NucNews - March 2, 2005
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- china
China fuels energy cold war
By Chietigj Bajpaee
Mar 2, 2005 Asia Times
http://atimes.com/atimes/China/GC02Ad07.html
HONG KONG - A notable feature of 2004 was the volatility in oil prices - New York light sweet crude prices reached a peak of US$55.67 on October 25, ending the year up 33.6% at $43.45 per barrel. While a number of supply-side and supply-chain factors have contributed to this situation, the most significant long-term factor contributing to rising oil prices is an increase in Asian demand, most notably from China. China's unprecedented growth not only makes it a driver of a long-term increase in energy prices, but also the most vulnerable to rising oil prices.
China, which has been a net oil importer since 1993, is the world's number two oil consumer after the US and has accounted for 40% of the world's crude oil demand growth since 2000. China's proven oil reserves stand at 18 trillion barrels, and oil imports account for one-third of its crude oil consumption.
China has initiated numerous policies to cope with its increasing energy needs, including stepping up exploration activities within its own borders, diversifying beyond oil to access other energy resources, such as nuclear power, coal, natural gas and renewable energy resources, promoting energy conservation and encouraging investment into energy-friendly technologies such as hydrogen-powered fuel cells and coal gasification.
China has also joined the United States and Japan in developing strategic petroleum reserves, with the creation of 75 days of emergency reserves in four locations in Zhejiang, Shandong and Liaoning provinces.
Nevertheless, in the face of sporadic power shortages, growing car ownership and air travel across China and the importance of energy to strategically important and growing industries such as agriculture, construction, and steel and cement manufacturing, pressure is going to mount on China to access energy resources on the world stage.
As a result, energy security has become an area of vital importance to China's stability and security. China is stepping up efforts to secure sea lanes and transport routes that are vital for oil shipments, and diversifying beyond the volatile Middle East to find energy resources in other regions, such as Africa, the Caspian, Russia, the Americas and the East and South China Sea region.
However, just as China has for centuries engaged in competition for leadership of Asia, the developing world and status on the world stage, so the need for energy security has now raised the possibility of further competition and confrontation in the energy sphere.
This competition has so far been limited to the economic sphere through state-owned oil and gas companies such as China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), its subsidiary PetroChina and China National Offshore Oil Corporation. However, as oil prices rise and China imports an increasing amount of its energy needs, the competition is likely to spill over into the political and military spheres. There are already indications of this.
China's quest for energy resources on the world stage is creating a destabilizing effect on international and regional security. Fueled by the lack of a coherent multilateral approach to energy security in Asia and by China's already tense relations with neighboring states, the competition for energy resources may prove to be the spark for regional and international conflict. In many cases, China is vying for energy resources in some of the most unstable parts of the world. Its involvement in regions with raging conflicts could potentially draw it into the disputes, escalating a regional conflict into an international conflict.
Sino-Japanese energy competition
While Sino-Japanese trade has reached unprecedented levels in recent years, the economic progress could be unraveled by political and military confrontation, and by energy competition. China continues to have tense relations with Japan as a result of a number of issues. These issues include, but are not limited to, Chinese opposition to a Japanese permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, former Taiwanese president Lee Teng Hui's visit to Japan at the end of 2004, and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine that honors Japan's war dead, including 14 Class A war criminals.
There has also been discussion in Japan about cutting its overseas development assistance to China in the presence of China's improving standard of living, high growth levels and confrontational relations with Japan. These tensions are likely to be further enflamed by both states' quest for energy security. Both states are net oil importers, with Japan importing as much as 80% of its oil needs.
In an attempt to access energy resources closer to home and diversifying beyond the Middle East, Japan and China have been actively lobbying Moscow for an oil pipeline. Beijing is pushing for a 2,400 kilometer route from Angarsk in Siberia to Daqing in China's northeast Heilongjiang province, while Tokyo favors a 4,000 kilometer pipeline from Taishet to the Pacific port of Nakhodka.
The Japanese-backed proposal was announced the winner at the end of 2004. However, with the sometimes tense relations between Japan and Russia, as seen most recently over Koizumi's sail around the disputed Northern Territories/ Southern Kurils on September 2, and Japan and Russia not having signed a formal peace treaty ending the hostilities of World War II, the construction of the pipeline may still experience several delays. Furthermore, China is not yet out of the picture as there are still discussions to build a branch from the Japanese pipeline to China by 2020.
Closer to home, a territorial dispute between China and Japan in the East China Sea, which both sides claim as their exclusive economic zone (EEZ), is being further fueled by reports of vast supplies of oil and gas in the region. The disputed territory includes the Diaoyu or Senkaku islands and the Chunxiao gas field northeast of Taiwan, which, according to a 1999 Japanese survey, holds 200 billion cubic meters of gas. Japan regards the median line as its border, while China claims jurisdiction over the entire continental shelf. In 2003, China began drilling in the area after the Japanese rejected a Chinese proposal to develop the field jointly. Although the Chunxiao gas field is on the Chinese side of the median line, Japan claims that China may be siphoning energy resources on the Japanese side.
The competition recently took the form of a military confrontation following the incursion of a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine into Japanese waters off the Okinawa islands on November 10 last year. The intrusion was followed by a two-day chase across the East China Sea. While China offered a swift apology for the incursion, this was soon followed by the intrusion of a Chinese research vessel into Japanese waters near the island of Okinotori. The vessel is believed to have been surveying the seabed for oil and gas drilling purposes. This was the 34th maritime research exercise by Chinese vessels within Japan's EEZ in 2004, up from eight in 2003, with China not giving prior notification in 21 of the 34 cases.
Adding to these tensions is Japan's shift from its post-war pacifist and defensive posture toward a more active military role in the region, as seen with the current deployment of its Self Defense Forces to Iraq. Furthermore, Japan has for the first time identified China as a potential security threat in its National Defense Program Outline released in December 2004. Three issues have been identified that could spark a conflict between China and Japan: natural resources in the disputed East China Sea, the disputed status of the Senkaku or Diaoyu islands and Japanese support for the US in a conflict with China over Taiwan. Mistrust and animosities rooted in Japanese atrocities during World War II combined with a confrontation over tangible issues, such as territory and energy resources, and a more active role by both states on the world stage create a recipe for a volatile situation.
Securing sea lanes
To China's south, another long-standing maritime territorial dispute in the South China Sea over the Spratly and Paracel islands threatens to be further enflamed by China's quest for energy security. The 130 islands making up the Paracel islands, which have been occupied by China since 1974, are also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan. The 400 islands of the Spratly islands are claimed partially by the Philippines, Brunei and Indonesia, and are fully claimed by Vietnam, Taiwan and China.
Relations between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have improved with China signing up to ASEAN's Treaty of Amity of Friendship and Cooperation in 2003 and all sides signing the Declaration of the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea in 2002. Nevertheless, tensions remain. In violation of the 2002 agreement, five states have permanent military garrisons on the atolls in addition to surveillance facilities under the guise of "bird watching" towers, weather huts and tourist facilities. The fact that Taiwan is not a signatory to any of these agreements is also a cause for concern.
A particular source of tension derives from the sometimes volatile relations between China and Vietnam. Most recently, China has commenced joint pre-exploration studies with the Philippines in the South China Sea, which has been openly opposed by Vietnam. China, meanwhile, has protested to PetroVietnam welcoming international bids for drilling and exploration activities in the disputed waters and Vietnam starting commercial flights and tours of the disputed territory.
Both states have engaged in sporadic clashes on at least four occasions, the most violent of which took place in 1988 in which the Chinese sank three Vietnamese naval vessels, killing 76 sailors. Sino-Vietnamese tensions have recently taken a back seat to the burgeoning trade relationship between both states, with China now becoming Vietnam's third-largest trading partner. A hotline was also established between both states in August 2004 as part of a commitment to resolve land and sea border disputes by peaceful means. However, as China expands its naval power projection capabilities and becomes increasingly desperate to access potential energy resources in the region, conflict may once again overtake cooperation.
These regional territorial disputes also have the potential to escalate into international conflicts, given the importance of the waterways to international trade and the number of bilateral security commitments between regional states and major world powers, such as between the US and the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, and between numerous Western powers and their former colonies (eg the British to Malaysia and Singapore, the French to Vietnam). For example, following the Chinese occupation in February 1995 of the Mischief Reef, which is 135 miles west of the Philippine islands of Palawan, the US conducted naval exercises with the Philippines close to the disputed territory. The joint exercises may be regarded as a warning to China's increasingly aggressive posturing in the region.
Also in Southeast Asia, China is pushing to secure the narrow Malacca Strait, which experiences 40% of the world's piracy. As much as 80% of China's oil imports flow through the 630 mile-long strait, which is just 1.5 miles wide at its narrowest point. Like Japan and the US, China is pushing to acquire a national fleet of very large crude carriers, or VLCCs, that could be employed in the case of supply disruptions brought on by an accident or terrorist attack along the Malacca Strait or a US-led blockade during a conflict over Taiwan. Currently, only 10% of China's crude oil imports come aboard Chinese vessels. China's growing anxiety over the security of its oil imports was demonstrated in June 2004, when China conducted its first anti-terror exercise simulating an attack on an oil tanker.
China is also looking into bypassing the straits with discussions for a pipeline to Myanmar, as well as possibly Bangladesh, Pakistan or Thailand. Pakistan looks like an unlikely candidate given the threat of terrorist attacks on pipelines traversing its territory. A pipeline through Bangladesh would have to cross the territory of strategic competitor India. Increasing sectarian violence in southern Thailand coupled with the country's close relationship with the US make a pipeline through Thailand unlikely as well. This leaves Myanmar as the most likely option, with a 1,250 kilometer pipeline from the deepwater port of Sittwe on the Bay of Bengal to Kunming in Yunnan province. Coupled with India's desire to access energy resources within Myanmar and Myanmar's proximity to India's troubled northeast insurgencies, Myanmar has become a potential stage for Sino-Indian energy competition.
Central Asia: The new great game
On its western borders, China has been an active player in the new great game. As part of its "Go West" development policy, China's longest pipeline, the 4,200 kilometer Tarim Basin to Shanghai gas pipeline, came online in August 2004. China's west-to-east pipeline could potentially be extended to Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and even further to Iran and the Caspian Sea. In October 2004, construction began on a 988 kilometer pipeline from Atasu in northwestern Kazakhstan to Alataw Pass in China's Xinjiang province, which will carry 10 million tons of oil a year once it is completed in 2005. The Chinese are also helping to develop oil fields in Uzbekistan and hydroelectric power projects in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
China's growing engagement with Central Asia has been motivated by a number of strategic interests. China led the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which began as the Shanghai Five in 1996. This body was formed in the presence of a civil war in Tajikistan, Taliban rule in Afghanistan, a series of terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, and Islamist revivalism in Uzbekistan under the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan/Turkestan (IMU/IMT) and more recently by Hizb-ut Tahrir.
SCO has moved from resolving border disputes to fighting the "three evils" of extremism, terrorism and fundamentalism and promoting greater economic integration and development in Central Asia and China's west. The Central Asian states have agreed to China's "Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence", as well as subscribing to China's viewpoint on numerous regional and international issues, including Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and the need for a multipolar world. Under the aegis of the SCO, China has also expanded its military presence in Central Asia, establishing an anti-terror center in Tashkent and engaging in its first joint military exercises with a foreign army in Kyrgyzstan in 2002.
However, China's increasing presence in Central Asia has been accompanied by a Russian reengagement with the region, an increasing US presence following September 11 as well as an increasing role by India (using its historical links), Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (using their religious links), Turkey and Iran (using their cultural links) and South Korea and Japan (that are relying on economic links to the region).
Numerous overlapping power blocs are emerging in the region, which spill over into the energy arena. For example, improving Sino-Indian relations have manifested in the energy sphere, with the chairman of Xinjiang autonomous region, Ismail Tiliwandi, making a trip to India in October 2004 to discuss transport links and a Sino-Indian natural gas pipeline project. With a growing military presence in the region and increasing desperation to access the region's energy resources, it is conceivable that Central Asia could re-emerge as the stage for future great power conflicts.
China expands in the Middle East
China has also attempted to improve relations with its already-established oil suppliers, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, by selling them military technology, investing in their industries and energy infrastructure and looking the other way with respect to their human-rights records.
Currently, China derives 13.6% of its oil imports from Iran. In March 2004, China signed a $100 million deal with Iran to import 10 million tons of liquefied natural gas over a 25-year period in exchange for Chinese investment in Iran's oil and gas exploration, petrochemical and pipeline infrastructure.
Growing Sino-Iranian relations are undermining US sanctions against Iran. The Bush administration has sanctioned Chinese companies 62 times for violating US or international controls on the transfer of weapons technology to Iran and other states.
The US Central Intelligence Agency has submitted a report to US Congress stating that Chinese companies have "helped Iran move toward its goal of becoming self-sufficient in the production of ballistic missiles". In the ongoing controversy over Iran's uranium enrichment program, China has also opposed bringing the issue before the UN Security Council, and has even threatened to veto any resolution that is brought against Iran.
As Saudi-US relations have soured in the post-September 11 world, the Saudi-US strategic partnership may be supplanted by a Sino-Saudi partnership. Saudi oil shipments to the US declined in 2004, while they increased to China. Sinopec has won the right to explore for natural gas in Saudi Arabia's al-Khali Basin and Saudi Arabia has agreed to build a refinery for natural gas in Fujian in exchange for Chinese investment in Saudi Arabia's bauxite and phosphate industry. Cooperation in the economic and energy spheres complements an already burgeoning relationship in the military sphere, as seen with China selling Saudi Arabia Silkworm missiles during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, and both states having strong relations with Pakistan.
Russia: Revival of the strategic triangle
Russia is China's fifth-largest crude oil supplier, with LuKoil now replacing Yukos as China's main supplier of Russian oil. China is expected to import at least 10 million tons of oil from Russia in 2005 and 15 million in 2006, while Russian rail shipment capacity is expected to increase from 20 million tons in 2004 to 60 million tons by 2006.
The controversy over the sale of Yugansk, which produces 60% of Yukos' oil output and pumps 11% of Russia's oil, has also highlighted the increasing presence of Chinese energy companies in Russia. While the mysterious buyer, Baikal Finance Group, ended up selling its stake in Yugansk to Rosneft in December, which may be acquired by Russian state-owned Gazprom, this does not preclude the possibility of Yukos' assets being acquired by China. China's CNPC has allegedly been offered a 20% percent stake in Yukos and provided a $6 billion loan to Rosneft to purchase Yugansk.
China's support for Russia's accession into the World Trade Organization and growing Sino-Russian trade and cooperation in the fight against terrorism is further cementing Sino-Russian relations. Sino-Russian energy relations appear to be mirroring political and military relations. Just as China increasingly relies on Russian energy resources, so it also constitutes Russia's biggest buyer of Russian military hardware. Russia and China are also to engage in their largest joint military exercises later this year.
In fact, growing Sino-Russian energy cooperation resurrects former Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov's idea for a strategic triangle between Russia, India and China. These states are bound together by their shared interests in the fight against terrorism, the push for a multipolar world and respect for the principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention with regards to their respective "separatist" movements in Chechnya, Kashmir and Taiwan.
Now the energy sector can be added to this list of shared interests. India and China are already collaborating in the energy sphere, with India holding a 20% stake and China a 50% stake in the development of the Yahavaran oil field in Iran. China Gas Holdings has also established an alliance with India's largest energy conglomerate, Gail. With India and China vying for assets in Yukos, Sino-Indian-Russian collaboration in the energy sphere could be further cemented.
Stepping on US toes in Africa and the Americas
As China has made limited progress in accessing energy resources on its doorsteps due to poor relations with neighboring states, it has shown growing interest in accessing energy resources further afield.
For example, a consortium 40% owned by China's CNPC pumps over 300,000 barrels per day in Sudan. China is also a major supplier of arms to the Sudanese government, which has just concluded a peace agreement with the main rebel group in the south, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), ending 20 years of conflict sparked over the allocation of oil revenues. The Sudanese government is still engaged in a conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan using proxy militias. China is also vying for energy resources in Angola and other energy-rich African states by offering arms and aid for oil.
China is also acquiring energy resources in the Americas. While attending the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Chile in November 2004, Chinese President Hu Jintao announced an energy deal with Brazil worth $10 billion, supplementing a $1.3 billion deal between Sinopec and Petrobras for a 2000 kilometer natural gas pipeline.
China is also acquiring oil assets in Ecuador, as well as investing in offshore petroleum projects in Argentina. During Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's visit to Beijing last December and Chinese Vice President Zeng Qinghong's visit to Venezuela in January, China also committed to develop Venezuela's energy infrastructure by investing $350 million in 15 oil fields and $60 million in a gas project in Venezuela.
On January 20, during Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin's visit to Beijing, China and Canada also signed a joint statement on energy cooperation which included accessing Canada's oil sands and uranium resources. China's growing energy interests in the Americas have been accompanied by a growing involvement in the region's security.
In October, China sent a UN peacekeeping contingent to Haiti in its first military deployment to Latin America. Ironically, Haiti is one of only 25 states that recognize Taiwan rather than China. The US is looking on with caution as China encroaches on a region that has traditionally been under its sphere of influence and a major supplier of energy resources. Venezuela and Canada together provide the US with a quarter of its energy imports.
Conclusion
Friction between China and the West has so far focused on the question of China's undervalued exchange rate, its human-rights record and relations with "rogue" states. However, competition over energy resources is now becoming an additional area of contention.
China's growing presence on the international energy stage could ultimately bring it into confrontation with the world's largest energy consumer, the US. While China and the US have launched the US-China Energy Policy Dialogue, both states are also engaged in a competition for energy resources in Russia, the Caspian, the Middle East, the Americas and Africa. This competition could potentially combine with other areas of friction. For example, in the event of China engaging in a conflict with Taiwan, Japan or India or internal repression such as a repeat of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, the US could censure China's actions by an oil embargo or by blocking vital sea lanes in the Malacca Strait, thus sparking a wider conflict.
It is not by coincidence that China has made progress in resolving its border disputes with India and Russia, while failing to make progress on territorial disputes with Japan in the East China Sea and in the South China Sea, given that the latter involve access to potential oil and gas resources. In this context, China's claim to pursuing a "peaceful ascendancy" policy and putting aside areas of disagreement in favor of creating a stable environment for economic development is limited to areas where China's vital strategic interests are not threatened.
Chietigj Bajpaee is a researcher for Civic Exchange, a Hong Kong-based political think-tank. He has been a researcher for the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies and a Risk Analyst for a New York-based risk management company. He has a graduate degree in international relations from the London School of Economics and an undergraduate degree in economics and government from Wesleyan and Oxford Universities.
Published with permission of the Power and Interest News Report, an analysis-based publication that seeks to provide insight into various conflicts, regions and points of interest around the globe. All comments should be directed to content@pinr.com
-------- depleted uranium
Oklahoma DU plant used to make armor piercing bullets
From: hippiechick51_2005
via: "Bob Nichols"
Date: 03/02/05 10:05:17
Sequaha Fuels plant at Gore, Oklahoma was closed in 1993-94 and moved to Kentucky. They made fuel for nuclear reactors and the DU bullets. They had an explosion of one of the cylinders in January 1986 that released " in excess of 29,000 pounds" of uraniu[m]hexafloride. they have not cleaned up any of the mess they left behind from the production of the fuel or the DU bullets. I just want to make this hazard known to the rest of the country and maybe someone will pressure the government to do something other than let the wind blow the contamination even fu[r]ther than it already has
-------- europe
Khan Network Can Regroup, Warns Report
by Anwar IqbaL
UPI South Asian Affairs Analyst
Washington (UPI) Mar 02, 2005
http://www.spacewar.com/news/nuclear-blackmarket-05k.html
The network that supplied nuclear technology to rogue states can regroup and resume its activities, warns a report by a Washington-based anti-proliferation organization.
The report by the Institute for Science and International Security explores the truly international character of this network and warns, "There is little confidence that other networks do not or will not exist or that elements of the Khan network will not reconstitute themselves in the future."
The joint study by the institute's president, David Albright, and its deputy director, Corey Hinderstein, describes the Khan network as "first and foremost, an elaborate and highly successful illicit procurement network."
The network was headed by Pakistan's chief nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan who in a televised confession in February last year admitted supplying nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
U.S. and other intelligence agencies had known about the activities of this gang for sometime but the Bush administration confronted Pakistan in early 2004 after collecting solid evidence of Khan's involvement in nuclear smuggling.
Khan is considered a national hero in Pakistan for enabling his country to test its nuclear devices in May 1998, less than a month after similar tests by archrival India.
Talking to reporters in December 2004, former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell recalled how he conveyed the message to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf: "We know so much about this that we're going to go public with it, and within a few weeks, okay? And you needed to deal with this before you have to deal with it publicly." According to Powell, "(T)he next thing we knew, A.Q. Khan had been put in custody."
The ISIS report, published in spring 2005 edition of the Washington Quarterly, says that Khan created this network in the 1970s to supply Pakistan's gas-centrifuge program, which has been used to produce weapons-grade uranium for Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.
According to this report, Khan and his associates slowly expanded their import operation into "a transnational illegal network" that also exported gas centrifuges and production capabilities as well as designs for nuclear weapons to mostly Muslim countries to turn a profit and provide additional business for their international collaborators.
"In addition to money, Khan was also motivated by pan-Islamism and hostility to Western controls on nuclear technology," the report says quoting several articles Khan wrote for technical journals in the late 1980s.
By 2003, when the network was exposed to the public, it had become a truly trans-national organization. Although the key providers of the necessary technology and several of the network's leaders, including Khan, were located in Pakistan, other leaders were spread throughout the world, including in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, South Africa and Malaysia, the report points out.
The network also depended on unwitting manufacturing companies and suppliers in many countries. It sold what the Pakistanis have called the P1 and P2 centrifuges - the first two centrifuges that Pakistan deployed in large numbers.
The P1 centrifuge uses an aluminum rotor, and the P2 centrifuge uses a maraging steel rotor, which is stronger, spins faster, and therefore enriches more uranium per machine than the P1 centrifuge's aluminum rotor.
Initial exports of the P1 centrifuges to Iran in the mid-1990s included 500 machines retired from Pakistan's nuclear program or made under contract by the network, says the report. This quantity of P1 centrifuges would only be able to produce about one quarter of a bomb's worth of weapons-grade uranium in a year.
In the Libyan case, the network focused on producing P2 components outside of Pakistan. The Libyans have informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that they placed an order for 10,000 P2 machines.
Because each centrifuge has roughly 100 different components, this order translated into a total of about 1 million components - "a staggering number of parts given the sophistication of gas-centrifuge components."
"Thus, it is clear that Khan's network was assembling an impressive cast of technical experts, companies, suppliers, and workshops. The workshops contracted to manufacture components for the network typically imported the necessary items, such as metals, equipment or subcomponents."
After the facilities produced the item, they would send it to Dubai with a false end-user certificate, where it would be repackaged and sent to Libya.
Initial information found in Libya identified roughly a half-dozen key workshops spread across at least Africa, Asia and the Middle East that were making the centrifuge components.
The network selected a workshop based on the type of centrifuge component needed and the materials and equipment involved in making those particular components.
The most publicly known facility - Scomi Precision Engineering, or SCOPE, in Malaysia - made stationary aluminum components and was the source of 15 percent of the total number of components destined for Libya.
In October 2003, the dramatic seizure of uranium-enrichment gas-centrifuge components bound for Libya's secret nuclear weapons program was made aboard the German-owned ship BBC China. As the ship passed through the Suez Canal, it was stopped by German and Italian authorities.
Workshops in Turkey importing subcomponents from Europe and elsewhere assembled other key parts of the centrifuges, including centrifuge motors, power supplies and ring magnets.
Tradefin Engineering, a company in South Africa, produced the elaborate equipment needed to insert and withdraw the uranium hexafluoride gas that is enriched in centrifuges. Tradefin also attempted unsuccessfully to make the sensitive maraging steel rotors for the P2 centrifuges.
Libya also ordered from the network a sophisticated manufacturing center, code-named Workshop 1001, to produce centrifuge components.
The original plan called for this center to make additional centrifuges either to replace broken ones or add to the total number after the network delivered the first 10,000 machines, but if the network encountered problems in making a component for the original 10,000 machines, Libya's manufacturing center may have had to accomplish that task as well.
Most of the equipment for the center came from Europe, particularly from or through Spain and Italy, and was sent to Libya via Dubai. The network had also supplied detailed manufacturing information for many of the parts.
-------- iran
Bush Leaning Toward Backing Europe on Iran
By REUTERS
March 2, 2005
Filed at 6:36 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran.html?pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush is leaning toward backing Europe in offering incentives to Iran aimed at persuading Tehran to give up its nuclear ambitions, U.S. officials said on Thursday.
Under the emerging strategy, the United States would not block Iran as it seeks to start the process of joining the World Trade Organization, and would not stand in the way of European allies if they want to sell Tehran parts for civilian aircraft, the officials said.
An announcement of the president's strategy could come this week, the officials said.
In exchange for not standing in the way of the incentives, the United States would insist that Iran abandon uranium enrichment, a demand Tehran so far has refused to accept.
Some U.S. officials believe offering incentives will strengthen the international community's hand by providing a united front for punitive measures, such as U.N. sanctions, if the incentives do not work.
Supporting Europe on the incentives would mark a significant shift in strategy for Bush, who has been reluctant to consider them before to avoid being seen as rewarding Iran for bad behavior.
Before a European trip last week, Bush talked of taking Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions, and officials believe that still may be necessary depending on how Iran responds.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush had not made a final decision and declined to discuss any details.
He said the United States and Europe are discussing ``how we can move forward together on a common strategy to get Iran to abandon any ambitions for a nuclear weapon.''
``We want to do our part to support the European efforts. This is about strengthening their diplomatic approach to resolving this matter,'' he said.
Bush met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday upon her return from London, where she discussed Iran with the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany. Bush planned more talks with her on Thursday.
The United States accuses Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons under cover of its civil nuclear program. Iran denies this, saying its nuclear program is peaceful and aims to produce power for its growing population.
It can take years of negotiations for a country to enter the WTO. As a first step Iran could be granted observer status, a stepping stone to full accession.
Countries granted observer status must begin the process of moving toward full membership within five years. Actual entry into the WTO can take years beyond that, and the United States could still hold up those talks indefinitely.
A senior congressional aide involved in the WTO issue said: ``It is a carrot, and it's not a very big one.''
``It means nothing by itself,'' said Greg Mastel, chief international trade advisor at the law firm of Miller & Chevalier.
``Actual membership talks could drag out for months or years or decades, or it could move very quickly,'' Mastel said, adding that if Washington chooses, it would have the power to ``slow things down'' or block Tehran's accession down the road.
Saudi Arabia and Russia, two of the largest economies still outside the trade body, have been negotiating for a decade. China's accession to the WTO took about 15 years to complete after negotiations began.
----
Europeans join calls for Iran to show 'more transparency' on nuclear issues
Wed Mar 2, 1:53 PM ET World - AFP
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050302/wl_afp/iaeanucleariranuseu_050302185333
VIENNA (AFP) - Germany, France and Britain joined the United States and the United Nations nuclear watchdog in calling on Iran to show more transparency regarding its nuclear activities.
The three European Union countries, which have been negotiating with Iran to stop its uranium enrichment program in exchange for trade and security benefits, issued a joint statement to the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. The IAEA had reported key areas where Iran was refusing to cooperate with UN inspectors.
"While transparency visits have taken place, Iran seems to have been determined to limit their scope," said British ambassador Robin Wright reading from the joint statement.
The Europeans still took a more conciliatory tone than the Americans. They noted that Iran's decision to suspend uranium enrichment -- which can be used for either nuclear energy or to make atomic weapons - was "a voluntary commitment" and urged Tehran to keep its word.
The US maintains that Iran's nuclear activities are designed for a clandestine weapons program. The head of the US delegation to the IAEA board, Jackie Sanders, cited "an alarming number" of unresolved questions and warned that the IAEA could not put off "forever" taking Tehran before the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.
Like the US, the Europeans criticized Iran for refusing to allow UN inspectors to visit its military site in Parchin where Washington accuses Tehran of simulating testing of nuclear weapons.
Parchin is not a site where there are definitely nuclear materials. But IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said that Iran was a "special case" since its nuclear program "has been clandestine for almost two decades" and he asked Tehran to allow widespread visits by UN inspectors.
The Europeans endorsed ElBaradei's call for Iran to come clean "in order to make up for the confidence deficit created by past activities and to build the necessary confidence in the future," the European statement said.
US President George W. Bush has said Washington is seeking a diplomatic solution in Iran and supports EU talks with Tehran. But Bush has said all options, including the military one, remain on the table.
The Iranian delegate to the IAEA, Cyrus Nasseri, said Iran was not allowing a second visit to Parchin, after a first one in January, in part because it was concerned about information leaks "in view of potential threats of military strikes against Iran's safeguarded and other facilities" by what he called "a major nuclear weapons state" in a clear reference to the US.
----
Iran says it fears leaked nuclear information
Says concerns are behind ban on further U.N. visits to some sites
Sirus Naseri, head of the Iranian delegation, delivers a statement Wednesday after a session of the International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board of governors, in Vienna.
The Associated Press
Updated: 8:32 p.m. ET March 2, 2005
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7070409/
VIENNA, Austria - Declaring some sites off-limits to U.N. inspectors, Iran said Wednesday it fears that leaked information gathered by them could help those planning a possible strike on its military installations.
Meanwhile, the United States, which has not ruled out such an attack on Iran, urged the U.N. Security Council to take action against Tehran, saying the Islamic Republic is “cynically” pursuing nuclear arms while hiding its intentions from the world — an allegation Iran denies.
Jackie Sanders, chief U.S. delegate to the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N nuclear watchdog, made the comments in response to an update on Iran’s nuclear record after more than two years of examination by the agency.
Sanders called the IAEA report a “startling list of Iranian attempts to hide and mislead and delay the work” of agency experts, and urged other countries to support a U.S. drive to have Iran referred to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions — which past board meetings have refused to do.
Parchin site in figurative crosshairs
Iran’s refusal to grant IAEA inspectors renewed access to the Parchin military site after an initial, severely restricted visit last month was one of the issues raised by the agency’s review. The United States says Iran may be testing high-explosive components for nuclear weapons, using an inert core of depleted uranium at Parchin as a dry run for a bomb that would use fissile material.
The IAEA says it has found no firm evidence that Iran’s nuclear program is intended for anything other than peacefully generating electricity. The agency also has not been able to support U.S. assertions that nearly 20 years of covert nuclear programs discovered more than two years ago were aimed at making nuclear weapons. Iran says these programs, too, were intended to generate electricity.
Iranian chief delegate Sirous Nasseri, noted Wednesday that his country was not obligated to allow any access to sites like Parchin, which are not part of the agency’s purview.
Worries about “confidentiality of information” gathered on such visits “are more intense in view of potential threats of military strikes against ... facilities visited by (the) agency,” he said.
While describing fears that America was getting ready for an attack as “ridiculous,” President Bush has refused to rule it out completely as a long-term possibility, saying last week that “all options are on the table.”
The IAEA review also focused on Iran’s decision to block any further probing of possible dual use equipment at the Lavizan-Shian site near Tehran — a move that effectively shut down one area of the agency’s inquiry.
The U.S. State Department last year said Lavizan-Shian’s buildings had been completely dismantled and topsoil had been removed from the site in attempts to hide nuclear-weapons related experiments.
IAEA review cites Arak reactor capability
The review also noted that Iran continues to build a heavy water reactor in the city of Arak that can produce plutonium, despite agency requests to cease construction on the facility.
It also mentioned delays by Iran in informing the agency that it was building tunnels in the central city of Isfahan for nuclear storage, and blips in its commitment to totally freeze all activities related to uranium enrichment.
Iran has suspended work on its enrichment program pending negotiations with France, Germany and Britain. But it has repeatedly said the freeze is short-term, despite hopes that it will fully scrap its plans.
“This is something that is not on the table and will not be on the table,” Nasseri told reporters, saying his country had “gone through blood and sweat and tears” to develop the enrichment program.
----
Iran Bans U.N. Nuke Visits on Some Sites
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 2, 2005
Filed at 4:09 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Nuclear-Agency.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Declaring some sites off-limits to U.N. inspectors, Iran said Wednesday it fears that leaked information gathered by them could help those planning a possible strike on its military installations.
Meanwhile, the United States, which has not ruled out such an attack on Iran urged the U.N. Security Council to take action against Tehran, saying the Islamic Republic is ``cynically'' pursuing nuclear arms while hiding its intentions from the world -- an allegation Iran denies.
Jackie Sanders, chief U.S. delegate to the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N nuclear watchdog, made the comments in response to an update on Iran's nuclear record after more than two years of examination by the agency.
Sanders called the IAEA report a ``startling list of Iranian attempts to hide and mislead and delay the work'' of agency experts, and urged other countries to support a U.S. drive to have Iran referred to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions -- which past board meetings have refused to do.
Iran's refusal to grant IAEA inspectors renewed access to the Parchin military site after an initial, severely restricted visit last month was one of the issues raised by the agency's review. The United States says Iran may be testing high-explosive components for nuclear weapons, using an inert core of depleted uranium at Parchin as a dry run for a bomb that would use fissile material.
The IAEA says it has found no firm evidence that Iran's nuclear program is intended for anything other than peacefully generating electricity. The agency also has not been able to support U.S. assertions that nearly 20 years of covert nuclear programs discovered more than two years ago were aimed at making nuclear weapons. Iran says these programs, too, were intended to generate electricity.
Iranian chief delegate Sirous Nasseri, noted Wednesday that his country was not obligated to allow any access to sites like Parchin, which are not part of the agency's purview.
Worries about ``confidentiality of information'' gathered on such visits ``are more intense in view of potential threats of military strikes against ... facilities visited by (the) agency,'' he said.
While describing fears that America was getting ready for an attack as ``ridiculous,'' President Bush has refused to rule it out completely as a long-term possibility, saying last week that ``all options are on the table.''
The IAEA review also focused on Iran's decision to block any further probing of possible dual use equipment at the Lavizan-Shian site near Tehran -- a move that effectively shut down one area of the agency's inquiry.
The U.S. State Department last year said Lavizan-Shian's buildings had been completely dismantled and topsoil had been removed from the site in attempts to hide nuclear-weapons related experiments.
The review also noted that Iran continues to build a heavy water reactor in the city of Arak that can produce plutonium, despite agency requests to cease construction on the facility.
It also mentioned delays by Iran in informing the agency that it was building tunnels in the central city of Isfahan for nuclear storage, and blips in its commitment to totally freeze all activities related to uranium enrichment.
Iran has suspended work on its enrichment program pending negotiations with France, Germany and Britain. But it has repeatedly said the freeze is short-term, despite hopes that it will fully scrap its plans.
``This is something that is not on the table and will not be on the table,'' Nasseri told reporters, saying his country had ``gone through blood and sweat and tears'' to develop the enrichment program.
On the Net:
http://www.iaea.org
-------- russia
Russia eyes new nuclear reactors in Iran after Bushehr
Wed Mar 2, 2005 11:08 AM ET Mideast - AFP
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050302/wl_mideast_afp/russiairan_050302160806
MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia is likely to build several more nuclear reactors in Iran after completing the Islamic state's first plant at Bushehr despite stiff protests from Israel and the United States.
"Completing Bushehr will certainly increase Iran's trust in us," Moscow's ambassador to Tehran, Alexander Maryasov, told the ITAR-TASS news agency on Wednesday.
"I think that this will create beneficial conditions for future projects," said Maryasov, adding that Russia's nuclear energy chief Alexander Rumyantsev studied the possibility of constructing at least two new reactors in Iran while on a visit there Sunday.
Russia signed a technological cooperation agreement with Tehran in 2002 that opened the way for construction of up to five reactors -- including a second one at Bushehr -- over the coming 10 years.
"Russia is breaking new ground by constructing the first nuclear energy station," he said.
The agreement on Bushehr had hinged on Iran's agreement to return the spent nuclear fuel to Russia for storage -- a provision both Russia and the West were insisting on to make sure that the Islamic state does not use the material to produce a nuclear weapon.
The fuel could theoretically be sent through centrifuges -- which analysts believe Iran is acquiring from Pakistan and China after being initially turned down by Russia in 1995 -- to make plutonium which can be used in nuclear bombs.
Maryasov said that the fuel would be monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency -- a UN safety watchdog -- to make sure that Iran complies and does not try to siphon off some of the fuel for other experiments.
"The IAEA will be leading constant, 24-hour-a-day monitoring, so there can be no way that any of this material is used for something else," said Maryasov.
The plant is now set to go on line by the end of next year.
Nuclear policy analyst Alexander Pikayev said there was no guarantee that Iran would keep to the agreement after receiving the fuel from Russia, but added a breach of the promise would be "catastrophic" for the country.
"Iran could theoretically still refuse to return the fuel... but this would have catastrophic diplomatic consequences for Iran," Pikayev said at a news conference..
He said one of the problems for the West was that Bushehr staffing meant that Iran would "create a new cadre of nuclear physicists" it never had before who could then switch to the military sector.
"There is still an element of danger with Bushehr, but the spent fuel agreement eliminates 98 percent of the problems," said Pikayev.
Other analysts said that Washington and Europe were no longer as concerned with Bushehr after the discovery of a vast secret nuclear network in Iran aimed at developing a "nuclear cycle" in which uranium could be enriched without foreign assistance.
"Iran is still receiving centrifuges in the gray and black arms markets," said Viktor Mizin if the Institute of World Economy and International Relations.
"And the United States is increasingly concerned about Iran now that it no longer has a regional counterweight in Iraq," he said.
"Strangely enough, this alleviates some of the diplomatic pressure for Russia," said Mizin.
The Bushehr project is worth 800 million dollars to Russia.
Analysts say that other military trade stands at between two and four billion dollars between the two countries -- making the Islamic state third largest purchaser if arms from Russia after India and China.
----
Investors of the World, Here's the Word on Putin Inc.
March 2, 2005 NY TIMES
LETTER FROM EUROPE
By ERIN E. ARVEDLUND
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/02/international/europe/02letter.html
MOSCOW, March 1 - In recent weeks, President Vladimir V. Putin's politics have generated most of the worry in the West. He has been cutting welfare benefits for veterans and pensioners, clamping down on free media and meddling in the Ukrainian election. Even President Bush, who badly needs the Kremlin's cooperation in combating terrorism, the spread of nuclear weapons and narcotics trafficking, gently chided Mr. Putin about maintaining democratic standards when the two met in Bratislava last week.
But the president's concerns about democratic principles may miss the larger point. The real threat to Russia's future could lie in the economy. For now, its gross domestic product is booming, it boasts a budget surplus and a windfall from record high oil prices. But it is pursuing a model of corrupt, state-managed capitalism, economists and political analysts say, that is inimical to democracy and could condemn its economy to perpetual third world status.
Many here believe the turning point was reached last December, when Russia renationalized one of its largest private oil fields in a deal that Andrei Illarionov, an outspoken Kremlin aide, acidly called "the swindle of the year."
The transaction was an offshoot of the Yukos affair, the Russian government's campaign to dismember what was once Russia's largest private oil company and jail its billionaire founder, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky. Having staggered the company with a questionable $28 billion tax bill, the Kremlin seized the oil fields and auctioned them for about half their worth.
The winner, a state-owned business named Rosneft, overnight joined the ranks of Russia's top oil companies.
Big oil fields changing hands at a cut-rate price recalls the rigged privatizations of Russia's robber baron era in the 1990's. But instead, it was the Kremlin cutting this deal, a parallel that for some here crystallized thinking on Mr. Putin's course for the country.
"Today, by our own decisions, we have done what is now, regrettably, clear to the outside world - we opted for the third world," Mr. Illarionov said after the auction. "We used to see street hustlers do this kind of thing," snapped Mr. Illarionov, who until recently was among Mr. Putin's most fervent supporters. "Now officials are doing it."
A few days later, he was relieved of his duties as Russia's Group of 8 representative; he still has an office in the Kremlin.
Exactly what Mr. Illarionov meant by third world is unclear. He would seem to be pointing to the developing world of the 1960's and 70's, with state-directed investment and rampant cronyism, rather than the more free market approach that became popular in the 1980's and 90's.
But the point was made. Instead of embracing free-market capitalism, Russia has veered away: renationalizing oil assets, weakening property rights and signaling to foreign investors that their millions - and their presence - are not entirely welcome.
"Illarionov was being colorful," said John Litwack, head of the Moscow office of the World Bank. "But if that is the new model - to destroy assets, expropriate the company and put the industrialist in jail - and if it's repeated, that's different than just renationalization. That's an environment more like the third world."
Even a former prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, who was dumped by Mr. Putin in 2003 and has talked about challenging him in 2008, told the Interfax news agency last week that the country "has taken the wrong turn, which harms the country's economic and social development."
Economists say it is uncertainty that is most damaging. Building blocks of a free market system - the courts, the tax agencies and law enforcement - have been corrupted during Mr. Putin's second term and by the Yukos case in particular, undermining investor confidence.
Russia's tax authorities, used by the Kremlin to undermine Yukos, have gone on a rampage. Vimpelcom, the country's No. 3 cellphone company, was served with a tax bill of $158 million late last year, linked by some Russian media reports to a vendetta by the telecommunications minister (who reportedly has investments in a competing company). Vimpelcom whittled that bill down to $17 million, but only after the intervention of the Norwegian government, whose state phone company Telenor is an investor.
After a privately run airport here, Domodedovo, showed remarkable profit growth in a recent regulatory filing, its long-term lease was canceled by the government, which then asked to renegotiate at more favorable terms.
Russia's business community now seems to worry that the government will muscle in on any profits, a tactic labeled "tax terrorism," by Yevgeny Yasin, former minister of economics under Boris Yeltsin, and currently the director of Russia's Higher School of Economics.
So if not Western-style, free-market capitalism, exactly what economic model is Russia embracing?
Pre-Yukos, some analysts said, Mr. Putin seemed to be following the path of Chile, Singapore and China - a strong central government, a credible partnership with the business elite, a pruning of the influence of state-sponsored monopolies and crony capitalism.
Post-Yukos, Russia's path is unknown. Some believe it may end up mimicking 20th-century Mexico, where the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, used its control of the national oil and gas company, Pemex, to maintain power for decades. "Pemex could be the model for Gazprom and Mr. Putin's party, United Russia," said Michael J. Economides, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Houston and co-author of "The Color of Oil."
Still others say that Russia is finding its own way. "Russia's model is not Asian, not European and not Latin American," said Alasdair Breach, chief strategist at Brunswick UBS investment bank. "It doesn't quite fit any of those categories. Hunting for a model is useful, but to find a direct comparison is impossible."
In any case, the Kremlin is re-evaluating the welcome sign once hung out for foreign investors, partly by taking control of some of the commanding heights.
"Given that the Kremlin has succeeded in concentrating power, the worry is they're enjoying it for its own sake," said Mr. Litwack of the World Bank. "There's no proof you have to be an open democracy or free market to attract investment. But you have to create conditions for investors."
And, many here believe, for democracy.
-------- ukraine
Ukraine Secret Service Seizes Uranium at Airport
By REUTERS
March 2, 2005
Filed at 5:49 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-ukraine-uranium.html?pagewanted=print&position=
KIEV (Reuters) - Ukraine's SBU security service arrested a man at Kiev's airport who had a case containing radioactive uranium-238 in his car, the Emergencies Ministry said Tuesday.
It said the man was detained at Boryspil airport, Ukraine's main international gateway, with 582 grams of uranium. It did not say when the arrest took place or whether he had been attempting to leave the country.
``SBU officers detained the person who was moving a case with a radioactive substance -- Uranium-238 -- in his car,'' the ministry said in a statement. It said ministry specialists had seized the case.
A ministry official said an investigation had been launched. SBU officials were not immediately available for comment.
Depleted uranium, where uranium-238 is normally found, can theoretically be used to make nuclear ``dirty bombs,'' but it is often used in gun ammunition and armor because of its high density.
Ukraine gave up its share of the Soviet nuclear arsenal after independence in 1991 but remains home to some of Europe's largest nuclear power stations. The country is trying to strengthen security and border controls as it now borders three member states of the enlarged European Union.
Eastern Europe's vast pool of nuclear technology is of major concern to the United States and the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, as it remains open to theft and black market trade.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
'Bunker Buster' Bomb Production Halted Again
Wed Mar 2, 5:50 PM ET Health - Reuters
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050302/hl_nm/health_bombs_dc
OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. (Reuters) - The plant that makes 2,000-pound "bunker buster" penetration bombs has stopped production for a second time after workers developed anemia due to TNT exposure, officials said on Wednesday.
Manufacture of the weapons -- heavily used in the Iraq war -- was stopped on Feb. 8 after resuming a few weeks before following a lengthy production halt, said Mark Hughes, spokesman for the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant.
Blood tests in February found that 17 employees who make the weapons in McAlester had low blood oxygen levels caused by exposure to trinitrotoluene, or TNT, he said.
Production of the powerful bombs, which are designed to destroy underground structures, was stopped in August after 34 workers were found to be anemic.
It restarted Jan. 1 after installation of a new ventilation system to filter TNT from the air, Hughes said.
Initially, practice bombs filled with concrete were made on the reopened line, but when production of bombs began blood tests showed TNT exposure again and the plant was closed, Hughes said.
He said the workers did not exhibit weakness, headaches or other symptoms of full-blown anemia, "but blood lab work indicated clinical levels" of the affliction, Hughes said.
Anemia is a condition in which the number of red blood cells falls below normal and the body gets less oxygen.
Hughes said plant officials are conducting further studies to determine what to do next.
The McAlester plant is the primary bomb maker for the U.S. military and employs 1,400 workers at its 70 square mile site in southeastern Oklahoma.
Hughes could not discuss how many bombs the plant produces or how many bunker buster bombs the U.S. has on hand, but said production of other types of bombs would continue.
----
The Bush Administration's Self-Made Nuclear Dilemma
by Amitabh Pal
Thursday March 2, 2005 by The Progressive
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0302-23.htm
The United States is in a dilemma over Iran and North Korea's nuclear programs, but it is a dilemma largely of its own making.
Don't get me wrong. It is terrible for any nation to go nuclear. The apparent move by both these regimes to pursue nuclear weapons will significantly ratchet up tensions in the Middle East and East Asia and greatly increase the chances of a nuclear holocaust. And the more nations that have nuclear weapons, the more the chances that such weapons could fall, inadvertently or otherwise, into the hands of terrorists. The weapons programs are also a significant waste of resources. The Iranian and North Korean governments could utilize those resources to fulfill their citizens' basic needs--if they had the inclination to do so.
But is it that surprising that these nations are going nuclear, especially given the aggressiveness of U.S. nuclear policy under the Bush Administration?
In its Nuclear Posture Review (the major policy statement on the subject of nuclear weapons), the Bush Administration, far from taking steps to get rid of its reliance on nuclear arms, revealed a more aggressive attitude in its willingness to utilize them. The Nuclear Posture Review recommended "greater flexibility" in using nuclear weapons and stated that they can be used to "hold at risk a wide range of target types." It even named seven countries as potential targets, with both Iran and North Korea making the list. (The other five were Russia, China, Syria, Libya and Saddam's Iraq.)
A subsequent presidential directive said that the United States could retaliate with nuclear arms against a chemical or biological weapons attack, and that it could even strike against countries suspected of having nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
What sort of a message does this send to countries like Iran and North Korea?
The Bush Administration's other moves on the nuclear front have been in keeping with this aggressiveness.
It abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in its futile search for a workable national missile defense shield.
The United States has shown few signs of starting global talks on a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, which would prohibit the manufacture of new fissile materials for nuclear weapons.
And it has all but abandoned the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which forbids the testing of nuclear weapons.
The U.S. Senate rejected the treaty in 1999, and the Bush administration has taken no steps to resubmit it. In fact, it has been making noises about resuming nuclear testing.
Even though its request for funds to reduce the time needed to get the Nevada test site up and running was killed by Congress last year, this hasn't stopped its drive. Just a few weeks ago, newly appointed Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said that "we will continue our efforts to maintain the ability to conduct underground nuclear testing."
This callous attitude toward international agreements does not serve the United States well when it asks other nations to abide by international law.
The Bush Administration has taken a number of other steps in recent months that haven't been very reassuring.
It has launched another campaign to request funds from Congress to research the development of earth-penetrating nuclear weapons (nicknamed "bunker busters"), arguing that these weapons would help target terrorist cells and infrastructure. The program was halted in November due to a bipartisan effort led by Ohio Republican Congressman David Hobson, but in its recent budget proposal, the Bush Administration submitted a request for $4 million this year and $14 million next year to carry out research on the subject.
It has been wanting to construct a new facility to manufacture plutonium pits, a key component of nuclear weapons, although Congress rebuffed it on that front, too, by reducing funding last year from a requested $30 million to $7 million.
And Bush's recently revealed effort to make some weapons in the American nuclear arsenal more sturdy and compact has been deemed by some analysts as partly a cover for the development of new types of nuclear weapons.
All these moves send a dangerous message: You can't have nuclear weapons, but we can, and we intend to use them. It's no wonder much of the world sees the United States as being hypocritical on the issue.
The U.S. long-term nuclear policy reeks of double standards, too. For years, the United States has been urging nations such as Pakistan and India to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which enjoins non-nuclear countries from developing nuclear bombs.
What few people know, however, is that Article VI of the treaty obliges nuclear powers like the United States to pursue disarmament in good faith. In a historic resolution passed on May 20, 2000 at a treaty review conference, the five established nuclear nations pledged an "unequivocal undertaking . . . to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals."
For all the progress made since then, the resolution might have been asking for a commitment to end global hunger or infectious diseases. Even after full implementation of the proposed cutbacks in their arsenals under the agreement that Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin reached three years ago, the United States and Russia will still have around 2,000 nuclear warheads, far in excess of any other nation. And they will have thousands more in storage, ready to be wheeled out at short notice.
Washington's obvious insincerity with regard to the NPT has fueled nuclear nationalism in North Korea, Iran, India, Pakistan, and Brazil.
Even some Republicans are recognizing the shortcomings of the Bush Administration's nuclear approach. It has engaged in "very provocative and overly aggressive policies that undermine our moral authority to argue that other nations should forgo nuclear weapons," said Republican Congressman Hobson in November. "We cannot advocate for nuclear nonproliferation around the globe and pursue more useable nuclear weapons options at home."
This hypocrisy is further heightened by the attitude the Bush Administration has toward its allies. Israel has a full-fledged nuclear weapons program with dozens of nuclear warheads. Last October it was revealed that South Korea conducted nuclear experimentation some years ago. But the Bush Administration hasn't exactly come down hard on either country.
Bush, for all his bluster, is only encouraging other countries to get nukes of their own.
Amitabh Pal is Managing Editor of The Progressive. His weblog will be posted every Tuesday on the Progressive.
----
Science Panel: Some High-Level Nuclear Waste Should Stay Put
WASHINGTON, DC, March 2, 2005 (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2005/2005-03-02-01.asp
Some types of radioactive waste at U.S. Department of Energy sites should be buried or left in place rather than shipped to a geological repository, such as the one proposed for Yucca Mountain, Nevada, say two new reports from the National Academies' National Research Council.
The nation needs to establish a "formal, risk-informed" approach to decide which wastes should stay on-site and which should be shipped away, said the 11 member Committee on Risk-Based Approaches for Disposition of Transuranic and High-Level Radioactive Waste.
The Hanford Nuclear Site in southcentral Washington state contains underground storage tanks that holding 54 million gallons of hazardous and radioactive waste. (Photo courtesy Hanford)
At issue are millions of gallons of highly radioactive waste left over from Cold War bomb-making now stored in steel tanks at sites in South Carolina, Washington, and Idaho.
Reports by two panels of the National Academies urged the Energy Department to revamp its $140 billion cleanup plans for defense nuclear waste with the aim of transporting a smaller quantity of it to a central repository.
The panel found that it is "technically impractical and unnecessary" to remove every last gram of high-level radioactive waste and ship it to a repository.
"Given the controversy surrounding this issue and the reality that not all of the waste will or can be recovered and disposed of off-site, the country needs a structured, well-thought-out way to determine which wastes can stay," said David E. Daniel, chair of the committee that wrote the report and dean, College of Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Committee Chair David E. Daniel is dean of the College of Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. (Photo courtesy UI)
"Information about the relative risks posed by various disposal options is vital to the decision-making process, and that information must be developed in a manner the public can trust," Daniel said.
The committee did not identify specific wastes that should be approved for alternative disposal.
Some transuranic waste currently buried at these sites, which consists of contaminated tools, clothing, and other debris, may not need to be removed to the the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, or WIPP, where this type of waste is buried in salt caverns.
The committee did not comment on how waste remaining on-site should be disposed of.
"The risk to workers and the environment involved in recovering some hard-to-retrieve waste, as well as the cost of doing so, may not be worth the reduction in risk - if any - that is achieved by disposal in a geological repository," the committee concluded.
The panel noted that techniques exist to separate highly radioactive material from some wastes, greatly reducing the potential hazard of what remains.
The scientists said agencies outside of the Energy Department should be involved in determining what wastes should be left in place and what should be transported to a repository, and observed that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission both have expertise in regulating radioactive material.
Sixty percent of the nation's nuclear waste is stored in tanks at the Hanford Site. Here workers address one of the 177 tanks on-site. (Photo courtesy Hanford)
The National Research Council studies stemmed from a controversy triggered when the DOE granted itself the authority to reclassify millions of gallons of highly radioactive waste as "incidental" waste, enabling it to leave it in tanks at facilities in Washington state, South Carolina and Idaho, instead of moving it to a permanent underground repository.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Yakama Nation, the Shoshone-Bannock tribes, and the Snake River Alliance, sued to stop the agency from abandoning the waste, and prevailed in court in July 2003.
But last fall Congress granted DOE the authority to reclassify, and therefore unilaterally dispose of, high-level waste in South Carolina and Idaho, but not in Washington or any other state.
"By calling for direct external regulation over DOE’s unilateral, ad hoc process of radioactive waste reclassification, the National Academy of Sciences has clearly sent a message that Congress must rein in DOE and address the mess that it has made of nuclear waste cleanup policy," said Geoff Fettus, the NRDC attorney who handled the case.
Most of the waste of concern is located in underground tanks at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state, the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory near Idaho Falls, and the Savannah River site near Aiken, South Carolina.
The NRDC says that several tanks in Washington and South Carolina are leaking. "More than a million gallons of this waste have leaked from these storage tanks into the environment," Fettus said.
The committee recommended that DOE and other interested parties implement a six-step decision-making process based on risk and other factors before any waste is exempted from deep geological disposal.
The report describes the characteristics of such a process and provides an example that is compatible with existing regulations, but it does not prescribe a specific process.
A second National Research Council report issued Tuesday says the DOE should consider extending the life of facilities used to treat and process radioactive waste at weapons and storage sites in Idaho, South Carolina, Washington, and Tennessee.
Train carrying high-level radioactive waste in casks makes its way across Eureka County in northern Nevada. (Photo courtesy YuccaMountain.org)
DOE currently plans to shut down these facilities when they are no longer needed at each site, but the report says they could potentially be used to process radioactive waste from other sites, thereby accelerating overall cleanup efforts. Closing the facilities prematurely could seriously delay the overall cleanup of contaminated sites, the report warns.
The cleanup could be accelerated by declassifying contaminated equipment left over from the Manhattan Project, according to the report. As long as this equipment remains classified, only employees with security clearance can work with it. Declassification could help shorten cleanup time and decrease costs.
In visits to the sites, the committee that wrote the report noticed that buildings posing little risk were being destroyed despite DOE's declared strategy of targeting the most significant risks first.
The committee recognized that some wastes and contaminated equipment will be left in place. To ensure the long-term safety of what remains, the report recommends that DOE follow the "cocooning" approach now being used to secure reactors at the Washington site. This concept involves stabilizing and monitoring wastes and making adaptations as new knowledge emerges, while keeping all stakeholders clearly informed.
In light of the National Research Council conclusions, the NRDC today called on Congress to block the DOE from disposing highly radioactive waste in South Carolina, Idaho, Washington or New York.
The environmental group would like to see the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency granted direct regulatory authority over the disposal of DOE’s high-level radioactive waste.
Nevada Senator Harry Reid, a Democrat, has lobbied to prevent the transportation of 70,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste by road and rail from 39 states to Nevada for disposal.
"What we should do with nuclear waste is leave it where it is," Reid said in July 2001. "Eminent scientists say that that is the safest way to store the nuclear waste. It could be stored on site in dry-cask storage containers for a fraction of the cost of a repository, a monitor retrieval storage system or a permanent repository. It could be done with no danger."
Reid says leaving the waste in place temporarily would give scientists time to devise better solutions.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been licensing dry cask storage systems at many nuclear reactors across the country.
----
Experts: Keep Cold War nuke waste at sites
Department of Energy also urged to bring in outside help
The Associated Press
Updated: 10:58 a.m. ET March 2, 2005
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7066394/
WASHINGTON - A significant amount of radioactive waste from Cold War bomb-making should remain at former production sites, and several locations should be kept open longer than planned to treat waste from elsewhere, scientists recommended Tuesday.
Reports by two panels of the National Academies urged the Energy Department to revamp its massive $140 billion cleanup plans for defense nuclear waste with the goal of transporting less of it to a central facility.
This would allow cleanup activities to be completed sooner and cost less, the panels said. The current cleanup schedule, involving dozens of sites, envisions most waste treatment and disposal to be finished in 20 years.
Bring other experts in, DOE urged
But the scientists also called for greater involvement outside of the Energy Department in determining what wastes should be left in place and what should be transported to a geological repository. The report said the department’s credibility on decisions involving waste disposal is hampered because the DOE both proposes and approves waste disposition plans.
“DOE should not attempt to adopt these changes unilaterally,” said the panel, suggesting the Environmental Protection Agency or Nuclear Regulatory Commission and perhaps an independent group of experts get involved in assessing how radioactive wastes should be treated.
This approach was applauded by some environmentalists Tuesday, who have argued that DOE has too much power in making waste disposal decisions. The report “clearly sent a message that Congress must rein in DOE and address the mess that it has made of nuclear waste cleanup policy,” said Geoff Fettus, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
There was no immediate reaction from the Energy Department.
Removal issue
States with some of the biggest cleanup challenges — including Washington, Idaho and South Carolina — and have argued that high-level defense nuclear waste should be taken away for deep geological burial.
But a National Research Council panel, asked to review the government program, concluded that the “recovery of every last gram” of such waste “will be technically impractical and unnecessary.”
In some cases removing waste could lead to increased human exposures to radiation, the panel said. It also said the expense associated with retrieval, immobilization and disposition of some of the waste in a central repository “may be out of proportion with the risk reduction achieved, if any.”
An attempt to recover all of this waste — such as the hardened “heel” waste attached to the inside of buried tanks at the Hanford site in Washington state — could lead to further leaks and contamination than if it were left in place, the report said.
Another National Research Council panel issued a companion report. It recommended that the Energy Department use waste treatment facilities that will handle cleanup efforts at the most contaminated sites to treat waste from other defense sites. That would require those facilities to stay open longer than planned.
Such use of treatment facilities at the Hanford site in Washington state, the Savannah River complex in South Carolina, the Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee and the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory in Idaho would accelerate overall cleanup efforts, the report said.
Background to debate
How far the Energy Department should go to clean up the environmental damage left over from decades of bomb-making and the pace of the cleanup have sparked intense debate between the federal government and states. State officials fear they may be burdened permanently with waste that will be highly radioactive for thousands of years.
Citizen activists and state officials argue that the federal government is required to remove as much of the highly radioactive waste left over from bomb-making as is technically possible. Such waste, they say, should go to an underground disposal site known as WIPP in New Mexico or the Yucca Mountain high-level waste dump proposed in the Nevada desert.
“Given the controversy surrounding this issue and the reality that not all of the waste will or can be recovered and disposed of offsite, the country needs a structured, well-thought-out way to determine which wastes can stay,” said David Daniel, chairman of the panel of scientists that wrote the report on what wastes should be exempted from deep geological burial.
The report said that techniques exist that allow the separation of the most highly radioactive material, which would go to a central repository, from less dangerous waste that can be processed to reduce the potential hazard and be allowed to remain where it is.
The panel, however, acknowledged that the implementation of a more “risk-based” approach to addressing the waste problem must be handled with care and within current rules and the law, or risk resistance from states.
The government must determine how best to dispose of the waste “in a manner the public can trust,” said Daniel, dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois.
----
PUTTING NUCLEAR WASTE TO WORK
Popular Mechanics March 2, 2005
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/1281696.html
A humble lawnmower engine–and a junked one at that–has pointed the way toward a novel solution for disposing of nuclear waste. If it works as well as its developer expects, it might even turn nuclear power into an energy source an environmentalist could love. Okay, maybe not love, but at least learn to live with.
The idea revolves–literally–around a new type of reactor. Called a Nuclear Powered Turbo-Reciprocating Engine (NPTRE), it runs on a mix of "fresh" and "spent" nuclear fuel. The NPTRE is the brainchild of Claudio Filippone, an electrical engineer who, after working with leading automakers, started on a new tack by enrolling in the University of Maryland's graduate program in nuclear engineering. Before long, he decided that the familiar piston engine just might hold the key to safely disposing of the world's growing stockpiles of radioactive waste.
There are several types of radioactive waste, ranging from gloves worn by nuclear medicine technicians to underground tanks bubbling with millions of gallons of lethal leftovers from the Manhattan Project and Cold War bomb-building. But the big problem, both in terms of waste volume and radioactive content, is created by the fuel removed from commercial power plants when they are shut down for refueling once every 18 to 24 months (the refueling cycle for nuclear submarines is more frequent). Each time this is done, a portion of the nuclear fuel in the core of the reactor is removed and placed in a "spent fuel pool" near the reactor.
Fresh reactor fuel contains mostly natural uranium (U-238), enriched with between 2% and 4% neutron-emitting U-235 uranium isotope. "The splitting of the U-235 and U-238 produces fission fragments which will transform their kinetic energy into heat and continue decaying through radioactive processes," explains Filippone.
Depending upon the power-plant design, the heat created in the fissioning chain reaction produces steam or boiling water, which in turn drives a turbine connected to electric generators. The fission fragments, although radioactive, produce too few fast-moving neutrons to continue to support fission. When this happens, the fuel is considered spent–even though it still contains a large amount of U-238.
Because some of the material in spent fuel remains radioactive for thousands of years and can also be used in making nuclear weapons, the law requires that spent fuel be stored in a permanent repository. By 2020, the Department of Energy estimates, 85,000 tons of spent fuel will have accumulated. A repository to hold it still hasn't opened, so it is backing up in the local pools.
This is where the NPTRE comes in. It would allow fuel to remain in nuclear plants, where the radiation it releases can be put to work. The NPTRE's basic mechanical operation would be familiar to anyone who has changed a lawnmower spark plug. In the NPTRE, the piston is pushed by a small volume of liquid water that is quickly converted–flashed–into a large amount of superheated steam. This phase change occurs when the piston is at top dead center (TDC) and immediately after liquid water has been squirted into a specially shaped heat cavity. The steam, which now occupies more volume due to its expansion, drives the piston down.
Heat to flash the water into steam is produced by a nuclear reaction that begins when a small amount of U-235 embedded in the piston enters a section of the reactor surrounding the cylinder head.
The NPTRE actually is made of two reactors placed one on top of the other. The one that influences the piston when it is at TDC creates a chain reaction that takes place in "new"–U-235-enriched–fuel surrounded by a water-moderated reactor, the top reactor. The moderator slows the neutrons coming off the piston and the surrounding cylinder, so they can be captured, and absorbed, by uranium atoms, which then split apart to sustain the chain reaction.
As the piston travels down the cylinder, it exits the water-moderated reactor and enters a second reactor. This one is filled with spent–U-235-depleted–fuel moderated by graphite. Graphite has special neutron-scattering characteristics that make a sustained nuclear chain reaction almost possible in the spent fuel. "However, by itself, the spent fuel and graphite combination cannot sustain a usable fission reaction," explains Filippone. "They need a little something extra."
That something extra comes in the form of neutrons emitted from the radioactive piston. As it approaches bottom dead center (BDC), it adds enough neutrons to support a pulsed chain reaction in the lower reactor. It produces a small amount of additional heat, which can be circulated through a heat exchanger or directly into the top reactor, and later used to spin a turbine.
Nothing lasts forever. Eventually, the amount of U-235 in the piston decreases to the point where it produces an insufficient number of neutrons to continue the chain reaction. "However, we're talking about extending the lifetime of the fuel and its permanence in the reactor-shielded environment, perhaps as many as four to seven times longer than the current utilization," says Filippone.
And that's not all. When all of the heat and motion is accounted for, the NPTRE will achieve a thermal efficiency of 56%. By comparison, a conventional reactor operates with a thermal efficiency of 30% to 33%.
Filippone is confident about the system's high efficiency because in order to convince his Ph.D. committee that his idea would work he built a prototype. The piston and cylinder were scavenged from a junked lawnmower engine, and the high-pressure water injector is a modified 8-cylinder Oldsmobile diesel pump.
To simulate the heat released when the piston reached TDC, he used a heating element and a fast-switching electric power supply. The prototype worked and he received his doctorate. Looking at Filippone's handiwork, a member of his dissertation committee remarked that the NPTRE looked like something out of the pages of Popular Mechanics–which of course it now is.
Although the Department of Energy has expressed interest in funding more research, Filippone is realistic about NPTRE's prospects. However, he believes that even if no NPTRE is ever built, the research that went into the project will produce dividends. The heart of the system–the intricate heat cavity that flashes water into steam–can coax higher efficiency from any type of heat engine. Including those that just putter along, cutting grass.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Nuclear power: the green alternative
By Pete Geddes, March 2, 2005 Bozeman, Montana, Daily Chronicle
http://bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2005/03/02/opinions/02geddes.txt
To reply: http://bozemandailychronicle.com/letters/ or email to: citydesk@dailychronicle.com
The International Energy Agency projects 65 percent growth in world energy demand by 2020. Two questions pop up: How will we meet this energy demand and what are the environmental consequences of our choices? When we consider these issues we confront three vexing realities. First, fossil fuels (i.e., oil and coal) are our cheapest, most available sources of energy. The U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal, with 25 percent of the world's reserves, double those of the next largest source, China. Second, billions of the earth's poorest are just climbing out of desperate poverty. Affordable energy is essential to their successful escape -- and they know it. Third, burning fossil fuels causes air pollution and contributes to climate change. Can we provide affordable and reliable energy for the world's least fortunate, while simultaneously combating global warming?
What about renewable energy, like solar? A Bozeman friend grins whenever the energy from his residential solar array causes his electric meter to spin backward. For him, electricity prices can't go too high.
Solar has great potential, especially for remote, off-the-grid applications. And passive solar construction ought to be a standard design feature in the Northern Rockies, where winters are long, cold and sunny. But high initial costs and long payback times will limit solar's widespread adoption for power generation. Wind and tidal power have similarly limited applications. I'm afraid we confuse hopes with realistic expectations if we believe that wind, solar or tidal power will soon meet our base load energy demands.
In contrast, coal is cheap and abundant. In the U.S. it generates 52 percent of our electricity. Its share of our energy portfolio will surely increase. Changing this future is especially difficult. In addition to its abundance and low price, coal has a powerful political constituency. China consumes almost half the world's coal production, using it to supply 75 percent of its annual energy demand. In addition to emitting CO2, coal is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels. Coal ash is radioactive. A typical coal-fired power plant releases about l00 times as much radioactivity as a comparable nuclear plant. Toxic heavy metals such as mercury are particularly nasty byproducts. Mercury falls downwind on land and into the oceans. It becomes toxic as methylmercury. It moves up the food chain, eventually accumulating in the fat cells of fish. As a result, pregnant and nursing mothers who eat large amounts of salmon and tuna can expose their children to mercury poisoning. Because of our stack scrubbers, the U.S. produces only 1 percent of non-natural global mercury emissions. China accounts for 25 percent. No serious person believes the Chinese will place the world's environmental and health concerns above their own economic interests.
The Critical Reality
All energy production has environmental impacts. For example, wind farms cause visual and noise pollution and kill birds. Our choices involve trading off among imperfect alternatives.
Is it time we rethink opposition to nuclear power? James Lovelock, promoter of the Gaia hypothesis, believes so. He writes: "Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media.... [N]uclear energy ... has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. I entreat my friends ... to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy."
France generates 79 percent of its electricity from nuclear power; Belgium, 60 percent; Sweden, 42 percent; Switzerland, 39 percent; Spain, 37 percent; Japan, 34 percent; the United Kingdom, 21 percent; and the United States, 20 percent. With 434 operating reactors worldwide, nuclear power meets the annual electrical needs of more than a billion people.
If we move forward with nuclear power we'll need to address many challenges. They include safely disposing of radioactive waste (a political more than a technical problem), the high cost of nuclear power (currently it can't compete with coal) and security. As we see with Pakistan and North Korea, proliferation is real.
Of course, nuclear power is not 100 percent safe. Nothing is. But the relevant fact is that nuclear power is safer, and more environmentally friendly, than any feasible alternative.
Pete Geddes is program director of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE) and Gallatin Writers. Contact him at: pgeddes@free-eco.org
-------- new mexico
Los Alamos Lab Signs Fence-to-Fence Cleanup Order
SANTA FE, New Mexico, March 2, 2005 (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2005/2005-03-02-09.asp#anchor4
Federal and New Mexico state officials Tuesday signed a legally enforceable fence-to-fence clean up order for Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) with officials from the University of California, which operates the lab for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Department of Energy (DOE). The result of two years of negotiations, the agreement requires comprehensive investigation and clean up of environmental contamination at LANL, including remediation of material disposal areas, ground water and other areas of contamination. The order also sets a schedule for environmental clean up work, which must be completed by 2015. LANL comprises 49 current and former Technical Areas covering approximately 40 square miles. From 1943 to the present, operations at LANL have generated, treated, stored, and disposed of solid wastes, hazardous wastes, and hazardous wastes mixed with radioactive wastes. Solid, hazardous, and radioactive wastes were disposed of in numerous septic systems, surface impoundments, pits, trenches, shafts, landfills, waste piles and other sites located throughout LANL. The types of hazardous and solid wastes that have been handled and disposed of include chlorinated and non-chlorinated solvents, high explosives, metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), nitrates, and radionuclides. Governor Bill Richardson, a Democrat who headed the DOE in the Clinton administration, and New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, a Republican, announced general agreement on this clean up order last March. Since then, the technical and legal staffs of the parties have been at work hammering out the details of the document signed Tuesday. Lt. Governor Diane Denish, Attorney General Patricia Madrid joined the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the formal signing of the order. “This agreement will help protect New Mexicans for generations to come,” said Denish. “The state and LANL standing together here today is proof that tough but fair environmental regulation can pay dividends.” “Execution of this enforceable order is a major accomplishment for NMED and all the people of New Mexico,” said NMED Secretary Ron Curry. “After many years of tough negotiations, this legal order puts New Mexicans in control of LANL clean up and gives us the power to make sure this important work is completed.” “This order represents a clear path forward for a measured clean up of laboratory sites and helps meet our ongoing commitment to protecting the safety of our people and the surrounding environment,” said LANL Director Pete Nanos. “We appreciate the relationship of trust this agreement represents between the state and our laboratory.” In addition to this order, DOE and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently formalized a Federal Facility Compliance Agreement (FFCA). This agreement will ensure that all surface water monitoring plans required by the order are completed. “The Department appreciates the commitment of NMED in establishing a firm regulatory role for the State,” said Ed Wilmot, Manager of the Los Alamos Site Office. “Both the Laboratory and Federal management have been significantly changed during the last year to improve our performance in becoming environmental stewards.” “My office has worked closely with NMED to fashion a corrective order for environmental clean up at LANL,” said Under the agreement the state is still free to pursue any remedies for natural resource damages that may have occurred. In several locations, there has been contamination of the regional aquifer, from which Los Alamos County draws drinking water. Currently at LANL, more than 1,900 sites require corrective action. A copy of the Order on Consent is available at the NMED website: http://www.nmenv.state.nm.us/HWB/lanlperm.html.
-------- new york
NY - NUCLEAR MEDICINE FUNDS TO DISAPPEAR UNDER PLAN
Brookhaven lab would be devastated if the House approves proposal by the Department of Energy
BY JAMIE TALAN
New York Newsday STAFF WRITER
March 2, 2005
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/health/ny-ndref024162326mar02,0,5470427.story?coll=ny-health-headlines
Proposed budget cuts by the Department of Energy would phase out research in nuclear medicine at Brookhaven National Laboratory and elsewhere.
Brookhaven scientists would lose up to $6million a year in federal funding. The plan also would eliminate funding of nuclear medicine at 23 universities
and three other national labs.
"It's a bad dream," said Stephen Dewey, a Brookhaven neuroscientist whose work on addiction relies on the scanning technology. "It's outrageous."
Nuclear scanning machines help doctors diagnose dozens of diseases, including heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's.
Brookhaven is the birthplace of some of the most widely used radiotracers, which are used to peer deeply and safely into the body. It is among a handful of
laboratories directly funded by the Department of Energy.
Last month, the Office of Management and Budget announced cuts including $37 million for nuclear medicine research nationwide. The budget drops from $37 million to $13 million in fiscal year 2006, and thereafter is eliminated, if approved by
the House in September.
"We judged that the DOE was not the appropriate place for research on nuclear medicine," budget office spokesman Noam Nuesner said. He said the National Institutes of Health "would be a better source."
But the National Institutes of Health also has been hard-hit by federal cuts, and none of its agencies has been designated to fund this research, said Dr.
Thomas Budinger, a department head of nuclear medicine and functional imaging at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. His lab would lose more than $2 million a year in funding.
"I'm struggling now to cover that loss," he said. "This is a shock to all of us."
Since the Department of Energy's beginnings in the 1970s, it has, by congressional mandate, funded medical uses of nuclear energy. Before that, the
Atomic Energy Commission funded this research. Highly sensitive, low-dose radioactive material is used.
In the 1970s, scientists at Brookhaven developed fluorodeoxyglucose, a radiotracer used in virtually every center that houses a positron emission tomography machine, known as a PET scan. The Energy Department also paid for work on thallium, a radiotracer commonly used to view the heart. Brookhaven scientists continue to develop radiotracers, including one to trace the effects of
nicotine on the brain and another to measure a chemical involved in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
"We need funding to take this technology into the future," added Joanna Fowler, director of Brookhaven's Center for Translational Neuroimaging. Today's patients are using technology developed decades ago.
The Society for Nuclear Medicine has encouraged its members to write letters opposing the cuts.
"There doesn't seem to be any basis for the reductions and no contingency plans for how these critical research demands will be met," said Robert Waters, a government affairs representative for Washington- based law firm Gardner,
Carton and Douglas, which represents the medical society. "The field has been left high and dry."
-------- oklahoma
TNT trouble halts bomb production
By JAMES BEATY, senior editor, McAlester OK News-Capital
Published on Wednesday, March 2, 2005 11:01 AM CST
http://www.mcalesternews.com/articles/2005/03/02/news/local_news/news03.txt
Seventeen employees at the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant stopped working with TNT after tests determined they may have abnormal blood levels.
Without the workers, production on the TNT line for 2,000 pound bunker-busting bombs has stopped. McAAP spokesman Mark Hughes said the 2,000-pound explosive bombs can still be made without using TNT.
Production on the line was also stopped twice last year after employees working on it developed hemolytic anemia.
After the second work stoppage, McAAP spent $350,000 upgrading the ventilation system in the affected building. McAAP put a second air scrubber in the building and employees were told to use more protective equipment.
Hughes said the most recent work stoppage occurred on Feb. 8. Work on the affected line has not resumed, he said. The 17 employees have had their blood drawn to monitor their conditions.
The affected employees are now at work on non-TNT lines, he said.
Hughes said McAAP does not expect any long-term effects on the health of the workers on the line. He said their overall health and safety continues to be McAAP's top priority.
McAAP officials are now working with U.S. Army hygienists, specialists and physicians to tighten health and safety measures, according to Hughes.
Hemolytic anemia causes the blood stream to carry lower than normal levels of oxygen, because the red blood cells that carry the oxygen have been prematurely destroyed.
After the line had been shut down for the first time last year and the original workers removed, a second group of workers had been brought in to work on the line.
When some of the second group of workers were also found to have developed hemolytic anemia last September, Col. Gary Carney ordered the line shut down until the air scrubber could be installed.
Up to 23 McAAP employees from both groups to work on the line tested positive for the anemia last year.
Work on the line resumed last year after McAAP installed the new air scrubber.
Contact James Beaty at jbeaty@mcalesternews.com
-------- south carolina
Energy Budget Changed Plutonium Fuel Factory Waste Plans
ATLANTA, Georgia, March 2, 2005 (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2005/2005-03-02-09.asp#anchor3
The citizens group Georgians Against Nuclear Energy (GANE) has filed two legal objections with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) against issuance of a construction authorization for the first U.S. mixed plutonium-uranium (MOX) fuel factory. The group says the new Energy Department budget released February 7 made two major changes affecting the facility that are not covered in the Environment Impact Statement now before the Commission. The MOX fuel factory is proposed for the federal government's Savannah River Site (SRS), a sprawling nuclear research and production laboratory near the Georgia-South Carolina border. MOX fuel would be produced by combining surplus plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons with uranium into a form that can be used by nuclear power plants. A consortium of three companies - Duke Project Services Group, the French state owned firm COGEMA, Inc., and Stone & Webster - has applied to the NRC for a license to construct and operate the facility. The GANE documents, filed Monday in the formal MOX plant licensing proceedings now before the Commission, challenge the adequacy of the NRC's Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the MOX plant, issued on January 28. GANE contends that the EIS is based on outdated information and that significant changes to the plutonium disposition program by the Department of Energy (DOE) require that the EIS to be redone and be reopened for public comment. The EIS is based on a waste management proposal suspended by the Energy Department after the EIS was issued, an action that GANE says was "apparently unknown by the NRC" at the time it published the Environmental Impact Statement. The Energy Department announced in its February 7 budget proposal to Congress that it was suspending a facility to treat nuclear waste from the MOX plant. GANE's second contention to the EIS concerns what the group says is "the failure to analyze DOE's revived plan to immobilize some surplus weapons plutonium at SRS as nuclear waste." The Energy Department has revived the "vitrification" option for weapons-grade plutonium at SRS, a fact not mentioned in the EIS. "During much of 2004, DOE was quietly exploring the feasibility of a new vitrification plan, whereby plutonium would be vitrified along with radioactive glass and managed as waste," said GANE coordinator Glenn Carroll. "In the FY 2006 budget request DOE announced it was seeking funds to design a new vitrification facility at SRS," she said. "It appears that the NRC was asleep at the wheel in not noticing these vitrification developments and that the DOE was too arrogant to formally provide information to the NRC about them," said Carroll. Carroll says DOE's reinstatement of the immobilization "alternative" requires the Commission to analyze the environmental impacts of dealing with plutonium by vitrification as compared to MOX. GANE asserts that no license to begin construction of the MOX plant can be issued by the NRC's Atomic Safety Licensing Board because the license would be based on an EIS which does not meet the legal requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act. The law requires that a supplemental EIS be prepared when significant changes occur to a proposed action. DOE has claimed it will begin "site preparation" for the MOX plant in May though no construction license has yet been issued and legal challenges to the plant are ongoing. GANE there are too many unanswered questions about the program for construction to begin. "The flawed EIS, which reveals that the NRC and DOE are not communicating about significant changes to the plutonium disposition program, must be withdrawn and all licensing decisions based on it frozen," said Glenn Carroll, GANE coordinator. "We've been highly concerned about the lack of planning for the toxic MOX waste stream from the beginning and now it is obvious that our concern that this deadly material was not receiving due attention is well grounded," said Carroll. "The good news," says Carroll, "is that DOE is moving to fully secure plutonium now at SRS by immobilizing it in existing high-level waste. GANE's role is to ensure that the environmental analysis of this viable plutonium disposition option is fully explored by holding the NRC legally accountable in the EIS process." GANE and other environmental and non-proliferation groups favor plutonium immobilization over use of the highly radioactive substance as a fuel for nuclear reactors. They say vitrification is cheaper, produces less waste than MOX, and is safer both in the U.S. and Russia from a non-proliferation perspective. The 2006 DOE budget is found at http://www.mbe.doe.gov/budget/06budget/Start.pdf
-------- utah
Moab tailings could wash into Colorado River
A matter of when, not if, U. professor says of uranium-mining waste
By Joe Bauman
E-mail: bau@desnews.com
Wednesday, March 2, 2005
Deseret Morning News
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,600115659,00.html
If the Moab uranium tailings pile stays where it is, eventually a big flood will wash it into the Colorado River.
Deseret Morning News graphic
"Not could. It will happen. It's just a matter of when," says one of the authors of a report on the subject, D. Kip Solomon, a University of Utah professor of geology and geophysics.
Even if no giant flood hits in the near future, radioactive and chemical contamination apparently has leached from it and migrated under the river. On the other side of the Colorado are a nature preserve and the city of Moab.
About 11.9 million tons of uranium tailings and contaminated soil were left near the Colorado River, three miles northwest of Moab, when Atlas Minerals Corp. stopped production in 1984. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the wastes cover 130 acres and were placed in an unlined impoundment.
Atlas "placed an interim cover over the tailings pile in 1995," the DOE adds.
The department has been preparing an environmental impact statement about what to do with the tailings, which at the closest point reach to within about 1,000 feet of the river.
Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. recently wrote to the DOE expressing his determination that the pile should be hauled away from the river as soon as possible.
"Recent flooding in the St. George and Santa Clara regions of Utah also demonstrated the swift and immense force of moving water in the desert," he wrote.
Huntsman's concerns are backed by studies, including one published in December 2003 by Solomon and Philip Gardner, a graduate student at the U.
DOE studies found ammonia and uranium in gravel below the Matheson Wetlands Preserve across the river, the researchers wrote.
"The magnitude of these concentrations and the location of the highest values suggest that groundwater from the mill tailings is flowing under the Colorado River and impacting groundwater" beneath the preserve, they added.
"We believe that there are fluids that have migrated underneath the river," Solomon said in a telephone interview.
Contrary to earlier expectations of the DOE, the river was not a barrier to the flow. A lot of contaminated fluids are discharging into the Colorado, he added. But some of it goes under the river to the Moab side.
Whether this occurs depends on the amount of water in the river and how much groundwater pumping is going on.
When the uranium mill was working, operators leached out material they needed by pouring fluids on the tailings. This caused material to leak out of the pile.
"They were pushing fluids beneath the river toward Moab," he said. Now that operations have ceased, whether the flow is still occurring "is a little uncertain."
The study uncovered "very, very permeable gravel deposits beneath the mill tailings, beneath the river and beneath the entire Matheson Wetlands Preserve," Solomon added.
Permeable gravel is important for two reasons, he said:
• The layer amounts to a hydrological "superhighway." It's a pathway along which groundwater can migrate under the river. If enough pumping takes place on the tailings side, water might flow toward it. If the reverse is true, water could flow from the tailings toward Moab.
In that case, some controls may be possible through pumping.
• The "very coarse gravels" show that the Colorado River has flooded in the past, bringing in gravel and boulders. "The river has migrated laterally over very large distances through geologic time," he said.
Above the gravel is about 15 feet of fine, silty material. The tailings are on top of the silt, approaching within 1,000 feet of the river in one place.
The tailings amount to "a house that's literally built on sands and silts," Solomon said. "They're not founded on any really competent material," meaning they could easily wash away.
At 24 and 30 feet below the surface, geologists uncovered organic material. A lab in Florida checked the age of the wood and peat through carbon dating.
Radiocarbon dates for samples from the two floods ranged between 1860 and 1980 for the most recent, and between 990 and 1090 AD for the earlier material. That is about when flood waters carried them in.
The samples were taken from a bore hole on the Moab side of the river. But the debris indicate the river's violence throughout the zone.
The report by Gardner and Solomon explains, "The radiocarbon ages of these two samples indicate that there have been two flood events in the last 1,000 years that have scoured down to 24 and 30 feet below present land surface, respectively, at a distance of more than 260 feet from the present river channel."
During January's flooding, the Santa Clara River in southwestern Utah rapidly ate away at its banks.
"The biggest meander was 700 feet," said Jan Sandberg, engineer for the city of St. George. "There was a lot of meandering in lots of areas."
"In the city of Santa Clara, it took a huge bite, took out a bunch of prime real estate," said Dean Cox, emergency services director for Washington County.
An erosion of 700 feet would not quite bring the Colorado River onto the Moab tailings. But the Santa Clara destruction happened with just one flood, and that river is far smaller than the Colorado.
If a big enough flood were to race through the Colorado, said Dianne Nielson, executive director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, "We're going to have uranium mill tailings strewn along the banks and sandbars along that river for distances downstream."
That, Nielson added, is unacceptable.
-------- us nuc waste
Scientists Say Removing All Radioactive Waste from Defense Sites Impractical
March 02, 2005 — By H. Josef Hebert, Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=7236
WASHINGTON — A significant amount of radioactive waste from Cold War bomb-making should remain at former production sites, and several locations should be kept open longer than planned to treat waste from elsewhere, scientists recommended Tuesday.
Reports by two panels of the National Academies urged the Energy Department to revamp its massive $140 billion cleanup plans for defense nuclear waste with the goal of transporting less of it to a central facility.
This would allow cleanup activities to be completed sooner and cost less, the panels said. The current cleanup schedule, involving dozens of sites, envisions most waste treatment and disposal to be finished in 20 years.
States with some of the biggest cleanup challenges -- including Washington, Idaho and South Carolina -- and have argued that high-level defense nuclear waste should be taken away for deep geological burial.
But a National Research Council panel, asked to review the government program, concluded that the "recovery of every last gram" of such waste "will be technically impractical and unnecessary."
In some cases removing waste could lead to increased human exposures to radiation, the panel said. It also said the expense associated with retrieval, immobilization and disposition of some of the waste in a central repository "may be out of proportion with the risk reduction achieved, if any."
An attempt to recover all of this waste -- such as the hardened "heel" waste attached to the inside of buried tanks at the Hanford site in Washington state -- could lead to further leaks and contamination than if it were left in place, the report said.
Another National Research Council panel issued a companion report. It recommended that the Energy Department use waste treatment facilities that will handle cleanup efforts at the most contaminated sites to treat waste from other defense sites. That would require those facilities to stay open longer than planned.
Such use of treatment facilities at the Hanford site in Washington state, the Savannah River complex in South Carolina, the Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee and the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory in Idaho would accelerate overall cleanup efforts, the report said.
How far the Energy Department should go to clean up the environmental damage left over from decades of bomb-making and the pace of the cleanup have sparked intense debate between the federal government and states. State officials fear they may be burdened permanently with waste that will be highly radioactive for thousands of years.
Citizen activists and state officials argue that the federal government is required to remove as much of the highly radioactive waste left over from bomb-making as is technically possible. Such waste, they say, should go to an underground disposal site known as WIPP in New Mexico or the Yucca Mountain high-level waste dump proposed in the Nevada desert.
"Given the controversy surrounding this issue and the reality that not all of the waste will or can be recovered and disposed of offsite, the country needs a structured, well-thought-out way to determine which wastes can stay," said David Daniel, chairman of the panel of scientists that wrote the report on what wastes should be exempted from deep geological burial.
The report said that techniques exist that allow the separation of the most highly radioactive material, which would go to a central repository, from less dangerous waste that can be processed to reduce the potential hazard and be allowed to remain where it is.
The panel, however, acknowledged that the implementation of a more "risk-based" approach to addressing the waste problem must be handled with care and within current rules and the law, or risk resistance from states.
The government must determine how best to dispose of the waste "in a manner the public can trust," said Daniel, dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois.
-------- MILITARY
-------- biological weapons
France Calls For Global Watchdog on Bio-Warfare Risk
Story by Mark Trevelyan
REUTERS FRANCE: March 2, 2005
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/29797/story.htm
LYON - France called on Tuesday for an international monitoring centre to stop dangerous toxins from falling into terrorist hands, as the head of Interpol warned the world was not ready to cope with the horror of a biological attack.
French Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin said biotechnology companies, research laboratories, hospitals and universities needed to become more sensitive to the risks associated with hiring staff, working on hazardous pathogens and granting access to sensitive areas.
He urged the creation of a United Nations-linked global watchdog and a database to keep track of potential biological threats.
"Why not create a joint database mapping sensitive labs, with an alert network for thefts, disappearances and suspect transactions, as well as a list of groups and individuals subject to special vigilance because they have tried to acquire sensitive materials," Villepin told police, health and counter-terrorism officials from 155 countries at an Interpol conference on bio-terrorism.
But he stopped short of demanding inspection powers for such a watchdog, along the lines of the UN nuclear agency, acknowledging that this could curb legitimate scientific research.
His comments highlighted the problems of countering biological terrorism in an era when genetic engineering techniques can be applied not just to developing new medicines but also to creating dangerous new virus strains.
Security officials have long warned of the risk of an al Qaeda attack using biological weapons such as anthrax, ricin, botulinum toxin, smallpox, plague or Ebola. Al Qaeda manuals on preparation of biological warfare agents were discovered at the group's training camps in Afghanistan after the US invasion in late 2001. Others have been posted on the Internet.
In a sober opening speech, Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said there was no more dangerous criminal threat to all countries.
"There is no crime area where the police generally have as little training than in preventing or responding to bio-terrorist attacks," the head of the 182-nation world police body told delegates.
"There might be pockets of adequate preparedness around the world, but were a massive terrorist attack that resulted in the spread of contagious disease to occur, we would not be prepared."
Noble told reporters that police needed improved communications systems and better contacts with the scientific community to help them prepare for such a disaster.
ATTACK ON FOOD CHAIN "NOT SCIENCE FICTION"
Jackie Selebi, South African police chief and president of Interpol, cautioned that an attack on the food chain, for example by targeting livestock, was "not science fiction".
'Major panic, temporary paralysis of government functions and private businesses and even civil disorder are all likely outcomes of a bio-terrorism attack," he said.
"In fact, bio-terrorism appears particularly suited to the small, well-informed groups. A bio-terrorist's lab could well be the size of a household kitchen and the weapon built there could be smaller than a toaster, and the range of options available to terrorists will continue to grow."
In the best known biological incident since the Sept. 11 attacks, five people were killed in the United States in 2001 when attackers sent anthrax spores through the postal system, triggering widespread public fear. The crime remains unsolved.
Security officials are still more concerned about the possible release of a deadly virus such as smallpox, which unlike anthrax is contagious and could spread rapidly around the world unless contained.
A 'war game' exercise staged in the United States in January, based on a simultaneous release of smallpox in European cities, highlighted dilemmas for governments such as sharing of vaccine stocks and how to close down international borders.
-------- business
Titan Admits Bribery In Africa
Contractor Will Pay $28.5 Million to Settle Criminal, SEC Cases
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 2, 2005; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64554-2005Mar1.html
Titan Corp., a San Diego defense contractor, pleaded guilty yesterday to three felony charges related to foreign bribery and agreed to pay $28.5 million to end investigations that spanned the globe and included allegations that the company funneled money to the president of the West African country of Benin.
The penalty is the largest for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by a publicly traded company, prosecutors said. Lockheed Inc., now Lockheed Martin Corp., paid $24.8 million in 1995 for conspiring to bribe an Egyptian politician.
----
Northrop Agrees to Settle Charges of Inflating Prices
Government Contractor to Pay $62 Million
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 2, 2005; Page E05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64233-2005Mar1.html
Northrop Grumman Corp. agreed yesterday to pay $62 million to settle allegations, first brought 16 years ago, that it overcharged the government on several defense programs, including the B-2 bomber.
The case originated from a whistle-blower lawsuit filed in 1989 by two former Northrop employees, James Holzrichter and Rex Robinson, who accused the company of inflating the price of several programs and misrepresenting its progress on others.
-------- iraq
Saddam's son Uday was poised to topple dad : controversial US journalist
Wed Mar 2, 2005 5:40 PM ET Mideast - AFP
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050302/wl_mideast_afp/iraqusudaycoup_050302224052
LOS ANGELES (AFP) - The eldest son of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was plotting to overthrow his father just as US troops advanced on Baghdad in March 2003, journalist Peter Arnett claimed in Playboy Magazine.
Uday Hussein, known for his ruthlessness and flashy lifestyle, had won the support of the leadership of his father's Fedayeen militia to overthrow Saddam's 35-year rule, according to an advance copy of the April edition of Playboy obtained by AFP.
The controversial reporter, who was fired by the US NBC television network in 2003 after suggesting that the US war plan in Iraq had failed, made the claim following an 18-month investigation in which he says he gained access to Uday Hussein's inner circle.
The article cited a letter from Saddam Fedayeen commander General Maki Humudat, dated March 26, 2003, in which he swore allegiance to a new Iraqi government under the control of Fedayeen chief Uday Hussein.
"According to your direction and command to form a new government under the leadership of your Excellency (Uday), we have informed all the senior officers of the Saddam Fedayeen of your desire to appoint them as your candidates for office in your government," the letter said.
Uday had planned to announce his seizure of the crumbling reins of power later the same day, but was thwarted when US jets bombed his Youth TV studios in Baghdad, according to Arnett.
The ambitious heir had even formed a shadow government on the outskirts of Iraq's capital, Baghdad that was disguised under the cover of his powerful Olympic committee and funded by murky oil deals, he said.
According to Arnett, the oldest son of the Iraqi dictator had long been chafing under his father's iron fisted rule and blamed his father for the punishing international sanctions on the country.
"Though it has not been reported until now, Uday Hussein was the biggest proponent of regime change inside Iraq," Arnett wrote.
"During the previous 10 years, he had slowly assembled the elements of power -- military, military and political management -- designed to overthrow his tyrannical father," said the reporter who was in Baghdad as US troops approached following the launch of the March 19, 2003 US-led attack.
But, according to the journalist, Uday's coup plan came too late as US-led forces were just days away from the Iraqi capital.
He and his younger brother, Qusay, were forced to flee Baghdad along with their father as the Baath party military machine collapsed ahead of the US seizure of the city in early April.
Uday and Qusay were killed in a blistering battle in the northern city of Mosul on July 22, 2003, while Saddam Hussein was captured alive in his home town of Tikrit in December of that year.
Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam War reporting and covered the 1991 Persian Gulf War for CNN from Baghdad, was fired from NBC at the end of March 2003 after granting a disputed interview to Iraqi state television.
In that interview just days before Baghdad fell, he said the US war plan was failing. "Clearly, the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces," he said.
-------- prisoners of war
Navy SEAL officer reprimanded over abuse
3/2/2005
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-03-02-seal-reprimand_x.htm
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A Navy SEAL lieutenant has received a punitive letter of reprimand for allowing men under his command to abuse an Iraqi detainee who later died during CIA interrogation at Abu Ghraib prison.
The lieutenant, whose name has not been released, was convicted of dereliction of duty and conduct unbecoming an officer during a nonjudicial hearing, the Navy confirmed Wednesday. He was acquitted of charges of assaulting the prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi.
Defense attorney Matthew Freedus said he would appeal. No defense attorneys were permitted at the four-hour proceeding Tuesday at the SEALs' command in Coronado, outside San Diego.
Punitive letters of reprimand are considered military career killers.
A total of nine SEALs and one sailor have been accused of abusing al-Jamadi and others in Iraq. All but one of the cases have been handled in closed-door proceedings.
"Yet again, we're concerned that nonjudicial punishment has been used in a case which was very serious," said John Sifton, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch. "It was a homicide, somebody died. Everybody's pointing the finger at everybody. Nobody's serving jailtime and this is becoming a pattern."
In the latest case, the lieutenant was the No. 2 in command of SEAL Team Seven's Foxtrot platoon, which captured al-Jamadi in November 2003. In a series of military court hearings, men who served under the officer testified that they or others punched, kicked and muzzle-struck the handcuffed and hooded prisoner. The lieutenant and others posed for photos that allegedly humiliated the prisoner.
Court-martial is scheduled for later this month for another lieutenant who was officer-in-charge of the SEAL platoon during the al-Jamadi mission.
The SEALs handed al-Jamadi, a suspect in the bombing of a Red Cross facility that killed 12, over to the CIA. He died a short while later in the Abu Ghraib shower room while being interrogated by a CIA officer and a contract agency translator.
His death became widely known last year when photos surfaced of grinning U.S. soldiers posing with his corpse, which had been packed in ice.
Documents obtained by The Associated Press show al-Jamadi died while suspended from his wrists, which were handcuffed behind his back — a position that human rights groups condemn as torture. One Army guard told investigators al-Jamadi's arms were stretched behind and above his shoulders in such a way that he was surprised they "didn't pop out of their sockets."
The CIA's Inspector General's office has investigated al-Jamadi's death and forwarded the case to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.
Jerry Hodge, the military pathologist who ruled al-Jamadi's death a homicide, said the prisoner's broken ribs and bruised lungs most likely were not caused by the alleged beating he received from the SEALs, according to a summary of his interview last year with the CIA Inspector General's office, which was obtained by the AP. No external bruises were found that would indicate such a beating, he said.
The Navy launched its own investigation in June when an ex-SEAL made allegations of prisoner abuse upon learning he was being kicked out of the SEALs for stealing a teammate's body armor in Iraq.
-------- spies
High court rules ex-spies cannot sue CIA
Associated Press
3/2/2005
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/2005-03-02-scotus-spies_x.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that former Soviet-bloc spies could not sue the CIA for allegedly backing out on a pledge of lifetime support in return for espionage services.
A former high-ranking diplomat and his wife, identified in court filings only as John and Jane Doe, had argued that the CIA should not be immune from lawsuits alleging a breach of a spy contract.
But in an unanimous opinion by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the court said a 130-year-old Supreme Court ruling dictated that former spies could not sue because of the secret nature of spy pacts, which are made with the understanding that "the lips of the other were to be forever sealed."
"The possibility that a suit may proceed and an espionage relationship may be revealed ... is unacceptable: 'Even a small chance that some court will order disclosure of a source's identity could well impair intelligence gathering,'" Rehnquist wrote.
According to filings, the couple wanted to defect from their country during the Cold War but were pressured by U.S. authorities to instead spy for them. In exchange, the CIA promised to provide them lifetime security.
When their spying was over in 1987, the CIA helped them resettle in Seattle with new identities, benefits and a bank job for the husband, the suit said. They received a $27,000 yearly stipend and became U.S. citizens.
The CIA stopped the subsidy when John Doe's salary from the bank hit $27,000, the suit said, but the two were promised the agency would "always be there." However, the couple contended that when Doe lost his job in 1997, the CIA refused to reinstate the stipend, saying the couple had received enough pay for their spy services.
A lower court in San Francisco had allowed the lawsuit, saying sensitive information could be kept secret by sealing records or other methods.
The case is Tenet v. Doe, 03-1395.
-------- us
Iraq War Deaths
Washington Post
Wednesday, March 2, 2005; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64437-2005Mar1.html
Iraq War Deaths
Total number of U.S. military deaths and names of the U.S. troops killed in the Iraq war as announced by the Pentagon yesterday:
1,490 Fatalities
In hostile actions: 1,139
In non-hostile actions: 351
Spec. Michael S. Deem, 35, of Rockledge, Fla.; Special Troops Battalion, 3rd Infantry Division, based at Fort Stewart, Ga. Died Feb. 24 in Baghdad of noncombat injuries.
Pfc. Chassan S. Henry, 20, of West Palm Beach, Fla.; 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division, based at Camp Hovey, South Korea. Killed Feb. 25 in Ramadi.
Pfc. Min S. Choi, 21, of River Vale, N.J.
Pvt. Landon S. Giles, 19, of Indiana, Pa. Both soldiers were assigned to the 6th Squadron, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, based at Fort Stewart, Ga. Killed Feb. 26 in Abertha.
2nd Lt. Richard B. Gienau, 29, of Peoria, Ill.; Army National Guard 224th Engineer Battalion, based in Burlington, Iowa. Killed Feb. 27 in Ramadi.
All troops were killed in action unless otherwise indicated.
Total fatalities include four civilian employees of the Defense Department.
A full list of casualties is available online at www.washingtonpost.com/nation
SOURCE: Defense Department's www.defenselink.mil/newsThe Washington Post
----
Defense funding add-ons hit
By Brian DeBose
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 02, 2005
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050301-104235-1574r.htm
Congressional budget writers say the Defense Department's emergency supplemental-spending requests have been riddled with poorly estimated combat costs and funding for projects that are not for emergency purposes.
House and Senate members are looking for new ways to pay for the unexpected costs of the war on terror, noting the need to focus on what's immediately needed. The creation of a so-called "rainy-day fund" and cutting the department's base-line budget are among the proposals.
-------- war crimes
U.S. Court Reverses $54M Verdict Against Salvadoran Generals Convicted of Torture
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2005
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/02/154213
A 54.6 million dollar verdict against two retired Salvadoran generals accused of torture in their home country two decades ago was reversed this week by a federal appeals court which ruled that the victim's claims failed to meet a 10-year statute-of-limitations rule. We speak with one of the plaintiffs in the case who was tortured in El Salvador and one the lawyers in the suit. [includes rush transcript] The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of eight men who say they were tortured by U.S. forces in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.
* Lucas Guttentag, attorney for the ACLU describing the torture allegations.
* Michael Posner, executive director of Human Rights First.
Meanwhile, a major court ruling in another high-profile torture lawsuit was in the news this week. A 54.6 million dollar verdict against two retired Salvadoran generals accused of torture in their home country two decades ago was reversed this week by a federal appeals court.
It is the second time the two generals - who have been living in Florida since 1989 - have prevailed in cases involving human rights violations.
In November 2000, a federal jury found that José Guillermo García and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova couldn't be held responsible for the murders of four American churchwomen who were raped and executed by Salvadoran soldiers in 1980. Jurors concluded the two men didn't have effective control over their own military at the time.
But less than two years later, another jury found the military commanders were civilly liable under the 1991 Torture Victim Protection Act in a lawsuit brought by a church worker, doctor and professor who fled to the United States after being brutalized by Salvadoran soldiers. That 54 million dollar verdict was reversed Monday when the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled that the victim's claims failed to meet a 10-year statute-of-limitations rule.
* Carlos Mauricio, one of the plaintiffs in the case. He was a professor at the University of El Salvador when he was detained in June 1983 and tortured for nearly two weeks at the National Police Headquarters. After coming to the United States, he obtained two Master"s degrees, in Molecular Genetics and Adult Education, from San Francisco State University, and a teaching credential. He teaches biology at Balboa High School in San Francisco.
* Carolyn Patty Blum, one of the lawyers on the case. She teaches at Columbia University Law School and is senior legal adviser at the .
AMY GOODMAN: ACLU attorney Lucas Guttentag described the torture allegations.
LUCAS GUTTENTAG: We have clients, all of whom were in U.S. military custody at the time, who were cut with knives, who were severely beaten, who were sexually abused and humiliated, who were put in excruciating, painful conditions with their arms behind their back, pulled up by chains, something that you expect to see only in a cartoon of torture, who were locked in coffin-like boxes and who were threatened with mock executions at repeated times.
AMY GOODMAN: Also at the news conference, Michael Posner, executive director of Human Rights First.
MICHAEL POSNER: We are here today asking U.S. federal courts for relief for two reasons. The first is to end the practice and policy of torture. The United States was founded on the simple principle that all people by virtue of their humanity have inalienable rights under law. Torture and calculated cruelty, inflicted as official policy, the kind of abuses suffered by our clients, cannot be reconciled with this principle. Such conduct strips people of their dignity and deprives them of their humanity. It is the opposite of a regime of rights under law.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Human Rights First, Michael Posner. Meanwhile, a major court ruling in another high profile torture lawsuit was in the news this week. A $54.6 million verdict against two retired Salvadoran generals accused of torture in their home country 20 years ago, reversed this week by a federal appeals court. It's the second time the two generals, who have been living in Florida since 1989, have prevailed in cases involving human rights violations. In November 2000, a federal jury found José Guillermo Garcia and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova couldn't be held responsible for the murders of four American church women, who were raped and executed by the Salvadoran soldiers in 1980. Jurors concluded the two men didn't have effective control over their military at the time. But less than two years later, another jury found the military commanders were civilly liable under the 1991 Torture Victim Protection Act in a lawsuit brought by a church worker, doctor and professor who fled to the United States after being brutalized by Salvadoran soldiers. That $54 million verdict was reversed Monday when the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled the victims' claims failed to meet a 10-year statute of limitations rule. We are joined on the phone right now by Carlos Mauricio, one of the plaintiffs in the case, a professor at the University of Salvador when he was detained in 1983 and tortured for nearly two weeks at the national police headquarters. He now teaches biology at Balboa High School in San Francisco. We're also joined by one of the lawyers in the case, Carolyn Patty Blum. She teaches at Columbia University Law School, senior legal adviser at the Center for Justice and Accountability. Carlos Mauricio, we are going to begin with you. Can you tell us what happened to you in 1983, and your response to this ruling?
CARLOS MAURICIO: Well, what happened to me in 1983, that I was kidnapped in front of my classroom. A special unit of the army, a death squad came for me in the evening of June 1983. They beat me up when I was in my classroom, took me away. I was blindfolded and handcuffed, and took me to a place that I didn't know, where I was kept for about three weeks. I was tortured in that place. I was blindfolded, so I didn't know who tortured me. But later the Generals Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova and Guillermo Garcia were found responsible for what happened to me, and I believe, I truly believe that they were responsible. A jury made by seven women and three men found them responsible. It was in 2002 in Florida in West Palm Beach. It was a federal court. The jurors believed that they were responsible, and we agreed with them. We agreed -- everybody agreed that they were responsible, and the jury found them responsible. That is very important, because now I have been told that in their appeal, the judges has turned down that situation, but what is important right now is that this is not the final decision, of course. We have the right to appeal, and we're going to do it. We have 21 days to do it, and we're going to make first a revision of the decision. This is not a final decision. But what is important right now is that we proved -- we did it, that those generals, they are responsible for the torture of thousands of people in El Salvador and also responsible for the genocide carried out against the Salvadoran population. That's very important. I believe that in the new appeal that we're going to make soon, the case will be on our side again. We are going to win in that case but, sorry for repeating myself, what is important right now is that we prove that those -- a jury found them responsible, and the appeal that they made is based in the technical situation that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that they were found responsible for North American jury in 2002.
AMY GOODMAN: Carolyn Patty Blum, lawyer at Columbia University Law School, the meaning of the Appeals Court overturning this? And what are your legal plans?
CAROLYN PATTY BLUM: Well, I would echo what Carlos just said in the sense that the decision of the 11th Circuit, United States Court of Appeals, is on a narrow, technical, legal basis, which is the concept of statute of limitations, and examines in detail when -- what circumstances exist for tolling or saying that the statute of limitations doesn't apply in a particular situation. It doesn't detract in any way from the findings of the court and of the jury that the generals were legally responsible for the torture of the three plaintiffs in the particular case. And as to the ruling itself, it is a very, very narrow, grudging construction of the circumstances under which the statute of limitations should be tolled. One of the things that I find so surprising and really appalling about the decision is that it shows little appreciation for the kind of case that this is. These statutes, the Alien Tort Claims Act, which was just affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court last year, and the Torture Victim Protection Act, are statutes about piercing the veil of secrecy on human rights abuses and ending the impunity of perpetrators. And therefore, the fact that the defendants were at the pinnacle of a system of state repression in El Salvador for the entire decade of the 1980s and depended on lies, deceit and secrecy to maintain their power and to maintain the repression against the Salvadoran people is clearly a factor that went into why it would have been impossible to bring a case against the generals until they came to the United States and a period of time had passed after peace had been achieved in El Salvador.
AMY GOODMAN: Carolyn Patty Blum and Carlos Mauricio, I want to thank you very much for being with us.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts / tribunals
Sen. Leahy on Bush's Judicial Nominees: You Can't "Make The Judiciary An Arm Of The Republican Party"
Democracy Now
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2005
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/02/154229
As the battle over President Bush's judicial nominees reopens in the Senate, we speak with Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. We also talk to him about restoring ties to the Indonesian military and 48 towns in Vermont that voted yesterday against war, calling for the Vermont National Guard be brought home. [includes rush transcript] The battle over President Bush's judicial nominees reopened in the Senate yesterday. For the second time in two years, appellate court nominee William Myers faced questions from the Judiciary Committee yesterday about his record as the Interior Department's top lawyer and a lobbyist for mining and cattle interests.
The impasse over judges is one of the most explosive issues facing the 109th Congress, and Myers is the year's first test case. He is one of seven appellate court nominees blocked by Democratic filibusters in Bush's first term but resubmitted by the president this year. Three other blocked nominees were withdrawn
* Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), he is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He joins us on the line from Virginia.
AMY GOODMAN: We're joined by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont. He’s the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He joins us on the line from Virginia. Welcome to Democracy Now!
SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY: Good morning. Good to be with you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us.
SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY: I was interested in your choice of music leading into the segment.
AMY GOODMAN: I understood you wanted us to just continue with the music in this news show.
SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY: No, no, no, no. That’s alright. I know that one very well.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond to – can you explain who the people are that President Bush has now re-nominated?
SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY: Sure. This thing has become so hyped and so misunderstood. President Bush has actually done very well with his judicial nominees with democratic help. Those have been consensus nominees. They have gone right through. For example, during the 48 months of his term, the democrats were in charge of the Senate for 17 months. During that 17 months, we confirmed 100 of his judges. In the remaining 31 months, the republicans confirmed another 103. We actually moved a lot faster for President Bush than his own party did, but some go beyond the pale. He has sent up one man, who we blocked, who’s back again, who practiced law illegally in two jurisdictions for years, first in the District of Columbia, then he practiced illegally, then moved to Utah and practiced illegally. He has been now nominated for the second highest court in the land. Can you imagine if Bill Clinton had done that? They would be screaming headlines on it. Another is a judge who has ruled so consistently with basically the financial interests. I'll give you one example. A woman had sued, turned out that she was one of many women who were in for physical exams, in this case a breast exam, and the doctor brings in a salesman and just puts a white coat on them so they can watch the exam. When she sues, the judge rules, well, she shouldn't have had any sense of a right of privacy. Well, you assume if you're in that kind of a situation, you're being examined by someone in a white coat, that they are a doctor. And now we had yesterday a lawyer involved not only in substantial conflicts of interest, but people that he placed in the Department of Interior, continue those conflicts of interest. As I said in these hearings, he said that he considers the environmental arm of our government the tyranny of King George. I reminded him that I was born and raised in the part of America that fought the revolution against King George, and that we don't consider our government that tyrannical. I mean, these people go beyond the mainstream. Now, I mentioned before how we moved 100 of his judges in 17 months. We did this even though we’d had 61 of President Clinton’s judges subject to these kind of pocket filibusters by the republicans. They never allowed them to vote, 61 - almost all of whom would have been confirmed had they came to a vote. We tried to change that by moving the President's, but we have also told the President, “This is an independent branch of government, the judiciary is. You cannot put people on there in a way that you are going to try to make the judiciary an arm of the Republican Party” -- actually an arm of the most conservative part of the Republican Party. I wouldn't allow it if a democrat wanted to make the judiciary an arm of the Democratic Party. It has to be an independent judiciary, or it loses all its credibility.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Vermont Senator, Patrick Leahy, about President Bush's judicial re-nominees, among them, William Pryor and Priscilla Owen. Can you talk about these two judicial nominees, Senator Leahy?
SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY: Well, I felt that Priscilla Owen from Texas is so far out of the mainstream. Her opinions -- even the very conservative Texas Supreme Court has criticized her as being out of the mainstream. If we're going to have positions filled, especially when –
AMY GOODMAN: In what way, specifically?
SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY: Well, just it is almost a knee-jerk reaction, corporations can do no wrong. People who have been injured have no real cause of action. It's so much over and over and over again. You read her opinions -- I’ll give you an idea. We had two or three senators who had met with her, were very predisposed toward her and then started reading her decisions and said, “How can somebody be this blind to what is happening to people?” Mr. Pryor was sent up -- actually he's on the bench now, because he was given a recessed appointment. He was sent up, and it was made very, very clear, he was there simply as a symbol. He's a nice enough person. I have met him. He's a pleasant person and all of that, but sent as a symbol and packaged by the White House in a way that we want to have a symbolic ideological position on this independent court. I mean, that almost guaranteed there would be opposition. We’ll go back now. He has been on the court for a few months. We'll go and look at the decisions he has written since he’s been there.
AMY GOODMAN: So, this issue of if you filibuster, and I want to ask if you plan to, Senator Frist saying -- using the nuclear option, the whole idea of ending filibuster.
SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY: Well, of course, that would so change the whole nature of the Senate. The Senate is unique, and the founders of this country set it up to be unique, so that every state has a voice, no matter its size, and so that things can be slowed up if they’re -- so that the passions of the moment can be slowed up. It’s sort of like Jefferson’s saucers, he referred to it, so the Senate can look at things more carefully. We have things that pass sometimes on the spur of the moment from the House of Representatives because it's emotional and so on, fully expecting the Senate to take some time to look at it. Sometimes we take too long. Most of the time, we get it very right. If you wanted to do away with the ability to slow things up, what you say is you might as well do away with the Senate. Let's have an arbitrary – you can have an arbitrary executive, they have their own party in power just do anything they want. It would also mean that almost half of the states in the country would have no voice. On a more practical matter, of course, 90% of what's done in the Senate requires a unanimous consent. If people stop doing that, the whole Senate would come to a screeching halt. It's a dumb idea. It's a dumb idea.
AMY GOODMAN: Senator Leahy, I wanted to get to two other issues before I know you have to go.
SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY: Sure.
AMY GOODMAN: One of them is IMET. One of them is Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State, calling for the restoration of international military education and training aid to Indonesia, restoring military ties with the Indonesian military, which were cut off after the Santa Cruz massacre in 1991, in which the Indonesian military killed more than 270 Timorese, and ultimately cut off in 1999 as the people of Timor voted for independence and Indonesian military razed the country to the ground. Now, Condoleezza Rice saying that they're going to restore. You have been very active on this issue over the past decade. What is your response?
SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY: Well, you are one of the most knowledgeable people in the media about the situation in Indonesia and Timor from your own experience there, and I’ve told Secretary Rice, I see no reason to be rewarding the Indonesians with this IMET program. It's not a great deal of money. They want it more for the symbolic, but we’ve had Americans murdered there, aside from all of the people in that region, the Timorese and others who have been murdered, and nothing has been done. I mean, if we just want to look at it from a purely selfish point of view, we have had Americans who have been murdered. You have a person who has admitted complicity in the murder, and we cannot get them even turned over to us. Why in heaven's name we are rewarding? This is supposed to be a law and order administration. Heck, I was a prosecutor. I wouldn't be rewarding somebody who is holding a murderer that I wanted to get, that Mr. Wamang, the one person indicted in the U.S., why hasn't he been indicted and arrested there?
AMY GOODMAN: So what are you going to do about --?
SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY: Well, I think that we – I think I’m going to keep pushing it. I think it was a bad, bad mistake on the part of the administration. I think it's almost saying, here you can thumb your nose at us. I would be amazed that they would do a thing to help us out, and unless there is an amazing change in it, I’m simply going to bring up the amendment again in the next appropriations bill. I think this is -- the Indonesians have spent millions of dollars trying to get these few hundred thousands of dollars because of the symbolic effect. My response to that would be if you want the symbolism, then do the substance. Turn over the people that murdered the Americans. Clean up your own house within the military. I think the police and others are moving better. The military certainly have not.
AMY GOODMAN: Senator Leahy, finally, in your home state of Vermont, 38 town meetings voted yesterday to condemn the war in Iraq, calling for Vermont National Guard to be brought home. Vermont has lost more soldiers per capita in Iraq than any other state. Would you call for these soldiers to be brought home, the Vermont National Guard?
SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY: We're a feisty state. We will do what we are called upon. I mean, our National Guard, the leaders of our National Guard have said that. I think the war was a mistake. I think we're stretching the Guard far, far too thin. I'm very, very proud of the men and women in our state who have answered. I hope we can get them back as soon as possible. I hope we can get back all of the Guard and reserves from all of the states as soon as possible.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about the significance of this number of towns?
SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY: Well, I want to see -- I understand the resolution. I'm just getting some of the press stuff this morning on it. I understand the resolution was very considerably in some towns; some towns are lost, one town I think it tied, others it passed overwhelmingly.
AMY GOODMAN: Right. In 38 of the 50 town meetings where it was brought up, it passed.
SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY: I don't know what part of the population, that's a small part of the population involved. We have almost 260 towns, but -- of varying sizes from 38 people to 38,000. I will look at it. I think the people of Vermont know my strong opposition to the war. They know I want to get these soldiers back, but I want to get them back from all of the states.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for joining us, Senator Patrick Leahy, democrat of Vermont, speaking to us from Virginia. Thanks for joining us.
-------- drug war
Pakistan issues warning on heroin
Wednesday, 2 March, 2005
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4308065.stm
Pakistan officials say the international community's emphasis on fighting terrorism is impeding its anti-narcotics efforts.
Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has seen a dramatic rise in recent months, according to the annual UN drug report.
They fear increased production over the border might trigger a growth in storage facilities and heroin production factories in Pakistan.
Afghanistan produced an estimated 4,200 tons of opium in 2004.
"We fear that the international community's lack of interest in this issue will lead to increased production of poppy," said Maj-Gen Nadeem Ahmed, the head of the Anti-Narcotics Force in Pakistan.
Heroin is produced by treating poppy extract with chemicals, a process that does not need more than a small laboratory that can be mounted at the back of vans.
No resources
Poppy cultivation had been almost completely eradicated from Pakistan but made a comeback in 2003, Maj-Gen Ahmed said. He added that 80% of the 2003 crop was destroyed.
More than 131,000 hectares were brought under poppy cultivation in Afghanistan the same year, he said.
The authorities fear that Pakistan could return to being a major transit route for Afghanistan's poppy crop.
Maj-Gen Ahmed said Pakistan did not have the resources to prevent cultivation and smuggling of poppy through effective ground and air surveillance.
He appealed for more helicopter gunships to fight increasingly sophisticated and well-armed smugglers, more detection equipment and more money to pay ground forces.
He said the paramilitary body assigned to assist drugs enforcement teams, the Frontier Corps, had been diverted to counter-terrorism activities on the Afghan border, making his task even more difficult.
Officials are also worried about Pakistan's own increasing opium and heroin consumption and the spread of HIV by intravenous drugs users.
Pakistan already has more than 500,000 heroin addicts, most of whom inject the drug, leading to the spread of killer diseases such as Aids and hepatitis.
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds to Testify Before Congress for First Time Wednesday
Antiwar.com
March 2, 2005
http://www.antiwar.com/edmonds/?articleid=5035
WASHINGTON - Sibel Edmonds, who was fired after exposing national security concerns at the FBI, will testify before Congress for the first time Wednesday.
Edmonds, a former Middle Eastern language specialist for the FBI, will share her story with members of the House Committee on Government Reform's Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations. The hearing will focus on the emerging threats of over-classification and pseudo-classification. Edmonds will testify about the government's excessive use of classification to cover up its own misconduct in her case. The hearing will be at 1 p.m. at the Rayburn House Office Building, in room 2154.
The hearing comes on the heels of a Justice Department decision last week to make public information about Edmonds' case that it had previously retroactively classified. The information has gone through a series of classification flip-flops that started in May 2004, when the department retroactively classified information about Edmonds' case that the FBI had provided to Congress in public briefings.
Edmonds, hired by the FBI shortly after 9/11, was fired after reporting shoddy translation work and national security breaches within the agency. She challenged her retaliatory dismissal by filing a law suit in federal court, but her case was dismissed last July after Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the so-called "state secrets privilege." The Justice Department apparently decided to retroactively classify the Congressional briefings not to protect national security but to bolster its "state secrets" claim. The ACLU is representing Edmonds in her appeal.
An executive summary of the Justice Department's Inspector General report into her termination concluded that Edmonds was fired for reporting the misconduct, and that such treatment would discourage federal employees from speaking up about potential security risks.
The ACLU said that the Edmonds case is part of a larger pattern by the government to silence employees who expose national security blunders. Coleen Rowley, Manny Johnson, Robert Woo, Ray McGovern, Mel Goodman, Bogdan Dzakovic, and Mike German are just a few of the other national security whistleblowers who were vilified and retaliated against.
Henry Waxman, a California Democrat and the ranking minority member on the House Committee on Government Reform, asked Edmonds to testify at the hearing Wednesday. A witness list for the hearing is attached.
For a web feature on the Sibel Edmonds case and more information on national security whistleblowers, go to http://www.aclu.org/whistleblower.
Details on the hearing:
WHAT: A House Committee on Government Reform subcommittee hearing on over-classification and pseudo-classification
WHO: FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds will testify at the hearing
WHEN: Wednesday, March 2, 2005, 1 p.m.
WHERE: Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2154
-------- torture
Rumsfeld sued over prisoner abuse
Aljazeera
Wednesday 02 March 2005
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/FB86D149-74DE-4F6D-ADC2-5E4201D72F2D.htm
Two US human rights groups have sued Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying he first authorised, then failed to stop torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Human Rights First on Tuesday filed suit in federal district court in Rumsfeld's home state of Illinois on behalf of eight former detainees who said they were severely tortured.
All eight were subsequently released without being charged.
"Secretary Rumsfeld bears direct and ultimate responsibility for this descent into horror by personally authorising unlawful interrogation techniques and by abdicating his legal duty to stop torture," said Lucas Guttentag, lead counsel in the case.
The Pentagon denied that it ever sanctioned or condoned the abuse of detainees.
"There have been multiple investigations into the various aspects of detainee abuse. None have concluded there was a policy of abuse," the Defence Department said in a statement.
Similar complaints
The ACLU filed similar complaints against three other senior officers: Colonel Thomas Pappas, General Janis Karpinski and Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez on behalf of prisoners mistreated at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
The suit against Rumsfeld focuses on an order he signed in December 2002 that authorised new interrogation techniques for detainees in the "war on terror" being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
These included "stress positions", hooding, 20-hour interrogations, removal of clothing, exploiting phobias, prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation.
When evidence became overwhelming that prisoners were being tortured, Rumsfeld turned a blind eye, the suit alleges.
"Secretary Rumsfeld knew full well that his orders were causing torture and he knew that torture was occurring on a widespread basis and he did not stop it," Guttentag said.
The plaintiffs want the court to declare Rumsfeld's actions unconstitutional and a violation of US and international law.
They are seeking monetary damages for their injuries and all eight are willing to come to the US to testify.
Horrifying abuse
The plaintiffs - four Afghan citizens and four Iraqis - allege treatment that included beatings, being cut with knives, sexual abuse and humiliation, being locked in coffin-like boxes, being deprived of food and water and threatened with execution and hung upside down for hours.
Arkan Muhammad Ali, a 26-year-old Iraqi held for a year from June 2003 to 2004, alleges that US personnel twice beat him unconscious, used a knife to repeatedly stab and slice his forearm, burned and shocked him with a metal device, locked him naked for several days in a small wooden box, urinated on him and made death threats against him.
Mehboob Ahmad, a 35-year-old Afghan citizen held for five months in 2003, said he was probed anally, hung upside down from the ceiling by a chain and hung by his arms for extended periods.
The mistreatment of prisoners became an international scandal after the appearance last year of pictures showing sexual abuse of men at Abu Ghraib.
-------- POLITICS
-------- voting
48 Vermont Towns Vote Against Iraq War, Call for State's National Guard to Come Home
Democracy Now
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2005
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/02/154235
In Vermont, 48 town meetings voted last night to condemn the war in Iraq and to call on political leaders to bring home the state's National Guard. We speak with an organizer with the Iraq Resolution Campaign that coordinated the town meetings. [includes rush transcript] In Vermont, 48 town meetings voted last night to condemn the war in Iraq and to call on political leaders to bring home the state's National Guard.
Vermont has lost more soldiers per capita than any state, and has the second highest mobilization rate for its National Guard and reservists.
* Ben Scotch, retired attorney in Vermont and organizer of the Iraq Resolution Campaign. The resolution was approved last night by 48 town meetings across Vermont.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
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AMY GOODMAN: Ben Scotch, you helped organize this resolution. Talk about how it all began.
BEN SCOTCH: Amy, it all began with a rally against the war shortly after the election, and Montpelier and the rest of Vermont have seen a good number of rallies, and they're very spirited, but the organizers of the rally got together after and they said, what more can we do? We need to rally, but we also need to speak, and it became clear that the right place to speak was town meetings. That's been a tradition well over 200 years here in Vermont. We got busy collectively as a team. We drafted a resolution. We redrafted it, and it went through 19 different versions. We then circulated it to the towns. I'm happy to say, Amy, that by midnight, we had 48 and not 38 towns, if you don't mind a very minor correction. We had 48 towns adopting resolutions that were very close to each other in text. There were some variations. We had three towns that voted it down, and just three towns that tabled it. We think that’s really an overwhelming signal to the nation.
AMY GOODMAN: And on this issue of calling the Vermont National Guard home, who suffered the worst casualties in any state per capita, what exactly are you calling for in this resolution?
BEN SCOTCH: Well, let me really summarize the resolution and hit its main points. I think I can really -- I think I can reduce that to just four points. The resolutions, every single one, and it got up to 56, more than 52, every single resolution begins with a plea to support and respect the troops. We need these people here. They're first responders, they're family, they're friends, they're workers down the street. They make up the fabric of society in Vermont. They're an important part of that fabric. So, we began with that, and Amy, it wasn't just lip service, as some have suggested. The rest of the resolution also supports members of the Guard. Let me just give you the high points of what we asked for. We asked for our legislature to assess the impact of the deployment, not just on readiness, but on our communities, on our families. We're asking the delegation, Senator Leahy, Senator Jeffords, Congressman Sanders, to help restore a reasonable balance between states and the federal government, not in the case of every war, only in what we call “wars of choice.” We know that if this country is attacked, if there's an emergency, if there’s an insurrection under the Constitution, there is no question that Guard members have signed up to serve, and that they would serve, and they would serve with enthusiasm and a sense of duty. Wars of choice are a whole different phenomenon. They're relatively new. We have no national policy governing the use of these wars. It's a big omission.
AMY GOODMAN: Ben Scotch, on that point, I want to thank you very much for joining us. Ben Scotch is one of the people who organized the Vermont Resolution Campaign, now learning that 48 of the 50 town hall -- town meetings in Vermont yesterday voted to condemn the Iraq war, beginning to call for the Vermont National Guard to be brought home.
-------- world politics
Lebanon 'victory' spurs Syrians to demand a voice
By Rhonda Roumani
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 02, 2005
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20050302-120412-1959r.htm
DAMASCUS, Syria -- Demonstrations that brought down the government of neighboring Lebanon on Monday inspired Syria's intellectuals and activists to issue new calls yesterday for greater political participation in their own country -- a nation known for its strict limits on dissent.
"What happened [in Lebanon] was a huge victory not only for the Lebanese people, but for the people of this region," said Wael Sawah, a Syrian political analyst and activist. "This is the first time a Cabinet resigns under popular pressure."
Michel Kilo, another prominent Syrian opposition figure, said that the Lebanese protests could have a ripple effect in Syria.
"The people here will want a bigger role and will start demanding their rights more," Mr. Kilo said.
Outside of the region, calls for Syria's troop withdrawal from Lebanon continued to echo yesterday as they have since last month's assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
In London, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that Syria must pull its 14,000 troops out of Lebanon.
"The pressure of the international community is quite palpable on Syria," she told reporters after a conference on Palestinian security. "They really should get about living up to their international obligations."
Miss Rice also accused the Islamic Jihad terrorist group of planning last week's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv from its offices in Syria.
"There is firm evidence that Palestinian Islamic Jihad, sitting in Damascus, not only knew about the attacks, but was involved in the planning," Miss Rice told ABC News.
Meanwhile, Syria yesterday gave its clearest indication yet that it is willing to move its troops out of Lebanon.
President Bashar Assad said in an interview published yesterday that a troop pullout could come in a matter of months.
"It [the withdrawal] should be very soon and maybe in the next few months. Not after that. I can't give you a technical answer. The point is the next few months," he told Time magazine.
Mr. Sawah and Mr. Kilo, both outspoken critics of Syrian policy, were among 60 intellectuals, activists and writers who signed a letter last week to voice support for the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon and for Lebanese independence.
Syria has an official opposition made up of five registered political parties that generally fall in line with the reigning government of Mr. Assad.
The more outspoken opposition remains unorganized, relatively small, and comes together under the name of a civil society group that works on individual initiatives in a piecemeal fashion. Without a political party or clear organization, they have been left to act on shared opinions.
"These people think that regardless of the role that the Syrian troops played in Lebanon between 1976 and 2000, the pretext for Syrian troops to remain in Lebanon expired after Israel withdrew from Southern Lebanon," Mr. Sawah said.
Syrian troops have been based in Lebanon since the outbreak of civil war in the mid-1970s. Israel, which invaded Southern Lebanon in 1982 to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization, withdrew five years ago.
Another Syrian opposition letter with 140 signatures also calls on Mr. Assad to withdraw.
Mr. Kilo, who signed both letters, said yesterday that most Syrians welcomed Monday's protests in Lebanon and the dissolution of the government.
"The Syrian people were scared that the U.S. and the Europeans will turn against their country because of the situation in Lebanon," Mr. Kilo said.
"They are happier that Lebanon will be a freer country and that it will be able to make its own decisions."
Even before Mr. Hariri's assassination, which is widely blamed on Syria, Damascus had been under international pressure to withdraw its forces from Lebanon.
U.N. Resolution 1559, which was backed by the United States and France and passed in September, calls for the immediate and complete withdrawal of all foreign troops from Lebanon.
Mr. Sawah said yesterday that calls for greater inclusion in government decisions do not mean that Syria's opposition is looking to topple the government.
"But we want to participate in the decision-making process," Mr. Sawah said. "We have to find a way to convince or make the government understand that there has to be shared decisions between the government and civil society."
----
US keeps pressure on Syria and Iran
Aljazeera
Wednesday 02 March 2005
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D832862A-55D4-4304-9B63-ACFF2553BFF7.htm
The US is keeping up its feud with Syria and Iran, blasting their governments as repressive and their human rights records as fraught with abuses.
But the US also faced criticism by a human rights group.
The US State Department's annual report on human rights in 2004 provided the latest forum for US criticism of the two Middle East countries that have come into Washington's sights over a number of issues.
The US administration, which has turned up the heat on Damascus since the 14 February assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri in Beirut, on Monday labelled Syria's rights performance as poor.
It said the government had barred organised political opposition and been responsible for "continuing serious abuses", including torture, arbitrary arrests and prolonged detention without trial.
But Amnesty International thinks America should deal with its own human rights violations first.
Nicole Choueiry, Amnesty's spokeswoman for the Middle East and North Africa, told Aljazeera.net: "Human rights abuses in Iran and Syria are not a new thing.
"We have been reporting on them for the past 10-20 years, but for the past few years we have also been reporting on human rights violations by the United States.
"We have been condemning the US for its systematic abuse in Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. The US needs to look at its own records before it condemns others. Amnesty International condemns the human rights violations of all three countries."
Restrictions
The US report said the Syrian government, "significantly restricted freedom of speech and of the press."
"The government also severely restricted freedom of assembly and association," the report said.
----
U.S., France Tell Syria To Leave Lebanon
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 2, 2005; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62296-2005Mar1.html
LONDON, March 1 -- In a tough warning to Syria, the United States and France on Tuesday demanded an immediate and total withdrawal of all Syrian troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon. They also urged other nations to help chart a more stable future for Lebanon, including sending international monitors to observe its crucial spring elections.
At a news conference with French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also said the United States and France were looking at what could be done to "stabilize" Lebanon if Syria leaves, hinting at possible support for an international presence to ease the transition or fill the security void. But she said discussions had just begun and would not comment on reports circulating here that the two nations were exploring the option of a U.N. mission.
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
California Revives Million Solar Roofs Legislation
SACRAMENTO, California, March 2, 2005 (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2005/2005-03-02-09.asp#anchor5
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger sent a proposal to the California legislature Monday that would speed the commercialization of solar electricity in the state, producing 3,000 MW of solar capacity by 2018 and electrifying one of the world’s strongest markets for solar energy. The Solar Energy Industries Association, representing over 700 companies and 20,000 employees in the U.S. solar industry, applauded the proposal which would create a 10 year incentive fund encouraging both residences and commercial buildings to install solar power. “This proposal comes directly from the governor’s office, which shifts the odds substantially in favor of the bill’s passage,” said Rhone Resch, SEIA President. On Monday, Schwarzenegger announced his support for bipartisan legislation that will provide the foundation for his goal to create one million solar roofs in the state by 2018. "I promised the people of California during the campaign that as governor I would push for solar power. Today, I am keeping that promise to harness renewable solar energy with the help of my friends Senator [Kevin] Murray and Senator [John] Campbell, to create one million solar roofs," the governor said. State Senators Murray, a Culver City Democrat, and Campbell, an Irvine Republican, have introduced SB 1 and SB 1017, which together will create the “Million Solar Roofs Initiative,” a framework for both commercial and residential roofs to be solar energy equipped. If the bills become law, when homeowners buy a solar system, on average, they will receive a nearly 40 percent rebate, or $5,000. Over the average 25-year life of the system, with electricity bill savings and mortgage interest tax savings, the system would pay for itself. Other tax credits and incentives including a 7.5 percent tax credit for every dollar spent on a solar system above and beyond the rebate received from state or federal sources make the program look attractive to consumers. The other bill directs the Public Utilities Commission to provide funding and support, through a self-generated incentive program, for the installation of solar energy systems on new and existing residential and commercial sites. Schwarzenegger said, “Today, in California where we are famous for the sun, we are going to put the positive benefits of that sun to good use. Through the ‘Million Solar Roofs Initiative’ and the willingness of the building community to join us in this effort, we will succeed in providing a stable alternative source of energy.” On Tuesday, Environment California hosted a briefing with representatives from Germany and Japan, home of the world’s two largest solar markets, as well as three American energy economists to discuss the economic benefits of growing California’s solar power market. Last year, a bill authored by Murray, sponsored by Environment California, and supported by Governor Schwarzenegger aimed to build more than a million solar homes by 2017. While the bill died at the end of the 2004 legislative session, Environment California's Bernadette Del Chiaro says "momentum was achieved and prospects for passing the nation's first and most aggressive solar homes policy are high for this legislative session."
----
Solar Power Manufacturers Launch Alliance
LAS VEGAS, Nevada, March 2, 2005 (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2005/2005-03-02-09.asp#anchor6
A new solar industry group - Americans for Solar Power-PV Manufacturers Alliance (ASPv-PVMA) - officially flipped the switch to the ON position, Tuesday at the solar trade show Power-Gen. The new organization's purpose is to help America achieve an annual 1 gigawatt (GW) market for distributed solar electricity in the year 2010. The 1 GW goal is equal to the amount of PV produced worldwide in 2004 - enough electricity to power the city of Las Vegas. ASPv-PVMA's founding companies include American Solar Electric Inc., BP Solar, First Solar, Kyocera Solar, Sanyo Energy, and Sun Power and Geothermal. Glenn Hamer, ASPv-PVMA president, said, "ASPv-PVMA will provide expert analysis to help the states take advantage of their solar resources, while mobilizing the American people to embrace solar energy. Within 10 years I am confident that every electricity customer in the United States, whether residential, commercial, or governmental, will have access to cost effective solar electric power." The U.S. solar electricity market is at an important juncture and poised for even greater growth, said Hamer. The governor of California is leading a campaign to generate 3 GW of solar electricity in the state by 2017. New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania are refining important solar initiatives. The Western Governors Association - covering 18 states - is committed to developing 30 GW of clean energy by 2015 in a program that could lead to major expansion of PV in its member states, and is now building state initiatives in Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. A federal energy bill with solar-related provisions is also a possibility. "New technologies such as First Solar's advanced module manufacturing process are rapidly reducing solar electricity costs to levels that make economic sense to consumers," said Mike Ahearn, CEO of First Solar. "The proper regulatory and incentive programs will enable U.S. consumers to start generating their own clean, affordable electricity, as they are already doing in Japan and parts of Europe," he added. "As a global leader in solar power for more than 30 years, BP Solar believes there is an important role for solar power in helping meet the nation's growing energy needs," said Mary Shields, BP Solar Regional President. "The American West has the sunshine, the political leadership and desire, and the growing energy needs to drive historic solar power growth right now," said Hamer. For 2005, ASPv-PVMA will focus on California's Million Solar Roofs program; the North East PV cluster, led by New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York; the Western Governors Association's 30 GW Clean Energy Initiative; revisions to the Arizona Environmental Portfolio Standard; the Texas revision to its Renewables Portfolio Standard; and the implementation of the solar portion of the Colorado RPS. Additionally, it will provide analytical support for legislation advancing in Nevada, New Mexico and Hawaii. The new organization said it will "leverage the pending federal energy bill" to help states achieve their solar objectives. For more information, visit: http://www.forsolar.org
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
U.S. Must Answer NAFTA Body on Mercury Pollution
MONTREAL, Quebec, Canada, March 2, 2005 (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2005/2005-03-02-09.asp#anchor1
The Bush administration must file a formal response to an allegation by U.S. and Canadian environmental groups that the U.S. government is failing to effectively enforce its own laws against coal-fired power plants and is allowing mercury emissions to degrade water bodies on both sides of the border. The request for a response was issued Thursday by the Secretariat of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) which is responsible for enforcing the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation, a side agreement under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The groups claim by failing to enforce the Clean Water Act from 1993 through 2004 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has allowed excessive mercury emissions to enter the air and water, degrading thousands of lakes, rivers and streams. The United States has up to 60 days to respond. Then the CEC Secretariat will review the environmental groups' submission in light of the United States' response to determine whether it warrants going on to the next step in the CEC process - development of a factual record. On September 20, 2004, the submission was registered by the Sierra Legal Defence Fund and Waterkeeper Alliance on behalf of Friends of the Earth Canada, Friends of the Earth-US, Earthroots, Centre for Environmentally Sustainable Development, Great Lakes United, Pollution Probe, Waterkeeper Alliance, and Sierra Club US and Canada. "The Bush administration is allowing coal plants to use our waterways as toxic waste dumps and simply refuses to effectively enforce the Clean Water Act against these polluters," said Scott Edwards, legal director of the Waterkeeper Alliance. "The CEC’s decision to seek a response from the government is the first step towards ensuring that the government finally acts to protect the health of our waterways and at-risk mothers and children in the US and Canada." The complaint centers on coal-fired power plants in 10 states - Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia - which the groups claim emit almost 60 percent of U.S. mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants and that the experience in those ten states is "reflective of the broader problem in the U.S." The groups assert that the number of fish consumption advisories for mercury has risen from 899 to 2347 since 1993, and that, according to the EPA, 35 percent of the total lake acres and 24 percent of the river miles in the U.S. are now under fish consumption advisories. The submission contends that the EPA "is allowing both nonpoint and point source discharges of mercury from coal-fired power plants that are contributing to a steady degradation of the nation's waterways as evidenced by increasing mercury fish advisories and the effective withdrawal of existing uses (fishable) of many of these water bodies." These discharges include both air emissions of mercury that fall back to the land in the form of precipitation or as dry particles and direct discharges to water. The Commission for Environmental Cooperation is an international organization created by Canada, Mexico and the United States under the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation. The CEC was established to address regional environmental concerns, help prevent potential trade and environmental conflicts, and to promote the effective enforcement of environmental law.
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Teflon Chemical in Drinking Water Costs DuPont $107 Million
PARKERSBURG, West Virginia, March 2, 2005
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2005/2005-03-02-09.asp#anchor2
DuPont Co. has settled a class action water contamination lawsuit against the company for $107.6 million, an arrangement approved Monday in a fairness hearing by Wood County Circuit Judge George Hill. The class action suit was brought against the company in August 2001 by residents living near the Dupont Washington Works plant south of Parkersburg. Plaintiffs claimed their health was harmed when their drinking water supplies were contaminated by ammonium perfluorooctanoate, known as PFAO, or C8, and used by DuPont as part of its manufacturing process for Teflon. DuPont has argued that C8, is a detergent-like substance and has no harmful human health effects. The company has reduced its C8 emissions by 95 percent since the original lawsuit was filed, said DuPont attorney Harry Deitzler. DuPont, based in Wilmington, Delaware, said in September that it decided to settle the case because of the time and expense of litigation. The company did not comment on the settlement Monday. Under the agreement, blood tests will be conducted on residents with wells and current and former customers of six area water districts to find out who is eligible for damages. DuPont must provide the six local water utilities with new treatment equipment to reduce PFOA in water supplies at an estimated cost of $10 million. One of the lead plaintiffs, Joe Kiger testified Monday he became concerned about C8 in his drinking water after receiving a letter from his water supplier, Lubeck Public Service District in October 2000 stating the unregulated chemical was in the district's drinking water. "As time went on, you heard about health problems in the neighborhood. Nobody seemed to have any answers," Kiger told the "Parkersburg News and Sentinel." He contacted local, state, federal and plant officials in an effort to find what C8 was, why it was in the water and what, if any, health effects it might have on those who were drinking and or using the water. Filing the lawsuit was a last resort, Kiger said, and he and fellow plaintiffs were "criticized, ostracized in the community by some people. They kept telling us we were going to run DuPont out. We took a lot of ridicule. It was never our intent to shut down DuPont. We just wanted to find out what C8 was and what it was doing to our health," Kiger said. DuPont could be required to spend $235 million on a program to monitor the health of residents who were exposed to the chemical. Under the terms of the settlement, the company will fund a $5 million independent study to determine if PFOA makes people sick and pay $22.6 million in legal fees and expenses for residents who sued. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is in the midst of its own extensive study of PFOA's health effects. In July 2004, the EPA alleged that DuPont repeatedly failed over 20 years to submit required information about C8. The agency is seeking millions of dollars in fines for violations of the Toxic Substances Control Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The company is challenging the fines.
-------- imf / world bank / wto (economics)
GE Expects Growth From Developing Nations
By JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN
AP Business Writer
Mar 2, 2005
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/G/GE_ANNUAL_REPORT?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
STAMFORD, Conn. (AP) -- General Electric Co. expects 60 percent of its growth to come from developing countries in the next decade, compared to about 20 percent for the past decade, according to the company's annual report.
Business with China should exceed $5 billion this year, while GE is also targeting growing opportunities in Russia, India, eastern Europe, southeast Asia, the Middle East and South America, Jeffrey Immelt, the company's chief executive, said in the report.
The Fairfield-based industrial, financial and media conglomerate "played hurt" in recent years as a weak economy and other setbacks harmed its key businesses, Immelt said in GE's annual report, which paints a picture of a bellwether planning to bounce back from tough times.
GE expects to return to double-digit profit growth this year after divesting $15 billion of slow-growth assets and investing more than $60 billion to create a faster-growing company, Immelt said.
GE's strategy relies on what Immelt called "imagination breakthroughs' - new projects and products such as a fuel-efficient locomotive and a portable ultrasound. The company plans to invest about $5 billion in that type of research and development over the next four years, hoping to boost sales by $25 billion.
To achieve that growth, GE has changed its approach to look at countries as customers, Immelt said. He cited Qatar, where GE has landed portions of the country's liquid natural gas projects and is pursuing a major airline order and other business.
Immelt dismissed the notion that GE is too big to grow and set a goal of increasing the company's revenue, excluding acquisitions, by 8 percent annually instead of the historic average of 5 percent.
Telephone calls seeking comment from analysts were not immediately returned.
In the last five years, GE stock peaked at $60 a share on Aug. 28, 2000, then sank to a low of $22.17 on Feb. 13, 2003, down by about two-thirds. The stock has since rebounded somewhat, closing at $35.22 a share in trading on the New York Stock Exchange Tuesday.
After years of strong growth in the 1990s, GE reported sluggish profits in recent years as some of its key industries faced slowdowns. The company made major acquisitions last year in health care and entertainment as part of a growth strategy.
GE expects to spend $3 billion to $5 billion annually in industrial acquisitions in the coming years. The company also promised consistent dividend growth and up to $15 billion in stock buybacks over the next two years.
Citing an initiative called "simplification," GE plans to cut costs by about $4 billion over the next three years.
Immelt, who took over from well-known Jack Welch days before the Sept. 11 attacks, acknowledged a tough tenure.
"Over the last four years, I have learned a little humility," Immelt said. "Now we feel better. We are a little more confident and a little less arrogant."
-------- ACTIVISTS
British police arrest Irish anti-war supporters
02/03/2005
Ireland Online
http://212.2.162.45/news/story.asp?j=135377618&p=y353783z4&n=135378378
Five British anti-war activists were arrested today after they forced their way into the Irish Embassy in London.
The demonstrators, who chained themselves together, were protesting at the use of Shannon Airport as a stop-over point for American war planes on their way to Iraq.
Embassy officials said the five were arrested for trespass on diplomatic premises at the embassy on Grosvenor Place, south west London, near Buckingham Palace.
The five, who are aligned with the Irish anti-war movement Pit Stop Ploughshares, were campaigning for charges against a number of Irish protesters over alleged damage to a US plane to be dropped.
It was understood the protest began at 9.10am when two women and three men chained themselves to the building.
The five were named as Milan Rai, Alex George, Zelda Jeffers, Maureen Ukairo and William Dawdarn.
Jos Jarman, spokesman for the group, said Irish Ambassador Daithi O’Ceallaigh had held talks with the group in the embassy before police moved in.
Fire officers were called in to release the protesters from the chains before the Metropolitan Police made the arrests.
An embassy spokesman said the demonstration was completely peaceful and a letter of protest had been handed in.
“Some of them managed to get through one of the two security doors but they were quickly stopped,” he said.
“All they are really doing is blocking people from coming into the embassy.”
Protesters also gathered outside the embassy and a banner was displayed declaring “Pit Stop Ploughshares Not Guilty”.
Five members of the Pit Stop Ploughshares are on bail due for trial in Dublin next week accused of disarming a US warplane at Shannon in February 2003.
The damage to the plane was estimated at €1.45m and if found guilty the protesters could face 10 years behind bars.
Mr Jarman said protesters were calling on the Government to drop the charges against Karen Fallon, Deirdre Clancy, Ciaron O’Reilly, Damien Moran and Nuin Dunlop.
“The point is that the war in Iraq was illegal and the Irish Government was breaking its own constitution and its position on neutrality,” Mr Jarman said.
“In light of the fact that war was brought illegally it is just unacceptable that these peace campaigners could be facing prison whilst Bertie Ahern remains at large.”
Mr Jarman claimed that within one month of the attack on the warplane at Shannon, three of the four companies contracted to ferry US troops and weapons had left Ireland.
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Israeli pacifist jailed for second time
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Mar 02, 2005
http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050302151701.zzahitts.html
A teenage pacifist who is refusing to complete Israel's compulsory three-year national service has been jailed for the second time in four months, his family said on Wednesday.
Yahel Avigur, 19, was sentenced to 28 days in a military prison on Sunday after serving an initial 14-day sentence last November.
His family said he would likely be sent to prison several more times upon his release, for his refusal to perform his military duties.
All male Jewish Israelis are obliged to serve in the army for three years from the age of 18 and women for 21 months.
Orthodox Jews are exempt for religious reasons.
Only women are can opt for social work in place of military conscription.
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UK schoolgirl wins right to wear hijab
Aljazeera
Wednesday 02 March 2005
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/0FC623F0-A613-425D-A46A-0CEDA33E431B.htm
15-year-old Bangladeshi Muslim schoolgirl in Britain has won the right to wear full Islamic dress at school in a case at the heart of passionate debate across Europe over religious clothing.
Britain's Court of Appeal on Wednesday overturned a previous court ruling in favour of Shabina Begum's claim that her school wrongly refused to allow her to wear the hijab.
The hijab, which includes what is referred to as a Jilbab, covers the entire body including the hair except for the hands and face, fulfils the requirements of Islamic dress code for women.
"What went wrong in this case was that the school failed to appreciate that by its action it was infringing on the claimant's Article 9 right to manifest her religion," Judge Scott Baker said, referring to religious freedom legislation.
Deeper interest
Shabina started at Denbigh High School in Luton, north of London, in September 2000, and at first wore a shalwar kameez - consisting of trousers and a tunic - which school rules allowed.
Britain's main Islamic umbrella group, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), welcomed Wednesday's ruling.
MCB head Iqbal Sacranie said in a statement: "This is a very important ruling on the issue of personal freedoms. Many other schools have willingly accommodated Muslim schoolgirls wearing the jilbab."
"Those that believe and choose to wear the jilbab and consider it to be part of their faith's requirement for modest attire should be respected. Today's judgment is a clear reflection of that common sense view."
The British case mirrors one in France, where a ban on Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses being worn in schools sparked a bitter row.
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Former editor of nuclear weapons issues publication dies
March 2, 2005 Associated Press
http://www.wqad.com/Global/story.asp?S=3011811
CHICAGO The former editor of a publication that gave a voice to scientists concerned about the dangers of nuclear weapons during the Cold War has died of cancer in California.
Ruth Salzman Adams -- who also worked for the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation -- was 81.
Adams -- a Chicago resident from 1949 to 1984 -- died Friday.
As editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists during the Cold War, Adams provided a forum for scientists to express their opposition to the deployment and use of nuclear weapons.
Adams -- who also edited several books -- joined the MacArthur Foundation in 1983 and concentrated on programs that highlighted the risks posed by weapons of mass destruction and promoted peace and social justice.
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On Vermont's Ballots: Iraq War
Annual Town Meetings Feature Both Discussion, Discontent
By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 2, 2005; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64186-2005Mar1?language=printer
NORWICH, Vt., March 1 -- The resolution calling for the return of U.S. troops from Iraq was the 31st item on the town meeting agenda here in the white-walled gymnasium they use for square dances and thrift sales. After a day of balloting, it passed.
In postcard-perfect Strafford, Vt., a few miles west along a dirt road, it passed with hardly a whisper of dissent, minutes after residents authorized $12,920 to buy a used backhoe loader.
And in Bethel, a mill town that is considered conservative by this blue state's standard, residents narrowly endorsed a version of the measure, against the urging of a Vietnam veteran and a soldier who returned last week from the war.
Town Meeting Day, a New England tradition that dates to the 17th century, has been hailed as a paradigm of representative democracy. On Tuesday, voters in 56 Vermont towns, more than one-fifth of the state's 246 municipalities, became perhaps the first in the country to participate in a formal referendum on U.S. involvement in Iraq.
By Tuesday evening -- it snowed all day long -- 39 of the towns had passed a version of a resolution that asked state legislators to study the local impact of National Guard deployments, the congressional delegation to reassert state authority over Guard units, and the federal government to bring U.S. troops home from the war.
Another three towns tabled the resolution; four rejected it, including Underhill, where 53 of its residents out of a population of 3,000 are deployed with the Guard, according to the Associated Press. Other towns had not yet tallied their votes.
The resolution is nonbinding and carries no formal weight -- just the sentiments of the tens of thousands of Vermonters who voted on it.
With this small state having among the nation's highest per-capita rates of Iraq casualties and National Guard deployment, Vermont has paid a heavy price since the conflict began. Of the 11 Vermonters killed, four were serving in the Guard.
A petition drive by local activists placed the initiative before dozens of this year's annual meetings, which are usually preoccupied with the nitty-gritty of local governance, such as school budgets. In some places, the resolution was dealt with no more fanfare than any other item on the printed agendas known as "warnings." In others, civil but pointed arguments dominated discussion.
"Vermont's always had a penchant for shooting its mouth off, and I mostly mean that in a positive way," said Frank M. Bryan, a University of Vermont professor and author of the book "Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How it Works."
He cites the example set by the Connecticut River Valley town of Thetford, Vt., which on Saturday passed a watered-down version of the Iraq resolution. In 1974, Thetford became the first municipality to call for the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon. In 1982, more than 160 Vermont towns passed resolutions demanding a nuclear freeze.
The state's three-member congressional delegation voted unanimously against invading Iraq, and Vermont (pop. 619,000) became a nationwide symbol of antiwar sentiment with the presidential candidacy of former governor Howard Dean, who now heads the Democratic National Committee.
But the state also has one of the nation's highest rates of military service.
"The hope is that this will begin a dialogue, that there will be a debate about this issue that will restore more authority over state governments," said retired math professor John Lamperti, 72, of Norwich (pop. about 3,500).
In Strafford (pop. just over 1,000), one of the measure's strongest proponents was the older brother of Rev. William Sloane Coffin, 80, the fiery former Yale University chaplain and antiwar icon during the Vietnam era, who lives quietly along the town green.
A sign at the front of the white steepled Town House, which was heated by a pair of potbellied stoves, read: "Please speak your name loud and clear. Sometimes it is hard to remember every name."
"I can't think of another forum in which people can express their views on any subject, even ones of national importance," said Ned Coffin, 83, a retired poultry farmer and windmill manufacturer. "The war was a mistake, and this is a way for that message to be heard."
But it was in Bethel, a working-class town of less than 2,000, that some of the most intense discussions took place. About 30 speakers came to the microphone in an hour-long debate that resulted in voting to remove some of the Iraq resolution's most controversial clauses.
"I think this has more to do with politics than it is about caring for the National Guard. I think there are people against this war and against this administration," said Vietnam veteran Lucien Hinkle, 62, a construction manager and farmer who spoke against the resolution.
James Bennett, 38, an Army National Guard staff sergeant who returned to the state last week from a year-long tour in Iraq, said Vermont soldiers are needed there.
"We are as much a part of the mission as anyone else, and we should stick with it," he said
Jeanne French Mattson, 68, disagreed, arguing that Guard units were needed to protect U.S. borders. "I don't want to wake up some morning and look out my window and see mushroom clouds," the retired secretary said. "I want my National Guard here in this country."
Federal control over the deployment of the Guard was challenged in the 1980s, when the governors of California, Maine and other states tried to resist sending troops to conflicts in Latin America. But Congress and the Supreme Court reinforced the president's authority to deploy the Guard. In Iraq, Guard and reserve units make up about 40 percent of U.S. forces.
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Vermonters Vote on Study of National Guard's Role
By PAM BELLUCK
March 2, 2005 NY TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/02/national/02vermont.html?pagewanted=print&position=
DUMMERSTON, Vt., March 1 - It began as a garden-variety Vermont town meeting.
The people of Dummerston - or at least the 120 or so who braved a blistering snowstorm - voted Tuesday to give $300 to a meals program for elderly shut-ins, to spend $93,500 on a dump truck and plow, and to grant tax-exempt status to the Green Mountain Camp for girls.
But then they turned their attention halfway around the world.
In a debate that echoed in at least 50 other Vermont towns holding their annual meetings this week, Dummerston passed a resolution asking the State Legislature to investigate the impact of National Guard deployments on Vermont's readiness for a natural disaster or other emergency. The measure, which also asks Congress and the president to "take steps to withdraw American troops from Iraq," was part of a new effort by antiwar activists to take the debate over the war down to a distinctly local level.
"There are people from Vermont who have been sent to Iraq who have been called upon to do things which they wouldn't choose to do," Ed Anthes, a mental health educator who supported the resolution, told the crowd in the cafeteria of Dummerston's elementary school. "They have been put in a vulnerable position. And then when they come home, we're the ones that are going to take care of them."
The resolution was spearheaded by antiwar activists who hope the campaign will spread. So far, at least one community in Massachusetts, Arlington, is planning a similar resolution, and some Pennsylvania communities may follow suit.
"A lot of folks are hoping to use Vermont as a model," said Peter Lems, the Iraq program coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee, which along with other antiwar organizations, like Military Families Speak Out, helped organize petition drives to get the measure on town meeting ballots.
"This shows that the antiwar movement is different for this war than it probably has been for every war before," Mr. Lems said. "What these people are demanding is accountability, and they have this incredibly strong message - their sons, their daughters and their parents in some cases have had their lives torn apart by the war. It's probably the most powerful message we have right now."
In results available Tuesday, 39 Vermont towns, including Dummerston, passed the resolution, 3 defeated it, 3 tabled it, and one town's vote ended in a draw. .
Though the resolution succeeded in most towns, it also caused earnest and impassioned debate.
Leaders of some towns, like Middlebury and Bethel, tried to keep the resolution from being considered at the town meeting, only to be told by the Vermont secretary of state that they had no choice.
Some places, like Thetford, after emotional wrestling matches, watered down the antiwar language to get something that would pass. And in Starksboro, which has had two of its soldiers killed in Iraq, such a passionate debate erupted among the 65 or so people who showed up that the town decided not to vote.
Vermont may have a reputation as a liberal state, but where the war is concerned it is not that simple.
About 1,200 National Guard members from Vermont have been called to serve in the war, at least one person from each of 200 towns in this small and largely rural state. With 42 percent of Vermont's National Guard deployed, only one state, Hawaii, has a higher rate per capita of reservists serving in the war. There are only about 600,000 residents of Vermont, and no other state has had a higher percentage of its population die in the war: four members of the National Guard and seven members of the active military.
"Vermont is a very small state, and people are really feeling the effect of this," First Lt. Veronica J. Saffo, a spokeswoman for the Vermont National Guard, said.
This is not the first time weighty national issues have appeared at town meetings. Two years ago, about 15 towns debated the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act. And in the 1980's, various towns voted on the issue of nuclear weapons.
But in many ways the Iraq resolution is different because it intertwines questions philosophical and deeply personal, beliefs about what nations should and should not do with the reality of husbands or daughters or nephews going to war.
"If it were just up to me, I would vote for it without a problem," said Hugh Johnson of Starksboro, whose stepson, Pierre Piche, was killed in Iraq in late 2003. "At the same time, many of the people who spoke out against it are my friends and neighbors. It isn't really fair to say if we just had a slim majority that Starksboro is in favor of this, or if we lose by a slim majority that Starksboro is against it. It would only serve to divide what is otherwise a very, very tight and cohesive community."
Bill Gates, a logger from Bethel, whose son, Bill, 18, was deployed with the National Guard in January, was conflicted about the resolution.
"My feeling is the Army National Guard, I would expect them to stay here and guard us," Mr. Gates said. He added, "I'm not antiwar, and I appreciate a strong president that's willing to do it."
Benson D. Scotch, a lawyer in Montpelier who drafted the resolution, said the focus was on the Guard so politicians would "get a picture of what this means to the family and the fabric of the community."
Not even antiwar activists are saying that the war has had drastic economic or practical effects in Vermont, but there have been reverberations. The Jonesville Country Store, a longtime stop for hikers and a place where hunters took fresh-killed moose, elk and bear to be butchered, closed in November when an owner, Stanley Budziak, was deployed with the National Guard. Mr. Budziak, who could be overseas for two years, ran the store with his mother, who is unable to handle the business alone.
In Milton, the Police Department has lost 3 of its 14 officers to National Guard duty in Iraq, creating "a situation where there is a very large amount of overtime," said Capt. Brett Van Noordt. "It's wearing my officers down."
In Dummerston, the resolution set off sparks. Calvin Farwell, a science and Latin teacher, proposed removing the section advocating withdrawal of troops. His idea was rejected.
"The consequences of this resolution being accepted scare me," said Charles Ranney, 62, a retired mechanic who supports the war. "The Pentagon will say we can't count on them, let's not fund them, and funding of the National Guard will fall to the state, and recruitment will drop and we will have to have the military draft reinstated."
John Willis, a photography professor, supported the resolution but was concerned that the call for troop withdrawal would make the Vermont towns ripe targets for critics.
"Now," Mr. Willis said, "it's too easy for people who support the administration to say we're just a bunch of nuts in Vermont."
Katie Zezima contributed reporting from Boston for this article.