafid Mahmoud Zlitni, the chairman of Libya's National Planning Council, said Thursday on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.
A number of Western advisers, including Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School and Daniel Yergin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning economist, have agreed to work with Libya in the transition to craft an efficient framework for implementing the changes over the next two years.
"The old times are finished and Libya is ready to move onto the new stage of modernization," Seif el-Islam el-Qaddafi said in an interview. "This will be conducted in a well organized manner that ensures new openness and ownership by the people of Libya, not a small class of oligarchs like Russia or Egypt."
"We are determined," he added. "But of course success can only be measured by the implementation."
But pushing through the proposals may prove a considerable challenge, according to Dirk Vandewalle, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College who specializes in North African politics and economics.
"Seif actually falls outside the formal system of government, so it makes you wonder how bureaucrats and businesspeople will react," Vandewalle said. "On the other hand, he does have considerable influence due to his father and this does show there is a genuine push for reform in Libya."
Although previous attempts to loosen economic restraints failed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Vandewalle said new external and internal pressures make the current climate much more favorable for cultivating such changes.
"The external pressures on Libya remain high and there is a strong internal feeling that change must happen," Vandewalle said. "They realize international investment will be needed for development."
The need to impress international investors prompted Qaddafi to invite nearly a dozen foreign experts to Libya last year to help study how changes could be woven through government and the economy. The gathering included Porter, Yergin, Mark Fuller, the chief executive officer of the consulting company the Monitor Group, and Lord Meghnad Desai, director of the London-based Center of Global Governance.
"These people are world experts," Qaddafi said. "There may be some reaction against them inside Libya, but they are the best."
One of the first projects involves a study of up to two years, beginning in March, by the Britain-based Adam Smith Institute on how to proceed with government reforms.
"They will study the structure of the civil service and find ways to streamline bureaucracy and reduce the number of employees," said Abdulhafid Mahmoud Zlitni, chairman of Libya's National Planning Council. "We need to make the government more modern and efficient."
The advisers will also study a series of Libyan proposals to modernize the economy, before issuing recommendations on how to proceed with implementation.
"Competitive sectors and clusters will become our concentration," Qaddafi said. "This is a big change from the 80s and 70s when we tried to make everything at home.
Specifically, Libya will focus on tourism, oil and gas while shutting down manufacturing sectors in which it finds itself uncompetitive.
"We now have a factory producing cars, which is crazy and will change," Qaddafi said. "We will not try to produce missiles or airplanes or anything that the Japanese can make better."
That transition will require a privatization program to both attract foreign investment and divest the state's hold on the economy, Qaddafi said.
"It is important to restructure in a way that does not repeat the mistake of concentrating wealth in the hands of a few," Qaddafi said. "The first target in this privatization will be the citizens of Libya and increasing their private ownership."
The plans also call for relying on advice and assistance from international financial institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Libya hopes to place resident advisers from those institutions in the central bank, commercial banks and ministry of finance.
A spokesman from the International Monetary Fund said that while the fund continues to work with the Libyan government, he was not aware of any plan to expand work or open an office in Libya.
But the most pressing reforms will happen in media, Qaddafi said. He vowed to end the state's control both in terms of ownership and censorship.
-------- ENERGY
-------- energy
OPEC Likely to Keep Production Unchanged
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 28, 2005
Filed at 3:19 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-EU-OPEC.html?pagewanted=print&position=
DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) -- OPEC will likely keep oil output unchanged, despite concerns about oversupply and prices hovering around the $50 a barrel mark, petroleum ministers and analysts said ahead of a key meeting this weekend.
Delegates arriving for the gathering in Vienna, Austria, said they were concerned about increased inventories, but pointed to the second quarter as the time for new cutbacks.
``That's certainly the consensus view,'' Adam Sieminski, an oil price strategist with Deutsche Bank in London, said Friday. ``There is some possibility they might want a small token cut in April.''
Most ministers have held fast to near identical statements that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries plans no change in output. But that follows similar statements made in the last five meetings, after which changes in output have always followed.
``There's still plenty of spreadsheets that say there's too much supply in the market. The data that is available does show inventories building, so why not?'' Sieminski said. ``It doesn't cost them much to do anything and it might just keep the markets off balance.''
Sheikh Ahmad Fahd al-Ahmad al-Sabah, OPEC's president and Kuwait's oil minister, said members would wait until the March meeting to decide on further cuts because prices are already too high.
Arriving in Vienna, he said the prices did not appear to be damaging growth in demand or the global economy.
His remarks echoed comments made by OPEC members Algeria and Libya earlier this week.
``If we go with the experience of 2004, then the price didn't hurt,'' al-Sabah said. ``Growth in demand will continue, but not as strong like 2004.''
A new price band would likely be discussed this weekend, he said, but any decision won't come until the cartel meets in March in Iran.
At its last meeting in December in Cairo, OPEC agreed to cut production by 1 million barrels a day this month to push output down to its self-imposed target of 27 million barrels a day. Cartel members are currently overproducing, with output estimated at about 29.6 million barrels a day.
Delegates said demand by China, which is expanding economically and needs oil to drive its development, is likely to keep supplies tight, as is demand from India.
There also is concern, analysts said, about tense relations between the United States and Iran over its desire to enrich uranium and what effects that could have on oil prices.
The United States and several other countries fear Iran is seeking to enrich uranium not to the low level needed to generate power, but to the weapons grade that forms the core of nuclear warheads.
Iran publicly insists it seeks only to make low-grade enriched uranium for nuclear fuel.
In an investment note, Barclays Capital said it believed OPEC would hold off any change in quota until its March meeting in Iran.
``Some of the key sets of balances that provide help in guiding output decisions appear to us to be underestimating the call on OPEC crude,'' it said.
Light, sweet crude for March delivery dropped 74 cents to $48.10 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. February heating oil fell 2.44 cents to $1.3725 a gallon (3.8 liters).
``Certainly, the market seems like it's holding its breath, waiting for the OPEC meeting,'' said Victor Shum, oil analyst at Purvin & Gertz, an energy consulting agency.
But some ministers said the gain in commercial petroleum inventories during the winter could lead to a cutback in the spring. Libyan Oil Minister Fathi bin Shatwan said his colleagues have said there doesn't appear to be a need for cutbacks on Sunday.
``Most of us have the same view that nothing needs to be done now,'' he said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Reid aid arrested during inauguration protest
KRNV TV
RENO, Nev., January 28
http://www.krnv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2870624&nav=8faOVikI
An aide to Nevada Senator Harry Reid was arrested during the presidential inauguration.
That' according to a report in the Reno Gazette-Journal.
Reid aide Nathan Ackerman was arrested for disorderly conduct at the ceremony. Capitol police say he refused to hand over a protest sign to officers during the swearing-in of president bush.
A Reid spokesman tells the Gazette-Journal the senator didn't know about the incident at the time and he does not condone it.