NucNews - March 14, 2005



<a name="nuclear"></a>

-------- NUCLEAR 

From: "Frida Berrigan" <BerrigaF@newschool.edu>
Date: Mon Mar 14, 2005 3:55pm
Subject: ATRC UPDATE: Nuclear Proliferation

March 14, 2005


Dear Friends,

So much has been happening lately!! Boeing fired Stonecipher, John
Bolton was put forward at U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Condoleeza Rice is
not running for President in 2008, Lebanon is pulling out of Syria, Bush
is quoting Tocqueville.... it is a crazy time.

Rather than trying to cover all these twists and turns, we are
conserving our energy with a long and focused piece on "Nuclear
Proliferation: Ongoing Challenges." We hope this is helpful.

All the best,

Frida Berrigan
Michelle Ciarrocca
Bill Hartung


NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION: Ongoing Challenges
By Michelle Ciarrocca

Let's face it, despite President Bush acknowledging nuclear
proliferation as the most serious threat facing U.S. security, under the
guidance of the Bush Administration the situation has gotten worse, not
better.

The Bush administration's hands-off approach in dealing with Iran and
North Korea to avoid "legitimizing" them has done more harm than good.
As Michael Hirsh pointed out in Newsweek, Bush "sought to treat them as
Ronald Reagan did the Soviet Union, ostracizing them and pushing for a
transition to democracy. But as one official notes, even Reagan
eventually did business with the leader of the 'Evil Empire.'" And with
the recent nomination of John Bolton as the next ambassador to the
United Nations, all talk of repairing relations abroad and pursuing a
more diplomatic approach seems like a joke

But now, more than ever, is a good time to take stock of the state of
nuclear proliferation and the ongoing challenges facing the U.S., and
the world. The NPT Review Conference is coming up at the UN in May. The
188 governments which have ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT) meet every five years to assess the implementation of the treaty,
and much has changed since the 2000 review conference. From North
Korea's recent announcement that it has acquired nuclear weapons and its
complete abandonment of the NPT to Iran's "noncompliance" and the
snail-pace reductions between the U.S. and Russia, there will be no
shortage of items to discuss during the upcoming review conference at
the United Nations.

There are eight countries with declared nuclear weapons: the U.S.,
Britain, France, China and Russia (all signatories of the NPT), India
and Pakistan (both outside of the NPT) and now, North Korea (which
walked away from the Treaty). Israel has nuclear weapons, but does not
officially acknowledge them.

IRAN
To this day, despite Tehran's confirmation of an existing underground
nuclear facility, Iran maintains its nuclear program is for peaceful
means and is not geared towards the production of nuclear weapons. Ali
Akbar Salehi, a nuclear affairs adviser to the foreign minister, told
the Associated Press, "To protect the safety of equipment against
possible danger of aerial attack, a major part of the plant has been
constructed underground, especially where thousands of centrifuges need
to be located."

In line with the neo-conservative elements in the Bush administration,
the U.S. has refused to hold direct talks with Tehran, and hard-liners
are urging the IAEA to refer the issue to the UN Security Council with
the hopes of placing sanctions on Iran. And while it has been widely
reported that U.S. forces have been checking out potential targets in
Iran, President Bush has said the U.S. is not planning to attack Iran,
but has also said all military options are on the table.

In recent statements, and in what would be an important policy shift,
the Bush administration seems inclined to back European diplomatic
initiatives, which would include economic and technological assistance.
In an interview with NBC, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said, "I've
had further discussions with my European colleagues, and we are
designing, I think, an important common strategy with Europe so that
Iran knows there is no other way."

As George Perkovich from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
notes, "The possibility of U.S. trade and investment offers a most
effective way to enhance Iranian decision-making. Instead of imposing
sanctions, which have punished Iranians for 24 years, a better strategy
would be to demonstrate the benefits of economic cooperation with the
U.S."

According to a nine-member bipartisan panel tasked with assessing the
quality of intelligence concerning the proliferation of nuclear,
chemical and biological weapons, data on Iran's weapons programs is
inadequate. With the report due out at the end of the month, The New
York Times reported that in "an effort to pre-empt any repeat of the
experience in Iraq, where prewar American assertions about illicit
weapons proved to be mistaken," members of the Senate Intelligence
Committee have begun its own review into the quality of intelligence on
Iran. Already, on FOX News, Vice President Dick Cheney is touting the
report as "one of the most important things that's going forward
today."

NORTH KOREA
Whereas President Bush's "Axis of Evil" label during his 2002 State of
the Union address (and other policy changes) led to North Korea kicking
UN inspectors out of the country and withdrawing from the NPT, Condi
Rice's "outpost of tyranny" tag for North Korea during her confirmation
hearing, is ruffling a few feathers.

In a recent statement from Kim Jong Il, North Korea's reclusive leader
said, "In response to the Bush administration's increasingly hostile
policy.. we have manufactured nuclear weapons for self-defense." North
Korea has also threatened to resume testing of its long-range missiles,
despite a moratorium that's been in place since the Clinton
administration, and has said it will not resume six-nation talks.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan dismissed the nuclear
declaration as empty rhetoric, and said the U.S. remains committed to
the six-party talks and to a peaceful diplomatic resolution with North
Korea. But while the Bush administration repeatedly states it has no
intention of attacking or invading North Korea, the administration has
been reluctant to put forth any new diplomatic solutions - an ongoing
point of contention with North Korea. "We have wanted the six-party
talks but we are compelled to suspend our participation in the talks for
an indefinite period till we have recognized that there is justification
for us to attend the talks and there are ample conditions and atmosphere
to expect positive results from the talks," the North Korean Foreign
Ministry said.

In past talks, North Korea said it would be willing to halt its
plutonium program as a first step in dismantling it. But does Pyongyang
mean what it says? As Leon Sigal from the Social Science Research
Council rightly states, "The surest way to find out is sustained
diplomatic give-and-take. Pyongyang isn't asking for much. It wants to
exchange 'words for words' and 'action for action.' It wants Washington
to commit now to normalize relations and give it written assurances not
to attack it, impede its economic development, or overthrow its
government."

US DOUBLE STANDARDS
As Richard Butler, former head of the UN Special Commission to Disarm
Iraq, rightly notes, "The Bush Administration has not only refused to
adhere to its obligation under the treaty and the additional promise of
2000, but has now embarked on what is anathema under the treaty - the
production of a new generation of nuclear weapons ... It beggars belief
that the Administration appears to believe it can succeed in restraining
Iran while it proceeds to violate its obligations."

The administration's 2006 Department of Energy budget is proof enough
of the priorities within the Bush administration. According to the
Center for Defense Information, the overall DOE budget decreased by 2%,
yet funding for the National Nuclear Security Administration rose by
$233 million. The good news is that funding for nuclear nonproliferation
portion increased by 15.1%, the bulk of which will go to eliminating
weapons-grade plutonium production in Russia. There was also an increase
in funding to the Global Threat Reduction Initiative ($93.8 million in
2005, $98 million in 2006) - these funds are for cases like Libya where
nonproliferation and dismantlement funding is urgently required. On the
down side, funding for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator or "bunker
buster" which was successfully cancelled in the 2005 budget, has
reappeared in the 2006 budget at $4 million. The Bush administration
plans to spend $26 million over the next two years to complete a study
on the bunker buster. And additional funding of $7.68 million was
requested to enhance testing and weapons production capabilities. SEE
LINK BELOW

Another sticking point in negotiations over nuclear proliferation is
U.S. policy towards Israel. Administration officials rarely acknowledge
Israel's nuclear weapons and the affect that has on the region. Saudi
foreign minister, Prince Saud Faisal told Newsweek, "Iran is always
mentioned but no one mentions Israel, which has [nuclear] weapons
already." He went on to note, "We wish the international community would
enforce the movement to make the Middle East a nuclear-free zone," an
issue which Arab countries have said will be discussed at the upcoming
NPT review conference.

It's time to face the reality that nuclear weapons are ill suited to
defend the U.S. against the most pressing and likely threats -
terrorists. Furthermore, if the U.S. insists on maintaining the nuclear
arsenal of the past and creating new nuclear weapons for the future,
other countries will certainly presume this is the only path to follow.
The fact is we can't have it both ways, the double standard of "do as I
say, not as I do" must stop.

With the increasing costs of the war in Iraq, one of the most
compelling arguments for a change in U.S. nuclear policy may come down
to funding and potential trade-offs within the Defense Department. "We
spend over $6.5 billion a year baby-sitting an arsenal of nuclear
weapons," says David Hobson (OH-R) who sits on the House Appropriations
Committee and led the campaign to slash funding for new nuclear weapons
in last years budget. He continues, "That's a lot of money in the
current environment, when we don't have enough money for armor for kids
on the ground in Iraq ... And we spend less than $500 million a year
helping to secure weapons-grade nuclear material overseas to make sure
it is not stolen and smuggled into our country."

The upcoming NPT review conference provides the perfect opportunity to
put all of these issues on the table, and more importantly, to come up
with viable, practical solutions. While the NPT itself provides a
commitment to nuclear disarmament from its signatories, a new report
from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has provided a more
comprehensive approach for all nations.

The report calls for a tougher international policy to deter the spread
of nuclear weapons, and puts new demands on declared and undeclared
nuclear states alike. The study recommendations include: state that
withdraw from the NPT should be barred from legally using nuclear
assets, NPT members should suspend nuclear cooperation with countries
not certified by the UN as complying with non-proliferation obligations,
the five declared nuclear powers must disavow development of new nuclear
weapons and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and India,
Pakistan and Israel should accept all nonproliferation obligations
accepted by the five declared nuclear states. LINK BELOW

TAKE ACTION - from Peace Action
Contact your members of Congress: No Means NO on new Nukes!

Like a petulant teen who is told that he cannot use the car and then
tries to sneak the keys off the hook when the adults aren't looking,
George Bush is trying to get our tax dollars to build new nuclear
weapons.

Last fall, Congressional Republicans and Democrats came together to
eliminate all money for new nuclear weapons. It's rare in Washington
these days for politicians from both sides of the aisle to come
together, putting aside partisan politics, to do what's right for the
country and the world. However, both Republican and Democrats found
(after being reminded by people like us) that the Bush policy of
planning to build new nuclear weapons, after starting a war in the name
of stopping nuclear proliferation, so hypocritical that they came
together to put an end to Bush's dangerous folly. However, Bush does not
understand that No means NO. In the 2006 Federal Budget that Bush
submitted in February, Bush has tried to pull a fast one and restore the
funds for new nukes. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) is leading the effort to
maintain the bipartisan momentum towards common sense that the House
built last fall.

Congress needs to hear from you. Tell your representatives to tell the
President, "No means NO on new nukes!" Please take action by using our
direct email connection to your congressional representative. Go to:
http://hq.demaction.org/dia/organizations/Peaceact/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=440



RESOURCES:

Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security, from the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 2005,
www.CarnegieEndowment.org/strategy -

Nuclear Arms Control: The Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, from
the Congressional Research Service, January 21, 2005,
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL31448.pdf

Overview of FY 2006 Department of Energy Request, from the Center for
Defense Information, February 23, 2005,
http://www.cdi.org/pdfs/doe-fy06.pdf

BOLTON
John Bolton as UN Ambassador?
Village Voice, Ward Harkavy, March 8, 2005
http://villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/000761.php

Bush Appoints Right-Wing Extremist to UN Post
Interpress News Service, Jim Lobe, March 7, 2005
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=27756



=====================
Frida Berrigan
Senior Research Associate
World Policy Institute
66 Fifth Ave., 9th Floor
New York, NY 10011
ph 212.229.5808 x112
fax 212.229.5579

The Arms Trade Resource Center was
established in 1993 to engage in public
education and policy advocacy aimed at
promoting restraint in the international
arms trade.

http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms




-------- australia

How safe is nuclear? BHP needs to decide

By Malcolm Maiden
March 14, 2005

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/03/13/1110649056097.html?oneclick=true

Are Don Argus and Chip Goodyear and the other directors of BHP Billiton believers in greenhouse global warming? Are they satisfied that nuclear power is a safe alternative to conventional carbon-fuel power technologies? Does BHP Billiton's board think existing proposals for the storage of the waste from nuclear power plants are adequate?

These and other questions need to be answered if the world's biggest mining group gets its hands on Olympic Dam, which contains about a third of the world's known uranium reserves.

BHP Billiton's bid for Olympic Dam's owner, WMC Resources, occurs at a critical time for the nuclear power debate. If the bid succeeds, the group will have not only the opportunity to shape the debate but a responsibility to do so.

Thirty countries around the world produce electricity using 441 nuclear power plants. Another 27 plants are being built and the International Atomic Energy Agency says 60 more will start up over the next 15 years.

It says atomic energy will, at the very least, generate 430 gigawatts of power globally by 2020, up from 267GW today (a gigawatt is 1000 million watts). The increase will result in nuclear power's share of the world's electricity supply only edging up, from 16 per cent to 17 per cent, but the critical point is that it is rising on the most conservative estimate, and could boom.
AdvertisementAdvertisement

The boom scenario derives from greenhouse theory, the Kyoto accord's constraints on carbon emissions, and China's astonishing economic growth. Anyone who has flown into Shanghai or Beijing knows why China is flagging a sixfold increase in its nuclear electricity generating capacity over the next 15 years. China's industrial revolution has really only just begun and airborne pollution in China's big cities, from coal-fired power stations and from the rapidly growing number of vehicles, is already producing pea-souper smogs.

Other Asian nations are also looking to aggressively expand nuclear power production. India plans a tenfold increase by 2020, for example, and the IAEA says an increasing number of developing nations are asking for assistance in assessing options for developing nuclear power capacity.

The uranium price is responding to the changed environment. Five years ago it was about $US7 a pound. Today it is three times that price and headed higher as demand continues to outstrip mining production and dwindling supplies of recycled uranium from decommissioned Cold War nuclear weapons.

Three and a half years ago, when Alcoa of the US tried to take over WMC, the Australian company's ownership of one-third of the world's uranium supply barely rated a mention. This time, it is an important component in the valuations placed on the company by Xstrata and then BHP Billiton. It was also a key consideration for the Federal Government when it reviewed the Xstrata bid under foreign investment rules.

BHP Billiton chief executive Chip Goodyear is saying to anyone who asks that the group's $9.2 billion offer for WMC is not based on "super cycle" commodity price forecasts. But the fact is that the potential for WMC to dramatically increase its sale and export of uranium for power generation is a wild card. Uranium could transform the economics of the acquisition - but it shouldn't until the world is sure that nuclear power is an acceptable alternative to fossil fuel power.

Early in their consideration of a bid for WMC, BHP's directors were asked whether they had any outright objections to the company owning and mining uranium. There were no dissenters: the directors of a mining company like BHP Billiton are, of course, generally in favour of the development of mineral resources.

Individual board members will, however, have different views about whether global warming is a threat, and different views about the future development of nuclear power.

There will be differences of opinion on BHP Billiton's board because there are differences of opinion about nuclear power everywhere. Highly radioactive spent-fuel rods, for example, are being reprocessed in Europe and buried in the US: there are opponents and fans of both systems, and old political divides are breaking down.

Some prominent environmentalists, including James Lovelock, the British creator of the Gaia hypothesis (which posits that the earth is a self-regulating super organism), believe nuclear power is the best possible response to global warming, or rather, the least threatening one. Others, including the Greens leader in this country, Bob Brown, flatly oppose nuclear power and all points of the production chain, including mining.

The Federal Labor Party opposes new uranium mines in Australia, and so does Geoff Gallop's Labor Government in Western Australia. The South Australian Labor Government of Mike Rann favours development of new mines and is backing the expansion of Olympic Dam.

BHP is new to the uranium business and the group's chairman, Don Argus, will first look to appoint directors who have experience in it. When the board and its top executives are fully briefed however, BHP Billiton should be able to help the world decide what role nuclear power will play in the response to the threat of global warming - by promoting research into fuel-rod storage options, for example.

It is in BHP Billiton's financial interest that the nuclear power industry grow safely and it has the intellectual and financial resources to help ensure that that does occur. When the world's biggest mining company owns a third of the world's uranium, ducking the debate about what happens to the stuff after it is mined is not an option.

The Maiden family owns BHP Billiton shares.



-------- china 

China threat to attack Taiwan alarms U.S., Asia

3/14/2005 11:10 AM (AP)
	
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-03-14-china-threat_x.htm

TOKYO — China's threat Monday to oppose Taiwanese independence with military force triggered measured words from Washington, a call for peaceful dialogue from Japan and a discussion of Australia's treaty obligations should a war break out. But Russia and Pakistan supported Beijing's new legislation.

The Bush administration said Monday that China's threat is an "unfortunate" development that could increase tensions in the region.

"We view the adoption of the anti-secession law as unfortunate," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said. "It does not serve the purpose of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. We believe it runs counter to recent progress in cross-Strait relations."

"I want the two sides to work hard toward a peaceful solution, so there will not be any negative impact," said Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, whose government recently declared a diplomatic resolution of the Taiwan dispute as a strategic objective with the United States.

China's parliament passed a law Monday authorizing an attack to stop Taiwan from pursuing formal independence, a day after President Hu Jintao told the Chinese military to be prepared for war.

The ceremonial National People's Congress approved the legislation over U.S. calls for restraint and warnings by Taiwan that it would damage regional stability and fragile ties between Beijing and Taipei.

An outbreak of hostilities would be a severe blow to stability in East Asia, possibly prompting a response from the United States — which has some 50,000 troops in Japan and 35,000 in South Korea — to defend Taiwan.

Such a conflict could pin top U.S. allies in the area such as Japan and Australia between treaty obligations to Washington and reluctance to alienate China, which is assuming a growing political and economic role in the region.

Russia on Monday reaffirmed Moscow's opposition to independence for Taiwan and said it considered the question of Taiwan an internal matter for China, a top strategic partner for Russia in Asia.

The Russian foreign ministry said the new law stressed China's commitment to giving priority to peaceful methods to unify the country under the one state, two systems approach.

In Australia, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said his government would consult with the United States, as required by the 54-year-old ANZUS treaty, if a Chinese attack on Taiwan triggered an American military response.

But whether Australia would join the fight was a separate question, he said.

"We would be bound to consult with the Americans and the ANZUS treaty could be invoked," Downer told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio. "But that's a very different thing from saying we would make a decision to go to war."

China is Australia's fastest-growing trading partner and fourth-largest export market. Trade between the two nations totaled $16.4 billion in 2002.

Not all Asian countries were worried about the move. Pakistan, a long time ally of China, supported the new law.

"Pakistan appreciates and fully supports efforts made by Chinese government for reunification of Taiwan to the motherland and considers the recently passed anti-secession law as part of these efforts," the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said in a statement.



-------- europe

Book: Nazis Tested Crude Nuclear Device

March 14, 2005 3:39 PM EST Associated Press

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/int?guid=20050314/42351a50_3421_1334520050314342614054

BERLIN - Nazi scientists trying to build an atomic bomb set off a test explosion two months before the end of World War II, killing hundreds of people in eastern Germany, a German researcher claims in a book published Monday.

"Hitler's Bomb" theorizes that the March 1945 device didn't achieve fission, but did scatter telltale radioactive particles at the Ohrdruf test site. It also claims that Nazi Germany briefly had a working nuclear reactor, something historians generally dispute.

Author Rainer Karlsch, an economic historian, offers no first-hand proof, saying his account is an interpretation of available evidence and he hopes it will spur more research.

He said soil samples from the Ohrdruf site he had analyzed for his book turned up above-average levels of radioactive isotopes such as cesium 137 and cobalt 60, though he quotes the testers as saying the site poses no radiation hazard.

However, access to what he believes was ground zero was barred because of old munitions at the site, which served as a Soviet military training area in East Germany after the war.

A U.S. mission that arrived in Germany with American troops in 1945 to investigate the German atomic bomb program concluded that the Germans were nowhere near making a nuclear weapon.

Karlsch doesn't claim they were near. But based on witness accounts recorded after the war, postwar Allied aerial photos and Soviet military intelligence reports, he argues that a test blast happened March 3, 1945, at Ohrdruf - then being run as a Nazi concentration camp. He says there probably were several previous tests.

"Hitler's bomb - a tactical nuclear weapon with a potential for destruction far below that of the two American atomic bombs - was tested successfully several times shortly before the end of the war," the book says.

Gerald Holton, a professor of physics and the history of science at Harvard University, said the main scientists in the Nazi atomic bomb program never mentioned a test blast or having built a working nuclear reactor.

British intelligence bugged the scientists - including a key planner, Walther Gerlach - while they were interned at Farm Hall manor in England after the war.

Any claims of a Nazi test blast "would have to have a lot of documentary evidence behind it," Holton said.

"It also would have to be checked against the remarks that Gerlach made during his period at Farm Hall ... where none of that sort of planning was discussed by him or anyone else."

Karlsch says scientists around Gerlach had "a certain amount" of enriched uranium from an as yet unknown source.

The German device probably was a 2-ton cylinder containing enriched uranium, he writes. The amount of uranium was small, meaning the conventional explosives used to trigger the device did not set off a vastly more destructive nuclear chain reaction, Karlsch said.

That would mesh with an account Karlsch said he found in Soviet military archives, apparently based on information from a German informant, that said the blast felled trees within a radius of about 500 to 600 yards.

Witnesses reported a bright flash of light and a column of smoke over the area that day, and residents said they had nausea and nosebleeds for days afterward, Karlsch says.

One witness said he helped burn heaps of corpses inside the military area the next day. They were hairless and some had blisters and "raw, red flesh."

Karlsch concludes that the blast killed several hundred prisoners of war and inmates forced to work at the site. Two months later, on May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered after the Soviets captured Berlin.

The book also seeks to turn attention from famous physicists like Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker - who historians believe were often ambivalent about building a nuclear bomb for Hitler - to lesser-known but fiercely ambitious scientists and Nazi officials who Karlsch theorizes were directly involved in the testing program.

Physicist Jeremy Bernstein, who edited the Farm Hall transcripts for the book "Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall," said a key question was where the enriched uranium could have come from.

"To enrich uranium, you need an plant the size of Oak Ridge, and the Germans never had one," he said, referring to the sprawling U.S. facility that produced enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb.

Russian officials were unaware of any such test by the Germans, said Nikolai Shingaryov, a spokesman for Russia's Federal Nuclear Agency. "Of course we don't know everything, but we don't have data about this," he said.

----

Hitler 'tested small atom bomb'

By Ray Furlong
BBC News, Berlin
Monday, 14 March, 2005

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4348497.stm

Sceptics agree the book sheds new light on Nazi nuclear experiments
A German historian has claimed in a new book presented on Monday that Nazi scientists successfully tested a tactical nuclear weapon in the last months of World War II.

Rainer Karlsch said that new research in Soviet and also Western archives, along with measurements carried out at one of the test sites, provided evidence for the existence of the weapon.

"The important thing in my book is the finding that the Germans had an atomic reactor near Berlin which was running for a short while, perhaps some days or weeks," he told the BBC.

"The second important finding was the atomic tests carried out in Thuringia and on the Baltic Sea."

Mr Karlsch describes what the Germans had as a "hybrid tactical nuclear weapon" much smaller than those dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

'Bright light'

He said the last test, carried out in Thuringia on 3 March 1945, destroyed an area of about 500 sq m, killing several hundred prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates.

The weapons were never used because they were not yet ready for mass production. There were also problems with delivery and detonation systems.

	
Karlsch has done us a service in showing that German research into uranium went further than we'd thought... but there was not a German atom bomb
Michael Schaaf, German physicist
"We haven't heard about this before because only small groups of scientists were involved, and a lot of the documents were classified after they were captured by the Allies," said Karlsch.

"I found documents in Russian and Western archives, as well as in private German ones."

One of these is a memo from a Russian spy, brought to the attention of Stalin just days after the last test. It cites "reliable sources" as reporting "two huge explosions" on the night of 3 March.

Karlsch also cites German eyewitnesses as reporting light so bright that for a second it was possible to read a newspaper, accompanied by a sudden blast of wind.

The eyewitnesses, who were interviewed on the subject by the East German authorities in the early 1960s, also said they suffered nose-bleeds, headaches, and nausea for days afterwards.

Karlsch also pointed to measurements carried out recently at the test site that found radioactive isotopes.

Sceptical response

His book has provoked huge interest in Germany, but also scepticism.

It has been common knowledge for decades that the Nazis carried out atomic experiments, but it has been widely believed they were far from developing an atomic bomb.

The bomb was much smaller than the weapon dropped on Hiroshima
"The eyewitnesses he puts forward are either unreliable or they are not reporting first-hand information; allegedly key documents can be interpreted in various ways," said the influential news weekly Der Spiegel.

"Karlsch displays a catastrophic lack of understanding of physics," wrote physicist Michael Schaaf, author of a previous book about Nazi atomic experiments, in the Berliner Zeitung newspaper.

"Karlsch has done us a service in showing that German research into uranium went further than we'd thought up till now, but there was not a German atom bomb," he added.

It has also been pointed out that the United States employed thousands of scientists and invested billions of dollars in the Manhattan Project, while Germany's "dirty bomb" was allegedly the work of a few dozen top scientists who wanted to change the course of the war.

Karlsch himself acknowledged that he lacked absolute proof for his claims, and said he hoped his book would provoke further research.

But in a press statement for the book launch, he is defiant.

"It's clear there was no master plan for developing atom bombs. But it's also clear the Germans were the first to make atomic energy useable, and that at the end of this development was a successful test of a tactical nuclear weapon." 


-------- iran

Iran: Nuke Program Needed for Electricity

By TAREK AL-ISSAWI
Associated Press Writer
March 14, 2005

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

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran, accused by the United States of using a nuclear energy program as a front to produce weapons, has repeatedly said its program is for peaceful purposes only, and that it needs nuclear power to generate enough electricity to remain self-sufficient.

But the United States is disputing that claim, too, saying the Gulf nation does not need nuclear power for electricity because it has massive oil and gas reserves.

The issue is gaining new prominence as Iran gets set to host a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries this week.

In a region largely dependent on the West for vital military and industrial needs, energy-rich Iran has long stood out as a nearly self-sufficient nation that is exerting all its efforts to produce nuclear energy despite stiff resistance from the international community.
	
Iran's total recoverable oil reserves exceed 130 billion barrels, equal to 12 percent of the world's oil. It has an oil production capacity of 4.2 million barrels a day, making it the second biggest producer of oil in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries after Saudi Arabia.

It has also discovered new oil fields in recent years, including a new field announced last week - Ramin, which is said to hold 855 million barrels. The New Azadegan oil field in southwestern Iran has estimated reserves of 5 billion barrels.

The U.S.-based Energy Information Administration estimated that in 2003, Iran produced 3.9 million barrels of oil a day, exported 2.5 million of those and locally consumed 1.4 million. More recent numbers were unavailable.

In addition to its oil, Iran has gas reserves estimated at 28 trillion cubic meters, the second largest in the world after Russia, according to government estimates, and it consumes much of its gas production.

However, the country disputes the idea that those reserves mean it should not seek nuclear power.

"America has more oil than Iran, and Russia has more gas than Iran, and both of them have many nuclear power plants," said Asadollah Sabouri, deputy head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.

"No country can deny Iran the advanced nuclear technology on the grounds that Iran is rich in oil and gas," he said.

Iran's Nuclear Energy Council has said the country must produce 7,000 megawatts of electricity through nuclear power plants by 2021 to meet its increasing electricity demands. Iran's parliament has asked for the construction of 20 nuclear power plants.

The nation aims to become the economic powerhouse of western Asia during the next 20 years. Under a plan approved in 2003, Iran would be a regional superpower and a base for high technology and scientific know-how by 2025.

Iran accuses the West of seeking to deprive it of nuclear technology purely because it is an Islamic republic.

The country's former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, told dozens of international nuclear scientists earlier this month that Washington and the Europeans had approved the building of 20 nuclear power plants in Iran and provide advanced nuclear technology when Tehran was under the pro-Western shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in the 1970s.

But they reversed their positions after the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the shah and brought the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power.

On Saturday, Iran scoffed at U.S. incentives aimed at coaxing it to drop its nuclear ambitions. An Iranian envoy in Europe, however, acknowledged in guardedly positive terms that there appeared to be a "new awakening" in Washington.

Hossein Mousavian, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, has said that obtaining nuclear technology is one of the ways for a nation to develop technologically.

Also at stake, Iranian officials say, is national pride. They insist that no Iranian government would even contemplate abandoning the nuclear program, adding that such a move would be tantamount to political suicide.

Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Hasan Rowhani, said last month that he told the Europeans in very clear terms that any Iranian government accepting to give up nuclear technology will collapse immediately.

Despite being under U.S. sanctions since 1979, Iran has managed to mass produce conventional weapons, planes, tanks, vehicles, electrical appliances and machines, making it both self-sufficient and an exporter of a variety of products and goods worldwide.

Last month, Iran and Russia signed a nuclear fuel agreement, paving the way for the 1,000 megawatt Bushehr nuclear power plant to go online by mid-2006. The signing came despite strong U.S. objections.

While the Iranian public might be divided into pro-reform and conservative movements, and differences remain over political and civil liberties, the nuclear program is the one issue that unites them.

"Iran's success in obtaining nuclear technology doesn't know factional parties. It's national pride," said prominent political analyst Davoud Hermidas Bavand.


--------

Iran Reportedly Offers to Halt Some Nuclear Development

March 14, 2005 Global Security Newswire (NTI)

http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2005_3_14.html#076C1AEF

Pressure by the United States and European Union has led to an offer by Iran to stop most of its nuclear fuel cycle development while retaining the right to enrich small amounts of uranium, the Financial Times reported Saturday (see GSN, March 11).

Iran made the offer to Washington through a third party, diplomats said Friday. Brussels was not included in the communiqu‚, possibly indicating an attempt to engage Washington directly, said one person involved in the offer.

The United States, however, remains opposed to direct negotiations with Iran and continues to demand of Tehran “cessation of enrichment activity,” said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher (Guy Dinmore, Financial Times, March 12).

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said Saturday that the U.S. incentives were insufficient, the Associated Press reported.

“The restrictions on spare parts that have no military purpose should have not been imposed from the beginning, and lifting them is not an incentive,” he said, adding that “joining the [World Trade Organization] is an obvious right of any country in the world.”

Iranian nuclear negotiator Sirus Naseri, however, described the U.S. offer as a “new awakening ... (that) I believe would stand to benefit the United States more than anybody else” (Nasser Karimi, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, March 12).

Fellow Iranian negotiator Hossein Mousavian told the BBC yesterday that the U.S. offer “does not represent any economic advantage and does not have much value,” Agence France-Presse reported

“To show their goodwill, the Americans should release our assets that are frozen in American banks, lift their economic sanctions against Iran and put an end to their hostile acts against Iran in the world and the region,” he said (Agence France-Presse/SpaceWar.com, March 13).

France is satisfied with the concessions offered by Washington, French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said today, AFP reported.

“These gestures made recently by the United States give us what we expected and show that the United States, like Russia and China . . . wants to give negotiations a chance,” Barnier said (Agence France-Presse/SpaceWar.com, March 14).

Naseri said today that Iran may be preparing its final offer in talks with France, Germany and the United Kingdom, Reuters reported.

“It might not be long before we put on the table our final proposal and give them a deadline to either accept or reject it,” Naseri said, adding that he recognized that such a strategy meant the two sides “might be moving toward an agreement or toward a confrontation” (Reuters, March 14).

Negotiations between Iran and the European nations are on track, despite Tehran’s public indifference to Washington’s incentives package, a top Bush administration official said yesterday.

“This is a negotiating process between the Europeans and the Iranians and it’s not surprising to hear those statements,” Stephen Hadley, White House national security adviser, told Fox News Sunday.

He added that Iranian President Mohammad Khatami had expressed interested in discussing the kinds of guarantees and assurances Iran could give to show it is not seeking atomic weapons (Agence France-Presse/SpaceWar.com, March 13).

Washington and Brussels are prepared to wait until after Iran’s presidential election in June for an agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program, U.S. and European officials have said, the Washington Post reported Saturday.

“Any durable agreement will need support from the government beyond June,” a European official said (Robin Wright, Washington Post, March 12).

Meanwhile, Israel has plans for a combined air and ground attack on targets in Iran in case a diplomatic push by the EU and the United States fails to resolve the nuclear issue, the London Sunday Times reported.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’ Cabinet gave “initial authorization” last month for an attack, and Israeli forces have practiced destroying Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant on a site mock-up, according to the Times.

U.S. officials have been informed of the plan and have indicated they would not block an Israeli attack if diplomatic efforts fail, the Times reported (Uzi Mahnaimi, Sunday Times, March 13).

“The Iranian threat is an existential threat to the state Israel. Military action is the very last resort,” Ephraim Sneh, a member of the Israeli parliament’s Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee and retired general, told Israel’s Army Radio yesterday. “We have to ensure that other steps, diplomatic steps are carried out first. Here the United States plays a leading role and I hope it will fill it” (Josef Federman, Associated Press, March 13).

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday told ABC’s This Week that Washington has not backed a military strike by Israel on Iran, insisting that the United States was committed to a negotiated settlement, AFP reported (Agence France-Presse/SpaceWar.com, March 13).


--------

Iran: Another "Intelligence" Fiasco

by Gordon Prather,  March 14, 2005 Antiwar.com

http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=5172

In announcing the president's decision to nominate John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, Condi Rice noted that, as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, Bolton "has held primary responsibility" within the Bush-Cheney administration "for stemming the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

Bolton's principal achievement? "John helped build a coalition of more than 60 countries to help combat the spread of WMD through the president's Proliferation Security Initiative [PSI]."

Now, as you probably know, the only true "weapon of mass destruction" is a nuke.

But, perversely, our future ambassador to the UN has been "point man" in the Bush administration's campaign to undermine the Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and to discredit and/or supersede the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN organization assigned by the Treaty to verify compliance by all its signatories.

In his first State of the Union message, President Bush essentially accused North Korea, Iran, and Iraq of having nuke programs, conducted in violation of the NPT, right under the noses and other sensors of the IAEA.

In particular, under the Agreed Framework of 1994, all existing North Korean "nuclear" activities had been "frozen" – under IAEA lock and seal – in return for a promise of free nuclear power plants and an interim supply of free fuel oil.

Obviously, if Bush was to impose "regime change" on Iraq, Iran, and North Korea on the pretext they had nukes, the IAEA nuke proliferation-prevention regime had to be discredited or superseded.

So, first, Bush unilaterally abrogated the Agreed Framework. Whereupon North Korea, predictably, withdrew from the NPT, and resumed producing and recovering weapons-grade plutonium.

Then, Bush announced in late 2002 his own National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction, from which Bolton developed the aforementioned Proliferation Security Initiative.

According to Bolton, the PSI was necessary because "proliferators and those facilitating the procurement of deadly capabilities are circumventing existing laws, treaties, and controls against WMD proliferation."

Presumably, Bolton had in mind Israel, Pakistan, and India. But as none of them are NPT signatories, none of them are subject to full-scope IAEA-NPT Safeguards.

So how does Bolton expect his PSI to succeed where the IAEA has allegedly failed?

In the particular case of North Korea – no longer subject to the NPT and the IAEA Safeguards regime – how did Bolton propose to prevent their turning their weapons-grade plutonium into nukes?

Obviously, he couldn't.

Well, how about preventing North Korea from transferring their plutonium nukes – or the makings thereof – to another state or to a terrorist group?

Well, Bolton intended [.pdf]:

"To take appropriate actions to (1) stop and/or search in their internal waters, territorial seas, or contiguous zones (when declared) vessels that are reasonably suspected of carrying such cargoes to or from states or non-state actors of proliferation concern and to seize such cargoes that are identified, and (2) enforce conditions on vessels entering or leaving their ports, internal waters, or territorial seas that are reasonably suspected of carrying such cargoes, such as requiring that such vessels be subject to boarding, search and seizure of such cargoes prior to entry."

Reasonably suspected?

By whom?

The U.S. "intelligence community"?

The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the U.S. Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction is due to report to the president by the end of this month.

According to the New York Times, the nine-member bipartisan presidential panel, led by Laurence Silberman, a retired federal judge, and Charles S. Robb, a former governor and senator from Virginia, had unrestricted access to the most senior people and the most sensitive documents of the intelligence agencies.

As you know, with respect to Iraq, the UN inspectors had it right; our "intelligence community" had it all wrong.

It's understandable that the panel is expected to be sharply critical of American intelligence with respect to North Korea's nuclear programs. Since Bush provoked North Korea into withdrawing from the NPT, there have been no IAEA inspectors on the ground in North Korea to provide "intelligence."

But, according to the New York Times, one person privy to the panel's deliberations and conclusions characterized American intelligence on Iran as "scandalous."

How could that be? If our intelligence weenies want to learn everything there is to know about Iran's nuclear programs, surely they learned their lesson in Iraq. All they have to do is go to the IAEA's Web site, click on "In Focus: IAEA and Iran," and read the IAEA's exhaustive reports.

That is, if Ambassador Bolton – or his PSI replacement – will let them.



-------- israel

No green light to Israel for strikes on Iran : Rice

Monday, March 14, 2005 - IranMania.com

http://www.iranmania.com/News/ArticleView/Default.asp?NewsCode=30464&NewsKind=Current%20Affairs

LONDON, March 14 ( IranMania) - US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice on Sunday said Washington has not backed a military strike by Israel against suspected Iranian nuclear sites, contrary to press reports.

When asked by ABC television's "This Week" program to respond to a report in the London Sunday Times that Israel may launch a unilateral attack on Iran if diplomacy fails, Rice insisted that Washington is committed to following a diplomatic course.

"The United States has now, with the European allies, put forward, I think, a strengthened now diplomatic hand for the European three to play," she said, referring to Britain, Germany and France.

"It really is now up to the Iranians to do what they need to do. Obviously, the president of the United States always has his options open, but we really do believe that this can be resolved diplomatically."

"What we've forged with Europe is a common front, a common approach to dealing with Iran that says Iran must not develop a nuclear weapon, that Iran's international obligations must be upheld," Rice told ABC.

"That means they cannot develop a nuclear weapon under cover of civilian nuclear power," she said.

"It says that if Iran is not willing to live up to those obligations, then there will be a supported referral to the (UN) Security Council."




-------- mideast

U.S., British, Libyan Officials Describe Steps Leading to Libya’s Decision to Abandon WMD Efforts

March 14, 2005 Global Security Newswire (NTI)

http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2005_3_14.html#42CEDD9C

U.S., British and Libyan officials have recently provided detailed information on the negotiations that led to Libya’s decision in late 2003 to dismantle its WMD programs, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 15).

The details were disclosed in recent interviews with the Times.

Libya first pitched giving up some of its WMD efforts in the late 1990s, with an offer to the Clinton administration to abandon chemical weapons development in exchange for loosening U.S. terrorism-related sanctions, officials said. The United States refused at the time, saying that resolving the issue of Libyan responsibility for the 1988 bombing of an airliner over Scotland was more important. However, the United Kingdom resumed diplomatic relations with Tripoli in summer 1999. 

Following that move, Libya turned over two intelligence agents implicated in the bombing, one of whom was convicted in 2001. Further negotiations between Libyan, British and U.S. officials led Tripoli to accept responsibility for the Lockerbie airline bombing and pledge to pay $2.7 billion to relatives of the 270 people killed in the attack.

U.S. and British officials said they informed Libya that resolving the Lockerbie bombing issue was not enough to lead to improved relations, the Times reported.

“We had made a point that while Lockerbie was extremely important, a sine qua non for progress on full reintegration would depend on addressing the WMD programs,” said one official.

Negotiations increased following a March 2003 meeting between Seif Islam Qadhafi, son of Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qadhafi, and British intelligence agents, according to the Times. During that meeting, Qadhafi indicated his father was willing to negotiate. Over the next several weeks, U.S. and British intelligence officials met with the head of Libyan external intelligence, Mousa Kusa, and other Libyan officials in several European cities, the Times reported.

“There were periodic contacts, but the Libyans were not admitting they had a nuclear program,” said a senior U.S. official. “They were being coy.”

In late August 2003, however, a ship carrying nuclear-related equipment was intercepted en route to Libya. That event is believed by some to be the final impetus for Qadhafi’s decision, the Times reported.

“The capture of the BBC China helped make clear to Libya that we had a lot of information about what it was doing,” said John Wolf, who was U.S. assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation at the time.

A senior British official said, though, that Libya had previously hinted at possessing a nuclear weapons program and had intended to abandon it, the Times reported.

“The BBC China was another nail in the coffin,” the official said. “But one can overplay the significance of that event.”

Economics might have been behind Libya’s WMD disarmament, the final details of which were hammered out in a Dec. 16, 2003, meeting between Libyan, U.S. and British officials, one European diplomat said.

“From my conversations with the Libyans, it appeared that they had determined that it was too expensive to develop nuclear weapons, both in specific terms and in terms of sanctions,” the diplomat said (Frantz/Meyer, Los Angeles Times, March 13).




-------- missile defense

Effort to Create a National Missile Defense System Hinges on a Controversial Acquisition Approach

By George Cahlink, Government Executive
March 14, 2005 Global Security Newswire (NTI)

http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2005_3_14.html#7358E918

WASHINGTON — In mid-December, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency failed a test it had spent nearly two years and millions of dollars preparing for. Twenty-three seconds before an interceptor missile was set to launch from the Central Pacific into the atmosphere and knock out a dummy warhead incoming from Alaska, a software glitch brought the countdown to a halt. The interceptor never left its silo, and the bogus weapon splashed harmlessly into the ocean. A few days later, the Defense Department announced it would not have a limited missile defense shield for the United States in place by the end of 2004, as previously planned (see GSN, March 10).

For many weapons program managers, such a high-profile test failure — which was not the program’s first — would be cause for despair. Contract awards might be delayed and more oversight likely would come from members of Congress and political appointees in the Pentagon. However, missile defense managers have not faced those obstacles. They quickly identified the problem as easy to fix, scheduled another test and declared that if an enemy launched a limited missile attack, the interceptors could be pressed into emergency action.

“We’re disappointed that we didn’t get this off,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, director of the Missile Defense Agency, told reporters in January. “But we are certainly not disheartened in any way, shape or form, because it shows us we are exactly working through what we consider to be the fine-tuning of this system as we proceed.”

The agency’s response reflects its confidence in the controversial “capabilities-based” acquisition strategy it is using to build the missile shield. With an annual budget of about $10 billion, few specific requirements spelled out in the contracts to construct the system and broad exemptions from traditional oversight, the agency believes it can quickly field a shield capable of offering limited defense. As technology improves and threats change, the system gradually will be upgraded to offer higher levels of protection.

Philip Coyle, the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation in the Clinton administration and a leading skeptic of missile defense efforts, is not impressed by this approach. He notes that it took nearly two years to prepare for the most recent test. “At the rate they are going, it could take 50 years to complete their flight test program,” says Coyle, now a senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information.

Obering argues that his agency has “been successful in developing a capability where in some cases there was nothing even two, 2 1/2 years ago. And we’ve done it with a lot of speed and within the cost and schedule constraints that we have. We ought to be taking the authorities that MDA has and see how we can apply those in other areas across the department.”

Indeed, the Pentagon believes the “capabilities-based” approach is the wave of the future that will allow the latest technologies to reach the field much more quickly. Already, the Army’s $2.8 billion Future Combat System and Defense’s agency-wide multibillion-dollar Global Information Grid, which provides a single battlefield network for the military services and U.S. allies, are being developed with the goal of achieving broad capabilities rather than meeting highly specific requirements. “It’s the effect we want, it’s not the platform we’re interested in,” Ryan Henry, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, told an industry group in January.
Old Idea, New Approach

Since the earliest days of the Cold War, the Defense Department has been trying to figure out how to build a shield to protect the United States from foreign missile attacks. Proposals ranged from small systems, such as the Army’s Safeguard missiles that briefly guarded nuclear missile silos in North Dakota in the 1970s, to President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which envisioned space-based lasers protecting the country from a nuclear holocaust. A variety of political, diplomatic, technological and financial issues have kept the United States or any other country from successfully deploying a missile shield. By the 1990s, large-scale missile defense systems seemed as dated as the Soviet Union.

In the late 1990s, though, the idea of a national missile shield began making a comeback as rogue nations, such as Iran and North Korea, developed more sophisticated ballistic missiles and fears grew that long-range missile technology could slip into the hands of terrorists. In 1998, a bipartisan commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld warned that the United States was underestimating the threat posed by ballistic missiles. A year later, Congress passed a law calling for the creation of a national missile defense system as quickly as possible.

During the Clinton administration, defense officials conducted research and development on building such a system, but repeatedly put off making any decisions on when and how to deploy it. I n December 2001, President Bush directed the Pentagon to pursue an “evolutionary approach” toward putting a missile shield in place by 2004. “The United States will not have a final fixed missile defense architecture,” he stated in the directive. “Rather, we will deploy an initial set of capabilities that will evolve to meet the changing threat and take advantage of technological developments.”

In early 2002, Rumsfeld, by then the defense secretary, combined various missile defense programs being pursued by the military services into a single research and development effort managed by a single entity, the Missile Defense Agency. He gave the agency unprecedented authority to operate outside normal acquisition rules by eliminating traditional oversight, scrapping documents that set out specific requirements, allowing shifts in funding among missile programs, and enabling the MDA director to set deadlines and schedule reviews and tests.

Dean Gehr, business development director for Raytheon Missile Systems in Tucson, Ariz., which is among the key contractors working on missile defense, says creating a single agency avoids the turf battles that sometimes plagued past programs pursued by the missile agency’s predecessor, the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. “We see it as a benefit, because you have more unity with one leader,” Gehr said.

The new approach also saves time. Most major weapon systems are designed based on complex requirements set by Defense Department officials and spend years in development and testing before they are fielded. For example, contracts were first awarded to design the Air Force’s F/A-22 fighter in the mid-1980s. Only now is the aircraft undergoing final flight-testing.

Military leaders and the White House believed the ballistic missile threat was too great to spend years developing a defense system, so they bet on the idea that a limited defense would be better than none at all. Under that approach, the system initially would be able to handle a small missile attack from a nation such as North Korea aimed at one or two locations, but could not deal with a large attack simultaneously aimed at multiple cities, as envisioned during the Cold War.

As technology and threats change and military personnel offer feedback on the system, the Pentagon can incorporate new technologies to create a more robust shield. This approach, known as “spiral development,” borrows on an idea pioneered by commercial software developers, who regularly issue new versions of basic operating systems.

The agency is funding and fielding pieces of the missile system in two-year blocks, not the traditional six-year weapons planning cycle. The 2004-2005 block focuses on using existing ground- and sea-based systems to provide limited defense against long-range threats. By the 2010 and 2012 blocks, the focus will expand to airborne lasers and fast-moving kinetic energy interceptors that can take out missiles shortly after they are launched.

Patricia Sanders, MDA deputy director for integration, says missile defense is not like other weapons systems, which generally replace previous versions already in the field. “There’s not a foundation to build on that you would have in replacing one aircraft with another, so we want to bring it on as rapidly as is feasible,” she said.

Maj. Gen. John Holly, the agency’s deputy director, said that in the past, a system would have to be nearly perfect before fielding, but now it can be deployed when it offers limited capability. For example, the Missile Defense Agency has six ground-based interceptors at Fort Greely, Alaska, that could be used in emergency situations, despite the fact that nine live intercept attempts using the missiles have resulted in only five hits.

The agency also has five Standard Missile 3 interceptors on Navy Aegis cruisers that could be called on in an emergency. It touts the availability of both options as a sign that it has met the president’s goal of having the beginnings of a missile shield in place by the end of 2004.

Growing Concern

Critics, however, contend that fielding a missile system outside traditional rules without extensive testing is the wrong approach. They question why the agency is being allowed to spend billions of dollars with little scrutiny and without having to pass regular tests. “A system is being deployed that doesn’t have any credible capability. I cannot recall any system being deployed in such a manner,” retired Gen. Eugene Habiger told The Washington Post last fall. In the 1990s, he headed the U.S. Strategic Command, where he oversaw all Air Force and Navy strategic nuclear forces.

Coyle, the former Pentagon weapons tester, says giving the MDA director responsibility for program reviews strips independent oversight responsibility from senior Pentagon officials on the Defense Acquisition Board. The board periodically reviews major weapons to ensure they are on track and approves changes in schedules and funding. Coyle says the reviews often include independent assessments on issues ranging from emerging threats to whether a program’s cost projections are realistic.

Holly said missile defense has received as much Pentagon oversight as other large weapons programs, just not through traditional channels. He says agency officials meet weekly with the Pentagon’s acting acquisition chief, Michael Wynne, and the department has set up a Missile Defense Study Support Group, including representatives of the defense secretary, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military services, to regularly review the program. Last fall, The Washington Post reported that the study group had met 47 times in two years, but quoted members as saying their role was advisory and they sometimes learned of program decisions after the fact.

“What we are doing is empowering senior leaders at the agency to make the program’s judgment calls,” Holly said. He said Defense Acquisition Board reviews focus “on trying to find problems as much as anything,” and require “tons of documentation” and numerous meetings leading up to them.

Terry Little, a longtime Defense Department weapons program manager who now is the agency’s executive director, said the missile defense program is subject to rigid internal annual reviews to determine whether it is meeting goals. This means, he says, that if airborne lasers show more promise than kinetic energy interceptors, money could be shifted from the former to the latter. “In most weapons programs, a commitment to develop is a commitment to the end,” Little says. “But here, we’re a lot more like private industry, with assessments that ask if we really need it.”

Last April, the Government Accountability Office criticized how the Missile Defense Agency tracked spending and questioned whether its testing efforts were realistic. The report (GAO-04-409) stated that program flexibilities should not “diminish the importance of ensuring accountability over the substantial investments in missile defense.” GAO auditors noted that the agency projected that it would spend $53 billion between 2004 and 2009, but had not established baseline cost estimates, which are needed to determine overruns. The agency has since agreed to provide such estimates.

However, auditors and the Missile Defense Agency could not settle their differences over independent testing of the missile shield. The Government Accountability Office called the agency’s flights tests “repetitive and scripted,” and urged MDA officials to submit to independent testing by the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation. Agency officials resisted, saying the program is a unique research and development effort, and that they would gradually step up their own tests.

Members of Congress, however, have become concerned about putting pieces of the missile defense system in place without more realistic testing. Last fall, they ordered the agency to submit the missile defense system to the same rigorous testing that other weapons face. Questions linger, though, over how those tests will be conducted. The Pentagon’s operational tests are judged against system requirements, which do not exist for missile defense. Moreover, recently retired Pentagon weapons tester Thomas Christie is already at odds with the Missile Defense Agency. He has told members of Congress that if the missile shield were deployed today, it would be only 20 percent effective in taking out incoming missiles. Agency officials contend the system would be 80 percent effective.

Obering says the agency can learn a lot from ground-based simulations and experiments, and generally uses flight tests for the purpose of confirming those results. Obering, who worked in the control room during some of NASA’s first space shuttle launches in the 1980s, says the space agency also relied extensively on simulations. “In fact,” he says, “the first time we launched the space shuttle, it was inhabited.”



-------- pakistan

Pakistan Denies It Will Hand Nuclear Parts to UN

Mon Mar 14, 2005 7:04 AM ET World - Reuters

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050314/wl_nm/pakistan_iran_dc_3

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan said Monday it was 
cooperating with the U.N. nuclear watchdog but rejected 
reports that it would hand over used centrifuge components 
to help solve a key mystery surrounding Iran (news - web 
sites)'s atomic program.

Diplomats familiar with a U.N. investigation into Iran's 
nuclear program said Sunday that Islamabad had agreed to 
hand over the parts so that U.N. inspectors could compare 
them with machinery sold to Iran by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the 
father of Pakistan's atomic bomb program.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Jalil Abbas Jilani said on 
Monday, however, that Pakistan was cooperating with the 
U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) but 
dismissed the reports that Islamabad would hand over 
centrifuges.

"Pakistan has not been asked to give centrifuges, nor will 
Pakistan do so," he told a regular weekly news conference.

Jilani did not elaborate on the nature of the cooperation 
with the IAEA but added that it would be strictly guided by 
Pakistan's national interest and the need to protect 
strategic capabilities.

Islamabad acknowledged for the first time last week that 
Khan, the disgraced scientist at the center of a global 
atomic black market, had provided Iran with centrifuges used 
to produce enriched uranium fuel for nuclear power plants or 
arms.

A diplomat, who asked not to be named, said in Vienna at the 
weekend that the centrifuges could hold crucial 
fingerprints, or "DNA," of uranium traces found on equipment 
in Iran.

In 2003, the IAEA found traces of uranium in Iran that had 
been enriched to various levels, some of them close to what 
would be usable in weapons.

This sparked fears that Tehran's secret centrifuge program 
had been used to purify uranium for atomic weapons.

Iran blamed the traces on contaminated centrifuge components 
it acquired second-hand from Pakistan. But Islamabad's 
refusal to allow IAEA experts to take environmental samples 
inside the country has prevented the IAEA from verifying 
Iran's explanation.

The IAEA has been investigating Iran for more than two 
years. It has found no proof of the atom bomb plans 
suspected by Washington but has been unable to verify 
Tehran's assertion that that the program is entirely peaceful.

An IAEA spokesman in Vienna declined to comment on whether 
Pakistan would provide the centrifuge parts, but two 
diplomats close to the agency said they would arrive soon. 
Analysts say Pakistan's admission that Khan gave Iran 
centrifuges appeared to be the result of U.S. pressure ahead 
of a visit to Islamabad this week by Secretary of State 
Condoleezza Rice.

In making the admission, Pakistan reiterated that there was 
no government involvement in the proliferation, a position 
analysts find difficult to believe given tight security 
surrounding its nuclear program.

Islamabad also repeated its refusal to hand over Khan to 
outsiders for questioning.                                                                                                                                 



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

Nuclear industry shows signs of revival

BY BILL LAMBRECHT
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Mon, Mar. 14, 2005

http://www.timesleader.com/mld/timesleader/news/politics/11132100.htm

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - After years of dormancy, the U.S. nuclear industry is stirring again, hoping that a friendly White House and Congress will provide the tax dollars it needs for its first expansion in years to build more plants in places like Clinton, Ill.

New construction likely is years away, but as part of its sped-up permitting process, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week reached an initial conclusion that no environmental problems stand in the way of Exelon Corp. adding new reactors at its Clinton plant in central Illinois.

A day later, President Bush delivered a strong pitch for the nation to resume building nuclear plants, pronouncing nuclear power "reliable and secure."

Now, the industry is pushing Congress for what it really needs: Huge subsidies to minimize the risk in building new plants.

"What we're saying to members of Congress is that we need to have an array of stimuli that folks might be able to tap into," said Steve Kerekes, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington.

Sixteen months ago, an energy bill that fell two votes short of final passage had just that sort of stimulus: $6 billion in tax credits; an additional $1 billion to build a nuclear reactor in Idaho that would attempt to generate hydrogen fuel; and an extension of the taxpayer-funded accident insurance in the half-century old Price Anderson Act.

Those same proposals are now under discussion in staff-level negotiations, along with a plan for loan guarantees that was scuttled last time at the 11th hour. Other incentives are being talked about, too.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, floated a new twist on subsidies last week when he suggested that nuclear power be classified with solar and wind generation as a renewable energy source to qualify for tax credits.

There's even talk among staff members about the possibility of providing cut-rate fuel for nuclear plants by dipping into the nation's uranium stockpile.

"It's 100 percent accurate to say that everything is on the table. Everybody is trying look at this from all angles, and by and large, there isn't a lot of disagreement," said a Senate staff member involved in the discussions.

For years, the debate over new nuclear power in Washington has been largely theoretical. The near meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979 stiffened anti-nuclear sentiment in the country. The nuclear waste problem looked unsolvable. Electricity deregulation killed the guaranteed profits for new plants. No new plant has been approved since the late 1970s.

But the climate for nuclear power has improved thanks to the Bush administration's support, soaring natural gas prices and concerns about pollution caused by plants that burn fossil fuels such as coal.

Congress is seriously addressing the issue, with the likelihood that bountiful incentives for the nuclear industry will be part of any energy bill that passes the Congress this year.

With 17 nuclear reactors in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Exelon is the nation's biggest nuclear operator and about to grow even bigger when it adds three more New Jersey reactors in a merger. Because of its size, Exelon often is viewed as the most likely company to resume nuclear-plant construction.

But Marilyn Kray, Exelon's vice president for project development, observed that her company is proceeding cautiously. Whoever leaps first into the nuclear-construction business will face heavy skepticism from lenders, she said.

That's why companies need the incentives that Congress is about to consider - along with assurances that the country needs more electricity, she said.

"Our decision on generation is going to be made on economics," she said.

The industry claims that fewer Americans look warily these days at nuclear power despite a tendency for television and films to portray it as threatening.

For instance, Fox Television's popular action series, "24" has featured a story line this season in which Muslim terrorists gain control of a nuclear plant, causing a meltdown.

Last week, the industry labeled such a scenario implausible because of security at reactors. Noting several such movie and television plots recently, the Nuclear Energy Institute's Kerekes remarked, "I've come to the conclusion that if nuclear plants didn't exist, Hollywood would have to invent them."

Speaking in Ohio last week, Bush observed that many people still worry about the safety of nuclear plants. "I know that and so do you," the president said, adding his view that nuclear plants are safe.

"We're taking early steps toward licensing the construction of nuclear power plants, because a secure energy future must include nuclear power," he added.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is backing up the president.

On Feb. 24, the commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board rejected arguments that highly radioactive wastes shouldn't be shipped for storage on Goshute Indian land in Utah.

Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of eight companies, has been pushing its storage plan since 1997; the commission might decide soon whether to grant final approval.

The tribal storage facility would not serve as a long-term alternative to burying 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a government plan plagued by delays and questions about geological safety.

But it would offer a short-term answer to companies such as Exelon in need of a repository for the dangerous wastes from reactor cores.

Last week, in declaring that that it found no environmental problems if Exelon decides to add more reactors at its Clinton, Ill., plant, the commission was moving forward with a streamlined permitting process that could land the company an "early site permit" by the summer of 2006.

The Clinton nuclear plant, 22 miles south of Bloomington, was built on a 460-acre parcel of land big enough for two reactors. But the former owner, Illinois Power, decided not to proceed with a second unit.

Commission staff members reached their conclusion after examining hundreds of pages documents submitted by Exelon. The commission said it had determined that new reactors at Clinton would generally have little impact on the environment.

It said drawing more cooling water could have a "moderate" impact on Clinton Lake and its aquatic life in years of little rainfall. The commission defines moderate as "sufficient to alter noticeably, but not to destabilize."

Exelon's Kray called the preliminary approval "a very significant milestone."

But it was just one step on path to early site permits that Exelon and two other companies are traveling in order to shorten the process later if they decide to build.

Like Exelon, Dominion Corp., of Richmond, Mo., has asked for a siting permit for expanding nuclear power at Mineral, Va., 80 miles southwest of the District of Columbia.

In Port Gibson, Mississippi, New Orleans-based Entergy Corp. wants the preliminary go-ahead for expanding generation at its Grand Gulf Nuclear Station.

A fourth company, Duke Power, announced last month that it is preparing to submit another kind of application seeking combined approval both for constructing and operating a new nuclear plant. The company has not identified a location other than to say it would build in its service area, which is the Carolinas.

Like the nuclear industry, watchdog organizations also are preparing for debate on the energy bill.

Navin Nayak, an energy specialist with the non-profit U.S. PIRG in Washington, uses the phrase "nuclear relapse" to describe what he says could happen in the country if Congress succumbs to the industry's demands.

"The bottom line for the nuclear power industry is that they're not going anywhere until the government steps in with taxpayer handouts," he said.

David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, observed that Exelon generally has a good safety record.

"They decided that nuclear power is their business future, and when you make that decision, you do the homework to make that possible," he said.

But Lochbaum, like other advocates, worries about the effects of the government's new streamlined procedures that will decide whether Exelon or the other companies are allowed to resume nuclear construction.

Lochbaum argued that sites for nuclear plants are being approved without knowing what kind of reactors might be built there. One impact of the split proceedings, he said, is to make it harder for critics to rally opposition and intervene.

"I don't think that was unintentional," he said.

----

US nuclear power safer than ever from terror attack: US nuke regulator

WASHINGTON (AFP) Mar 14, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050314172132.n74z30t6.html

US nuclear power plants have "hardened" their defenses against potential terrorist attacks and do not face a significant risk from suicide aircraft attacks, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's chairman said Monday.

NRC chairman Nils Diaz said the nation's nuclear industry is safer than ever nearly four years after the September 11, 2001, hijacked airplane strikes on New York and Washington.

"Both nuclear security and safety are better than they have ever been and both are getting better," Diaz said at a news conference here.

"What we have done in the last three and a half years is to make it very difficult for anyone to find ways to attempt acts of radiological sabotage, even more difficult to succeed in doing real harm, and to be very prepared to protect our people in the very unlikely event of radiological release," he said.

Protective barriers have been moved further away from nuclear reactors, the number of guards has increased and towers have been installed to shoot potential intruders, Diaz added.

"We have hardened both the security and the safety of the power plants," he said.

According to a power plant security report released by the NRC, engineering studies were conducted on the threat of a commercial airplane attack on nuclear facilities.

"For the facilities analyzed, the vulnerability studies confirm that the likelihood of both damaging the reactor core and releasing radioactivity that could affect public health and safety is low," the report said.

"We found that general aviation, in general, is not a significant threat to a nuclear power plant," Diaz said.

-------- nevada

Reid seeks big change to nation's nuke policy
Bill would give DOE more power, make Yucca obsolete

By Benjamin Grove 
<grove@lasvegassun.com>
Las Vegas SUN WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF 
March 14, 2005 

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/sun/2005/mar/14/518445837.html?Yucca%20Mountain%20Nuclear%20Waste%20repository

WASHINGTON -- Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., intends to unveil legislation aimed at making Yucca Mountain obsolete by allowing the Energy Department to take ownership of waste as it sits now at nuclear power plants.

The bill, similar to a bill that Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., has been pushing since 2001, would represent a significant shift in nuclear waste policy and would likely face strong opposition in Congress.

The bill would allow the Energy Department to take ownership and responsibility for cost and security of on-site waste storage, currently a burden of the nuclear utilities nationwide that produce the waste, Reid spokeswoman Tessa Hafen said.

Reid's bill would allow the department to use the money in a national nuclear waste fund to manage the radioactive material at the plants. Currently, by law, that money must be used for the development of a national permanent geologic repository -- Yucca.

Congress in 1982 pledged that the Energy Department would begin shipping waste to Yucca by Jan. 31, 1998, for permanent storage. But the planned underground repository has been delayed by budget and legal setbacks.

Nuclear utilities have continued to store some of the nation's most radioactive "high-level" waste at their plants -- and in recent years filed 66 lawsuits against the government, with potential damages in the billions of dollars.

Congress will break for a spring recess later this week, and Reid intends to introduce the legislation shortly after Congress returns April 4. Reid hinted at his intention in written comments submitted for a hearing of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee last week.

"I believe it is time to look at other nuclear waste alternatives," Reid said in the written statement. "One option may be for the federal government to take responsibility for the nuclear waste at the reactor sites. This is the right thing to do and I look forward to discussing this option with my colleagues."

Two potential allies could be Sens. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Reid aides said. Bennett and Hatch strongly support Yucca. But they are also trying to stop a proposed temporary nuclear waste site on Goshute Indian reservation land in their state, considered a stopover site for waste until Yucca is completed. Reid is hoping to pique their interest because his bill could eliminate the need for the Utah site.

Bennett and Hatch have received pledges from White House officials that the administration would continue to support Yucca and not the temporary Utah site, although the White House has taken no concrete steps to block the Utah site.

Reid likely would need the support of Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Senate Energy Committee and of the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees Yucca funding. Domenici, who was unavailable for comment, is a leading Yucca proponent but has also endorsed consideration of both short- and long-term waste storage alternatives as the delayed Yucca program plods ahead.

Reid likely would face a significant legislative battle. The Nevada delegation has always operated in a Congress where Yucca enjoyed majority support, especially from lawmakers who represent districts with nuclear plants.

Reid's bill would represent a significant change in the nation's long-standing nuclear waste strategy. Congress approved geologic storage in 1982 and designated Yucca as the sole focus of study in 1987. President Bush and Congress officially approved Yucca in 2002 after years of Energy Department research and fierce lobbying by Nevada lawmakers against the controversial repository.

"I really don't think Congress has the stomach to go through that again," said Mitch Singer, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's top lobby group.

Nuclear industry officials will strongly oppose the legislation because they have long argued that a permanent geologic repository was the best long-term waste solution. Plants, which store waste in cooling pools and outdoor, above-ground "dry casks," were never designed for permanent storage, they say.

"It's a non-starter," NEI waste management director Steve Kraft said of Reid's bill. "Every year this point gets missed: It's not the ownership of the material, it's where the material is. The material has to leave our sites."

Nevada officials and other Yucca critics have long said it was safer and more cost-effective to continue storing waste at plants, at least until a better Yucca alternative can be developed.

Reid aides said a notable benefit of the Reid bill is that it would eliminate the need for shipping waste cross-country by truck and train.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., plans to co-sponsor the bill, an Ensign aide said.

But Berkley hasn't won much House support in four years that she has advocated a bill similar to Reid's legislation. Her bill has only garnered a handful of co-sponsors and has never even been granted a hearing by House Republican leaders, who generally support Yucca. The House in 2002 approved Yucca on a 306-117 vote.

Nils Diaz, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which would license and regulate Yucca, today said there is no significant safety hazard to temporary on-site waste storage. But he said that at some point waste stored on-site should be moved to a central site and that the commission supports geologic storage.



-------- new york

Nuclear Regulatory Commission: Oconee Nuclear Station safe in 2004

(Seneca-AP) March 14, 2005

http://www.wistv.com/Global/story.asp?S=3072745&nav=0RaPXRu6

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says the Oconee Nuclear Station operated safely last year.

The regulatory agency pointed out several past and potential problems at the station operated by Duke Power near Seneca. Duke's Dayle Stewart says those issues are based on hypothetical scenarios. Stewart says there was never any danger to the public from plant operations last year.

The report issued earlier this month cites a report last fall on concerns about staffing during a standby shutdown in case of fire. Stewart says that potential problem has been resolved.

The letter also points out the station was fined $60,000 for failure to get commission approval for a change in a safety procedure. The report says three other potential problems are under review. 



-------- MILITARY 


-------- business

Contracts Awarded

By Judith Mbuya
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 14, 2005; Page E04

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32556-2005Mar13?language=printer

Anteon International Corp. of Fairfax won a five-year, $47 million contract to provide program management and other support services to the Naval Sea Systems Command.

Maximus Inc. of Reston won a $20 million contract from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to review appeals of Medicare fee-for-service claim denials in the eastern half of the United States.

McDonald Bradley Inc. of Herndon won an $11.1 million contract with the Defense Department to build a network to provide information to troops defusing roadside bombs in Iraq.

NFR Security Inc. of Rockville won a $650,000 subcontract from Computer Sciences Corp. to support its work on the Army's Logistics Modernization Program by providing network protection.

SRA International Inc. of Fairfax won a five-year, $86.4 million task order for information technology services for the Missile Defense Agency's enterprise information management system.

Trusted Computer Solutions Inc. of Herndon won a three-year, $21.7 million contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory to supply its SecureOffice Trusted Workstation technology.

MPRI Inc. of Alexandria won a $7.4 million contract from the Army's Victory Contracting Office in Baghdad to operate and maintain a military artillery range.

BearingPoint Inc. of McLean won a $14.6 million contract from the Agency for International Development to provide support services for economic policy reform for central Asian republics.

Northrop Grumman Information Technology Inc., Defense Enterprise Solutions of McLean won an $8 million contract from Air Force for research and development in "novel optically diverse applications."

Bell-Boeing Joint Program Office of Patuxent River, Md., won an $8.4 million contract from the Naval Air Systems Command to provide continued flight test and data integration efforts for the MV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft.

Exxon Mobil Fuels Marketing Co. of Fairfax won a $32.3 million contract from the Defense Logistics Agency for foreign military sales to Israel.

Applied Hydro-Acoustics Research Inc. of Centreville won a $6.9 million contract from the Naval Sea Systems Command for a small-business innovative research effort in the development of tactical sonar data fusion for surface ship sonar systems. Tactical data sonar fusion is aimed at improving sonar processing technology.

Northrop Grumman/PRB Services Inc. of Hollywood, Md., won a $7 million Navy contract to provide software development, systems engineering and configuration management for the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center.

Norfolk Dredging Co. of Chesapeake, Va., won a $5.3 million contract from the Army Corps of Engineers for maintenance dredging of the Military Ocean Terminal in Brunswick, N.C.

Eyak Technology LLC of Reston won a $5.1 million contract from the Army's Defense Threat Reduction Agency at Fort Belvoir for unclassified and classified network equipment and information technology systems.

Pitney Bowes Government Solutions of Landover won a $6.4 million contract from the U.S. Postal Service for supplies, fulfillment and operations.

Norfolk Dredging Co. of Chesapeake, Va., won a $5.3 million contract from the Army Corps of Engineers for maintenance dredging of the Military Ocean Terminal in Sunny Point, N.C.

GKY and Associates Inc. of Springfield won a $1.5 million contract from the Army Corps of Engineers to provide the hydrology and hydraulic architect and engineering services in the Great Lakes and Ohio River division.

Progeny Systems Corp. of Manassas won a $5.4 million contract from the Navy to update, maintain and provide system support for the digital data collection system information server.

Comptech Corp. of Rockville won a $3.3 million contract from the Defense Logistics Agency for transportation equipment.

Northrop Grumman Defense Mission Systems of Reston won a $2.5 million contract from the Air Force to provide aircraft components and accessories.

Information from Washington Technology was used in this report. 



-------- prisoners of war

Rendition and torture

By Nat Hentoff
March 14, 2005 Washington Times

http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20050313-091433-9736r.htm
    
    This is the first of two columns on America's rendition of suspected terrorists to countries known for torturing prisoners.
    
    As the heroic voters in Iraq have demonstrated, President Bush made the right decision by ending the horrors of Saddam Hussein's reign of mass murders and torture. But he and his administration have continued to deny accountability for abuses of detainees, including "extreme interrogations" that are in continuing violation of our own laws and international treaties we have ratified.

    On May 7, 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, testifying before the House and Senate Armed Services committees, said of these charges of abuse: "Each of us has had a strong interest in getting the facts out to the American people. We want you to know the facts." But Congress has resisted appointing an independent commission, like the Sept. 11 Commission, to actually get at all the facts with the power to subpoena the chain of command up to the very top.

    Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has shown no interest in an independent probe, and that's understandable, as he was a key figure in loosening up the rules of interrogation, including those in the U.S. Army Field Manual 34-52 that expressly prohibit "acts of violence or intimidation (during interrogations) including physical or mental torture... or exposure to inhumane treatment." AndtheAugust2004 Schlesinger report (The Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Operations) concluded that abuses of detainees were "widespread" and "were not just the failure of some individuals to follow known standards, and they are more than the failure of a few leaders to enforce proper discipline. There is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels." But, like Congress, the Schlesinger report fell short of reaching those higher levels. And, as a lead editorial in the Jan. 7 WashingtonPost noted: "The record of the past few months suggests that the administration will neither hold any senior official accountable nor change the policies that have produced this shameful record." Moreover, in the Jan. 8 National Journal, Stuart Taylor emphasized: "Congress continues to abdicate its constitutional responsibility to provide a legislative framework" for our treatment of detainees. There are members on both sides of the aisle who are concerned, but the Republican leadership in Congress will not move.

    Rep. Edward Markey, Massachusetts Democrat, has again introduced a bill that would end "extraordinary renditions" by which the CIA sends suspected terrorists to countries known including on annual State Department human rights lists for torturing prisoners. But when New York Times columnist Bob Herbert asked a spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert whether Mr. Hastert supports the Markey bill, the answer was: "The speaker does not support the Markey proposal. He believes that suspected terrorists should be sent back to their home countries." (I called Mr. Hastert's office, but there has been no response.) But international treaties we have signed, and our own laws, forbid outsourcing torture including to "home countries" of alleged terrorists whom we have not charged with any crime.

    Accordingly, to get at the facts as Donald Rumsfeld has urged, there is no alternative but the courts, under the separation of powers. On March 1, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights) filed suit in an Illinois Federal District Court, Ali, et al. v. Rumsfeld.

    The eight men represented in the lawsuit were held in U.S. detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, where, the lawsuit claims, they "were subjected to torture and other cruel and degrading treatment while there, including severe and repeated beatings, cutting with knives, sexual humiliation and assault, mock executions, death threats, and restraint in contorted and excruciating positions." There were no charges against them, and all have since been released.

    Lucas Guttentag of the ACLU, who is lead counsel in the lawsuit, declares that "Secretary Rumsfeld bears direct and ultimate responsibility for this descent into horror by personally authorizing unlawful interrogation techniques and by abdicating his legal duty to stop torture... (he) has not been held accountable for his actions." Similar accountability complaints have been filed by the ACLU in federal courts in Connecticut, South Carolina and Texas against Col. Thomas Pappas, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez "on behalf of the torture victims who were detained in Iraq."

    In the legal actions against Mr. Rumsfeld, co-counsel retired Rear Adm. John D. Huston, former Judge Advocate General of the Navy, states: "One of the greatest strengths of the U.S. military throughout our history has been strong civilian leadership at the top of the chain of command. Unfortunately, Secretary Rumsfeld has failed to live up to that tradition. In the end, that imperils our troops and undermines the war effort." Much of the media has been asleep on this historic move in the courts to affirm our values to ourselves and the world, but I intend to stay on this story.

    Other journalists are also engaged. When will Congress and our courts join us? 





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


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

Government Report on U.S. Aviation Warns of Security Holes

March 14, 2005
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/politics/14terror.html?pagewanted=all&position=

WASHINGTON, March 13 - Despite a huge investment in security, the American aviation system remains vulnerable to attack by Al Qaeda and other jihadist terrorist groups, with noncommercial planes and helicopters offering terrorists particularly tempting targets, a confidential government report concludes.

Intelligence indicates that Al Qaeda may have discussed plans to hijack chartered planes, helicopters and other general aviation aircraft for attacks because they are less well-guarded than commercial airliners, according to a previously undisclosed 24-page special assessment on aviation security by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security two weeks ago.

But commercial airliners are also "likely to remain a target and a platform for terrorists," the report says, and members of Al Qaeda appear determined to study and test new American security measures to "uncover weaknesses."

The assessment comes as the Bush administration, with a new intelligence structure and many new counterterrorism leaders in place, is taking stock of terrorists' capabilities and of the country's ability to defend itself.

While Homeland Security and the F.B.I. routinely put out advisories on aviation issues, the special joint assessment is an effort to give a broader picture of the state of knowledge of all issues affecting aviation security, officials said.

The analysis appears to rely on intelligence gathered from sources overseas and elsewhere about Al Qaeda and other jihadist and Islamic-based terrorist groups.

A separate report issued last month by Homeland Security concluded that developing a clear framework for prioritizing possible targets - a task many Democrats say has lagged - is critical because "it is impossible to protect all of the infrastructure sectors equally across the entire United States."

The aviation sector has received the majority of domestic security investments since the Sept. 11 attacks, with more than $12 billion spent on upgrades like devices to detect explosives, armored cockpit doors, federalized air screeners and additional air marshals.

Indeed, some members of Congress and security experts now consider airplanes to be so well fortified that they say it is time to shift resources to other vulnerable sectors, like ports and power plants.

In the area of rail safety, for instance, Democrats are pushing a $1.1 billion plan to plug what they see as glaring vulnerabilities. "This is a disaster waiting to happen," Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, said last week at a Senate hearing marking the one-year anniversary of the deadly train bombings in Madrid.

Still, the new aviation assessment, examining dozens of airline incidents both before and after the Sept. 11 attacks, makes clear that counterterrorism officials still consider the aviation industry to be perhaps the prime target for another major attack because of the spectacular nature of such strikes.

The assessment, which showed that the F.B.I. handled more than 500 criminal investigations involving aircraft in 2003, will likely serve as a guide for considering further security restrictions in general aviation and other areas considered particularly vulnerable, the officials said.

The report, dated Feb. 25, was distributed internally to federal and state counterterrorism and aviation officials, and a copy was obtained by The Times. It warns that security upgrades since the Sept. 11 attacks have "reduced, but not eliminated" the prospect of similar attacks.

"Spectacular terrorist attacks can generate an outpouring of support for the perpetrators from sympathizers and terrorism sponsors with similar agendas," the report said. "The public fear resulting from a terrorist hijacking or aircraft bombing also serves as a powerful motivator for groups seeking to further their causes."

The report detailed particular vulnerabilities in what it called "the largely unregulated" area of general aviation, which includes corporate jets, private planes and other unscheduled aircraft.

"As security measures improve at large commercial airports, terrorists may choose to rent or steal general aviation aircraft housed at small airports with little or no security," the report said.

The report also said that Al Qaeda "has apparently considered the use of helicopters as an alternative to recruiting operatives for fixed-wing aircraft operations." The maneuverability and "nonthreatening appearance" of helicopters, even when flying at low altitudes above urban areas, make them attractive targets for terrorists to conduct suicide attacks on landmarks or to spray toxins below, the report said.

The assessment does not identify who might be in a position to carry out such domestic attacks.

While law enforcement officials have spoken repeatedly about their concerns over so-called sleeper cells operating within the United States, a separate F.B.I. report first disclosed last week by ABC News indicated that evidence pointing to the existence of such cells was inconclusive.

The question of how well the government is protecting airline travelers surfaced again last month after the disclosure in a Sept. 11 commission investigation that in the months leading up to the attack, federal officials received 52 warnings about Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, some warning specifically about hijackings and suicide operations.

Federal officials now say they have taken a number of steps to tighten security for helicopters, chartered flights and the like in response to perceived threats, as they did last August in temporarily ordering federal security guards and tougher screening for helicopter tours in the New York City area.

Rear Adm. David M. Stone, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security who oversees the Transportation Security Administration, said that "the report validates T.S.A.'s sense of urgency in our daily efforts to secure aviation, and that same sense of urgency can be found in our work securing every other mode of transportation."

The report also sought to codify the various responsibilities for aviation security in the increasingly complex labyrinth of federal agencies, and it examined 33 terrorist plots against airplanes inside and out of the United States over the years.

Of the more than 500 criminal cases involving aircraft handled by the F.B.I. in 2003, two were hijackings in the United States involving flights from Cuba that landed in Florida. More than 300 episodes involved undeclared weapons or other problems at screening and security checkpoints, while 175 cases were triggered by on-board interference or threats against crew members, often involving alcohol.

In one case, a passenger sprayed perfume at a flight attendant "in a hostile manner," the report said. 

----

Gun certification moving slowly, pilots say

3/14/2005 10:46 AM (AP)
	
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-03-14-pilots-guns_x.htm

WASHINGTON — While the pace of training and deployment of armed pilots on commercial flights has picked up, supporters of the program say the Bush administration still is making it unnecessarily difficult for crews to take guns into the cockpit.

Pilots who monitor the program estimate that between 4,000 and 4,500 have been trained and deputized to carry guns since the Federal Flight Deck Officer program began in April 2003. That total is about three times as many as a year ago, yet a fraction of the 95,000 pilots who fly for U.S. airlines.

David Mackett, president of the Airline Pilots Security Alliance, a group formed to lobby for guns in the cockpit, said tens of thousands of his colleagues are interested in the program.

"We have an armed pilots program that's arming very few pilots," said Mackett, who hasn't signed up because of the way the program is run. He said many others won't join for the same reason.

Mackett contends the Transportation Security Administration isn't moving to get substantially more pilots trained to carry guns because it has never really wanted the program.

TSA spokesman Mark Hatfield disputed that, saying agency chief David Stone fully backs the effort and that procedures have been changed to more quickly get pilots into the program.

"I've got a pipeline with a couple of thousand applicants and we're running two full classes a week," Hatfield said. The TSA can train about 50 pilots per class.

Hatfield said he couldn't disclose which procedures had been adjusted because of the program's sensitive security nature.

The exact number of armed pilots is classified. No pilot has fired a weapon, either intentionally or accidentally, while on duty, according to TSA spokeswoman Andrea McCauley.

The TSA initially opposed the program, worrying that introducing a weapon to a commercial flight was dangerous and that other security enhancements since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks made it unnecessary. The agency reluctantly endorsed the idea when it was clear Congress was behind it.

The Bush administration now wants to spend $7 million more on arming pilots in 2006 than the $25.3 million this year. The increase will mostly go toward retraining pilots who already carry firearms, according to a TSA spokeswoman, Amy von Walter.

Pilots must volunteer, take a psychological test and complete a weeklong firearms training program run by the government to keep a gun in the cockpit. Mackett said it can take from two months to a year to get a gun from the time an online application is submitted. Some pilots never even hear back from the TSA, he said.

Mackett said the psychological testing and background checks are unnecessary because pilots already have been carefully vetted by their airlines to be able to fly commercial jets.

Hatfield countered that the requirements are needed because of the unique stresses of defending a plane from terrorists while trying to fly it.

"All of the testing, including the psych portion, is designed to ensure we have the most capable candidates for this extremely demanding job," he said.

"Unlike other law enforcement jobs, it's not just about making a life-or-death decision and waiting for backup. It's about making that decision and then turning around and flying the plane again."

Another pilots' group, the Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations, gave the TSA a "D" for the guns-in-the-cockpit program as part of its annual "Aviation Security Report Card."

Both pilot groups object to the requirement that pilots carry their government-issue semiautomatic guns in a lockbox when they're not in the cockpit and to store it in the cargo hold when they're traveling but not flying a plane.

Coalition president Jon Safle said that forcing pilots to give up their guns is "just not a smart thing to do" and that it exposes the weapons to loss or theft.

Last year, Congress failed to pass a bill that would speed the application and training process, allow pilots to carry guns in holsters and let those among them with military or law enforcement backgrounds carry guns immediately.

Mackett said the pilots will try again this year.



-------- POLITICS


-------- propaganda wars

State Propaganda: How Government Agencies Produce Hundreds of Pre-Packaged TV Segments the Media Runs as News

Democracy Now
Monday, March 14th, 2005

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/14/152202

According to a major expose in The New York Times, federal agencies under the Bush administration - from the State Department to Agriculture to the Transportation Security Administration - have been producing hundreds of pre-packaged TV segments that have been broadcast on local stations as real news. We speak with John Stauber of PR Watch, which has been tracking the rise of government and corporate-produced news for years. [includes rush transcript] A new report by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security has found that al Qaeda may have already discussed plans to hijack charter planes, helicopters and other general aviation aircraft because they are less guarded than commercial airliners.

The internal report - obtained by The New York Times - detailed particular vulnerabilities in what it called "the largely unregulated" area of general aviation. The report makes clear that counterterrorism officials still consider the aviation industry to be a prime target for major attacks.

While the news grabbed headlines this past weekend, the Transportation Security Administration has been spinning a very different story. The TSA has been putting out video news releases that have been broadcast on local news stations as real news. This is an example.

    * Video News Release produced by the Transportation Security Administration.

That was a video news release featuring a "reporter" who is actually a public-relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. Yesterday, The New York Times featured an extensive front-page investigation detailing the extent that pre-packaged news releases - produced by the federal government - are being used by television stations all across the country.

The article reports that at least 20 federal agencies - including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau - have distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years. Many were then broadcast on local stations without crediting the government as the source of the information.

The article goes on to state that "the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations." Later the article says that "some reports were produced to support the administration's most cherished policy objectives like regime change in Iraq and Medicare reform...They often feature quote, unquote "interviews" with senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics are excluded as are any hints of controversy, waste or mismanagement."

This is another example of a video news release produced by the State Department.

    * Video News Release produced by the State Department.

We go to Madison, Wisconsin to speak with John Stauber - whose organization PR Watch has been tracking the rise of government and corporate-produced news for years.

    * John Stauber, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy, publishers of PR Watch.


AMY GOODMAN: The T.S.A. has been putting out video news releases that have been broadcast on local news stations as real news. Here is an example.

      JENNIFER MORROW: For most Americans, New Year's Eve simply marks the end of another year, but for the Transportation Security Administration, it represents another success in the drive to strengthen aviation security and restore America's confidence in air travel. At every airport, the evidence of new and better security, a top-notch workforce of federal security screeners, more bomb sniffing dogs on patrol and now screening of checked bags for explosives.

      SPOKESPERSON: Less than a year ago, T.S.A. had only a handful of employees to get the job done. Today more than 20,000 screeners are checking bags at over 400 airports in America, making sure they're safe before they're loaded onto planes.

      JENNIFER MORROW: It’s one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history. Thousands leaving impressive careers and good jobs to take up the front lines in the war against terrorism.

      WOMAN: I have experienced flying in and out of national for a while, and yes, it is much better. And I feel very good about traveling today.

      JENNIFER MORROW: The T.S.A. met a November deadline to position highly trained passenger screeners at security checkpoints. And now at the end of the year, the latest improvement, making sure every piece of checked baggage is screened for bombs.

      SCREENER: Every bag will be x-rayed and screened. We deal with the ETD and the EDS technology. If there's a case where there's an explosive device in a bag it, will be retrieved and detected before it boards the aircraft.

      JENNIFER MORROW: The T.S.A. will use electronic equipment to screen bags at all 429 U.S. airports. And where necessary, dogs, hand searches and bag-matching techniques to get the job done, all of it to insure that every bag is safe before it gets loaded onto a plane, and just as importantly, to give Americans who fly another reason to have peace of mind. This is Jennifer Morrow reporting. 

AMY GOODMAN: That was a video news release featuring a reporter who is actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. Yesterday, The New York Times featured an extensive front page investigation detailing the extent that prepackaged news releases produced by the federal government are being used by television stations all across the country. The article reports that at least 20 federal agencies, including the Pentagon and the Census Bureau, have distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years. Many were then broadcast on local stations without crediting the government as the source of the information. The article goes on to state, quote, “The administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive of than previously known. At the same time records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations.” Later, The New York Times piece says, quote, “Some reports were produced to support the administration's most cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq and Medicare reform.” They often feature, quote, unquote, “interviews” with senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics are excluded as are any hints of controversy, waste or mismanagement. Let me bring you now another example of a news release, but we're going to do this after the break. Coming up, we'll see a news release that came out from the State Department around Iraq. This is Democracy Now! We'll go to that after this break.


AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Laurie Garrett. She has just quit Newsday, issuing a scathing memo about the state of the media today. On the phone with us, we're joined by John Stauber of P.R. Watch. But let me bring you the second of these VNRs, that's video news releases, that local newscasts are using around the country. This one was produced by the State Department.

      REPORTER: The televised images from Baghdad prompted celebrations from Iraqi Americans all across the United States. They seemed to revel in the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, as much as they did in Baghdad. In suburban Detroit, hundreds of Iraqi Americans marched triumphantly through the streets. The community of Dearborn is home to America's largest Arab community. On Warren Avenue people chanted, "No more Saddam," as they honked horns and waved Iraqi and American flags.

      IRAQI AMERICAN 1: We love the United States! We love America! They help us!

      IRAQI AMERICAN 2: Yes!

      REPORTER: In this Kansas City cafe, Iraqi Americans watch the historic events on TV.

      IRAQI AMERICAN 3: I'm very, very happy. I said, thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A. I love Bush, I love U.S.A., because they do that for Iraqi people’s freedom.

      REPORTER: At the Arab American Center in San Jose, California:

      IRAQI AMERICAN 4: To see him toppled and destroyed, it's very gratifying. It's very gratifying to all of the Iraqis.

      REPORTER: At this Mid-Eastern market in Denver, Colorado:

      IRAQI AMERICAN 5: I never heard anybody who said he wants to see Saddam stay so they all want Saddam to go.

      REPORTER: For Iraqis living in the U.S., the nearly quarter century-long nightmare in their homeland is now drawing closer to the end. 

AMY GOODMAN: A video news release produced by the State Department. On the phone us with from Madison, Wisconsin, John Stauber whose organization, P.R. Watch, has been tracking the rise of government and corporate produced news for years. Welcome to Democracy Now!, John.

JOHN STAUBER: Hi, Amy. It’s a pleasure to be on.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. This is a major piece in the Times. They have got the frames of video news releases front and center in yesterday's New York Times headline, "Under Bush, A New Age Of Prepackaged News." You have been following this kind of, I think you could call, selling, whether it's corporations or government, for a long time. Respond.

JOHN STAUBER: I was absolutely elated to see The New York Times front page coverage with the inside spread. I would urge everyone watching or listening to read that article. We link to it off of our website at prwatch.org. In the more than ten years that I have been investigating and reporting on the widespread use of public relations as news, there's never, ever been a story like this. This widespread use of fake news, we're talking thousands of stories a year. This is a billion dollar sub-industry of the P.R. industry has been going on for 20 years, and this is the first mainstream media expose of any length and depth about it.

AMY GOODMAN: So let's get into how these end up on local newscasts.

JOHN STAUBER: Well, it's like this. First of all, we're talking about fake news. These are news stories done by journalists, but these are journalists who now work for public relations firms employed by the State Department, employed by pharmaceutical companies, and they're producing news stories, video news releases, which are provided free to TV networks and TV stations, and are then aired by TV networks and news producers as if they were news, often as if they were produced locally by the station. And what this is, actually, is propaganda, because these are not news stories. They look like news stories, but they have a bias in favor of a political program or an ideology or a product. And the networks and stations that air these, and we're talking about thousands of these produced a year, are engaging simply in plagiarism and fraud, fraud perpetrated on their viewers, saying this is news when it's not news. It's all provided. To follow up on some critical points that Laurie was making earlier, what's going on here is that TV news directors and networks are not only passing on fake news and propaganda, but that so-called “news hole,” all of that time that could be used to actually report news is being filled up with this fake news and propaganda. And The New York Times piece really, really puts the wood to the Bush administration for their massive spending, a quarter of a billion dollars in just the last four years on P.R. spin and propaganda. You know, we need a full scale investigation of how that money has been spent, but actually, that's just the tip of the iceberg, when you consider that most of these are coming from corporations.

AMY GOODMAN: Couldn't you also argue that people would have gotten a sense of where these were coming from earlier, if the actual newscasts didn't look a lot like this anyway? I mean, you have a Pentagon report where they're all saying, “Welcome, America,” without any countering point of view. Isn't that often what we got anyway, and it really is hard to distinguish. This is what's frightening. The VNR, the video news release from the Pentagon, from a standard report, and maybe that's even worse, a report that so-called was produced independent of the government. Laurie Garrett.

LAURIE GARRETT: One of the things that happens a lot in the local news is, since -- again, they have to have a high profit return on their local newscast, and that's hard to do if you are spending a lot of money sending reporters out to do slick, well-produced stories. But you could take a produced story like this, the one you just saw about Iraq or the one about the Transportation Safety Agency, and you can pull out the audio of the fake reporter and put in audio of your own reporter, voicing over the same footage with basically the same slant and the same construct of the editing of the video, and it sounds like, and if you are sitting there in Memphis, Tennessee, watching this on your TV, or in Oakland, California, or wherever you might be, to you, it seems like a locally produced, legitimate news story. And this is true both for things coming from the government and also it has been true for a long time, for corporate spin releases on specific corporate products, especially the pharmaceutical industry.

AMY GOODMAN: Looking at the piece inside, they have a photograph of Karen Ryan, the so-called reporter in several of the government produced segments. “As she cringes at the phrase, ‘covert propaganda.’ These are words for dictators and spies, and yet they have attached themselves to her like a pair of handcuffs,” the Times writes. “Not long ago, Ryan was a much-sought-after so-called reporter for news segments produced by the federal government. A journalist at ABC and PBS, who became a P.R. consultant, Ryan worked on about a dozen reports for seven federal agencies in 2003 and 2004. She was surprised by the number of stations that were willing to run her government segments without any editing or acknowledgement of origin. As proud as she says she is of her work, she did not hesitate even for a second when asked if she would have broadcast one of her government reports if she were a local news director. She said, ‘Absolutely not.’” John Stauber.

JOHN STAUBER: Well, to use her own words this is covert propaganda, and the fact that when she puts on her journalist hat, she says, "I wouldn't air the fake news that I produce through my P.R. firm," really underlines that. Karen Ryan has sort of become the poster child over the last year, of this problem, but there's -- here's what's happening. The people like Karen Ryan, the public relations professionals who usually, by the way, come out of journalism and go into P.R. because there's a lot more money to be made, say, “Hey, you know, we're P.R. people. Of course, we produce these. It's up to the news directors and producers to label them as provided footage.” But they know. They know perfectly well that virtually no news director in this country, no producer at a TV station in this country, labels this as provided footage. They should, but if they label that footage, and they said, “This is a video news release provided by the State Department,” “This is a video news release provided by the Transportation Security Administration,” “This is a video news release provided by Monsanto,” that would destroy it. That would expose it. So, what's going on here is that the public relations industry, the billion dollar industry of video news releases knows that the TV news directors and producers are not going to label these, and there's a very simple solution here. Label it. They should be labeling it. The Radio, TV, and News Director's Association has for decades now turned a blind eye to this, and it clearly violates their ethics code. In The New York Times article, they're muttering about strengthening their ethics code, but that won't matter, because they don't care. There's so much money to be made or saved, if you will, by replacing real news on TV with fake news, that this will continue to be a widespread problem unless there's a mobilization of outraged news viewers who demand that the F.C.C. step in and enforce standards which would seem to indicate that this is in violation of the F.C.C. standards, and then I think the media reform movement is also going to have to figure out how to hold TV news directors and producers’ feet to the fire, because they’re not going to want to give this up. This – we’re talking billions of dollars here in producing these and in airing them instead of going out and producing real news.

AMY GOODMAN: Laurie Garrett.

LAURIE GARRET: You know, one of the things that I found, Amy and John, I’d love to know your sense of this, as well, but one of the things I found as a visiting professor at a lot of graduate journalism departments around the country over the last few years is, I have seen this disturbing trend where I will ask students in the room, “How many of you want someday to work at a major newspaper, be a Woodward or Bernstein at The Washington Post or be a network television correspondent.” A couple of hands go up. Then I look the at rest of the room. “Well, what is it you all want to do?” and they all say “public relations.” So, the lines are getting very, very blurred, even at the level of the basic training in journalism schools.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, aren't P.R. schools and journalism schools also merging in some places?

LAURIE GARRETT: They have merged. I mean, let's face it. And when you ask the students why public relations as opposed to journalism, often they would say to me, “Well, there really isn't that much of a distinction, but you can make more money on the P.R. side.”

AMY GOODMAN: Well, isn't the scandal around Jeff Gannon or whatever the guy's name is, who was in the White House using a false name and asking puffball questions, isn't this -- how, John, would you connect this to this expose on VNRs. I mean, you have got these P.R. people who aren’t even using their own names in their reports, who are using fake names, for example, the T.S.A. so-called reporter?

JOHN STAUBER: I consider the Jeff Gannon story and scandal a major scandal, and certainly, that deserves much deeper examination than it's gotten. But I think when we're talking these fake news stories, it's an even bigger scandal, and here's why. Most Americans get most of their news, unfortunately, from television. We know that TV is the worst source to receive news. For instance, back in the first Gulf War, the Hill & Nolten P.R. firm produced 20, at least, video news releases promoting the war. No one has gotten a hold of those to examine them. A reporter from The Progressive investigated this afterwards, and the P.R. firm refused to turn them over. We also know from the University of Amherst study back then, and there have been other studies that have corroborated this with other situations since, that the American public, who watched the most TV coverage of that Gulf War, thought they knew the most, actually knew less than most people who were getting their news through newspapers, for instance, and yet were the strongest supporters of the war. So, the bottom line here is that if you are watching war on television, with all of the propaganda and video news releases that go along with it, you are actually being misinformed, and yet you're more likely to support the war. Television is the number one source of so-called news for most Americans, and a huge proportion of that is fake news.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, isn't this a violation of the Smith-Mundt Act after World War II, that you're not supposed to propagandize your own population. You know, it’s why we can’t hear Voice of America in the United States?

JOHN STAUBER: Well, it would appear to be, and there are other acts, going all the way back to the 1920s where Congress has weighed in and said that in a democracy, government propaganda is inappropriate and illegal. But the government has consistently gotten around that, and both Republican and Democratic administrations and politicians have hired P.R. professionals and used spin and used propaganda, but I think the exciting thing now is that I hope this New York Times expose in the context of all of the other exposés going on and in the context of the growing media reform movement will really incite a mobilization where, through F.C.C. regulations and through grassroots mobilization, we can get rid of these video news releases.

AMY GOODMAN: I just want to bring in one thing, since we only have 30 seconds. In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger also coming under criticism for producing video news releases. Last week, his communications director, Rob Stutzman defended the so-called VNR, saying it's just like any other press release, only it's on video.

JOHN STAUBER: Well, that would be true if the press release constituted verbatim, for instance, most of the front page of The New York Times. The difference here is that they're handing a fake news story, and it's being aired as a real news story. It's not being used for background information. It's taking the place of the news.

AMY GOODMAN: And we're paying for it.

JOHN STAUBER: Yeah. In the case of Governor Schwarzenegger –

AMY GOODMAN: Taxpayer dollars.

JOHN STAUBER: -- and the Bush Administration, that's public money.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. I want to thank you, John Stauber, for joining us from P.R. Watch, prwatch.org. And Laurie Garrett, thanks very much for spending the hour with us.

LAURIE GARRETT: It’s terrific.

AMY GOODMAN: Former Newsday reporter, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, now at the Council on Foreign Relations.

To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359.

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Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist Laurie Garrett Quits Newsday: "When You See News As a Product...It's Impossible To Really Serve Democracy"

Democracy Now
Monday, March 14th, 2005

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/14/151255

We speak with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Laurie Garrett, who resigned from Newsday and ripped the paper's parent company, the Tribune Company, for putting profit over quality journalism. Garrett says, “If you trim back your staff, if you trim back your costs, and you put out a lower quality product, your stock value goes up. All across the news industry, we have seen this same phenomenon." [includes rush transcript] Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Laurie Garrett made headlines last week when she resigned from New York Newsday - where she had worked since 1988.

In a blistering memo to her colleagues at the paper, she ripped Newsday's parent company - the Tribune Company - for putting profit over quality journalism. In the memo announcing that she is going to work full time at the Council on Foreign Relations, she wrote that "All across America news organizations have been devoured by massive corporations - and allegiance to stockholders, the drive for higher share prices, and push for larger dividend returns trumps everything that the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions." She went on to write, "This is terrible for democracy. I have been in 47 states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had on the national psyche. I have found America a place of great and confused fearfulness."

She continues: "It would be easy to descend into despair, not only about the state of journalism, but the future of American democracy. But giving up is not an option. There is too much at stake."

Laurie Garrett joins us today in our studio. She is the author of "The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust." She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for her reporting on the Ebola virus. She's also won a Polk Award and a Peabody and was finalist for another Pulitzer in 1998.

    * Laurie Garrett, website: LaurieGarrett.com.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let's let Laurie Garrett speak for herself. She joins us in our firehouse studio. She is author of The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for her reporting on the Ebola virus. She has also won the George Polk Award, a Peabody, and was a finalist for yet another Pulitzer in 1998. We welcome you to Democracy Now!

LAURIE GARRETT: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. So, you are leaving Newsday. Can you talk about your decision?

LAURIE GARRETT: Well, you know, I -- first of all, I have to say that I deeply admire my colleagues. I already miss them terribly, and I feel great regret about having to leave Newsday. It's been a fantastic home for a long time and a place where I could do a lot of journalism that -- I'm not sure there were very many other outlets that might have supported my work. And I have certain editors I admire very, very deeply at Newsday. The top of the list would be Les Payne, who I think is just one of the great consciences of American journalism. But we have been through so much at Newsday over the last decade, and I should add, our sister papers, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant, and so on, we have all been through such corporate machinations and taken such hits that -- ten years ago we had a circulation of well over a million. We had a tremendous impact in New York City, so much so that The New York Times was scared to dickens and was actually beefing up its coverage of the city, which now it seems to almost ignore most of the time. And The Daily News and The New York Post were both terrified. We had a routine of garnering Pulitzer Prizes year after year. And we had some of the most creative foreign coverage you were likely to see in any major daily newspaper. And today, the last data I was privy to, which may be out of date, Newsday was down to about 400,000 readers -- that's a loss of, you know, somewhere between 700,000 and 800,000 readers -- and has a very low profile in New York City and is a shadow of its former self. And it has all been a series of terrible cuts done to the institution for the sake of the bottom line, the stock price of first Times Mirror stock, and then when Tribune bought out Times Mirror, of Tribune stock.

AMY GOODMAN: How did it happen? Who was brought in, and how have the people like you in the newsroom fared?

LAURIE GARRETT: Well, you know, it has been an unbelievably demoralizing set of situations. When I first joined Newsday in 1988 we had this amazing presence in New York City. There really were two newspapers: Newsday, which was based on Long Island, and New York Newsday, which was based in Manhattan. Sometimes there was tension actually between the two papers, and it could get nasty at times, and that was a problem and that should have been fixed. But it was not a problem that was unfixable, and ultimately, New York Newsday was right on the cusp of being a major profit center for the Times Mirror Corporation and of having an enormous, enormous impact on New York City. And I was surrounded by, in that newsroom, some of the most exciting colleagues I'll ever have the pleasure of working with. It was just, you know, hard to even imagine, when I look back on that talent pool, what we had in 1993, 1994 in the newsroom. But it was at a time in the 1990s when more and more corporations were showing astounding stock returns. Remember, the market was just overheated beyond belief in the early 1990s and would soar until the big crash of 1997. And the family that owned 51% of the stock of Times Mirror, the Chandler family based in Southern California, felt that the profit returns they were realizing on the investment were rather small compared to many of their friends and wealthy compatriots, who were invested in other kinds of businesses, and so on. And they brought in from General Foods Corporation, a CEO who had never had anything to do with media, had no understanding of journalism. Frankly, as far as I could tell, didn't give a darn about journalism. His mandate was to raise the stock value. Six weeks after he took over, in a single day, he eliminated entirely New York Newsday, he eliminated the evening edition of the Baltimore Sun, he cut 10% of the staff at the Hartford Courant, he eliminated all Spanish-language editions of Los Angeles Times and shrank L.A. Times’ bureaus for metropolitan coverage of greater Los Angeles. He, across the board in all aspects of the Times Mirror media empire, which included television, cut, cut, cut. And it worked.

AMY GOODMAN: He came from General Mills.

LAURIE GARRETT: General Foods, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And they called him the Cereal Killer?

LAURIE GARRETT: They called him the Cereal Killer. And that day, the stock value went up, just skyrocketed. If I remember the numbers right, and this could be off, I won't be held responsible, but I believe it was about 19 on the market in the morning and went up to 80-something by 5:00, and they continued to stay high. So, very clearly, what was happening at that time in the corporate world was, if you trim back your staff, if you trim back your costs, and you put out a less – a lower quality product, your stock value goes up. And all across the news industry, we have seen this same phenomenon. And it has built and built and built.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think that people could have organized across the Tribune empire from the Los Angeles Times to Baltimore Sun to Newsday, and said, no, we won't put it out at all?

LAURIE GARRETT: Well, at that time we weren't owned by the Tribune. At that time it was theTimes Mirror Corporation. The Tribune came in a couple of years later into the picture, partly at the urging of certain people high up in the Times Mirror Corporation who were opposed to what was happening and thought the Tribune might be white knights. But the Tribune Corporation, which -- their flagship operation is the Chicago Tribune newspaper and Tribune Broadcasting -- moved in and first did do some very positive things, improving the quality of the Los Angeles Times, but then showed their true colors, and we started to see the bottom-liners walking through the newsroom and demanding ever higher profitability until literally one year, I think two years ago, Newsday, turned over a 25% profit in a single year, which is unheard of in the news industry, and got in trouble because Tribune had pegged it at 31%.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who has quit her newspaper where she has been for how long?

LAURIE GARRETT: Since 1988.

AMY GOODMAN: Since 1988. Talk about some of the work that you did there. For example, you won the Pulitzer Prize for your coverage of Ebola. So what -- that was 1996 -- but what did you do to do that series, and do you think you could have done it today?

LAURIE GARRETT: Well, there were a number of series of reporting that I did, and I was hardly exceptional. I mean, the halls of Newsday are full of people who have done extraordinary reporting. And there was a time when we were supported to do so. In 1995, I went off to cover the Ebola outbreak in then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. There were a lot of reporters there, but I was fortunate to be one of the only science reporters there and strongly supported by my institution, that said, stay as long as you need to stay, spend what you have to spend to make the story come alive. And I was able to use resources to get out into the villages, identify who the index case was, how it originally spread, and from whom to whom.

AMY GOODMAN: This was where?

LAURIE GARRETT: This was in what is now called Kikwit, Democratic Republic of Congo, but then called Zaire. And when I came back, I issued a memo to management saying, I have been keeping my eyes on what's going on in the former Soviet Union. I think that every aspect of health there is collapsing. I'd like to go, and I think it's going to take several months, and it's going to be very expensive, and I will have to hire translators, and I'd like to take a photographer with me. And they said, okay, go. And it was an enormous budget. I was out of pocket as a reporter for about six months, came back, wrote a 32-part series. They ran all 32 parts on the collapse of health in the former Soviet Union. And that series won the Polk, George C. Polk Award, but more important than whether it won an award, there was a newspaper willing to dedicate that much news hole, that much column inches and everything, to a problem that was not in the United States, that was overseas, that might come to haunt us and has indeed come to haunt us in the form of drug resistant strains of tuberculosis that have made their way from prisons in Siberia to the streets of New York, and things of that nature, but what it really was a series about was, here was our former Cold War enemy, and we come to find out that the only way they were able to fight that Cold War was by destroying their entire social service infrastructure and spending on military and spending on repression of their own people. And look at what they did to their health system in the process. I mean, you know, I said to Newsday, I have to go deal with AIDS in Africa, and they said, bye-bye, and I was on a plane and off to Africa. I came back and said, I have to deal with AIDS in India. Bye-bye, I was on a plane to India. It's the kind of institution that would do that. If you showed with your track record that you would come back with the goods, you would get that story, and you could have the dedication to write it well. The editors would fight it through, and it would get published. But what we see today all across the newspaper industry and more and more in broadcasting is to – a 30-part series on the collapse of health in the former Soviet Union? I don't know any institution today that would publish that.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Laurie Garrett. She will stay with us. And if you are watching or hearing this live, maybe at the video/audio stream at democracynow.org or on your local community radio or television station, you can ask a question, too, by emailing mail@democracynow.org, that's mail@democracynow.org. We're also going to be talking about the latest front-page piece in The New York Times, well, yesterday, on VNRs, video news releases, not from corporations (that's been going on for a long time), but from the government, from the Pentagon, from the Agriculture Department, from the Transportation Department ending up in your local newscast, though you think it's a local news report that comes from an independent reporter. Stay with us.


AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Laurie Garrett. And if you have any questions for her, you could email mail@democracynow.org. In fact, Laurie, you go through this public media terrain, having -- you started at Pacifica, went on to NPR, went on to Newsday and now has quit Newsday with a blistering memo to her colleagues talking about the state of the media today. You say that the corporatization of the news media is a threat to democracy. Why?

LAURIE GARRETT: Well, first, let me be very clear about something. I'm not coming from some ideological space on this, and I’m definitely not anti-corporate, nor am I anti-profit. I think it's perfectly reasonable that you can make a modest profit off of news, but when you see news as a product that has to compete with other product lines, so that if toilet paper turns a 35% annual profit return in one division of your company, your news product has to turn a 35% profit return, as well, then I think it's impossible to really serve democracy. Because what kind of news can turn that kind of a profit? Well, number one, it's not lengthy. Number two, it doesn't take on slow, plodding, difficult, complicated subject matter. Number three, it doesn't reprint testimony. It doesn't reprint speeches from the halls of Congress, because they can be boring. If it's broadcasting it doesn't run, you know, a senator speaking at length, it might run a few seconds clip unless it's, you know, the Sunday morning talk shows or something of that nature.

Long run, what we're getting at here is a couple of things are kind of crashing together at the same time. First of all, all across the news industry there's a recognition that people under 30 are not watching. They're not reading. They don't subscribe to newspapers. They're not watching the evening news, and in many cases, it's hard to pin down exactly how people under 30 in America are getting information. It's a kind of information cocoon in which you’re osmotically absorbing from thousands and thousands of places from the internet, from your friends, from text messaging, from God knows where. And it means that those of us who come from more established old patterns of media dissemination of information are nervous. Will that generation eventually buy newspapers? When I was in college, being a subscriber to a mainstream newspaper was a way of showing you were an adult. And having that newspaper outside your dorm room said to all of the other students, I’m serious. I'm a grownup.

Today, apparently, young people don't think there's any value to that at all. It's kind of garbage. And so, the news industry is terrified about that. Now, if you couple that with the need to make advertising revenue, who is your big ad market? Precisely that age group. If you look at the evening news, one of the things that's happening to network television news is look at the ads. It's, you know, hemorrhoid cream. It's Viagra. It's arthritis medication. It reflects their demographic, which is that most of the people watching an evening network newscast are well over 60 years of age. So, when you look at what is the information source that's got the snappy ads that signal these viewers or these listeners or these readers are under 35 years of age, it's like the top of the hour drivel on MTV.

So, how do we get to a point for our democracy, for our nation, where people who go to pull that lever in New York or push that button or punch that hole in the voting booth wherever they may be actually know what's going on in the world, and actually have had a critical, informed analysis, including all that so-called boring, plodding information that tells them what the nature is of Medicare, how if you are 35 years old today, you're going to not be able to pay for prescription medication when you need it, when you are 55? All of these elements that are the essence of understanding how you are a citizen in a society are getting harder and harder to convey, because it's not profitable to convey them. One of the key things, Amy, I want to put across is when I put this memo out, I had no intention for it to go beyond my immediate friends and colleagues at Newsday. It's been a shock and surprise to me to see how widely it's ended up all over the place and the kind of brouhaha it's caused.

And I want to say one thing to any of your viewers out there that are coming from a kind of conspiracy place. I do not believe, and I have never witnessed it in the newsroom, that the political agenda of these corporations or any group of individuals dictates news coverage. It might at certain institutions, perhaps Fox Television, for example, but what I’m talking about is not political bias. I'm not talking here about somebody coming in and saying, you cannot write that story because it doesn't reflect our agenda. I have never ever seen that happen at Newsday, at NPR, in any newsroom I have worked in. What I am talking about is that a story that requires some difficulty to appreciate, that deserves complex analysis, and that might need 3,000 words to explain will not get that 3,000 words, because it's not snappy, it doesn't sell, it's not got a great catchy headline with it, and besides, we need that space to do Michael Jackson. We need that space to show Martha Stewart walking out of prison. And celebrity news sells. But plodding analysis of Social Security does not.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me ask you, when you say you don't think there's any political agenda there, let's just go back a little. When there was blanket coverage leading up to the invasion of Iraq, for example, when all of the media really was focusing on these issues, and yet -- and you write about this too -- somehow the issue that weapons of mass destruction were not there just didn't make it to the front pages of the Times. I mean, in that sense, you're talking about media that beat the drums for war. And it wasn't just The New York Times, it was all of the networks, as well.

LAURIE GARRETT: Well, I think there's a couple of things going on there, and that is a little more complicated. First of all, journalists love to be responsible for scoops. And that's a good thing. I mean, the competitive atmosphere that gets reporters out there hustling is a good thing. However, if the hustle is about trying to get access to a White House that is notoriously impervious to media query, that is one of the major anti-media fortresses in the country, or access to the Department of Defense when there's a Secretary of Defense who is openly disdainful, openly disdainful of the reporters in the room at every press conference, then if you want a scoop to show what's going on on the eve of this war, you needed to cultivate certain kinds of sources. Well, for some of the media, those sources turned out to be Chalabi, the leader of the whole right wing insurgency in Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz and his staff in the Department of Defense, the staff of Vice President Cheney, and certain key individuals in the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency. And so, you know, I was getting the same information. I was covering, before the search for weapons of mass destruction, I was covering bio-terrorism very heavily after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks. I was getting the same information, but I was always trying to double-check it against something else. And our feeling was you don't run a story unless you have got at least two confirmed sources, and ideally, three or four.

AMY GOODMAN: That don't come from the same place.

LAURIE GARRETT: That don't come from the same place, and that haven't -- have clearly not been sharing their information with each other, so that they're basically echoing each other's comments. But very clearly in the pell-mell rush to scoop, scoop, scoop, and to look hot, hot, hot, a lot of reporters did not show that caution. We saw stories that in The New York Times, in The Washington Post, in a number of news outlets claiming evidence of weapons of mass destruction that clearly was bogus. One of the most egregious was the claim that a Russian scientist who had been a smallpox expert was in Baghdad, and had advised the Iraqi government on smallpox production when, in fact, the time that woman had been in Baghdad had been as part of the eradication campaign, as a public health officer to eliminate smallpox from planet earth. And it really besmirched her reputation to even imply that she was a bio-weaponeer. But these were all things that were just fed. I mean, look at how the media convicted Richard Jewell of the Atlanta Olympic bombing, when it turned out, of course, that he was completely innocent. Look at how quickly the media moved to try and convict Steven Hatfill of being responsible for the anthrax mailings, when, in fact, he is free today, the judge has actually given him the right to interrogate his accusers from the media and to demand “how do you claim knowledge that I committed these events?” And then, of course, the Wen Ho Lee case in Los Alamos Laboratory, where a Taiwanese American scientist was accused of feeding discs of information to the Chinese government. Nobody ever explained why a Taiwanese would be helping mainland China. That alone should have caused some serious skepticism. But, of course, ultimately the judge in that case not only threw out all the charges against Wen Ho Lee, but particularly castigated The New York Times for their coverage and for having basically convicted him on the pages of their newspaper.

AMY GOODMAN: Very interestingly, that was right before September 11, 2001. If people were asking what was the FBI doing before, why weren't they investigating these guys that ended up in the United States that perhaps were part of the September 11 attacks, well, maybe they should look at how many of them were going after Wen Ho Lee. We're talking to Laurie Garrett. And, Laurie, I'd like to ask you to stay for the hour, because I would like to ask you more about bio-terror and bio-weapons, something that you certainly have investigated, as well.

To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359.


-------- us politics

Rice Says She Has No Desire to Seek Presidency

Bloomberg
Monday, March 14, 2005; Page A06

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31232-2005Mar13?language=printer

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ruled out a run for the presidency yesterday, damping grass-roots efforts to draft her for a 2008 election campaign.

"I don't have any desire to run for president, I don't intend to, I won't do it," she said on ABC's "This Week." "I don't know how many ways to say 'No.' "

Rice ranked second among women deemed best suited for the presidency in a nationwide poll conducted Feb. 10 to 17. Among those surveyed, 42 percent said they would support a Rice campaign. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) ranked first with 53 percent, according to the poll of 1,125 registered voters by Hearst Newspapers and the Siena Research Institute in Loudonville, N.Y.

At least four Web sites are devoted to encouraging support for Rice to seek the presidency. Rice, 50, a former political science professor and provost at Stanford University, has never sought elected office.

"I've never wanted to run for anything," she said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

"I want to do what I am doing -- I love being secretary of state thus far," she said. "And one of these days very soon I am going to return and be an academic again and get back to the California life and to the world of ideas."



-------- OTHER


-------- environment

National Homebuilders Association Integrates Green Practices

ATLANTA, Georgia, March 14, 2005 (ENS)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2005/2005-03-14-09.asp#anchor7

The three day 2005 National Green Building Conference that opened Sunday in downtown Atlanta is the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) showcase for resource efficient, environmentally sensitive and cost-effective new homes.

Called “Greening the American Dream,” the conference offers educational sessions such as “Building America’s Houses that Work,” “Why Green Development Makes Cents” and “New Approaches to Great Communities.”

“This conference is really about two things – highlighting current green building successes, like the properties featured on the tour, and bringing green building to more builders and consumers,” said Ray Tonjes, chairman of NAHB’s Green Building Subcommittee and a home builder from Austin, Texas.

“If homes built today are 100 percent more energy efficient than those built 30 years ago, then continued advances in energy and resource efficiency will help make homes of the future even more efficient and more affordable for Americans," Tonjes said.

On Sunday, a bus tour of green building success stories took conference participants to nearby Brookhaven Solar EarthCraft House, an energy efficient home that is strong on water conservation methods. EarthCraft House™ is a program developed by the Southface Energy Institute and the Greater Atlanta Home Builders Association to encourage environmentally sound and energy efficient construction. Each house is inspected by trained Earthcraft Inspectors to ensure it meets the program's strict guidelines.

“To thrive as a green builder, you have got to be environmentally friendly while keeping in mind your customers’ pocketbooks,” said Tonjes. “This conference shines a spotlight on successful green building techniques and concepts as they move further into mainstream home building.”

One learning track at the conference provides information on NAHB’s voluntary Model Green Home Building Guidelines, recently developed to help builders incorporate affordable environmental practices into every phase of the home building process.

The Guidelines take in lot preparation and design, environmentally sensible construction practices, and planning to reduce the home’s impact on vegetation, soil, water, and enhance the home’s long-term performance. They touch on framing techniques and home designs that can optimize the use of building materials, energy efficiency, water efficiency and conservation, as well as managing moisture and ventilation to create comfort for the residents. 



-------- ACTIVISTS

Hundreds of Thousands Jam Beirut in Rally Against Syria

March 14, 2005
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/international/middleeast/14cnd-beir.html?pagewanted=all&position=

BEIRUT, Lebanon, March 14 - Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese jammed the center of downtown Beirut today, packing its central square and spilling out onto the surrounding roads, in the largest demonstration yet demanding the withdrawal of all Syrian forces from the country.

Seemingly every available space around the heart of the city overflowed with people waving the red-and-white striped Lebanese flag in what was being billed as the largest demonstration ever in Lebanon's history.

In the main mosque, still under construction, demonstrators even crammed the tiny balconies hundreds of feet up on the four minarets, balconies that the muezzin traditionally used to sing out the call to prayer. A few daredevils inched their way out along the huge construction crane looming over the square to drape a Lebanese flag at the end.

"We don't want Syrian spies and secret police, we don't want any foreign intervention," said Noha Dahir, a veiled, 18-year-old Sunni Muslim student who came by bus from the northern city of Tripoli. "Those Lebanese who want the Syrians to stay can go live in Syria, there are plenty of Lebanese here to fill the country."

The most notable element in the rally was that it did represent a broad cross section of Lebanese from all around the country.

"They can say that they represent a wide spectrum of Lebanese factions, including some Shiites, and they have been able to bring the Sunnis into the streets, which is not easy," said Ghassan Salame, a former minister of culture and political science professor, speaking by telephone from Paris. "They have an upward momentum now after a week that was full of uncertainty."

There have been rallies in the city center every Monday since former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated four Mondays ago, on Feb. 14, but organizers were determined to make this one especially large in response to the pro-Syrian march led by the militant group Hezbollah last Tuesday that also filled the downtown with hundreds of thousands of mostly Shiite demonstrators.

"This will counterbalance last Tuesday, and now we can sit and talk," said Mazen al-Zain, a 30-year-old financial analyst, noting that he himself was a member of an illustrious Shiite clan from southern Lebanon. "What is really important after today's gathering is that we all sit down at the same table."

The presence of such a huge number of Lebanese put added pressure on the government of Syria to announce a serious timetable for the withdrawal of both its 14,000 troops and its estimated 5,000 secret police officers in the country. Although President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has promised a withdrawal into the Bekaa Valley by the end of March and a further discussion with a joint Lebanese-Syrian commission in early April, there is still no indication of a timetable of a complete withdrawal.

The United Nations envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, was due to report back to Secretary-General Kofi Annan about the exact promises delivered by the Syrians in talks Saturday. The United States and other Western nations have said they want all Syrians out before new parliamentary elections tentatively scheduled for May. Also, a United Nation fact-finding mission of senior police officers is returning to New York this week from Lebanon to give Mr. Annan its assessment of the investigation into Mr. Hariri's assassination.

Participants in today's march were convinced that the size of the opposition to any Syrian presence meant that the withdrawal was only a matter of time.

"They are trying to prove they are still strong to their nation while they are retreating," said Samer Khoury, 32, a manager in the Virgin megastore overlooking Martyrs Square, where the demonstrators gathered. The store's former parking lot is now the burial place for Mr. Hariri and the bodyguards who died with him.

The demonstration turned into an all-day affair, with marchers gathering around midmorning, hours before the official 3 p.m. start time, and the last speakers still going strong at 6 p.m. Banks and schools closed early and offices around the capital emptied, all swelling the crowds. The mob was so thick that numerous participants fainted and ambulances slowly inched their way through to rescue them.

Marwan Hamade, the first speaker, who himself survived a car bomb in October, addressed some of his words to the slain prime minister. "Your dream came true today and the horrendous crime failed," he said, before going on to repeat the opposition demand that all the leaders of the security services resign for their failure to protect Mr. Hariri. Given such organizations' close ties to Syria, of course, many Lebanese suspect one or more of the secret services might have had a hand in the crime.

Bahiya Hariri, Mr. Hariri's sister and a member of parliament, used her speech to reach out to both Hezbollah and its godparent Syria, which has long seen Lebanon as its last negotiating card to retrieve the occupied Golan Heights from Israel.

"We will stand by Syria until its land is liberated and it regains its sovereignty on the occupied Golan Heights," she said, prompting boos from the crowd. As for Hezbollah, she said, "We insist on building together with them the future of great Lebanon."

There were numerous calls on President Émile Lahoud of Lebanon to resign and one sign said "The Anti-Swimming Revolution," a reference to Mr. Lahoud's penchant for spending hours each day at the pool. Syria's forcing through a three-year extension to Mr. Lahoud's term last August was the opening shot in the tensions that culminated with Mr. Hariri's assassination and the current popular movement demanding Syria's withdrawal.

Mr. Lahoud angered many Lebanese over the weekend by suggesting that the demonstrations should end because someone might throw a hand grenade, possibly setting off a renewed civil war. They were also angry that Mr. Lahoud reinstated last week Prime Minister Omar Karami, who was forced to resign on Feb. 28 by a giant opposition protest. Still, the opposition has not pressed demands that Mr. Lahoud resign, fearing a complete power vacuum at the top in the absence of a cabinet.

"We kicked him out the door and he came back through the window," said Mr. Marwan Kayrouz, a 33-year-old real estate investor, who like many dismissed the idea of a renewed civil war. "Who is going to fight who? All the factions are here."Indeed, the mix of demonstrators was readily apparent in the mix of dress codes, from veiled women to horsemen in traditional Arab headscarves to women with bare midriffs and pierced belly buttons. A few of the banners cemented the theme of unity by displaying both a cross and a crescent.

Many of the banners displayed a certain degree of wit: "Long Live the Syrians in Syria," one said.

The demonstrators have adopted blue as the color demanding the truth from the investigation into Mr. Hariri's assassination and two long blue scarves were draped around the neck of the two main figures in the famous statue on Martyrs Square, the blue cloth occasionally lifting in the slight breeze under sunny skies.

"I feel a certain kind of grandeur today," said Tarek Hamade, the chef at the rooftop Virgin Restaurant that overlooks the entire square. "The Lebanese people are finally saying what they wanted to say for years, and they are saying it out loud."

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Four Activists Face Jail For Pouring Blood At Recruiting Station

Monday, March 14th, 2005
Democracy Now! Headlines

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/14/151249

In upstate New York, four pacifists calling themselves the St. Patrick's Day Four are facing six years in jail for staging a non-violent demonstration two years ago at a military recruiting station. On March 17, 2003, the four activists entered a recruiting station near Ithaca New York, said a prayer and then poured their blood on the station's windows, walls, the U.S. flag and on the stand-up cut-outs of smiling military recruits. On Friday the four defendants pleaded not guilty in federal court on a number of charges including conspiracy to impede an officer of the United States. One of the defendants Clare Grady, said, "What we do, I don't consider it as protesting. I consider it as upholding the best of human law that we've come up with so far, and upholding God's law."

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Ruth Adams, 81, Editor of Atomic Bulletin, Dies

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 14, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/national/14adams.html?pagewanted=print&position=

CHICAGO, March 13 (AP) - Ruth Salzman Adams, who as editor of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists gave a voice to scientists concerned about the dangers of nuclear weapons during the cold war, died on Feb. 25 at her home in San Diego. She was 81.

The cause was cancer. Her death was announced by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, where she worked for years.

As editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists from 1961 to 1968 and from 1978 to 1983, Ms. Adams provided a forum for scientists to express their opposition to the deployment and use of nuclear weapons.

Ms. Adams was born on July 25, 1923, in Los Angeles, and spent her childhood in Nevada and Minnesota.

After World War II, she worked at the University of Chicago. From 1968 to 1971, she was a consultant and research associate at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass., and she was executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois from 1971 to 1974.

Ms. Adams, who also edited several books, joined the MacArthur Foundation in 1983, concentrating on programs that highlighted the risks posed by unconventional weapons and promoted peace and social justice.

She is survived by her husband of 51 years, Robert McC. Adams, former provost of the University of Chicago and former secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; three daughters, Gail Lorien of Oakland, Calif., Beth Skinner of East Otis, Mass., and Megan Adams of San Francisco; and three grandchildren.

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Two years out
After two years, Americans need to demonstrate against an insane and destructive war

by Geov Parrish  
3.14.05 Working for Change

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=18715

Two years ago this week, the United States launched an unprovoked invasion of Iraq.

It is pointless, at this juncture, to rehash the reasons why the invasion was launched: except to note that democracy didn't figure into it. For public consumption, of course, there were the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and the nonexistent links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda and 9-11; privately, of course, there was oil, the chance to enrich friends through privatization, the geopolitics of the Middle East and the "we're the boss" message intended for the world.

None of it can excuse what has happened in the last two years.

The so-called "liberation" of the people of Iraq has resulted, according to the conservative estimates of the British medical journal Lancet, in the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians in the last two years. The entire population of Peoria. Gone. Most of them women and children. That's out of only 24 million people in Iraq; an equivalent loss in the U.S. would be 1.2 million people, the population of Dallas or San Diego.

Four hundred World Trade Centers.

Everyone in Iraq knows somebody who has died. Most families have been touched. The war, meanwhile, has tormented everyone. From one city alone, the entire population of Fallujah, 400,000 -- minus the deaths -- are now homeless or refugees. The health care system is in crisis; it cannot handle the sick and wounded. Unemployment is endemic, reaching 70 percent. The economy is in tatters. Reconstruction is at a standstill (and the money appropriated for it is disappearing down well-lined pockets of Bush Administration friends.) Electricity is available perhaps a couple of hours a day. Prisoners continue to be randomly arrested and abused. People cannot leave their homes; the security situation in much of the country is a nightmare: not only the war's random shootings, car bombs, and IEDs, but the roving criminal gangs nobody has the power to curtail.

One hundred thousand dead.

Among Iraqis, America gets the blame for this. We should have, in their minds, gotten rid of Saddam, secured the peace, and then left Iraqis to govern themselves. Instead, we tried to set it up as some sort of colonial outpost, trying to ensure that any election would only be among trusted exile puppets who would do Washington's bidding. The vast majority of Iraqis want the U.S. out. Now. They see it as the only practical way to stop the bloodshed, the war, the madness: remove the target of American troops and an American-run government, and the reason for the insurgency will evaporate. Naturally, the Bush Administration will do no such thing.

But that doesn't stop people from hoping, and it is in this context that the Jan. 30 elections must be understood. Iraqis -- Shiites and Kurds, anyway -- voted because they saw the elections as a last nonviolent opportunity to force Dubya into a timetable for withdrawing troops. This has been a firm stance of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's United Iraqi Alliance, the slate widely expected to get a majority in the elections.

But the UIA didn't get a majority, a result that Scott Ritter, Dahr Jamail and others have charged (and many Iraqis believe) is the result of cooked returns. Six weeks out, there has still not been a new government formed between the UIA and the second-place Kurds. Kurds are negotiating for the presidency, and for the inclusion of the major city of Kirkuk in the Kurdish Autonomous Region. They want, ultimately, an independent Kurdistan -- something Turkey (among others) will never allow. Meanwhile, negotiations between the Kurds and Shiites over a new government threaten to shut out the Sunnis, who already comprise the bulk of the insurgency -- a prescription for civil war.

In other words, it's a mess, and getting worse. The bombings and shootings continue to increase; the suffering continues to increase. Amazingly, many Iraqis now pine for the un-liberated days of Saddam. They are clear on one thing: the United States must go. Even civil war, they say, would be preferable to the current nightmare.

The Iraqi war has its costs in the United States, too: soldiers killed, or maimed physically or mentally. Anecdotal evidence already suggests a new Gulf War syndrome, more pervasive, caused, perhaps, by the heavily-used depleted uranium shells. PTSD, spousal abuse, and even suicides are common among returning soldiers.

But this isn't about Americans. It's about the suffering (aka "liberation") of the people of Iraq, who, after 35 years of a brutal dictator, 20 years of war, and 10 years of crippling economic sanctions, had already suffered quite enough.

People in Iraq need to know that people in the U.S. oppose this war. That, as much as any changing of Bush Administration minds, is why the demonstrations scheduled across the country next weekend are so important. Go. Make your voice heard. Remember that war is not an abstract game. Remember that democracy cannot be installed at the barrel of a gun. Remember that this country belongs to us -- not to a tiny neocon cabal.

And remember the 100,000 dead. And counting. --Geov Parrish