NucNews - April 26, 2005 -------- NUCLEAR -------- china U.S. Nuclear Envoy Arrives in Beijing By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 5:40 a.m. ET April 26, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-China-US-NKorea.html?pagewanted=print&position= BEIJING (AP) -- The chief U.S. envoy on North Korea began talks with China's government on Tuesday on efforts to persuade the North to resume negotiations on ending its nuclear program. Christopher Hill, a U.S. assistant secretary of state, said he would meet Tuesday and Wednesday with Chinese officials. He met Monday in Seoul with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and other officials to discuss resuming the talks. Asked whether the six governments in the negotiations -- which also include Japan and Russia -- were any closer to going back to the table, Hill said, ''We don't know.'' ''We've got five countries that are there, and one that continues to stay away,'' Hill said. ''As soon as we get the North Koreans to the talks, we look forward to a very vigorous negotiation.'' Hill met Tuesday afternoon with Vice Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, ministry spokesman Qin Gang said. Yang was until recently China's ambassador to Washington. ''Our wish is for all the relevant parties to resume the talks as soon as possible and do more to contribute to the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula,'' Qin said. Concerns about the isolated North increased after it apparently shut down a nuclear reactor recently -- a move which could allow it to harvest weapons-grade plutonium. South Korea warned the North on Monday against holding a nuclear test. The last round of talks on U.S. demands that the North give up its nuclear program ended in June without a settlement. Efforts to start a new round have foundered since North Korea declared in February that it possessed nuclear weapons and would boycott future talks. -------- iran Iran Not Worried Over Threat of Sanctions By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS April 26, 2005 Filed at 7:59 a.m. ET http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Sanctions.html?pagewanted=print&position= TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Day after day, Iranians shrug off the prospect of U.N. sanctions, Washington's key threat against Iran's unwillingness to abandon nuclear ambitions -- and for good reason: Tehran has powerful friends with keen financial interests in blocking such punishment. But even if Iran cannot secure a Russian or Chinese veto of any attempt at imposing U.N. Security Council sanctions, it has weathered an American embargo for 25 years. Many Iranians, while acknowledging some pain, credit the U.S. embargo with making them more self-reliant. A Foreign Ministry spokesman, exasperated by repeated warnings for Iran to end its nuclear ambitions or face U.N. sanctions, said recently that ''we don't know with what language to tell the Europeans and Americans that Iran is not afraid of the U.N. Security Council.'' ''We have been subject to sanctions in the past,'' Hamid Reza Asefi added. ''In the short term, it has put us under pressure. But in long term, it has helped our economy to flourish.'' Before the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran's greatest pride was assembling the Paykan automobile. Today, its products include passenger planes, missiles and cars. And while it has struggled with inflation unofficially estimated at 27 percent and an unemployment rate believed as high as 25 percent, huge oil and gas reserves have kept the economy afloat. Business is brisk in Tehran's crowded bazaars, where shoppers pack stores and streets are jammed with bumper-to-bumper traffic. Despite a protracted power struggle, living standards have greatly improved since U.S. sanctions were imposed in 1979. Then, families struggled to make ends meet. Today, Iranians spend on new cars and holidays at home and abroad and youths follow the latest Western trends. Iran gradually has opened its market and reached out to non-American partners. Those ties could pay off if the United States calls for U.N. sanctions. Even if Iran's case is brought before the Security Council, China's energy interests in Iran coupled with its veto power could be a formidable force to overcome. China reported signing a memorandum of understanding in October to buy $70 billion worth of liquefied natural gas from Iran over 30 years. A week later, Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing, during a visit to Iran, said China was opposed to referring Iran to the Security Council over its nuclear program. Russia, another veto-wielding member of the Security Council, has invested heavily in Iran's nuclear program. With promises of more contracts, it is unlikely to agree to international sanctions without a fight. Russia has said it will continue its nuclear cooperation with Iran despite American pressure to stop, adding that it is certain Iran's aims are peaceful -- producing an alternative fuel source and not acquiring a nuclear bomb as Washington maintains. ''China clearly is opposed to sanctions against Iran, and Russia is reluctant to support sanctions,'' said Iranian political analyst Davoud Hermidas Bavand. Until recently, the United States said that while it would pursue diplomatic means to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear program, it was not prepared to take the military option off the table. But after Europe made clear it would not support the use of force against Iran, Washington changed tactics, toned down the rhetoric and agreed to offer Tehran economic incentives in return for permanently freezing its nuclear program. President Mohammad Khatami has said no incentives exist that would persuade Iran to give up its program. Negotiations with European powers are going slowly. The latest round began a week ago and was scheduled to end Friday. Iran admits the U.S. sanctions have set it back but says they have not blocked its economic and scientific advancement. The sanctions, renewed in March, ban the export of advanced technology to Iran and are partly blamed for a string of Iranian plane crashes. Tehran has been forced to supplement its fleet of aging Boeing and European-made Airbus airliners with planes bought or leased from the former Soviet Union. There have been several major plane crashes over the past two years, the most recent in 2003, when a Russian-made Ilyushin plane crashed in bad weather into a mountain in southeastern Iran, killing about 300 members of the elite Revolutionary Guards. In 2002, Iran's transportation minister at the time, Ahmad Khorram, told parliament that Iran's air industry had reached ''a crisis point'' and was suffering from U.S. sanctions. Later that year, the first Iranian-made passenger plane went into service. The twin-propeller Iran-140, assembled in Iran with Ukrainian technology, is produced in Isfahan and is a source of Iranian pride. Three Iran-140s, with 52-passenger capacities, are flying domestically; aviation officials say a dozen more will join the Iranian fleet within five years. Iranian political analyst Saeed Leylaz noted Iran's defense industry also has made strides despite international sanctions. In July 2003, the Revolutionary Guards were equipped with the Shahab, or Shooting Star, a medium-range missile that can carry a nuclear warhead and reach Israel and various U.S. military bases in the region. Before the revolution, ''Iran was a net importer of weapons,'' Leylaz said. ''Sanctions forced Iran to produce its defense requirements locally. Now, it's even an exporter of weapons.'' Iran sells guns, rifles and tank parts, rocket launchers, mortars and mortar launchers to more than 60 countries. It refuses to say which ones. Associated Press Writer Ali Akbar Dareini contributed to this report from Tehran. -------- iraq / inspections Weapons Inspector Ends WMD Search in Iraq By KATHERINE SHRADER Associated Press Writer Apr 26, 9:04 AM EDT http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_WEAPONS_HUNT?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME WASHINGTON (AP) -- Wrapping up his investigation into Saddam Hussein's purported arsenal, the CIA's top weapons hunter in Iraq said his search for weapons of mass destruction "has been exhausted" without finding any. Nor did Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, find any evidence that such weapons were shipped officially from Iraq to Syria to be hidden before the U.S. invasion, but he couldn't rule out some unofficial transfer of limited WMD-related materials. He closed his effort with words of caution about potential future threats and careful assessment of this and other unanswered questions. The Bush administration justified its 2003 invasion of Iraq as necessary to eliminate Hussein's purported stockpile of WMD. "As matters now stand, the WMD investigation has gone as far as feasible," Duelfer wrote in an an addendum to the report he issued last fall. "After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted." In 92 pages posted online Monday evening, Duelfer provided a final look at an investigation that, at its peak, occupied more than 1,000 military and civilian translators, weapons specialists and other experts. His latest addenda conclude a roughly 1,500-page report released last fall. Among warnings sprinkled throughout the new documents, one concludes that Saddam's programs created a pool of weapons experts, many of whom will be seeking work. While most will probably turn to the "benign civil sector," the danger remains that "hostile foreign governments, terrorists or insurgents may seek Iraqi expertise." "Because a single individual can advance certain WMD activities, it remains an important concern," one addendum said. Another addendum noted that military forces in Iraq may continue to find small numbers of degraded chemical weapons - most likely misplaced or improperly destroyed before 1991. In an insurgent's hands, "the use of a single even ineffectual chemical weapon would likely cause more terror than deadlier conventional explosives," the addendum said. And still another said the survey group found some potential nuclear-related equipment was "missing from heavily damaged and looted sites." Yet, because of deteriorating security in Iraq, the survey group was unable to determine what happened to the equipment, which also had alternate civilian uses. "Some of it probably has been sold for its scrap value. Other pieces might have been disassembled" and converted into motors or condensers, an addendum said. "Still others could have been taken intact to preserve their function." Leaving the door to the investigation open just a crack, a U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a small team still operates under the U.S.-led multinational force in Iraq, although the survey group officially disbanded earlier this month. Those staying on continue to examine documents and follow up any reports of weapons of mass destruction. In a statement accompanying the final installment, Duelfer said any surprise discovery would be most likely in the biological weapons area because facilities and other clues would be comparatively small. Among unanswered questions, Duelfer said a group formed to investigate whether WMD-related material was shipped out of Iraq before the invasion wasn't able to reach firm conclusions because the security situation halted its work. Investigators were focusing on transfers from Iraq to Syria. The questioning of Iraqis did not produce any information to support the transfer possibility, one addendum said. The Iraq Survey Group believes "it was unlikely that an official transfer of WMD material from Iraq to Syria took place. However, ISG was unable to rule out unofficial movement of limited WMD-related materials." ---- Inspectors Find No Proof Iraq Hid Weapons in Syria By REUTERS April 26, 2005 Filed at 2:48 a.m. ET http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-iraq-wmd-syria.html?pagewanted=print&position= WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S.-led group that scoured Iraq for weapons of mass destruction has found no evidence Iraq hid such weapons in Syria before the U.S. invasion in March 2003, according to a final report on the investigation. The 1,700-member Iraq Survey Team, responsible for the weapons hunt, also said in a report released late on Monday it found no Iraqi officials with direct knowledge of a transfer of weapons of mass destruction developed by former President Saddam Hussein. President Bush and other U.S. officials cited a grave threat posed by Iraq's chemical and biological weapons and Baghdad's efforts to acquire a nuclear arms capability as a justification for war. No such weapons were found but U.S. officials said it was possible Saddam sent them to Syria for safekeeping. The report is the final addendum to the investigators' September report that concluded prewar Iraq had no WMD stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and that its nuclear program had decayed before the U.S.-led invasion. The Iraq Survey Group, led by CIA special adviser Charles Duelfer, wrapped up its physical searches for weapons of mass destruction last December. The new report posted on the CIA Web site said: ``Based on evidence available ... it is unlikely that an official transfer of WMD material from Iraq to Syria took place. However ISG was unable to rule out unofficial movement of limited WMD-related materials.'' It said investigators ``found no senior policy, program or intelligence officials who admitted any direct knowledge of such movement of WMD.'' ``Indeed, they uniformly denied any knowledge of residual WMD that have been secreted to Syria,'' the report said. The report said the WMD investigation had gone as far as feasible and there was no reason to continue holding many of the Iraqis who had been detained in the process. ``After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing on the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted,'' the report said. It noted there was a risk some Iraqi scientists might share their skills with insurgents or terrorists. The report added the pool of scientists who still possessed potentially dangerous expertise was shrinking. -------- japan Japan gives go-ahead for new nuclear power plant Tue Apr 26, 2005 05:12 AM ET (Reuters) http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=3EKCA15WG1TI0CRBAE0CFEY?type=topNews&storyID=8294321 TOKYO, April 26 - Japan has given the go-ahead to Chugoku Electric Power Co. (9504.T: Quote, Profile, Research) to build the country's 57th nuclear power unit, the government and the company said on Tuesday, as the industry struggles to repair an image damaged by scandals. The announcement comes about three months after the country's 53rd nuclear power generator began commercial operation, and against a backdrop of safety scandals and a fatal accident at a plant last year that shook the domestic nuclear power industry. Chugoku Electric, one of the smallest of Japan's 10 major utilities, will build the No. 3 1.373-million kilowatt nuclear power generator at its Shimane plant in western Japan, a company spokesman said. The electric company plans to start building the unit in September and begin commercial operation in December 2011, the company said in a statement. Chugoku Electric currently operates two nuclear power units, with a combined capacity of 1.28 million kilowatts. Both units are located at the Shimane plant. The Shimane No. 3 unit will be the second biggest single nuclear power generator in Japan. It was the first time since July 2003 the government had approved the building of a new nuclear unit. Japan has a policy of promoting nuclear power, prompted by its lack of natural resources such as oil and natural gas and amid an international movement to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. "The Japanese electricity industry aims to increase use of nuclear power energy and reduce oil use," an official at the government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said. Japan has the world's third biggest nuclear power generation capacity after the United States and France. Its 53 nuclear power generators have a combined capacity of 47.122 million kilowatts. Three nuclear power generators are currently under construction or undergoing test runs in Japan. The 53 units generated about 28 percent of Japan's electricity in the business year ended March 2005 and they are expected to generate about 40 percent of electricity in 2013. SCANDALS The Japanese electricity industry has suffered years of scandals and accidents related to nuclear power plants. In August, hot water and steam leaking from a broken pipe at Kansai Electric Power Co.'s (9503.T: Quote, Profile, Research) Mihama No. 3 nuclear power generator killed five workers in Japan's worst-ever nuclear power plant accident. The company had not inspected the pipe since the unit started operating in December 1976. Kansai's president said he would resign in June to take responsibility for the accident. That accident followed an admission by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) (9501.T: Quote, Profile, Research) that it had falsified nuclear safety documents for more than a decade, a revelation that forced it to shut all 17 of its nuclear power generators for inspections by mid-April 2002. TEPCO and Kansai Electric are Japan's number one and two utilities. -------- korea N. Korea, 6, and Bush, 0 By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF April 26, 2005 NY TIMES OP-ED COLUMNIST http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/26/opinion/26kristof.html?pagewanted=print&position= Here's a foreign affairs quiz: (1) How many nuclear weapons did North Korea produce in Bill Clinton's eight years of office? (2) How many nuclear weapons has it produced so far in President Bush's four years in office? The answer to the first question, by all accounts, is zero. The answer to the second is fuzzier, but about six. The total will probably rise in coming months, for North Korea has shut down its Yongbyon reactor and says that it plans to extract the fuel rods from it. That will give it enough plutonium for two or three more weapons. The single greatest failure of the Bush administration's foreign policy concerns North Korea. Mr. Bush's policies toward North Korea have backfired and led the North to churn out nuclear weapons, and they have also antagonized our allies and diminished America's stature in Asia. The upshot is that there's a significantly greater risk of another Korean War, a greater likelihood that other Asian countries, like Japan, will eventually go nuclear as well, and a greater risk that terrorists will acquire plutonium or uranium. In fairness, all this is more Kim Jong Il's fault than Mr. Bush's. Right now some administration officials are glaring at this page and muttering expletives about smarty-pants journalists who don't appreciate how wretched all the options are. But if the Bush administration had just adopted the policies that Colin Powell initially pushed for - and that Mr. Bush largely came to accept several years later - then this mess could probably have been averted. You don't have to take it from me. Charles Pritchard, the ambassador and special envoy who was the point man for North Korea in the first Bush administration, says of this administration's decision-makers: "They blew it." Another expert still involved in North Korea policy puts it this way: "Their A.B.C. approach - 'Anything but Clinton' - led to these problems." A bit of background: North Korea made one or two nuclear weapons around 1989, during the first Bush administration, but froze its plutonium program under the 1994 "Agreed Framework" with the Clinton administration. North Korea adhered to the freeze on plutonium production, but about 1999, it secretly started on a second nuclear route involving uranium. That was much less worrisome than the plutonium program (it still seems to be years from producing a single uranium weapon), and it probably could have been resolved through negotiation, as past crises had been. Instead, Mr. Bush refused to negotiate bilaterally, so now we have the worst of both worlds: that uranium program is still in place, and the plutonium program is churning out weapons material as well. Now the administration talks about asking the Security Council for some kind of limited quarantine for North Korea. That won't fly, because China and South Korea won't enforce it. It's more likely that North Korea will continue to churn out plutonium as well as uranium, and perhaps conduct an underground nuclear test. And administration hawks will again consider a military strike on Yongbyon, even though that would risk another Korean War. North Korea is the most odious country in the world today. It has been caught counterfeiting U.S. dollars and smuggling drugs, and prisoners have been led along with wire threaded through their collarbones so they can't run away. While some two million North Koreans were starving to death in the late 1990's, Mr. Kim spent $2.6 million on Swiss watches. He's the kind of man who, when he didn't like a haircut once, executed the barber. But Mr. Bush seems frozen in the headlights, unable to take any action at all toward North Korea. American policy now is to hope that Mr. Kim has a heart attack. Selig Harrison, an American scholar just back from Pyongyang, says North Korean officials told him that in direct negotiations with the U.S., they would be willing to discuss a return to their plutonium freeze. Everything would depend on the details, including verification, but why are we refusing so adamantly even to explore this possibility? The irony is that Mr. Bush's policies toward North Korea have steadily become more reasonable over time. Perhaps by the time he leaves office, he'll finally be willing to negotiate seriously with the North Koreans. But by then North Korea will have well over a dozen nuclear weapons, the risks of a terrorist nuclear explosion at Grand Central Terminal will be increased, and our influence in Asia will be in tatters. E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com -------- russia Putin calls collapse of Soviet Union 'catastrophe' April 26, 2005 By Mike Eckel ASSOCIATED PRESS http://www.washtimes.com/world/20050426-120658-5687r.htm MOSCOW -- President Vladimir Putin lamented the demise of the Soviet Union in some of his strongest language to date, saying in a nationally televised speech yesterday that it was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." In his annual address to lawmakers, top government officials and political leaders, Mr. Putin also sought to reassure skittish investors about Russia's investment climate -- just two days before a ruling in the tax evasion and fraud trial of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. His statements about the collapse of the Soviet Union and its effects on Russians, at home and abroad, come amid a wave of nostalgia just two weeks before the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe -- a conflict Russians call the "Great Patriotic War." Mr. Putin, who served as a colonel in the KGB intelligence agency, has resurrected some communist symbols during his presidency, bringing back the music of the old Soviet anthem and the Soviet-style red banner as the military's flag. In the 50-minute address at the Kremlin, Mr. Putin avoided mentioning the need to work more closely with other former Soviet republics -- in contrast to previous addresses -- and made passing reference to the treatment of Russian-speaking minorities in former Soviet republics. "First and foremost, it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," Mr. Putin said. "As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory. The epidemic of collapse has spilled over to Russia itself." Russia regularly complains about discrimination against Russian-speaking minorities, particularly in the Baltic countries of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. There was no immediate reaction from officials in the three countries, which have often stormy relations with Moscow. Mr. Putin's popularity has been bruised in the past year by widespread street protests over painful social security reforms and his unsuccessful attempts to head off a popular uprising in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine. Critics also have criticized the Russian leader for reacting to terrorist attacks last year by pushing through legislation ending the election of independent lawmakers and the popular elections of provincial governors. The 60th anniversary Victory Day celebrations, to be held May 9 in Moscow, will be a major celebration for Russia. Dozens of heads of state are expected to attend, including President Bush, French President Jacques Chirac and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Workers are frantically painting and scrubbing the city -- red, star-studded posters hailing war veterans are plastered throughout the capital and vintage Soviet war films are being shown almost nightly on television. Much of Mr. Putin's speech centered on assuaging the fears of investors who have been spooked by a series of contradictory and sometimes punitive legal and regulatory measures. He said tax inspectors do not have the right to "terrorize business," and repeated a call for the time for challenging the results of past privatization deals to be cut to three years from the current 10. Foreign companies need clear "rules of the game" on which sectors of the economy are open to investment, Mr. Putin said, adding that Russians should be encouraged to bring their undeclared earnings home rather than stash them away abroad. Investors and analysts are closely watching how a Moscow court will rule as early as tomorrow in the criminal case of Khodorkovsky -- once Russia's richest man and now its most famous inmate. Many see the criminal trial and a parallel tax assault that has dismantled his Yukos oil empire as a Kremlin-instituted policy. Some experts say Russia is already experiencing slowed growth as a result of Yukos, along with other cases, such as a $1 billion tax bill imposed on the Anglo-Russian oil company TNK-BP. ---- Stymied by Nuclear Secrecy By Pavel Felgenhauer Tuesday, April 26, 2005. Moscow Times Issue 3154. Page 11. http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/04/26/009.html During last week's visit to Moscow, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice created quite a stir when she told journalists that progress has been achieved in talks to allow American inspectors access to Russian nuclear installations. Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov was quick to deny this: "Visits by U.S. inspectors to nuclear installations in Russia are not under consideration. It's not an issue." During the summit between President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush in Bratislava, Slovakia this February, the official Kremlin web site published, apparently by mistake, a preliminary draft of the Joint Statement on Nuclear Security that contained a sentence about U.S. inspectors having access to nuclear installations. The official text of the statement did not contain this clause. Since then, there has been much speculation about the issue in Moscow. Within nationalist circles connected to the military, it is believed that the Kremlin is in secret negotiations to sell control over Russia's nuclear deterrent to the Americans. It is an idea that has been much harped on since the demise of the Soviet Union. Under the pretext of ensuring nuclear security, the United States will occupy Russian nuclear bases. The last Soviet superpower feature it still has will be lost, and Russia will be under the full control of the secret World Government. Ivanov was so categorical in his denial because fear and opposition is rampant. In fact, the U.S. military has been performing on-site inspections of Russian nuclear bases regularly since the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was ratified in 1991. Russia has provided detailed data about the performance of test flights of intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. At present, the main problem is access to specific nuclear industrial installations within so-called "closed nuclear cities." As the Bratislava Statement put it, "While the security of nuclear facilities in the United States and Russia meets current requirements, we stress that these requirements must be constantly enhanced to counter terrorist threats." Most experts, Russian and foreign, agree that nuclear warheads attached to ICBMs are secure: In their concrete silos on land or in silos on submarines, the warheads are well guarded by minefields, barbed wire and concrete-fortified machine-gun positions. During the Cold War, the military believed that U.S. forces would attempt to take over the Russian nuclear arsenal before it had the opportunity to fire, which explains the heavy security. To better guard nuclear weapons from ground attack, our ICBMs were gathered into regimental positions of 10 missile silos in one cluster with one command silo and a common defense perimeter. The United States, in contrast, scattered its ICBM silo positions to make them less vulnerable to a "disarming" Russian ICBM attack. Nuclear materials and parts of fully or partially dismantled warheads are stockpiled in several of the 10 closed cities of the nuclear ministry, or Minatom, which later became the Federal Atomic Energy Agency, or Rosatom. An official paper signed in November 1997 by Minatom Minister Victor Mikhailov stated that over 500 tons of arms-grade plutonium and uranium were stored in Russia in conditions that "do not meet international safety standards." As the dismantling of the Soviet nuclear arsenal continued, warhead assembly factories, which did not have adequate storage facilities, were saturated with nuclear materials. More than 20,000 nuclear weapons can be made out of 500 tons of arms-grade plutonium and uranium. The U.S. has over the last decade spent billions of taxpayer dollars to upgrade nuclear security in Russia and is ready to help elevate the security of nuclear material storage within Rosatom. But without inspections and control, the U.S. Congress is reluctant to provide funding for security upgrades. Rosatom is not happy to comply, afraid the inspectors will spy on Russian nuclear secrets, recruit locals in closed cities or simply discover and make public the embarrassing backwardness of security procedures. However, a high-ranking U.S. official told me that officials are indeed close an agreement to gain access to a large number of previously closed nuclear industrial sites. It is good news that Moscow and Washington are close to finding a formula for jointly addressing the vital issue of the vast stockpiles of arms-grade nuclear materials in Russia. It is bad that negotiations are being conducted Soviet-style — in almost complete secret — allowing conspiracy theories to dominate public debate. Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst based in Moscow. -------- u.n. Watchdog Warns of Nuclear Inspection Loophole By Louis Charbonneau Tue Apr 26, 2005 10:30 AM ET (Reuters) http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050426/wl_nm/nuclear_inspections_dc_1 VIENNA - The United Nations atomic watchdog wants to scrap a little-known loophole in U.N. nuclear non-proliferation rules which allows countries to keep out unwanted inspectors, an internal U.N. document says. The so-called "small quantities protocol" is an agreement that states who say they have little or no nuclear material can sign with the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The IAEA is tasked with policing the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the global pact against nuclear weapons. One result of the protocol is that it allows NPT signatories to remain exempt from rules which compel them to notify the IAEA of stocks of natural uranium up to 10 tons, which experts say could be purified into fuel for at least one atom bomb. The IAEA said in a confidential report circulated to the 35 states on its board of governors that 86 countries have signed this protocol, nearly half of the NPT's 189 signatories. The protocol "has the effect of holding in abeyance the implementation of most of the safeguards measures" as well "obligations to provide certain information and the agency's right to request access to relevant locations." "As a result the (IAEA) does not independently verify a state's initial confirmation that it meets the requirements for (the protocol), nor that that state continues to do so," the IAEA report, obtained in full by Reuters, said. In other words, once a state has signed the protocol it is assured that U.N. inspectors will have virtually relinquished their authority to uncover secret activities, a diplomat said. "Once you sign the small quantities protocol, you're off the hook," said the diplomat from an IAEA board member state. The IAEA's internal report recommended that the agency's board approve no further small quantities protocols and that it grant IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei the authority to ask that all signatories of the protocol agree to cancel them. As a result, the report said the protocol "would cease to be operational," eradicating what one diplomat described as a "very dangerous loophole in the IAEA inspection regime." The report said the IAEA hoped to formally discuss this issue at the agency's next regular board meeting in June. An IAEA spokesman declined to comment. INSPECTIONS "KEPT TO A MINIMUM" In a September 2002 brochure on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear security, the IAEA explained the protocol. "With such limited reporting requirements, (protocol) states are assured that the effort spent on fulfilling the requirements of a safeguards agreement is kept to a minimum," the IAEA said. Parties to the protocol include the United Arab Emirates, according to a list included in the IAEA report. The emirate Dubai was the headquarters and shipping center of a global nuclear black market linked to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the disgraced scientist who supplied Iran and Libya with sensitive technology, diplomats close to the IAEA have said. One state interested in signing the protocol is Saudi Arabia, diplomats on the IAEA board told Reuters. However, they said the IAEA board would almost certainly refuse to approve the Saudi request. Earlier this year, Pakistan denied media reports that Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic weapons program, had sold Saudi Arabia nuclear technology useable in atomic weapons. ---- Ex-Officials Say Bolton Inflated Syrian Danger By DOUGLAS JEHL April 26, 2005 NY TIMES http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/26/politics/26bolton.html?pagewanted=print&position= WASHINGTON, April 25 - John R. Bolton clashed repeatedly with American intelligence officials in 2002 and 2003 as he sought to deliver warnings about Syrian efforts to acquire unconventional weapons that the Central Intelligence Agency and other experts rejected as exaggerated, according to former intelligence officials. Ultimately, the former intelligence officials said, most of what Mr. Bolton, then an under secretary of state, said publicly about Syria hewed to the limits on which the C.I.A. and other agencies had insisted. But they said that the prolonged and heated disputes over Mr. Bolton's proposed remarks were unusual within government, and that they reflected what one former senior official called a pattern in which Mr. Bolton sought to push his public assertions beyond the views endorsed by intelligence agencies. The episodes involving Syria are being reviewed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as part of its inquiries related to Mr. Bolton's nomination to become ambassador to the United Nations. Some of the former intelligence officials said they had discussed the issue with the committee, while declassified e-mail messages from 2002 provided to the committee by the State Department allude to one previously unknown episode. One newly declassified message, dated April 30, 2002, and sent by a senior State Department intelligence official, dismissed as "a stretch" language about a possible Syrian nuclear program that had been spelled out in a draft speech circulated by Mr. Bolton's aides for approval. In the speech itself, delivered five days later, Mr. Bolton made no reference to a Syrian nuclear program. Until now, Senate Democrats leading the opposition to Mr. Bolton's nomination have focused mostly on a 2002 dispute related to Cuba, in which Mr. Bolton has acknowledged seeking the transfer of two intelligence officials with whom he had differed. But a top Democratic staff member on Monday described the clashes over Syria as "an example, perhaps the most serious one, not of Mr. Bolton's abusing people, but of trying to exaggerate the intelligence to fit his policy views." In one Congressional appearance, in June 2003 before the House International Relations Committee, Mr. Bolton offered a considerably darker view of Syria's nuclear program than the C.I.A. had in a report to Congress two months earlier. Among other things, Mr. Bolton said American officials were "looking at Syria's nuclear program with growing concern and continue to monitor it for any signs of nuclear weapons intent." The C.I.A. report to Congress in April said only, "In principle, broader access to Russian expertise provides opportunities for Syria to expand its indigenous capabilities, should it decide to pursue nuclear weapons." In a third episode, in July 2003, the sharp objections raised by intelligence officials from several agencies to proposed Congressional testimony by Mr. Bolton on Syria included a 35-page memorandum from the Central Intelligence Agency. The incident became public at the time, and the government said the assertions spelled out in Mr. Bolton's prepared testimony went well beyond what the United States had previously said about Syria's weapons programs. In particular, intelligence officials say, Mr. Bolton had planned to say in a classified portion of his testimony that Syria's development of chemical and biological weapons posed a threat to stability in the Middle East. In the face of the objections, Mr. Bolton postponed the testimony until September, though Mr. Bolton has said the main reason for the postponement of the speech is that he was summoned to a White House meeting. "There were a lot of disagreements about the speech," Mr. Bolton said on April 11, when he was asked about the episode during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "It was clear to me that more work needed to be done on it." But Mr. Bolton noted that the testimony he ultimately gave to the House committee in September 2003 had been fully cleared by American intelligence agencies. Mr. Bolton's office declined to comment Monday, and a State Department spokesman, Tom Casey, referred a reporter to Mr. Bolton's Congressional testimony. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has asked the C.I.A. to provide the committee with a copy of its objections to Mr. Bolton's prepared testimony in 2003. In the versions most recently supplied by the State Department to the Senate committee, the e-mail messages from 2002 included a subject line that said "Clearance Request: Speech by Under Secretary Bolton - New [ ] Language," with the word between the brackets deleted, as were the names of most senders and recipients. But earlier, unredacted copies of the message provided to Congress by the State Department had shown that the messages, including the response that criticized some language as a "stretch," referred to Syria, according to Congressional and intelligence officials. In a letter to the Senate committee on April 22, Matthew A. Reynolds, the acting assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, said country names had been "inadvertently included" in the documents previously released to the committee, and he asked that the Senate disregard them. The exchanges on Syria in 2002 were part of a broader debate on an address that Mr. Bolton ultimately delivered to the Heritage Foundation on May 5. Sharp differences over the assertions on Cuba that Mr. Bolton had sought to make led to a rift between the under secretary and the State Department's intelligence bureau. Mr. Bolton's supporters have said the exchanges were part of the customary back-and-forth in government in advance of such speeches, but his critics say they were unusual in scope and intensity, and reflected the degree to which Mr. Bolton sought in his remarks to go beyond previous intelligence assessments. In the speech itself, Mr. Bolton pointed to Cuba, Syria and Libya as "rogue states intent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction," a trio that extended "beyond the axis of evil" of Iran, Iraq and North Korea that President Bush had described in his State of the Union address several months earlier. On Syria, Mr. Bolton said in the 2002 speech that the government in Damascus "is pursuing the development of biological weapons and is able to produce at least small quantities of biological warfare agents." In testimony to Congress in June 2003, Mr. Bolton said American officials "know that Syria is pursuing the development of biological weapons." But a report sent to Congress by the C.I.A. in April 2003 was more guarded in its assessment than Mr. Bolton had been. Using an abbreviation for biological warfare, it said only that it was "highly probable that Syria is also continuing to develop an offensive B. W. capability." -------- u.s. nuc weapons Philip Morrison, 89, Builder of First Atom Bomb, Dies By DENNIS OVERBYE April 26, 2005 NY TIMES http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/26/science/26morrison.html?pagewanted=print&position= Dr. Philip Morrison, who helped assemble the first atomic bomb with his own hands, and then campaigned for the rest of his life against weapons that could deliver such devastation, died Friday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 89. He died in his sleep, his family said. In four decades as a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Morrison was known as a spellbinding speaker and an inspirational popularizer of science, the original teacher of "physics for poets." He was known to the public though his PBS series "The Ring of Truth," and for a long-running and prolific stint as the book reviewer for Scientific American. Among his legacies is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which sprang from a short paper in Nature that he wrote in 1959 with his colleague, Dr. Giuseppe Cocconi, at Cornell. Dr. Charles Weiner, a historian of science at M.I.T., said, "The world has lost one of the major voices of social conscience in science." On Dr. Morrison's 60th birthday, in 1975, Victor Weisskopf, another M.I.T. professor, said, "Nobody else has better demonstrated, or rather embodied, what it means to the human soul to perceive or recognize a new scientific discovery or a new theoretical insight." In 1945, Dr. Morrison was among the scientists of the Manhattan Project preparing to try to detonate the world's first nuclear explosion. A lieutenant of his former graduate school teacher, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the project, Dr. Morrison rode in the back seat of a car from Los Alamos - where the physicists were working - to the Trinity test site, in Alamogordo, N.M., with the bomb's plutonium core beside him in a special carrying case studded with rubber bumpers. A little later, when he poked his head up from behind a sand dune in time to catch sight of the explosion, he was surprised not by its brightness but by its heat, he later recalled. Shortly afterward Dr. Morrison was one of a handful of physicists sent to the island of Tinian to assemble the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. A month later, he was part of a team that toured the city. Conventional bombing had destroyed other Japanese cities in a checkerboard pattern, leaving red rust intermingled with gray roofs and vegetation, he recalled in an interview in The New Yorker. "Then we circled Hiroshima, and there was just one enormous flat, rust-red scar, and no green or gray, because there were no roofs or vegetation left." He said, "I was pretty sure then that nothing I was going to see later would give me as much of a jolt." Philip Morrison was born in 1915 in Somerville, N.J. When he was 4 he was stricken with polio, which left him partly handicapped. He grew up in Pittsburgh and attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon) and then the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained a Ph.D. in physics under Oppenheimer's tutelage. After teaching briefly, Dr. Morrison was recruited for the bomb project and was put in charge of testing. His duties included dangerous experiments called "tickling the dragon's tail," in which scientists slipped pieces of a bomb closer and closer together to study what happened as it approached the moment when the assembly went "critical." Although Dr. Morrison approved of building the bomb, fearing that the Germans would build one first, he was alarmed by the decision to drop it without warning. His firsthand experience of the entire cycle of creation and apocalypse "stamped him for life," Dr. Kosta Tsipis, an M.I.T. physicist and arms control expert, said in an interview yesterday. In 1946, Dr. Morrison left Los Alamos and joined another bomb project leader, Hans Bethe, at Cornell, where his research interests gradually shifted from nuclear physics to astrophysics and cosmic rays to cosmology. He became a forceful advocate of international arms control, helping to found the Federation of American Scientists, writing for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, appearing at meetings and signing statements with the likes of Albert Einstein and Paul Robeson opposing militarism. In his undergraduate years, he joined the Communist Party, and at Berkeley he was labeled a "troublemaker." In 1953, Dr. Morrison was called before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee, where he testified that while he had indeed been a Communist long before, he was not one then and had not been since he was a young man. Cornell quickly announced that he could keep his job. His boss, Dr. Robert R. Wilson, said, "He demonstrated his patriotism by the distinguished role he played in the wartime development of the atomic bomb." Dr. Morrison never lost his fire. At M.I.T., where he moved in 1964, he was the author or co-author of several books and studies on arms control, often in collaboration with Dr. Tsipis. The most recent was "Reason to Hope," which discussed ways to overcome the problems of war and overpopulation. Dr. Morrison's activities as a popularizer of science were of a piece with his work as an arms critic, said Dr. Weiner of M.I.T., who described his style as impassioned but not elitist. He began one important lecture at a symposium by walking in and dropping a big rock, a meteorite, on the stage with loud clunk. "This is my text," he started. He helped write the script and narrated the 1977 film "Powers of Ten," also by Charles and Ray Eames, in which a camera zooms from a couple having a picnic in Chicago out to the limits of the cosmos and then back down through the woman's hand to the level of atoms and quarks. In 1992, he and his wife, Phyllis, with the Eameses, turned it into a book. Dr. Morrison and his fast-talking raspy voice became familiar to millions of television viewers in 1987 when PBS aired his six-part series, "The Ring of Truth." Dr. Morrison's first marriage, to Emily Morrison of Boston, ended in divorce. Phyllis, his second wife, died in 2002. He is survived by a stepson, Bert Singer, of Cambridge, and his wife, Angela Kimberk. Dr. Morrison's interest in extraterrestrial intelligence arose from work on cosmic rays. While at Cornell, he concluded that these particles originated in cosmic cataclysms like exploding stars and even exploding galaxies. Dr. Morrison wondered if a particular kind of cosmic ray, high-energy radiation known as gamma rays, could convey information across the universe. One day his colleague Dr. Cocconi suggested that such gamma rays would be a way for civilizations to communicate across the lonely gulfs between stars. The pair looked into it and decided that radio waves would be better still. In a paper in Nature on Sept. 19, 1959, they suggested that radio astronomers could look for a signal. A year later, Dr. Frank Drake, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va., began the first search. He struck out. Today, thousands of stars and millions of dollars later, SETI (or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which has endured political storms, has still not hit pay dirt, but the galaxy is vastly mysterious, and the words that Dr. Morrison and Dr. Cocconi used to end their paper are still apt. After pointing out the profound effects of discovering such a signal, they wrote, "The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search, the chance of success is zero." -------- u.s. nuc facilities Navajos Move to Block Uranium Mining Apr 26, 2005 PeoplesNetWorks (New Standard) http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/1745 An overwhelming majority of the Navajo Nation Council voted last week to block uranium mining on Navajo lands, cutting off extraction of the radioactive material from large swathes of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. The Council's 63 to 19 vote put an official stamp on efforts by regional groups to bar mining companies from taking advantage of up to $30 million in federal subsidies potentially provided by the not yet passed 2005 Energy Act to develop "in situ" uranium mining -- a process of pumping the uranium out using thousands of gallons of water and a special solution. Pit mining is banned by the Navajo vote as well. Now Native activists are pushing to overturn the portion of the energy bill that stipulates the subsidies, and they have help from New Mexico Congressman Tom Udall, a Democrat, who has offered an amendment to strike the subsidies from the legislation. Native American activist, writer and former Green Party vice presidential candidate Winona LaDuke called on the Council and other native people to build on the vote and begin developing wind and solar energy resources. American Indians in the Four Corners region and other states east of the Rocky Mountains have suffered for years from long-term health and environmental affects of the uranium mining that dotted Native lands during America's nuclear obsession at the start of the Cold War. Generations of Navajo communities grew up scarred by cancers and birth defects. By the early 1980s, the US Department of the Interior counted a thousand "significant nuclear waste sites" on Navajo lands. --Christopher Getzan -------- MILITARY -------- arms U.S. may sell bunker busters to Israel Proposed deal raises concerns about Israeli strike on Iran Updated: 7:44 p.m. ET April 26, 2005 Reuters Updated: 7:44 p.m. ET April 26, 2005 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7646107/ WASHINGTON - The Pentagon notified Congress on Tuesday of a proposed sale to Israel of 100 guided bunker-busting bombs, a move that analysts said could prompt concerns about a unilateral Israel strike against Iran. Israel has requested the sale by the Lockheed Martin Corp. of GBU-28s worth as much as $30 million, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency said in a notice required by law for government-to-government military sales. The GBU-28 was developed for penetrating hardened command centers located deep underground and would be used by the Israeli air force on its U.S.-built F-15 aircraft, the agency said. Israel dismisses speculation Israel — believed to be the Middle East’s only nuclear armed state — has denied speculation that it might make a military strike on Iran to prevent it from producing an atomic bomb. In 1981 Israel sent jets to bomb an Iraqi reactor, driving Saddam Hussein’s quest for a bomb underground and fueling speculation of a similar strike on Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in a interview with CNN earlier this month, said his country was not planning any military attack on Iran. Sharon, in a separate interview with Fox News, said: “Of course we take all precautions and all the steps to defend ourselves. But it’s not that Israel should give the answer to the international problem” of Iran potentially developing a bomb. In January, Vice President Dick Cheney warned Israel could in the future try to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency said the sale of the GBU-28s would “not affect the basic military balance in the region.” ‘A provocative step’ John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World, said the proposed sale was clearly “a provocative step” that would prompt concerns about a unilateral Israeli strike, particularly in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. “One could be suspicious that these bombs could be used for an Israeli attack on Iran,” Isaacs said, noting that the bunker-busting bombs in question were non-nuclear, which limited their ability to dig far underground. “This particular munition is designed to destroy deeply buried high-value assets such as command centers or nuclear weapons facilities,” agreed Loren Thompson at the Virginia-based Lexington Institute. “Draw your own conclusions.” The success of any such strike on possible Iranian nuclear facilities would depend on the quality of intelligence about the location of such facilities, as well as how far underground such sites were buried, Isaacs said. “It’s not a slam dunk in any way,” he added. Once notified, Congress has 30 days to reject planned foreign military sales but rarely does so. -------- china Taiwan needs weapons to counter China buildup April 26, 2005 By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050425-094959-3865r.htm Taiwan urgently needs to buy submarines, missile defenses and patrol aircraft to counter the growing threat posed by China's rapid buildup of military forces, a former Pentagon China specialist says. Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Mark Stokes, until recently one of the top China policy-makers at the Pentagon, said the Chinese arms buildup is "extremely serious and growing more serious by the day." "Since 1999, the People's Republic of China has embarked on a concentrated and aggressive campaign to diversify its options in order to force Taiwan's political and military capitulation in an increasingly brief period of time," Col. Stokes said. Col. Stokes, currently a defense consultant living in Taiwan, provided his remarks to The Washington Times in an e-mail message after they first appeared in the Taipei Times. Col. Stokes said Taiwan needs to buy the eight diesel electric submarines the United States offered several years ago, along with Patriot PAC-3 missile defense systems and P-3 maritime patrol aircraft. The submarines are needed to thwart China's strategy of conducting a massive first strike on Taiwan at the outset of a conflict. "China has a relatively weak anti-submarine warfare [ASW] capability, and submarines provide an asymmetrical means to put the [People's Liberation Army's] surface assets at risk," Col. Stokes said, noting that the submarines could thwart China's growing submarine force. The overview by the former official comes as Taiwan is considering passage of a special $18 billion budget for new arms. It also comes as Lian Chan, chairman of the nation's opposition Kuomintang, or KMT political party, is set to make the first visit to China by a KMT leader since 1949, when the Chinese nationalist forces fled the mainland during a civil war. The KMT in the past has opposed passage of the special arms budget. Col. Stokes said the U.S. response to a Chinese attack on Taiwan will depend in part on how willing Taiwan is to defend itself. Taiwan once was able to resist a mainland attack for months or weeks, but now has only days to survive, he said. "This is why Taiwan needs to invest in a force that can sustain itself long enough for the United States to come to its aid," he said. "No one should expect the United States to enthusiastically risk the lives of its own young sailors, airmen, soldiers and marines to defend a Taiwan that is not willing to take the steps necessary to provide for a strong defense," Col. Stokes said. If a crisis happens in five or 10 years and Taiwan is not ready, then "future historians are very likely to place part of the blame on a KMT leadership that sacrificed long-term interests for short-term political gains," he said. Col. Stokes said that while submarines and patrol aircraft are needed, buying missile defenses should be the top priority. China has an estimated 750 short-range missiles within range of Taiwan, according to defense officials. ---- Sudan's oil makes China a defender against U.N. April 26, 2005 By David Blair LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH http://www.washtimes.com/world/20050426-120652-1122r.htm KHARTOUM, Sudan -- Sudan's oil wealth and soaring energy prices have given President Omar Bashir a powerful ally on the U.N. Security Council -- China -- as the East African nation battles demands for economic sanctions over atrocities in Darfur. Largely overlooked by the outside world, China has become the key player in Sudan's oil industry, as evidenced by the metallic maze of chimneys, pipes and vents that glitters on the horizon outside Khartoum. The sparkling new oil refinery is a crown jewel for Sudan's military regime, forming a vital artery for a thriving oil industry that contributed nearly $2 billion to government coffers last year. Without this windfall -- likely to be far larger this year -- analysts say it would be difficult for Mr. Bashir to maintain his military machine, let alone wage war against rebels in the western region of Darfur. Energy-hungry China has invested more than $15 billion in Sudanese oil through the China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC), a state-owned monolith. The cost of Khartoum's new refinery alone was about $700 million. Freshly painted billboards in Khartoum carry pictures of smiling Chinese oil workers and the slogan: "CNPC -- Your close friend and faithful partner." China's embassy in Khartoum and its commercial office declined to talk about oil. "We are a shareholder in a number of operating companies here. We conduct our operations through them. If you want to learn more, you must contact the mines and energy ministry," a CNPC spokesman said. CNPC's annual report discloses that about half of its overseas oil comes from Sudan, and that it deployed 10,000 Chinese workers to build a 900-mile pipeline linking the Heglig oil field in Kordofan province with Port Sudan on the Red Sea. The report trumpets this achievement, completed in June 1999, as the company's "first long-distance crude pipeline constructed and operated abroad." China rushed construction of the pipeline so it could be finished in time for the 10th anniversary of the coup that brought Mr. Bashir to power. China is dependent on Sudan for 7 percent of its oil imports. When the United Nations' Security Council passed Resolution 1564, threatening Sudan with oil sanctions unless it curbed the violence in Darfur, China rendered the resolution meaningless by pledging to veto any bid to impose an embargo. China is one of five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council, along with the United States, Britain, France and Russia. Critics accuse China of being Sudan's chief international protector. "It's very clear that's what is happening," said Georgette Gagnon, deputy director of the Africa desk at Human Rights Watch. "China is now the largest foreign investor in Sudan, so it has an economic interest in ensuring that the Sudanese government is not penalized too harshly. It has been opposed to sanctions from Day One," she said. Beijing needs Sudan because of need for oil to fuel an economic boom that will increase consumption by at least 10 percent every year for the foreseeable future. Sudan, meanwhile, is happy to have a reliable customer for its oil reserves, officially set at 563 million barrels but thought to be as high as 5 billion barrels. American investment in Sudan was officially banned in 1997, and European multinationals steer clear of the avalanche of protest that would accompany any dealings with Mr. Bashir's regime. "The crisis in Sudan is being fueled by the issue of oil," said William Ezekiel, of the Khartoum Monitor, Sudan's leading independent daily newspaper. "The government is ready to ally with Satan if it can protect its own interests." -------- un Another ex-colleague criticizes Bolton 4/26/2005 (AP) http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-04-26-bolton_x.htm WASHINGTON — In the latest complaint against John R. Bolton, a former colleague says the undersecretary of state doesn't have what it takes to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "Bolton has none of the qualities needed for that job," Frederick Vreeland, a former U.S. ambassador to Morocco, said in an e-mail to the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "On the contrary, he has all the qualities needed to harm the image and objectives in the U.N. and its affiliated international organizations. If it is now U.S. policy not to reform the U.N but to destroy it, Bolton is our man." The administration stood firm Monday in support of Bolton. In Crawford, Texas, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged quick action on the nomination and said she and Bush believe Bolton is the right person for the job, particularly as the United Nations undergoes change. "We need a strong voice at the United Nations who can participate in and indeed lead in an extremely important reform debate that is going on now in the United Nations," Rice said. Vreeland, who worked with Bolton in the early 1990s under the first President Bush, said Bolton "dealt with visitors to his office as if they were servants with whom he could be dismissive, curt and negative." "He spoke of the U.N. as being the enemy," Vreeland added in the e-mail sent Friday to Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware. The e-mail was first reported by Time magazine. "It is totally erroneous to speak of Bolton as a diplomat." Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman, contrasted Vreeland's comments with Bolton's continued support from Rice and Bush, saying, "They know him a bit better than a retired ambassador who worked with him 15 years ago." Bolton's nomination stalled last week. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee postponed a vote until May 12 after GOP Sens. George Voinovich of Ohio, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska expressed reservations. The delay came amid new allegations of abusive personal behavior and misuse of his government power. Since that April 19 meeting, another committee Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, said she believed a delay was appropriate. "It was obvious that members needed more time to look into the nomination," said her spokeswoman, Kristin Pugh. Murkowski has said she supports Bolton. "I have no reason to think that she'll change her vote," Pugh said. Committee aides probing Bolton's background were preparing written questions that could be submitted to him as early as Tuesday, according to a Democratic staff member who spoke on condition of anonymity. They were also reviewing a letter sent to Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., by Lynne D. Finney, who worked for Bolton during the early 1980s. Finney said Bolton tried to fire her. When it was deemed illegal, he retaliated by moving her to a "shabby windowless office in the basement" to force her to quit, she said. Another State Department spokesman, Tom Casey, said: "We've looked into this. Nobody we've spoken to ... has any recollection of these events." Also Monday, the State Department and Britain's Foreign Office disputed a Newsweek magazine report that the tough stance of Bolton, then the United States' chief arms-control negotiator, prompted then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to go around him during talks with Iran and Libya last year. Newsweek said Powell acted after British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw complained about Bolton. Britain's Foreign Office said Straw couldn't recall such a meeting with Powell. Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman, said the foreign secretary wrote to Bolton when his nomination was announced to say he was looking forward to working together. ---- For White House, Bolton debate about state of U.N. April 26, 2005 By Bill Sammon THE WASHINGTON TIMES http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050426-122001-4194r.htm The White House is shifting debate away from John R. Bolton, President Bush's embattled nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and toward the scandal-plagued U.N. itself. "We are going to make the case from here on out that this is about reform -- or more of the same -- at the U.N.," a senior administration official told The Washington Times. "Senators are realizing this is about the U.N.," added the official, who discussed Mr. Bolton on the condition of anonymity. "And they know the president is firmly behind him." To underscore the point, the White House wants Mr. Bolton to meet with Sen. George V. Voinovich to assuage the Ohio Republican's concerns about the nominee's temperament, which some consider abrasive. The official said Mr. Bush thinks Mr. Voinovich, who last week put the Bolton nomination on hold until May 12, "will support him once questions are addressed." Voinovich spokeswoman Marcie Ridgway would not answer questions about a White House-brokered meeting with the nominee, saying only that the senator "is still reviewing Bolton's record." Enlisting the support of Mr. Voinovich would allow the administration to focus more on the United Nations, which has been rocked by scandals ranging from the oil-for-food program in Iraq to sexual abuse by peacekeepers in Africa. Mr. Voinovich is not the only Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who is being aggressively lobbied by the White House. Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island are also being courted. "We're staying in close contact with GOP senators and making sure they have the facts," the administration official said. The effort is being led by White House congressional liaison Candida Wolff and includes Matt Kirk and Deb Fiddelke, who specialize in Senate relations. At the State Department, where Mr. Bolton is undersecretary for arms control and international security, officials have set up a rapid-response effort to answer any accusations that might arise against Mr. Bolton. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday called for the nominee to be confirmed without further delay. "We've tried to be as responsive as possible to all of the questions that have been asked," she told reporters in Texas. "But I would really hope now that people will move forward on John Bolton's nomination." Democrats say Mr. Bolton is unqualified both because of his past statements questioning the abilities of the United Nations and because of a series of recent charges that he has bullied colleagues and subordinates, including in some instances trying to have intelligence analysts bolster the intelligence claims he wanted to use in speeches. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli lashed out at what he called a string of unsubstantiated press stories aimed at torpedoing the Bolton nomination. "I think what we're seeing, frankly, is a pattern that's emerging," Mr. Ereli said. "Charges get made, many of them either unsourced or based on distant and vague memories or really short of details. And then, when you look at them closely, you find out that the facts don't add up or that they can't be substantiated." Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, said yesterday that the number of accusations against Mr. Bolton has increased since Mr. Voinovich postponed the committee vote on the nomination. "People will look at those and weigh those," he said on CNN. Mr. Reid stopped short of pronouncing the nomination doomed. "Let's find out if he's qualified, both from a perspective of experience, which appears to be the case, but I don't know about his temperament." White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Mr. Bolton has the right temperament to reshape the United Nations. "A vote for John Bolton is a vote for reform at the U.N., and a vote against him is a vote for the status quo," Mr. McClellan told The Times. "He is the right person at the right time to bring much-needed reform to the U.N." The Senate committee's postponement of the Bolton vote has given Democrats more time to come up with objections. Last week, they seized on reports that former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was giving moderate Republicans a mixed review of Mr. Bolton's tenure at the State Department. Last year, Mr. Powell told The Times that the was "not as conservative" as Mr. Bolton. On a scale of zero to 100, with 100 being most conservative, Mr. Powell said Mr. Bolton is "at around 98," adding: "I'd be somewhere around 60, 65." •David R. Sands and Stephen Dinan contributed to this report. -------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE -------- drug war Colombia Coca Crop Spraying Not Harmful - Study REUTERS COLOMBIA: April 26, 2005 http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/30533/story.htm BOGOTA - The largest scientific investigation yet into the health effects of Colombia's program of spraying illegal coca crops, the raw material for cocaine, has concluded that the chemicals used do not harm either humans or the environment. The results of the study announced on Friday by the Organization of American States contradicted claims by environmental groups and affected peasants that the US-backed drug crop spraying program's chemicals made people ill. "The way they are used in Colombia's eradication program, they do not present a significant risk for human health," said the study by the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission, which is an agency of the OAS. A large portion of the more than $3 billion in US aid since 2000 has gone into bankrolling Colombia's program of spraying coca crops using the herbicides glyphosate and cosmo-flux. Critics of the program say spraying also kills peasants' food crops, although Colombian authorities say coca growers often hide their plants in banana and yucca plantations. The area planted with coca crops in Colombia's jungles has fallen by a third since a peak in 2001, although crop dusters made no progress reducing area last year due to replanting, according to US government figures. Colombia is the world's largest supplier of cocaine. The government sees destroying the cocaine trade as key to ending Colombia's four-decade-old civil war, because Marxist rebels and far-right militias both use drug proceeds to buy weapons. The OAS study was the first major international study into the health effects of spraying, although investigations in Colombia had drawn similar conclusions. "This scientific study shows us the way. We are doing the right thing and we are going to continue the spraying program," said Colombian Interior Minister Sabas Pretelt, adding that spraying could be extended to several national parks. -------- ENERGY -------- alternative energy Power for Moon Base Could Come from Sun April 26, 2005 — By Eric Berger, Houston Chronicle http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=7608 HOUSTON, Texas — Here's how local scientists propose to power the first human outpost on another world: Launch a rover to the moon and melt its dusty soil into acres of electricity-generating solar panels. A year later, when astronauts arrive, all they have to do is plug into the grid. It may sound like science fiction, but some Houston researchers believe they can turn the vision into reality. And they may well be right. A recent experiment proved the workability of the concept to use the fine, gray lunar soil, which includes silicon and every needed metal. The scientists simulated in a vacuum chamber what their rover would have to do -- melting a sample of soil identical to that brought back from the moon by astronauts and solidifying it into a smooth sheet of glassy material that could convert light into electricity. "This was the crucial step," said Alex Freundlich, a physicist at the University of Houston, of research published in the science journal Acta Astronautica. The research was funded by a $750,000 NASA grant. This summer, Freundlich and his team will request an additional $10 million to $20 million from NASA to continue their work and begin building a prototype rover. If successful, the venture would remove one of the greatest barriers to a permanent space settlement: cheap and replenishable power. When Freundlich and his colleagues first proposed the idea four years ago, it was just a clever concept, other planetary scientists say. "Now they've put some meat on the bones of their plan," said Patricia Reiff, director of the Rice Space Institute at Rice University. "They've made it a lot more believable as an option." Freundlich's project also received a boost after President Bush announced last year that he would like to establish a lunar colony as a starting point for manned missions to Mars. The current, rough timeline calls for a team of four to six people to live for a few weeks or a month at a time on the moon by 2015 or 2020, said Paul Spudis, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the President's Commission on Moon, Mars, and Beyond. A number of robotic probes must scout and prepare a lunar site before humans live there, he said. Ideally, much of the resources needed, such as water and energy, will come from the moon itself. "This is a very intriguing idea," Spudis said of Freundlich's work. "I might say it's even likely to happen." With current technology, a good solar cell converts about 17 percent of the light hitting it into electricity. The crude solar cells created by Freundlich were only about 1 percent efficient, but he says there should be no problem eventually creating cells that are 5 percent or even 10 percent efficient. If powering a moon base seems ambitious, it's a mere steppingstone to an even grander goal of Freundlich and other colleagues at UH, including physicist David Criswell. The plan, originally conceived by Criswell, calls for covering much of the moon's surface with solar panels and beaming the electricity by microwave back to Earth. About 13,000 terawatts of sunshine falls on the moon, about 100 times the amount of all the energy used on Earth. By harvesting just a fraction of that solar energy and returning it to Earth, there would be cheap and unlimited power for all. "We're running out of power solutions on Earth," Freundlich said. "This, I think, is the best solution, and we need to go to the moon to make it happen." To see more of the Houston Chronicle, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.HoustonChronicle.com. Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News ---- China Eyes Turbines at Sea to Boost Wind Power REUTERS CHINA: April 26, 2005 http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/30532/story.htm BEIJING - Wind turbines stationed up to 50 km (30 miles) offshore and in waters up to 30 metres deep could be a key part of China's renewable energy programme in two or three decades, a senior industry official said on Monday. The sea-based farms would be ideally situated to supply clean power to the populous and booming east coast area, without competing for space wanted for farming or urban development. "Offshore wind sites are close to the main electricity load centres in eastern China, so offer great potential for future energy supply," Shi Pengfei, vice-chairman of the Chinese Wind Energy Association, told a conference. "I am confident that in 20 to 30 years a very significant proportion of the wind power in China will be off-shore." China's top state planner, Ma Kai, said on Saturday the country was looking for more varied energy supplies to reduce its reliance on coal such as nuclear, wind and hydro power. Coal accounted for about 67 percent of energy consumption and 76 percent of energy production in the world's fastest-growing major economy, he said. Sea winds could be harnessed to generate an estimated 750 gigawatts, although few projects were under way now, Shi said. This would be around 70 percent higher than the country's total installed generating capacity at the end of 2004 and maybe three times the potential of onshore sites. China aimed to have 20 gigawatts of wind-generating capacity installed by 2020, equivalent to around 1.0 percent of annual electricity consumption at that time, Shi said. At present the industry is limited by its high costs, with the price of power generated by a 100 megawatt wind project over two times higher than the equivalent from a coal generator. The majority of equipment -- around four-fifths -- is imported and few Chinese firms make larger turbines. However the government has set up wind power concessions to lure investment and know-how, guaranteeing a fixed price for power, as well as help with infrastructure like access roads. Shi said he expected the cost of wind-generated power to move closer to that from coal-burning plants when there is around 3000 MW of market demand, and the country has set a generating target of 4000 MW by 2010. Unlike European wind power leaders like Germany and Spain, China is not obliged under the Kyoto treaty to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. But the government is concerned by the effects of air pollution, much of it from coal-burning power plants, on health and is keen to boost clean energy. A senior government adviser said recently that acid rain affected around one third of the country. -------- energy China Says Not To Blame For Global Energy Crunch REUTERS CHINA: April 26, 2005 http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/30552/story.htm BOAO, China - China's fast-growing economy is largely self reliant in energy and is not to blame for a crunch in world energy supplies, the country's top state planner said on Saturday. Some have pointed to rising demand from China as a contributor to high oil prices but Ma Kai said the country was 94 percent self-sufficient in energy last year, helped by its huge coal industry. "China's economy is growing very fast but by no means does it have to lead to strained energy supplies around the world," Ma told an economic forum on the tropical island of Hainan. China was looking for more energy supplies at home to meet its growth needs, and there were enough resources to support this, Ma said. China is largely dependent on coal to drive its economy, the world's seventh largest, and Ma pointed to abundant recoverable coal reserves of more than 140 billion tonnes. Coal accounted for about 67 percent of China's energy consumption and 76 percent of energy production, he said. China was trying to save energy and develop other sources, such as nuclear, wind and hydro power generation, to reduce its reliance on coal, Ma added. The worst power crunch in two decades hit China last year. More than two-thirds of its provinces suffered electricity blackouts and coal ran short amid soaring demand for energy. Shortages continue in southern China this year, with projections for a national shortage of 23,000 megawatts this year, down from 40,000 megawatts last year. ---- Nuclear Waste Of Time TomPaine.com Tuesday, April 26, 2005 http://www.tompaine.com/20050430/articles/nuclear_waste_of_time.php? Beyond the slimy but pedestrian observation that the Washington Post is further handing its Op-Ed page over to industry shills, today's piece by Ambassador John Ritch, "The Key To Our Energy Future ," is just short-sighted and wrong. Ritch wants us to believe that the only path to reducing carbon emissions is one where nuclear power generation is increased 10 times: To avert climate catastrophe, greenhouse emissions must be reduced over the next 50 years by 60 percent -- even as population growth and economic development are combining to double or triple world energy consumption. Every authoritative energy analysis points to an inescapable imperative: Humankind cannot conceivably achieve a global clean-energy revolution without a rapid expansion of nuclear power to generate electricity, produce hydrogen for tomorrow's vehicles and drive seawater-desalination plants to meet a fast-emerging world water crisis. This reality requires a tenfold increase in nuclear energy during the 21st century... The good ambassador apparently thinks there is a conceivable future in which energy consumption doubles or triples. There is none. On top of that false foundation, he then proposes a brute-force approach to our energy problems: If you don't have enough, you need to build more. Let's unravel. Climate change is only one of four interconnected and massive problems facing the planet. If the only issue we were worried about was climate change, maybe it would be worth considering nuclear power. But the problem is much bigger. The problem is embedded in the inefficiency and overconsumption built into the American economy, and by extension, the rest of the developed world. The pathway toward a sustainable future lies in the developed world becoming more energy efficient, while the developing world leapfrogs over the excesses of our present economic order. Investing heavily in nuclear energy will actually slow down the process of transitioning the American economy. Nuclear power is inherently a centralized energy source, and much of the inefficiency within the American energy grid is from transmission losses. Instead of nuclear, we need to invest in clean micro-generation of renewable energy distributed throughout well-deisgned communities that encourage light rail over cars. Reducing losses to transmission and reducing vehicle miles travelled during commuting times will save more energy than nuclear power generates today. It will also create a lot more jobs as America eliminates unhealthy sprawl and replaces it with attractive, friendly and safe communities. Or, we can just build a nuclear plant next to a poor minority suburb, sit in longer and longer traffic jams, pay higher and higher costs for distant housing, drive up the price of auto fuel, and encourage nuclear proliferation. All paid for with more industry subsidies financed by China. Thanks, but I'll pass. --Patrick Doherty | Tuesday 11:42 AM ---- The Key to Our Energy Future By John Ritch Tuesday, April 26, 2005 Washington Post; A15 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/25/AR2005042501345_pf.html In the current debate over the energy bill, one important factor is being all but ignored: A global renaissance in nuclear energy is gaining momentum, and it could have greater implications than any or all of the other proposed methods being discussed for dealing with our energy problems. Today some 440 civil nuclear reactors, in 30 countries comprising two-thirds of humankind, produce 16 percent of the world's electricity. Under current plans, these nations will construct several hundred more reactors by 2030. China and India will lead the way, but the expansion will be broad-based. Nuclear power will also extend to new countries as diverse as Poland, Turkey, Indonesia and Vietnam. Meanwhile, nuclear "phaseouts" in countries such as Italy and Germany seem sure to be reversed. Around the world, there is a new realism about nuclear energy, a recognition of its essential virtue, which is its capacity to deliver power cleanly, safely, reliably and on a massive scale. This thinking is eclipsing old-school anti-nuclear environmentalism. Increasingly, thoughtful environmentalists see anti-nuclearism as counterproductive. They worry not about the growth of nuclear energy but about the likelihood that it is not growing rapidly enough to produce the clean-energy revolution the world urgently needs. Carbon fuel emissions -- 900 tons each second -- continue unabated, even as science warns that we are fast reaching a point of irreversible global warming with consequences for sea levels, species extinction, epidemic disease, drought and severe weather events that will disrupt all civilization. To avert climate catastrophe, greenhouse emissions must be reduced over the next 50 years by 60 percent -- even as population growth and economic development are combining to double or triple world energy consumption. Every authoritative energy analysis points to an inescapable imperative: Humankind cannot conceivably achieve a global clean-energy revolution without a rapid expansion of nuclear power to generate electricity, produce hydrogen for tomorrow's vehicles and drive seawater-desalination plants to meet a fast-emerging world water crisis. This reality requires a tenfold increase in nuclear energy during the 21st century. Fortunately, advances in technology and practice can facilitate this expansion by meeting legitimate public concerns: ? Safety. In the two decades since Chernobyl, the global nuclear industry has built an impressive safety record that draws on 12,000 reactor-years of practical experience. A network of active cooperation on operational safety now links every nuclear power reactor worldwide. ? Arms Proliferation. Illicit weapons programs of rogue regimes pose an ever-present risk. But strong, universal safeguards can ensure that civil nuclear facilities do not increase that risk. Security for the environment and against terrorism need not conflict. ? Cost. Steady reductions in operational and capital costs have already made nuclear energy highly competitive. Once governments begin to impose a real price on environmental damage -- through emissions trading or carbon taxes -- the balance will tilt decisively toward nuclear. ? Waste. In truth, waste is nuclear power's greatest comparative asset. Unlike carbon emissions, the volume is minimal and can be reliably contained and managed. For a half-century, the civil nuclear industry has safely stored and transported all end products from electricity generation. For long-term storage, a scientific consensus favors deep geological repositories. Governments worldwide must follow the lead of Finland, Sweden, the United States and France by moving to construct such sites. The scope of the environmental crisis requires that governments accelerate the nuclear renaissance. One essential element will be a comprehensive post-Kyoto treaty on climate. It must include all major nations and yield a steady, long-term contraction in global emissions. The key is an emissions-trading mechanism that yields efficiency in clean-energy investment and a net flow of investment from North to South. This economic assistance will be the most cost-effective in history if it prevents the globally destructive greenhouse emissions that will otherwise occur in the developing world. Another key is investment. Full-scale nuclear investment is still impeded by the absence of carbon penalties, the short-term bias of deregulated energy markets and the fact that 21st-century nuclear reactors have not yet achieved economies of scale. Governments must prime the pump using start-up aids such as loan guarantees and tax credits for first-of-a-kind engineering costs. We need multinational investment, too. Today the major U.N. development institutions reflexively embrace unscientific prejudice while the International Atomic Energy Agency works alone to promote the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Governments must now direct the World Bank and the U.N. Development and Environment Programs to pursue a clean-energy vision with nuclear power in a central role. Recently, leading academic institutions in 25 countries formed a partnership called the World Nuclear University to build standards for a globalizing nuclear profession. To support this effort, governments worldwide should marshal their own resources -- and we must summon the great philanthropies -- to supply a global infusion of scholarship funds for studies in peaceful nuclear science. Today technology is spurring a growth in world population and energy consumption that jeopardizes the future of our biosphere. Wisely used, modern technology can also be our salvation. The writer is director general of the World Nuclear Association. He was U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency and other U.N. agencies in Vienna from 1993 to 2001. -------- environment Blair Policies "Massive Betrayal" Say Greens Story by Nima Elbagir REUTERS UK: April 26, 2005 http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/30536/story.htm LONDON - Prime Minister Tony Blair's policies on climate change are a "massive betrayal" of the British people, the Green Party said on Monday in a bid to inject environmental issues into the May 5 election. Blair's government, which has come under increased criticism from environmentalists, says Britain has met its international obligations but, embarrassingly for the nation that is heading the G8 through 2005, admits it has slipped behind on its own, tougher, targets. "I think it's a massive betrayal of the British people that he apparently does know the real risks of climate change," said Caroline Lucas, a Green Member of the European Parliament. "His own scientific advisor said very clearly it represented a bigger threat than international terrorism, and he's refusing to put in place the policies to address that," she told a news conference. The Green Party, which has members in the Scottish and European parliaments but none at Westminster, is fielding 200 candidates and targeting Labour voters disaffected by the war in Iraq. Other groups have also criticised the main parties' track records. A recent survey by Greenpeace took both Labour and the main opposition Conservatives to task for failing to live up to their rhetoric on the environment. The survey rated the three parties' responses to 10 questions on climate change, with Labour coming out only one point ahead of the Conservatives on 38 percent and the Liberal Democrats the overall winner at 67 percent. GREEN VOTE? But although Blair has made climate change a key issue for his presidency of the Group of Eight rich nations and Britain's presidency of the European Union in the second half of this year, it has barely been mentioned in the election campaign. "Who I give my vote to will be based on more immediate things like job security or whether I can afford to pay my mortgage," said James Edwards, a 33 year old Londoner who cycles to work every day. "I cycle because public transport's depressing so although I'd vote on locally based green issues, like more cycle lanes, that's not how I'd choose my Prime Minister." But the Greens' Lucas says it is time for the electorate to start thinking longer term. "The message is simple: if you want to preserve the planet for future generations, vote Green," she said. -------- ACTIVISTS On Beyond Organic: Ed Begley, Jr., Eco-Celebs Walk the Talk April 26, 2005 — By Icicle Networks http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=7603 Hearing celebrities expound on politics or talk about their commitment to causes makes many people groan. Maybe it sounds like they're being fed sound bites or just trying to connect their name to the latest hot trend. But no one can deny the power of American celebrity culture. High-profile, truly dedicated actors like Ed Begley Jr., and groups like the Environmental Media Association are having a deepening impact on the powerfully influential Hollywood industry and the messages it puts out. Join host Jerry Kay, publisher of the Environmental News Network as we hear from one of the most dedicated actor-activists, and find out the strategy behind the "greening" of Hollywood. This Week's Guests: Ed Begley Jr. Ed is both a successful actor -nominated for Emmy, American Comedy and Golden Globe awards- with a long list of movie, television and theatre credits and a highly respected and committed environmental activist. He lives in a solar powered home, drives an electric car and grows much of his own organic produce. A long time leader in Hollywood's environmental movement, his work has earned him a number of awards from some of the most prestigious environmental groups in the nation, including the California League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, The Coalition for Clean Air, Heal the Bay and the Santa Monica Baykeeper. Debbie Levin, President, Environmental Media Association The Environmental Media Association (EMA) mobilizes the entertainment industry in a global effort to educate people about environmental issues and inspire them into action. Over the past five years, utilizing a Board of Directors that include some of the most influential names in the entertainment business, Debbie has moved EMA in new directions with a strong emphasis on getting younger stars involved. She has a degree in Film from the University of Southern California, and a background in the television business. Resources: Ed Begley Jr. Homepage - http://www.edbegley.com/ Interview with Ed Begley - http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/ed.htm Woody Harrelson's Environmental Website - http://www.voiceyourself.com Leonardo DiCaprio's Environmental Website - http://www.leonardodicaprio.com/ Daryl Hannah on being off-Grid - http://www.off-grid.net/index.php?p=313 The Beyond Organic radio show broadcasts every Wednesday at 10 a.m. (PST). For information on this week's guests and to tune in, visit www.BeyondOrganic.com. You can also listen at http://www.iciclenetworks.com and http://www.wisdommedia.com. ---- Regulated Resistance: Is it possible to change the system when you are the system? Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - 01:06 PM http://www.newtopiamagazine.net/articles/30 BY CHARLES SHAW - In February of this year, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), a coalition of more than 800 peace and justice groups throughout the United States, held their second annual Assembly to hear and vote on proposals for a 2005 “action plan.” With the war in Iraq fast approaching its second anniversary, and the larger “War on Terror” crossing its third and half year, close to 500 delegates from 275 member groups traveled to St. Louis in the hopes that the “anti-war movement”—which emerged with unprecedented speed and size just prior to the US invasion of Iraq in spring of 2003—could be resuscitated. Despite impressive beginnings, the movement as a whole has yet to make any significant impact on US policy, or achieve any lasting public resonance. More disturbing is the fact that since Bush’s victory in November, it has gone completely MIA. One week after the election, the US launched a massive, sustained offensive on the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which absolutely leveled the metropolis of 350,000. Virtually everyone in the “movement” knew this offensive was a forgone conclusion should Bush be reelected (though few understood that the offensive would likely have gone ahead regardless of who won). Yet, despite this foreknowledge, the streets of America remained empty. In San Francisco, the usual hotbed for anti-war activism, barely 500 people showed up to a demonstration organized by the local chapter of International ANSWER, and endorsed by Global Exchange & Code Pink, the two most prominent activist groups in the Bay Area. Most rationalized the poor turnout by claiming the movement was “saving its energy for the Counter-Inaugural Protests.” It was believed by activists and even by FEMA that the protests would be the largest and most volatile since the reelection of Richard Nixon in 1972. But instead, the Counter-Inaugural became an organizing boondoggle, and in the end an anemic gaggle of less than 10,000 protestors showed up in Washington, DC. The Inauguration itself turned out to be one gigantic Republican hootenanny with over 400,000 fur-clad Bush supporters turning out to hail their Chief. So innocuous were the protestors that Bush backers actively harassed and on a few occasions even physically attacked them in the street. Even though the hard core members of the anti-war movement had been protesting for three and a half years—since the days following 9/11 when the Bush Administration leapt immediately and, some argued, recklessly into war mode, audaciously proclaiming “a war that will not end in our lifetime”—it was clear that whatever the “movement” was doing, it wasn’t working. It sadly had become the proverbial tree that falls in the forest, unseen, unheard, and unheeded. By the time the UFPJ Assembly came around, it was clear that time had come to consider radical new possibilities. Unfortunately, the Assembly was far from radical. What emerged from that conclave was a benign and puzzling collection of campaigns utterly lacking in passion, outrage, or threat. There was really no way to explain such politically correct palaver as “Presenting the Cost of War to Local Communities”, and “Supporting Clergy and Laity”, and tacit lip service was paid to a series of fourteen other proposals which UFPJ stated they “will support through website publicity, email announcements, and/or other similar means.” Some of these, such as War Tax Resistance, Counter-Recruitment campaigns, and Direct Actions on SUV manufacturers for contributing to oil dependence, are substantially more important, more powerful and, many would argue, more necessary tactics than letting the local priest know you’re down with his peace efforts. I spoke with many attendees who left the Assembly wondering what had happened to the “resistance” in the resistance movement, and why the “anti-war movement,” in its present incarnation, is not addressing the root causes of our war policies. Janice Matthews, a mother of six from Kansas City, Kansas, two of whom are draft age, has been involved with the 9/11 Truth Movement since its inception more than two years ago. She and seven colleagues attended the Assembly to present a campaign to raise awareness of the government cover-up of the real facts behind the September 11th attacks. She believes that the proposals that were adopted at the Assembly speak pretty clearly to the direction of UFPJ and, more importantly, their seeming lack of willingness to accept or participate in any risk. “It was a contingent of mainly middle-aged, middle-class Liberals who chose very safe, mostly easy proposals,” Matthews said, “and rejected the more powerful and potentially more ‘dangerous’ proposals—the ones that might have had a real impact. It also seemed like they alienated the youth contingent by flatly rejecting all the Direct Action proposals. I fear this will come back to haunt the movement.” It was über-activist David Solnit who helped meld eight individually proposed Direct Action campaigns into one comprehensive “People Power” proposal. Solnit (who is so well-respected The Simpsons did an episode which parodied a composite of him and Julia Butterfly Hill called "Lisa the Treehugger") disagrees with Matthews, even though his proposal was voted down. “Those of us who brought the ‘People Power’ proposal did not expect it to pass for a number of reasons,” Solnit said. “But felt we had achieved our goals of raising the discussion of strategy and of a people power approach that moved from influencing to asserting power.” Jim MacDonald of DAWN (the DC Anti-War Network) rebuffs Solnit’s acceptance of UFPJ’s refusal to adopt Direct Action plans. “I see a contradiction between pressuring Congress and nonviolent resistance because the rationale used for engaging in nonviolent resistance (especially nonviolent civil disobedience) is the belief that democracy and the democratic process are broken. I believe that one should always engage in negotiation rather than resistance if one still has the slightest hope. But many of us who engage in nonviolent resistance believe that the system is hopelessly broken, and do not believe that it can be remedied at all.” People’s strategies of public opposition…are in my opinion unlikely to succeed until they expose the unjust secret arrangements and deals on which these official policies are based. The US political establishment, seemingly unassailable on its surface, becomes more vulnerable when the private, covert, and sometimes conspiratorial origins of what passes for public policy are exposed. — Peter Dale Scott, Oil, Drugs, and War In social movements, such tactical conservatism is often linked to an underlying unwillingness to address root causes. At the UPFJ Assembly, this tendency played itself out in the marginalization of the “9/11 Truthers.” Even though Matthews knows that she and fellow 9/11 Truthers are not popular people, that people say derogatory and mean-spirited things about them and the work they do, call them “crazy” and “conspiracy nuts” or just plain “freaks,” and make the ubiquitous snide remarks about tin foil hats when they are not around, she thought that they’d get at least a fair shake, considering that 9/11 is the lynchpin for the entire “War on Terror.” But despite meticulous research, well produced media presentations, and reams of compelling evidence that shows, at the very least, significant holes in the “official story,” Matthews soon learned that when Truthers do speak up, more often than not they find themselves marginalized out of the public debate. “We submitted a proposal which summarized how 9/11 impacts the issues UFPJ and all their member groups take on regularly and therefore why it matters to them. We really asked for very little—simply that UFPJ publicly acknowledge the need for a real investigation into 9/11. Some of the members individually were very kind to our faces, and heaped lots of praise and bluster on us for our ‘courage’ and the ‘importance’ of our work, but in the end I don’t think they had any intention of taking us seriously. The fact that ‘second-tier’ proposals like ours, which didn’t ask for much in the way of UFPJ resources, were not even allowed into debate in the general Assembly didn’t help. Worse still, without even hearing pro and con statements or having an opportunity to ask questions about our proposal, it was voted down.” Matthews colleague Gabriel Day believes those delegates who voted against 9/11 Truth did so because they only will let themselves believe in the safe "blowback" theory of 9/11, which asserts that the US was attacked solely by radical Islamic fundamentalists because of its policies in the Middle East, and that the Bush Administration chose to “hijack” this catastrophe to serve their own purposes, but had no idea the attacks were coming, nor had any complicity in organizing or facilitating them. “This approach completely ignores mountains of evidence pointing to government foreknowledge and even potential complicity in the attacks,” said Day. “[UFPJ] are more concerned with ending the current hot conflict in Iraq and still fail to see the huge potential to derail the whole PNAC war machine by exposing the criminal, treasonous acts of 9/11.” Rejection is something Matthews and her ilk have grown used to in this work. For strength, she has latched on to a quote by Michael Rivero which she thinks sums up the individual public resistance to 9/11 Truth: “Most people prefer to believe that their leaders are just and fair, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which he lives is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one’s self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.” “Our issue took thought, reading, education, questioning,” Matthews says, airing a long, painful sigh. “‘Pressuring Congress & Elected Officials to Bring the Troops Home’ (one of the five proposals that passed) doesn’t take any thought, any courage, or outside-the-box thinking and is very easy to vote for. It also takes no effort to get your membership to ‘go along’ with it.” In the end the UFPJ assembly appeared to have more in common with the recent Republican and Democratic conventions than it did with the now infamous 1969 SDS conference in Chicago. That loose analogy had been drawn on a few occasions preceding the gathering, owing to the crucial dilemma in which the “movement” now finds itself. It was, to many, a cliquish, backslapping exercise in self-adulation by the ruling elite of the “movement” within a rote setting where everything was predetermined and stage-managed. This was reflected not only in the tepid proposals passed by the Assembly, but also by the fact that “Steering Committee” membership turnover was nominal at best, even though the previous leadership had failed to make any sort of lasting impact on the American consciousness, and the “movement”, as stated earlier, was floundering in obscurity. Looking at the UFPJ 2005 “action plan” to end the war, one is reminded of the passage in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where eternity is described as a mountain of sand the size of Ireland, over which every million years a bird flies, swooping in to remove one single grain. But the question no one seems to be asking is, why did they approve such a milquetoast plan of action? What, if anything, was influencing their decisions? **** For a growing number of activists and concerned citizens, the American “anti-war movement” should not be only about protesting our one unpopular war in Iraq. It should be about bringing an end to this Leviathan known, speciously, as the United States Department of Defense (DOD), specious because it has a peculiar understanding of the word “Defense”. With an annual budget of almost half a trillion dollars, the United States funds a global garrison of scores of overseas military bases in 130 of the 191 member nations of the United Nations, fleets of air and water craft which control air space and shipping routes, a battalion of classified technology satellites with the ability to read a wristwatch, a standing army of 1.7 million of the most heavily armed professional soldiers on earth, and an arsenal of 10,600 nuclear weapons on 15 minute alert which have the capability to destroy the world a dozen times over. The US is presently engaged in two hot wars in Central Asia, and plays a significant military role in the ongoing conflicts of Colombia, Georgia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Horn of Africa, which includes Ethiopia, Somalia, and the Sudan. It is currently engaged in diplomatic warfare against Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela, and a hot conflict with one or more of the above is by all accounts imminent. The DOD routinely engages in arms deals with other nations in service of the weapons industry, which are used to foment civil wars and transnational conflicts and secure the illegal drug trade. The US also exports military training in “advisory” roles, generally a euphemism for providing intelligence and Special Forces support to indigenous armies. And in what is perhaps the most contentious issue, the US gives somewhere in the neighborhood of $11 billion annually in direct and indirect military aid to Israel, which the Israelis have used to build the fourth largest armed forces on earth, a secret stockpile of an estimated 200 nuclear warheads, and to continue the 38-year-old brutal occupation of Palestine. This aid, and the ongoing diplomatic cover the US gives Israel in the United Nations, is the bedrock of anti-American hatred in the Middle East, yet it goes largely misunderstood in the American public, and is intentionally censored by the “anti-war movement” due to the strong pro-Israeli interests of the Democratic Party, their corporate benefactors, and the mainstream media, which plays a substantial role by intentionally misreporting and distorting news emerging from the Occupied Territories. Recently, the US has consented to sell big-ticket arms to both India and Pakistan, irrespective of the fact that, of all the potential wars facing the world today, this one is considered the most likely conflict to end in a nuclear exchange. The American people appear to have willingly acquiesced to a prevailing social culture of war and militarism, reflected in the biased reporting of corporate media and a flood of television, film, and corporate promotions glorifying the military. The domestic impact of these war policies has had a devastating impact on federal social programs and state assistance. Moreover, with the Patriot Act and Department of Homeland Security, civil liberties and Constitutional protections have found themselves undermined, putting our very freedom in jeopardy. This glaring policy disaster on the part of the leadership of the “anti-war movement” was discussed in an article by Virginia Rodino that appeared in Dissident Voice, “How US Anti-War Activists Can Help Topple the Empire”: The first implication is to simultaneously build an anti-imperialist movement, as we build the anti-war movement. An anti-imperialist movement will situate within our present work US military endeavors since World War II, and give our movement a history and theoretical foundation which is today in a weakened state. Deconstructing imperialism will also allow our movement to identify with current domestic crises, and give us the theoretical tools to identify and build broad coalitions with the masses of working people in the United States who also suffer from imperialism through such projects as the War on Drugs, union-busting, the prison-industrial-complex, and the two-corporate-party electoral system. The anti-war movement must develop an understanding that the war in Iraq is linked inextricably to the entire neo-liberal project. As New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman has unequivocally stated in an analysis cheerleading Madeline Albright’s State Department, "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist—McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps." Rodino is a member of the UFPJ Steering Committee, and was compelled to put a disclaimer on this article clarifying the opinions stated therein were “solely her own.” This omission of anti-imperialist rhetoric, and Rodino’s forced disclaimer, speaks volumes to the present political climate, where it is “suicide” to challenge the legitimacy of the Leviathan. Americans have watched the Democratic Party becoming more and more unabashed about their support for the bloated and ever escalating “Defense” budget, and have stood in befuddlement as Democrats come out of the closet in droves regarding their support for the war in Iraq and developing conflicts with Iran and Syria. Listening to Howard Dean, Hilary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, Carl Levin, or even Barak Obama these days, one is hard pressed to differentiate between their rhetoric and that of the Neocons. Even ostensible “progressive” heroes like Barbara Boxer, John Conyers, Ted Kennedy, and Dick Durbin are mum on the Empire question. And lest we all forget, the Democrats ran a pro-war candidate for President last year, and odds are they will run a pro-war candidate for President in 2008. This, to say the least, has presented a fundamental paradox within the “anti-war movement.” UFPJ’s most notable achievement—the half-million strong march during the RNC—was done under the slogan, “We Say No to the Bush Agenda!” But it’s clear war is not just the Bush agenda, it is bipartisan Foreign Policy, as the Democrats have signed off on every dime Bush has bilked from the American people. Eric Ruder, reporting on the Assembly for the Socialist Worker wrote, “Throughout the weekend, no one addressed the elephant in the living room—the decision of leading members and forces in UFPJ to campaign for John Kerry. For most of last year, the antiwar movement was at a standstill—even as the potential audience for antiwar opposition increased, and the US occupation was shaken by the Abu Ghraib torture scandal and a growing Iraqi resistance.” Perhaps a smaller elephant to consider is how UFPJ got away with its surreptitious campaigning for Kerry when it is prohibited by law from doing so, under the very not-for-profit rules that keep it from adopting a more appropriate radical anti-imperialist, anti-war agenda. Two things become have become readily apparent. The first is that it has been clear for some time that the Democratic Party is not particularly interested in peace. So long as the “anti-war movement” remains in bed with the Democratic Party, regardless of whatever dubious claims they make about the anti-war sentiments of “the rank and file” of the party, they will never be permitted to address the legitimacy of the Leviathan. The second is that Iraq truly is a huge and magnificent pissing match between the two ruling parties and their respective corporate benefactors. This schism can more properly be described as two competing forms of Neoliberal expansionism. And they are fighting it out any way they can, including flooding millions of dollars through various establishment foundations down into the not-for-profit activist sector, where a few, highly visible members of the “progressive left” have imprisoned the “anti-war” debate inside Iraq like an ideological Abu Ghraib. Next week: Who and What are “The Gatekeepers of the So-Called Left”? Charles Shaw is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Newtopia, and has been deeply involved in the anti-war movement since the bombing of Afghanistan. Newtopia Magazine is a member group of United for Peace and Justice.