NucNews - March 10, 2005



-------- NUCLEAR 


-------- africa

Typing Error Causes Nuclear Scare

Thu Mar 10, 2005 11:39 AM ET - Reuters

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050310/od_nm/odd_sudan_nuclear_dc_1

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - A stenographer for the U.S. Congress generated alarming headlines in the Sudanese press this week by giving the mistaken impression the United States conducted nuclear tests in the African country in 1962 and 1970.

The Sudanese government asked the United States for an explanation and began its own investigations into a Web site report that a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee had talked about the tests in Sudan.

But Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail, who had summoned the U.S. charge d'affaires on hearing the news, said Thursday it turned out that the word Sudan was merely a typing error for Sedan, the name of a nuclear test site in Nevada.

"The American administration ... said that there is a typing mistake," he told reporters. "Instead of writing Sedan, the typist in the military subcommittee branch typed Sudan," he said.

"Now they want to correct the spelling mistake and they want to confirm the tests did not take place in Sudan but in Sedan, part of the United States in Nevada," he added.

A U.S. embassy official in Khartoum said a statement had been issued affirming no tests were made in Sudan, but did not say how the mistake had happened. The official transcript of the hearing, in the strategic forces subcommittee on March 2, has already been corrected, with a note saying the word Sedan was misspelled in the original.

Ismail said he was very relieved the reports were not true.

"Our first concern of course was for the people of Sudan." 

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US says nuclear tests conducted in 'Sedan' not 'Sudan': Khartoum

KHARTOUM (AFP) Mar 10, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050310190802.awdqcxkt.html

The United States Thursday informed the Sudanese government that nuclear tests carried out about four decades ago were in Sedan, in the US state of Nevada, and not in Sudan, the Sudanese foreign minister said.

The clarification came in response to Mustafa Osman Ismail's request Tuesday that Washington look into reports of nuclear waste allegedly buried in the country in the 1960s and 1970s.

Ismail then said the information had been posted on a news website by an unnamed US Defense Department official.

"We have no reason that makes us doubt the explanation that we have received from the US administration," he told reporters Thursday, adding, , that the investigation the Sudanese authorities had begun would continue "so as to be fully reassured."

Before obtaining clarifiction on the matter, several senior Sudanese government officials had fiercely criticised the United States, branding it an "evil" and "criminal" state which they blamed for the spread of cancer in their country. 



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-------- depleted uranium

CT Lawmakers want state to track effects of depleted uranium

By Susan Haigh, Associated Press
AP-ES-03-10-05 1819EST

http://www.record-journal.com/articles/2005/03/11/news/state/state01.txt

HARTFORD — In the 13 years since she cleaned uranium dust off U.S. military tanks and other equipment after Operation Desert Storm ended, Melissa Sterry's health has steadily deteriorated.

She had three heart attacks and was diagnosed with a laundry list of other ailments, including chronic respiratory difficulties, muscle aches and spasms, chronic fatigue and a restricted airway, among other things. She takes 30 medications and is unable to work.

The 42-year-old veteran from New Haven believes many of her medical problems are from exposure to depleted uranium, a heavy metal used in armor-piercing weapons, and other chemicals she was exposed to while working in Kuwait with an Army logistical support unit.

"For me there's been this gradual loss of abilities," she told a legislative committee Thursday.

State legislators in Connecticut want to keep track of Sterry and other veterans' health problems as they return from Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

On Thursday, the Select Committee on Veterans Affairs unanimously passed a bill that would establish a commission to study the health effects of depleted uranium and other toxic substances. It would also create a new health registry for Connecticut's returning military personnel and veterans.

Sen. Gayle Slossberg, D-Milford, the committee co-chairman, said if the full General Assembly passes the bill, Connecticut would be the first state to embark on such a study and create a related health registry.

"Over the next six months, by having a task force develop a registry and protections for our soldiers, Connecticut is going to lead the nation in taking care of — and insuring the health and well-being of — our servicemen and servicewomen," Slossberg said.

The committee also passed a related bill proposed by Rep. Patricia Dillon, D-New Haven, that would ensure that any Connecticut member of the armed services or any reserve component who has been called up for active duty can be independently screened for possible exposure to depleted uranium when they return home.

Both bills await action by the Public Health Committee.

Several Connecticut military personnel who recently returned from Iraq told legislators personal stories of being exposed to all sorts of chemicals including depleted uranium, which is left over from the process of enriching uranium for use as nuclear fuel.

Capt. Gregory Samuels of Mansfield, former commander of the Connecticut National Guard's 143rd military police unit, spent a year in Baghdad. He told of a vehicle filled with munitions that exploded outside his camp in 150-degree heat. The vehicle remained at the site for about week.

"I would say every soldier was exposed to depleted uranium one way or another," he said.

Maj. Kevin McMahon of Old Lyme, a member of the 118th medical battalion, said his unit was stationed near an Iraqi trash pit that burned day and night, billowing black smoke.

"I have no idea if I'm going to have a hacking cough 10 years from now," he said. "I do know I was exposed to things. What are those things? I don't know."

By tracking the soldiers' ailments, the state can collect the data and document what is happening to the veterans, said state Veterans Commissioner Linda Schwartz. The information will also help Connecticut determine the needs of its soldiers.

"Something happened to them between the time they left and the time they returned," Schwartz said. "We may theorize it could be depleted uranium, but it may be a number of things."

Although Sterry receives federal veterans benefits for a leg injury, she still needs medical benefits. Like the Vietnam War veterans exposed to the allegedly toxic defoliant Agent Orange, Sterry said she has had to fight to convince the federal government to recognize there are health risks to uranium exposure.

The Pentagon has said depleted uranium is safe and is about 40 percent less radioactive than natural uranium.

"People should be assured that this substance, this depleted uranium, does not pose a major risk for their health," Dr. William Winkenwerder, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, said last year regarding a New York National Guard soldier who claims he fell ill due to exposure to depleted uranium.

The Pentagon ultimately determined that the soldier's health problems were not caused by the exposure.

-------- health

Radiation: The Invisible Culprit in Breast Cancer

By Stephanie Hiller
March 10, 2005

http://www.northbayprogressive.org/

After decades of presumed uncertainty over the continuing breast cancer epidemic, a recent report by Breast Cancer Action and the Breast Cancer Fund in San Francisco has dared to shine a beacon of light on the hidden culprit, revealing that the "best-established environmental cause of breast cancer" is ionizing radiation.

This news may come as no surprise to those of us who remember that the primary result of the atomic bombing of Japan --after 100,000 people were instantly vaporized --was cancer. We knew that exposure to radiation causes mutations in the DNA, causing cell replication to go wild.

Yet the August American Cancer Society and the government's National Institutes of Health have continued to murmur for more than fifty years that we don't really know what causes cancer, and legions of doctors and hospitals and even patient advocacy organizations have repeated the lie, including Sonoma County's own honored Dr. Amy Shaw, medical director of Sutter's Breast Cancer Center -- who said recently, "We don't know why breast cancer rates are so high in Sonoma County."

One woman dies every month of breast cancer in Sonoma County, a high incidence exceeded by Marin County, where 184.7 cases (per 100,000) annually has become typical, higher than San Francisco's 157.9. The Bay Area's breast cancer incidence is the highest in the world.

If scientists don't know why that is so, it may be because they haven't been asking the right questions, said Dr. Janette Sherman, a doctor of internal medicine and toxicologist who began her career working as radiation researcher at the Naval Shipyards in San Francisco, in the top secret National Radiological Defense Laboratory (NRDL), where undetermined quantities of radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project and subsequent radiation experiments lie buried in a ditch that feeds into San Francisco Bay.

Radiation is the "elephant in the room," said Nancy Evans in our phone conversation about the report she helped author, "State of the Evidence: What is the Connection Between the Environment and Breast Cancer?" The report, released last October, actually names that elephant and devotes two pages to its implications for breast cancer, a landmark in breast cancer advocacy. Even then, the focus is on radiation used in medical procedures, with only a few words about the really big animal of ionizing radiation that has been steadily swelling as a result of nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

Medical uses of radiation, particularly in the form of x-rays, are valuable diagnostic procedures, but their dangers are underestimated, Evans told me. "It's not to say you shouldn't have x-rays, but let's treat them the way we treat prescription drugs --put the dosage in the record, instead of telling the patient that having an x-ray is like flying to Denver," a comparison which, as the report clearly notes, is untrue. You would need to fly 3,300 hours to receive the equivalent of one chest x-ray and even a mammogram, the smallest dosage, is equivalent to 1000 hours of flying. "Standards of mammography are now tightly regulated, but that's only thanks to patient advocacy," Evans said. "Ten years ago, technicians were not properly trained to read them and they often had to be repeated."

But the big offenders in the medical realm are CT Scans and fluoroscopy.

CT Scans, which deliver a very high dose of radiation, make up only ten percent of radiological procedures but account for 65 percent of the radiation dosage we receive. They are becoming increasingly popular, particularly for children, because they're quick and it isn't so hard to get a wiggling child to hold still. But kids are much more susceptible to damage from radiation, and "when they're scanning kids, they may be setting them up for the possibility of cancer twenty years down the line."

The breast is particularly sensitive to radiation, Evans noted, particularly in adolescent girls. The effects will not show up for 20 years.

Legislation is pending in congress to get better quality control of scans, but it's going nowhere, Evans reported, and 13 states do not even require that technicians be licensed.

No states require that the radiation dose be measured.

"Every bit of radiation increases your cancer risk," said Evans, even non-ionizing radiation from electromagnetic fields, especially cell phones, which are increasing the levels exponentially. "It can't be a good thing that we had radar on top of Mt. Tam during the Second World War, or that we have barrels of waste deposited at the bottom of the sea near the Farallones.

"Hamilton Air Force base is a toxic waste dump, including nuclear and chemicals, the worst kind of toxic mix. At the housing development built on the base, they've told them not to grow any fruit trees because they wouldn't be safe to eat. There's a toxic plume that went into the groundwater.

"Chemicals and radiation potentiate each other," Evans added. In an investigation of men with brain tumors who were exposed to solvents as well as high EMF, it was the ones with both who got tumors.

Smoking also compounds the effects of radiation, and in the case of breast cancer, second hand smoke may be worse than smoking, because smoking at least reduces estrogen levels while delivering more than 300 chemicals to the lungs, but second hand smoke just delivers the toxins.

But just as the dangers of smoking were long denied, the environmental forces that contribute to breast cancer are still not acknowledged by the great bastions of cancer research that basically control the flow of cancer information to the public.

It's the estrogens in a woman's body that "somehow stimulate breast cancer growth," says the ACS (American Cancer Society) at its web site, notwithstanding the fact that breast cancer rates have risen exponentially since the 1940s, when a woman's risk of getting the horrid disease was one in 20 --now it's one in seven, and rising. How much have her hormone levels increased in that period? Birth control pills do have an impact on estrogen levels, but no one says they are a major cause of breast cancer.

It's life style, harps the ACS, blaming the patient for being overweight, failing to exercise, using alcohol, and menstruating too early and too long. The list of risk factors does not even include HRT, which has been conclusively implicated in breast and ovarian cancer.

One has to wonder whether there isn't some misogynist attitude at work here. The breast, after all, is one of the most tantalizing of organs, one of the most desired and adored. So if something happens to it, well, the woman is probably at fault, as she is at fault for so many other things that can go wrong in a life.

How men respond to their wives' mastectomies is a subject for another essay. But if there is one risk factor that may be considered neutral, it might be presumed to be the genes, though if a man wants a woman with healthy breasts he might want to make sure her mother didn't die of breast cancer, or her sister&emdash;or better yet, insist that his fiancé be tested for the guilty BRCAI or BRCA2 gene that has been linked with breast cancers in some --actually very few --women.

Some women have actually had prophylactic mastectomies on learning that they have the gene, even though not every woman who has it gets cancer. The gene doesn't cause cancer --it causes a susceptibility to cancer probably induced by some other means.

In her book, Life's Delicate Balance, toxicologist Janette Sherman says "the actual effect does not appear until this particular gene is found in either the sperm or ovum at the time of fertilization. This event may occur several generations after the initial injury." And what caused that? Could it have been exposure to fallout during atmospheric testing from 1957-1963?

In any event, the breast cancer gene doesn't cause cancer&emdash;it simply indicates a sensitivity that responds to insult from outside. BRCA1 is, in fact, "a suppressor gene, meaning when it is functioning as nature intended, it repairs damage to the DNA of a cell…when mutated, the altered gene allow for runaway growth."

In a phone interview, I asked Dr. Sherman whether she considers ionizing radiation to be the primary cause of cancer. " I am convinced that it is," she said. The main reason is the increasing level of surrounding (so-called "background") radiation from various sources, including nuclear power plants, which are now working more hours and discharging more isotopes. A nuclear power plant discharges 200 radioactive isotopes every moment into the atmosphere; "if it didn't, it would blow up," said Sherman. Though these isotopes decay, they often decay into equally damaging isotopes. Or more damaging. In the case of strontium-90, for example, discharged during bomb tests, the next isotope formed as it degenerates is itrium-90, which, unlike the parent isotope, "seeks soft tissue." Strontium-90, which is attracted to the bone, is still acutely present in the atmosphere, as an ongoing study of baby teeth confirms (see Radiation and Public Health, www.radiation.org).

"Women are paying more attention to their diet and pesticide absorption, and breast cancer rates are still rising."

And not only breast cancer. We have a veritable epidemic of cancers here in the United States, the world's leader in the production and use of radioactive isotopes.

Thyroid cancer is going up, as well as hypothyroidism, including neonatal hypothyroidism, all due to the presence of radioactive iodine-131.

Infant mortality is suddenly rising in the United States after a decades-long decline.

Childhood leukemia continues to rise, childhood brain cancers, and other diseases of children linked to radiation, including the rare but increasing rhabdomyosarcoma, a cancer of the connective tissue, that has struck 18 children in communities in Long Island ringed by power plants.

And autism. Sherman said there is a direct correlation between cases of autism and major contamination at the Rancho Seco Power Plant --and a documented decline after the plant closed.

All these things suggest that radiation is having a heavy -- and unmentioned -- impact on our health. While Sherman believes pesticides, other toxins, and in particular organochlorines are all implicated in cancer, radiation may be the root cause of a whole slew of diseases, including breast cancer.

Low-level radiation is the worst kind.

What people need to understand, Sherman emphasized, is that these are all mostly attributable to what is known as low-level radiation.

While we continue to apprehend massive releases incurred by the archetypal mushroom cloud that has loomed over our imaginations ever since the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's the steady release -- and chronic exposure -- of alpha and beta particles, as well as gamma and x-rays, that are undermining the genetic legacy and subtle biological balance that sustains health of our bodies.

Alpha particles are highly charged positive particles. Once inhaled or ingested, these unbalanced elements immediately seek the solace of an electron from neighboring atoms, which, subsequently unbalanced, seek the same, setting off a kind of chain reaction within the body.

"High dose radiation kills the cells or the person," said Dr. Sherman. "Low radiation damages cells. It's not readily repaired because the repair gene seems to be damaged most." (emphasis added) "So what you have effectively is internal radiation in the body."

Internal radiation produces free radicals responsible for a host of immune disorders that have been steadily rising during the nuclear era. Free radicals are also caused by chemical toxins, which in turn enhance the effects of radiation.

But nobody is investigating these connections, perhaps because funding is not readily available for such studies.

Bay Area cancer

"When industry or the government puts excess radiation into the environment, the risk is to us, and the benefit is to them," said Marylia Kelly, executive director of TriValley Cares, which monitors nuclear discharges in Livermore.

"Usually a cell will suffer multiple insults before cancer is initiated," she explained, referring to the work of two Bay Area Nobel-prize winning scientists. "Some materials are initiators and some are what they call promoters. If you have a promoter without an initiator, you don't get cancer.

"But radiation is both.

If radiation is responsible for the very high cancer rates in the Bay Area, where is it coming from?

Lawrence Livermore Laboratory by its own account draws a 50-mile radius around the lab to describe the area affected by its discharges, Kelly told me.

Marin County is within that radius.

The lab is a superfund site. It has generated releases of plutonium-239 and tritium, which have been found in the soil and water of the surrounding community.

Then, Dr. Sherman told me, there are the bomb tests. "Not all of the radiation from the Nevada test site traveled east," she said. Some went up into the Sierras, where it got into the snow pack. When the snow melts, it travels down the Sacramento River into the Bay Area.

Then there's the Hunter's Point Naval Radiological Laboratory, another superfund site, which has been implicated in the very high cancer rates -- higher than Marin -- of its neighbors, mostly people of color.

"We performed studies on animals radiated at the Nevada Test site," Sherman told me. Animals were also raised specifically for these experiments. The animals were buried outside the lab. Pollutants from the site have traveled into a creek that feeds into the bay.

And there is definitely radioactive waste from the Navy and the labs stored at the Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Site in 47,500 steel containers, which corrode. The containers are definitely known to be leaking, Marylia Kelly confirmed.

In other words, there is radioactive pollution in the waterways.

"So we would get it in the fish?" I asked Sherman.

Not only in the fish. The waves stir it up and carry it in toward the shore. Birds may pick it up and carry it. Wind may move it.

And then there's the fog, which travels all over the Bay Area.

There's the milk our children drink, carrying the strontium-90 that the cows pick up from the grass.

There's local well water. Has anyone tested it? Sherman asked.

Just one radioactive particle ingested or inhaled starts the process that may lead to cancer.

"They just have to get out there and test the water, test the mud around the Bay, test the fish. It's not rocket science. It doesn't require a million dollar study."

Why aren't they doing it?

"You just have to follow the money," said Sherman. "I've thought about this a great deal. The nuclear and energy industries, they're owned by the oil companies. The worst thing for them is for everyone to have solar panels on their roofs.

But the cancer rates are rising, and our stifled voices and suffocated rage make us more susceptible to the disease, as mind-body specialists attest.

Perhaps the new report from Breast Cancer Action and the Breast Cancer Fund will stir women and men to speak out.

Resources

The report may be found at the web site of Breast Cancer Action, http://www.bca.org/

To order Janette Sherman's excellent book, Life's Delicate Balance, visit http://www.janettesherman.org/

John Gofman's work shows the dangers of x-rays, http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/

More info on low-level radiation at http://www.llrc.org


-------- iran

Pakistan's nuclear hero Khan provided centrifuges to Iran: minister

ISLAMABAD (AFP) Mar 10, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050310221051.hdekpi00.html

The disgraced father of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, provided Iran with centrifuges but the government was in no way involved in the deal, a cabinet minister said Thursday.

"Dr Qadeer has provided Iran with centrifuges but the government of Pakistan had nothing to do with it. He gave them from the black market. Pakistan government was not involved," Information Minister Sheikh Rashid told

The first public disclosure that Khan gave Iran centrifuges needed to enrich uranium comes as Washington is mounting pressure on the Muslim country to give up its alleged nuclear weapons programme which Tehran insists is for peaceful purposes.

Washington believes the technology has enabled Iran to enrich uranium to a level required for making nuclear weapons.

The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency has discovered traces of highly enriched uranium in Iran. Iran has said this contamination is from equipment it bought from abroad, with this widely believed to be from Pakistan although Pakistan is not named in IAEA reports on the matter.

The IAEA is still investigating and has not ruled out that the contamination may be from other, even domestic Iranian, sources, although the agency said in a report in November that its "overall assessment" was that "environmental sampling data available to date tends, on balance, to support Iran's statement about the origin of much of the contamination."

IAEA inspectors had in January visited locations outside Iran where centrifuge components had been stored before their shipment to Iran, IAEA deputy director Pierre Goldschmidt said earlier this month, in what was apparently a reference to visits to Pakistan.

IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said the agency was "well aware that designs and components were provided by the AQ Khan network to Iran." She refused to comment further.

Khan confessed to leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya in February 2004 after a government probe into nuclear proliferation.

The investigation was launched in November 2003 after the IAEA, the UN's nuclear watchdog, informed Pakistan about the leak.

Khan was later pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf, but he has been living under virtual house arrest in Islamabad.

Pakistani leaders have repeatedly vowed they would not allow any foreign country or agency to interrogate the nuclear scientist, who is credited with making Pakistan a nuclear power.

"We have refused direct interrogations by anyone. The reason is national sensitivity," Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri said last month at the end of a three-day visit to Tokyo.

Rashid said again Thursday Pakistan would not hand Khan over to any other country.

The United States has said Khan was leader of network of black marketeer spreading nuclear technology to different states.

"This is not a new information. We have said earlier that the illicit transfer of information and technology to Iran came through international black market," a foreign ministry official told AFP.

"A network of these black marketeers was identified and dismantled after thorough investigations," said the official, who could not be named.

The official said they came across the information that Khan had provided "outdated" centrifuges to Iran during his interrogation.

As suspected weapons programs around the world come under scrutiny, Pakistan has said its nuclear proliferation probe has not been closed and it would investigate any new information.

Iran is currently engaged in talks with Britain, France and Germany over demands that Tehran give up uranium enrichment.

EU negotiators want Iran to abandon enrichment as an "objective guarantee" that it is not developing nuclear weapons and are offering in return trade, security and technology rewards -- an offer Iran has so far refused.

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Iran-EU nuclear talks continuing, but deadlocked

GENEVA (AFP) Mar 10, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050310182923.p2z6ee28.html

Nuclear talks between Iran and the EU were to continue Friday with the two sides deadlocked over Europe's demand that Tehran give up uranium enrichment, a fuel process which can also make atom bombs, a European diplomat said.

The negotiations, which began Tuesday in Geneva, had been expected to end Thursday.

Britain, France and Germany want Iran to abandon enrichment as an "objective guarantee" that it is not developing nuclear weapons and are offering in return trade, security and technology rewards.

A new round of talks, the fifth since December, is to be held later this month, possibly in a capital of the one of the three states negotiating for the European Union -- Britain, France and Germany, another diplomat said.

The diplomat said much of the discussion this week was to prepare the next meeting, which will move from the expert to a more political "steeering committee" level designed to review progress since December.

Iran's top national security official Hassan Rowhani described the talks as "successful" despite the reported deadlock, the official Iranian news agency IRNA said Thursday.

Rowhani did not elaborate, but his comment comes on the back of warnings from other senior Iranian officials that the negotiations were in danger of breaking off.

"Iran does not see nuclear technology as means for providing security. It is only regarded as substitute to oil and gas resources," Rowhani was quoted as saying. "We have to be self-sufficient in nuclear fuel."

"There is some very hard haggling going on," a senior European diplomat close to the talks in Geneva told AFP.

European lawmakers Thursday urged Iran to stop making "confusing and contradictory" statements about its nuclear programme and reaffirm its commitment to suspend uranium enrichment, in a motion at the European Parliament.

Pakistan meanwhile confirmed Thursday its disgraced nuclear hero Abdul Qadeer Khan provided Iran with centrifuges, the machine that enriches uranium to what can be bomb-grade levels, but said the government was in no way involved in the deal.

"Dr Qadeer has provided Iran with centrifuges but the government of Pakistan had nothing to do with it. He gave them from the black market," Information Minister Sheikh Rashid told AFP.

The first public disclosure that Khan gave Iran centrifuges needed to enrich uranium comes as Washington is mounting pressure on the Muslim country to give up its alleged nuclear weapons programme which Tehran insists is for peaceful purposes.

Iran also insists it has the right to enrich uranium under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and that it will eventually resume fuel cycle work.

The EU-Iran talks began in December after Iran had agreed the previous month to temporarily suspend uranium enrichment as a confidence-building measure.

The European approach is one of "constructive engagement," in contrast with the United States which wants to bring Tehran before the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.

Washington is however preparing to back the European initiative. Diplomats say US cooperation is needed if Europe is to deliver on the trade and security benefits Iran seeks, which range from joining the World Trade Organization to having US economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic lifted.

A second European diplomat said Britain, France and Germany have told the Iranians that if they insist on enriching uranium they should "put in place objective guarantees as good as their abandoning the fuel cycle and they haven't come back (to the Europeans) on that."

The diplomat said the Europeans were content to have the negotiating process drag on.

"As long as we're talking, the Iranians are suspending their fuel cycle activities and that is good," the diplomat said.

A third European diplomat said the whole process may be in a state of limbo until after Iranian presidential elections in June decide whether pragmatists or Revolutionary Guard hardliners take power.

"One side may be prepared to make a deal. Another side may want a bomb at all costs," the diplomat said.



-------- japan

Japan's TEPCO delays restart of nuclear power unit

Thu Mar 10, 2005 03:10 AM ET (Reuters)

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7861371

TOKYO, March 10 - Top Asian power utility Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) (9501.T: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Thursday it had delayed the restart of the No. 3 nuclear generator at its Fukushima-Daiichi power plant due to mechanical trouble.

TEPCO, which shut the 784,000-kilowatt unit on Aug. 9, 2004 for regular inspections, said it had begun the restart process on Tuesday in order to resume power generation on Monday next week.

But the company had to suspend the restart on Wednesday due to the mechanical trouble. TEPCO has no idea when it will be able to resume the process, it added.

Currently, seven of TEPCO's 17 nuclear power units are operating.


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Japan Warns EU Against Unilateral Reactor Move

REUTERS JAPAN: March 10, 2005

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/29880/story.htm

TOKYO - Japan warned the European Union on Wednesday against starting to build the world's first nuclear fusion reactor, saying such a unilateral move would backfire.

The two sides are competing over a multi-billion-dollar project to host the reactor.

"It is a question of whether we should regard the project as a simple material object or a framework for international cooperation," Satoru Ohtake, director of fusion energy at the Science and Technology Ministry, told Reuters.

"If they were to do that on their own, what they would lose would be huge ... Why should only Japan make a concession?"

In Brussels on Monday, European Research Commissioner Janez Potocnik said the EU wanted to start building the reactor by the end of 2005 with or without an international agreement.

"I intend to pursue a six-party agreement until the last possible moment," Potocnik said in a statement after briefing EU research and industry ministers.

"I am at the same time determined that the solution including the highest possible number of parties should be found soon, that is in due time to allow construction to start before the end of this year."

Six partners are involved in the quest to construct the first thermonuclear reactor -- the European Union, Japan, China, the United States, Russia and South Korea.

Japan's close security ally, the United States, and South Korea have supported building the reactor in Rokkasho, a Japanese fishing village, but EU sources believe they would back a move to construct it in Cadarache, France, if Tokyo stepped aside.

Ohtake reiterated that Japan's September proposal for the reactor project was superior to that of the EU.

"The EU's argument does not excel our offer," he said, without elaborating on the Japanese proposal. "But we should continue our negotiations."

He said it was too early to hold high-level political talks to resolve the simmering dispute. The EU had called on Japan to hold such discussions to reach an early compromise.

"We are trying to host the project not for money or economic reasons. We believe it's meaningful to bring the project -- a centrepiece of global science -- to Japan or Asia," he said.

Nuclear fusion has been touted as a long-term solution to the world's energy problems, as it would be low on pollution and use sea water as fuel. But 50 years of research have so far failed to produce a commercially viable fusion reactor.

Construction of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is forecast to cost some 4.6 billion euros ($6.14 billion) over 10 years. The EU intends to cover 40 percent of that from its budget while France has proposed doubling its contribution to 20 percent of the costs.

Including a development phase, the ITER project is forecast to last 30 years at an overall cost of 10 billion euros. ($1=.7491 euro)


-------- mideast

Israel, U.S. war game eyes Iranian missiles

Thu March 10, 2005 6:14 PM GMT+05:30
By Dan Williams (Reuters)

http://www.reuters.co.in/locales/c_newsArticle.jsp;:423044e6:be6c65ef4c396cf3?type=worldNews&localeKey=en_IN&storyID=7864654

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Israel and visiting U.S. troops began a biennial air-defence exercise on Thursday that Israeli security sources said aimed to boost the Jewish state's preparedness for any future Iranian missile strike.

The month-long war game, codenamed Juniper Cobra, will test Israel's Arrow II missile-killer system in conjunction with U.S.-supplied Patriot batteries, which shoot down incoming threats at lower altitudes.

Israeli and U.S. officials described the drill, last held in 2001 on the eve of the Iraq war, as routine.

"There is absolutely no connection with this exercise and any event in the region," U.S. Army spokeswoman Connie Summers told the American military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

But Israeli security sources said Juniper Cobra would treat Iran's most advanced Shahab-3 missiles, which are thought capable of reaching Israel, as the main "threat".

"These war games always take a real enemy into consideration," said a source. "Last time, it was Iraq's Scud missiles. This time around, it's the Iranian Shahabs."

Fears of a confrontation between Israel and arch-foe Iran have risen in recent months. Israel and its U.S. ally accuse the Islamic Republic of seeking nuclear arms and have hinted at military action as a final option to stop it getting the bomb.

Tehran insists its nuclear programme is for energy needs only and that the Shahab is intended as a deterrent -- especially against Israel's assumed atomic arsenal. Iranian officials have vowed to retaliate if the country is attacked.

The Arrow is the world's only system capable of intercepting missiles at atmospheric level, an advantage considered key to prevent devastating fallout from non-conventional warheads.

Iraq fired 39 Scuds with conventional warheads at Israel in the 1991 Gulf War, causing one death and extensive damage in residential neighbourhoods mainly on the Mediterranean coast.

Patriot missiles supplied to Israel were largely ineffective in intercepting the Scuds but have since been upgraded.

Independent experts estimate the Arrow's success rate at 95 percent but some doubt whether it would be reliable against a salvo of Shahab-3s, which are four times faster than Scuds.



-------- missile defense

Missile Defense Test Failed As Support Arm In Silo Failed To Clear: General

Washington (AFP) Mar 10, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/news/bmdo-05l.html

An interceptor missile failed to fire in a missile defense test last month because a support arm in the silo did not clear when it was supposed to, a senior Pentagon official said Wednesday.

Air Force Lieutenant General Henry Obering, director of the Missile Defense Agency, said the program to field a system capable of intercepting long-range ballistic missiles was going through "a period of disappointment."

"The hard things about missile defense we are accomplishing. The easy things is what we are having trouble with, like arms moving out of the way," he told reporters.

The interceptor missile has now failed to launch in two successive tests because of what officials described as relatively minor glitches.

Obering said that in the latest test on February 14 the interceptor missile shut down when a support arm in the silo failed to move out of the way prior to launch.

Three arms are positioned around the interceptor missile in the silo. Just before launch they are lifted out of the way like a drawbridge, he said.

"In the case of the last flight test in February, one of those arms did not completely clear, and therefore the signal was sent to the fire control system to stop the launch," he said.

Experts still do not know why the arm failed to retract, or what the implications are for the eight interceptor missiles already installed in silos in Alaska and California.

"I'm very, very disappointed in this last test because of the simplicity of the failure, and the fact that it was a glitch that really got in out way," the general said said.

A flight test on December 15 was aborted because of a software glitch.

The interceptor missile shut down in that test when an internal safety device on the interceptor detected an anomaly in electronic message traffic between the flight computer and the thrust vector controller, which guides the missile.

Obering said he has chartered an independent review of the testing program to try to determine why the failures weren't caught in time, and how they can be prevented in the future.

He also appointed Rear Admiral Kathleen Paige, who heads a separate program to develop a sea-based missile defense system, as director of mission readiness to get the testing program for the ground-based system back on track.

The next flight test could be held as early as the end of April if the underlying cause is identified quickly, he said.

The Pentagon had expected to put the ground-based missile defense system into operation by the end of last year, but that has been delayed indefinitely.

Obering, however, said missile defense crews in Alaska and California can now shift the ground-based system from a test mode to an operational posture in a matter of minutes as a result of "shakedown" exercises.

"When we started the process back in October it was taking us hours to be able to make that transition. We've worked that down to minutes, and we continue to refine the procedures for that," he said.

The February 14 flight test was not a complete loss, according to Obering.

Radar and other sensors tracked a target missile that was fired from Kodiak Island, Alaska. Fire control computers generated a "weapons task plan" that was relayed and accepted by the interceptor missile before it shut down.

Obering also highlighted the successful intercept on February 24 of a short range missile by a Standard Missile-3 interceptor fired by Aegis destroyer in the Pacific.

It was the fifth successful test of the sea-based system. But it marked the first use in a test of operational versions of the SM-3 missile and the Aegis missile defense system.

Paige said the Aegis destroyer received no warning of the missile shot, which was fired from just over 100 miles away.

"We hit the warhead of the threat missile right where we needed to, right where we expected to," she said.

The test was the centerpiece of a three week naval exercise called Stellar Dragon which involved a mock war a sea with two Aegis warships, submarines and gunboats.

It has come amid tensions with North Korea, which said this week that it was no longer bound by a moratorium on missile tests that it has observed since September 1999.

Paige said the navy has four operational SM-3 missiles available in case of a crisis.

"If called upon in an emergency, that system can deploy and defend against short, medium range ballistic missiles," Paige said.

"The hammer isn't cocked but if you cock it, they will be loaded," she said.

Seven Aegis warships have been modified for missile defense missions, several of which are stationed in the western Pacific. Obering said they are equipped to track missiles with their Spy-1 radars but not to engage them.

----

Pentagon sees missile-defense progress

March 10, 2005
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050309-112253-8284r.htm

U.S. defenses against enemy missiles are progressing toward full deployment and a new sea-based version hit a simulated Scud missile flight during a test last month, Pentagon officials said yesterday.

    Air Force Lt. Gen. Trey Obering, director of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, told reporters that the basic system of interceptor missiles, sensors and tracking devices is working and is a critical national security weapon.

    "Overall I'm very optimistic," Gen. Obering said during a telephone conference. "This is a critical capability and I think that people will realize over time that we absolutely need this for our security, and I think we'll look back and say thank goodness that we were able to develop this system when we did and get it into the field."

    Eight long-range missile interceptors currently are deployed in Alaska and California as both a test system and emergency missile shield against a very limited long-range missile attack.

    Gen. Obering declined to comment on North Korea's recent announcement that it is ending its self-imposed moratorium on long-range missile tests.

    Rear Adm. Kathleen Paige, a second Missile Defense Agency official, said the Navy's Aegis ballistic missile defense weapon hit a simulated Scud missile in flight over the Pacific last month. The Feb. 24 launch of Standard Missile-3 near Hawaii scored a direct hit in a wartime-conditions exercise.

    "This was a very important test because it was the first time we had ever used an operational version of the Aegis ballistic missile defense weapon system," Adm. Paige said.

    The test involved a realistic "war at sea" scenario and concluded with the Navy cruiser USS Lake Erie firing the first SM-3 at a 310-mile-range target missile.

    The Navy currently has four additional SM-3s that could be deployed in a conflict. The full system of 18 SM-3-armed ships will be deployed beginning in 2007. An additional six Aegis-equipped warships are currently deployed in Asia to monitor North Korean missile launches as part of the missile defense system.

    The SM-3 missile slammed into the nose of the Scud target missile 80 miles in altitude and about three minutes after launch, and about 80 seconds after the Erie's radar system detected it, Adm. Paige said.

    Gen. Obering said two recent ground-based interceptor test failures were disappointing, the result of minor "glitches" that are being fixed.

    Last month, a ground-based test interceptor failed to launch after a connecting arm on the silo failed to retract. An earlier test of the long-range interceptor failed due to a software problem.

    "We have confidence in the basic functionality of the system," he said. "We've got some things to correct in our test program, but they are not major deficiencies in the system."

    The current ground-based missile defense can be converted from a test system to an emergency operational missile defense in "minutes," he said. 

----

Missile Defense Director Moves to End Test Glitches
Equipment Review Ordered; Admiral to Oversee Preparations

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 10, 2005; Page A19

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21817-2005Mar9?language=printer

The general in charge of the Pentagon's faltering effort to develop a system for defending the United States against ballistic missile attack said yesterday that he has ordered a thorough review of all ground equipment used in testing and appointed a senior Navy officer to oversee future test preparations.

The moves by Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry A. "Trey" Obering III follow failed attempts in December and February to launch interceptor rockets in tests of the fledgling system. Both failures have been blamed on what defense officials say were minor glitches -- a flawed software code in December and a faulty silo retracting arm in February.

In a conference call with reporters, Obering expressed continued confidence in the system. He said that even without the launch of the rockets, the recent tests scored some successes by demonstrating the system's ability to track target missiles and generate intercept instructions. But he acknowledged frustration at the tendency of simple glitches to foil the tests.

"The hard things about missile defense we are accomplishing," Obering said. "The easy things are what we're having trouble with."

The testing setbacks have proven especially disappointing for the Pentagon, which has been hoping to get into a rhythm of regular flight trials after a two-year hiatus in such experiments. The new tests are particularly important because they are the first attempted flights of the system's interceptor missile, which is designed to fly into space and release a "kill vehicle" that would steer into enemy warheads. Previous flight tests relied on a slower, less advanced interceptor.

The tests are part of an effort to construct a scaled-down version of the "Star Wars" network envisioned by President Ronald Reagan two decades ago. While Reagan imagined a shield against a massive Soviet attack, President Bush has pursued a more limited system aimed at thwarting a small number of ballistic missiles that might be fired at the United States not by a major power such as Russia or China but by a smaller adversary such as North Korea or Iran.

But Bush has pushed to make the system operational before it has been subjected to realistic testing, prompting complaints from congressional Democrats and many scientists that the program remains largely unproven. The Pentagon has conducted 10 flight tests since 1999, scoring five hits but under conditions markedly different from what would occur in actual attacks.

Obering said he hopes to run another intercept test by the end of April. But investigators have yet to determine the root cause of last month's failure of the retracting arm -- one of three arms that were in the silo, the general said.

He said the review of all ground-testing equipment that he has ordered is patterned after an intense study of the history of all interceptor components conducted last year. He has also asked a team of independent experts to look "at our complete test process on the ground" for signs of weakness, he said. And he has created a new post -- director of mission readiness -- for managing future test preparations.

The new post will be filled by Rear Adm. Kathleen Paige, who has led a parallel Pentagon effort to develop a ship-based system for intercepting short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. That program has scored successful intercepts in five out of six tries. Obering said he hopes Paige will bring "some of the expertise and procedures from the sea-based program" into the land-based one.

"We've got some things to correct in our test program, but they are not major deficiencies in the system," said the general, who serves as director of the Missile Defense Agency. "These are things that we should not be plagued with; we should not be having these types of glitches.

"They're not going to generate major modifications," he added. "I will take some steps to make sure that we have solved those minor problems that keep tripping us up. But, overall, I'm very optimistic."

The Bush administration had planned to place the land-based system on alert by last October. But even with the first interceptors installed several months ago, the system has remained in what Pentagon officials continue to refer to as a "shakedown" phase.

Obering said adjustments in the system have led to a substantial drop in the time required to switch it from a test mode to an operational one for intercepting enemy missiles.

"It was taking us hours to make the transition," he said. "We've worked that down to minutes."

Eventually, he added, the plan is to be able to achieve the transition in no time at all -- like the flick of a switch.


-------- nato

NATO to invest 59 million euros in two Bulgarian airbases

SOFIA, March 10 (AFP) 

Mar 10, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050310184408.g1sy4jyp.html

The Bulgarian government approved a NATO project to invest 59 million euros to modernise two of Bulgaria's airbases, officials said Thursday.

The 79-million-dollar investment is part of a larger NATO project on improving collective defence in the Alliance, which Bulgaria joined in April

Two Bulgarian airbases will receive funds from the project - the multifunctional airport for large aircraft at Bezmer, south-east, and Graf Ignatievo to the south, which would be used for stationing US fighters and refueling aircraft.


-------- treaties

McNamara derides 'illegal' nuclear policies
Former defense secretary: U.S., global powers must reduce arsenals

The Associated Press
Updated: 6:21 a.m. ET March 10, 2005

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7146042/

SAN FRANCISCO - Former defense secretary Robert McNamara said Wednesday the United States and global nuclear powers haven’t adhered to nonproliferation treaties and have done little to reduce nuclear arsenals following the end of the Cold War.

advertisement
Speaking about U.S. and NATO nuclear policies at the World Affairs Council, the Vietnam-era defense secretary said the United States and other nuclear powers like Russia and China have pursued policies that are “illegal and immoral.”

“A decade after the Cold War, the basic U.S. nuclear policy has not been changed,” said McNamara, 88, adding that he believed “every leader of a nuclear power should be present at a detonation.”

The remarks come as the Bush administration grapples with the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to discuss North Korea during an upcoming trip to South Korea followed by visits to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

China is heading stalled six-way talks to deter North Korea from building a nuclear weapon. North Korea has refused to return to the talks for now.

McNamara said the United States has continued to pursue an aggressive nuclear policy, including plans to update or enhance existing nuclear weapons and construct devices like “bunker busters” and “mini-nukes.” He added that Russia still has scores of nuclear weapons pointed at the United States, many with antiquated operating systems.

“We have absolutely got to get rid of these weapons or reduce them to the degree that there is no chance of destroying nations,” he said.

McNamara added that the threat of terrorists using a nuclear device could be reduced if the United States in particular tried to understand terrorists’ anger and motivations.

McNamara served as defense secretary in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations — he resigned as Johnson’s defense secretary as public opposition rose to the Vietnam War — and was also president of the Ford Motor Co. and the World Bank.

Recently featured in the film “The Fog of War,” McNamara was a prominent figure in the foundation of early U.S. nuclear weapons strategy. He was later criticized for his role in Vietnam by both veterans and the anti-war movement.


-------- u.s. nuc weapons

Roland Anderson, A-Bomb Patent Lawyer

By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 10, 2005; Page B07

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22168-2005Mar9?language=printer

Roland A. Anderson, 97, a patent lawyer for the Manhattan Project and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, died Feb. 28 of congestive heart failure at Suburban Hospital.

Mr. Anderson was born in Brockton, Mass. He received his undergraduate degree from Upsala College in East Orange, N.J., and a law degree from Columbia University and was admitted to the New York bar in 1932.

From 1932 to 1942, when he enlisted in the Navy, he was a lawyer with two New York firms, Sheffield & Betts and Edward Bower & Poole.

As a Navy officer, Mr. Anderson served from 1942 to 1946 as deputy adviser on patent matters, Office of Scientific Research and Development, and from 1944 to 1946 as deputy chief of the Manhattan Engineer District, better known as the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb.

"No man had greater insight into the technical details of the entire project than [Capt. R. A.] Lavender and his chief deputy, Roland A. Anderson, for they examined all the detailed inventions made," Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the project, wrote in his book, "Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project."

When Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal presented Mr. Anderson the Navy Commendation Medal in 1946, he noted that because of "his keen judgment and legal knowledge in effecting the settlement of difficult technical situations, he made possible the assembly of records defining the government's basis for the rights under all such inventions."

Mr. Anderson retired from the Navy with the rank of commander in 1946.

Following his military career, he served as chief of the Patent Branch of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission from its inception in 1947 to 1959. He was assistant general counsel for patents from 1959 until his second retirement in 1973.

He served on the Ad Hoc Committee of the Federal Council for Science and Technology, which developed the Presidential Patent Policy Statement of 1963, and in 1971 was vice chairman of the Committee on Government Patent Policy of the Federal Council for Science and Technology. He also was chairman of the committee's executive subcommittee.

He continued to serve as a private patent consultant for a number of years. He contributed articles to professional periodicals and spoke before organizations on patent matters.

A member of the Federal Bar Association and the Government Patent Lawyers Association, he also was active in his community. He was a member of Augustana Lutheran Church in the District for more than 50 years and a member for 25 years of the board of directors of the Chevy Chase Fire Department. He also was involved with the Hamlet Citizens Association and was a member of the American Legion.

He enjoyed golf (scoring a hole-in-one in 1978), bowling, home movies and travel throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. At age 94, he accompanied his family to Alaska, where he went whitewater rafting.

Survivors include his wife of 51 years, Sarah Grandstaff Anderson of Chevy Chase; a daughter, Beth Offutt of Malvern, Pa.; and two grandchildren.


-------- u.s. nuc facilities



-------- nevada

Despite delays, Yucca director says project is alive and well
Bush support remains strong

By Benjamin Grove
<grove@lasvegassun.com>
March 10, 2005 Las Vegas SUN WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2005/mar/10/518426855.html

WASHINGTON -- Despite critics recently sounding a death knell for Yucca Mountain, the nuclear waste repository program is alive and well, the acting Yucca manager told Congress this morning.

"I believe we are better situated today than we have ever been to move forward with this program," Theodore Garrish, deputy director of the Energy Department's Yucca program, said at a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing.

Garrish is standing in as the person in charge of the Yucca Mountain program in the wake of Margaret Chu's resignation from the Yucca director position.

In testimony Garrish delivered a rosy portrait of the program, adding that Bush administration support remains strong.

"We are poised to make significant progress in the coming years," he said.

After the hearing, Garrish acknowledged that two program hurdles made it impossible to say exactly when Yucca might open. That depends on when the Environmental Protection Agency releases a revised radiation standard, and on Congress delivering Yucca budget requests, Garrish said.

"I don't know what the end date is because of those two issues," Garrish told reporters.

Chu had said the underground repository could be completed by 2012. Garrish called that the "earliest" possible date. Project critics and some insiders have said 2015 or 2017 is more realistic.

Garrish said the department still aims to have its application for a license to construct Yucca completed by the end of this year, although the department may not actually submit it to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by then.

The planned $57.5 billion program has been beset by delays and budget setbacks since Congress chose the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas as the nation's high-level nuclear waste dump.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a member of the appropriations panel with jurisdiction over Yucca, today ticked off a short list of program setbacks, including a July federal court ruling that threw out the EPA's 10,000-year radiation standard, and an Energy Department delay in filing Yucca documents on a public computer database.

"Last year was really a bad year for Yucca Mountain," said Reid, who annually works to slash funding for Yucca.

Garrish said the department had submitted roughly 1 million documents, roughly 5 million pages, to the License Support Network database. The department aims to post another 3.7 million documents, which are under review, by mid-summer.

"All told, the license application process is going well," Garrish told the panel.

Panel chairman Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., asked Garrish if the Energy Department's $651 million request for Yucca in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 was sufficient. Garrish responded that it was.

But Garrish in his testimony emphasized that the department still aims to lean on Congress to give it more direct access to a national nuclear waste fund, free from the constraints of annual budget limits set by Congress. The program will need "significantly increased funding" in the 2007 fiscal year and beyond, Garrish said in prepared written testimony.

"Historic appropriations will not get this job done," Garrish told reporters. "Where you need the money is in the construction."

Next year the department needs money to respond to NRC reviews of the license application, Garrish said. The department's goals for 2006 include fabricating prototype waste containers; procuring some equipment for Yucca construction; and completing a revised work plan, cost estimate and schedule, he said.

The department this year aims to complete the license application and complete a draft environmental impact report for the Nevada rail line that would be used to ship waste to Yucca.

Of most immediate concern to program managers is how the department's license application will mesh with the new radiation standard, which the EPA could release this spring. The department's license application aims to demonstrate to the NRC that Yucca can meet the court-rejected 10,000-year standard.

Energy Department and EPA officials are not having a behind-the-scenes dialogue about the revised standard, Garrish said. The department has merely given technical data to the EPA, he said. He dismissed Nevada officials who claim the two agencies are legally, but inappropriately, communicating about the revised standard without Nevada participation.

"This is totally EPA's issue," Garrish said. "They have to decide the standard, not us."


-------- utah

Utah Republicans fight nuclear dump on reservation site

Hatch: 'Yucca Mountain is the ultimate goal'

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thursday, March 10, 2005 Las Vegas Review-Journal

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Mar-10-Thu-2005/news/26036981.html

SALT LAKE CITY -- Frustrated at failing to win over federal regulators, Utah officials took their case against a high-level nuclear repository proposed for a Utah Indian reservation to the White House on Wednesday.

Utah Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett and Rep. Rob Bishop met with White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, a former Utah resident and Bush strategist.

Hatch and Bennett said the meeting was good, but they wouldn't say whether Bush administration officials had made any specific commitments to stop the commissioning of a nuclear waste dump on the Goshutes' Skull Valley land.

"They know that Yucca Mountain is the ultimate goal here; it's what has to be done under the circumstances and we're going to do everything to help them get there," Hatch said. "But we expect them to help us to not have to put up with this type of treatment."

Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman will go to Washington next week to meet with Bush administration officials about several issues, including the state's opposition to the nuclear-waste plan.

The new effort comes after the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board rejected the state's argument that there was an unacceptable risk that a fighter from Hill Air Force Base could crash into the waste site and release radioactive material.

The state has asked the board to reconsider its decision. If that fails, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will decide whether to license the facility.

The repository would be on the Goshutes' Skull Valley land 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. It would be operated by Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of eight utilities, as a temporary dump for spent nuclear fuel rods before they are stored permanently at the proposed Yucca Mountain facility, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Opponents fear that if the temporary site is approved, the Yucca plans will be dropped and Utah will end up having the depleted nuclear fuel permanently.

Hatch said state lawmakers would have to go the extra mile to ensure that the state didn't "suffer the indignity of having 4,000 casks of spent fuel rods stored above ground" near the Utah testing range.

In 2002, Hatch and Bennett agreed to vote for storing waste at Yucca Mountain in exchange for a pledge from then Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Card that federal funds would not be used to help ship nuclear waste to the Goshute facility if it were licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

---- 

Matheson Renews Fight to Protect Utahns from Nuclear Weapons Testing

"Utahns are still dealing with the legacy of illness, suffering and death as a result of the government's deceit about the dangers of past nuclear testing."

March 10, 2005 Congressman Jim Matheson's office

http://www.house.gov/matheson/press2005/050310.html

Washington, D.C. - Congressman Jim Matheson today announced he has reintroduced legislation that impedes efforts to resume nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site.

Matheson originally introduced the "Safety for Americans from Nuclear Weapons Testing Act" in 2004 after funds were appropriated to study development of two new types of nuclear weapons and to shorten the time needed for test site readiness. Since then, administration officials have indicated that development of new weapons or problems with the current nuclear weapons stockpile may lead to renewed testing. Without additional legislation, testing can resume at the discretion of the Secretary of Energy.

Utahns are still dealing with the legacy of illness, suffering and death as a result of the government's deceit about the dangers of past nuclear testing. Matheson notes scientific evidence that refutes the Department of Energy's claim that radioactive fallout from underground blasts is completely contained.

"Like thousands of Utah families, I am painfully aware of the federal government's failure to protect its citizens from the dangers of radioactive fallout created during atomic testing in Nevada," said Matheson. "The federal government said we were safe. The federal government knew we were at risk. I will not stand by and let the government take Utah families down that path again."

Matheson said he is very pleased that Sen. Bob Bennett has announced plans to reintroduce companion legislation in the U.S. Senate. Bipartisan efforts in the House and Senate last year resulted in much of the proposed funding for nuclear weapons development being zeroed out from the FY 2005 Department of Energy budget.

The President's fiscal year 2006 budget includes $8.5 million in both the DOE and the Department of Defense budgets to continue studying the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, or "bunker-buster" weapon. Matheson said he doubts the military would spend half a billion dollars developing new nuclear weapons and then not test them. Matheson and other defense hawks favor research into non-nuclear precision weapons to destroy deeply-buried, hardened bunkers.

"Government studies clearly show past nuclear testing resulted in extensive radiation exposure throughout the country. To date, more than 5,100 Utahns have filed claims under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) for cancer and other illnesses from atomic fallout. More than $200 million has been paid by the Department of Justice. We need much more accountability from the federal government before we even consider putting citizens at risk again," said Matheson.

Matheson said his legislation would require the government to conduct a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review to assess health, safety and environmental impacts prior to conducting nuclear weapons testing, require Congressional authorization prior to the possible resumption of weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site, and require at least one week's public notice prior to any test. It also requires government and private monitoring of radiation levels throughout the country and creates a consortium of universities that will study the health effects of radiation exposure. Finally, it includes new provisions that ensure local citizen involvement.

Groups such as the National Atomic Veterans Association, the Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Utah Medical Association, the Ute, Navajo and Paiute Tribal Governments, the Grand County Council, and the St. George Chamber of Commerce have endorsed the legislation.

"I remember my father telling me about how people in southern Utah would watch the sky light up from the nuclear tests and how Utahns supported the program because they were strong patriots who believed in their country and trusted their government. Many untimely deaths later, we've learned to be skeptical of the government's safety claims regarding this issue," said Matheson.

From the Office of Utah Congressman Jim Matheson

MATHESON NEWS
2nd DISTRICT

For Further Information
Alyson Heyrend: (801) 486-1236
Cell: (801) 455-5593
http://www.house.gov/matheson

March 9, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE


Alyson Heyrend
Communications Director
240 E. Morris Ave., #235
Salt Lake City UT 84115
(801) 486-1236 fax (801) 486-1417
(801) 455-5593 cell



-------- vermont

Entergy prepares dry cask proposal (Vermont)

By CAROLYN LORIé
Brattleboro Reformer Staff
Thursday, March 10, 2005

http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102~8860~2754621,00.html

BRATTLEBORO -- There might be some progress on the horizon for getting the dry cask storage issue at Vermont Yankee moving through the state Legislature.

Rob Williams, spokesman for Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee, said the House Committee on Energy and Natural Resources asked plant officials to submit a proposal for what they are seeking.

Williams said the company would have something to the committee by the end of the week.

Legislators are also in agreement about how the issue will be addressed.

After conflicting statements about whether the matter would be dealt with through a petition process or through a bill, Rep. Steve Darrow, D-Putney, said legislation would be introduced through one of the standing committees. Entergy will not go through the petition process, which would have most likely taken much more time.

Darrow also said that current discussion among legislators indicate that the bill will cap the number of units to those necessary to get through to 2012, which is when the plant's license expires.

Another matter under consideration is taxing each cask, which an Entergy representative said would not be acceptable to the company.

The state of Minnesota currently taxes the casks at one of its nuclear power plants that is owned by several utilities. Although Entergy Nuclear is a private corporation, nothing in Vermont law bars the state from doing the same as Minnesota.

Once the issue is resolved in the Legislature, Entergy can apply to the Public Service Board for a certificate of public good.

There has been some confusion about whether the company could pursue approval from both bodies simultaneously. Earlier this week, however, the Windham Regional Commission recommended that the board reject Entergy's application until the general assembly gave its approval for dry cask storage.



-------- virginia

North Anna nuclear debate is good--as long as it's based on fact
Facts--not diatribes--are needed in nuclear-power debate

Date published: 3/10/2005 Fredericksburg Lance-Star

http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2005/032005/03102005/1688320

RICHMOND--In his recent letter to the editor, Paxus Calta ["Want the whole story on nuclear power? You pay, big time," Feb. 25] quotes me as saying, "We're here because we don't think the media are telling the whole story."

Linking my statement to "anti-market subsidies," he presents the typical propaganda and skewed data of anti-nuclear extremists that I was criticizing. He quotes me out of context, disingenuously, to make his point.

My assertion was that the benefits of nuclear power receive short shrift in the public discourse on this country's energy needs. Yes, the nuclear industry receives research and development funds from the federal government, but so does every energy technology.

The 2006 Department of Energy research and development budget provides $1.2 billion for renewables and conservation, $800 million for clean coal, and $510 million for nuclear. These levels reflect the growing awareness that the United States will need a diverse generation portfolio to meet increasing demand, to reduce emissions, and to move closer to energy independence.

Some technologies also receive production tax credits. For example, the current tax credit for wind power is $18 per megawatt-hour produced. Currently, no such production tax incentive exists for the nuclear industry.

However, in order to assist in overcoming financial concerns and uncertainty in using a new licensing process, some have suggested that the first few new nuclear plants be provided with a limited set of incentives. The most recent proposal capped support at $125 million for up to 6,000 MW for the first eight years. This formula would equate to about 35 cents per MWh.

Calta's description of government support also distorts the Price-Anderson Act. First, nuclear operators do carry their own property insurance. Second, the Price-Anderson Act allows commercial nuclear operators to purchase "group" liability insurance that would be used only in the case of a major accident.

For both property and liability insurance, commercial nuclear operators pay 100 percent of the premiums; taxpayers and the government contribute nothing.

Since its inception in 1957, the Price-Anderson Act has become a model for other industries and activities that our society deems essential, such as oil production, agriculture, banking, and vaccine production. If we were to eliminate all such programs, many people would lose their homes, children would not be vaccinated, and food and oil prices would skyrocket.

Objections to the Yucca Mountain project fail to mention that commercial nuclear operators have paid, and continue to pay, billions of dollars to a fund to store and dispose of spent nuclear fuel.

Much of the delay and final costs of the project can be attributed to the frivolous lawsuits filed by extremist groups such as the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, for which Calta is a board member.

After working in the management of spent nuclear fuel for nearly a decade, I am confident that it can be transported and disposed of safely. If citizens revolt, as Calta suggests, it will be when they realize that the problem of final disposition is political, not technical.

And Calta's windmills? Sixty thousand of the most advanced windmills operating under the best conditions in the most suitable areas would occupy more than 1.3 million acres of land and would equate to less than 10 percent of our nation's current electricity production.

Furthermore, his cost estimate for windmills does not take into account that backup power sources must be built and maintained to compensate for wind power's low-capacity factors.

That's not to say that we shouldn't build wind farms where feasible, but even the American Wind Energy Association has concluded that under the best of circumstances, wind energy could supply only about 6 percent of our nation's electricity by the year 2020.

Should citizens raise their concerns regarding new nuclear power plants and energy policy? Certainly. But we can't have a fair debate without proper perspective.

LISA SHELL is vice president of North American Young Generation in Nuclear, a group of individuals aged 35 and younger who work in the fields of nuclear science and technology.



-------- us nuc waste

Catapult Technology Wins $45.6 Million Contract From the Department of Energy Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM)
                 
March 10, 2005 /PRNewswire/

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/03-10-2005/0003161043&EDATE=

    BETHESDA, Md.  -- Catapult Technology, Ltd., a Maryland-based 8(a) Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB), has been awarded a five-year $45.6 million contract to support the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) at the U.S. Department of Energy.  This is the largest single award to an SDVOSB.

    Established in 1982 by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, OCRWM is dedicated to develop and manage a federal system for storing spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear reactors and radioactive waste from national defense activities. OCRWM has established a program of three major projects: the Yucca Mountain Project, The National and Nevada Transportation Project and the Waste Acceptance Project, all with significant emphasis on efficient and effective project management.

    OCRWM is dedicated to protecting the health and safety of the current population and future generations in a safe and environmentally conscious manner.  Since 1982, the Yucca Mountain Project has led extensive scientific studies to suitably develop an underground repository for safely isolating radioactive nuclear waste for at least 10,000 years.  Currently, the Yucca Mountain Project is acquiring a license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to construct the repository.

    Catapult will support OCRWM in obtaining this licensing.  Emphasizing safety and quality, Catapult will provide IT support services for the operation and maintenance of the OCRWM communications network, computer operations, cyber security, software development, and program support activities at three sites:  Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, and Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

    Randy J. Slager, President and CEO of Catapult, noted, "This contract recognizes Catapult's award-winning past performance as the contractor of choice for many government agencies.  Catapult is a project-oriented organization with a proven focus on quality and safety.  We look forward to working with the Department of Energy by supporting the safe operation of the repository, protecting people and the environment."

    An established 8(a) Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned information technology and consulting firm, Catapult provides quality technology solutions, human resources and management consulting to the federal government and private sector.  Recognized as the top SDVOB IT prime contractor to the federal government, Catapult is the 31st fastest growing private company in the country.  An SEI Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI(R)) Level II company, Catapult is ISO 9001:2000 registered.  Founded in 1996, Catapult has a staff of approximately 300, many of whom hold active security clearances. 

     Richard Lum
     Communications Director
     Catapult Technology, Ltd.
     (240) 482-2100

SOURCE Catapult Technology, Ltd.
Web Site: http://www.catapulttechnology.com  



-------- MILITARY 


-------- biological weapons

An Acidic Message

Thursday, March 10, 2005; Page A20

Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22101-2005Mar9.html

WHEN 758 microbiologists send an open letter to the director of the National Institutes of Health, protesting the premise of a $1.7 billion research project, everyone should sit up and take notice. Just such a letter was recently dispatched, complaining that unprecedented increases in NIH funding for biodefense projects not only had diverted funds from more basic and important microbiological research -- a claim that NIH disputes -- but corrupted the NIH peer-review process. A system that in the past awarded grants to the best scientists, the critics suggested, now awards grants to any scientists, good or bad, who study anthrax.

There are good reasons to criticize NIH for its management of the biodefense money that Congress granted after the 2001 anthrax attacks. NIH had never before funded anything other than basic research and had never involved itself directly in the production of specific vaccines or therapies. It is doing so because Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, argued that his institute, and not the Defense Department -- which has failed to produce vaccines in the past -- was the best place for that work to be done. Mr. Fauci believed (and still does) that there would be spinoffs for other areas of science. But while scientists doing basic research don't like the change, some in Congress have precisely the opposite set of concerns: namely that the NIAID is wasting money pursuing multiple research projects with unclear goals and hasn't figured out how to focus on the nation's more specific biodefense needs.

If it were intended only to get the government to think harder about the best ways to define, fund and manage biodefense work, the open letter would serve a useful purpose. If the letter were intended to point out that some basic research in microbiology, immunology, genetics and other fields could prove, in the long term, more important to the nation's biodefense than specific work on anthrax or plague, we would also agree. That, certainly, is a message that Congress and the administration need to hear.

Where we lose sympathy for the authors is when they state that funds have been diverted from "projects of high public-health importance" to "projects of high biodefense but low public-health importance." This country has already experienced one anthrax attack. Security officials have stated repeatedly their belief that al Qaeda and others continue to search for more lethal bioweapons. Surely that makes biodefense projects of "high public-health importance." That this is not more widely understood means that there is still too little contact between the scientific community and national security and intelligence agencies. This letter, which was written and published in an openly confrontational manner, won't help solve that problem.


-------- iraq

Ex-Marine Says Public Version of Saddam Capture Fiction

United Press International March 10, 2005

http://www.wokr13.tv/news/national/story.aspx?content_id=422B960A-26BA-4891-9E60-21C8818788D4

A former U.S. Marine who participated in capturing ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said the public version of his capture was fabricated.

Ex-Sgt. Nadim Abou Rabeh, of Lebanese descent, was quoted in the Saudi daily al-Medina Wednesday as saying Saddam was actually captured Friday, Dec. 12, 2003, and not the day after, as announced by the U.S. Army.

"I was among the 20-man unit, including eight of Arab descent, who searched for Saddam for three days in the area of Dour near Tikrit, and we found him in a modest home in a small village and not in a hole as announced," Abou Rabeh said.

"We captured him after fierce resistance during which a Marine of Sudanese origin was killed," he said.

He said Saddam himself fired at them with a gun from the window of a room on the second floor. Then they shouted at him in Arabic: "You have to surrender. ... There is no point in resisting."

"Later on, a military production team fabricated the film of Saddam's capture in a hole, which was in fact a deserted well," Abou Rabeh said.

Abou Rabeh was interviewed in Lebanon. 


-------- mideast

Bush Administration Advises Israel to Be Quiet on Lebanese Politics

By STEVEN ERLANGER
March 10, 2005 NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/10/international/middleeast/10cnd-israel.html?pagewanted=print&position=

JERUSALEM, March 10 - The Bush administration has told Israeli officials, including the foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, to hold their tongues on the politics of Lebanon in order not to help Syria and its main supporter there, Hezbollah, Israeli officials said today.

But Israel is making no secret of its desire to see Syria out of Lebanon, representing a new consensus on the part of the Israeli political and strategic elite that the days of Syrian-sponsored stability in Lebanon are over.

The Israeli view is that Hezbollah, which is financed and supplied by Iran and Syria, would be more weakened by a Syrian withdrawal than restrained by a continuing Syrian presence.

Hezbollah is Israel's main concern. Not only does the group represent Shia interests opposed to Israel's existence and to a possible peace treaty with the Palestinians, Hezbollah forces, with more than 10,000 Syrian-supplied rockets, also line Israel's northern border and finance suicide bombers in the West Bank.

Until the last year or so, Israeli officials say, the consensus was different - that Syria, with its reputation for keeping its treaties, was an agent for stability in Lebanon and especially in southern Lebanon, which Hezbollah controls, not the Lebanese army. There, Israeli army outposts along the border are matched by Hezbollah outposts, often in fortifications originally built by the Israeli army before former prime minister Ehud Barak pulled out of Lebanon completely in 2000.

"The idea was that the Syrians are awful, but they provide an address if something goes wrong and represent the status quo," a senior Israeli official said. "But the dominant paradigm has now changed. The status quo Syria represents is no longer a stable one. Our view now is that the status quo is not good."

Another Israeli official acknowledged that there is "some apprehension about Syria leaving Lebanon, but it's a calculated risk one has to take to weaken Hezbollah." Hezbollah has been forced to take a blatantly pro-Syrian, and thus anti-Lebanese stand, the official said. "By distancing Syria from Lebanon, by loosening its grip to some extent, this will definitely hurt Hezbollah. It won't wither away, but it will lose potent support."

Israel sees Hezbollah and Iran "as practically synonymous," the official said, while Syria served as an Iranian ally in the locality, able to supply Hezbollah with weapons and money. "Syria was able to stop any activity of Hezbollah in Lebanon at will, which is why Israel trusted Syria," the official said. "But Syria used Hezbollah for its own purposes, to drive us out of Lebanon. And it was happy for Iran to supply Hezbollah for that purpose. All that may now become much more difficult, which is why Hezbollah had to come out so firmly in public on the Syrian side."

Iran is nervous, too, the officials said. Iran sees Israel as an ideological enemy and a regional rival, which is pushing the United States and Europe to try to deny Iran nuclear weaponry and destroy the Iranian revolution. "Iran's gun against Israel is Hezbollah in southern Lebanon," a military intelligence official said. "And Iran also uses Hezbollah to keep the Palestinian pot boiling in the West Bank," by offering thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. Iran also has dozens of Revolutionary Guard officers in southern Lebanon.

Eran Lehrman, a former Israeli intelligence officer who directs the Israel office of the American Jewish Committee, said that the Israeli elite is traditionally divided along the same lines as Washington: the stability-seekers versus those who seek profound change.

"You can find people who think that Syria is more or less handling Lebanon, so we have an address if something goes wrong, and others who think that if Lebanon becomes Lebanon with a capital L, there is a chance for real change - that it might be able to extend its control to its own borders, rather than being held hostage to Iranian-Syrian tactics versus Israel," Mr. Lehrman said.

He said Israel blames Syria for the recent assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister. "Hariri understood that prosperity meant stability and no longer being hostage to the agenda of Hezbollah, Iran and Syria," he said. "To the Syrians, Hariri was a foreign agent working with the United States and France to create the U.N. resolution calling on Syria to leave Lebanon and forcing it on Syria's neighbors. That's enough to get you killed in Syria's neighborhood."

That the killing of Mr. Hariri increased pressure on Syria to leave Lebanon isn't the point, Mr. Lehrman said. "Sometimes stupidity needs no other explanation," he said, and the new Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, is considered much weaker than his late father.

As recently as December, the Israeli national security council warned about the destabilizing effect of a Syrian exit from Lebanon, which could give Hezbollah "greater freedom of operation to escalate the conflict on Israel's northern border."

"The transition could be difficult," one of the Israeli officials said. The Syrians could create "provocations" designed to frighten the Lebanese about chaos or to "change the focus" to renewed Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the official said. "Of course Israel has options, too," the official said. "We could respond to Hezbollah provocations by hitting Syria itself or Syrian forces in Lebanon, to show that we know the source and have no fight with the Lebanese people."

But Syria has existential interests in Lebanon that will make it very difficult to leave, said Michael B. Oren, a historian with the conservative Shalem Center here. "Syria needs income from the Lebanese economy and drug-smuggling, which brings in as much as $4 billion a year," Mr. Oren said. "Hezbollah allowed Syria to have a quiet border with us on the Golan Heights and an active, combative border with us in Lebanon. Until Barak, the assumption was that we had to give back the Golan to make peace with Lebanon. But now that syllogism is being deconstructed, which makes Syria and Hezbollah very anxious."

Assumptions are shifting, Mr. Oren said. "It's like pool - someone has smacked the triangle of balls, which are going every which way. We don't know how it will fall out, but the status quo has been obliterated."



-------- prisoners of war

Alleged torture 'outsourcing' protested

Washington, DC, Mar. 10 (UPI) 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20050310-044046-2701r.htm

Two Democratic House members and human rights groups rallied Thursday to protest what they called the "outsourcing" of torture by the Bush administration. 

 Reps. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Betty McCollum, D-Minn., joined representatives from several human rights groups to demand an end to the practice of "extraordinary rendition," in which they said the United States sends prisoners to other countries that are known to use torture.

The rally included representatives from Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, Amnesty International, Association of the Bar of City of New York/NYU School of Law and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Media reports this week said the White House issued a directive authorizing the CIA to hand over prisoners to other countries for interrogation, including countries known to routinely practice torture, Markey's office said.

The office cited a CBS News "60 Minutes" story that highlighted the alleged use of a "torture plane" to send prisoners to 40 countries, including human rights abusers such as Syria and Uzbekistan. 

----

U.S. military has new interrogation rules

Washington, DC, Mar. 10  (UPI)

http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20050310-072332-4071r.htm

There have been at least 70 cases of substantiated abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, according to a new military review. 

 The report by former Navy Inspector General Vice Adm. Albert Church said Pentagon policies that allowed harsher interrogation techniques are not to blame for the abuse. Instead it was a breakdown of military discipline at low levels.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Army in Iraq has issued new, more restrictive guidelines for interrogating prisoners that more closely reflect traditional Army doctrine.

The Church report said senior military officials should have taken swifter action when the first signs of prisoner abuse appeared, and should have issued clear guidance on how to handle prisoners. Both might have halted the abuses, which came to light graphically when photos of prisoners being humiliated and mistreated were released publicly.

The New York Times reported Thursday the new procedures in Iraq clarify the prohibition against the use of muzzled dogs in interrogations, give specific guidance to field units as to how long they could hold prisoners before releasing them or sending them to higher headquarters for detention, and makes clear command responsibilities for detainee operations.


-------- space

No plan B for outer space

Mar 10th 2005
From The Economist print edition

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3738886

America's plans for humans to explore space may cause it to relax its laws on weapons proliferation

HERE'S a wizard idea. Spend $40 billion building a big tin can in orbit round the Earth, in order—at least in part—to keep the rocket scientists of your former enemy from going to work for your current enemies. Then find that a law intended to stop the current enemies getting their hands on such rocket scientists' knowledge means you can no longer use this expensive tin can. Confused? You are not the only one. Because that, in a nutshell, is what is about to happen to American space policy unless the law is amended. Indeed, it looks likely that if the law is not changed, America's entire manned-spaceflight effort, and another $50 billion of spending with it, could come to nothing.

The legislation in question is the Iran Nonproliferation Act (INA), which came into force in 2000. The orbiting tin can is the International Space Station (ISS), an American-led (and largely American financed) project which also involves Japan, Canada, Brazil, the EU and, most notably, Russia. To keep people on it requires regular servicing trips. In practice, that means visits from America's space shuttles (grounded at the moment) and Russia's Soyuz spacecraft. But after April next year, an agreement that committed Russia to supply the space-station programme with flights on Soyuz will expire. From then on, America's space agency, NASA, will not be able to pay for any more Soyuz flights because of the INA.

NASA has information about the International Space Station. See also the Iran Nonproliferation Act and the House Committee on Science.

The act prevents NASA from buying such flights until the president certifies that the Russian government is demonstrating a “sustained commitment” to prevent the transfer of weapons of mass destruction and missile-delivery systems, and also that neither the Russian Space Agency nor any entity reporting to it has made any such transfers in the previous year. So even if the space agency were as clean as a whistle, Russia's government has to be behaving itself. And it isn't, so there is something of an impasse.

In the absence of the shuttle, visits to the station require two Soyuz vehicles: one docked as an emergency escape pod and one to transport astronauts to and from the station, an arrangement that NASA would not be allowed to benefit from after April 2006. But even if shuttles return to service this year, as is planned, they can only remain docked to the station for a few weeks at a time, which puts a limit on the span of any American stay there.

The implications are serious. Besides shutting off the flow of money to the impoverished Russian agency, it would, in the words of a report issued on March 2nd by the Congressional Research Service “significantly affect US utilisation of the ISS”. David Goldston, chief of staff at the House of Representatives' Committee on Science puts it more bluntly. He says the issue has the “potential to stop the space-station programme dead in its tracks. It is absolutely essential that Congress decide within the next six months how it is going to deal with this issue.”

Mir, Mk II?

For those who can remember the early 1990s, this may all seem a bit odd. The rationale for inviting Russia into the station partnership in the first place was to ensure that its scientists and engineers were involved in peaceful activities, and not inclined to sell their knowledge to rogue states. The trouble is that, by 1998, there was evidence not only that Russia was flouting the Missile Technology Control Regime but also that “entities” of the Russian Space Agency—in other words, Russian companies that produce material for the agency—were doing so, too.

So, when the INA was enacted to put pressure on Russia to stop transfers of weapon and missile technology to Iran, it also explicitly banned payments for the space station. Today, that leaves a difficult situation. It is likely that the president will be unable to certify that Russia is a non-proliferator. So what else could be done? Timothy Hughes, legal council for the House science committee, says that “given heightened concerns about proliferation, the conflict between non-proliferation law and the goal of fully utilising the ISS may be difficult to resolve. One scenario involves amending the INA.”

Such amendments would involve the science committee as well as the House Committee on International Relations. A spokesperson for its chairman, Henry Hyde, agrees that legislation will be needed. According to him, “It is our understanding that the administration will forward a proposal in the near future.”

Whether the Russian Space Agency itself is now implicated in proliferation is classified information. Sources point out optimistically that America has not yet chosen to apply sanctions to the agency. But that does not necessarily mean that the Americans are happy with it. The key question is spelled out in the Congressional Research Service report, which wonders whether “the non-proliferation benefits gained by linking the ISS to Russian proliferation are worth the costs to the US space programme at this point.”

These costs could be high. According to the president's new “vision” for space exploration, the station is needed to study the long-term effects of space travel on humans. How such long-term effects are to be studied if astronauts are allowed to visit only for a handful of two-week spells a year is unclear. Already, some people are asking questions about whether much of this research—into such things as “psychosocial” adaptation (not murdering your companions), bone loss, the effects of radiation, and the remote delivery of medical attention—could be done on the ground.

Given poor access to the station, it is also hard to see how NASA could justify spending another $30 billion on completing it by 2010. And if the station were not completed, then the shuttle would not be needed either. Together, they represent about $50 billion of planned expenditure over the next decade.

No wonder a kerfuffle is going on between the administration, Congress and NASA. What kind of legislation might emerge is unclear. One possibility might be to permit a discrete and limited allowance of payments for Soyuz. These, at least in principle, might be tracked.

Another possibility is for NASA to modify its shuttles so that they can dock with the station for longer. First, though, these shuttles must demonstrate that they can fly safely at all. Hopes are high for the first intended flight in May, but there are worries about the second. A panoply of new sensors, cameras and monitoring systems has been added, and nobody knows what nasty surprises about safety these may reveal after the first flight. Despite this, NASA is still saying, in public at least, that there will be another 28 shuttle flights to complete the space station. That implies a rate of five a year from 2006, which some experts regard as hopelessly optimistic—so NASA must also decide what it can build with fewer shuttle flights. This would mean further compromises on what the station could do.

All of which raises a question and an intriguing possibility. The question is just what NASA is for. Sherwood Boehlert, the chairman of the House science committee, has cautioned it against becoming a single-mission agency by viewing everything through a lens of manned exploration and putting science second. NASA has always tried to stretch itself too thinly, and if its whole vision is focused on manned exploration, then science will probably suffer. The agency has already trimmed its Glory mission, designed to answer crucial questions about climate change, as well as a mission intended to investigate the Jovian moon Europa. If NASA truly sees itself as a manned-exploration agency, and its plans for the next five years hinge on the intricacies of international politics, then not much is left if things go wrong.

The intriguing possibility, therefore, is that Russia, which was encouraged to destroy its ageing Mir space station when the ISS opened, could inherit sole use of the new station. Whether it would want such a dubious prize is a different matter.



-------- spies

BOOK EXCERPT 'A Spy's Journey: A CIA Memoir'

PRESIDENTS AND INTELLIGENCE
March 10, 2005 NY TIMES
By FLOYD L. PASEMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/10/books/chapters/0310books-paseman-excerpt.html?pagewanted=print&position=

Chapter Nineteen

Presidents have been users and abusers of intelligence since the inception of the republic. Some have been great users, some have been indifferent, and some have had no use for intelligence-particularly human spies. But they all have had one thing in common-they had some idea of what they expect intelligence to do. Bob Gates, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from 1991 to 1993, may have said it best: "Presidents expect that . . . the product [of intelligence] should be able to predict coups, upheavals, riots, intentions, military moves, and the like with accuracy. . . . Presidents and their national security teams usually are ill informed about intelligence capabilities; therefore they often have unrealistic expectations of what intelligence can do for them."

I'll now offer some observations about U.S. presidents and intelligence through history, and I'll confine most of my comments to those presidents who were in office during my active days with the CIA from 1967 to 2001.

None other than the father of our country, President George Washington (1789-1797) ran spy networks himself, and set the precedent for requesting contingency funds from Congress for that purpose. Washington also used ciphers and directed several covert action operations. Perhaps the best-known failed American spy, Nathan Hale, was in fact one of the first spies recruited and dispatched by Washington. The successful interception and decryption of Lord Cornwallis' dispatches precipitated Washington's final victory at Yorktown. Washington's spy adventures were reputed to have been the inspiration for James Fenimore Cooper's highly successful novel The Spy, which was first published in 1821.

With the precedent set, most presidents since have actively used intelligence for a variety of purposes. One of the great advocates of democracy, Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), used covert action against the pirates of the Barbary Coast. James Madison (1809-1817) and John Tyler (1841-1845) both undertook overseas actions based on intelligence, although Madison may also be best known for one of the first intelligence failures-the failure to learn of the British approaching Washington during the War of 1812. The British thus burned the White House, giving Madison and his wife time enough only to save Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Washington and the original draft of the Declaration of Independence.

President James K. Polk (1845-1849) also dispatched secret agents on missions, but is best remembered for his eloquent defense of the contingency fund and the right of the president to protect sources and methods from an inquisitive and demanding Congress. In Polk's own words: ". . . in time of war or impending danger the situation of the country may make it necessary to employ individuals for the purpose of obtaining information or rendering other important services who could never be prevailed upon to act if they entertained the least apprehension that their names or their agency would in any contingency be divulged." That defense remains legal precedent today for the protection of U.S. intelligence agency sources and methods.

During the Civil War, in the tradition of Washington, Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) was also his own spymaster. Lincoln recruited and ran a spy by the name of William Lloyd, a publisher of rail and steamship guides who had access to every Confederate state. Lincoln tasked and paid Lloyd personally. Unfortunately for Lloyd, no records were publicly available to substantiate this. Lloyd sued for monies due him after Lincoln's assassination, and helped to create law when the Supreme Court ruled against him in "Totten, Administrator, v. The United States" (1875), when it upheld a president's absolute right to contract and dispatch secret agents. The court ruled that Lloyd would have to seek redress from his employer-who of course was dead!

Additionally, Lincoln employed the famous Alan Pinkerton to set up spy networks in the Confederacy. Lincoln also pioneered the use of overt press to gather and analyze intelligence. An avid reader of the southern press, Lincoln made many of his decisions on the basis of press reporting from southern newspapers and other periodicals.

Both presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, actively used intelligence during the Civil War. However, with the end of the war, most later presidents were relatively passive about the use of intelligence. Presidents neglected intelligence so much during this period that, during the Spanish-American War, when the United States military discovered they had no maps of Cuba, they were reduced to getting copies from the British.

The one exception was Teddy Roosevelt (1901-1909), who benefited from good intelligence during the Spanish-American War. Enamored with clandestine operations, Roosevelt actually instigated a covert action in Panama to acquire the Canal Zone. Roosevelt immodestly claimed all the credit, stating: "I do not think that any feat of quite such far-reaching importance has been to the credit of my country in recent years; and this I can say was my own work. . . ."

It wasn't until World War I boiled over that presidents again generally became active users of their own intelligence services. Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) was on the receiving end of an intelligence coup-the Zimmerman Telegram that drove the U.S. to abandon neutrality and enter the war. And, to Wilson goes the accolade of being the developer of independent analysis when he created an independent unit called the Inquiry. This was a group of businessmen and academics whose job was to help the president develop courses of action following the end of World War I. Indeed, it was the Inquiry that wrote most of Wilson's Fourteen Points.

The other Roosevelt, Franklin (1933-1945), was president during the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history before 9/11, the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Although he was intrigued with intelligence, and also reportedly ran one or two agents of his own, Roosevelt liked the fractured nature of U.S. intelligence at the time-with the army competing with the navy, and the FBI competing with both. Roosevelt had a cozy, close relationship with British intelligence operating out of New York and liked the British patrician way of doing business. Although he finally agreed to the first national U.S. intelligence apparatus, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Roosevelt never supported closer overall coordination of a national U.S. intelligence effort.

During Harry Truman's presidency (1945-1953), a more systematic use of intelligence finally began to take shape with the establishment of the first national intelligence service in history, the CIA, in 1947. When he assumed office, Truman was ill prepared to oversee the nation's secret operations. Incredibly, when Truman was vice president, he was denied knowledge of the Manhattan Project-the development of the atomic bomb. Truman set about to ensure that no future president-elect would be taken by surprise by either foreign events or intelligence operations conducted on behalf of the current administration. Truman instituted a procedure that became tradition and offered all presidential candidates secret intelligence briefings even before the elections. That tradition endures today, although the frequency and depth of these briefings has varied widely. All presidents-elect, however, have received substantial, in-depth intelligence briefing before taking office.

President Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower (1953-1961) was the first recipient of these candidate briefings when he first ran for president in 1952. Ike knew the value of intelligence from his days as Supreme Commander during World War II. Ike further knew the value of technical intelligence and pushed technical collection to new heights during his two terms. The U-2 was developed and deployed with Ike's backing. Ike is also known as the first president to publicly acknowledge spying on another country, the U.S.S.R., during the Cold War. This incident was when a U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia, which greatly embarrassed the administration when the pilot, Gary Francis Powers, was captured alive.

In fact, following Eisenhower, in several instances candidates have believed that pre-election briefings have influenced the presidential debates before the elections. Candidate Richard M. Nixon was persuaded that his opponent, John F. Kennedy, had been briefed on the planning for the Bay of Pigs and took advantage by attacking Nixon as being soft on Cuba. Historians remain divided as to whether or not Kennedy was briefed on the CIA's Cuba operations. Regardless, Nixon never really forgave the CIA.

And, the 1960 election was the first where the vice-presidential candidates received at least rudimentary briefings. All vice-presidential candidates since then have also received briefings in various forms.

But John F. Kennedy (1961-1963) was himself surprised by some of the intelligence he did not receive in briefings from President Eisenhower and his staff. As the specter of Vietnam arose, Kennedy complained once in private, "Dammit, Ike never mentioned Vietnam. He talked about Laos and the 'Secret War,' but he didn't say a word about Vietnam." Kennedy had a fascination with intelligence, particularly human intelligence and covert action. Kennedy was the benefactor of two of the greatest spy operations in history. The first was Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the U.S.S.R., who spied for the United States and Great Britain and provided near-real-time intelligence to the president during the critical time of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Additionally, Kennedy benefited from the excellent photography of the U-2 during that same crisis. Perhaps no other president has faced such a crisis-near nuclear war-and saved his nation and perhaps the world due to human and technical intelligence.

President Lyndon Johnson (1963-1969) never liked or trusted the CIA or other U.S. intelligence organizations. Johnson considered intelligence analysts who took official positions to be unhelpful to his own domestic agenda, the Great Society. When I came into the CIA in 1967, Johnson was president, and we were engaged in the escalation of what was to become the Vietnam quagmire. In CIA headquarters, it was said there were three kinds of case officers: those who had been to Vietnam, those who were in Vietnam, and those who were going to Vietnam.

It is entirely possible that Johnson's first experiences with security and intelligence-the tragic assassination of JFK-left him jaded about intelligence, analysis, and warnings. Johnson's first question to his foreign policy team was to ask if the assassination could be part of a Soviet plan to strike, followed by a full-scale missile attack.

But a more likely reason for Johnson's aversion to the Agency was that he reportedly held a grudge, believing the CIA had conspired to help Kennedy get the Democratic nomination at the 1960 convention. Further, Johnson felt the Kennedys-Jack and Bobby-had a mutual admiration with top levels of the CIA that he did not have. Johnson's uneasiness extended to his immediate relationship with the CIA director he inherited, John McCone, with whom he was never comfortable. Given that, it is not difficult to understand Johnson's ultimate rejection of any intelligence on Vietnam with which he disagreed. Further, as documented by Christopher Andrew in his excellent work, For the President's Eyes Only, Johnson was really only interested in what the CIA could do in the field of covert action in North Vietnam.

Johnson firmly believed that the increasing military losses absorbed by the North Vietnamese would ultimately lead them to conclude that they couldn't win the war. When CIA analysis repeatedly stated that, in fact, the North Vietnamese would and could sustain such heavy losses, Johnson simply discarded the CIA analysis and relied even less on their product. In fact, during perhaps the defining moment of the Johnson administration, the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, Johnson showed no interest at all in CIA information about the incident.

History has proven that CIA assessments during the Vietnam War were accurate, and reflected the deepening quagmire in Southeast Asia. Interestingly, this was in opposition to Johnson's inclination to believe information from his favorite-J. Edgar Hoover-and the reports of growing widespread domestic opposition to the war. Ultimately this led to Johnson's decision in April 1965 to replace McCone with a Texas crony, Vice Admiral William Raborn. Bob Gates captures Johnson's views about intelligence and the CIA with one of his most revealing quotes: "Let me tell you about these intelligence guys. When I was growing up in Texas, we had a cow named Bessie. I'd go out early and milk her. I'd get her in the stanchion, seat myself, and squeeze out a pail of fresh milk. One day I'd worked hard and gotten a full pail of milk, but I wasn't paying attention, and old Bessie swung her shit-smeared tail through that bucket of milk. Now, you know, that's what these intelligence guys do. You work hard and get a good program or policy going, and they swing a shit-smeared tail through it."

Johnson's crony for DCI didn't last long. In June 1966, Johnson surprised everyone, including Richard Helms, by announcing that he would be the new DCI.

History blames Johnson and his administration for the terrible events in the tragic attack on the U.S.S. Liberty. Although the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 ended in a sweeping Israeli victory, the attack on a U.S. naval vessel with the resultant death of 34 American sailors continues even to this day to taint the Johnson administration. And the continual denial of access to relevant files at the Johnson Library does nothing to alleviate this.

The final blow to support for the war in Vietnam struck on January 31, 1968, when Tet exploded. During the early hours of the traditional lunar holiday, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese regular forces attacked more than 100 cities in South Vietnam. This ranked with Pearl Harbor in the pantheon of intelligence failures, and ultimately led to Johnson's decision not to seek re-election. On November 5, 1968, Richard Milhouse Nixon was elected President of the United States of America.

As an aside, during Johnson's run for the office in 1964, his opponent, Barry Goldwater, in addition to receiving a crushing electoral defeat by Johnson, "set a precedent by declining to receive any intelligence briefings."

Interestingly, even though President Nixon (1969-1973) was peeved at the CIA because he believed that it provided information to Kennedy in the 1960 election, he did accept candidate briefings when he next ran in 1968. His opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, also received the briefings. And in another twist, two other presidential candidates, Governor George Wallace of Alabama and dark-horse candidate Lester Mattox of Georgia, received the briefings.

After Richard Nixon arrived in the White House, he selected Henry Kissinger as his national security advisor. Together, they made perhaps one of the most experienced foreign policy teams in U.S. history. But ironically, although Nixon was no fan of the CIA, he was enamored of the Agency's covert action capabilities and what they could do for his foreign policy, as was his predecessor.

If there was one thing that bound Nixon to his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, it was their mutual love of secrecy and foreign policy. And, although Nixon kept Richard Helms on as his DCI, he hedged his bets by moving his former military advisor Lieutenant General Robert E. Cushman in as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence.

Combined with this penchant for secrecy and action, Nixon dragged a reluctant CIA into expanding Operation Chaos, actually begun in 1967 by his predecessor. As with Johnson, Nixon was convinced that student strikes and riots, both domestic and foreign, were being fed by money from the international communist movement. He thus ordered the CIA and FBI to engage in illegal domestic surveillance on American campuses, activities for which the CIA later-and properly-was called to task. It's important, however, to note that during the academic year 1969-1970, there were 174 bombing incidents on American campuses. This further fueled Nixon's conviction that subversive elements were at work.

Nixon wanted the Vietnam War to end. He had acknowledged that, following the Tet Offensive, a military victory was no longer likely. In an effort to bring negotiations about, Nixon ordered the secret invasion of Cambodia's Parrot's Beak in April 1970. News of this immediately leaked and fueled additional protests on U.S. campuses, to include the tragedy at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when National Guardsmen shot into a crowd, killing four student demonstrators.

Nixon's foreign-policy focus turned to Chile in October 1970, when the Marxist Salvador Allende was poised to become Chile's democratically elected president. In response, Nixon ordered the CIA to take action, and ordered two simultaneous tracks of covert action: find some way to prevent Allende from being elected to office by the Chilean congress, and, more sinister, engineer a military coup. Incredibly, Nixon also ordered that the proposed military coup be kept secret from the State Department, the Pentagon, and even the U.S. Embassy in Santiago.

The attempted military coup resulted in disaster. Books have been written on this subject, but in short, even though the CIA tried to put together a coup, the CIA was unable to engineer it at such a late date. Allende was elected, and Nixon never forgave the CIA for its failure to stop Allende's election.

Nixon made a fatal decision in his attempt to set up a covert action capability to operate right out of the White House. Given that one of their tasks was to identify leakers, the unit called itself "the Plumbers." The team included two ex-CIA operatives, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. It was a farce, breaking into the office of a psychiatrist of an administration critic, Daniel Ellsberg, in hopes of getting damaging evidence. And later, this group was responsible for the Watergate episode that ultimately brought down Nixon. The Watergate burglaries-to tap the phones of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building-were almost comic in their ineptitude. The first attempt on May 26, 1972, was aborted. On May 27, a second attempt failed for lack of proper equipment. On May 28, the burglars were able to make entry and place the bugs, but several of the listening devices didn't work. On the morning of June 17, an attempt to enter and fix the malfunctioning bugs ended in the burglars' arrest and the beginning of the Watergate scandal. Incredibly, the scandal did not develop in time to become an issue in the 1972 presidential campaign, when Nixon swept to victory. But Nixon got his revenge on the CIA by firing DCI Richard Helms on November 20, 1972, and sending him off to be Ambassador to Iran. And, it was at this point that President Nixon was heard on tape to say, "What the hell do those clowns do out there in Langley?"

The election of 1972 also had its unique aspects. Nixon's opponent, Governor George McGovern, was scheduled to receive intelligence briefings as the Democratic candidate. Unfortunately, a scandal over McGovern's running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, resulted in a cancellation of the briefing, which subsequently never took place.

Nixon began his second term with a great foreign policy success, the Paris Peace Accords, ending 10 years of American involvement in Vietnam. And the year began also with a new Director of Central Intelligence, James R. Schlesinger, who took the position in February 1973. Schlesinger was an arrogant, abrasive man, albeit one of many talents. A Washington insider, Schlesinger was a former deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission at the time of his selection as DCI.

Schlesinger's stay as DCI lasted only five months, but, per instructions from the president, he wanted to shake up the CIA. In that he succeeded. Schlesinger forcibly fired and retired over 1,500 CIA employees, two-thirds from the elite Directorate of Operations, the spy arm of the nation. Morale at the CIA fell to rock bottom. Overseas assignments were cancelled; many employees overseas received cables advising them to return home to be fired. In my first decade of espionage, this was the lowest point I had experienced. It was devastating, and we expected worse as rumors abounded that Nixon and Schlesinger had only begun.

In retrospect, we were lucky that Schlesinger really had no interest in remaining DCI after the cuts, and that Nixon became obsessed and involved with the problem of surviving Watergate. Nixon moved Schlesinger to Defense (as a reward?) and appointed William Colby, a career professional, as the next DCI in May 1973.

But the turmoil was only beginning. On October 10, 1973, Spiro Agnew resigned the vice-presidency, and Nixon appointed Gerald R. Ford. On August 8, 1974, Nixon announced his resignation, and Ford (1974-1977) became the first non-elected President of the United States.

Although Ford had been appointed and therefore had not received presidential candidate briefings, he had had access to intelligence information during his time on the House Appropriations Committee from 1957 to 1965. This made for a smooth transition when he did begin getting regular CIA briefings.

But in addition to the task of restoring confidence in the presidency, Ford faced the task of restoring confidence in the CIA as well. And, he tackled both. But in the midst of his efforts, working with DCI Colby, Congress decided to begin its own investigations of American intelligence. To counter this, President Ford set up his own inquiry and established the Rockefeller Commission to look into the alleged misdeeds of the CIA in January 1975. Not to be out-maneuvered, Congress countered with the Senate establishing the Senate Select Committee (the Church Committee), and the House, not to be outdone, fielding the Pike Committee, both with the mission of probing the activities of the CIA.

Fortunately, I was overseas when these hearing made prime-time TV. But their effect was immediate and enormous on the morale of our CIA employee population. Even overseas, the films of Senator Church holding up CIA-made guns for assassination and the jocular handling of this by members of the committees was devastating to those of us trying to recruit people to spy on behalf of the United States government. It was the Church Committee that coined the now famous comparison of the CIA to the rogue elephant. And, President Ford, one of Congress' own, continued to have to battle the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress to keep what secrets were left. Also, during this time, in December 1975 the CIA station chief in Athens, Richard Welch, was brutally gunned down by the cowards known as "November 17."

Ford's difficulties with Congress finally ended. His early efforts to restore CIA morale in 1976 were aided by the fact that the Pike Committee self-destructed in controversy when the entire committee voted not to release its own report for security reasons. Additionally, the Rockefeller Commission, and even the Church Committee, found in the end that "the CIA has done its job."

As an important footnote, from 1975 to 1979 I personally recruited more high-level spies than at any other juncture in my career. The truth was that all the publicity about the CIA enhanced the belief by foreigners that the CIA could do anything.

At the Republican National Convention in August 1976, Ford barely defeated another Republican, whose criticisms of him were fatal-Ronald Reagan. And the result was that Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in November by less than two percent of the vote.

President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), in the words of author John L. Helgerson, "distinguished himself in the eyes of CIA officials by becoming the first presidential hopeful to request intelligence briefings even before receiving his party's nomination."9 None of us intelligence professionals will ever forget the four years under President Carter. He made being a Washington outsider into a plus in the early stages of his presidency. And, we faced in Walter Mondale, Carter's vice president, one of the most anti-CIA senior cabinet officers in history. However, I must note that, after he became ambassador to Japan, Mondale had an awakening. He had refused to deal with the CIA when he visited Japan in the mid-1970s, but when I visited Tokyo as chief of the East Asia division, Ambassador Mondale hosted a reception for me.

It was very difficult to deal with Carter's belief that HUMINT- spying by people-was distasteful, but the interception of their communications-SIGINT-or the photographing of their denied areas-IMINT-was acceptable. Carter's ultimate rejection of spying came when he refused, for the first time in history, to retain the sitting DCI, George H. W. Bush. And, although Carter eventually replaced him with a crony from the Naval Academy, Stansfield Turner, most people forget that Turner was not Carter's first choice. That honor went to ex-JFK aide Theodore Sorensen. However, Sorensen's background as a conscientious objector worked against him, and during confirmation he withdrew his nomination, clearing the way for the later nomination and confirmation of Turner.

The nomination of Turner, who, along with Carter, had no use for human spying, drove the sagging morale at the CIA even lower. The clandestine service, the DDO, was a shell of its former self, being reportedly nearly only half of its previous size when Turner took charge. In August 1976, Turner announced that the spy directorate would have to take another 820 cuts in the next two years, 147 being immediate forced retirements.10

I was overseas when the bombshell was announced, and the lack of sensitivity in the way this was handled was incredible. A number of officers found out they were on the list of 147 by being notified of their retirement electronically. Confidence in Turner, and Carter by extension, was lost. It didn't help that it took Carter a year and a half from Turner's confirmation to make his first visit to the CIA headquarters.

It's ironic that, with the decimation of our human intelligence collection network, it was the subsequent lack of human intelligence on Iran that let Carter down in the end during the hostage crisis. But you can't have it both ways-fire and retire hundreds of experienced, language-qualified officers, and still enhance your ability to recruit spies. By February 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini returned in triumph, the stage was set for tragedy in Tehran.

Meanwhile, as with every recent president before him, Carter became enamored with the idea of CIA covert action capabilities helping solve a political/foreign policy problem. This took root when, on December 27, 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Carter was determined to make the Soviet Union pay the price. Under a presidential covert action finding (the requirement that a president find that a covert action is essential to American foreign policy before it can be funded in Congress), in January 1980 Carter authorized the CIA to begin funneling arms to the Mujahideen guerrillas. Again, ironically, it was Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, who got the credit for driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan via one of the most successful covert action programs ever run-begun by Carter.

But the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, left Carter with a problem that dominated the remainder of his term. To his credit, Carter authorized a rescue attempt for six diplomats who had managed to escape to the Canadian embassy undetected, and, through daring and good intelligence, these six were rescued in January 1980. Details of that escape are contained in Antonio Mendez' book, Masters of Disguise. That success encouraged Carter to direct a military rescue attempt to save the other 43 hostages being held in Tehran; Operation Eagle Claw was born.

The CIA and intelligence units of the U.S. military had done their jobs right. Agents and support mechanisms for the rescue were in place. April 24 was set as the date. But things went wrong from the start, and at a refueling location in the Iranian desert, eight Americans and one Iranian interpreter were killed in a mishap when helicopters and refueling aircraft collided. Combined with the earlier loss of three essential helicopters, Carter had no choice but to abort the rescue and announce its failure to the American people-and the world. Carter's presidency never recovered, and he was defeated decisively by Ronald Reagan that November.

In the 1980 campaign, candidate Reagan received but one intelligence briefing, but he became an intelligence advocate following his election. Reagan had a built-in intelligence advantage because his vice president-George H. W. Bush-was the first former Director of Central Intelligence to be elected to that position (and later, as president).

No president in history initiated as many covert action programs as did Ronald Reagan (1981-1989). Interestingly, Reagan's first exposure to intelligence and intelligence matters came after the end of his time as governor of California. President Ford appointed him to the Rockefeller Commission that was to look into the issue of alleged CIA abuses. And, during his campaign against Carter, Reagan scored big when he promised to unleash the CIA.11 When he appointed as his DCI William J. Casey, an OSS veteran who hated communism and bureaucracy, it was inevitable that trouble was brewing in the intelligence arena.

Morale boomed as the administration got money to rebuild the spy apparatus and launched an all-out assault against communism. But with Casey sitting at the president's elbow, having successfully lobbied to be the first DCI in history to be a cabinet member, it was inevitable that this combination would push covert action and intelligence to its legal limits.

Central America was first on both the president's and Casey's agenda, and Nicaragua and the Sandinistas were first on that list. Reagan signed his first finding against Nicaragua, and this included defending El Salvador as one of its objectives. By the end of Reagan's first year, we were arming and training the anti-Sandinista guerrillas from a base in Honduras. The resistance group was known as the Contras.

Interestingly, President Reagan's hard line against the Soviets and Eastern Europe was more popular than the threat that he and Casey saw closer to our own borders. Congressional opposition came in the form of a proposal, the Boland Amendment, which was a structure to forbid the use of U.S. funds to overthrow the democratically elected communist Sandinista government. In December 1982 both houses of Congress adopted the amendment, thereby prohibiting the CIA from providing equipment, training, or advice toward the overthrow of the government of Nicaragua. Casey seethed. And while he seethed, Iran-Contra was born.

It was preceded by the incredible presidential approval for the CIA to begin placing mines in the harbors of Nicaragua, ostensibly to interdict arms shipments arriving there. The blunder worsened when six ships from six different nations-including one from the Soviet Union, struck the mines. It was only through good luck than none sank. A full crisis was now on hand as Congress learned the full extent of the operation and the CIA involvement. (Interestingly, one of my classmates was on the ships laying the mines. He told me that all of our maritime experts had told their superiors that this was an operation that would not stop the arrival of shipping, and would not likely remain covert.)

This was the point at which Reagan and particularly Casey felt the CIA was being too negative and not aggressive enough in taking on the communist threat, particularly in Central America. Thus it was that the direction of these covert action programs moved from the CIA to the National Security Council (NSC), then under National Security Advisor Robert "Bud" McFarlane. With Casey's eager encouragement, McFarlane had been attempting to find other sources than Congress to support the Contras. He found funding initially from Saudi Arabia. And he found the man to make the operation work, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, one of his assistants at the NSC.

Meanwhile, in the 1984 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Walter Mondale received only an overview of world events from the sitting National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane. Mondale never requested any briefings from the CIA, and he lost the election to Reagan.

In Reagan's second term, North quickly became the driving force to Casey's and Reagan's desire to defeat the communists in Central America, no matter the cost. The entire operations left the control of the CIA. North assumed powers far beyond his Lt. Colonel position. And, covert operations began to intermingle. Reagan was also preoccupied with the developing problems in Lebanon, where, by the end of 1985, nine Americans had been taken hostage. Given the Iranian hostage crisis, which turned to his benefit, Reagan was determined to rescue these hostages. Thus, Iran-Contra was born.

Incredibly, President Reagan authorized the covert sale, by Israel, of U.S.- made TOW missiles to Iran in an attempt to gain the release of the hostages held in Lebanon, taken and held supposedly under the direction of Iran. In short, the President of the United States of America was humiliated by a gang of thieves, approved of during the rogue operations of the NSC, with the result that only three hostages were released while Iran gained thousands of missiles and other equipment. The basic problem was simply that DCI Bill Casey, and President Reagan as well, simply could not pass by the opportunity to have antagonistic state -Iran - pay for missiles, the proceeds from which the NSC would then divert to pay for the war against communism in Central America. The trouble was, of course, it was all illegal and ignored intelligence community assessments.

The foolishness of this operation was best illustrated by the scandal which followed, greatly embarrassing President Reagan. Casey was spared the ignominy of this by his unfortunate and untimely stroke and subsequent death in 1987. And, his successor, Bob Gates, had to withdraw his nomination as Director of Central Intelligence in the uproar which followed. In all, it was an inglorious end to the reign of a President and a Director of Central Intelligence who had been provided the very best that the CIA could offer in intelligence and analysis.

During the 1988 election campaign, Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis agreed to and received only one intelligence briefing before the election. Dukakis' vice presidential candidate, Senator Lloyd Bentsen, attended that one briefing.41

By 1989, however, Reagan's legacy had come full turn, and his Vice President, George Bush, a former Director of Central Intelligence, became President of the United States (1989-1993). Earlier, when he had been offered the post of DCI, Bush, a savvy politician, had at first been concerned about being earmarked for a position that was a dead end for a politician - a "no win" job designed to take him out of the political arena. Bush, however, was wise enough to accept it only on the condition that he gain direct access to the President - a condition President Ford had agreed to.

Despite the fact that Bush had been DCI, the DCI when he became president, William Webster, was never close to him. As a result, initially Bush relied on his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, and his Deputy, Bob Gates. President Bush began to rely more and more on the advice of Bob Gates to deal with his most pressing problem, the Soviet Union.

And the Soviet Union, of course, began to unravel early in Bush's presidency. By mid 1989, the Soviet leader Gorbachev's own intelligence apparatus had begun to work against him, and Bush was well served by good, accurate CIA assessments about the staying power of Gorbachev and his likely successor, Boris Yeltsin. Bush was well prepared for the events that followed, due to his affinity for, and support of, good intelligence. Even though the CIA had not predicted the ultimate dissolution of the Soviet Union, they had warned well and early about the likelihood of revolt and trouble in the Eastern European countries. And Bob Gates gained still more influence with the President.

About the same time, an intelligence fiasco further diminished DCI Webster's standing with the administration. The CIA had attempted to plan a coup against Panamanian leader and thug Manuel Noriega. He had proven to be a real pain to the Bush administration, and Bush consequently wanted him removed. The failure of the CIA to implement a covert action there to remove Noriega led Bush to finally order military action to accomplish the goal. The United States invaded Panama on December 20, 1989, and secured the surrender of Noriega the following month. Operation Just Cause, as it was known, was the largest use of military force since the Vietnam War.

By mid 1990, the President was occupied by the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait - an event intelligence had warned was coming but which still surprised the administration diplomatically. The fact was both human and technical intelligence confirmed Hussein had no intention of invading our closet Arab ally, Saudi Arabia, thus freeing the administration to concentrate on a response to the Kuwait invasion. The administration responded with a full-fledged war in the Middle East, Operation Desert Storm, launched in January 1991. No President has ever been served better by intelligence than was President Bush during the war that followed. Human intelligence, imagery, and signals intelligence - all served to provide immediate and up-to-date information desperately needed by - and used effectively by - U.S. military commanders. This was to become the model for "support to the war-fighting Commanders-in Chiefs," a phrase which was to become the guiding principle for U.S. Intelligence for the next two presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. It involved the total dedication of all intelligence resources - human intelligence, signals intelligence, imagery, and mazint (the measurement of emanations such as telemetry) - to provide all source collection and analysis directly to the battlefield commanders.

But the Bush administration was to learn a lesson - there are limits to what intelligence of all sorts can do. The first Bush administration got involved in what was known as "the Great SCUD Chase."42 Despite the best intelligence that the United States and Israel could garner, the U.S. forces never totally destroyed Hussein's primary weapon of fear, the SCUD missiles which continued to bring death and destruction throughout the First Gulf War. As we know, the second Bush administration made the same mistake in their mistaken pursuit of weapons of mass destruction during the 2002 Second Gulf War.

One thing the first Bush president did was to ensure a trusted intelligence professional held the nation's highest intelligence office - the Director of Central Intelligence. The first Bush did so when he made Bob Gates the DCI in the fall of 1991. The second Bush emulated his father and decided to leave the consummate intelligence professional, George Tenet, in the position following the election of 2000. In between, as we shall see, the two terms of the Clinton administration largely ignored both intelligence and the DCI.

The presidential campaign of 1992 had many unique aspects as regarded the candidates and intelligence briefings. President and candidate George Bush continued receiving the briefings he had been getting for 12 years. Given that he had also been the Director of Central Intelligence in 1976, he knew and understood the importance of making the intelligence briefings available to all candidates. Candidate Bill Clinton was offered and accepted intelligence briefings. In another unique growth in the process of acquainting the potential presidents and vice presidents with intelligence, for the first time the briefings of candidates Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore, included sessions with the outgoing chairmen of the two Congressional intelligence committees, Senator David Boren and Representative David McCurdy.43 The candidates were well prepared.

If there is one word to describe the Clinton (1993-2001) administration's attitude towards intelligence in its eight years, it is neglect. Along with the Clinton administration's obvious focus on the domestic economy - which won them the election - it was quickly clear that the administration in reality had little interest in intelligence as an adjunct to foreign policy. In one of his first appointments, Clinton ousted one of the most experienced professional intelligence officers to hold the position of Director of Central Intelligence, Bob Gates. The selection of R. James Woolsey as the new Director of Central Intelligence made sense in that he was an experienced Washington insider who knew the ways of congress. What he did not have, however, was the ear of the President. Nor was the new President interested in the staple of intelligence for Presidents, the President's Daily Brief (the PDB). Breaking with a long tradition, the President Clinton seldom saw the DCI (reportedly twice in two years), and only had the gist of the PDB briefed to him by his National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger - who had little intelligence experience.

And, what he also did not have by the end of his eight-year presidency was a robust, effective intelligence community. The CIA saw its elite clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations, decimated both in personnel and budget. It is estimated the Clinton administration diverted nearly 80 billion dollars a year away from Defense to its domestic agenda. And the CIA took massive hits from its portion of the Defense budget. Meanwhile, under directed personnel cuts, the CIA shut down a good share of its overseas operations, and our number of human spies (human intelligence or Humint) was decimated, with severe consequences to follow.

As almost all presidents do, Clinton directed a review of intelligence priorities and intelligence reform. There is nothing particularly bad about this; it is a well-established historical event. Harry Truman directed one via the Hoover Commission in 1949. Eisenhower did so with a second Hoover Commission in 1955. Nixon appointed the Packard Commission to review intelligence performance. Jimmy Carter opted for "Zero-Based Budgeting" to reform intelligence. Ronald Reagan set up the Grace Commission to recommend restructuring.44 But Clinton's emphasis was on "being selective" due to tight budget allowances for the foreign agenda. The administration set up a "Tier" system to do this. Issues were divided into two sets - "hard targets" and "transnational issues" (such as Cuba, Iran, Iraq, China, North Korea, Libya, and weapons proliferation, narcotics, terrorism, and international crime) and "global coverage" (everything else). Further, within these two sets was a "Tier" system ranking things from 1 (top priority) to 4 (bottom).

In other words, the intelligence community was of necessity to ignore the bottom tier of requirements (known as Tier 4 countries), which it could not fund under the cuts it took. It was inevitable that some significant events were going to be missed, and the intelligence community would then be blamed for intelligence failures. The best example, and there were significant others, was in 1998 when the intelligence community missed predicting nuclear tests by both India and Pakistan. Meanwhile, in what was to become the Clinton administration's biggest and costliest overseas military deployment, Bosnia missed the cut as well. Simply put, resources were focused elsewhere under the Tier system.

It was apparent to the DCI, Jim Woolsey, early on that he was not going to have direct access to the President. Although he tried to make it work, finally in frustration, Woolsey turned in his resignation after having served just less than two years. Never without a quip, Woolsey was later to joke that, when an East German landed a small plane on the White House lawn, people "thought it was me trying to get an appointment to see the President."

After considerable arm-twisting, Clinton finally secured the agreement of Deputy Secretary of Defense John Deutch to reluctantly take the job. Deutch lasted only one and one-half years before he resigned. The next DCI-nominee, Clinton's National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, withdrew his nomination after an acrimonious series of events clearly indicated his confirmation hearings were going to be contentious. Finally, six months later, Clinton turned to Deputy Director George Tenet, a savvy professional with great contacts in congress, who won easy confirmation in July 1997.

Clinton's lack of understanding about the cohesiveness of the intelligence community, and of the principled stands analysts and others are often called upon to take, is reflected in his desire at the end of his administration to pardon the convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. In 1985, Pollard had been arrested and convicted of spying for the Israelis and received a life sentence. Over the years, the Israeli government had lobbied hard to get Pollard pardoned, to remove the blight of their operation against the United States. With Clinton, they almost succeeded. Word reached the senior levels of the U.S intelligence community that Clinton was seriously considering a pardon of Pollard as one of his final acts. Sources claim that the DCI at that time, George Tenet, made it known to the President such an act would have serious repercussions. Rumor is that Tenet even threatened to resign should the President pardon Pollard, although I have no evidence that this was the case. Knowing Tenet, however, I would certainly not be surprised at such a principled stand.

President George W. Bush (2001- ) of course took office in one of the disputed elections in U.S. history without a majority of the vote. But it was clear even before the election the new president was going to be very interested in intelligence. The candidate Bush made it clear he valued the personal intelligence briefings very much. Immediately after taking office, he asked the sitting DCI, George Tenet, to remain in position.

As of this writing it is too early to make any lasting observations about this President and intelligence. There have already been, however, two seminal events regarding intelligence - the tragedy of September 11, 2001, and the Second Gulf War.

In regards to the former, the President has made it clear that, while he reluctantly supported an inquiry into "why intelligence failed to warn us of 9/11," he nonetheless had full faith in DCI Tenet and in the CIA. Regarding the Second Gulf War, the failure of UN and administration weapons inspectors to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has been embarrassing to an administration that used those weapons' very presence as the main justification for going to war unilaterally and without provocation. Press releases as I was finishing this book in January 2004 indicated that there was yet another move afoot to blame the intelligence agencies for the failure to locate the WMD. I suspect that, as with other so-called "intelligence failures," it will be found that intelligence performed its duty well, but what they found and reported was not in line with what an administration in power desired. Unfortunately, history is replete with similar examples.

For those who are interested in Presidents and how they handle and use/abuse intelligence, I recommend three books:

- John Helgerson's book, Getting To Know The Presidents: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates: 1952-1992 is a seminal work not to be missed.

- Christopher Andrews' excellent work, For The President's Eyes Only.

- G.P. A. O'Toole's Honorable Treachery.

Chapter Twenty-One

WHAT'S WRONG AND WHAT'S RIGHT WITH THE CIA

We need to recognize that perhaps a number of officers should spend their careers in only one or two countries, becoming the experts they need to be. We got so worried about the possibility that our officers would go native that it is nearly impossible to find officers who stay more than three years in any one country. We used to have numerous officers who made their entire career serving in only one geographical component. That practice fell to the broadening experience that came to be one of the precepts toward promotions.

The other problem greatly affecting our ability to run operations, recruit spies, and produce good intelligence relates to the badly conceived plan relating to a program called the Capital Working Fund. The program began around 1995 or 1996. The idea of it was that activities had to pay for themselves and that everyone had to manage their own support budget. It has been a disaster, and has left the Agency in general, and the Directorate of Operations in particular, without the mechanisms it needs to focus on spying. Instead, our operating divisions spend the time of our operations personnel trying to get supplies, air tickets, and other necessities instead of doing what they were hired to do. The scheme, unfortunately, came from the administrative top. The result was the dismemberment of the very services we had come to rely on to support the difficult activity of spying.

In the meantime, the support mechanism was sold off. We no longer have our own airline; people thousands of miles away that never heard of spying and have no idea of the risks involved handle our health coverage; and, what was once the greatest retirement system in the world was handed over to the Office of Personnel Management. You can no longer get anyone to personally answer a telephone on any question regarding retirement pay or medical claims.

It is essential that we recognize that spying is not a quantifiable activity with a product that comes off the assembly line like a television set. There are some times we spend a huge amount of time, and yes, dollars, attempting to secure a spy in a needed location, and fail. We still have to pay for that. It is an imprecise art form that does not allow us to always look at the bottom line. It has led to us not having enough spies where we need them most.

Further, the Agency developed way too many superstructures over the past decade. Senior positions that are needed in the field have been taken for headquarters positions. And I cannot help but note this goes all the way to the ridiculous-a case officer was and is assigned to liaise with television and Hollywood. It would seem to me that he would be more productive spying in the back alleys of Algeria.

I am not in the minority feeling this way. During the year before the publication of this book, a whole series of articles were published delineating virtually the same observations. I believe in the CIA. I believe it has the greatest work force in the world, and it continues to hire and attract the very best and brightest. I believe its future is secure, and it will continue to gather and collect the best intelligence it can under the circumstances. But I believe in order for this to happen, the CIA needs to go back to the basics of spying and quit trying to look like a private business conducting its work for profit.

And, sadly and lastly, the Agency has lost its way in recognizing its people. Awards and recognition used to be significant individual affairs. Now, they are done in large groups to make it easier. Formerly, when any DO officer retired, he was given an individual ceremony, with a senior officer no lower than the associate deputy director of operations presenting the award. By way of example, I was honored with the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal upon retiring. When I was called regarding the ceremony and received the paperwork, I discovered that I was one of many who would be getting awards that day. It was to be a massive ceremony in the CIA auditorium, where all awardees simply walk up to the stage when their name is called and walk off. In reality, I was quite disappointed by this. I had nearly 35 years of service, had risked my life for my country and the Agency, had been in the Senior Intelligence Service ranks for over a decade, and had served in many senior assignments. It seems to me that it merited at least a private meeting with one of the Agency senior officials for my family and me. We used to move heaven and earth to see that each of our people retiring had what Andy Warhol called their 15 minutes of fame. I called in and asked for my award to be mailed to me instead. I am not bitter about this, simply disappointed. We ought to do better than put an assembly line together for recognition.

So, what's right with the CIA? The answer is, a lot.

The Agency had consistent and good leadership at the top for the past nine years. The leadership began tackling the problems I mentioned above as early as 1998, and the expansion of our human intelligence system is well underway, although we cannot expect it to be a quick fix.

The Agency's analytical capability is second to none. The establishment of the Kent School of Analysis put the emphasis back on quality analytical work and the development of a professional cadre for the future.

The Agency continues to recruit the best and brightest from America's youth. It is extremely gratifying to refer numerous colleagues who are honor roll graduates to the Agency for employment consideration. It is this quality of new employees that will guarantee the continued excellence of the CIA.

The Agency continues to have the support of not only the political leadership on both sides of the aisles of Congress, but also of the American people. I continue to be amazed and gratified by the almost universal support for American intelligence I find everywhere I go and everywhere I speak in public. I am always moved when, as frequently happens, someone in an audience stands up and says, "I just want to thank you for what you did with your life." It doesn't get any better than that.



-------- us

A Breeding Ground For Tyrants

by Michael Gaddy, March 10, 2005 LewRockwell

http://www.lewrockwell.com/gaddy/gaddy15.html  

The irritating sound of a ringing phone brought me roughly back to reality. I had been lost in the serenity of the snow-covered peaks of the La Plata and San Juan Mountains of Southern Colorado. At first, there was no immediate response to my hello. I thought it a call from a telemarketer, but after the pause, was delighted to hear the voice of a damn good soldier I have known for over two decades, who is on his second tour in Iraq. His response to my question of what was going on over there now, still assaults my conscience: "Well, this morning our unit went out and shot up a bunch of civilians and our commander is writing it up as a great military victory."

This is not the first report of unacceptable military and civilian leadership as it pertains to the war in Iraq I have received from this soldier. He continued telling me of the insane actions of his commander: "He has a whole new definition of ‘recon-by-fire;’ he picks out a building in our area of operations, then tells his soldiers to ‘fire it up.’ It makes no difference we have no Intel of enemy activity, nor have we received any enemy fire from that building. His purpose is to continue to shoot into buildings until someone shoots back."

When asked what was the reaction by most of the soldiers in this unit to such actions by their commander, I was told there are basically two types of soldiers in most units. There are the career guys who have more than a decade invested and have seen so many commanders like this they believe them to be the norm rather than the exception. Then, there are the young soldiers who have fallen for the line about killing as many of these "rag heads" as possible because of 9/11 and protecting "the folks back home." Soldiers, who see this war for what it is and voice those thoughts, are reported up the line as malcontents and enemy sympathizers. The vast majority of soldiers would rather live through the lies and atrocities than be labeled a traitor and the ramifications of that label once they return home. So, many just hope to survive and get the hell out of the military and away from the madmen who lead them.

This nation, its political leadership and the vast majority of its religious leaders, have thrown away their moral compass and replaced it with a rabid nationalism unseen on the world stage since Germany in the 1930s. Torture and murder of hundreds of thousands are readily accepted, as long as it is done for the graven image called the State. Eventually, unless we take a different path, the number of those tortured and murdered will include those in this country who refuse to submit to the State as it pursues its "mission from God." The venom readily spews forth from the shills for the State now, building a hate and resentment in the masses for any who would challenge the official position of perpetual war for peace.

Since our nation and its civilian leaders have lost their ability to judge right from wrong, why should we expect anything different from our military?

Many military officers see this war as the open door of opportunity to the stars of a general and all the attendant trappings: power, money and prestige. Like the perfumed princes of the Vietnam War, they believe, "it may not be a good war, but it is the only war we have." Success in war is a simple equation: how many people can you put in a body bag? An immoral leadership cares little if they are combatants or civilians. Military leadership follows the lead of its civilian leadership; if they lie, it is an acceptable practice, if they condone illegal war, they do the same, if killing and torturing innocents is ordered and then covered-up, then it must be OK. Why should we even question this or this when it comes to our military leaders seeking to move up the career ladder?

Those in the military see two separate but distinct choices: embrace illegal war and the actions necessary to "succeed," or do what is right and suffer the ridicule, humiliation, and possible imprisonment of others who chose that path.

Tragic are those who choose to support illegal war and then have to deal with their consciences once they are away from the false bravado and macho support. Just another casualty of war, they say.

Most of the military officers, who excel at unconstitutional, aggressive war, will move into positions of higher authority once this war is over and will dictate military policy in the future. They will remember the path they took to attain the lofty status of general and so will those who are younger and seek to emulate them. They will have learned that to follow the lies of unprincipled civilian leadership is indispensable to success, and conscience and morals will never take you past colonel – if that far.

None of these officers will consider their oath of enlistment and its mandate of obeying the Constitution over unconstitutional, illegal orders. After all, following the Constitution is not a step on the career path to the inner ring at the Pentagon. They will never allow the thought to enter their minds that anyone issuing an unconstitutional order, military or civilian, is, in fact, the domestic enemy referred to in the enlistment oath.

March 10, 2005

Michael Gaddy [send him mail], an Army veteran of Vietnam, Grenada, and Beirut, lives in the Four Corners area of the American Southwest.



-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE


-------- drug war

Canada's marijuana industry is booming

By Susan Bourette, 3/10/2005 Christian Science Monitor

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-03-10-csm-pot_x.htm

TORONTO — On the street it's called Northern Lights, Ontario Hydro, and B.C. bud. It's one of Canada's biggest agricultural exports — a potent form of marijuana cultivated in sprawling "grow houses," worth an estimated $4 billion to $7 billion annually. Much of it is smuggled into the USA.

Once hidden in farming communities and well-heeled suburbs, grow operations — indoor nurseries with high-tech lighting and temperature controls — have been thrust into the national spotlight. On Thursday, Canada buried four young Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers who were killed during a bust in rural Alberta on March 3.

The Alberta grow house was just one of thousands across Canada. Here in Ontario, police say indoor pot operations have risen 250% in the past four years. And Vancouver is home to some 7,000 "grow ops" at any time, police say.

The tragedy — the deadliest incident for Canada's national police force in 120 years — has ignited debate as Canadians begin to question whether liberal attitudes toward marijuana and lenient laws enacted over the past two decades have contributed to the drug boom.

"It's really got people talking about the problem," says Marc Pinault, staff sergeant with the Ottawa Police Service's drug unit. "It's pretty clear that we produce a pile of pot, and it's really good stuff. I don't know that that's something we should be really proud of."

Drugs moving east

British Columbia has long been the hub of sophisticated, high-tech nurseries capable of producing pot with nearly 30 times the kick of what was found on the street a decade ago, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency. Sgt. Pinault says the increasing numbers of massive growing operations — once largely the preserve of Asian gangs and bikers on the West Coast — indicate the problem is moving East into provinces like Ontario and Quebec.

Tom Stamatakis, a Vancouver police officer and a member of the Canadian Professional Police Association, says criminals across the country are modeling their operations after those found in and around Vancouver.

For example, he says, grow houses are increasingly found in upscale areas of the city as criminals ply their trade behind picket fences and a facade of respectability. Inside, they're a hotbed of danger — rigged with booby traps to ward off intruders and noxious chemical compounds that pose serious health threats.

But those aren't the only perils. DEA special agent Rodney Benson of Seattle says recent busts have also netted a pile of automatic weapons and explosive devices.

"We're definitely seeing more violence," explains Benson, who recently oversaw a year long, cross- border sting called Operation Hockey Bag, in which investigators charged 22 people and seized more than 400 lbs. of marijuana, along with $3.4 million and a dozen firearms. "It's not just weapons — it's what we're seeing from the organization. They rule and intimidate from within."

RCMP investigators are still sifting through the evidence, trying to find out what led to the killing of the four officers last week. The incident began as an attempt to repossess a pickup truck but ballooned into a larger investigation after the marijuana growing operation was discovered. The gunman, Jim Roszko, killed the officers and later turned a high-powered, semiautomatic weapon on himself.

Canadian officials stress that it was an isolated act of extreme violence — and they hope to keep it that way. Many, like Stamatakis of Vancouver, say that Canadian lawmakers are too lenient in meting out penalties for those involved in growing operations contributing to the drug explosion.

"When even the outgoing prime minister [Jean Chrétien] makes a flippant comment like, 'What's the big deal about marijuana? I've probably had a few puffs myself.' That sends the wrong message to the community and the courts," Stamatakis says.

Softer laws for using, harder for selling

There has been a major push to decriminalize marijuana across the country in recent years. Canada was the first country to regulate its medicinal use, in 1999. However, while the government has recently moved to introduce softer penalties for possession, penalties for growers could get stiffer. A marijuana bill, reintroduced in November, advocates that possession of up to 15 grams would be punishable by fines of $100 to $150 Canadian ($85 to $125), but would no longer lead to a criminal record.

For growers, those caught with more than three plants, face up to five years in jail, or 18 months plus a $25,000 Canadian ($20,700) fine. Those caught with more than 25 plants could face 10 years in jail, while the bill provides a maximum sentence of up to 14 years for operations with more than 50 plants.

Last week, Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan issued a warning in the wake of the shootings, telling judges that they will be forced to explain their decisions in writing if jail terms are not imposed on those who grow plants. Under Canadian laws, criminals face a maximum seven-year jail term. In practice, however, many people convicted of growing marijuana receive sentences of little more than a few months, police say.

Criminologist Patrick Parnaby says the events of last week are likely to lead to stiffer penalties. When something like narcotics is intimately tied to violence, there is going to be a powerful public backlash, says the associate professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario. "Stricter laws will make the public feel a whole lot better," he says.

But many users pushing for decriminalization couldn't disagree more. Blair Longley, leader of the federal Marijuana Party, says legalization would wipe out criminal enterprises across the country.

"They've just used this [the Alberta shootings] as an excuse to crack down and enforce outdated laws," says Longley. "In reality, liberalizing the laws would mean you would get rid of almost all the profits and, therefore, all the crime."


-------- human rights

Are civil rights the best antiterror defense?

3/10/2005
By Peter Ford and Lisa Abend, 
The Christian Science Monitor

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-03-10-liberties-terror_x.htm

PARIS AND MADRID — Behind bars in two of Britain's most heavily guarded prisons sit 12 men the police say are too dangerous to set free, but whom they cannot charge with any crime for lack of evidence.

The prisoners, all North African terror suspects, may well soon earn their freedom, however, since Britain's top court has ruled that their detention is unlawful.

As the British government scrambled this week to pass new antiterror legislation that does not breach international human rights codes, in Madrid world leaders, academics, legal experts, and policemen met to discuss ways in which democracies can defend themselves against terrorism, while not compromising their ideals.

The challenge, said former Romanian Prime Minister Petre Roman, "is Solomonic: Do we fight terrorism or protect liberties?"

The answer, suggested many of the participants at the conference called to mark the first anniversary of the Madrid railway bombings, is that only by protecting liberties can terrorism be fought effectively.

"Upholding human rights is not merely compatible with a successful counterterrorism strategy. It is an essential element in it," UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the meeting Thursday.

"Compromising human rights ... facilitates achievement of the terrorist's objective, by ceding to him the moral high ground and provoking tension, hatred, and mistrust of government among precisely those parts of the population where he is more likely to find recruits," he added.

Scrupulous respect for the rule of law "wrong-foots the terrorists, forcing them to campaign not against a regime but against democracy itself, which means the rule of the people," agrees Phil Bobbitt, the US law professor who led the conference deliberations on democratic responses to terror. The terrorists can take on democracy, "but I think it's a losing strategy," he says.

Surveying improvements in world security since 9/11, Gijs de Vries, the European Union counterterror czar, said he saw bright spots, such as airline security and passport control, but warned that "serious risks" remain that demand closer cooperation between the world's intelligence agencies.

"We have to change the mental matrix from where a premium is put on secrecy to one where a premium is put on sharing," he insisted.

The Madrid conference was due to close Friday with the proclamation of an "agenda" for international action. It was expected to call on security services to treat a terrorist attack in another country as if it were an attack on their own state.

That change in mentality is under way, as spy agencies measure "the extremity of the threat," according to Philippe Hayez, deputy director of intelligence at the French intelligence agency, the DGSE, who addressed a conference in Paris this week.

He cautioned, though, that "intelligence cooperation is almost an oxymoron. Intelligence by its nature does not lend itself to cooperation."

The EU is currently drafting legislation that would require member states' intelligence agencies to work as closely with each other as they do with their own national colleagues.

"Though trust cannot be established by decree," acknowledged Joaqim Nunes de Almeida, the European Commission official overseeing the effort, "at least we can overcome the legislative obstacles" to better cooperation.

Other juridical difficulties persist, however, including the different legal standards in different European countries. British courts, for example, do not admit evidence gleaned from phone taps, a defense of civil liberties that other European countries find hard to understand.

The British government has resisted calls to change that practice. Instead it introduced a bill to Parliament this week that would allow the government to issue "control orders," which would ban terror suspects from using the Internet or telephone, and restrict their movements through electronic tagging or house arrest.

There's pressure to act because the current antiterror law expires on Sunday, but the House of Lords has forced Prime Minister Tony Blair to amend the bill by giving judges, not the government, authority to approve control orders.

The bitter row in Britain, says Professor Bobbitt, illustrates his point. "Law- based democracy is clumsy, it is slow, and it is awkward," he says. "But you get something reasonable in the end."


-------- prisons / prisoners

California Prison Staff, Inmates Poisoned by Computer Recycling

WASHINGTON, DC, March 9, 2005 (ENS)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2005/2005-03-09-09.asp#anchor3

A prison industry that takes old computer terminals apart for recycling is under investigation for exposing prison staff and inmates to harmful levels of toxic materials, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The national organization represents government workers who have environmental concerns.

PEER said today that hazards identified by staff at the California prison were removed from the response the prison made to the Occupational Safety & Health Administration, the reviewing agency.

The federal penitentiary at Atwater is a maximum-security institution located near Merced in California’s Central Valley. The federal prison industry authority UNICOR has operated a computer recycling plant at Atwater since 2002 but the operation has been plagued by safety problems and shutdowns PEER said. Six other federal prisons have similar computer recycling plants.

In late December, prison staff filed an OSHA complaint, alleging that particles of heavy metals, such as lead, cadmium, barium and beryllium, are released when inmate workers break the glass cathode ray tubes during shipping and disassembling.

The UNICOR factory at Atwater provides an open food service in the contaminated work areas, staff complained, and neither prison staff nor inmates were informed of health risks. No training on handling contaminants is provided. Blood and urine monitoring is incomplete, staff said.

In his initial draft response to OSHA, the warden at Atwater acknowledged many of these problems. The Federal Bureau of Prisons headquarters, however, removed most of admissions of fault from its final response that was sent out on February 11, said PEER.

Staff at Atwater wrote the warden to protest the changes and challenge the accuracy of the final report to OSHA.

“The concern is not only about prisoners but about staff who go home with toxic dust on their clothes and risk spreading contamination to their families,” said PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, an attorney.

Wipe samples taken off skin, clothing, floors and work surfaces showed dangerous levels of hazardous dust. “Recycling computer parts is inherently a dirty business but it does not have to be a deadly one,” Ruch said.

A 2003 study of the computer recycling operation at Atwater conducted by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition found that "UNICOR's primitive practice of manually smashing leaded glass in athode ray tubes unnecessarily exposed workers to risk of toxic contamination and cuts. Security restrictions on the kinds of tools available to prisoners made their work less efficient and more dangerous. Workstations were not designed to avoid ergonomic hazards."

"One inmate reported, 'Even when I wear the paper mask, I blow out black mucus from my nose every day. The black particles in my nose and throat look as if I am a heavy smoker. Cuts and abrasions happen all the time. Of these the open wounds are exposed to the dirt and dust and many do not heal as quickly as normal wounds.'

"Inmates reported that those who sought to improve conditions faced discipline and loss of their jobs," the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition report states.

In recent months, the State of California and Dell, the country’s largest computer maker, have cancelled their computer recycling contracts with UNICOR. Last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also suspended its contract.

None of these moves were prompted by safety concerns but PEER says they all have the effect of placing greater economic pressure on keeping costs low for the remaining UNICOR computer clients.

“At a time when budgets are getting thinner, the temptation to cut corners and put workers at risk becomes even greater,” Ruch added, pointing to the larger question as to whether UNICOR is equipped to handle electronic waste safely. “At the very least, there needs to be an independent investigation into what is going on at Atwater.”

All relevant documents are online at: http://www.peer.org/ 



-------- torture

Curbing terror or menacing freedom?

Mar 10th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3737145

IN THE wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, President George Bush and the British prime minister, Tony Blair, faced little opposition in arguing that tough measures had to be taken to counter the threat from al-Qaeda and other international terror groups, even if this meant compromising some basic civil liberties. Both countries rushed through new anti-terror laws and began interning suspects—America mainly at its military base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, and Britain mostly at Belmarsh high-security jail in London.

But, more than three years after the attacks, both leaders have recently suffered setbacks to their anti-terror policies. American and British judges have ruled that their governments cannot go on detaining suspects without giving them acceptable recourse to the courts. In the latest such ruling in America, last week, a judge found that Mr Bush had greatly exceeded his powers in continuing to detain without charge José Padilla, who is accused of conspiring to build a radioactive “dirty bomb”. And on Thursday March 10th, Mr Blair was in a head-on confrontation with Parliament’s upper house, the Lords, which voted, for the third time in four days, to reject key parts of a new anti-terror bill that the prime minister is trying to rush in. The bill must be made law by this weekend, otherwise a court ruling will force the government to let the Belmarsh detainees walk free.

Britain's home office publishes information on its Terrorism Bill. The House of Lords Constitution Committee reports on its findings. Liberty, a human-rights pressure group, criticises the bill, as do the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. America's State Department reports on a decision determining that the special military tribunals used in Guantánamo Bay are illegal (further documents can be found here). America's Justice Department has information on the Patriot Act. FindLaw has a selection of documents pertaining to José Padilla and Yaser Hamdi's case.

Mr Blair’s anti-terrorism policy has been in growing disarray for several months. In December, Britain’s highest court, the Law Lords, struck down one of the main measures in the terrorism law passed after the September 11th attacks, which allowed the government to detain foreign terror suspects indefinitely without trial. To enact this law, the government had to become the first country to opt out of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which enshrines the right to liberty. The convention allows such opt-outs only in cases of “war or public emergency threatening the life of the nation”. However, the Law Lords rejected the government’s claims that the current terrorist threat justified such an opt-out.

Faced with having to release Britain’s ten remaining foreign detainees, all North African Muslims, Mr Blair decided to rush through a second anti-terror law, allowing ministers to impose other restrictions on terror suspects, short of imprisonment, ranging from house arrest to curfews. He argued that such measures were indispensable, for instance in cases where suspects could not be prosecuted without revealing intelligence sources.

Fierce criticism of the proposed new law, including from many members of Mr Blair's own Labour Party, has forced him to offer a series of concessions. To narrowly win a vote last week in the lower house, the Commons, the prime minister had to agree that only judges, not government ministers, would be able to impose house arrest. To win another Commons vote, on Wednesday, he agreed to keep an amendment that the Lords had made in a vote two days earlier: new powers to impose curfews and other restraints on suspects' freedoms will also be restricted to judges, not ministers.

Sunset battle over the sunset clause

However, Mr Blair continued to reject some of the upper house's remaining demands. In particular, he was adamant that there would be no “sunset clause” in the law, triggering its automatic expiry within a year, thereby giving Parliament a chance to rewrite it from scratch. All he would concede was an annual review of the law, meaning that it would remain in force except in the unlikely event of Parliament voting expressly for its abolition. On Thursday afternoon, the Lords again voted heavily in favour of a sunset clause and defiantly threw the bill back to the Commons. The controversial measure looked set to continue being tossed from one house to the other on Thursday evening, with little sign of compromise.

There is already a sunset clause affecting some of the most controversial measures in the Patriot Act, the terrorism law America passed after the September 11th attacks. Mr Bush is urging Congress to renew these measures, which include special powers for the FBI to obtain information about suspects. To help overcome considerable resistance to this in Congress, the president recently appointed as his new homeland-security secretary Michael Chertoff, a former judge with a record of speaking up for civil liberties.

While gearing up for a struggle to renew the Patriot Act, the Bush administration continues to battle with the courts over its detentions of more than 500 terror suspects, many now held for three years with no legal advice and no indication of whether they will be charged. Last June, the Supreme Court made three rulings that were a severe blow to Mr Bush’s detentions policy. First, the court ruled, prisoners at Guantánamo had the right to petition against their detention. Second, it decided that Yaser Hamdi, an American citizen captured in Afghanistan, may not be held indefinitely as an “enemy combatant” without any opportunity to face a court. And third, the court granted Mr Padilla another chance to have his case against detention heard in a lower court.

Mr Bush’s response to the first ruling was to create “combatant status review tribunals” to determine whether each Guantánamo inmate had been correctly classified as an “enemy combatant”. However, last month a federal court ruled that these tribunals were unconstitutional. The government, pointing out that another federal court had earlier come to the opposite conclusion, is now taking the matter to the Court of Appeals.

In response to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Mr Hamdi, the government felt obliged to release him and send him back to Saudi Arabia, where he had been living. Now it faces a trickier decision over Mr Padilla. Exercising the right the Supreme Court granted him, he has taken his case to a court in South Carolina, where he is being held. Last week, the judge in the case ordered that he be charged with a crime or set free within 45 days.

Mr Bush and Mr Blair are in a bind. They face strong challenges to their anti-terror measures from judges, lawmakers and civil-rights groups, while knowing that their public will judge them harshly if another big terror attack occurs. However, harsh anti-terror laws are no guarantee that terrorism will stop. Worse still, they risk doing more harm than good. This was the case with Britain’s old Prevention of Terrorism Act, which was used during the Northern Ireland conflict to detain large numbers of people, most of whom were not subsequently charged with a terrorism-related offence. The resentment that this caused among the province’s Catholic minority only served to sustain support for the IRA, not deter it. Similarly, long detentions without trial at Guantánamo and Belmarsh risk serving as recruiting-sergeants for the terror groups that the measures are aimed at curbing.



-------- OTHER


-------- environment

Kyoto Protocol Spurs Race to Develop Fuel Cells

March 10, 2005 
By Kyodo News International

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=7295

TOKYO — Competition to develop fuel cells for practical use is intensifying with the coming into effect of the Kyoto Protocol obliging developed countries to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

Fuel cells are regarded as a source of "clean energy" emitting no harmful gases, a cause of global warming, and in the future could be used for vehicles, mobile phones, personal computers, houses and other things.

The cells generate electricity using hydrogen extracted from methanol and natural gas, and various fuels are used as hydrogen supply sources.

At the 2005 World Exposition to open in Aichi Prefecture in March, an experiment will be carried out for the world's first energy system combining fuel cells with power generated by household kitchen garbage and sunlight.

An industry official said, "It is an effective system to realize garbage disposal, reuse of resources and environmental measures at a stroke." At the exposition, Aichi-based Toyota Motor Corp. will operate a "fuel cell hybrid bus" to carry visitors between the exposition's two sites over a 4.4-kilometer road.

Hitachi Ltd. will unveil at its pavilion a mobile phone information terminal equipped with a cartridge-type fuel cell containing 5 cubic centimeters of methanol.

When the fuel runs out, the cartridge is changed. "If commercialized in the future, cartridges could be sold at shops in railway stations and convenience stores for about 100 yen," a Hitachi official said.

Tokyo Gas Co. has already commercialized fuel cells and on Feb. 8 began selling the world's first cogeneration-type fuel cell system for household use.

Besides electricity, heat from electricity generation can also be used. Utilizing the high efficiency in electricity generation of fuel cells, electricity, air conditioning and hot water supplies could be provided to households at cheaper rates than before.

Toyota and Honda Motor Co. have already begun leasing passenger cars with fuel cells to government ministries and agencies to publicize them among consumers.

At the first international fuel cell exhibition held in Tokyo in January, some 230 companies from 10 or so countries, including Japan, the United States, South Korea and China, exhibited their products.

In the keynote lecture, Yun Sok Ryol, head of a research institute affiliated with Samsung Electronics Co., said, "I am confident that the next-generation energy is fuel cells." He said Samsung has made fuel cells a core business, along with semiconductor memory and liquid crystals.

Ford Motor Co. of the United States is poised to go all out to develop fuel cells with Japanese moves in mind, a Ford official said.

But to commercialize fuel cells, it is imperative to cut the cost of producing the cells themselves and products equipped with them, industry sources said.

In the case of fuel cell vehicles, a widespread network of hydrogen stations on roads will have to be established, the sources said. 


-------- ENERGY 

Bush Makes Renewed Push for Strategy on Energy

By DAVID E. SANGER
March 10, 2005 NY TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/10/politics/10bush.html?pagewanted=print&position=

COLUMBUS, Ohio, March 9 - President Bush tried on Wednesday to reinvigorate his administration's energy strategy, promising to overcome the obstacles Democrats and environmental groups have mounted to drilling in an Alaskan wildlife refuge and saying it was time to start building more nuclear power plants.

Mr. Bush's renewed push, during a one-day visit to the Battelle Memorial Institute here to view an array of new energy technologies, was a rare departure from his almost daily lobbying for his No. 1 domestic priority: remaking the Social Security system. But his energy and environmental initiatives have suffered several setbacks in Congress, including the defeat on Wednesday by a Senate committee of Mr. Bush's antipollution legislation, which critics argued did not go far enough.

The White House said Wednesday afternoon that it planned to announce regulations on Thursday that would effectively put part of the defeated legislation into place. And Senate Republicans are moving this week to maneuver a vote on drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, that would not be subject to a Democratic filibuster.

"We could recover move than $10 billion of oil from a small corner of ANWR that was reserved specifically for energy development," Mr. Bush said to applause. "That's the same amount of new oil we could get from 41 states combined."

Many of those 41 states, officials later acknowledged, have no known oil reserves.

Mr. Bush argued that the drilling operation would involve 2,000 acres of the vast refuge, or "the size of the Columbus airport." He said the project would have "almost no impact on land or local wildlife," a point that environmental groups sharply dispute. The president was introduced by Samuel W. Bodman, the new secretary of energy, who toured the Alaska refuge last weekend with some Senate Republicans and Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton.

Mr. Bush's visit to Battelle, whose work includes new energy technologies and top-secret Defense Department contracts on ways to defend against germ weapons, was intended to demonstrate his commitment to energy conservation. In the past, the president has taken prototypes of hydrogen-powered cars onto the South Lawn of the White House, and he mentioned the promise of that technology again at Battelle. He said he saw technology "so that we can build the world's first coal-fueled zero-emission power plant," and he pointed to federally financed efforts to convert coal into a clean-burning gas.

Politically, White House aides say, such visits help defend Mr. Bush against accusations that his administration is more interested in drilling than conserving. Mr. Bush argued anew on Wednesday that he needed to do both, though many of his administration's plans to exploit new sources of energy are immediate and the new conservation technologies will take years. He also talked about producing ethanol and biodiesel fuels, subjects that usually get the most attention during primaries in the Midwest.

Mr. Bush rarely discussed nuclear power in last year's campaign, but he noted on Wednesday that "America hasn't ordered a nuclear power plant since the 1970's, and it's time to start building again."

He has several proposals under way, supported by the nuclear industry, to encourage new plants, and the administration is supporting an International Themonuclear Experimental Reactor that has become a source of competition between France and Japan, both of which want to be the site of the multi-billion-dollar project.

The driving force behind a national energy policy in the White House has been Vice President Dick Cheney, who headed the panel that initially set the administration's course - and became the first source of arguments about the secrecy of the Bush White House. There is still some mystery about industry's role in developing the proposals Mr. Cheney's group endorsed. But there has been little mystery about the direction the administration wants to head.

Mr. Bush tried during his visit to Ohio to draw on the main arguments he employs in selling a consistent tax policy to promote his energy plan. Companies and financial markets, he said, would be reluctant to invest if they feared that energy supplies could run short.

"All these uncertainties about energy supply are a drag on our economy," he said. "It is difficult for entrepreneurs to risk capital when they cannot predict the size of next month's energy bill."

Referring to the blackout in the summer of 2003, Mr. Bush added, "It's hard to plan with confidence if you're not sure the lights are going to stay on."


-------- ACTIVISTS

Combat boots arranged just so become an eye-catching tribute

By Elizabeth Fitzsimons 
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
March 10, 2005

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20050310-9999-7m10boots.html

Vickie Castro's eyes scanned the dozens of young, earnest faces staring out from the poster. She was searching for her son, an Army specialist killed in Iraq.

But Jonathan Castro's picture hadn't been added to the display yesterday. So the grieving mother turned her attention to the 150 pairs of black combat boots arranged outside the County Administration Building in San Diego.

One pair was tagged for her son. And like many other boots lovingly adorned with flags and handwritten notes, it soon would be accompanied by something personal: a laminated family snapshot that Castro brought from her home in Corona.

The boots and posters were part of a daylong memorial titled "Eyes Wide Open."

Sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group based in Philadelphia, it is meant to show the human cost of war.

Begun in Chicago with 504 boots in January 2004, "Eyes Wide Open" has traveled to 45 cities, its boot total growing at each stop to match the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq.

The exhibit will continue today in Escondido.

Castro heard of the memorial through a network of families who have lost loved ones in Iraq. "To too many Americans, it's not real," Castro said of the casualties.

Finding an Army officer at your door at 8 p.m. makes it real, she said.

"You know why he's there. He's there to rip your heart out. He's there to let you know you've lost the center of your universe."

Organizers had planned to display more than 1,500 pairs of boots across a large lawn, but their permit afforded them space for only about 150. The county restricts protests and other free-speech events to four paved areas around the building; the lawn is reserved for weddings and community gatherings.

Volunteers lined up the boots in a semi-circle, facing out, as if each pair were standing in formation. Some visitors said it was easy to imagine those boots filled with real feet, and above, legs, a body and a face.

Many pairs were rented from Army surplus stores, but a few belonged to the troops who had worn them.

Facing the boots were everyday shoes set out to represent Iraqi civilians who had perished since Operation Iraqi Freedom began in 2003. Among them: men's loafers, women's sandals and a child's small, blue sneakers. A 14-foot panel carried the names of thousands of deceased Iraqi civilians.

Castro swept the tears from her cheeks as she surveyed the boots.

Jonathan Castro was killed on Dec. 21 when a bomb ripped apart the mess hall tent on his base in Mosul. He was 21.

His mother said she and her husband, Jorge, have tried to return to their daily routines.

"All we can do is cling to each other and try to get through a day at a time without too many tears," Vickie Castro said. "It's like a wave that crashes over you – the reality that you're never, never going to see him again."

Throughout the day, the exhibit pulled passers-by away from their office duties and walks along Pacific Coast Highway.

Tara Soest works in the county building. She noticed the memorial while getting on and off an elevator.

"It's really moving, and I haven't even lost anyone in the war," Soest said.

Her brother is in the Navy and just returned from Bahrain, and she has a friend who was recently deployed to Fallujah, Iraq.

Soest, 21, moved slowly from one pair of boots to another.

"This seems like so many here, but it's only a fraction of what the toll is," Soest said.

One pair of boots represented Lance Cpl. Joseph C. McCarthy of Apache, Ariz. McCarthy, a Camp Pendleton-based Marine, was killed Sept. 6 in Al Anbar province. Attached to his boots was an article from his hometown newspaper, along with a photo.

The image shows McCarthy wearing desert fatigues. He's stooped, his assault rifle is swung around his back and his right arm reaches out to drop candy into the hands of two Iraqi children.

A few pairs over are the big boots once worn by 40-year-old Sgt. Elmer C. Krause, an Army reservist from Greensboro, N.C. Krause died April 9, 2004, when his convoy came under attack.

Stuffed into one of the size-13 boots was a teddy bear from his 10-year-old son, Jonathon. His certificates for the Purple Heart and Bronze Star lay to the right.

And on the left was an album containing letters of condolence from President Bush and others at the highest levels of government. Each note was addressed to Jonathon.

One mother who inspected the boots told of how her son, a Marine, returned home after two tours in Iraq. He's now tormented by nightmares and cries every night, said Sonia Rodriguez, 42, of National City.

"Yes, he returned to me, but he wasn't the same," Rodriguez said.

Elizabeth Fitzsimons: (619) 542-4577; elizabeth.fitzsimons@uniontrib.com 

----

From: "Global Network" <globalnet@mindspring.com>
Date: Thu Mar 10, 2005 1:00pm
Subject: BBC RADIO SPACE NUKES STORY INTERVIEWS GAGNON/PUBLIC COMMENTS NEEDED ON NEW NASA MISSION

BBC SPACE NUKES STORY INTERVIEWS GAGNON

PUBLIC COMMENTS NEEDED ON NASA'S NEXT NUCLEAR SPACE MISSION

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/projectprometheus.shtml

BBC radio ran a half hour story (click on link above to hear it) on NASA's plan to launch nuclear power into space. Called Project Prometheus, BBC investigated (mostly from NASA's point of view) the prospects for nuclear propulsion in space. Project Prometheus is the name that the Bush administration has given to the planned nuclear rocket now under development by NASA and the Department of Energy (DoE). The BBC story interviewed Global Network Coordinator Bruce Gagnon about the organizations opposition to space nuclear power.

In order to meet the growing demand for plutonium for future space nuclear missions, NASA is now planning to expand plutonium production facilities at the Idaho National Laboratory. In addition to the nuclear rocket, NASA also plans a growing list of nuclear missions to outer planets in the coming years. The next plutonium mission set for launch is the New Horizons mission to Pluto. New Horizons will carry a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) that transforms heat from decaying plutonium-238 into electricity to power the spacecraft's instruments. The New Horizons mission is set to launch from the space center in Florida in January or February, 2006. The Global Network will be organizing opposition to this launch and your help will be needed.

a.. NASA has just released its Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the New Horizons Mission. Public comments are due before April 11, 2005. We urge concerned citizens to write NASA and state your opposition to nuclear power in space. Send your comments to: osspluto@h...

The nuclear industry views space as a new market and are feverishly working to convince the global public that launching nuclear power into space will be safe. What we know is that rocket technology can and does fail. Launches from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida have a 10-20% failure rate. In 1996 a Russian Mars mission, carrying plutonium on-board, failed to achieve proper orbit and burned up as it reentered Earth orbit spreading deadly plutonium over the mountains of Chile and Bolivia. The plutonium production process is also dangerous. Between 1994-1996, while fabricating the plutonium RTG's for the 1997 Cassini mission at Los Alamos Labs in New Mexico, the DoE reported 244 cases of worker contamination.

The U.S. military has long stated that they need nuclear reactors in space to power weapons technologies in the future. NASA's current director, Sean O'Keefe (former Secretary of the nuclear Navy) has stated that every mission at NASA from now on will be "dual use," meaning that each mission will be testing civilian and military technologies at the same time. So then what is the military application of the nuclear rocket?

Space News, an industry publication, ran a story on March 7, 2005 called NASA Asks Public To Comment on RTG-Powered Pluto Probe. In the article Bruce Gagnon was quoted as saying, "NASA is controlled by two entities today, the Pentagon and the nuclear industry. NASA just doesn't give a damn about the public's input."

With that said, the danger of the planned dramatic increase in launches of nuclear devices in coming years should concern all of us. It will only take one accident, and a release of plutonium into the Earth atmosphere, to unleash severe health consequences globally. This is not some theoretical possibility, since the beginning of the space age, there have already been eight accidents with space nuclear power, some quite severe. (See the Global Network web site for a list of those accidents.)

a.. Please help us by sending your comments to NASA by April 11 opposing the launch of nuclear power on the New Horizons mission. Even though NASA does not want to listen to the public, let's make sure they hear from us anyway. (People from outside the U.S. are also encourage to write. This is a global issue!) Send your comments to: osspluto@h...

Thanks for your support.

Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 729-0517
(207) 319-2017 (Cell Phone)
http://www.space4peace.org
globalnet@mindspring.com
http://space4peace.blogspot.com (Our blog)