NucNews - March 11, 2005



-------- NUCLEAR 


-------- australia

Rann backs uranium mining policy rethink

Friday, March 11, 2005 Australian Broadcasting

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200503/s1321653.htm

South Australia's Premier Mike Rann has called for the federal Labor Party to review its policy on uranium mining.

The State Government has been pushing for a major expansion of the Olympic Dam uranium mine in South Australia's far north.

The Deputy Premier flagged his support yesterday for increased uranium mining, and changes to federal Labor's three mines policy.

Mr Rann agrees that a review is needed.

"There is absolutely no doubt that there will need to be a review of federal ALP policy at the next national conference," he said.

"That has already been foreshadowed because there are anomalies in that and I'll be addressing that at the national conference."



-------- business

Northrop builds a team to lead bid for LANL

By Diana Heil | The New Mexican
March 11, 2005

http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/11435.html

As the competition to manage Los Alamos National Laboratory nears, Northrop Grumman Corp. has assembled a team to run head-tohead with the University of California and Bechtel National.

Northrop Grumman will have the lead role in a partnership with CH2M Hill of Denver, which would handle environmental cleanup and manufacture triggers for nuclear weapons. “We’re pressing ahead,” David Amerine of CH2M Hill said in an interview Thursday. A third player, Teledyne Brown, would cover minor aspects of operations. The team hasn’t settled on a university partner yet.

Last week in Washington, D.C., the trio met with the board overseeing the competition . Amerine said his team suggested ways to make the contest less slanted toward the University of California, the lab’s operator since its inception in 1943.

The scoring system in the request for proposals — a draft document at this point — puts too much weight on science and technology and not enough emphasis on environmental cleanup and the manufacturing of triggers, Amerine said.

In the latest version of the bidding criteria, the government increased the amount of money the next lab operator could make, from the previous figure of $30 million a year to about $60 million. The Northrop Grumman team suggested raising the lucre even higher along with higher financial risk, or offering a small base fee with the possibility to earn much more depending on good performance .

At last week’s meeting, the trio asked federal officials how serious the Energy Department is about bringing management change to Los Alamos.

“I genuinely have the impression that the Department of Energy is interested in change,” Amerine said, “but there are other political factors at play.”

After a series of security, safety and business lapses in the past few years, then-Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham and Congress decided to put the Los Alamos management contract out to bid for the first time in history . A new contractor could be selected as soon as October .

Bidders will be scored, in part, on the senior laboratory leadership they propose. Northrop Grumman has taken the bold move of advertising five top positions at LANL, including the deputy director’s seat, in The Washington Post and elsewhere.

UC regents have yet to vote on whether to enter the competition and won’t do so until the final request for proposals is published. However, the university is reviewing potential senior managementteam members and considering a full range of candidates, including the incumbents, school spokesman Chris Harrington said.

The University of California and Northrop Grumman, which has offices in New Mexico, could turn out to be the top two contenders; however , some interested parties are choosing to keep silent. Nuclear Watch of New Mexico — in concert with other anti-nuke groups — is gearing up for the competition.

Those who say they’ve dropped out of the race as prime bidders include: Lockheed Martin Corp., Battelle Memorial Institute, University of Texas, Texas A & M University and Computer Sciences Corp. 



-------- canada

Premier's Lepreau strategy under fire

WebPosted Mar 11 2005 10:55 AM AST
CBC News

http://nb.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=nb-lepreau20050311

FREDERICTON  —  A former federal environment minister says Premier Bernard Lord is using a "blackmail argument" to squeeze money out of Ottawa for the Point Lepreau nuclear plant.

David Anderson agrees with Lord that refurbishing the plant should qualify for emission credits under the Kyoto accord to reduce greenhouse gases.

$1.4 billion for refit

But he criticized Lord's threat to build more coal-fired plants if Ottawa doesn't send money for Lepreau.

"It's highly irresponsible to try and link that type of argument," Anderson said.

"It would appear too much to be the blackmail argument. And Mr. Lord would find it a very, very expensive argument to put forward, because New Brunswick would find the federal government far less generous on a host of other plans that are federal-provincial."

Anderson says officials in Ottawa are worried about setting a bad precedent – by giving money to provinces for energy projects they would probably do anyway.

Even so, he says the federal government might agree to compensate New Brunswick for every tonne of carbon emissions it eliminated from the air by generating energy with nuclear power, rather than coal or oil.

That same argument was made this week by Bill Thompson, the deputy-minister in New Brunswick's energy department.

"Point Lepreau doesn't put greenhouse gases into the system, so if we're going to refurbish that, we think we should get credit for that," he said.

Thompson also repeated the premier's stand on the issue, saying that a lack of financial support from Ottawa could be a "deal-breaker" – and could force the province to consider generating more power with fossil fuels.

After more than 20 years of service, the Point Lepreau nuclear plant is nearing the end of its operational life.

But an investment of $1.4 billion to retool the plant from top to bottom, would allow it to generate power for another two or three decades.

The board of directors of NB Power has yet to make an official recommendation to the province on whether to proceed with the project.

But the premier has stated that he supports the idea in principle: the only obstacle for him is money.


<a name="du"></a>

-------- depleted uranium

Australian troops will be protected from radiation: Army chief

Friday, March 11, 2005 Australian Broadcasting

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200503/s1321536.htm

The Chief of the Army says Australian troops going into southern Iraq will be protected against depleted uranium ammunition.

Lieutenant General Peter Leahy says a military survey group has returned from southern Iraq after talks with Japanese and British forces there.

He says the survey group was able to discuss concerns about depleted uranium in the area and the Army will now consider any implications.

But Lt Gen Leahy says the 450 Australian troops being deployed to southern Iraq will be fully protected from radiation.

"I don't think we've got results yet of the data and information that we've brought back, I think we should wait until we've seen that," he said.

"But we are well-prepared to respond to that and to make sure that when our forces deploy they have the appropriate protection and the full knowledge of where some of these things might be so that we can avoid them."

---

Weaponised Uranium letter to Australian Prime minister

From: davey garland <thunderelf@yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Fri Mar 11, 2005 7:00am

Can folk send this around this letter that has been written by Australian anti-DU activists to their lists to get the ball rolling into Howards post box. Naturally this needs to come from the australian public, so if you can pass it on to any activists etc you might know off down under, or amonst your anti-war,veterans, greens etc networks there, then that would be magic. Helps gives the Aussie anti-du movement is bigger voice.
many thanks

Davey Garland
Pandora DU research Project

To: The Prime Minister
John Howard
Parliament House, Canberra 2601

Ref: Weaponised Uranium

Dear Prime Minister,

We the people of Australia heard you say on ABC radio prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that you would not send Australian Defence personnel to conflict theaters where nuclear weapons were being used. Taking into account your facility with language, we want to make it very clear that we understand that nuclear and radioactive weapons have different triggering devices, but in essence we are talking about weapons that have the capacity to kill randomly and consistently over long periods of time, and to cause environmental and human disaster in military and civilian populations.

My Prime Minister, you have announced the Australian troops will be sent into Samvah, an area of conflict where Dutch and some US troops have refused to serve due to the high levels of radiation. So what of your promise?

As you know DU weapons were used almost ubiquitously both during and post invasion in both rural and urban conflict zones. DU weapons along with chemicals weapons in the form of napalm and white phosphorus, were used against the citizens of Fallujah. The environmental and human evidence points to a disaster of epic proportions. Already 56% of US troops returning from GW1 are on sickness benefits, despite only a small percentage of them being wounded. 11,000 out of 580,400 who served in GW1 have died.. Those statistics are alarming in themselves. Veterans are seeing their post Gulf War children being born with horrible deformities. 40% of soldiers in one unit alone have developed cancer after only 16 months. This is the environment into which you are sending ADF personnel. We know it and you know it.

If this does not alarm you Prime Minister, it should. The weapons being used in the Gulf War, the Balkans and Afghanistan alter the Master Code for DNA. The US military labs and Manhattan Project personnel alarmed at the implication for global health and survival are now making this news public.

We as people of Australia, sent you letters before, expressing our concern at the widespread use of weaponised uranium missiles, commonly known as Depleted Uranium. We wrote because there is increasing evidence of these weapons becoming more ubiquitous, and they are now definitely linked to cancer and birth defects amongst civilians, and combatants. You chose to stay silent, to not listen to the voices of your concerned citizens. But this time the stakes are higher. The data and science is known and well developed. The Casualties have come in and been counted. The doctors who were threatened and told to misdiagnose and maintain secrecy are speaking out.
There are no more excuses Prime Minister. No place to hide as the elephant in the lounge room is getting harder to ignore.

Sending troops to a known radiation zone without full protection is in effect sentencing them to death. Maybe you agree with Kissinger¡Çs adage that that ¡ÈMilitary men are just dumb stupid animals to be used in Foreign Policy¡É but they are wives, daughters, husbands, fathers, sons, to all of us¡Ä There are no excuses now PM. What you are doing is deliberately sentencing those troops to a multiple of radiologically induced disease and possibly death. They are clearly not your children.
\
There is no safe place in Iraq. DU in its post impact oxide form, blows with the wind and is respirable. It has already entered the water table and is in livestock and plants. What we have is a human and environmental tragedy of unimaginable proportions. Is this how you want to go down in history John, as the Trojan horse that brought silence on the world?

At a time when it has been revealed that 42 of the US states are now severely contaminated by radiation emanating from DU testing, manufacturing and deployment, you have handed Australian sovereign territory to the US for testing and bases. We understand that Australia also uses weaponised uranium in missiles such as the Javelin. We abhor this as a future for Australia, as we know that areas used for such purposes in the US are now marked as Areas of National Sacrifice, being biologically toxic. You do not have our permission to kill our land and our people.

We the people of Australia, in our name, and the name of future generations demand:

¦² The immediate withdrawal of Australian troops from this intransigent war. It is clear there is nothing to be gained and we have failed the people miserably. More have died as a result of the Coalitions activities than from all the years of Sadam Hussein¡Çs dictatorship.
¦² An end to the purchase and use of all uranium containing weapons
¦² An end to the intimidation of scientists investigating the human and environmental costs of the use of such weapons
¦² An immediate independent study of all civilians in conflict zones and Australian combatants, to investigate the nature and extent of radiation and heavy metal sickness
¦² Immediate compensation for all combatants thus effected
¦² Immediate clean up at the US, UK and Australian government¡Çs expense, of all areas contaminated with DU residue.
¦² Public disclosure of all Australian weapons containing DU, which our taxes have bought.
¦² An immediate end to negotiations over the use of Australian land for weapons testing.

We demand a full account and end to the use of these Weapons of Current and Future Destruction in line with the Geneva Convention.

Name: Address:

--------

Veterans exposure to uranium eyed

By GREGORY B. HLADKY, Journal Register News Service
03/11/2005 Bristol, CT, Press

http://www.bristolpress.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=14126998&BRD=1643&PAG=461&dept_id=10486&rfi=6

HARTFORD -- Two bills focusing on potentially dangerous health risks faced by Connecticut veterans because of exposure to depleted uranium ammunition won initial approval from a legislative committee Thursday.

"It’s a real milestone," said state Rep. Patricia Dillon, D-New Haven, who sponsored one of the bills to assure Connecticut soldiers a legal right to screening and follow-up care for exposure to depleted uranium. "I think we’re going to be a real leader on this."

The other measure that also won unanimous approval from the legislature’s Veterans’ Affairs Committee would create a state task force to investigate the health effects of depleted uranium exposure and review the best screening methods used to detect it.

Both bills now go to the legislature’s Public Health Committee for further action.

Dillon said her bill is intended to put into Connecticut law a soldier’s right to be tested and treated for exposure to depleted uranium, which is increasingly being used by the U.S. military to enhance the effectiveness of armor-piercing ammunition.

"Theoretically, we’re putting into state law what the Army says it’s already doing," said Dillon. She said many veterans of the first Persian Gulf war and the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have told her the U.S. military isn’t providing the needed screening.

The co-chair of the veterans’ affairs panel, state Sen. Gayle Slossberg, D-Milford, said, "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."

Veterans like Melissa Sterry of New Haven, a 42-year-old ex-soldier who served during the first Gulf conflict, have testified they believe exposure to depleted uranium is at least partially responsible for a broad range of devastating illnesses.

Sterry’s dramatic testimony last month about her long battle to get federal officials to ac-knowledge that exposure to depleted uranium may have contributed to her debilitating problems drew attention to the need for state action.

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal also testified in support of the legislation at a public hearing Thursday.

"Unfortunately, the Defense Department has not fully acknowledged the potential scope of exposure nor has the Department fully tested all veterans who may have been exposed to depleted uranium," Blumenthal said.

Debbi Newton, president-elect of the National Guard Association of Connecticut, submitted testimony calling the proposed task force study "an important first step in understanding what the effects are and how best to treat them and how to fund such treatment."

Newton also praised the concept of creating a health registry system for veterans and military personnel so that they could be contacted "years down the road should further study, research or evidence be found that they may be suffering from the effects of exposure and not even know it."



-------- india / pakistan

Nuclear row precedes Rice's Pakistan visit

March 11, 2005
By Anwar Iqbal
UPI South Asian Affairs Analyst

Washington, DC, Mar. 11 (UPI) -- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will arrive in the Pakistani capital next week in the middle of a new controversy involving disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan and his underground network of nuclear proliferators.

This time, the controversy has been stirred by Pakistan's Information Minister Shaikh Rashid Ahmed, who told reporters at a seminar in Islamabad Thursday that Khan had illegally delivered gas centrifuges and other nuclear technology to Iran. The centrifuges are used for enriching uranium.

This is the first time that a senior Pakistani official has publicly acknowledged the nature of transferred nuclear technology to Iran. But Ahmed did not say when the deliveries were made and how.

"We have seen those reports and we are looking into them," a State Department official told United Press International when asked to comment on Ahmed's statement.

"Dr. Khan helped Iran in his personal capacity," said the minister, insisting that no Pakistani official was aware of Khan's activities or his links to the nuclear black market that Khan was running.

Diplomatic sources told UPI that originally Rice had not planned to raise the nuclear issue with the Pakistanis during her visit next week.

The sources said that this will be Rice's first visit to the country as secretary of state and she wanted to keep it non-controversial. "But now it will be difficult for her to ignore the public acknowledgement of a cabinet minister," said a senior South Asian diplomat. "Ahmed should have known the repercussions of what he was saying before he said it."

But other diplomatic sources, also from South Asia, say that there's nothing in the statement that the Americans did not already know. According to these sources, the United States has maintained regular contact with the Pakistanis on this issue ever since Khan confessed to selling nuclear technology to these three rogue states.

"The Americans already know much more than what the minister said in his statement," said another South Asian diplomat.

In February last year, Khan confessed to selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea. He has been under house arrest since then and is regularly interrogated by Pakistani security officials.

So far U.S. officials have not been very responsive to the demand that they be allowed direct access to Khan. Instead they say that the Pakistanis are fully cooperating with them and that they are satisfied with the information they were receiving from the Pakistanis.

Diplomatic observers in Washington say that Ahmed's statement would create more problems for Iran than it would for Pakistan. Pakistan, they say, has always maintained that it was not aware of Khan's activities, and Ahmed also repeated this position while acknowledging that Khan had sold centrifuges to Iran.

Iran is already under tremendous international pressure to give up its nuclear program. Tehran defends its program by saying that it intends to use enrich uranium for producing electricity. The United States rejects the Iranian position, saying that a country which already has huge energy resources does not need uranium for producing electricity.

And Ahmed's statement that Iran has purchased a particular type of centrifuges that can be used for enriching uranium to weapons grade fuel will further strengthened America's argument that Iran is making nuclear fuel for weapons and not for electricity.

Diplomatic observers predict that America will now further increase its pressure on Iran to give up its nuclear program.

Ahmed's acknowledged, the observers say, could also increase pressure on Pakistan to allow America and other international experts to directly question Khan to determine how much damage his network has already done.

Since Khan is still very popular in Pakistan as the father of its nuclear bomb, President Pervez Musharraf had pardoned him after his public confession and instead of sending him to jail he confined Khan to his home.

Musharraf also has rejected suggestions to hand over Khan to another country, possibly America, for further interrogation or to allow international experts to interrogate Khan.

On Thursday, Ahmed reiterated Pakistan's stance when he said that "Dr. Khan will not be handed over to any other country, nor will we allow foreigners to interrogate him."

But there are questions that Pakistan will now have to answer, particularly about media reports that Khan might have sold nuclear know-how to some unnamed Arab states or to non-state actors.

So far Washington does not seem particularly worried about Arab states, perhaps because it has direct access to most Arab states to determine whether they have a weapons grade nuclear program or not. But it is the non-state actors -- diplomatic jargon denoting terrorists - that worry Washington. Last month a CIA report warned that there was "serious possibility" of these non-state actors acquiring nuclear technology.

----

Pakistan's opposition halts parliament with protest over nuclear row

ISLAMABAD (AFP) Mar 11, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050311111355.pxfrywgm.html

Pakistan's political opposition stormed out of parliament Friday over government statements that nuclear pioneer Abdul Qadeer Khan provided Iran with centrifuges, which can be used to enrich uranium.

The government said for the first time Thursday that Khan had given the key atomic technology to Pakistan's neighbor, which is coming under heavy pressure from the United States over its own nuclear program.

Washington believes the technology has enabled Iran to enrich uranium to a level required for making nuclear weapons, despite Tehran's insistence that its nuclear program is for peaceful means only.

Opposition lawmakers were angered over the parliament chair's refusal to hold a debate on the statements made Thursday by Information Minister Sheikh Rashid, which they said were meant only to curry favor with Washington.

"Once again Pakistani leadership is playing in the hand of the United States to serve its sinister motives against Iran," said opposition lawmaker Liaquat Baloch, a leader with the Islamic party alliance Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal.

"This is part of a conspiracy to defame national heroes and our scientists."

Baloch demanded the government stop making "reckless" statements and tell lawmakers when the centrifuges were handed over and who was in control of the military and the government in Pakistan at that time.

Rashid said Thursday that Khan, who fell from grace after he publicly confessed early last year that he passed nuclear secrets to other countries, had passed the centrifuges along to Iran through the black market.

He insisted the government was in no way involved.

Khan admitted to leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya after a government probe into nuclear proliferation.

The investigation was launched in November 2003 after the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, informed Pakistan about the leak.

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

She refused to comment further.

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

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.


-------- iran

Russian producer ready to ship nuclear fuel to Iran

MOSCOW (AFP) Mar 11, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050311011643.zki15wez.html

Russia's chemical plant in south-west Siberia is set to ship nuclear fuel for Iran's Bushehr power station that Russia is constructing despite US protests, the Interfax news agency reported late Thursday.

"The fuel has been manufactured and is stored at the plant, to be delivered at demand," the factory's chairman Vladimir Razin told reporters, adding that 168 fuel assemblies would be required to run the reactor.

Many countries are concerned that Iran could use a civilian nuclear power program as cover for clandestine efforts to develop the capacity to build nuclear weapons, an effort which would require capacity for enriching uranium to weapons-grade level.

Under the deal signed last month at Bushehr, the site in Iran of the country's first civilian nuclear power station still under construction, Iran agreed to return immediately to Russia all nuclear fuel after it has been spent in civilian reactors.

Germany, Britain and France -- the "EU-3" -- are pursuing efforts to persuade Iran through diplomatic pressure to drop any uranium enrichment ambitions. The United States has taken a tougher line, refusing to rule out military strikes against suspected nuclear weapons development facilities.
 
----

Iran Bought Centrifuges, Pakistan Says

Associated Press
Friday, March 11, 2005; Page A20

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25147-2005Mar10?language=printer

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, March 10 -- Pakistan admitted Thursday that the scientist who headed its nuclear program sold Iran a crucial component needed to enrich uranium and produce nuclear material for warheads.

The admission by Information Minister Rashid Ahmed was Pakistan's first public acknowledgment that Abdul Qadeer Khan provided Iran's secret nuclear program with completed centrifuges. But Ahmed said Pakistan knew nothing of his activities when they occurred and insisted that Khan would not be turned over to another country for prosecution.

Khan "gave some centrifuges to Iran," Ahmed said in a telephone interview. "He helped Iran in his personal capacity, and the Pakistan government had nothing to do with it."

Khan, a metallurgist, is widely considered the father of Pakistan's program to produce atomic bombs to counter India's nuclear arsenal. Last year Khan confessed to providing Iran, Libya and North Korea with technical assistance and components for making high-speed centrifuges. Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, pardoned him and allowed him to keep the riches he allegedly made from his illicit nuclear deals.

The CIA released a report in November saying it believed Khan aided Iran's nuclear weapons program more than previously disclosed, but the unclassified version of the report made no mention of actual centrifuges being delivered to the Iranians.

Ahmed, the information minister, initially made the admission about Khan at a seminar in Islamabad organized by a local newspaper group, in which he stuck by Pakistan's insistence that Khan would never be handed over to a third country for prosecution.

"Yes, we supplied Iran the centrifuge system. Yes, Dr. Qadeer gave Iran this technology. But we are not going to hand over Dr. Qadeer to anyone. We will not," Ahmed said at the seminar, according to an audiotape obtained by the Associated Press.

----

West lying about Iran nuclear aims: cleric

TEHRAN (AFP) Mar 11, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050311110631.ydyeldte.html

A top Iranian conservative cleric on Friday accused the United States and Europe of using allegations Tehran is seeking an atomic weapon as a pretext to deprive the Islamic republic of nuclear technology.

"The West is lying when they say they are afraid of Iran with an atomic weapon, the reality is that they want to deprive us from gaining science and technology," Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani said, followed by the usual chants of "Death to America, down with Israel" from the faithful.

In an address at the weekly Friday prayers, broadcast live on state radio, he added: "This regime and nation does not need and want an atomic bomb, and it will not heed your demands, since every youth is an atomic bomb."

More than half of Iran's nearly 70 million population were born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Tehran's clerical regime insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, and that it is not seeking to develop nuclear weapons, as charged by Washington.

Tehran is currently negotiating with the Britain, France and Germany who are trying to convince Iran to halt its work on the nuclear fuel cycle -- including the sensitive process of enriching uranium -- in return for a package of incentives covering trade, security and technology.

The United States maintains that Iran is trying to covertly develop nuclear weapons, while Tehran insists that its program is purely meant to meet civilian energy needs.

US President George W. Bush on Thursday renewed sanctions barring US firms and citizens from oil dealings with Iran, citing an "unusual and extraordinary threat" from Tehran.

----

Iran offers to curb nuclear plans

By Guy Dinmore in Washington and Raphael Minder
Published: March 11 2005 19:32 Financial Times

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c1dfe414-9257-11d9-bca5-00000e2511c8.html

Iran has responded to combined pressure from the US and Europe by offering to halt development of most of its nuclear fuel cycle facilities while retaining the ability to enrich small amounts of uranium, diplomats said on Friday.

Iran's offer, communicated to the Bush administration, was seen as a first response to the united approach involving a mix of economic incentives and threats that the US and Europe agreed on following President George W. Bush's summit meetings last month.

Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, confirmed the shift in US policy on Friday, announcing that the US would lift its objections to Iran's application to join the World Trade Organisation. The US would also consider licensing spare parts for Iranian commercial aircraft.

France, Germany and the UK the European Union trio leading negotiations with Iran declared they would support US efforts to refer Iran to the UN Security Council if it ended its voluntary freeze of its uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing activities.

Diplomats and analysts in Washington doubted that the US and EU3 would accept Iran's proposal that it retain, under international inspection, a small number of centrifuges to enrich uranium. Under the temporary agreement reached with the EU in November, Iran was allowed to keep running a dozen centrifuges out of the tens of thousands it was developing.

In their public statements, US officials have demanded the complete and permanent end to Iran's nuclear fuel cycle activities. Diplomats noted with interest this demand was not specifiedin the State Department's official announcement yesterday.

Iran denies its civilian programme is a cover to develop nuclear weapons and insists it has the right to pursue nuclear development under international safeguards.

Diplomats were sceptical that the EU-US mix of carrots and sticks, as presented, would be enough to persuade Iran.

Foreign ministers of the EU3 and Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, said in a joint statement: “Progress is not as fast as we would wish.” 

---

New nuclear clues could lift lid on Iran's programme

By Stephen Fidler
Published: March 11 2005 21:14 Financial Times

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/0db7a55c-9271-11d9-bca5-00000e2511c8.html

Recent advances in an international investigation into the nuclear smuggling network centred on Abdul-Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist, have boosted hopes of uncovering the truth about Iran's nuclear programme.

Mr Khan has admitted helping the nuclear programmes of Iran, Libya and North Korea over more than 15 years but there are big gaps in investigators' understanding of what was supplied and to whom.

In a critical advance for the investigation, the Malaysian government has allowed experts from the UN's international Atomic Energy Agency access to Bukhary Sayed Abu Tahir, the Sri Lankan described by President George W. Bush as the network's chief financial officer. The experts held an initial long interview with Mr Tahir in February. Western diplomats say further sessions are expected.

The interviews with Mr Tahir, in detention in Malaysia, should provide material to corroborate or challenge accounts about its nuclear procurement given to the IAEA by the Iranian government.

Some analysts say concerns about what Mr Tahir may say could prompt further pre-emptive disclosures by the Iranian and Pakistani governments.

They say such a calculation might have prompted the release in January before the Tahir interview by Iran to the IAEA of a one-page handwritten document reflecting an offer made to Iran by the Khan network in 1987.

Investigators have known for more than a year that early contacts were made between Iran and the network in 1987. But the significance of the document was that it showed the network offered to provide Iran with the wherewithal to manufacture and cast uranium metal, an ability Iran would need only if building a nuclear weapon.

Iran has said it took up only part of the offer that related to the construction of centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium. Such centrifuges would be useful as part of a nuclear energy programme which Iran says it is pursuing and in a nuclear weapons programme, which it says it is not.

Nuclear analysts said the document might have encouraged Pakistan's first public admission this week that the network supplied Iran with centrifuges, ruling out that it supplied other, even more incriminating, technologies.

The document emerged out of a 1987 meeting in Dubai, attended by three Iranian officials, Mr Tahir and his uncle, a man named Mohamed Farouq, western diplomats said. As many as three Europeans may have attended, including possibly a German engineer, now dead, called Heinz Mebus.

IAEA officials have said the offer included a dis-assembled centrifuge machine, drawings and specifications for a complete centrifuge plant and 2,000 centrifuge machines. They also offered reconversion and casting equipment and other material used to cast uranium metal from enriched uranium hexafluoride produced by the centrifuges.

Iran did not immediately take up the offer to buy the centrifuge machines but might have hit trouble manufacturing them because later contacts between the two sides resulted in the delivery of 500 centrifuge components in the mid-1990s.

----

U.S. Offers Modest Incentives to Iran

By DAVID E. SANGER
March 11, 2005 NY TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/11/international/middleeast/11cnd-iran.html?pagewanted=print&position=

WASHINGTON, March 11 - Europe and the United States have agreed on a joint approach to negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program after months of dispute, with the Bush administration agreeing to offer modest economic incentives, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said today. The United States will drop objections to Iran's eventual membership in the World Trade Organization and will also allow, "on a case-by-case basis," some sales of civilian aircraft parts to Iran, Ms. Rice said in a statement issued by the State Department.

Later, in a question-answer session with reporters, Ms. Rice said, "The key here was to establish with our European allies a common agenda, a common approach to the issue of getting the Iranians to live up to the international obligations which they have undertaken." Britain, France and Germany are the three countries that have been negotiating with Iran.

"We have said for quite a long time now that we supported this diplomatic effort and that we wanted it to succeed, and that Iran ought to take the opportunity given to it," she told reporters. "What we've tried to do, in removing our objection to W.T.O. application from the Iranians and to the provision of certain spare parts to Iranian commercial aircraft, is to now more actively support that diplomatic effort."

Senior American officials said on Thursday, in anticipation of today's announcement, that the Europeans had in turn agreed to take the nuclear issue to the United Nations Security Council if negotiations fail.

Despite Ms. Rice's remarks that the United States has long supported the European diplomatic moves, the agreement represents a major shift in strategy for both the Bush administration, which has refused for years to offer Iran incentives to give up its program, and for Europe, which had been reluctant to discuss penalties.

"We share the desire of European governments to secure Iran's adherence to its obligations through peace and diplomatic means," Ms. Rice's statement said.

The State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, said there is no deadline for the success of the European talks, but stressed that Iran could face Security Council sanctions if it does not comply with the nuclear treaty.

The American incentives would go into effect only if Iran agreed to halt the enrichment of uranium permanently, senior American officials said Thursday.

Asked whether the incentives to Iran might be increased in the future, Mr. Boucher said: "We're not negotiating with Iran. We are supporting the Europeans. The Europeans thought that these were good steps for them, so that as they presented their position to Iran, they would be able to present credible commitments or credible possibilities that they could carry through on. Iran can't get into the W.T.O. without the consent of all the parties. So for one party or a few parties to say, you know, "We'll help you in the W.T.O." - they can't deliver on it without the support of people like the United States."

Entry into the World Trade Organization is a process that usually takes years.

The agreement has been widely anticipated since President Bush returned from Europe late last month.

Mr. Bush did not announce the change himself, just as he did not announce a similar offer to North Korea last June. But he has been closely involved in the administration's change of direction, officials said. But while the United States is a party to negotiations with North Korea, it does not plan to join the talks with Iran directly, officials said, leaving that to the Europeans.

Until now, the president has insisted he would never "reward" Iran for giving up activities that he has insisted are a cover for a weapons program. That position hardened after Iran admitted that it had hidden facilities and enrichment activities from international inspectors for 18 years.

Iran has voluntarily halted its enrichment activities while it is engaged in negotiations with Britain, France and Germany. But its leaders have repeatedly declared that it will never give up its right to enrich uranium for what it insists are peaceful purposes. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which Iran has ratified, gives all signers the right to enrich uranium as long as the work is peaceful, declared and fully monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The monitoring is intended to assure that a country is only producing low-enriched uranium capable of fueling commercial nuclear reactors, rather than high-enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.

Iran's senior negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, told a conference in Tehran last weekend that the country would never agree to a permanent cessation of enrichment. But the senior American official involved in the administration's negotiations with Europe said that, after some heated internal debate, "the Europeans are now with us in the view that we could never monitor their enrichment activity reliably enough" to ensure that Iran was not producing bomb-grade uranium.

Some European diplomats have argued that point in recent weeks, saying that Iran cannot be prohibited from enrichment while other signers of the treaty are permitted to produce nuclear fuel. But the American official insisted "that argument is now over."

Some officials in the Bush administration have said they believe that Iran will not agree to give up enrichment, no matter what incentives Mr. Bush offers. They see the president's decision to dangle what amount to modest American economic incentives as part of an effort to speed along the negotiating process so that Iran's intentions become clear.

At that point, in the view of hawks on the issue inside the White House and the Pentagon, the Europeans will be bound to take the issue to the Security Council. These officials would only speak anonymously because such delicate negotiations hang in the balance.

When she served as national security adviser, Ms. Rice often said that the question of stopping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon should be put before the Security Council, but the Untied States could never muster the votes among the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog.

The Europeans, in contrast, have argued that unless the United States joined in the incentives they offered, Iran would never seriously consider giving up control of what is called the "nuclear fuel cycle," the ability to produce nuclear fuel itself.

American officials have said they will insist on a timetable so that talks do not drag on for months or years. Whether the Europeans will announce such a timetable is unclear. Several weeks ago, the new director of central intelligence, Porter J. Goss, said that Iran was judged to be several years away from producing an actual weapon.

Iran could see benefits from the offer of aircraft parts relatively soon, officials said. Its aging craft are in need of parts for engines and American-made avionic equipment. But entry into the World Trade Organization is far more complex, requiring huge changes in a nation's economy and vast openings to foreign investors. The United States offered to help Russia along that path eight years ago, but it has still not joined the W.T.O. China took years to negotiate its entry.

With today's announcement, the administration will have changed course in dealing with both of the leading aspirants for nuclear technology, North Korea and Iran. Mr. Bush came to office refusing to deal with either nation until each first gave up its weapons program. In North Korea's case, that approach was judged no longer tenable last June, and the administration offered a similar road map of incentives. But North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, has yet to respond to that offer.


-------- korea

N. Korea launches harsh crackdown

March 11, 2005
By Jong-Heon Lee
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20050311-071827-8618r.htm

Seoul, South Korea, Mar. 11 (UPI) -- North Korea has recently tightened state control over its hunger-hit population amid U.S.-led pressure over its nuclear weapons program and human right conditions, sources here say.

South Korean officials and analysts interpret the move as part of efforts to prevent mounting outside threats over the nuclear standoff from triggering internal threats or opposition to the Stalinist leadership.

Boosted by external threats, domestic opposition can jeopardize the totalitarian regime, evidenced, they say, by Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu, who was shot to death in December 1989 as communist rule ended in Eastern Europe.

In the latest development, two North Koreans were shot to death in public in late February on charge of smuggling North Korean women into China, according to a Seoul-based online radio service run by defectors from the communist nation.

The execution took place at a marketplace in the North Korean city of Heoryong, bordering China and Russia on Feb. 28, Free NK (North Korea) said, citing a North Korean staying in a Chinese border city.

According to North Korean defectors and intelligence sources in Seoul, human trafficking is rampant in North Korea for sex trade and labor. "Attitudes towards sex have changed dramatically in North Korea," said a defector who resettled in Seoul last year.

"North Korean women who illegally crossed the border into China for food were sold into the sex trade," he said. "Female fugitives are working in restaurants and karaoke in China to earn money," the defector said.

The open execution comes at a time when outside influence is seeping in the watertight society. North Koreans traveling to China are exposed to the rapidly spreading capitalist culture there, and some of them smuggle radios and CDs containing South Korean songs and TV dramas, which are popular in most of Asia.

With no signs of a revival of the country's tattered economy, cracks were starting to show in North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's dynastic control. Leaflets and posters against Kim's rule appeared in the nation.

In the face of growing cracks in the system, North Korea amended its criminal code last year increasing penalties for expressing criticism of the government and other "anti-state" crimes. The revision, the fifth since 1950, also calls for tougher regulation on new crimes caused by infiltration of outside information.

North Korea also postponed its legislative session, which was due to open this month, in an apparent bid to tighten domestic control over the people by fanning a sense of crisis across the country.

In its New Year message, North Korea put top priority on preventing the influx of any capitalist culture into the closed society. Under the message, North Korean security agents have launched aggressive crackdown on "anti-socialist" behaviors in border areas since January.

So far this year, North Korea has executed more than 60 citizens to warn its people against committing any "anti-republic" behaviors, such as illegal border crossing and information leakage, according to a Seoul-based relief group.

"North Korea executed in public 60 people sent back from China in January," said the Headquarters for Protection of North Korean Defectors. The victims were repatriated to the North after failed attempts to find political asylum by forcing their way into a diplomatic compound in Beijing.

The open execution was the first one reported since 1998, according to North Korea watchers in Seoul. "The North's regime may have needed a scapegoat to warn the people against committing any deviation behaviors," a defector said.

North Korea has also tightened security along its long border with China to check its citizens making their way into China with bribes to border guards, according to South Korean intelligence sources.

Hundreds of households close to China were also forced to relocate to remote areas farther from the border to prevent their involvement in illegal border activities, such as human trafficking.

The North's authorities have also banned the use of mobile phones and confiscate them to prevent information from being leaked to the outside world.

North Korea introduced mobile service in November 2002, with cell phones from Motorola Corp. of the United States and Nokia Corp. of Finland, and Nokia is available in the market in Pyongyang. The number of mobile phone users increased to more than 20,000 in 2003, according to Chosun Sinbo, a newspaper run by pro-Pyongyang ethnic Koreans in Japan.

But the use of mobile phones has helped pierce North Korea's Iron Curtain and break down the Pyongyang regime, which insulates itself through isolating citizens, curbing the spread of information.

Many North Koreans, including border peddlers and border guards, have Chinese cell phones, and they easily contact South Koreans with them in the border areas. They make cell phone calls to their South Korean relatives or North Korean defectors to ask for cash or other economic aid, South Korean officials say.

North Koreans are using Chinese telecommunication networks to reach South Korean phones, intelligence sources here say. Chinese communication firms, which have rapidly expanded their cell phone services, recently installed relay stations along the border with North Korea, which has kindled a cell phone boom in North Korea.

The Chinese devices are charged using pre-paid phone cards, and cost some 400 Chinese yuan (less than $50) for three month's use.

Despite the strict measures, mobile phones have served as conveyer belts of information from the outside world to help combat decades of state-sponsored propaganda and misinformation, defectors say.

How to maintain the closure of the society in this globalized world community? This is a huge dilemma for North Korea to keep the hermit kingdom afloat.


-------- u.n.

IAEA Says Nuclear Energy Looks to Bounce Back

Story by Marguerita Choy
REUTERS FRANCE: March 11, 2005

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/29896/story.htm

PARIS - Interest is growing in nuclear energy as a sustainable solution to soaring oil and gas prices and to fight global warming and poverty, the United Nations nuclear watchdog IAEA said on Thursday.


The International Atomic Energy Agency said about 64 countries, including 34 ministers, will meet in Paris on March 21 and 22 to discuss the controversial energy source.

Only about 30 countries operate nuclear reactors as many backed out of atomic energy after the world's worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 in the then-Soviet Ukraine.

"Such a long list of countries is a good sign that there is a re-evaluation of the facts of each country to reach sustainability," Yuri Sokolov, an IAEA deputy director general told reporters ahead of the conference in Paris.

The IAEA said nuclear energy was critical to meeting the world's growing energy needs and in reducing greenhouse gases.

"Nuclear power plants can meet all these objectives. With 50 years of experience, nuclear has become more efficient. We hope the conference will promote an understanding of the potential of nuclear energy for the world's energy demand and for humanity," Sokolov said.

Industrilised nations like Italy, which after Chernobyl shut four nuclear plants and abandoned another that was 80 percent built, and the United States, which has not built any new reactors since the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979, will attend the Paris conference.

Developing countries such as Ghana and oil-rich Nigeria will also attend, as will Iran, to present its views amid accusations that it is pursuing nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian atomic energy programme.

"Nuclear energy is for all countries. In principle, there are no restrictions on its use," said Sokolov, adding that Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

Nuclear energy is less susceptible to price shocks and nuclear reactors also hardly release any carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas scientists say is responsible for climate change.

Sokolov said if fuel costs double, prices of electricity generated from oil and gas would go up by 40 to 60 percent, while those from nuclear sources will rise by only 2-3 percent.


-------- nevada

Energy officials turn shy in talk about Yucca schedule

By STEVE TETREAULT
STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Friday, March 11, 2005
Las Vegas Review-Journal

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Mar-11-Fri-2005/news/26048040.html

WASHINGTON -- Energy Department officials are displaying new caution about projecting schedules for Yucca Mountain, saying deadlines for establishing a nuclear waste repository for a large part now are out of their hands.

For years, the department had its eye firmly on 2010 to begin accepting high level nuclear waste at the Nevada site.

But after several setbacks in the past year, Yucca Mountain managers said in February that 2010 was being abandoned. Project director Margaret Chu said DOE was "hoping 2012" would emerge as the new opening date.

DOE began distancing itself from that prediction almost immediately, and its officials continue to do so.

Although saying 2012 can be achieved if everything goes their way, Yucca managers in recent public comments have mentioned 2015 as another possibility.

More often, DOE officials carefully couch any talk of deadlines, saying the project faces uncertainties ahead, including waiting for the Environmental Protection Agency to set new radiation health standards and getting enough money from Congress to build the $57.5 billion project.

Officials also express new caution about maneuvering through a complex Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing process that could stretch beyond three or four years as the state of Nevada challenges whether the mountain safely can contain highly radioactive material for thousands of years.

"There are a number of issues that could extend our activity, but we are attempting to do this as expeditiously as possible," Ted Garrish, Yucca Mountain acting director, said Thursday.

The Energy Department submitted a chart to Congress on Thursday that included cost estimates for both a 2012 and a 2015 repository opening. Some in private industry have said a realistic schedule would have Yucca Mountain open between 2015 and 2020.

Some DOE officials were exasperated when Chu mentioned 2012, sources said. She made her comments to a group of reporters following the department's 2006 budget announcement on Feb. 7.

Chu's resignation was announced four days later. She said her departure had been in the works for months, and there has been no indication of a connection between her departure and her references to 2012.

Chu "put a marker out there that got people uncomfortable," a DOE official said.

Another DOE executive suggested that Chu made the comment in haste to escape pressure from reporters seeking new details about the schedule.

"To tell you the truth, (reporters) were walking down the hallway with Margaret Chu during her last week, and she just put it out there," the official said.

"So that's what happened."

Nonetheless, 2012 became a new benchmark. Since then, the department has cushioned any talk of Yucca time lines.

Chu, who has moved to New Mexico, could not be contacted Thursday night.

"There is great uncertainty for (the Energy Department) as to what is going to happen politically and financially," said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

"They are not in control anymore."

The department's new caution on Yucca Mountain reflects the influence of new Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, some say. Bodman has acknowledged to Congress in several appearances that meeting deadlines has not been DOE's strong suit in a number of areas.

"The new secretary is real concerned about doing things, making estimates of dates or financials, that we can't back up," Garrish said.

"It is possible, if circumstances all work right, for an earlier rather than a later date," Garrish said.

"I don't want to give a date that is wrong. It is important that we be careful."

A nuclear industry consultant said Yucca Mountain managers "got a lot of heat for missing the schedules," and their acknowledgement of complications ahead "is a new breath of reality."

"Projects are always dependent on resources," the consultant said.

"They now are acknowledging that."


-------- ohio

FirstEnergy's chief gives upbeat report on its future

Friday, March 11, 2005 Toledo Blade

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050311/BUSINESS03/503110343/-1/BUSINESS

In an industry forum, the chief of FirstEnergy Corp. said that, despite the firm's past problems with the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant near Oak Harbor, the financial outlook for the company this year is positive.

The company expects to earn $2.70 to $2.85 a share, Anthony Alexander, president and chief executive, told analysts during an annual industry teleconference yesterday. The utility had a profit of $2.67 a share last year and it expects to pay a dividend of $1.65 a share this year, a 10 percent increase.

Repeating his message from Feb. 15 when the utility issued its 2004 financial statement, Mr. Alexander told analysts that Davis-Besse's latest maintenance outage went well and the equipment inspections were adequate.

"I feel pretty good about where Davis-Besse is since it's been back on line," he said.

The power plant returned to full power about a month ago after the three-week scheduled maintenance outage, its longest since the plant was allowed to go back into operation a year ago with a retrofitted reactor head.

The plant had been shutdown for two years following the discovery of a reactor head so corroded it nearly erupted.

Davis-Besse's next scheduled maintenance outage is a year away.

The plant's extended outage took $38.3 million out of the company's bottom line last year.

The company plans to reduce debt by $750 million to a total of $11.5 billion, which should help it get an investment-grade rating from Standard & Poor's, Mr. Alexander said.

FirstEnergy plans to have capital expenditures this year of $1 billion.


-------- utah

New Nuclear Friction In West

File photo of entrance into Yucca Mountain.
by Hil Anderson
Washington DC (SPX) Feb 21, 2005

http://www.terradaily.com/news/nuclear-doctrine-05h.html

The Bush administration is risking yet another nuclear controversy in the West as the president's Energy Department hems and haws over what to do about a huge pile of radioactive waste rock heaped uncomfortably close to the Colorado River.

The Energy Department and its incoming secretary, Samuel Bodman, have yet to give any solid reassurances to area governors that their concerns that the Moab, Utah, site won't be pushed aside as they were when the president pushed ahead with the controversial nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

"We cannot afford to assume the risks associated with having uranium tailings strewn along river banks and bars of the Colorado River below Moab," Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman insisted in a letter sent last week to the Moab project manager. "Good science and good sense tell us the tailings must be moved."

The tailings consist of a towering pile of waste from an old uranium mill that rests virtually a stone's throw from the upper Colorado River, which is, as any westerner is keenly aware, a primary source of water for the growing downstream urban areas in Nevada, Arizona and Southern California.

Environmentalists, and more importantly to the White House, state lawmakers of both parties, point out that the Colorado provides water for around 25 million people who would no doubt prefer that it not be mixed with radioactive material on a molecular level as it flows south.

The idea that the Colorado would some day erode its way to the Moab tailings pile and cause the material to crumble into the waterway has officials in Utah and other states sounding a clarion alarm, even if such an event were to occur decades down the road.

Dianne Nielson, executive director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, told the Deseret News in an interview last week: "What do you think 10 million tons of radioactive and poisonous waste would do to the water? It would be bad. The only thing we don't know is just how bad."

The worried rhetoric is similar to that heard a few years ago as the federal government endlessly dithered over a plan to make Yucca Mountain the one and only spot in the nation to store nuclear waste.

Warnings of possible geological flaws in the Nevada site were discounted, however, by President Bush, who announced in 2002 that the project was going ahead - regardless of Nevada's feelings on the matter.

The phrase "easier said than done" applies in earnest to the Moab project as much as it does to Yucca Mountain. Congress passed a law in 1999 mandating that the federal government, specifically the Department of Energy, do something about the growing problem in Utah.

The Energy Department late last year completed the draft of the environmental impact study of the project. It is about 1,000 pages long and requires 24 pages just for the table of contents.

But what has western politicians and officials worried is that the study includes possibly leaving the tailings where they are simply placing a cap over them rather than hauling them to a new resting place well away from the river.

Further, they found it unusual that the EIS did not declare that moving the tailings was the "preferred alternative," a step that is common in the EIS process.

The very idea that Washington was considering leaving the pile in place then set off political Geiger counters in the West where the unpleasant possibility arose that the White House might take the easy way out and let the Moab pile sit and simmer where it is.

"My concern is that short-term cost considerations are going to trump the right decision," Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, told Bodman last week during a House Science Committee hearing.

Bodman, who is considered in Washington to be a consummate administration company man, did not do much to mollify Matheson's concerns by responding blandly that he was aware of Moab and would follow through on the 1999 law to mitigate the problem.

"I can assure you that the department will not knowingly violate the law," he said. "There may be some differences of opinion as to what the law says, and I can't speak to that."

Bodman could be excused for not yet being up to speed on Moab; however, Matheson and other Utah officials have every reason to suspect that the department might opt for the cheaper alternative and leave the tailings in place.

Removing the tailings would require either the construction of a rail line or slurry pipeline or the expansion of nearby US-190 to accommodate a stream of trucks that would run for eight years.

In short, the EIS predicted, moving the tailings would cost anywhere from $329 million to $464 million depending on the site; putting a cap on the pile and leaving it where it is would run about half that.

The study stated that Energy Department officials wanted to wait for the end of the public comment period on the draft before selecting a preferred alternative. The comment period concluded Feb. 18, and the department has 30 days to make its choice.

The agency could indeed commit to the more expensive option of moving the tailings, although with the current federal budget deficit running at around $400 billion there is ample ground for suspicion in the West that the Moab tailings will be left like a cancerous tumor on the banks of one of the region's most important sources of water.


-------- MILITARY 



-------- biological weapons

BioWar: Proposals to open Russia BW sites

By Dee Ann Divis
Senior Science & Technology Editor
March 11, 2005

http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20050310-023631-3248r.htm

WASHINGTON, DC, Mar. 10 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Defense reportedly is weighing a proposal to secure as many as 74 possible Russian bioweapons sites so terrorists cannot obtain possession of the pathogens stored there.

The move ultimately could put out of reach some of the most important Russian weapons facilities, including laboratories in Obolensk and Novosibirsik, as well as Ministry of Defense facilities in Kirov and Sergiev Posad.

The proposal, being made by the International Exchange Group, would begin with a pilot project to secure six specific sites and then expand to other locations if successful. Destruction of pathogens stored at the facilities is a possibility, but that would depend on further negotiations with the Russians, said Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., a supporter of the idea and part of the group's oversight body.

IEG is a non-governmental organization with offices in Washington and close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin's government. In fact, the group's ability to influence those in authority in Russia is at the center of the proposal. It is supposed to be able to ensure American funds spent on securing the dangerous material are not subject to the fraud and abuse that Weldon said has consumed 25 percent to 30 percent of such U.S. aid to Russia since the demise of the Soviet Union.

The six proposed sites include the State Scientific Center of Applied Microbiology in Obolensk -- a former biological weapons facility where scientists researched bacteria including anthrax, plague, tularemia and glanders.

Also on the list is the State Scientific Center of Virology and Biotechnology, a part of the notorious Vektor Institute.

Vektor had some 4,500 scientists working on bioweapons in 1990, author Richard Preston told Congress in 1998. It also is supposed to be holding Russia's samples of smallpox virus -- supposedly only one of two such sample sets in the world.

The smallpox connection makes the center -- which Ken Alibek has identified as being in Novosibirsik -- particularly interesting. Alibek, a Russian bioweapons expert who defected to the United States in 1992, confirmed to United Press International the center worked on virus-based biological weapons.

The headquarters for Biopreparat -- the Biopreparat Open Joint Stock Co. in the city of Moscow -- also is on the list. Created in 1973, Biopreparat was an umbrella organization for commercial pharmaceutical research and a front for bioweapons activity. Though no research was done there, Alibek said, the site could hold clues to work done at other locations.

"In my time all biological weapons development information was kept in that building," Alibek said.

Other sites on the list include the Scientific and Research Institute of Virology and the Epidemiological and Microbiological Scientific and Research Institute in Moscow. These were not bioweapons sites, said Alibek, but both housed collections of pathogens. The sixth is the Federal Center of Animals Health Protection. The type of work done there and its role are unclear.

The six sites are "absolutely" worth securing, Alibek said, and the expanded list has facilities he thinks gaining access to would be particularly important.

Among the most valuable would be the Scientific Research Institute of Microbiology in Kirov and the Center of Virology at Sergiev Posad. Both were run by the Ministry of Defense and access to the latter has been refused up to now.

Gaining access previously denied is exactly what the proposal is about, Weldon said.

"It is a brand new concept," Weldon told UPI. "They have never done it before. Usually this work is done ministry to ministry. What we are exploring is the use of a non-governmental entity in Russia that is very close to Putin to get access that we haven't been able to get through the traditional channels. This is kind of a whole new process. That is why we are doing two small pilot programs to test it -- to see if it is real."

Weldon, fluent in Russian and a long-time proponent of improving relations between the United States and Russia, co-chairs IEG's Joint Political Council with Alexander Kotenkov, plenipotentiary representative of the president at the Russian Federation at the Council of Federation -- the upper house of the Russian Parliament, roughly equivalent to the U.S. Senate. The two men provide "guidance, consultation and strategic oversight" a company brochure said.

Also looking over IEG's shoulder are a number of seemingly well-placed Russian officials. The group's Board of Guardians includes Victor Zavarzn and Vladimir Vasilev, chairmen of the Duma committees on defense and (homeland) security, respectively.

Also on the board are:

--Aleksander Bortnikov deputy director of the Federal Security Service, which handles internal security and, as of last year, head of FSS's Economic Security Service;

--Yury Baluevsky, first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation;

--Lubov Sliska, first deputy chairman of the State Duma, and

--Alexey Alexandrov, member of the Council of Federation.

Money for the project, a figure in the low millions of dollars, Weldon said, likely would come from the Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, with no further congressional approval required. Work would be done by Russian agency personnel but inspected by the American funders. Work would not be paid for until it was confirmed to be correct and complete, he said.

The proposal is being reviewed, Weldon said, by the office of Douglas Feith and an interagency panel, Weldon noted. Feith is the Defense Department's undersecretary of defense for policy.

Feith's office did not respond to several requests for information on the proposal.

"We haven't had access to all the biological sites or the chemical sites," said Weldon, who has been pushing the idea for the past six months. "The Russians have said if we work through this process we can get access to any site in Russia." 


-------- business

Microsoft security practice raises concerns

By TED BRIDIS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 11, 2005

http://famulus.msnbc.com/famulusgen/ap03-11-153951.asp?t=apnew&vts=31120051755

WASHINGTON, March 11 — Microsoft Corp. is giving early versions of its software security patches to the U.S. Air Force and other organizations, a practice some experts fear could give rogue hackers important details about how to break into unprotected computers on a massive scale.

       Microsoft maintains that participants in its security-testing program abide by strict rules to protect these early software patches from leaking into the Internet's underground. For added security, it doesn't provide documentation to participants about which Microsoft products might be affected and allows only for limited testing in a computer laboratory.

       Hackers who study such repairing patches can identify the vulnerable software and build tools to attack it. Microsoft said the program's goal is to more thoroughly test its upcoming security patches for reliability; some repairing patches from Microsoft in previous years have inadvertently disrupted computers.

       ''The challenge for us as a company is to make sure the updates we provide are good quality,'' said Stephen Toulouse, a program manager for Microsoft's Security Response Center.

       For years, Microsoft had denied suggestions it privately shared detailed information about vulnerabilities discovered in its software before it's publicly announced. Craig Mundie, a senior vice president, said earlier this week that fears about dangerous leaks compel Microsoft to keep such sensitive information a closely guarded secret.

       ''We're very highly incented not to be too generous,'' Mundie said.

       Some security experts challenged Microsoft's year-old practice, which was first disclosed in Friday's Wall Street Journal. They cited the likelihood that even early versions of software patches may leak from participating organizations into the hacker community.

       The U.S.-funded CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University suffered such breaches when hackers stole and publicized sensitive details about software vulnerabilities before repairs were available.

       ''Leaks definitely do happen,'' said Marc Maiffret, an executive with eEye Digital Security Inc. of Aliso Viejo, Calif., whose researchers have found dozens of serious flaws in Microsoft's products. ''You run the risk of this getting out to the wrong people. It will be interesting to see whether they can contain it.''

       Peiter ''Mudge'' Zatko, a security expert who has worked for both the Clinton and Bush administrations, said the risk from Microsoft's effort was ''the worst possible thing for national security.'' He said outside the U.S. government's classified military environment, it was nearly impossible to guarantee secrecy.

       ''What Microsoft is doing is really, really bad,'' Zatko said.

       Microsoft said its program participants, which it declined to identify except for the Air Force, were carefully selected and sign nondisclosure agreements. Toulose acknowledged there was some risk but said building hacker tools by examining a software patch was ''a significant engineering challenge.''

       ''One of the things we have to weigh is that risk against making sure we can provide a quality update,'' he said.

       Another outside researcher, Russ Cooper, said he was mollified by Microsoft's efforts to enforce secrecy agreements and withhold important details about any future vulnerabilities.

       ''I'm not terribly worried,'' said Cooper, senior scientist at Cybertrust Inc. ''Anybody participating in this program probably enjoys the status and will do everything they can to make sure they don't violate any agreements and get pulled out.'' 


-------- chemical weapons

Judge Dismisses Agent Orange Lawsuit

March 11, 2005

By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
Associated Press Writer

http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/A/AGENT_ORANGE?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME

NEW YORK (AP) -- A federal judge Thursday dismissed a lawsuit filed on behalf of some 4 million Vietnamese claiming that U.S. chemical companies committed war crimes by making Agent Orange for use during the Vietnam War.

U.S. District Judge Jack B. Weinstein disagreed that the allegedly toxic defoliant and similar U.S. herbicides should be considered poisons banned under international rules of war, even though they may have had comparable effects on people and land.

The Brooklyn judge also found that the plaintiffs could not prove that Agent Orange had caused their illnesses, largely because of a lack of large-scale research.

Plaintiffs' lawyers said an appeal was planned.

The lawsuit was the first attempt by Vietnamese plaintiffs to seek compensation for the effects of Agent Orange, which is laden with the highly toxic chemical dioxin and has been linked to cancer, diabetes and birth defects among Vietnamese soldiers, civilians and American veterans.

U.S. aircraft sprayed more than 21 million gallons of the chemical between 1962 to 1971 in attempts to destroy crops and remove foliage used as cover by communist forces.

Lawyers for Monsanto, Dow Chemical and more than a dozen other companies had said they should not be punished for following what they believed to be the legal orders of the nation's commander in chief.

They also argued that international law generally exempts corporations, as opposed to individuals, from liability for alleged war crimes.

"We've said all along that any issues regarding wartime activities should be resolved by the U.S. and Vietnamese governments," said Dow Chemical spokesman Scot Wheeler. "We believe that defoliants saved lives by protecting allied forces from enemy ambush and did not create adverse health effects."

The Department of Justice had supported the chemical companies in court, saying a ruling against the firms could cripple the president's power to direct the military.

A plaintiffs' lawyer, William Goodman, said the judge made "a clear error" in deciding Agent Orange was not a poison and said an appeal was planned.

"The use of this chemical in Vietnam was a scandal from the very beginning, and the failure of this court to redress these wrongs is a continuation of that scandal," Goodman said.

Some 10,000 U.S. war veterans receive medical disability benefits related to Agent Orange.

The Vietnamese government has said the United States has a moral responsibility for damage to its citizens and environment but has never sought compensation for victims.

On the Net:

U.S. information on Agent Orange: http://www1.va.gov/agentorange 


-------- europe

Ukraine part of Europe-US alliance: FM

WASHINGTON (AFP) Mar 11, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050310234046.09wuoqup.html

Ukraine's history and destiny are tied with Europe and the United States in trade, defense, politics and culture, the country's foreign minister said on his first official trip to Washington.

"European and Euro-Atlantic acceptance will be the final recognition of Ukraine as a European nation," Boris Tarasyuk told an audience at George Washington University in Washington.

"It insures that Ukraine will no longer be considered as a former colony" of the Soviet Union.

Tarasyuk ticked off an ambitious list of pacts Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko plans to lobby for on his first official visit with US President George W. Bush in April.

Ukraine has announced that it will veer sharply westward, seeking accession into the European Union, NATO and the World Trade Organization while turning its back on Russia.

"Ukraine's roots are traced in European civilization," Tarasyuk said.

The pro-Western Yushchenko won a monumental struggle over three rounds of presidential elections last year against his pro-Russian rival, Viktor Yanukovich, in what became known as the peaceful "orange revolution," with the open support of Washington.

Tarasyuk said that prior to Yushchenko's visit, he would lobby the US Congress for a repeal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which denied Ukraine favored nation status in US trade based on its prior repressive government. US Senator John McCain has committed to that effort.

Ukraine will protect foreign investment, Tarasyuk said, including intellectual property rights.

Although Yushchenko will keep his campaign promise to withdraw troops from Iraq, Ukraine will not leave a vacuum in Iraq, Tarasyuk said, but will other ways to maintain a presence there.


-------- mideast

Behind Scenes, Israelis Press for Syria to Leave Lebanon

By STEVEN ERLANGER
March 11, 2005 NY TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/11/international/middleeast/11israel.html?pagewanted=print&position=

JERUSALEM, March 10 - The Bush administration has asked Israeli officials, including the foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, to restrict public comments on the politics of Lebanon in order not to give ammunition to Syria and its main supporter there, Hezbollah, in their struggle with the Lebanese opposition, Israeli officials said Thursday.

But in private, Israeli officials are making no secret of their desire to see Syria out of Lebanon, and there is a new note of optimism here about the fresh problems that Syria's weakness causes for Hezbollah.

A consensus has emerged among 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 Shiite 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, line Israel's northern border and, Israeli intelligence believes, finance suicide bombers in the West Bank.

Until the last year or so, Israeli officials say, the consensus was different. Syria, with its reputation for keeping its treaties, was viewed as an agent for stability, especially in southern Lebanon, which Hezbollah controls, often from fortifications built by Israel before the 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."

Another official acknowledged there was "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 pro-Syrian - and thus anti-Lebanese - stand, the official said, adding: "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 continued. "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."

But Hezbollah's open support for Syria is likely to hurt it as a political party, the Israelis say. At the same time, given the group's close connections to Iran, there is little reason to believe Hezbollah is going to abandon militancy and terrorism for pure politics.

Iran is nervous, too, the officials said. Iran sees Israel as an ideological enemy and a regional rival that 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.

Eran Lehrman, a former Israeli intelligence officer who directs the Israel office of the American Jewish Committee, said the Israeli elite was 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," he said, "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."

Israel blames Syria for the recent assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, Mr. Lehrman said. "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 served only to increase pressure on Syria to leave Lebanon misses the point, he added. "Sometimes stupidity needs no other explanation," he said, and the new Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, is considered much weaker than his late father.

But Syria has 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."


-------- prisoners of war

Army, CIA Agreed on 'Ghost' Prisoners

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 11, 2005; Page A16

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25239-2005Mar10?language=printer

Top military intelligence officials at the Abu Ghraib prison came to an agreement with the CIA to hide certain detainees at the facility without officially registering them, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. Keeping such "ghost" detainees is a violation of international law.

Army Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, who was second in command of the intelligence gathering effort at Abu Ghraib while the abuse was occurring, told military investigators that "other government agencies" and a secretive elite task force "routinely brought in detainees for a short period of time" and that the detainees were held without an internment number, and their names were kept off the books.

Guards who worked at the prison have said that ghost detainees were regularly locked in isolation cells on Tier 1A and that they were kept from international human rights organizations.

Jordan, in a statement that was included in the abuse investigation of Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, said that it was difficult to track ghost detainees and that he and other officers recommended that a memorandum of understanding be drafted between his 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, the CIA and the 800th Military Police Brigade "to establish procedures for a ghost detainee." An Army major at the prison "suggested an idea of processing them under an assumed name and fingerprinting them," but Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the top military intelligence officer there, "decided against it."

Instead, Jordan's statement said, Pappas "began a formalized written MOU [memo of understanding] procedure" in November 2003, with the CIA and members of Task Force 1-21, "and the memorandum on procedures for dropping ghost detainees was signed."

In his statement to investigators, also obtained by The Post, Pappas said that in September 2003, the CIA requested that the military intelligence officials "continue to make cells available for their detainees and that they not have to go through the normal inprocessing procedures." Pappas also said Jordan was the one who was facilitating the arrangement with the CIA.

Defense Department officials have said that there were as many as 100 ghost detainees held in prisons in Iraq but that the detainees slipped through the cracks and were not part of any official agreement. A Navy report issued yesterday said there was evidence of about 30 ghost detainees, but Pentagon officials said they could find no evidence of a signed agreement.

The Army has resolved not to allow ghosting at its detention facilities. The American Civil Liberties Union yesterday released edited versions of some of the documents, but the names of the officers were omitted from them.

----

Commons report shows Guantanamo abuse
Human rights disregarded

Morning Star, Friday March 11 2005 60p
by BOB GLANVILLE and ADRIAN ROBERTS

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk

    'If this is a symbol of Western democracy,
    I would hate to see a dictatorship.'

		- Hussein al-Alak <hussy_al_2000@yahoo.co.uk>
          Iraq Solidarity Campaign

HUMAN rights campaigners charged the British authorities with complicity in the abuse of Guantanamo Bay prisoners yesterday, in the wake of a new Commons report.

The report, from the cross-party intelligence and security committee, found that British intelligence officers had twice been involved in questioning Iraqi detainees while they were hooded, in breach of international human rights agreements.

It suggested that MI6 officers had not been “properly trained” in the Geneva convention.

But activists warned that British involvement in the inhumane treatment of detainees — at Guantanamo and in prisons across Iraq and Afghanistan — had soiled the country’s reputation across the Middle East.

Committee chairwoman, Labour MP Ann Taylor, said that intelligence personnel sent to work at outposts ofthe so-called “war on terror” were “not sufficiently well trained on the Geneva convention prior to their deployment.

“Nor did they know that the UK had prohibited certain interrogation techniques in 1972,” she added, The committee, which oversees the work of the intelligence agencies, proposed that Britain agrees the terms under which prisoners are held with allies under the various  international conventions.

But, signalling the contempt in which the US holds human rights agreements, MPs conceded that an agreement between Britain and the US is unlikely because its interpretation of the conventions “are different to the UK view.”

The committee also revealed that British intelligence staff were working at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq at the time of the horrific abuse of prisoners by US troops, a charge that was flatly denied by the government at the time.

“We have no record of them raising any concerns,” the MPs revealed, Labour Against The War chairman Alan Simpson MP welcomed the committee’s “willingness to hold British troops and interrogators to the Geneva convention, which we have all signed up to.”

But he pointed out that much of the intelligence on the supposed terrorist, threat currently in circulation, had been obtained by US personnel “who disregard the convention on a much wider scale.

“It means that some of today’s information has been extracted under torture, which is the same evidence which has been used in Britain to justify detention without charge or trial,” warned Mr Simpson. Stop the War Coalition convener Lindsey German called it “shocking that these interrogations have been taking place outside the guidelines. But it is more shocking that they take place at all. “It is time for Britain to pull the troops out,” she insisted.

Iraq Solidarity Campaign spokesman Hussein al-Alak warned that the British behaviour in Iraq has caused it to lose “99 per cent of its credibility in the Middle East.”

He observed that, “if this is a symbol of western democracy, I would hate to see a dictatorship.”

Human rights activists rallied in Brighton yesterday, calling for British resident Omar Deghayes to be released from Guantanamo Bay and tried in Britain.

Mr Deghayes, who was blinded in one eye by US torturers at the camp, could be deported to Libya, where his family says that he faces certain death.


-------- spies

China breaks code?

Inside the Ring
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
March 11, 2005 WASHINGTON TIMES

http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm

    The U.S. code-breaking community is worried about China's advances in cracking U.S. codes.

    Three Chinese cryptologists last month reported they had found a way to crack a U.S. government-approved information security system known as SHA-1, or Secure Hash Algorithm-1.

    The SHA-1 encryption is used widely within the U.S. government, including the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community. It is currently the Federal Information Processing Standard and has been since 1994.

    Put simply, SHA-1 is a security authentication device that is used to verify the integrity of digital media, and to make sure that data or messages, such as secure e-mail, are not changed during transmission.

    Chinese researchers, Xiaoyuan Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin and Hongbo Yu reported in a paper Feb. 13 that they had "developed new techniques that are very effective" for breaking SHA-1 code, without using time-consuming "brute force" attacks.

    The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which made SHA-1 a federal standard, said in a statement that it could not confirm the Chinese code-breaking but noted that the three researchers are "reputable" specialists with cryptographic expertise.

    NIST said the new "attack" or code-breaking "is of particular importance in digital signature applications, such as time-stamping, and notarization."

    But the institute sought to play down the implications of the Chinese claim, stating that the method described in the paper will be "difficult to carry out in practice."

    Still, the U.S. government is phasing out SHA-1 over the next five years. "Due to advances in computing power, NIST already planned to phase out SHA-1 in favor of the larger and stronger hash functions (SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512) by 2010," the statement said.

    Disclosure of the code break followed China's publication of a defense white paper in December that identifies the use of information technology as a central element of Chinese military doctrine.

    U.S. defense officials say China's military believes its cyber-soldiers can successfully cripple the U.S. military by attacking key computer-run infrastructures and other information networks.

    Daniel E. Spisak, a private security engineer, said China is capable of building its own SHA-1 "cracker" using computers.

    "This could potentially allow them to access sensitive systems," he said. "However, from what small knowledge I do have of how secure data links get set up for some kinds of DOD projects, I think it would be very difficult to exploit the SHA-1 [code break] to their advantage."

    The danger, he noted in an e-mail, is that China could exploit a security lapse in U.S. government networks and systems.

    Mr. Spisak said as long as U.S. government computers are properly protected by multiple layers of defense and authentication mechanisms, "one can ensure it is sufficiently difficult to gain illegal access to sensitive networks and systems even with one part failing."

    But if proper security precautions are not taken, "then all bets could be off," he said.

    Bruce Schneier, a cryptography and security specialist, said the Chinese breakthrough is not alarming. But he noted that within the U.S. National Security Agency there is an old saying: "Attacks always get better; they never get worse."
    
    Rummy on counterspying

    Richard Haver, until recently a senior Pentagon intelligence adviser, revealed last week the philosophy of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in dealing with the problem of foreign spies.

    Mr. Haver told a conference on counterintelligence at the Bush School at Texas A&M University that Mr. Rumsfeld urged CIA Director George J. Tenet several years ago to go on the attack against foreign intelligence services.

    "The secretary had a very simplistic view of this; complex, but simple in its straightforwardness, which is typical of him," Mr. Haver said in a speech.

    "The best defense is a good offense," Mr. Haver said of the Rumsfeldian view. "If you are sitting back, waiting for the enemy to attack you, it will happen. If you want effective counterintelligence, the principal element of that is the capability of your system to attack the adversary intelligence service before they attack you."

    Foreign spies have limited resources to focus on a large target, he noted. But "if you are inside that system, if you understand what they're doing before they do it, then you can mount good defense."

    Getting at foreign intelligence agencies is the job of the CIA and other human-intelligence-gathering agencies, including the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, which revealed a new offensive counterintelligence strategy at the conference.

    "You never really win this battle," Mr. Haver said. "One victory doesn't mean the war is over. Until we reach nirvana, the battle will continue as long as we have secrets." 


-------- un

Top U.N. Envoy to Present Syria With Ultimatum
Nation Must Withdraw From Lebanon or Face Isolation

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 11, 2005; Page A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25429-2005Mar10.html

A top U.N. envoy will tell President Bashar Assad that Syria will face political and economic isolation if he does not completely and quickly withdraw from Lebanon, U.N. and U.S. officials said yesterday.

In a meeting set for tomorrow, Terje Roed-Larsen plans to inform Syria that the international community is united in insisting that Damascus comply with U.N. Resolution 1559 -- and is prepared to impose wide punitive sanctions if it does not act quickly, the officials said.

"If he doesn't deliver, there will be total political and economic isolation of his country. There is a steel-hard consensus in the international community," a senior U.N. official said.

In preparation for the diplomatic confrontation, Roed-Larsen has met over the past week with top U.S., European and Arab officials to determine the positions and parameters of action. In a final round of talks, he met yesterday with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and also won backing from the Arab League in talks with its secretary general, Amr Mousa, earlier this week -- discussions aimed at leaving Syria no political escape routes, the source said.

The U.N. official said Roed-Larsen had found "remarkable" support for a tough showdown with Assad. The fury over Syria's domination of Lebanon for almost three decades erupted quickly after the Feb. 14 assassination of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, who had resigned to protest Syria's political manipulation last fall to keep Lebanese President Emile Lahoud in power three years beyond the constitutional limit.

The timing of Hariri's death, apparently by a car bomb that killed 17 others, happened amid a new U.S. and European effort to promote democracy in the Middle East. Hariri, who led a growing opposition movement, had ties to top U.S., U.N., French and Saudi officials, many of whom now champion Lebanon as a top priority.

Roed-Larsen will tell Assad that he must take four steps, U.S. and U.N. officials say.

First, Syria must honor the independent sovereignty of Lebanon and not undermine its spring elections for a new parliament. Roed-Larsen "will imprint on everybody that there is a united demand from the international community for free and fair elections" that will include international observers, the U.N. source said.

Second, Assad must provide a complete timeline for a full pullout of troops. The international community will accept "sequencing," or a phased withdrawal, but it must be expeditious, the source said.

Third, Damascus must provide a timeline for the pullout of 5,000 intelligence agents in Lebanon.

Finally, Roed-Larsen will discuss other requirements in Resolution 1559, including the need to disarm and dismantle foreign and domestic militias operating in Lebanon, all of which Syria supports, U.N. and U.S. officials said. But the United Nations is prepared to wait until after the election to allow a new Lebanese government to deal with the militia problem.

"Clearly the presence of Syrian forces and Syrian intelligence agents is incompatible with a fully fair election, untainted by outside interference. And that's the basis of 1559," State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said yesterday.

The impact of extensive sanctions on Syria could be devastating, U.S. experts and oil analysts said

"They're very, very worried about being isolated," said Theodore H. Kattouf, former U.S. ambassador to Syria. "Syria's economy is weak. It has a strong overlay of socialism and the limited capitalism is beset by cronyism and corruption. In the past, Syria has always had an economic savior, be it subsidies from the Gulf, free oil from Iran in the 1980s, large payments of gratitude from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for [military] participation in the first Gulf War [against Iraq], incredibly cheap oil from Saddam Hussein. So there was always someone to bail out Syria. Plus, there were all the years of cheap military equipment from the Soviet Union.

"When you look around now, who will bail out Syria's economy? The impact of isolation would further weaken a weak economy, lower living and thereby increase popular discontent," he added.

Syria was worried enough about being isolated after the U.S. Congress passed the Syrian Accountability Act -- which called for punitive steps against Damascus -- that it hastily concluded an economic cooperation agreement with the European Union to have a lifeline, Kattouf said.

Comprehensive sanctions have rarely been imposed by the United Nations or large groups of nations. Among the few countries to face widespread economic embargoes and diplomatic sanctions were Iraq during the final decade of Hussein's rule, North Korea, Libya and Iran during the drawn-out drama after the U.S. Embassy takeover from 1979 to 1981.

Iraq survived the most stringent U.N. sanctions because it sold oil illegally -- including to Syria. "But that would be more difficult for Syria because it doesn't have the same kind of middleman arrangements or pipelines, and everyone knows Lebanon doesn't produce crude so you can't export [Syrian crude] through Lebanon," said Jamal Qureshi, an oil market analyst at PFC Energy.

At a high point in the mid-1990s, Syria produced about 550,000 barrels of oil per day, but now produces about 400,000, and most of it is for domestic consumption, he added. Syria exports about 150,000 barrels a day for an income of $200 million a month, a major source of badly needed foreign exchange for Syria. "If you could get U.N.-imposed sanctions, rather than just U.S. sanctions, then it would certainly hurt Syria," Qureshi said.

Roed-Larsen will also travel to Lebanon first in a symbolic move before the Syrian stop to pay respects to Hariri's family. After his talks in Damascus, he will return to Beirut to meet Lahoud and Prime Minister Omar Karimi, who are aligned with Syria, as well as key leaders of the Lebanese opposition, U.N. officials said.

----

Annan Calls for Treaty Outlawing Terrorism

March 11, 2005
By ED MCCULLOUGH
Associated Press Writer

http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/T/TERRORISM_CONFERENCE?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME

MADRID, Spain (AP) -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called Thursday for a world treaty on terrorism that would outlaw attacks targeting civilians and establish a framework for a collective response to the global threat.

Although the United Nations and its agencies already have 12 treaties covering terrorism, a universal definition has been elusive.

World leaders and officials have had deep disagreements over whether resisters to alleged oppression - for example, Palestinian suicide bombers attacking Israeli targets - are terrorists or freedom fighters; and whether states that use what they think is legitimate force might be branded terrorists.

But Annan was categorical in his address Thursday to terrorism experts and world leaders from 50 countries, including Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

"The right to resist occupation ... cannot include the right to deliberately kill or maim civilians," Annan told the conference on democracy, terrorism and security. The United Nations, he said, must proclaim "loud and clear that terrorism can never be accepted or justified in any cause whatsoever."

Gonzales pledged to work closely with Europe to strengthen a collective effort against terrorism.

"The fight against terrorism is, in the end, a struggle over values," the attorney general said in remarks that stressed the close cooperation between Europe and the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Freedom, not terror, will triumph," Gonzales said. "We will not be divided. And we, not they, will know victory."

In his speech, Annan stressed that no country is exempt from attack and that the way forward is coordinated action by like-minded governments, which must reject brutal tactics.

"Perhaps the thing that is most vital we deny to terrorists is access to nuclear materials," Annan said. "Nuclear terrorism is still often treated as science fiction. I wish it were. ...

"Were such an attack to occur, it would not only cause widespread death and destruction, but would stagger the world economy and thrust tens of millions of people into dire poverty," he said. Preventing that would justify the use of force.

Annan said multinational police, legal and diplomatic work is the best strategy, for example, pinpointing and thwarting terrorist groups and their activities; and blocking the travel, financial and other means to carry out attacks. But when military force is required, the Security Council "will not hesitate" to use it.

All the while, "human rights and the rule of law must always be respected," he said. "Upholding human rights is not merely compatible with a successful counterterrorism strategy. It is an essential element in it."

The secretary-general said the world body needs a 13th treaty to define terrorism, stigmatize it and prepare a framework for governments to work together to curtail it.

"Now the time has come to complete a comprehensive convention outlawing terrorism in all its forms," he said.

Annan's remarks closely track the recommendations made by the approximately 180 academics, police and intelligence officials, legislators and other experts on terrorism who participated in the Club de Madrid's program the past six months, culminating in the four-day conference in Madrid.

The city and the date for the summit were chosen to commemorate the victims of the train bombings on March 11, 2004, that killed 191 passengers and bystanders and wounded more than 1,500.

"Tomorrow will be a day of mourning for Spain," Zapatero said at the close of Thursday's session. "Let me assure you that those responsible will be punished in the courts of justice ... Terror never achieves its objectives."

A new treaty on terrorism in Annan's view would deal with victims, too, as well as attempt to dissuade individuals or groups from choosing terrorism. He said it would also deter states from supporting terrorism, help states develop institutions and strategies against violence, and defend human rights.

On Friday, the 56 former presidents and prime ministers in the Club de Madrid will release a report called the "Madrid Agenda" that they - and Annan - hope governments will use to develop laws covering terrorism and encourage governments to act together, democratically.

"Terrorism is a perverse phenomenon, inhuman and unjustifiable," Spain's King Juan Carlos said, adding he hopes "the work of this summit serve to affirm the commitment of every democrat ... to eliminate terrorism from the face of our planet."

Among the delegates and world leaders, there seemed wide consensus on major themes. In one key area - financing terrorism - experts urged world leaders to create an institution under the United Nations to track how terrorists raise funds.

Experts said measures taken so far to curb terrorist financing were insufficient to cut the flow of funds to al-Qaida and similar groups.


-------- us

US military detains Iraqi journalist
Iraq, Politics, 
3/11/2005

http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/050311/2005031140.html

Reporters sans frontieres (RSF), Paris has called for the immediate release of Iraqi journalist Majed Fadhil Zaboun, of the independent daily "Al-Fourat." Zaboun has been held by US military forces since he was arrested on the Syrian border, on 28 February 2005, as he was returning from a conference in Damascus.

"This is not the first time that US forces have arbitrarily detained a journalist in Iraq," RSF said. "Even in an area of sensitive operations, it is important that the armed forces continue to respect the work of professional journalists. The US authorities must either explain why they have been holding this journalist all this time, or free him at once."

Reached by telephone, "Al-Fourat" editor Shaker Al-Jabbouri said he was "outraged" by Zaboun's arrest. "Everyone knows Majed Fadhil Zaboun, he is a respected writer and journalist," Al-Jabbouri said. "This illegal arrest is a flagrant violation of his rights. The Americans suspect everyone and don't hesitate to imprison innocents. This is not what I call democracy."

Zaboun, who is the cultural editor for "Al-Fourat," went to Damascus on 22 February with a delegation of Iraqi poets to cover a conference. When they did not hear from him several days after his scheduled return, his colleagues became concerned and began to look for him. It was not until 3 March, when they called the US embassy in Baghdad, that they learned he had been arrested. Officials at the embassy gave their assurances that they would "do everything necessary" to get Zaboun released.

An independent, Arabic-language newspaper founded in 2003, "Al-Fourat" specialises in political analysis for Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. It has a circulation of 10,000 and is distributed throughout the country.

----

Russian Citizens Held in Iraq by Coalition Forces

MosNews
03.11.2005 

http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/03/11/iraqdetention.shtml

Soldiers of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq have detained two Russian citizens among over 1,000 foreigners, Russian Information Agency Novosti reported, citing the Iraqi Human Rights Minister Bakhtiyar Amin’s interview to the Saudi paper Riyadh.

A special committee including officials from the Human Rights, Interior and Justice Ministries, and of the coalition command will consider the cases of the detained foreigners, Amin said. He noted that Iraq was not going to extradite the detainees to their home countries.

The other detainees are from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Yemen.

The U.S.-led forces have been fighting a guerilla war against local and foreign insurgents in Iraq since toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.

Seven Russian citizens were also detained earlier by U.S. forces in Afganistan and held in Guantanamo Bay before being extradited to Russia.

----

Iraq War Compels Pentagon to Rethink Big-Picture Strategy

By Mark Mazzetti 
Los Angeles Times
Fri Mar 11, 7:55 AM ET

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/latimests/20050311/ts_latimes/iraqwarcompelspentagontorethinkbigpicturestrategy&cid=2026&ncid=1480

WASHINGTON — The war in Iraq (news - web sites) is forcing top Pentagon (news - web sites) planners to rethink several key assumptions about the use of military power and has called into question the vision set out nearly four years ago that the armed forces can win wars and keep the peace with small numbers of fast-moving, lightly armed troops.


As the Pentagon begins a comprehensive review that will map the future of America's armed forces, many Defense Department officials are acknowledging that an intractable Iraqi insurgency they didn't foresee has undermined the military strategy.

In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon unveiled a new agenda that promised to prepare the military to fight smaller wars against terrorist networks and to swiftly defeat rogue states.

With Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushing for a "lighter, more lethal and highly mobile fighting force," the Pentagon scrapped as outdated the requirement that the U.S. military be large enough to simultaneously fight two large-scale wars against massed enemy armies. And it spent little time worrying about how to keep the peace after the shooting stopped.

Something happened on the way to the wars of the future: The Pentagon became bogged down in an old-fashioned, costly and drawn-out war of occupation. Though the rapid assault on Baghdad in March 2003 went smoothly, it is the bloody two years since that have diverged from the Pentagon's blueprint.

"When people were thinking about regime change, they really weren't thinking about the long-term stabilization and peacekeeping operations. There was a view that in terms of gross numbers, [regime change operations] wouldn't last as long as Iraq has," said Rand Corp. fellow Andrew Hoehn, who led the Pentagon's last major review in 2001.

As the Pentagon begins its assessment, it has 145,000 troops stationed in a country they were supposed to have left months ago. And with tensions rising between Washington and the two other countries labeled by President Bush (news - web sites) as part of an "axis of evil" — Iran (news - web sites) and North Korea (news - web sites) — there is a growing belief within the military's ranks that the White House's rhetoric about preemptive war is out of sync with the U.S. military's strained resources.

Some inside the Pentagon criticized senior Bush administration officials for assuming that the war in Iraq would end when U.S. troops toppled Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime — and for assuming the U.S. could reduce its troop presence to 30,000 soldiers within six months of Baghdad's fall.

"The administration was flat wrong on Iraq because they had blinders on," said a senior Army official who worked on strategic planning at the Pentagon. "There's now a much greater perception that we need to know what we're signing up for before we get into it."

As a consequence, the importance of peacekeeping operations and help from allied militaries — ideas that some discounted three years ago as remnants of the President Clinton (news - web sites) era — are back in vogue at the Pentagon.

Although born out of a blizzard of complex diagrams and flow charts, the Pentagon assessment, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review (news - web sites), or QDR, is not an academic exercise.

First undertaken after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the QDR is the playbook the Pentagon uses to guide decisions such as how big the military should be and which big-ticket weapons the Defense Department ought to purchase.

The Pentagon's decision in 2001 to scrap the two-war doctrine freed war planners from requiring enough heavy armor divisions to simultaneously fight two major wars, and allowed the Pentagon to invest in more futuristic weaponry like a missile defense system.

"We're always going to have a limited budget. So when we're making decisions about where to spend the next dollar, you want everyone clear about which sheet of music we're all singing off of," said Michele Flournoy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Flournoy was one of the lead Pentagon officials on the 1997 review, which embraced the two-war doctrine.

The new review, which is just beginning, will not be completed until early next year. Last fall, a Pentagon advisory board predicted that the protracted stability operations underway in Iraq and Afghanistan (news - web sites) were a model for the U.S. military's future. The Pentagon has focused too little on preparing for what happens after major combat operations end, said the Defense Science Board, which advises Rumsfeld.

"Some have believed, or hoped, that the technological and conceptual advances … can reduce the time and personnel needed for stabilization and reconstruction," the board said. "Unfortunately, we do not find that is the case."

The Defense Science Board report was commissioned to guide the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review studies, and it is part of a growing body of Pentagon analysis signaling a shift in Defense Department thinking. 

Another possible shift has to do with the perception of U.S. allies. With the Army and Marine Corps straining to meet the Pentagon's troop requirements for Iraq and Afghanistan, the participation of allies has taken on greater importance. Foreign troops would be necessary for any large-scale operation the U.S. military might undertake, planners said, if only to share the post-conflict burdens such as those confronting the U.S. military in Iraq.

"There are smarter, more efficient ways to do regime change and occupation," said one senior civilian official at the Pentagon. "One of those ways is to rely much more on our friends and allies to do the back-end work."

In recent weeks, Bush administration officials have taken a far more conciliatory tone with some of America's oldest European allies. Whereas Rumsfeld once slighted NATO (news - web sites)'s western European members — referring to them as "old Europe" — he poked fun at those comments to win over European ministers during a trip to the continent last month.

"That was old Rumsfeld," he said.

On Thursday, Rumsfeld welcomed French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie to the Pentagon, praising the cooperation between the nations' militaries over the years.

The Iraq war has also shown the weakness in a strategy created by the Pentagon in 2003 to help plan major operations.

The 10-30-30 construct said that the U.S. military should plan military actions to seize the initiative within 10 days of the start of an offensive, achieve limited military objectives within 30 days, and be prepared within another 30 days to shift military resources to another area of the world.

Many Pentagon officials fear that the success Iraqi insurgents have had in preventing a U.S. troop reduction in Iraq could be the new rule, rather than the exception.

As few enemies choose to fight the U.S. military head-on, they might opt instead to fight protracted rear-guard insurgencies.

"I think that the Pentagon realizes by now that 10-30-30 is largely outdated," said Frank Hoffman of the Marine Corps' Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities, a contributor to the Defense Science Board study. "It presumes a model of warfare that we ourselves have made obsolete."

Hoffman said no adversary was likely to present U.S. forces with a conventional threat that can be defeated in 30 days.

"Our enemy's metric is protracting conflicts to 3,000 days or more," he said. "Prolonged insurgency, death by a thousand cuts, is their answer to 'shock and awe.' " 



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


-------- courts / tribunals

Vietnamese Lose Agent Orange Case Against Chemical Companies

NEW YORK, New York, March 11, 2005 (ENS)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2005/2005-03-11-09.asp#anchor2

Claims by Vietnamese nationals who said they were injured and their land laid waste by the U.S. use of Agent Orange and other herbicides during the Vietnam conflict have been dismissed by a federal judge in New York.

Dow Chemical Co. and Monsanto Co. were among the more than 30 companies were named in the civil lawsuit. Other companies named include Hercules Inc., Occidental Chemical Corp., Ultramar Diamond Shamrock Corp., Maxus Energy Corp., Uniroyal Inc. and Wyeth.

"There is no basis for any of the claims of plaintiffs under the domestic law of any nation or state or under any form of international law," U.S. District Court Judge Jack Weinstein wrote in a 233-page ruling. "The case is dismissed."

The suit said that from from 1965 to 1971, as many as four million Vietnamese people were poisoned by dioxins, chemical byproducts of Agent Orange. Dioxins are a class of chemicals that can cause cancer and deformities..

Evidence of injuries in the case was presented in "brief anecdotal form," the judge wrote. "The fact that diseases were experienced by some people after spraying does not suffice to prove ... that the harm resulted to individuals because of the spraying."

"No study or technique presented to the court has demonstrated how it is now possible to connect the herbicides supplied by any defendant to exposure by any plaintiff to dioxin from that defendant's herbicide," he wrote.

The chemical companies claimed that they produced Agent Orange according to U.S. government specifications and that there has never been a proven connection between Agent Orange and health problems as the plaintiffs alleged

The case was considered a test of the reach of U.S. courts and the power of the U.S. president to authorize use of hazardous materials during wartime.

----

Vietnam fury at Agent Orange case
Former soldier Nguyen Van Quy says he will not stop campaigning

Friday, 11 March, 2005, 11:35 GMT (BBC)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4339419.stm

Vietnamese plaintiffs have condemned a US court's decision to dismiss their legal action against manufacturers of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.

"It is a wrong decision, unfair and irresponsible," said Nguyen Trong Nhan, vice president of Vietnam's Association of Agent Orange (VAVA).

He said his group was thinking of filing an appeal.

The judge in the case said allegations the chemical caused birth defects and illness had not been proved.

"There is no basis for any of the claims of plaintiffs under the domestic law of any nation or state or under any form of international law. The case is dismissed," said US District Judge Jack B Weinstein.

But Mr Nguyen disagreed.

"Weinstein has turned a blind eye before the obvious truth. It's a shame for him to put out that decision. We just want justice, nothing more.

"This is just another war that could be long and difficult, as was the Vietnam War. We are determined to pursue it until the very end, until the day we will be able to ask for justice," he said.

Test case

Former North Vietnamese solder Ngyuen Van Quy, who is being treated for liver and stomach cancer and whose two children are disabled, also said he would not give up his struggle for compensation.

"I'll fight, not just for myself, but for millions of Vietnamese victims. Those who produced these toxic chemicals must take responsibility for their action," he said.

The plaintiffs had sought compensation from pharmaceutical firms including Monsanto, Dow Chemical and Hercules Incorporated, for the alleged effects of Agent Orange, a defoliation agent used to deprive communist Vietnamese forces of forest cover.

The plaintiffs argued that the chemical caused birth defects, miscarriages and cancer.

The civil action was the first attempt by Vietnamese plaintiffs to claim compensation for the effects of Agent Orange.

The defendants argued that the US government was responsible for how the chemical was used, not the manufacturers.

Legal precedent

However, in 1984, several chemical companies paid $180m (£93m) to settle a lawsuit with US war veterans, who said that their health had been affected by exposure to the substance.

Ngo Thanh Nhan, a professor who participated in a campaign to drum up support for the case, said this fuelled the Vietnamese plaintiffs' argument.

"If the medical files [of Vietnamese victims] are not convincing enough, we will use the ones of the American soldiers," he said in Tuoi Tre newspaper.

"There's no reason why those who sprayed chemical products got compensation for their contamination... and the direct victims' suit is rejected by an American court."

Agent Orange was named after the colour of its container. As well as herbicides which stripped trees bare, it contained a strain of dioxin.

In time, some contend, the dioxin entered the food chain and caused a proliferation of birth defects.

Some babies were born without eyes or arms, or were missing internal organs.

Activists say three million people were exposed to the chemical during the war, and at least one million suffer serious health problems today. 


-------- homeland security / national intelligence

States Say They Know Little About Threats

By LARA JAKES JORDAN, 
Associated Press Writer
Friday, March 11, 2005

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/03/11/national/a104812S02.DTL

The first call came in midafternoon: State homeland security advisers needed to join a classified briefing about a potential new terror threat. Most states were connected to the U.S. Homeland Security Department by 4:45 p.m.

At 6:30, they were still waiting.

Eventually, state directors were told to leave the Feb. 25 video conference call while Homeland Security and other federal agencies debated how much to reveal about recent al-Qaida intelligence.

State officials say the incident was part of an uphill struggle to share clear and concise terror information with agencies trying to protect Americans in every state.

Homeland Security "is supposed to be the pathway to state and local governments," said Virginia homeland security director George W. Foresman, who was on the call and served as vice chair of a commission that evaluated the nation's readiness for terrorism from 1998 to 2003. "I think they're trying to do the right thing. But here they are, still clamoring for acknowledgment from other federal agencies that they're responsible for doing it."

The department, which merged 22 federal agencies when it opened its doors two years ago, calls itself the "one-stop shop" for state and local officials on homeland security issues. But recent studies indicate a majority of states are only somewhat satisfied with information they receive, and complain of getting mixed signals and conflicting guidance from Homeland Security and other federal agencies.

All 50 states have designated homeland security directors to help coordinate and analyze a daily barrage of intelligence and crime data. Their job titles and daily responsibilities, however, vary from state to state.

In Massachusetts, state officials routinely cross-check the validity of intelligence received from one federal agency — generally Homeland Security or the FBI — against another. In Washington state, officials collect intelligence from Homeland Security, the FBI and the military so "you're not dependent on a single source," said Adjutant General Timothy Lowenberg.

And in Maryland, the state's anti-terrorism advisory council of 180 agencies is coordinated by the Justice Department. Maryland's terror intelligence center in suburban Calverton, which opened in 2003, is run by state and local police agencies and the FBI.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Harvey E. Eisenberg, the Maryland advisory council's coordinator, said he works closely with Homeland Security and public health officials to distribute terror information beyond traditional law enforcement channels.

"Part of it is a culture change," Eisenberg said from his office in Baltimore. "How do we all talk to each other without violating trusts? How do we get information out effectively and fast without compromising security? And how do you trust people to make those calls?

"I know that has to change."

Homeland Security officials and state directors generally agree the department has made significant strides in sharing information since 2003.

States and major urban areas obtain real-time threat intelligence through the department's information network, and Homeland Security has equipped states with videoconference technology for biweekly meetings. The department also participates with the FBI on joint terrorism task force investigations.

But the department acknowledges states need more in-depth and detailed threat information.

"It shouldn't only be about, `Here's a little tidbit of information, let's get it out to everybody,'" said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. "It should be trying to provide a context within which state and local governments can have a better understanding for their own purposes of the nature of the threat that we face."

Hours after the thwarted Feb. 25 call, Homeland Security issued a classified but vague intelligence bulletin to state directors indicating potential al-Qaida attacks on the United States. Counterterrorism officials later said the intelligence indicated Osama bin Laden was trying to enlist his top operative in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for the attacks.

Homeland Security said the state directors were the first people below the federal level to get the information on official channels. Several state directors, however, said they were told the department released the intelligence after it had already started to seep to local law enforcement agencies or the National Guard.

Jonathan A. Duecker, Pennsylvania's homeland security director, said the teleconference calls and bulletins are mostly "good-faith efforts" to keep states informed. Direct one-on-one calls from Homeland Security, however, put him on alert and "perk me up."

Recent studies by a Homeland Security Advisory Council task force and the National Governors Association indicate states are increasingly frustrated with a daily flood of information from a variety of federal sources. States want one point of contact in Washington for intelligence collection and analysis, followed by "dissemination through a single pipeline," said Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

However, Homeland Security "has not had, in the past, the access to the immediate information and intelligence from all the other agencies," said Romney, who chaired the task force. "And so we have tended to go agency to agency, gathering information through an ad hoc process rather than through a single federal doorway."

But relying on a single agency can be risky. In January, an ultimately bogus FBI tip indicated Chinese nationals described as possible terror suspects were headed to Boston. Homeland Security was not involved in the case, which led to a brief but potent public scare in Massachusetts. Romney said state and federal officials share some blame in the false alarm because "more information than necessary was disseminated."

In Washington state, Lowenberg said simple coordination with its state, local, tribal and private partners might help Homeland Security close the gaps.

"It would enhance national security to do that," he said. "In the earliest days, there was an earnest effort to bring the state homeland security advisers in to collaborate. And now it tends to be much more of a one-directional flow of information — from the Department of Homeland Security to the states."


-------- human rights

Torture and Oppression of Kurds in Syria

March 11, 2005
by Sanjay Suri
Antiwar.com
(Inter Press Service)

http://www.antiwar.com/ips/suri.php?articleid=5142

The Syrian government must put an immediate end to human rights abuses against Syrian Kurds, Amnesty International said in a report published Thursday on the eve of the anniversary of the Qamishli clashes.

More than 30 Kurds were killed in clashes that spread from a football match between Kurdish and Arab teams in Qamishli in northeastern Syria in March last year. The clashes brought into focus the plight of Kurds in Syria.

Amnesty says that more than 2,000 people, almost all of them Kurds, were arrested after the riots. "Kurdish detainees, including children as young as 12, women, teenage girls and elderly people, were reportedly tortured and ill-treated," the report says. "Dozens of Kurdish students were expelled from their universities and dormitories, reportedly for participating in peaceful protests."

Kurds remain a people without a nation, spread across Turkey which has the largest population, Iraq, Iran and Syria. Kurds have faced persecution in all these countries. There are an estimated 1.5 to two million Syrian Kurds.

The abuse of Kurd rights has continued after the clashes last year, the Amnesty report says. "The authorities must open investigations into the allegations of unlawful killings, deaths resulting from torture and ill-treatment in custody and torture of Kurds that have come to light since March 2004," Amnesty said in its report.

Since March 2004 there has been a significant increase in the number of reported deaths of Kurds as a result of torture and ill-treatment in custody, the Amnesty report says.

"Five of nine such deaths reported to Amnesty International in the seven months after March 2004 were of Syrian Kurds," the report says. "There have also been a number of deaths in suspicious circumstances of Kurdish military conscripts during the same period: at least six died, reportedly due to beatings or shootings by military superiors or colleagues. No investigation is known to have been carried out into any of the deaths in either category."

The report, which Amnesty says followed several months' research, also describes the "systemic identity-based discrimination suffered by the Syrian Kurds." The report highlights cases of Kurdish human rights defenders who have sought to promote rights of the Kurdish population in Syria and suffered arrest, torture and unfair trial.

"The Syrian authorities must set up an investigation into the apparently disproportionate response of the security forces to the March 2004 events," said Amnesty International. "They must investigate the alleged unlawful killings and deaths as a result of torture and ill-treatment in custody and the widespread reports of torture, and propose remedies to deal with the systemic discrimination against Kurds as well as other human rights violations that may have contributed to the tension and the outburst of violence."

The Amnesty report also calls on the Syrian authorities to end the prohibitions on the use of the Kurdish language in education, the workplace, official establishments and at private celebrations, and to allow children to be registered with Kurdish names and businesses to carry Kurdish names.

Amnesty says several hundred thousand Syrian Kurds are effectively stateless and, as such, are denied the full provision of education, employment, health and other rights enjoyed by Syrian nationals, as well as being denied the right to have a nationality and passport.

It has asked for legislation under which prisoners of conscience have been imprisoned to be brought in line with Articles 18-22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Syria has been a party since 1969. That guarantees the right to freedom of conscience, expression, assembly and association and the right to exercise these freedoms without undue interference. It has asked for independent investigations into allegations of unlawful killings and an amendment of legislation on nationality to find an expeditious solution to the statelessness of Syrian-born Kurds.



-------- POLITICS


-------- investigations

Study: Pentagon not to blame for abuse

March 11, 2005
By Pamela Hess
Pentagon correspondent

(UPI) United Press International

http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20050310-064724-7595r.htm

Pentagon policies that allowed harsh interrogation techniques and narrowed the definition of torture were not to blame for dozens of cases of prisoner abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan or Guantanamo Bay, according to a new Defense Department report. 

 The report also resisted faulting senior military and civilian commanders for the abuse, although it acknowledges they failed to take swift action when torture allegations first came to light and to issue clear guidance to service members on the treatment of detainees.

"It is clear that such warning signers were present, particularly at Abu Ghraib ... that should have prompted those commanders to put in place more specific procedures and direct guidance to prevent further abuse," the report states.

"I don't believe anybody can call this a whitewash. The facts are what the facts are," said Vice Adm. Albert Church at a Pentagon press conference after a day of testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on his 10-month investigation.

Church said abuses occurred not because of Pentagon and Bush administration policies but because of a breakdown of military discipline.

"We found, without exception, that the DOD officials and senior military commanders responsible for the formulation of interrogation policy evidenced the intent to treat detainees humanely," the Church report states.

He blamed the abuse on low-level soldiers who went too far.

Church's report -- one of 10 spawned by the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal -- is notable for what it does not include. Church did not interview Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who approved in December 2002 a slate of harsh interrogation techniques for prisoners at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. Those techniques have since been dialed back.

Rumsfeld declined to comment on the Church report.

"I have not read the report, and I think I'll leave it there. And I have been quite busy this morning, and I wasn't able to see any of the testimony," he said at a press conference with the French defense minister.

However, Church confirmed to reporters Thursday he had personally briefed Rumsfeld on his findings.

Church also did not interview Ambassador Paul Bremer, the civilian in charge of the administration of Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004, and who was aware of overcrowding and security problems at Abu Ghraib.

In addition, Church did not interview the FBI interrogators at GTMO who alleged in e-mails last summer that their military counterparts were abusing prisoners and violating the Geneva Conventions.

"Having reviewed the thousands and thousands of documents in the other interviews, I really had no need to go any further. But the opportunity was there," Church said.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said Church, as a member of the military under Rumsfeld's chain of command, could not properly investigate his superiors.

"An impartial and comprehensive investigation of senior-level Pentagon officials would require the appointment of a special prosecutor by the attorney general," Romero stated Thursday.

There are at least 70 cases of confirmed detainee abuse involving 121 victims. The deaths of six detainees are classified as homicide. So far, 115 U.S. service members have been punished, most of them with reprimands and non-judicial punishment and 36 courts-martial.

Those numbers do not include most of the abuses connected to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, which are still being tried and in some cases investigated.

Of the 70 closed cases, 59 occurred in Iraq. Twenty-six involved serious abuse and another five cases of abuse resulted in the death of a detainee. Serious abuse is considered to be misconduct that results in or has the potential to result in death. It also includes all sexual assaults, threats of death or bodily harm, and maltreatment that could result in death.

The list is not comprehensive because it only includes those cases that were adjudicated by September 2004.

The Pentagon released an unclassified summary of the lengthy Church report that traces the evolution of Pentagon policy toward detainees and interrogation from December 2002. It includes new details of specific cases, including an incident in Afghanistan a year ago.

An Army infantry battalion met resistance while conducting a cordon and search operation in a town called Miam Do. U.S. forces killed several Afghans in subsequent fighting. The entire village was detained for four days to screen it for enemy fighters. During the screening, an Army lieutenant colonel from the Defense Intelligence Agency punched, kicked, grabbed and choked numerous villagers. He was disciplined and barred from contact with detainees.

Church said about a third of the cases of abuse occurred at the point of capture -- usually after a battle, when emotions on both sides were running high, and when only adherence to military discipline can avert maltreatment.

Church did not assign specific blame for the breakdown of discipline, but said it was at the level of mid-grade officers and senior enlisted personnel.

"To me, that's where the breakdown was," he told the Senate committee. "It's accountability at that level."

The Army inspector general is investigating the conduct of senior Army officials to determine who should be held accountable, at least for the Abu Ghraib abuse.

"I've seen the list; it's a couple of pages long. So I think that's coming," he said.

Church with the "clarity of hindsight" identified several "missed opportunities" on the part of the military that might have prevented abuse of detainees. The Office of the Secretary of Defense did not provide to U.S. Central Command or the generals in charge of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan any guidance on appropriate interrogation techniques for prisoners the way it did for prisoners held at Guantanamo.

"CJTF-7 was left to struggle with these issues on its own in the midst of fighting an insurgency," Church wrote, referring to the U.S. military command in Iraq.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers in March 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, sent a memo to Rumsfeld asking that the same interrogation guidelines in place at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base be issued to commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rumsfeld did not respond to that request, according to Church.

Another "missed opportunity" was the failure to pass on lessons learned from detainee operations in the Balkans and even the Vietnam War to commanders of the Iraq and Afghan wars.

"Interrogation policy reflecting the lessons learned ... should have been in place in Iraq long before September 2003," Church wrote.

Still, Church said the failure to issue the policies and respond forcefully to early warnings of abuse should not be grounds for punishment.

"I don't think you can hold anybody accountable for a situation that maybe if you had done something different, maybe something would have occurred differently," Church told Pentagon reporters Thursday.

Church said the Defense Department did not have a formal understanding with the CIA about the treatment of detainees in Iraq, which should have comported with the Geneva Conventions. Instead, the CIA was able to keep at least 30 detainees off the books, thereby preventing their imprisonment from being reported to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

In a tense exchange with Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain who was imprisoned and tortured during the Vietnam War, Church said he supported the different rules of interrogation for different kinds of prisoners -- Iraqi, al-Qaida and Taliban.

"My opinion is that the president made the right call," he said.

An irritated McCain noted the North Vietnamese made a similar distinction when they took him prisoner.

"I'm very concerned about what might happen to Americans who are taken prisoner unless we have clear and specific guidelines that we adhere to, including the Geneva Conventions," McCain said.

Church was allowed to read but not have a copy of a March 14, 2003, memo from the Justice Department entitled "Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants." It was prepared by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo for the Pentagon general counsel, and was the controlling "legal authority" for the treatment of detainees, superceding the Geneva Conventions which otherwise stipulates how combatants, lawful or otherwise, are to be treated in war.

Church said military lawyers objected to the findings of that memo, but were ultimately overruled.

Congress has not been granted access to the memo.

Church rejected criticism that his report sidestepped what Pentagon critics call the central issue: whether senior military officials who should have been aware of the Abu Ghraib abuse but did nothing to stop it should be held accountable. He said that was not his mandate.

"A lot of people would like (my) investigation to be a lot of things that it wasn't. It was to document and catalogue all the interrogation techniques, the migration (of techniques), what was used, what wasn't used," Church said.

In late January, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, issued new interrogation guidelines that more closely reflect standard Army doctrine, Church said. 


-------- propaganda wars

NEPAL: Nepal's cartoonists say what reporters can't

Taipei Times
Friday, March 11, 2005

http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=21677

With censors scrutinizing all the news reports ever since King Gyanendra took power, cartoonists are taking on topics that journalists must avoid

Throttled by censorship, Nepal's newspapers have found a new way to get their message across to their readers -- cartoons.

Tough media censorship has been in place in Nepal since King Gyanendra took power on Feb. 1, declaring a state of emergency.

Military censors now watch over the publication of news reports, several journalists have been detained, and several newspapers in villages and smaller towns have been shut down.

But cartoonist Rajesh KC -- he uses initials for his last name -- is among a handful of cartoonists trying to illustrate with sketches what cannot be said in words. He works for the country's largest newspaper, Kantipur.

One recent cartoon showed three top leaders -- under house arrest for weeks, and unable to get haircuts -- trying to find a barber to trim their increasingly long hair.

Another showed family members jumping to grab the telephone when a bicycle bell rings outside -- an allusion to the snapping of telephone and Internet links for a week after the royal takeover.

The topics may not sound contentious but reporters have to avoid them.

"We have been able to do what journalists have been barred from doing. Our role has become much more important now and we owe it to our readers to get the messages to them," KC said.

"I have had to draw a line that I cannot cross. However, with every cartoon I feel I am getting bolder," he said.

The one issue he avoids is Nepal's security forces, which can be particularly sensitive to criticism. Army officials have warned him, he said, against drawing cartoons that would "hamper the morale."

Besides making fun of the government and illustrating its activities, the cartoonists also portrayed the difficulties faced by common people due to the recent blockade of highways by the Maoist rebels.

In the Katmandu newspaper Rajdhani, one recent cartoon showed a politician giving a speech inside his bedroom because public speeches are now banned, with another showing detained political leaders asking a soldier if they are allowed to give speeches in jail.

The cartoonists' work resonates strongly with readers.

"These days it seems the only ones who are brave enough to express [opinions] in newspapers are the cartoonists," said Prem Sharma, a court clerk.

In the early days of the takeover, soldiers were stationed in all the newspaper offices, deleting any material they thought was critical of the king or the government. The government later issued a directive to media companies saying they could not publish or broadcast anything against the king, the royal government and the security forces.

Cartoonists are the only ones who have not complied. One cartoon showed a journalist faxing his story and a government censor hiding under the table, reading the story as it is fed through the machine.

Another portrayed a father scolding his son for cutting apart the newspaper, with his wife explaining it was not the child's fault -- the newspaper itself had shrunk.

Date Posted: 3/11/2005

----

General says weather has hampered Marine Corps' recruiting

By Sandra Jontz, 
Stars and Stripes
European edition, 
Friday, March 11, 2005

http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=26793&archive=true

WASHINGTON — While neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night keeps the postman away, bad weather apparently kept Marine Corps recruiters from their appointments and routes, said a Marine general Thursday.

The Corps has missed recruiting goals two months running. “It’s easy to say it’s the war in Iraq, but I’m not so sure,” Lt. Gen. Jan. C. Huly, deputy commandant for plans, policies and operations, told a gathering of defense writers.

A harsh winter kept potential recruits indoors, and thus recruiters from signing them up.

The beginning of the calendar year is the hardest time to lure students who are just beginning to think about life beyond high school, Huly said.

But the Corps made a mistake in letting Marines eligible to become recruiters deploy to combat zones instead of the streets of America, said Huly, who has served as the deputy commanding general for the Marine Corps Recruiting Command.

“We didn’t have as many recruiters on the streets as we wanted.”

The Corps missed its February goal by 192 recruits, and January’s goal by 84; the first time goals were missed in 10 years. “Let’s just keep in context just how big this alleged iceberg is out there.”

The service is adding recruiters over the next two years.

Additionally, the Corps is tasked with boosting its end-strength by 3,000 this fiscal year for a total of 178,000 Marines.

Recruiters will not only be looking for the basic infantryman, but for Marines with an aptitude for languages, Huly said.

The Army also missed its February recruiting goals.

Army leaders have said that the failure is linked in part to public concern over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, fueled by the near-daily reminders of American casualties.

To date, 1,664 U.S. troops have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than 10,000 have been wounded.

“People are watching the news,” Doug Smith, a spokesman for U.S. Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky., said last week. “They know the risks of military service in today’s environment.”

And the Pentagon’s top spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said in early March that with a nation at war, parents are using their influence over their children to steer decisions away from military service.


----

Hughes to Head Efforts to Improve U.S. Image Abroad

Reuters
Friday, March 11, 2005; 11:11 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28659-2005Mar11?language=printer

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former White House counselor Karen Hughes, a longtime confidant of President Bush, will head the U.S. effort to turn a tide of anti-American hostility abroad, particularly among Muslims, an administration official said Friday.

The State Department post of undersecretary for public diplomacy, designed to promote American values overseas, has been vacant since Margaret Tutwiler left last summer.

The White House declined to confirm Hughes' appointment but spokesman Scott McClellan indicated she would return in some capacity.

"I do expect there's going to be more to say soon on how she will continue to help out as part of the team," McClellan said.

Hughes, 48, has been a Bush adviser since he was governor of Texas. She moved to Washington when he won the 2000 presidential election but left her White House job in 2002 to return home to Austin, Texas, with her family.

In her new post, Hughes would lead the Bush administration's efforts to counter the negative image of the United States in many Muslim countries that was spurred by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and a perceived anti-Palestinian bias in Washington's Middle East policy.


-------- voting

Ex-N.H. GOP Official Sentenced

NATION IN BRIEF

Friday, March 11, 2005

Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25628-2005Mar10.html

CONCORD, N.H. -- The former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, Chuck McGee, was sentenced to seven months in prison for jamming Democratic telephone lines during the 2002 election.

McGee pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiring to make anonymous calls with the intent to annoy or harass. He was also fined $2,000 and ordered to perform 200 hours of community service. 


-------- OTHER


-------- environment

Oregon Demonstrates How to Keep Runoff Free of Lawn Chemicals

PORTLAND, Oregon, March 11, 2005 (ENS)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2005/2005-03-11-09.asp#anchor8

Misuse and overuse of pesticides and chemical fertilizers on lawns can lead to surface water problems. Rain or irrigation washes the chemicals off the lawn and into storm drains, and ultimately to rivers and streams. Once in the water, the chemicals can harm fish and other aquatic organisms.

In an effort to keep chemicals out of runoff, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) is offering lawn help for householders with a new website.

Funded by a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the DEQ site Healthy Lawns, Healthy Families at: www.healthylawns.org includes information about how lawn care habits influence water quality and tips on how to practice natural lawn care that can produce a healthier lawn and keep waters clean at the same time.

The Department of Environmental Quality partnered with Metro, Clean Water Services, the City of Eugene and the Coalition for Clean Rivers and Streams to create the website content.

The site includes an interactive demonstration of how lawn care habits affect the health of rivers. Visitors to the site are invited to take a pledge to use alternatives to lawn and garden chemicals. Those who pledge will receive a “Natural Lawn Care Practiced Here” lawn sign courtesy of the DEQ.

The site also has videos of Oregonians telling stories about how they successfully use natural methods to create healthy, attractive lawns without harmful chemicals. People shown in the videos are motivated to practice lawn care out of concern for the environmental, and the health of their children and pets.

Oregonians in Central and Eastern Oregon who have reduced the use of chemicals on their lawns and would like to share their stories on video are encouraged to tell DEQ about their natural lawn care successes.

Contact Phil Hodgen at 541-278-4609 or, by email, at hodgen.phil@deq.state.or.us.



-------- ENERGY 


-------- alternative energy

US Lawmaker Aims for North America Energy Sufficiency

USA: March 11, 2005
Story by Christopher Doering
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/29889/story.htm

WASHINGTON - With US gasoline prices poised to set a record high this spring, the head of the House Resources Committee Thursday unveiled an ambitious plan that aims to achieve energy self-sufficiency for North America by 2025.


Rep. Richard Pombo, a California Republican, said the United States must wean itself from dependence on foreign oil suppliers to help protect consumers from volatile prices.

His proposal would create a 16-member commission to develop ways to achieve energy self-sufficiency in the United States, Canada and Mexico by 2025. The panel, to be appointed by President Bush, would get one year to prepare specific recommendations.

The measure will be added to an energy bill that has languished in Congress for four years.

Pombo's goal of regional energy self-sufficiency -- even with help from oil exporting neighbors like Canada and Mexico -- is a tall order. The United States now imports 58 percent of the 20.8 million barrels of oil it consumes per day.

Pombo predicted a broad energy bill with incentives to boost US oil, natural gas, coal, electricity and nuclear production would finally be passed by the US Senate this year. While the House has approved an energy bill in the past, moderate Republicans and Democrats in the Senate have repeatedly blocked its passage.

"As pressure builds, as oil prices continue to rise, as energy costs continue to rise, members of Congress will respond to that" and pass an energy bill, Pombo said at an energy industry group meeting.

The Energy Department on Tuesday predicted retail gasoline prices will hit a record high this spring, reaching a national monthly average of $2.15 a gallon. The increase reflects the climbing cost of crude oil.

Pombo's committee, which has a major role in writing energy legislation, favors boosting oil and gas drilling in the western United States and in offshore waters of the Gulf of Mexico and California. It also backs a White House plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to drilling.

Senate Republicans on Wednesday inserted a provision for ANWR drilling in a fiscal 2006 federal budget resolution, which cannot be filibustered under Senate rules.

"I'm not going to be upset if they put it in the budget," Pombo said. "We just need to get it done."

The House Resources Committee will not act on energy legislation before the second week of April, after Congress returns from its spring recess, Pombo said. The Senate Energy Committee is working on a similar timetable.


-------- ACTIVISTS

Explosion of Youth Activism Around the Iraq War

By Adam Waxman, Foreign Policy in Focus
FPIF Discussion Paper
March 11, 2005

http://www.fpif.org/papers/0503students.html

Adam Waxman is a sophomore at Guilford College studying International Political Economy and Quaker Theology. He interned for Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in the summer of 2004 and is an FPIF contributor (online at www.fpif.org). Last fall he was elected president of the Guilford College Young Democrats. Currently he is working with the North Carolina Peace and Justice Coalition and the March 19 th Mobilization Committee at Guilford. A collection of his published writings can be found at www.domne.blogspot.com.

As goes Greensboro, so goes the nation.

Don’t believe me? Greensboro, North Carolina, is a bellwether for the pulse of students across the country. This Southern city has seven colleges and universities in its metropolitan area. These schools range in size and political temperament from the small and liberal Guilford and Bennett Colleges to larger, more conservative institutions such as Elon University and University of North Carolina - Greensboro (UNCG). As a whole, Greensboro and Guilford County are also a good microcosm of the country. Mostly rural North Carolina voted for Bush, but more urban Guilford County and Greensboro narrowly voted for Kerry. Greensboro also attracts lots of out of state students--for example, two-thirds of Guilford College ’s students are out of state, letting us have our finger on the pulse of the nation.

And something’s happening here. I’m a sophomore at Guilford and there’s an energy here that I haven’t seen in nearly two years of organizing on this campus. Since late January, our campus has been consumed by organizing for a large demonstration against the Iraq War in nearby Fayetteville (home of Ft. Bragg ) on March 19. In our first two days of tabling, we signed up 80 students to attend the march. Students are engaged and determined to take action on Iraq .

This specific demonstration that we’re working toward is unusual as well. It will bring together military families, veterans, and their supporters for a rally calling for the United States to bring the troops home and end the war. That’s unusual because most in our activist community don’t identify with military families and veterans, for several reasons. First, Guilford is a Quaker school, and many in our activist community are pacifists. Cultural and class conflicts have often made our organizing more fragmented than it should be. Yet, a higher number than usual of our students (compared to other actions) are not only committed to going to the demonstration, but are actively organizing on our campus as well.

For example, we are reaching more and more students who are natives of the South. Some of the main leaders of our organizing committee for the March 19th action were born and raised in Greensboro. A specific person who signed up to get involved recently stands out in my mind—this guy, an adult education student at Guilford, is a native of North Carolina who is a semi-retired 11-year veteran of the United States Marine Corps and drives racecars for a living. You don’t get much more “red state” than that.

His and other veterans’ involvement in the movement reflect a main theme of the demonstration that is set for March 19th. The peace movement is generally seeing more people who are directly affected by the war, namely veterans and their families, speaking out.

Anecdotes from Guilford are, of course, not the best determinant of the level of student activism in Greensboro. After all, Guilford is a Quaker school with a strong history of progressive political action. Yet, something is happening across Greensboro as well. Students are organizing on all seven campuses for this demonstration. For the first time we are actively coordinating our work by forming the Greensboro Student Action Coalition (GSAC). The coalition’s first big event, a teach-in connecting student activism to the peace work of military veterans, drew over 50 student activists from across Greensboro to network and strategize around ending the war. This event also attracted widespread attention from local media, which doesn’t often happen at progressive events in Greensboro.

“It’s been really incredible,” notes Liz Nemitz, a senior at Guilford who has been involved in the coalition since its inception. “We’re doing work with kids at University North Carolina-Greensboro, Bennett, and Agriculture and Technical University in Greensboro that we never had worked with before, and it’s brought a whole new perspective to our organizing--we see ourselves as a college town rather than in individual bubbles.”

I’ve seen what Liz says is true--for the first time, I’ve found myself leaving Guilford ’s campus to go do outreach on other, more conservative campuses where organizers are needed. It’s brought me a whole new level of respect for activists on those campuses, activists who work hard under difficult circumstances.

Some of the work in Greensboro has come about as a result of local organizing by the Beloved Community Center , a group that works on economic and racial justice issues. Trends nationally, however, point to increasing concern and student activism around Iraq . For example, many thousands of young people turned out to protest President George W. Bush’s inauguration on January 20. Thousands more participated in a massive nationwide student strike that occurred in a diverse group of schools including Seattle Central Community College , Paideia High School in Atlanta , Georgia , and Boulder High in Colorado .

I may be only 20 years old, but I’ve been an organizer since 2002. Speaking from my experience in organizing for the January 20 demonstration, I found that folks who had not been active politically before were motivated to demonstrate. Polling also suggests that youth are fearful of a draft (when the question is asked, about 80% of young people are against reinstating conscription) and turning against the war in droves.

Student activism around Iraq is not new. Students played a key role in the peace movement prior to the invasion of Iraq , with the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition organizing a major student strike on March 5 of 2003. After the invasion, however, student activism seemed to drop off a bit. Organizations like the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition that had worked on the student strike got less press attention that they did before the war, even when compared to the attention that was given to other peace groups like United for Peace and Justice during the same period after the invasion. According to an article by Richard Moreno for Z Magazine, most of the schools that had large walkouts on January 20 of this year were not the same schools that had seen large protests on March 5, 2003 . Moreno goes on to correctly note that one fact this trend shows is that much of the work that happened before the war did not sustain itself, or resurface until this year.

So why now are more students getting involved in Iraq-related issues? There are several reasons why student activism is bubbling up now. Many of the reasons are pretty obvious: for example, it has become clear that the Bush administration lacks an exit strategy in Iraq , and young people fear a draft. However, I believe there is one major reason that youth have turned to acting against the war that has been overlooked by many commentators: the 2004 election.

For some political analysts and activists, there were no positive long- or short-term outcomes of the 2004 elections as they relate to the antiwar movement. Such analysts particularly decry the involvement of youth in the campaigns of Kucinich, Kerry, and Dean. Cat Geary, student outreach coordinator for March 19, argues, “Young activists began to silence themselves, instead expending their energy campaigning for Kerry, a pro-war candidate. This left the mainstream debate without an antiwar position.” What activists such as Geary fail to see is that youth activism around the election prepared a shift in youth culture that will greatly benefit the peace movement in 2005 and beyond.

America’s youth today are consummate volunteers, though less civically active in terms of voting when long-term trends are examined going back to the 1970s. This is especially true of college students. Surveys have shown that 60% of young people do over 3.5 hours of service a week, and that number is increasing due to outreach programs by colleges that provide support for college student volunteers. Many youth activists work in areas such as hunger, homelessness, fair housing, and justice for prisoners.

The 2004 election helped institutionalize the idea of political activism as a part of service. Nonprofits such as National Voice and the League of Young Voters worked directly with community groups to help register and turn out youth. Youth-focused media such as Comedy Central and MTV decided that this was the election for youth empowerment and turnout, and spent a lot of resources emphasizing civic responsibility through Public Service Announcements featuring youth celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Seth Green. Rock the Vote, a nonpartisan arm of MTV, worked to register voters as never before, registering over a million youth voters in 2004. Also, the influence of Jon Stewart’s increasingly political The Daily Show on youth culture cannot be overstated.

As a result of all of the work of these various nonprofits and media organizations about 45% of young people (age 18-24) voted in 2004. That was the demographic’s highest voting rate since 1992, according to exit polls and analysis by CIRCLE, a research center on youth and civic engagement housed at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.

We also volunteered on more campaigns, everything from dogcatcher to president. Overwhelmingly, we supported progressive candidates--especially the candidacies of Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich, who opposed the Iraq War. Exit polling showed that young people cited foreign policy and Iraq as perhaps their foremost reason for getting involved. Yet, of course, progressive young people lost in 2004. Neither Dean nor Kucinich won the Democratic nomination, and Kerry went down to defeat.

Unlike many activists on the left, however, youth did not despair in the dark winter of December 2004. There was no talk of running to Canada, or giving up on politics altogether. Instead, we kept up the energy that had grown in 2004 and looked for other places to put it.

Many went back to their work in soup kitchens and homeless shelters, but with a new sense that advocacy and politics matter. John Wilson Irwin, a Greensboro student who hails from a low-income neighborhood in Memphis who now is an activist with the Greensboro Housing Coalition, notes: “I see connections between the fact that people in Greensboro don’t have adequate housing and the fact that we’re spending billions of dollars on a pointless war.”

As someone who has worked as both a peace activist and on numerous political campaigns, I have recognized several ways in which various activist movements can tap into student energy. The most important is this: give young people real responsibility in the movement and listen to their ideas. Political campaigns tend to take their bright, energetic young volunteers and stick them in a windowless room to stuff envelops. They’re used solely for grunt work--knocking on doors, manning phone banks, etc. Every now and then that can be fun, and it’s obviously necessary work, but if I’m going to make a hundred phone calls, I’d like at least to have a voice in what it is I’m saying.

Surveying some of the peace groups, it appears to me that the movement against the Iraq War is doing a good job in this respect. For example, United for Peace and Justice, the large U.S. peace movement coalition, does a good job of integrating youth voices into its work and leadership positions. One in eight members of the coalition’s 40-member steering committee represent youth-oriented groups such as the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition and Student United for a Responsible Global Environment.

In contrast, of the over 400 members of the Democratic National Committee (the official, elected leadership of the Democratic Party), only one in 20 are under 30. None of the DNC’s nine elected leaders serve as a formal youth liaison, despite the fact that this was one of the only age demographics to decisively break for Kerry.

The DNC does have a large youth-affiliate organization in College Democrats of America. I have worked with both the peace movement and on Democratic electoral campaigns. Based on that personal experience, I can say that I have found peace activists much more willing to respect my ideas and use my energy to its fullest potential, whereas when working on Democratic political campaigns I was only used for grunt work. The only exception in my experience was the Howard Dean campaign, which did a great job giving young people a real voice in the organization and the organizing.

The 2004 elections were, in many obvious ways, a defeat for the left. But pessimistic analysts who see it as a total defeat are ignoring cultural shifts and long-term trends that are poised to benefit the peace movement and the wider progressive political community. In particular, youth activism around the election prepared a shift in youth culture that will greatly benefit the peace movement in 2005 and beyond.

----

Calif. Anti-War Memorial Stirs Passions

By SETH HETTENA
Associated Press Writer, Mar 11, 2005
	
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/E/EYES_WIDE_OPEN?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME

ESCONDIDO, Calif. (AP) -- Laid out in rows stretching longer than a football field, 1,513 pairs of black military boots gave a sunsplashed park the quiet, somber mood of a cemetery.

The traveling exhibit, a reminder of the U.S. troops lost in Iraq,  arrived on the West Coast this week as divisive as the war itself - especially for the families of the fallen men and women.

To some of the families, it is a cathartic, fitting memorial in a nation they say seems largely anesthetized to the pain of a distant war. For others, it's an outrage tormenting them in their grief.

"There's a difference between honoring our fallen and using them as pawns," said Georgette Frank, who believes the exhibit defamed the memory of her son, Marine Lance Cpl. Phillip Frank, by linking him with an anti-war agenda he never would have supported.
	
The "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit, created by the American Friends Service Committee, a branch of the pacifist Quaker church, began its nationwide tour in Chicago with 500 boots - then the war's death toll.

The exhibit arrived in downtown San Diego on Wednesday, but space was limited there because of what the county and organizers said was a misunderstanding over a permit. It was moved Thursday to Escondido, northeast of San Diego.

Nine families have donated their sons' military boots for the exhibit, and others have provided time and support. Most of the boots come from military surplus stores.

Cindy Sheehan calls the exhibit a wonderful memorial to her 24-year-old son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, who died last year in an ambush in Sadr City. She has left tissues, notes and many tears on the boots that bear her son's name and plans to donate his boots later this month.

Sheehan, who lives in Vacaville, said the exhibit is also a fitting reminder in a nation that has banned media coverage of America's war dead as their remains arrive in flag-draped caskets.

"If some people look at it and they're offended by it maybe they should be," she said. "I'm in unbearable pain every second of every day because of only one pair of those empty boots."

About two dozen families, however, have asked that their loved ones' names be removed from the exhibit. The committee said it removes names from the boots on request, although the names are still read aloud during events.

Frank said she and her husband believe the "naive" peace movement only encourages insurgents in Iraq with the message that continued violence will lead the United States to withdraw its troops. She said her son, felled by a sniper's bullet last year in Fallujah at age 20, was committed to bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq.

"How can I be against the war when this is what my son went to do?" she asked. "And you know what, he succeeded on the Sunday when the Iraqis voted."

Christine M. Dybevik of Coos Bay, Ore., was angered that the name of her son, Marine Lance Cpl. Gary Van Leuven, was used without her permission. Van Leuven, 20, was killed last year in a fierce fight in Husaba along the Syrian border.

"This road back from hell is hard enough without having to defend my son's name in a political arena," Dybevik said. "Our sons made the ultimate sacrifice and they did it for the American way of life and not for some political view."

Fernando Suarez del Solar of Escondido supports the exhibit, and donated the boots worn by his son, Lance Cpl. Jesus Suarez del Solar, 20, who was killed during the March 2003 Iraq invasion.

"We don't need more empty boots," Suarez del Solar said. "We need the people inside the shoes home with their families in peace."

On the Net:

http://www.afsc.org/eyes/default.htm 

----

MoveOn.org Makes Peace With War

by Norman Solomon, March 11, 2005 Antiwar.com

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/solomon.php?articleid=5148

Sadly, it has come to this. Two years after the invasion of Iraq, the online powerhouse MoveOn.org – which built most of its member base with a strong antiwar message – is not pushing for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

With a network of more than 3 million "online activists," the MoveOn leadership has decided against opposing the American occupation of Iraq. During the recent bloody months, none of MoveOn's action alerts have addressed what Americans can do to help get the U.S. military out of that country. Likewise, the MoveOn.org Web site has continued to bypass the issue – even after Rep. Lynn Woolsey and two dozen co-sponsors in the House of Representatives introduced a resolution in late January calling for swift removal of all U.S. troops from Iraq.

That resolution would seem to be a natural peg for the kind of kinetic activism that established MoveOn's reputation. A movement serious about ending U.S. military activities in Iraq could use the resolution as a way to cut through political tap dances and pressure members of Congress to take a stand. Down the road, generating grassroots support for a get-out-of-Iraq resolution has potential to clear a congressional pathway for measures cutting off funds for the war.

But, tragically, MoveOn's leadership is having none of it. Over a period of recent weeks, the word "Iraq" appeared on the MoveOn.org home page only in a plug for a documentary released last year. Inches away, a blurb has been telling the Web site's visitors: "Support Our Troops: Contribute your frequent-flyer miles so that American troops can get home." (But not stay home.) Many soldiers are returning to the killing grounds of Iraq, while a growing number are vocally opposed to this war.

Why won't MoveOn "support our troops" by supporting a pullout of our troops from Iraq? "We believe that there are no good options in Iraq," MoveOn.org's executive director, Eli Pariser, told me. "We're seeing a broad difference of opinion among our members on how quickly the U.S. should get out of Iraq. As a grassroots-directed organization, we won't be taking any position which a large portion of our members disagree with."

In sharp contrast, early in the 2004 primary campaign, MoveOn committed itself to endorsing any Democratic presidential candidate receiving more than 50 percent of the Internet ballots cast by its activists. (Howard Dean fell shy of a majority, so there was no MoveOn endorsement.) But now, evidently, a majority of MoveOn members in favor of swift withdrawal from Iraq would be insufficient if a "large portion" disagreed.

When I asked Eli for clarification, he replied: "We've been talking with our members continuously on this issue. We've surveyed slices of our membership in January and in December, and surveyed our whole membership last spring. That's how we know there's a breadth of opinion out there."

But last spring was a year ago. And any surveying of "slices of our membership in January and in December" came before the Woolsey resolution offered an opportunity to find out how the MoveOn base views the measure. In any event, there will always be "a breadth of opinion" about this war – a fact that does not trump the crucial need for clarity of purpose.

If MoveOn leaders were willing to submit the House get-out-of-Iraq resolution to MoveOn's rank-and-file in an up-or-down vote, the chances of a substantial majority would be excellent. Too bad the leadership of MoveOn.org is currently unwilling to find out.

The 29 members of the House now sponsoring the resolution are hardly radicals. They recognize the kind of grisly consequences of equivocation that occurred during the Vietnam War: refusal to speak forthrightly about the urgent need to end military involvement only fuels the war's deadly momentum.

It's all well and good for MoveOn.org to excoriate President Bush for his many big lies in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. But such activities don't make up for going along with the basics of the present-day Iraq war.

When a large progressive organization takes the easy way and makes peace with war, the abdication of responsibility creates a vacuum. Ironically, a group that became an Internet phenom by recognizing and filling a void is now creating one. And other groups are bound to emerge to fill it.

Among the emerging organizations is Progressive Democrats of America, a fledgling national group with an activist focus on the Iraq war that is laudably straightforward. "We're organizing a new campaign in every congressional district we can to call for the end of funding for war and occupation, and for the transfer of reconstruction assistance to Iraqis themselves," says Tim Carpenter of PDA. He contends that "public pressure can awaken Congress to an opposition role."

War in Iraq requires continual funding, of course, so President Bush's new supplemental boost of $80 billion in war appropriations has been moving through Congress in recent days. Tacitly accepting the war's continuation, MoveOn declined to take a stand against the essence of congressional backing for the war – the money that keeps paying for it. Meanwhile, PDA launched an effort against the $80 billion; the organizing included a National Call-In Day aimed at members of Congress on March 10.

MoveOn.org pioneered the use of e-mail and Web technologies as creative tools to further its political agenda. Now that the MoveOn agenda on the Iraq war has tumbled into the shallow depths of the Potomac, some similar online activism will be needed if MoveOn's dive is going to be merely temporary. So, to help get the cyber-ball rolling, please forward this article around the Internet and post it where appropriate.

Friends don't let friends drive drunk, and peace advocates do a lot more than shrug when a previously great antiwar organization starts to get lost.

If MoveOn continues to abandon its antiwar base, that base will get the picture – and move on.

--------

Hunter S. Thompson:  "Suicided" is now a verb

Fri Mar 11, 2005 11:51pm
By Jane Stillwater 

http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com
 
      I keep getting all these e-mails in my inbox saying that Hunter S. Thompson didn't kill himself -- and frankly, there are a lot of unanswered questions here. 
 
     "He was talking to his wife over the phone when he did it.  You don't just kill yourself in the middle of a conversation with your wife!" one e-mail read.  Okay, but maybe he did it that way because he wanted her to feel bad about herself?  But would Thompson actually do something like that?  And what is all this stuff about his son being in the house and also firing a gun?
 
     Right before he died, Thompson told a Globe & Mail reporter that he was afraid he was about to be "suicided".  He said the same thing two years earlier on a local radio show.  "We'll see what happens to me if I get my head cut off in the next week by -- it's always [inaudible] who commit suicide right afterward.  No witnesses.  They have a new kind of crime."  How sad.  That "suicided" is now a verb -- and a believable verb at that.
 
    Our government has a policy written down somewhere that covert assassinations are a good thing.  Just how far are they willing to take this?
 
     But maybe Thompson did kill himself.  After all, he did use a lot of drugs.  Duh.  Drugs will make you suicidal.  Everybody knows that even Prozac or Paxil can have that effect.  Only in modern-day America can we be having this conversation.  What ever happened to the good old days when your grandmother got depressed from living 100 miles from nowhere on a farm in zero degree weather and no electric washer and hung herself?  Now we gotta be driven to suicide by "mood elevating" drugs!  (Carnahan, Wellstone and JFK Jr. didn't use drugs.  They just happened to be on the wrong airplanes.  And Giuliana Sgrena happened to be on her way to the wrong airport!)
 
     Who else on the American landscape has been "suicided"? James Forestall?  Probably.  Marilyn Monroe?  Probably not.  Margie Schoedinger, the woman who accused George Bush of rape?  Maybe.  There is always that lingering doubt.... Then there was that reporter Gary Webb who was investigating drug-running connections involving the CIA -- the coroner claimed that he was so eager to kill himself that he shot himself in the head fatally TWICE -- but why would someone hot on the trail of a blockbuster story want to off himself?  
 
     And what about Jim Hatfield, the author of "Fortunate Son"?  Or Colin McMillan? 
 
     Well, there's a quick and obvious way to find out if Hunter S. Thompson killed himself:  An autopsy!  Double-duh.  Did Thompson have gunpowder on his hands?  What angle did the bullet go in?  Did they find the gun right near the body?  What kind of bullet was used?  Was the shell found?  Was the crime scene conaminated?  WAS there an autopsy? And why aren't we being told this stuff? 
 
     Conspiracy buffs, let's get ON this one.  Why do you think that Thompson might have been offed?  Was he about to expose a Washington DC porno ring?  Was he going to come up with proof that Bush knew about 9-11? 
 
     And how come one of the few top-notch investigative reporters left in America -- besides Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins, Dahr Jamail, Amy Goodman, Paul Krugman, Seymour Hersh and Greg Palast -- is now dead?  Hunter, you gotta come back from the grave, sniff around, find out what really happened and tell us the Truth! 
 
PS:  Someone just "suicided" this post on my blog! 
 
PPS:  I just want to reassure Ann Coulter, Jeff Gannon, Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch that they have nothing to worry about.
 
-
 
From Democracy Now:  Monday, December 13th, 2004
Investigative Reporter Gary Webb Who Linked CIA to Crack Sales Found Dead of Apparent Suicide http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/13/1457240
 
-

Who killed Hunter Thompson? Is Greg Palast next?
by Joey Dauben - North Texas Indy Media.  Did Hunter Thompson kill himself? Did Gary Webb?  Did Bush autobiographer Hatfield kill himself?  Joey Dauben doesn't think so.  "As Greg Palast stated recently, when reporters become bigger than their subjects they're covering," Dauben said, "they're dealt with."
  http://www.ntimc.org/newswire.php?story_id=2007
 
-
 
From Tool:  Margie Schoedinger, the woman who allegedly filed a lawsuit against George W. Bush in December 2002, claiming that she had been raped, has died of a gunshot wound to the head, registered officially as "suicide".
http://pub12.ezboard.com/fpoliticalpalacefrm17.showPrevMessage?topicID=664.topic
 
-
 
From Peter:  Another "Suicide": Colin McMillan:  Colin McMillan was clearly a big player in various Bush/Oil/Military criminal enterprises.  Now he has a bullet in his brain.  This incident reminds me of the scene in Good Fellas when the Joe Pesci character is going to be "made" at the local Don's house.  Indeed, McMillan thought he was headed to a top slot in the Organization, but, for some reason, it didn't work out that way.   http://www.cryptogon.com/2003_07_20_blogarchive.html
 
-
 
From Megan:  ONE BY ONE, THEY'RE GOING TO PICK OFF ALL DISSENTERS UNLESS WE ALL DISSENT LOUDLY AND OFTEN.   Also, see below where Hunter predicted on "Democracy Now" that he'd end up mysteriously dead of suicide - gives you chills....  I highly recommend reading this...   http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/23/164218&mode=thread&tid=25
 
Regarding the death of Jim Hatfield:  http://www.davidcogswell.com/Essays/DeathHatfield.html
 
-
 
From John:  My truth (La mia verità) By Giuliana Sgrena
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Media/030605Sgrena/030605sgrena.html
 
-
 
From Hunter S. Thompson himself (via Jodie):  To Compare Bush To Nixon Is An Insult.

     Let's face it, the yo-yo president of the U.S.A. knows nothing.  He is a dunce.  He does what he is told to do, says what he is told to say, poses the way he is told to pose. He is a fool.  http://www.rense.com/general63/nix.htm

-

From "Amy Goes to Probate Court":  Everything you ever wanted to know about probate -- and a lot more too!  "What is prooo-bait?" asked Amy.  Good question.  We were all abaout to find out.  http://travelswithamy.blogspot.com/2004/04/amy-goes-to-probate-court-short.html
 
-
 
From Aprille: Facing a barrage of calls from the media and the public, the Sacramento County Coroner's Office issued a statement Tuesday confirming that former investigative reporter Gary Webb committed suicide with two gunshots to the head.  [TWO gunshots?  How did Webb manage that?]http://sacbee.com/content/news/story/11772749p-12657577c.html 
 
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From MA Dark [Election fraud is STILL the issue]:  In These Times Article -- Kerry won.  A Corrupted Election:  Despite what you may have heard, the exit polls were right. http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1970/ 
 
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From Bill:  [Here is the raw data that proves that Diebold rigged the Op-Scan voting machines in Florida]  Read Kathy Dopp's charts and tables:  http://residentbush.com/Aftermath-2004_Florida-Results.htm

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The New Face of Protest?

by KAREN HOUPPERT, March 11, 2005 The Nation
[from the March 28, 2005 issue]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050328&s=houppert

On a Sunday afternoon in February a young man made a plea to a room full of 400 antiwar activists who had gathered in St. Louis for three days of strategizing on how to end the war in Iraq. "I'm probably the most experienced activist in my organization and I've been an activist for one year," 25-year-old Michael Hoffman said, "so we need your help with logistics." In return, he promised that his group would serve as a shield. "When there are massive protests, we will be out front. We will say that you are doing everything you can to support the troops by demanding that this war is ended, and ended now, so that the troops are brought home and cared for when they return."

His speech was short, but it was one of the few that brought whoops, cheers and a standing ovation from the crowd of United for Peace and Justice delegates, a national coalition of more than 1,000 antiwar groups. As he left the dais and made his way through the crowd, he seemed surprised by the reaction he got--indeed, surprised to find himself in this role of war resister.

Until the summer of 2003, Michael Hoffman was a US Marine with the Tenth Regiment. Hoffman, who says he believed from the beginning that this was a war for oil, had been slated to get out of the service before his unit shipped out to Kuwait in February 2003. But two days before Hoffman's time was up, his sergeant called him to let him know that the Secretary of the Navy had instituted "stop loss," which meant that those soldiers deemed necessary to the war could not get out of the service when promised; Hoffman would be going to Iraq instead of home to Allentown, Pennsylvania. What Hoffman saw when his unit went into Iraq on March 20 only hardened his opposition to the war. "Seeing the civilian casualties and the horrible things that were done and the destruction we laid on that country, it seemed pretty clear to me that we never had the Iraqis' best interests in mind," he says.

Today, Hoffman is a co-founder of the fledgling organization Iraq Veterans Against the War and also a centerpiece of the peace movement's emerging strategy. Antiwar activists are determined to make the military a major pillar of the movement, both by homing in on one of the war effort's weak spots--the military's faltering campaign to recruit new soldiers--and by embracing antiwar troops. Perhaps recalling the late but powerful entrance of the voices of Vietnam vets in the protests of that era--like, say, the youthful Lieut. John Kerry, who once spoke eloquently about what he saw in Vietnam--today's 1960s-activist-stacked peace movement hopes to be more strategic about the military's role.

It is an alliance rich with promise. Part of the challenge for this peace movement is persuading Americans that attacking the war is not the same thing as attacking the troops. The Vietnam-era mythology of antiwar activists spitting on soldiers is still alive and well in the American psyche (no matter how many times its veracity has been called into question). Putting veterans on the front lines of the peace movement subverts this image. At the same time, this tactic has drawbacks--among them is that it risks reinforcing the notion that civilian opposition to war is somehow less legitimate.

For now, buoyed by news reports of dissent in the ranks, antiwar leaders are convinced that soldiers make valuable allies. "They have a credibility in this conversation that allows them to reach more people and to take on some of the arguments of the conservatives in a more persuasive way," says Charley Richardson, one of the co-founders of Military Families Speak Out and the father of a soldier who served in Iraq. Richardson and his wife, Nancy Lessin, have seen MFSO grow from 200 families in 2003 to more than 2,000 families today. "More soldiers and spouses are speaking out today," says Lessin, who believes that even more harbor antiwar sentiment but stay quiet. Noting that the organization has seen a membership shift--it used to be predominantly parents of soldiers; now more wives of soldiers have joined--Lessin is encouraged: "That is significant because that's where the code of silence is greatest, on military bases, and that's where breaking the code is more difficult."

Huge numbers? No. But a symbolic presence can be powerful--letting others who feel similarly know that it's OK to speak out. And putting military families and soldiers up front can shift public opinion, organizers say.

"Part of the problem is that no one, from the next-door neighbor to the politicians in Congress, wants to be seen as not supporting the troops," says Lessin. "Our role is to change that construct, to say that real support of the troops right now--when they have been sent off to fight and die in a war based on lies--is to fight against a war that never had to happen. We say, 'We need you to support the troops this way.'" Getting vets and military family members involved is thus critical. "This group of people gives us permission to speak out against the war."

Helping this effort along are some recent, highly visible signs of disgruntled troops. There is Specialist Thomas Wilson, the soldier who, during a feel-good town meeting in Kuwait, got so much press when he dared to question Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as to why soldiers were being forced to "dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal" to up-armor their vehicles instead of getting proper protective equipment from the Army. Then there were the twenty-three members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company in Iraq who mutinied, refusing to drive their trucks on what they clearly considered a suicide mission. Further, peace activists have been encouraged by a spate of well-publicized lawsuits from both enlisted soldiers and officers.

The suits draw attention to what John Kerry dubbed a "back-door draft," in which tens of thousands of veterans who had gotten out of the service, active-duty soldiers who believed they had completed their tours in Iraq, and officers who put in for separation or retirement have been told to think again. (One 56-year-old Californian, who served three tours in Vietnam before getting out of the service decades ago, was among those recently ordered to report for duty.) While the Pentagon has reminded the public that we are at war, lawyers for some reluctant soldiers contend otherwise. In cases filed in the past few months, they argue that the United States is engaged in "nation building" and "putting down the Iraqi insurgency"--two activities not covered under President Bush's declaration of a "state of emergency" on September 14, 2001. Since Congress never formally declared war against Iraq, they claim, Bush does not have the power to ignore the contractual agreements soldiers sign upon enlisting. (And indeed, Bush reassured the nation on May 2, 2003, from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, that the war in Iraq was over and had been won by US forces: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.")

In addition to fighting in the courts, war opponents have also tried to build bridges with progressives inside the military community. "We affirm that defending your country and supporting your troops does not mean suppressing your conscience," the Civic Soldier Forum announces in a soon-to-be-released ad for military publications. The forum, a national organization of self-described "progressives who are also patriots," comprises military analysts, active-duty troops, civilians and veterans.

At the grassroots level, progressives are also working to involve soldiers. For example, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of one of the Army's largest posts (Fort Bragg) as well as an Air Force base (Pope AFB), the Quakers are joining up with Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out (MFSO), Veterans for Peace, Gold Star Families for Peace and September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows to organize a large antiwar demonstration on March 19. They are expecting anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 protesters.

Meanwhile, in Vermont, activists are taking a completely different tack. Here, in a state with no active-duty military bases but a number of National Guard soldiers, fifty towns passed a resolution on March 1 to end the war. "This war is being perpetrated in our names with our tax dollars," says Sherry Prindall, mother of a National Guard soldier deployed to Iraq. Speaking in radio commercials broadcast across the state, she has been urging Vermonters to consider the war a local issue. Though organizers admit their resolutions are unlikely to end the war, they see this as a significant educational effort. "The basic goal of the whole exercise is to initiate a conversation in Vermont," says Ben Scotch, one of those spearheading the campaign. "We want to bring the discussion outside of the peace movement to engage people in the fire departments and schools and the veterans of foreign wars groups--the whole community."

The effort dovetails nicely with the rest of the peace movement's counterrecruiting efforts, which are newly focused on the National Guard. "This is just one part of the larger struggle to deny the government the troops it needs to fight the war," explains MFSO's Richardson. Banding together with the American Friends Service Committee, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace and United for Peace and Justice, MFSO intends to bring the war home by exposing the local impact of the war on soldiers, families, communities and states through a focus on the National Guard. Because as many as 50 percent of some states' National Guard troops are deployed at any given time, residents are left without the state-based emergency response teams they may need. "This is an issue that state legislatures can and must take on," insists Richardson. Not only do antiwar activists hope to expose this vulnerability and propel more states to adopt resolutions like Vermont's; they are ultimately going for a trickle-up effect. If grassroots activists can persuade a city councilor to support their cause, and then a state legislator, eventually members of Congress might feel they have a supportive base for taking a stand. To that end, peace activists are tying the cost of the war to local issues. Libraries and schools are underfunded, the argument goes, because money is going instead to fund military adventures. "We have to say that Bush's budgets are immoral and we are looking for moral ways to use our money," says Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, an organization of women for peace.

Meanwhile, college students are protesting the presence of recruiters on their campuses, and parents of young people are beginning to speak out against the military's hunt for high schoolers. Cindy Sheehan, a California resident whose 24-year-old son, Casey, was killed two weeks after he arrived in Iraq in April 2004, says she gets furious when recruiters call the house asking to speak to her three younger kids. "They get the list from the schools," she says, referring to a little-known clause of the No Child Left Behind Act that requires public schools to provide recruiters with students' names, addresses and home phone numbers--or lose federal funds. "I tell the recruiters that sacrificing my oldest son for a lie is already way too much and they're not getting any of my other kids!"

Sheehan is a perfect example of the kind of folks peace activists insist are part of a silent majority: She opposed the war but was disinclined to speak out. "I was stunned and dismayed when the United States invaded Iraq," Sheehan says. "I didn't agree with it. I didn't think it was right, but I never protested until after Casey was killed." She pauses and steels herself for what feels like the hundredth brutal mea culpa: "And I am very sorry I didn't." Taking to heart the old union slogan "Don't mourn, organize," Sheehan is clearly deeply immersed in both. Along with dozens of other families who lost soldiers in the war, she formed a new organization, Gold Star Families for Peace, and has made it her penance to share the details of her own experience. "Now I am doing anything I can to shorten this war and save other families the pain we're going through," she says.

Her voice and those of other military families are being welcomed in the peace movement. And more soldiers themselves are slowly creeping out of the woodwork. But getting huge numbers of troops involved may be a long shot. There is tremendous peer pressure in the military community--the Defense Department calls it "bonding" and considers it the cornerstone of military training--and soldiers who are vocal about their opposition to the war face considerable obstacles. Not only may their peers shun them, but the Army may go after them.

The Civic Soldier Forum runs ads in various military publications. One that is forthcoming in The Stars and Stripes raises a provocative question: "Who says that those who defend democracy cannot practice it?" Eloquently posed, the question is not merely rhetorical. There are so many rules governing soldiers' political lives that most seem to shy away from all activism for fear of breaking one. (Regulations even specify the size of bumper stickers allowed on their cars.) Officially, members of the armed services can participate in protests as long as they are not in uniform, don't divulge military secrets and don't appear to be speaking for the military. "Unofficially, your supervisors can give you every single horrible detail they can find," says Hoffman, the Iraq veteran who spoke at the St. Louis antiwar event. "In Iraq, they can put you on every dangerous mission they need to staff."

Lou Plummer, an Army veteran whose son Drew was home on leave from the Navy the day the Iraq War started, says his son paid a big price for speaking his mind. Lou brought Drew to a peace vigil that day in Fayetteville. When an AP reporter interviewed Lou and then turned to Drew and asked what he thought, the young man told him he thought the war was about oil. "He didn't speak to any other reporters. He is not an activist. He just answered the question from his heart," Lou recalls. Days after Drew's comments ran in the press, when he reported for duty at the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, he was charged with violating Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The charge was disloyalty. When Drew was hauled before his superiors, his father explains, he "was asked if he sympathized with the enemy and said 'No.' He was asked if he planned to sabotage the ship and said 'No.' He was asked if he was sorry for what he said to that reporter and he said 'No.' So he was convicted of disloyalty and demoted."

Hoffman insists this isn't uncommon. "Lots of guys who speak out then get railroaded into an Article 15 hearing because they're offered a choice between that and a court-martial," says Hoffman. Under an Article 15 hearing, soldiers forgo legal representation and a trial, instead agreeing to let their commander make the call through a less formal administrative hearing. "And basically, you're guilty until proven innocent," says Hoffman.

While the antiwar movement embraces soldiers who brave such hostility to express their qualms about the war, dissenting military voices do not always share all of the peace movement's goals and priorities. As a result, these alliances have the potential to backfire. For example, Specialist Wilson's comment to Rumsfeld about the lack of armored vehicles was the complaint heard round the world. But if it gets invoked as justification for increased military spending, the cheers may fade. Or if the complaints of military families who lament the current operational tempo that has their spouses deployed more than they're home spur a military buildup, they may find themselves at odds with the larger peace movement. Indeed, progressives may be putting the military out front for the same reasons that the Democrats are now determined to put religion out front--and both "projects" raise the same serious questions: Is this capitulating to the political climate rather than contesting the very premise that says the God-fearing make the best leaders, or the khaki-clad soldiers the truest patriots? And when some of those "true patriots" are the perpetrators of crimes, like those committed at Abu Ghraib, will the peace movement's promilitary stance inhibit strong criticism?

Ultimately, there is a danger that the soldier's perspective, so crucial to the peace movement now, may prove problematic to the larger progressive movement that activists hope this will spawn. After all, for many soldiers this is a one-platform plank, making their immediate asset their long-term flaw. "So many of the other activists at this United for Peace and Justice convention can be written off by Americans as crazy pinko commie lefties," Hoffman told me privately, after he had addressed the larger assembly of peace activists in the St. Louis convention hall. "But we're the vets who've been there and fought, and it seems it's hard for us to be dismissed. We've been to Iraq. We've seen it. We know it's wrong. We have to end it." He shrugs and raises his hands, palms up, as if he holds a tidy package. "It's very simple. There's not a lot of other issues we're talking about."