NucNews - June 1, 2005
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Containers with radioactive cobalt found in Georgian capital
TBILISI (AFP) Jun 01, 2005
http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050601040911.7tqcfdj2.html
Two containers with the radioactive isotope Cobalt 60 inside have been discovered in a well in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, intelligence officials said.
"According to preliminary information, these containers had been lying here for some 30 years, completely without control," Archil Topchishvili told AFP late Tuesday.
Cobalt-60 is used in many common industrial applications, such as in leveling devices and thickness gauges, and in radiotherapy in hospitals. Large sources of cobalt-60 are increasingly used for sterilization of spices and certain foods.
The powerful gamma rays kill bacteria and other pathogens, without damaging the product. After the radiation ceases, the product is not left radioactive. This process is sometimes called "cold pasteurization."
The containers were removed to a secure place, Topchishvili assured.
-------- australia
Australian mining company fined 150,000 dollars over uranium leak
Wed Jun 1, 2005 4:20 AM ET (AFP)
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050601/hl_afp/australiaresourcesuranium_050601082056
SYDNEY - A uranium mining company has been fined 150,000 dollars (113,600 US dollars) over incidents in which workers drank and showered in tainted water and children played with uranium-laced mud.
Energy Resources of Australia last month pleaded guilty in a Darwin court to charges related to contamination at its Ranger mine in the world-heritage Kakadu National Park and incidents in which tainted vehicles left the mine.
Some 150 workers were exposed to contaminated water, some falling ill with nausea, headaches and rashes, after fluid used during the uranium extraction process was mistakenly connected to the drinking supply in March.
The matter was rectified 10 hours later when an alert supervisor noticed that the water tasted funny. The mine was shut down for two weeks.
In a second incident contaminated vehicles left the mine site and one was left at a mechanics workshop where children used the uranium-tainted mud it was carrying to build a sandcastle.
Energy Resources of Australia, which last year made a profit of 38.6 million dollars, was fined 150,000 dollars and ordered to pay more than 25,000 dollars in costs, Australian Associated Press reported.
In sentencing, magistrate Vince Luppino said there was no long-term physical damage done but the incident had the potential to harm workers and the environment.
The contamination was foreseeable and could have been avoided by "basic and inexpensive equipment," he said.
-------- depleted uranium
U.S. casualties from Iraq war hidden away at Walter Reed -- “Used once and thrown away”
By Nicole Colson
Jun 1, 2005, 13:14
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_18190.shtml
June 3, 2005 -- SINCE GEORGE W. Bush launched his “war on terror,” more than 25,000 U.S. troops have been medically evacuated from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan--about half of them injured by bombs or bullets.
Many of the most seriously wounded will eventually find themselves at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Walter Reed is considered the nation’s premier military medical facility. But some patients tell a different story--of a vastly overcrowded facility, where they don’t receive adequate treatment.
Many of the wounded are returning home from Bush’s war for oil and empire to discover that their personal battles are far from over. NICOLE COLSON reports on the crisis at Walter Reed.
THE FLIGHTS almost always land at night--and the wounded are brought off planes in the dark. Kept away from the news cameras, the nightly parade of the injured who arrive at Maryland’s Andrews Air Force base from U.S. Army medical facilities in Germany are driven--sometimes in vans or school buses converted into ambulances--to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., the nation’s top military hospitals.
These soldiers have gone from the front lines to the back door--brought back to the U.S. under the cover of darkness to keep them hidden from the media and the public.
According to the Pentagon, the soldiers arrive at night because “operational restrictions” at a runway near the military’s main hospital in Germany, where the wounded from Iraq are brought first, affect the timing of flights.
But Paul Rieckhoff, founder and executive director of Operation Truth, an advocacy group for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, told Salon reporter Mark Benjamin that there is a different reason. “They do it so nobody sees [the wounded],” Rieckhoff said. “In their mindset, this is going to demoralize the American people. The overall cost of this war has been...continuously hidden throughout. As the costs get higher, their efforts to conceal those costs also increase.”
For the nearly 4,000 U.S. troops wounded in Iraq who have been brought through the doors of Walter Reed as of March, the personal cost of the war is staggering. Despite the Bush administration’s repeated claims of reaching a “turning point” in the occupation of Iraq, the 250 beds at Walter Reed have been filled to capacity since the invasion--and before that, since the early days of the war on Afghanistan in 2001.
In late 2003, press accounts reported that medical staff at Walter Reed staff were working 70- to 80-hour weeks to handle the influx of patients. Overcrowding was so bad, in fact, that a number of the less seriously wounded were sent to stay in hotels near the hospital--transported during the day to Walter Reed for outpatient treatment. The situation is no better today--though it is more hidden than ever because of the media blackout that the Pentagon has tried to throw over Walter Reed.
Among the patients, the number of seriously injured--suffering from burns, amputations, brain damage, infection and combat stress--show anything but a “turning point” in Iraq.
Ironically, the main reasons for the overflow of seriously injured are improvements in body armor and the use of better medical technology on the battlefield. Because of this, many soldiers today are surviving with more severe injuries than in previous wars.
According to Pentagon statistics, approximately 6 percent of the more than 12,000 troops wounded by bombs or bullets in Iraq or Afghanistan have required amputation--three times the rate in Vietnam. About 20 percent have head or neck injuries, and many more have suffered breathing and eating impairments, blindness or severe disfiguration. Dr. Roy Aaron of Brown Medical School in Rhode Island told the Boston Globe in December that the Veterans Affairs system “literally cannot handle the load” of amputees.
A recent USA Today report found that between January 2003 and January 2005, more than 400 cases of traumatic brain injury--usually the result of a bomb or rocket attack--were diagnosed among wounded soldiers at Walter Reed alone. Slightly more than half of those were left with some form of permanent brain damage.
IN NOVEMBER 2003, when the Bush administration was still claiming that U.S. soldiers were being greeted as “liberators” in Iraq, Ellen Barfield managed to visit Walter Reed. A member of the national board of directors of Veterans for Peace, Barfield and three others members of the group went to the hospital to visit wounded troops, bringing them gifts and offering to talk.
She described meeting two Iraq war vets, one with a badly shattered leg and the other with a wound caused by being shot through both hips--bad enough, Barfield told Socialist Worker, that both were certain to be “fairly messed up for the rest of their lives.”
As she and the others they were leaving the hospital, they saw a soldier walking the halls of Walter Reed who was missing both hands. “Different people are affected by different wounds differently, but I think that would be a really hard thing to experience,” she said. “Those are the things that kind of hit me the hardest.”
Barfield said this was the last visit to Walter Reed that Veterans for Peace was allowed to make. “We tried again, and they didn’t even ever respond to our request,” she said. “They figured out who we were, and we were on the no-go list. And it wasn’t just us. They got really touchy about everyone.”
Patrick McCann, an activist with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, says that he remembers meeting one soldier during a Veterans Day vigil outside Walter Reed in 2003. “Number one, he had both of his legs blown off mid-thigh by a rocket-propelled grenade,” McCann said. “Not mid-calf, but mid-thigh--above the knee...The guy was in complete shock, to the point that he was denying the injury, as if it was a hangnail or something.”
McCann said he wonders about that soldier today. “This guy was still very jingoistic,” McCann said. “He talked about some little Iraqi kid flipping the bird at him, and he shot at the kid. I said, ‘Well, I hope you didn’t hit him.’ And he said, ‘Well, I tried to.’ I wonder where that guy is, 18 months later, because I bet the reality has sunk in now.”
FOR J.D. (a pseudonym), the reality of Walter Reed has sunk in--only too well.
A patient at the facility last year, J.D. joined the Army in 2002--after being assured that there were no plans for deployment overseas. “But once I get there, and we’re in basic training, that’s when we find out about they’re going to send people to Iraq,” J.D. told Socialist Worker. “I thought, ‘Okay, what have I put myself into?’ But it was too late already.”
After serving in Iraq for 11 months, J.D. was taken to a hospital in Iraq after suffering mysterious symptoms. J.D. was sent back to the U.S. to Walter Reed, where doctors diagnosed cancer. Since then, J.D. has undergone surgery at Walter Reed--although doctors have not been forthcoming about the exact procedures.
J.D. says that there is no history of cancer among family members and is convinced the illness was caused by exposure to depleted uranium--possibly during a night when the camp in Iraq came under fire for two hours. The next day, the platoon sergeant said the attack was friendly fire.
“He explained to us that the unit in charge of the camp was testing some new equipment, and they were testing it on the Iraqi side,” J.D. says. “Our camp is divided from the Iraqi side only with a fence...They test everything on the Iraqi side. They don’t care who they kill, what kind of damage they do, because they’re Iraqis. So they don’t care.”
For months, J.D. asked doctors to perform a test to measure for depleted uranium--but they haven’t responded. “The other day,” J.D. said, “I had an argument with one of my doctors because he said, ‘Oh, that’s nothing, uranium doesn’t really cause cancer like you think.’”
J.D. says that “there are a couple more soldiers in this hospital who are young people who have no history of cancer, and they have leukemia or lymphoma or other types of cancer. And the only one thing we all have in common is that we all were in Iraq. There is another person who is trying to get that test done, and they keep on--not refusing, but they avoid the subject.”
OTHER PATIENTS at Walter Reed have reported similar treatment. Often, they say, the situation is even worse when dealing with injuries that can’t be seen--the post-traumatic stress and other psychological problems resulting from witnessing and participating in the horrors of war.
Reporter Mark Benjamin interviewed 14 soldiers receiving psychiatric treatment at Walter Reed over the course of a year. His conclusion: “[T]he Army’s top hospital is failing to properly care for many soldiers traumatized by the Iraq war.”
According to Benjamin, therapy is mostly administered by “a rotating cast of medical students and residents, not full-fledged doctors or veterans,” with a heavy reliance on medication. Even more troubling, however, is that the Army seems bent on denying that the stress of war caused the soldiers' mental trauma.
“When you get [to Walter Reed], they analyze you, break you down and try to find anything wrong with you before you got in [the Army],” Spc. Josh Sanders told Benjamin. “They started asking me questions about my mom and my dad getting divorced. That was the last thing on my mind when I’m thinking about people getting fragged and burned bodies being pulled out of vehicles. They asked me if I missed my wife. Well shit, yeah, I missed my wife. That is not the fucking problem here. Did you ever put your foot through a 5-year-old’s skull?”
Then there’s the case of Spc. Alexis Soto-Ramirez, who served with a unit of the Puerto Rico National Guard. Suffering from chronic back pain that became excruciating during the war, Soto-Ramirez was diagnosed with “psychiatric symptoms” that were “combat-related.”
He was sent to Walter Reed’s “Ward 54”--the in-patient psychiatric unit--where he was supposed to get the best care the military had to offer. Instead, less than a month later, he was dead--having hanged himself with the sash from his bathrobe.
René Negron told Benjamin that he visited Soto-Ramirez at Walter Reed shortly before his death and that “he was real upset with the treatment he was getting. He said: ‘These people are giving me the runaround...I’m getting more crazy being up here.’”
Soto-Ramirez’s medical records illustrate the military’s “bottom-line” thinking. “Adequate care and treatment may prevent a claim against the government for PTSD,” wrote a psychologist in Puerto Rico before sending him to Walter Reed.
“The Army doesn’t want to get into the mental-health game in a real way to really help people,” said Col. Travis Beeson, who was flown to Walter Reed for psychiatric help during his second tour with one of the Army’s special operations units in Iraq. They want to Band-Aid it. They want you out of there as fast as possible, and they don’t want to pay for it.”
As of March, of the 244,054 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan discharged from service, more than 12,000 had been in VA counseling centers for readjustment problems and symptoms associated with PTSD. According to a report from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “will produce a new generation of veterans at risk for the chronic mental health problems that result, in part, from exposure to the stress, adversity and trauma of war-zone experiences.”
But if the experience of soldiers at Walter Reed is any indication, the U.S. government will turn its back on this newest generation of battle-scarred veterans--just as it did with soldiers returning from Vietnam.
Patrick McCann says this disregard for the health and welfare of veterans is part of a familiar cycle. “They say that one in four Iraqi war vets--I’m not talking about Gulf War vets, I’m talking about this one--one in four Iraqi war vets who have returned have already been in for medical treatment,” he said.
“VVAW used to have this slogan: Used once and thrown away. You’re beginning to see that now, and it’s going to balloon in geometric progression.”
Josh Brand and Laura Lising contributed to this report.
Adding insult to injury
SPC. ROBERT Loria lost his arm when a roadside bomb blew up his Humvee in Baquba in February 2004. After hospital stays and therapy at Walter Reed, Loria was getting ready to return home to his family in early December.
But instead of his last paycheck, the military had something else for him--a bill for nearly $1,800.
According to the military, Loria was “overpaid” family separation pay for his time as a patient--where he was learning to get along without his right arm. They also claimed he owed money for his travel between Fort Hood, the base where he was stationed in Texas, and Walter Reed. As a final insult, they billed him $310 for “missing equipment.”
Loria’s bills were finally taken care of--after a media storm prompted some politicians to step in. But the bitterness he and his family are left with is palpable. “They want us to sacrifice more,” his wife Christine told the Times Herald-Record last week. “My husband has already sacrificed more than he should have to...Him being blown up was supposed to be the worst thing, but it wasn’t. That the military didn’t care was the worst.”
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My Own Recent Conversations With U.S. Soldiers
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Mitchell E. Potts June 1, 2005
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/05/06/con05194.html
http://www.opednews.com/potts_052905_conversations.htm
I am a Navy Veteran. I served on the U.S.S. Yosemite, and in 1991 was deployed to the Persian gulf as a part of Operation Desert Shield. I recieved an honorable discharge in March of 1993.
At some point during my service in the U.S. military, I realized that my own patriotism was being used against me to do the bidding of the rich elite that had intentionally set in motion the circumstances which led to the Persian Gulf War. I didn't figure that out all at once, but little by little I saw evidence that my own government has often had a hand in creating our own enemies. I like to imagine that had I known at the time, when I was ordered to sail to the Middle East, the extent to which the United States government had empowered and armed Saddam Hussein's Iraq, I would have chosen to be a conscientious objector. However, I can't be sure about that, because I am certain that in 1991 I truly believed I was playing a role in defending my country.
Because of my own experience, I have great empathy for those Americans serving in uniform who take pride in their role as a member of the United States armed services; I honestly believe they are mostly unaware that their patriotism is misplaced. Although, from the conversations I have had with some of them lately, I can see that they question many of their actions in fighting this endless War On Terror.
Now, I am an anti-war/peace activist. I have been spending quite a bit of time in Washington DC demonstrating against my own government's policies of war for profit. In doing so, I have been in a position to meet and talk with many people from across America that were visiting the capitol city; some of them have been individuals who have fought in Iraq.
On March 20th, 2005, I played a part in a week long 24 hour a day vigil at the White House, sponsored by DC Anti-War Network, to mark the two year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. One night during that week, I had a very interesting conversation with a young man who was in the Air Force. He told me he had flown in a B-2 Stealth Bomber during the initial invasion, and that he had personally dropped a lot of bombs on Iraqi cities.
Trying to withhold my judgment of his actions, I asked him the first question that came to my mind ... "How did that make you feel?"
I was quite shocked by his answer. He boldly proclaimed, "I enjoyed it!" However, before I could respond, he amended his re mark ... "Actually, that's not exactly what I meant," he said in a much more somber tone, "I got a rush from it ... and that is what I enjoyed."
"Oh," I replied; without informing him, I instantly starting to pray for this misguided person, as well as praying for all those affected by his actions.
A couple weeks after the DAWN vigil had ended, I was sitting at the White House Anti-Nuclear Vigil giving Concepcion, who has been there talking to the tourists every day since 1981, a short bathroom break. In no time at all, I was surrounded by a large group of high school kids who seemed very interested in what I had to say. Before long, another young man, who identified himself as an Army soldier, entered into the conversation and said he was proud that he had been in Baghdad fighting for my right to Free Speech.
Ignoring his comment about defending my freedom, I started asking him about what it was like on the ground in Iraq. The majority of the students remained silent and listened as he and I engaged in a fairly polite dialogue. After he described the conditions he was subjected to during his service, I asked him if he knew about the Depleted Uranium that the U.S. military uses in armor piercing munitions. He said he knew about the low level radioactive material, and admitted that he was often in environments that he thought were probably contaminated with DU. He went on to tell the stunned crowd of students that, although there were official requirements for protection in such circumstances, he and his fellow soldiers seldom used the protection as it impeded with their ability to fight; he vividly described trying to breathe while choking on the combination of smoke and sand he was forced to inhale while fulfilling his duties. I responded by telling him and the students what I knew about Gulf War Syndrome. He didn't say a word in response when I detailed the increased cancer and birth defect rates among veterans who had been exposed to DU in Iraq and Kosovo. I then asked him if he had any children. When he told me that he did not have any yet, I replied that I sincerely hoped that any children he might have in the future would not be affected by his exposure. You should have seen the depressed look on his face as he weakly uttered that he hoped so too.
My most intense conversation with soldiers who have taken part in the Iraq War, was outside Walter Reed Army Hospital at the Code Pink vigil that takes place every Friday night to shed light on the enormous amount of wounded soldiers that are brought onto the base under the cover of darkness. One night at the beginning of May, Media Benjamin, Nancy Shia and I were talking to a couple of young men who were at the hospital recovering from their wounds; they came out to confront us about why we were there.
Mostly, we just listened to them. We stood silently as a soldier, who said he had been involved in the Battle of Falluja, described his experiences there. After showing us the scars that indicated where a bullet had entered into the front of his throat and had exited from the back of his neck, he explained how he had felt that his buddies in his squad were like family to him; he said that he missed the feeling of camaraderie he had felt.
I asked him if they ever prayed. He laughed out loud at that. He said they did not ever pray that he could remember. When I asked him if he felt like the members of his squad played the role of God in that they were the omniscient eyes and ears that served to help each other stay alive, he agreed with that.
The part of this particular conversation that stands out in my mind the most is when he described the day to day routine of his actions in Iraq. He told me some things that I have not heard reported in the so-called "liberal media."
He described how they would often raid schools, even more than mosques, because that is where many of the insurgents would hide out. He also told me that the one thing he felt the worst about his actions in Iraq was that the U.S. soldiers would routinely round up the kids and use them as human shields. I asked him why they did that, and he replied that it was because the Muslims would not shoot their own children. He repeated that he did not feel good about doing that, but said that it was the only way for him to survive sometimes.
About that time, another soldier who had been listening piped in and told me that he didn't mind us protesting because they had fought for my freedoms. I didn't ignore that comment this time; I told him I was a Navy veteran who had spent time in the Persian Gulf the first time around, and I did not need him to fight for me. Furthermore, I informed him that my status as a veteran is not what gives me the right to Free Speech, and that everyone was entitled to that as an inalienable right. He intensely listened to me as I went on to explain that I felt those of us who were demonstrating and protesting were actually the ones who were securing his freedoms, and that if it were not for people like me, then the soldiers who are fighting in foreign countries would return home to America to find that they had no rights or freedoms left.
When he questioned me about this, I detailed my own recent experiences demonstrating in DC. I told him how I was arrested simply for peacefully kneeling on the steps at the U.S. Supreme Court. I told him about the numerous times I have heard Secret Service and Park Police blatantly lie to me and other protestors in regard to the regulations at the White House. I told him about how police in DC and NYC had arbitrarily swept up peaceful protestors and innocent bystanders alike in an attempt to suppress Constitutionally protected Free Speech. He seemed dumbfounded; I think I gave him a lot to think about.
I must note here that each of the young men I have included in this essay have told me they would go back to fight for freedom again if asked to do so. One thing I can say about all these conversations, is that the soldiers involved were all polite and able to maintain a dialogue without any macho self-righteous undertones. I feel that the people who have actually been a part of the Neo-Cons' perpetual war are much more respectful than the average right-wing zombies that yell and scream at me about how I am committing treason for exercising my First Amendment rights.
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
Mitchell E. Potts
Springfield, MO
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U.N. Training Iraqis in Jordan to Measure Radiation from Depleted Uranium
June 01, 2005 — By Dale Gavlak, Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=7853
AMMAN, Jordan — Concerned about depleted uranium and what they say are increasing cancer rates, Iraqi officials are receiving training from U.N. experts on techniques to measure radiation levels according to international standards, a U.N. official Tuesday.
Pekka Haavisto, chairman of the U.N. Environment Program's Iraq Task Force, said the Iraqis were especially concerned about the southern city of Basra and the surrounding area. He said the Iraqi government approached UNEP for help.
"They did their own studies and found that the cancer risk has increased by two to three times since the 1991 Gulf War," Haavisto told The Associated Press. "These are local studies and have not been internationally verified so it is difficult to say if the picture is so black."
Depleted uranium is a heavy metal used in armor-piercing weapons. The Pentagon maintains that depleted uranium is safe and is about 40 percent less radioactive than natural uranium.
The British government has given UNEP detailed information on locations where it used 1.9 tones of depleted uranium in the south of Iraq, but UNEP says the U.S. government hasn't come forward with the same information despite U.N. requests.
UNEP is instructing 16 officials from the Iraqi Ministry of Health and Environment, including both vice-ministers, in how to detect depleted uranium.
"The UNEP is currently providing training and equipment to Iraqi scientists to measure Beta and Gamma radiation from depleted uranium sources," Haavisto said.
He said UNEP has carried out studies on depleted uranium found in munitions used in Kosovo and the Balkan wars but "due to the security situation in Iraq, we are training Iraqis to conduct the studies themselves."
Haavisto said the UNEP is concerned that "there has been no proper clean up in Iraq since wars in 2003 and 1991. There is still depleted uranium and other chemicals on the ground. Looting has contributed to the problem," he said.
"Usually hazardous materials must be cleaned up as rapidly as possible," he added.
He said the UNEP had several other concerns about Iraq, such as the presence of toxic materials, heavy metals and oil spills that present environmental and health hazards.
UNEP's studies in the Balkans called for monitoring depleted uranium affected areas, cleanup efforts and clearly marking affected sites.
It concluded that that localized contamination can be detected at contaminated sites and so precaution is needed, while in general, levels are so low that they do not pose an immediate threat to human health and the environment.
But the Balkans studies also identified a number of uncertainties requiring further investigation, according to UNEP. These include the extent to which depleted uranium on the ground can filter through the soil and eventually contaminate groundwater, and the possibility that depleted uranium dust could later be re-suspended in the air by wind or human activity, with the risk that it could be breathed in.
UNEP is also involved in environmental management of the Iraqi marshlands.
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JORDAN: IRAQI HEALTH WORKERS TRAIN UP IN DEPLETED URANIUM
01-Jun-05 11:38 (AKI)
http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level.php?cat=Trends&loid=8.0.172988654&par=0
Amman, 1 June - United Nations agencies began a three-day workshop on depleted uranium on Wednesday in the Jordanian capital. UN personnel, donor governments and senior employees from the Iraqi health ministries are being trained to measure the substance and understand its environmental and health consequences. The Iraqi government has attributed an increase in cancer, congenital malformations and renal diseases in the Iraqi population to exposure to depleted uranium, which is used for munitions and military equipment and to transport radioactive materials.
Depleted uranium, which is twice as dense as lead, can be found in localised concentrations in countries in regions that have suffered recent high-tech warfare, such Kosovo, Iraq and Kuwait. The possible risks to human health that depleted uranium poses first came to light after the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) conducted post-conflict studies in the Balkans and the Gulf.
"UNEP believes an assessment in Iraq would add to our understanding of how depleted uranium behaves in the environment and the possible associated heath risks," it said in a statement. UNEP is organising the three-day training workshop in Amman, together with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the World Health Organisation (WHO).
WHO has said epidemiological studies are needed to investigate the reported increases in and explore all possible causal factors. Iraqi health officials and scientists working with WHO have developed plans for the surveillance of cancers, congenital malformations and renal diseases, for investigating the health effects of environmental risk factors including depleted uranium and for improved cancer control.
Areas that need further study in Iraq include whether depleted uranium on the ground could filter through the soil and contaminate groundwater, and whether the depleted uranium dust could be suspended in the air by wind and human activity, with the risk that it could be inhaled, UNEP said.
(Ajd/Aki)
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BBC File On 4 DU story
Downloaded from http://bbc.co.uk/radio4
BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 4
TRANSCRIPT OF "FILE ON 4" CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP
TRANSMISSION: Tuesday 3rd June 2003 2000 - 2040
REPEAT: Sunday 8th June 2003 1700 - 1740
REPORTER: Jenny Cuffe
PRODUCER: Gregor Stewart
EDITOR: David Ross
PROGRAMME NUMBER: 03VY3022LHO
THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.
"FILE ON 4"
Transmission: Tuesday 3rd June 2003
Repeat: Sunday 8th June 2003
Producer: Gregor Stewart
Reporter: Jenny Cuffe
Editor: David Ross
EXTRACT FROM SIX O'CLOCK BBC TV NEWS BULLETIN, 28th May 2003
NEWSREADER: Well as Tony Blair was arriving in the Gulf, the helicopter carrier, HMS Ocean, was arriving home after its tour of duty in the region. Hundreds of wellwishers packed the jetty at Devonport naval base in Plymouth to welcome the crew back.
CUFFE: Last week, another batch of troops returned from Iraq after a conflict which has once again shown the crushing superiority of American and British fire-power. The allies made extensive use of weapons containing depleted uranium - a toxic and radioactive material that's been the subject of heated controversy since its use in the first Gulf War. In File on 4, we report on new scientific research, which suggests it may be more harmful than the military is prepared to admit. Faced with increasing public concern, the MOD is offering a medical test to those who think they've been exposed to DU on the battlefield. But will the test provide the reassurance veterans seek? And who'll protect the people of Iraq and other recent theatres of war?
SIGNATURE TUNE
BEACH: Depleted uranium is a dense, tough, heavy metal which - for weapons purposes - is 20% better at penetrating an armoured target like a tank.
CUFFE: General Sir Hugh Beach helped introduce depleted uranium, or DU, into the British armoury. BEACH: There is one other feature of depleted uranium, which in point of fact makes it extremely effective, and that is it is what is known as paraphoric, which means to say that when it hits armour and goes through it, it produces a cloud of particles which spontaneously ignite in the air and so you get a great heat flash which then of course, generally speaking, kills the people inside the tank anyway, which is an advantage.
CUFFE: But the cloud of particles released on impact contain a hidden danger. Depleted uranium is radioactive as well as toxic - a by-product of the nuclear industry. And since its use in the first Gulf War of 1991, there's been growing concern that it could do long-term harm to those who breathe it in. In information published this year, the MOD sets out how troops will be protected from DU on the battlefield. It says: READER IN STUDIO: Appropriate safety instructions have been issued to those who have been deployed.
CUFFE: 'The Safety Guidance and Procedures to UK Armed Forces and MOD Civilians' was produced by the MOD's Gulf Veterans' Illnesses Unit. It warns:
READER IN STUDIO: The main DU hazard is inhalation of particulate material formed during a fire or explosion, or an impact or when DU is damaged. Anything which prevents particulate material being inhaled - for example wearing a respirator or dust mask - or redistributed - for example working in wet conditions - reduces the risk.
CUFFE: But File On 4 has learned that some troops were never told about DU and never given any safety instructions. Alan Hopkins is recently back from Iraq where he served in Basra as a member of the Territorial Army. He was called up in February and underwent basic training with his platoon of 2nd Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He says the risk from DU munitions didn't even get a mention. Out in the field, Alan Hopkins was in a team recovering Iraqi tanks that had come under fire. None of them was given any protective clothing. And when he questioned his commanding officers about this, he says they couldn't tell him what the official policy was.
HOPKINS: When you start dragging the tanks out, there's a lot of dust getting kicked up, and the knowledge I did have of DU, I know that it itself is in a dust form. You know DU is getting used out there, you start to think, 'Well is this normal desert dust or DU dust?' This is where you start asking yourself the questions, then put it to your superiors, hopefully for them to find out. Unfortunately they didn't. There was four crews in my platoon. One of the crews was half way through dragging an Iraqi tank out when a German TV crew pulled up to them and said, 'You do realise we've just tested that for DU contamination?' Then they told them it was positive. And also a British medical colonel pulled up to one of the crews and started jumping up and down saying, 'Who's told you to move that? None of them have been cleared.' And yet this is halfway into our operation of clearing the Iraqi tanks.
CUFFE: So how did the crews react to that news?
HOPKINS: They were obviously very concerned and raised these points when they got back, and once again no information came back down apart from 'Put your name on the list and we'll get you tested when you get home.'
CUFFE: It was only when he got back home that he realised what protection he should have got from the MOD. According to these safety guidelines, you should have been wearing a respirator or a dust mask. Were you at any time issued with those?
HOPKINS: No, and the first time I saw those instructions was when I looked at the web site today.
CUFFE: And it says that after work in a contaminated area, all your outer clothing should be stored in a plastic bag until laundering or disposal among non-radioactive waste.
HOPKINS: Nothing happened like that at all, absolutely nothing. When I was getting de-mobilised, I requested to see a doctor and raised my concerns with him that I may have been contaminated with DU. Basically he didn't know what DU was when I mentioned it, it just says DU. And all he did was read out an A4 sheet of paper what the current policy was - you put your name on the list and you'll get tested as and when we get round to it.
CUFFE: So how confident do you feel that you are being properly protected by the MOD?
HOPKINS: I don't feel confident at all. They don't seem to show the sense of urgency that I would like when it's my health. Not happy at all.
CUFFE: The Defence Minister responsible for veterans' affairs is Dr Lewis Moonie. How does he respond to Alan Hopkins' concerns?
MOONIE: Anybody who was definitely going into situations where depleted uranium was either being used or had been fired will have been given the briefing and will know what to do.
CUFFE: Well, he was a member of the Royal Mechanical and Electrical Engineers and he was clearing Iraqi tanks.
MOONIE: Well, in that case I do not believe that he hasn't had the briefing. Everybody in that regiment has.
CUFFE: So you dispute his word?
MOONIE: I do dispute his word, yes.
CUFFE: This is a soldier who has been out in the field. He says that at no time did he or any of the others get instructions about wearing protective clothing - in fact they didn't even have protective clothing to wear.
MOONIE: I'm quite sure that if he wishes to raise this with the Ministry or with those responsible, the matter will be dealt with. Everybody, but everybody is given the briefing on how to deal with it.
CUFFE: The lack of protection was an issue back in the first Gulf War but you'd think that after twelve years this would have been sorted out and there wouldn't be any disputes.
MOONIE: As I have said to you, and at the risk of sounding boring, clear instructions have been given. They have been issued in writing to every soldier who's gone out there. Dust masks are available - if not, then they can use an even higher level of protection, which is the respirator mask, which every soldier has been issued with. There is no excuse for anybody going into an Iraqi tank which has been struck by depleted uranium, not properly protected.
CUFFE: So should he take this matter up with you?
MOONIE: He should certainly take it up with his superiors and I'll be taking it up with his regiment as well, to find out the truth of the matter.
CUFFE: For the first time, the MOD is offering a test to anyone who's worried about exposure to depleted uranium.
ACTUALITY ON AIR BASE
CUFFE: Wattisham Air Base in Suffolk is home of the Army Air Corps and the 7 Air Assault Battalion of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. A thousand troops from this base were deployed in Iraq and many of them are now safely back home. Casualties were light, but experience from previous conflicts suggests there may be long-lasting effects. As well as confronting Saddam Hussein's forces, many of these men and women are likely to have been exposed to DU.
CURRY: Captain Ballard?
BALLARD: I've just recently got back from Iraq and before we left theatre we got a DU testing card, and I thought I'd come into the medical centre and ask if I can possibly have one of these tests.
CUFFE: Captain Phil Ballard is leaving the army in a few weeks' time and he wants to be sure nothing about his service in the Gulf comes back to haunt him.
BALLARD: We spent most of our time down in Southern Iraq in the Ramala oil fields. Due to my skills, I can speak Arabic, and I was used as an interpreter quite often.
CUFFE: So why have you come for this test, and why are you interested particularly in depleted uranium?
BALLARD: Out there I've been in the vicinity of some Iraqi vehicles possibly struck by DU ammunition. We'd go in and actually have a look at the Iraqi position that was destroyed. Quite often it would be a dug-in tank position or artillery position. Some were smouldering, some were just completely burnt out. I thought it best to come and get it checked out.
CUFFE: The Captain's the first in his regiment to ask for the test, but his doctor Lieutenant Colonel Ian Curry says he's sure more will follow.
CURRY: Depleted uranium is something you can't see, can't taste, can't feel, can't touch. I think there's a very rational fear of the unknown. None of them have been exposed by virtue of being hit by a DU munition. I would imagine that a good proportion of them would have been in the area where the possibility of DU rounds being used exists. So, taking a precautionary view, then one must assume that potentially most of them may have walked past a hulk that may have had DU used on it. It is possible that the majority of them will have been exposed.
CUFFE: And what test are you offering exactly?
CURRY: The test that I - via the MOD - is offering is a urine test for total body uranium. And if any soldier has an abnormally high level of total body uranium, then they will be called back for subsequent testing to assess the different amounts of the different isotopes or types of uranium that they have in their body.
CUFFE: The MOD's announcement that returning troops would be tested was welcomed by Malcolm Hooper - professor of medicine at Sunderland University - who advises Gulf War veterans. He sits on the Government's DU Oversight Board, a committee of scientists and officials from the MoD and British Legion. But when Professor Hooper learned that the initial test was for uranium, and that only those showing high levels would be given a more sensitive test to identify depleted uranium, he was furious. In his view, there will be soldiers with potential contamination who'll be missed.
HOOPER: I want the assurance that they're going to be looking at depleted uranium and not uranium on this false assumption that if uranium exposure is going to cause long-term damage then it will be only if there are high levels being excreted in the urine. That is a false assumption. It's an invalid assumption. Uranium testing is not going to discover depleted uranium.
CUFFE: Our understanding is that the Ministry of Defence is setting a threshold, so they're testing for uranium. If there is a quantity that is above a certain threshold then they will go on and look for depleted uranium.
HOOPER: Yes.
CUFFE: Is that not a perfectly legitimate and cost-effective approach?
HOOPER: It's not an approach that's valid scientifically. If we're concerned about depleted uranium, you have to measure depleted uranium. So any idea of a cutoff point is really just sticking your finger in the air and thinking of a number. And it's not good enough. It's just avoiding doing good science, and I think we need to do good science.
CUFFE: Professor Hooper is at odds with Defence Minister Lewis Moonie.
MOONIE: Well, I'm afraid that this is scientific illiteracy. There is no difference chemically whatsoever between depleted uranium and ordinary uranium. Ask any competent scientist in the country and they will tell you that.
CUFFE: Does that mean that you've put incompetent scientists on your DU Oversight Board?
MOONIE: I have put representatives of the veterans and various veterans' committees on who are not scientists and who frankly from what you've said just now don't know what they're talking about. I've said this to them repeatedly, time and time again. There is no difference chemically between the two. If you test for uranium in the first instance as a gross test, you're testing also for depleted uranium. If the gross test for uranium is positive then you can do the isotope tests that you need for depleted uranium afterwards.
CUFFE: But with so much controversy around the levels of exposure, wouldn't it be better just to test straightaway for depleted uranium, and then you'd finish the arguments once and for all?
MOONIE: I doubt very much if we'd finish the arguments once and for all: you're talking about people who are arguing for the sake of it now. If anybody is exposed to uranium in such a way as to produce physical effects then it will show up in the tests that we're offering them.
CUFFE: But it's not quite as clear-cut as the Minister suggests. Among scientists on the DU Oversight Board, there's heated debate about the level of radiation exposure needed to cause harm. On impact, a DU shell sends microscopic ceramic particles into the air. These are insoluble and can lodge in body tissue, especially in the lungs, where they continue emitting low-level radiation for years to come. Professor Hooper's argument is that you don't need many of them to suffer irreparable damage, and people who've been contaminated won't necessarily have high quantities in their urine. He wants a broad range of military personnel to be tested - not just volunteers worried by maximum exposure.
HOOPER: In the Minister's words, I don't see how he can make any sweeping assertion that if you are not excreting large quantities of uranium, you're not at risk and we don't need to look for depleted uranium. That is a statement that is not valid and is being challenged within the Board very actively. The debate has been about who will be exposed to depleted uranium? The answer is that we don't really know, because you can't make statements about the possibility of contamination, particularly with the very tiny particles, very fine particles of depleted uranium dust which blow about all over the place, so that anybody could be contaminated. It's a lottery.
CUFFE: The DU Oversight Board includes members of the MOD and you would think that there was a full and frank discussion between you about what was now taking place.
HOOPER: Well this is what has disappointed me particularly. We've actually established all the ground rules and we had in fact come to a place of considerable agreement about how to go ahead. But if we don't do that we're going to be in serious trouble and we'll just be back to a dogfight about the meaning of the data and the quality of the data - things that we've already taken care of.
CUFFE: One certainty in the mist of scientific argument is that there's a lot we don't know about depleted uranium. Professor Brian Spratt sits on the Oversight Board, but he's also chair of the Royal Society's DU Working Party. They've looked at all the research so far and decided that there's an increased risk of lung cancer, but only for those who've been exposed to high levels. But Professor Spratt says more work needs to be done.
SPRATT: We've also been pushing the MOD to try and do a rather broader survey of soldiers on the battlefield to try and get a much better idea of the intakes of DU that occur across the battlefield, because we really need that information to understand about exposures to DU on the battlefield. And I think they are listening to us.
CUFFE: Listening, but they haven't agreed to take action?
SPRATT: I'm getting positive noises that they may take, say, a tank regiment who are likely to have some of the heaviest exposures and may do some DU tests on those.
CUFFE: And is the MOD sharing its methodology with you?
SPRATT: We have had some views on the tests that they're going to do, but we haven't heard in any great detail.
CUFFE: Internationally, there's growing concern about depleted uranium, as veterans from previous conflicts report mystery illnesses. Two years ago, several European leaders called on NATO to remove DU from its arsenal, after it was reported that eight Italian peacekeepers in the Balkans had since died from leukaemia. The US government tried to reassure them by pointing to a study of about 60 veterans of the first Gulf War who'd been wounded with DU shrapnel and whose health was being monitored.
EXTRACT FROM US PILOT ACTUALITY ON TEN O'CLOCK BBC TV NEWS BULLETIN 21st August 2002
MAN 1: . just killed a bunch of people you know.
MAN 2: Yeah, but we don't know which ones they are.
MAN 3: Friendlies, they were US people.
CUFFE: 104 US soldiers were inside vehicles when they were struck by DU shells in so called friendly fire. There's no greater exposure to DU than that. One of them was Jerry Wheat from New Mexico.
WHEAT: I was a scout for 47 . out of the Third Armoured Division. In March of 91 we went up against the Terracotta division of the Republican Guard, and my vehicle was hit with a tank round. It had knocked me out, it had knocked my helmet off, and when I came to, the vehicle was filled with smoke, my body was kind of burning up because it had blown a fireball when the round had penetrated. And after taking off again, the vehicle was struck again with another round. And when the second round went through, I was hit with about 25 pieces of shrapnel. So I had shrapnel in my head, second and third degree burns, and then shrapnel all down my back.
CUFFE: After being patched up in the field hospital, he was sent back to the battlefield.
WHEAT: When I did return back to my unit, my vehicle still ran so I was still driving that vehicle for a good three, four days afterwards. All the gear was covered with almost like a talcum powder. I pretty much lived in that vehicle for those three, four days - ate off that vehicle, I slept in that vehicle, I inhaled the dust. We had no idea that we could have been exposed to DU.
CUFFE: Jerry Wheat only discovered that it was DU when his father, a Los Alamos lab technician, removed one of the pieces of shrapnel. Since then his health has been regularly monitored by the US Department of Veterans' Affairs, as part of its research study. But according to Dan Fahey, a legal expert who advises US veterans, the study's findings have been deliberately misrepresented by the US Government.
FAHEY: Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the US study is that Pentagon spokesmen have actually lied about the health of veterans in the study and have claimed falsely that there have been no cancer cases, and most recently that there have been no tumours among the veterans in the study. Now in 2001, when there was a large controversy in Europe over the use of depleted uranium in the Balkans, Dr Kilpatrick, who is the Pentagon's main spokesman on depleted uranium issues, was sent to Europe and he gave a press briefing in Brussels at which he stated very clearly, 'We have seen no cancers among the veterans in our study,' and he therefore used that assertion to claim to the press in Europe that if we haven't seen cancers among our vets, then there's nothing really for you to worry about. But we now know that there had, in fact, been a cancer case among those veterans. More recently there has been a story coming out of Baghdad in which a US military medical doctor has claimed there have been no tumours, and in fact I know there's been a tumour because at least one veteran who has had a tumour is a friend of mine, and he's been in a study since 1993, so sometimes they lie and other times they're very carefully choosing their words. But the overall theme that's coming out is that the Department of Defence is willing to misrepresent the health of veterans in the United States study in order to achieve a political goal of downplaying public concern about depleted uranium weapons.
CUFFE: The veteran whose tumour was not reported in the study was Jerry Wheat.
WHEAT: I had a tumour that had developed in my left arm, and when they removed it I had asked that it was to be sent to the lab in Canada so that I could get a second opinion on it, but that didn't happen because they got rid of it. Then they're saying that the tumour could have been there since birth and it wasn't related to anything, in any way related to the depleted uranium.
CUFFE: Couldn't you have got that tumour earlier, as they suggested?
WHEAT: It didn't start bothering me until four years after the Gulf War, which is about the time it would have taken to develop. If they would have sent the tumour off to a private lab like I had asked, I would have known for sure.
CUFFE: He's now worried about a pain in his right arm and is having further medical tests. Dr Michael Kilpatrick is the Pentagon's spokesman on DU, who was sent to reassure European leaders. He now concedes that some of the veterans have had health problems. You've said that there have been no cancers among the veterans in that study. It's also been reported that there are no tumours. Is that still the case?
KILPATRICK: Well, no. Dr McDermott in late 2002 in a report described one of her new arrivals into the study as having Hodgkins Lymphoma. There is now one in her series who were involved in friendly fire who has a cancer, a Hodgkins Lymphoma.
CUFFE: It's also been said that there have been no tumours, but in actual fact we have spoken to a veteran in the study who has developed a bone tumour.
KILPATRICK: The word tumour is one from a medical standpoint that means any sort of growth, and that could be anything from a fatty lipoma to a cancer, and one would expect that there would be incidences of cancers over time in any population that you follow. We believe that it is important to follow them over time, because we just don't have enough in the medical literature to be able to have any conclusion of is there a health effect.
CUFFE: So really it's too soon for people to be drawing any conclusions from your shrapnel study about the potential health effects of DU?
KILPATRICK: Well, I think that from that study, when we do not see any really large number of any sort of medical condition, that is comforting, but it is not something that you can say we can close our mind and close the book on depleted uranium. We must keep an open mind and continue to follow these individuals over time.
CUFFE: It is not just the US military who have relied on the shrapnel study to support their contention that no veteran has suffered serious ill health as a result of DU radiation. The Royal Society quotes it. So too does the MOD's chief medical adviser, Sir Keith O'Nions.
O'NIONS: There are no clear health effects that are attributable to depleted uranium, even within the US set of those individuals that have uranium shrapnel embedded in their bodies. That is getting fairly close to facts, which are extremely important. That's really what we're trying to get at.
CUFFE: That shrapnel study in the US looked at only sixty veterans. It says that there are no cancers as a result, and yet in fact there are two cases of ill health that could be attributed to depleted uranium.
O'NIONS: Well, I think the details of the tests and the observations on American veterans is up to the US to talk to you about.
CUFFE: Well of course, but I mean you draw on it as part of your approach to depleted uranium and your understanding of depleted uranium, and therefore obviously it is important that we get the facts straight about it.
O'NIONS: I mean, I'm simply unable - not only unable, unwilling - to comment on the details of that because I don't have the details of those things in front of me.
CUFFE: But if you, in a sense, rely on that study, aren't you worried that perhaps its credibility has been thrown into question?
O'NIONS: Well we rely on a very large number of studies, and we rely very greatly on independent assessments of a very large amount of data.
CUFFE: Both the MOD and the US Department of Defence have consistently said that there's no reliable evidence linking health effects to depleted uranium. But important new research funded by the US Government shows for the first time how DU might cause cancer. It was carried out by Dr Alexandra Miller of the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Maryland. She has found direct evidence that radiation from DU damages chromosomes within cells, and that the radiological and toxic effects of DU may combine to cause cancer.
MILLER: What I wanted to find out is whether or not the exposure to the cells from depleted uranium would lead the cells to exhibit what's called genomic instability. Now genomic instability is a persistent and transmissible instability from a cell that was irradiated to future generations of offspring cells that are not irradiated or not exposed to the initial metal or the radiation. And the finding was that we could induce this type of instability in the offspring cells.
CUFFE: Does that mean that the cell is damaged in some way, and does that equate to cancer?
MILLER: The data, in other model systems, in vivo and in human studies, has not yet shown that there is a direct link between genomic instability and carcinogenesis or cancer development. There is within the scientific community theories that genomic instability in general is associated with precarcinogenesis stages. In theory there is a link between instability and the process of carcinogenesis.
CUFFE: Dr Miller's research was a test tube study, but a German scientist has been examining blood taken from sixteen war veterans and a civilian control group. The veterans' chromosomes showed a significant increase in particular aberrations associated with exposure to ionising radiation.
ACTUALITY OF JUSTIN HARVEY WITH HIS FIANCEE
HARVEY: Is there 53 of these?
FIANCEE: Yes, I think so.
CUFFE: One of the veterans in the study is Justin Harvey, now 31 and getting married in two weeks time. Sorting out the guests' buttonholes is a welcome distraction from his ailments.
HARVEY: That's one job less for the wedding day, isn't it?
FIANCEE: And you've paid for it, haven't you?
HARVEY: Yes, it's all paid for now.
CUFFE: Justin was 18 when he served in the Royal Armoured Corps in the Gulf. He was in the reconnaissance unit, identifying enemy positions and bringing down air strikes or artillery, moving in and out of areas where tanks were still smouldering. Back home he became so ill he had to be pensioned out of the army, and he now suffers from osteoporosis, a bone condition normally associated with older people. His generation of veterans have been left to find out for themselves if they've been contaminated with DU.
HARVEY: Out of sheer frustration, myself and other veterans, we instigated going abroad and getting tests done, because the MOD weren't interested in doing any testing at that time.
CUFFE: So you sent away to the Canadian laboratory, and it said?
HARVEY: That I'd actually been internally contaminated with depleted uranium, and I agreed to travel to Berlin and another test was done. The test came back with chromosomal aberrations, which I understand is damage at a cellular level. It could lead to further health problems. There is some concern about the prospect of having children. That could well be affected by my service in the Gulf.
CUFFE: The scientist who carried out the research is Albrecht Schott of the World Depleted Uranium Centre in Berlin. Although it's only a pilot study and needs to be extended, he says it raises concerns about the long term health effects of those who've been exposed to DU.
SCHOTT: The alpha radiation breaks the chromosomes and sometimes the cell makes mistakes in repairing, and so you get false chromosomes.
CUFFE: What is the long term effect of those?
SCHOTT: The chromosomes are the genetic substance. The uranium also damages sperm and eggs and this leads to the congenital damage to babies.
CUFFE: If exposure leads to congenital abnormalities and cancers, you'd expect to be seeing that now, twelve years from the first Gulf War. The MOD points to an epidemiological study of mortality and morbidity rates among a sample of veterans compared to a control group, which shows no overall increase in cancer. But Malcolm Hooper, Professor of Medicine at Sunderland University, says the published research requires closer scrutiny.
HOOPER: The only handle we've got on the health of Gulf War veterans from the centre is a cancer registry, and the mortality studies have shown that overall, between the comparison group of soldiers who didn't go and those who did, that the mortality rates are roughly comparable. But if you start breaking down the figures, you begin to find some very important differences. The cancer rates in both groups are similar. But when you look at the type of cancer, you come up with things like, in the Gulf War veterans a significant excess of lymphomas, which is what you'd expect from radiation, and we know that lymphoma is associated with this because we have a study on the Italian Cohort of Peacemakers in Kosovo who have come back with something like eight times the rate of lymphoma of their comparison group. The mortality figures on their own can be easily used to make a case that all is well, there's nothing particularly different. When you start looking at the detail you begin to see that there are significant things that are different, and the mortality is just a gross figure and it's got to be unpacked to get key information about what's going on in the health of these guys.
CUFFE: The study, published in Hansard in July last year, showed that between 1991 and 2002, 14 Gulf veterans died from cancer of the bone, compared to 8 in the control group, and 19 died from lymphatic cancers, compared to 11 controls. But Sir Keith O'Nions, the MOD's chief medical officer, insists that it's the total cancer rate that's important.
O'NIONS: The overall conclusion from the Royal Society concerning that study and a variety of other studies is that there is no clear excess of cancers related to exposure to depleted uranium.
CUFFE: And yet it ignores the findings that there is an increase in cancers involving the lymph system and the bone.
O'NIONS: I don't think it's ignoring anything. It's basically taking into account all of the conclusions and claims that have been reached and putting their peer scientific judgement as to what are the clear statements that can confidently be made on the basis of it. That's rather different from just saying things that you could say that might be true. I think it's the job of independent peer groups to tell the public what you can say confidently on the basis of the research that's taken place, and their views are quite clear.
CUFFE: And can't you confidently say on the basis of that research that there is an increase in malignancy of the lymph and lymphatic system and the bone?
O'NIONS: There is no clear correlation between exposure to DU and those excesses of those cancers. That's clear in the epidemiological studies and the view of the Royal Society.
EXTRACT FROM 10 o'clock NEWS ON BBC TV, 21st March 2003
REPORTER: It was shocking and it was awesome. Tonight, this new phase of the air war smashed into the heart of Baghdad.
CUFFE: Cities like Baghdad and Basra are now littered with the debris of war, and internationally there's growing concern about the safety of civilians. After the first Gulf War, doctors in the south of the country reported an alarming increase in cancers and children born with abnormalities, though the US and British governments have dismissed any link to DU. Alan Hopkins, the TA soldier now home from service in Basra, thinks the people of Iraq need protection.
HOPKINS: A lot of the tanks were placed in civilian locations by the Iraqis, greatening the risk of contamination to the local population as well. You see a lot of the small children out there, they're very innocent, they go climbing over anything and touching things, as British children do. There's got to be future risk there as well for them.
CUFFE: And when you say those tanks are in civilian areas, I mean, how close to houses?
HOPKINS: You're looking 10, 15 metres some of them, sort of parked in someone's driveway. Very very close.
CUFFE: The UN says protecting the Iraqi population from accidental exposure to DU should be a priority, but first it needs information from the allies about where the munitions were used. Professor Brian Spratt of the Royal Society is also calling for action.
SPRATT: We're very concerned, and so is the United Nations' environmental programme, that DU penetrators should not be left lying around, particularly in residential areas, and there should be clean up. That's one thing that needs to be done.
CUFFE: And as far as you know, are there any plans to do that?
SPRATT: The answer to that is we don't really know. We believe from talks with the MOD that they have sealed off the tanks in the areas where they control, but we have at the moment no indications that the Americans are going to give us the data on where DU was used, and particularly important, where it was used in residential areas where mothers, children as well as soldiers might be exposed.
CUFFE: The Pentagon spokesman, Michael Kilpatrick, says he can't give any information yet about the amount of depleted uranium that was used or where it fell.
KILPATRICK: We certainly do agree with the United Nations' environmental programme that it is very important to get in and to be able to assess what are the health risks. We do agree with the United Nations that picking up any of the penetrators that are on the surface of the ground is important.
CUFFE: It's essential to know where they are. The UN is wanting to go in and look at those areas and seal them off. When will you give them the information that's needed?
KILPATRICK: Well again, I think that this is going to be very dependent on the situation and the war and when we are able to safely have people come in to do that, it'll be important. Where depleted uranium was used has been recorded and will be made available.
CUFFE: But why can't you do that now? You don't need to be safe on the ground, surely, in order to give that information to the UN?
KILPATRICK: Well again, this is more than just a Department of Defence interaction, and it certainly is an interaction with the United States and the United Nations, and that process is underway, there are dialogues and discussions being held as we are sitting here talking.
CUFFE: After the conflict in Kosovo, it took the UN 18 months to get NATO to say where they'd used DU weapons. It was too late then to cordon off areas and protect civilians, but it meant they could monitor the soil and ground water. They detected radioactivity, but said the only serious risk was if people got contaminated soil on their hands and then transferred it to their mouth. The European Parliament has called for a moratorium on the use of depleted uranium munitions. A UN sub-commission on human rights has declared them illegal because they cause indiscriminate harm. But Britain's Defence Minister, Lewis Moonie, is adamant they're the best weapons for the job.
MOONIE: There is no question of these weapons being illegal, nor has that ever been suggested to my knowledge by the UN or by anybody else. We will carry on using depleted uranium until we have an effective alternative. The purpose of using a weapon like this is to ensure that the enemy are killed and destroyed and our people are not, and that is my primary duty as a Defence Minister.
CUFFE: The UN sub-commission on human rights has suggested that these weapons are illegal because they cause indiscriminate suffering.
MOONIE: I'm afraid this is again, you're talking about scientific illiterates here. They do not cause indiscriminate suffering. They knock a hole in a tank, they kill or injure the crew inside, and they prevent that tank from destroying our own. I will use a weapon like this, to which there are no legal objections whatsoever, and I will use it whenever possible to ensure that my people exit battle as far as possible unscathed.
CUFFE: While the government continues to hold firm, the latest scientific research does raise further questions about the safety of DU. This conflict in Iraq presents an opportunity for more detailed study. But the controversy over the MOD's tests and the Pentagon's delay in giving information about where the munitions were used won't reassure those looking for definitive answers.
SIGNATURE TUNE
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Sweden's nuclear waste headache
By Lars Bevanger
BBC News, Forsmark nuclear power plant
Wednesday, 1 June, 2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4597589.stm
As Sweden begins decommissioning its nuclear power plants, time is running out to find a way to make 9,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel safe for the next 100,000 years.
The nuclear industry says it has the answer, but environmentalists dismiss it as old and unsafe technology.
A 1980 referendum held in the country decided nuclear power should be phased out. The first reactor came offline in 1999, the second this week.
The remaining 10 reactors will all be shut down in the next few years, bringing to an end 40 years of nuclear history.
'Safe for 100,000 years'
Some 60m under the sea outside the Forsmark nuclear power plant just north of Stockholm, I am shown into a complex network of tunnels.
This is where contaminated equipment and clothing from the nearby power plant is stored. But it is also a showroom for what the industry hopes can be a final solution for a much bigger problem: the highly radioactive spent fuel.
Kai Ahlbom heads the geological research of the bedrock here, which he thinks would be suitable for permanent storage of the world's most toxic waste.
"This rock is 1,800 million years old. Not much has happened to this bedrock during that time," Mr Ahlbom explains. He is confident this geology will not change much for at least another 100,000 years.
That is how long spent nuclear fuel remains dangerous to the environment. It is the responsibility of the nuclear power plant operators here to make sure their waste remains safe until it is no longer radioactive.
Digging it down
The plan is to construct a deposit some 500m underground, where the fuel can be permanently stored. Today, spent nuclear fuel sits in temporary storage in the south of the country.
"We will encase the waste in 5cm-thick copper canisters, to protect against corrosion," Mr Ahlbom says.
"Then, we want to encase the cylinders in bentonite clay. It's basically like cat sand; it absorbs humidity very efficiently, and swells when wet."
After all nuclear waste has been stored, the site would be filled in, and safe enough to be left without human intervention until the radiation risk has gone, Mr Ahlbom believes.
'Old technology'
But environmentalists are not happy with the solution. Kenneth Gunnarsson, from the Swedish NGO Office for Nuclear Waste Review, told the BBC News website the waste problem was far from being solved.
"No one in the world has a solution. And the Swedish nuclear industry's solution is an old one they came up with in the 1970s. This is old technology," he says.
The president of Sweden's Society for Nature Conservation, Mikael Karlsson, agrees, and says the industry for too long has concentrated on one solution, and has made compromises on safety when its model has run into problems.
"Swedish legislation requires an assessment of alternative methods and locations, and that is something which the operators have not conducted yet.
"So they won't get any permits from the government for storing the waste according to their present proposals, if the legislation is to be followed," he said.
But while environmentalists are critical of the industry's failure to come up with alternative storage solutions, they have yet to present any alternatives themselves. And time is running out.
The temporary storage for spent nuclear fuel was designed to operate for 40 years. It is already half way through its lifespan.
----
Sweden shuts nuclear plant in shift to wind
Voters backed move in 1980, before global warming became factor
Updated: 9:13 a.m. ET June 1, 2005 Reuters
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8058171/
STOCKHOLM, Sweden - A Swedish nuclear reactor has produced its last watt, shut down at the stroke of midnight Tuesday as part of a citizen-sanctioned shift to more environmentally friendly power.
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The Barseback-2 nuclear reactor was Sweden's oldest, accounting for three percent of the country's total electricity output. Nuclear power provides 40 percent of Sweden's electricity.
The closure is part of nuclear phase-out program backed in a referendum in 1980. The first reactor at Barseback closed in 1999.
In the short term, the Barseback-2's output will be replaced by increased production at other reactors, which have been overhauled and modernized in recent years.
$1 billion wind investment
Longer term, Sweden is planning a big increase in renewable energy. State-owned Vattenfall, which operates Barseback, said it would invest $1 billion in building northern Europe’s biggest wind farm.
Vattenfall said it hoped to begin construction of 100-150 wind power turbines in 2009, generating more than 2 terawatt hours of electricity per year from 2010.
Barseback produced around 4 terawatt hours out of Sweden’s total 148 in 2004.
It also plans to invest $218 million to build an offshore wind power park in the Oresund sound near the bridge between southern Sweden and Denmark.
However, some in the industry don't feel wind will be as reliable as nuclear power since power can fluctuate depending on the weather.
Less support due to warming fears
In addition, public support of the shutdown has waned due to growing worries about the carbon dioxide emissions that many scientists fear are tied to global warming. Unlike power plants that run on fossil fuels, nuclear power does not emit CO2.
Sweden’s neighbor Finland is building its fifth reactor, which is to come on line in 2009.
And critics say that closing Barseback goes against the government’s policy of promoting environmentally friendly energy as the shortfall will have to be made up by importing energy produced from fossil fuel power stations.
“It will increase carbon dioxide emissions,” said Kalle Lindholm, spokesman for Sweden’s power industry group Swedenergy.
But the closure was met with relief in Denmark, which has lobbied Stockholm for years to close the plant due to its proximity to Copenhagen.
In a statement, Denmark's Defense Ministry said the closure "ends several years of a political tug-of-war between Denmark and Sweden and the people of Copenhagen can now look forward to a life without a nuclear power plant in their line of sight."
----
Sweden shuts down atomic reactor
At midnight on Tuesday, technicians closed Barseback down
Wednesday, 1 June, 2005 (BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4595631.stm
Sweden has closed its Barseback 2 nuclear reactor. two years behind schedule, and 25 years after Swedes voted to stop using atomic energy.
Danes celebrated the shutdown, as Barseback lies just across the Baltic Sea from their capital, Copenhagen.
Sweden took the decision to phase out nuclear power in 1980, when anti-nuclear protest was at its peak.
However, concerns about global warming have led many to reconsider the case for nuclear energy.
Although Denmark remains nuclear free, Sweden's northern neighbour Finland is building its fifth nuclear reactor, due to come online in 2009.
The Swedish state company Vattenfall, which runs Barseback, says it will invest SEK8bn ($1.09bn) to build the biggest wind farm in northern Europe.
It hopes it will produce two terawatt hours per year from 2010. Barseback produced double that, and Sweden used 148 terawatts hours last year.
A third of Barseback's 348 employees will keep their jobs for the time being, and the plant will not be knocked down until at least 2020.
Price rises
Recent polls should some 80% of Swedes say they want to keep nuclear power, which covers half of the country's electricity needs.
The majority of Swedes say they fear they will have to import energy from carbon dioxide-emitting coal and gas power plants elsewhere in Europe, as a result of energy shortages.
There have also been warnings that power costs are on course for sharp rises.
"There is a lack of electricity in the Nordic market and this will only contribute to that," Kalle Lindholm, spokesman for Sweden's power industry group Swedenergy, told Reuters news agency.
But the authorities say measures to increase energy from renewable sources to replace the capacity lost through the closure of Barseback 1 and 2 have been completed.
In the 1980 referendum, people voted on three alternative ways of phasing out nuclear power - the vote gave no option to continue nuclear energy.
As a result, Barseback 1 was closed in 1999.
-------- iran
Iran Tests Solid Fuel Motor for Missile
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 1, 2005
Filed at 2:57 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/01/international/middleeast/01iran.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran has successfully tested a solid fuel motor for its medium-range Shahab-3 ballistic missile, a technological breakthrough in Iran's military industries, the defense minister said Tuesday.
Minister Ali Shamkhani did not say when Iran tested the motor, one of two engines he said were developed for the Shahab-3, a weapon capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and reaching Israel and U.S. forces in the Middle East.
''A missile using liquid fuel is short-lived. You can use it for a limited time. Solid fuel makes the missile durable and dramatically increases its accuracy (in reaching targets),'' Shamkhani said on state-run television.
So far, Shahab-3 has reportedly been based on liquid-fuel technology.
The Shahab-3 ballistic missile had been known as a single-stage device and military experts said the development of a second motor demonstrates a significant improvement in Iran's missile program.
Former top Russian Defense Ministry official General Leonid Ivashov told Russian Itar-Tass news agency Tuesday he was not surprised at Iran's missile technological advancement.
''Iran has possibilities of testing a solid propulsion missile. ... I visited defense enterprises of Iran and I saw how strongly it advanced in the field of the military hardware on the whole and in missile technology in particular,'' Itar-Tass quoted Ivashov as saying. Iran has close military cooperation with Russia.
Last November, Shamkhani said Iran was able to mass produce the Shahab-3 missile. The missile -- whose name ''Shahab'' means shooting star in Farsi -- has a range of about 810 miles. Iran last successfully tested the medium-range missile in 2002 before equipping its elite Revolutionary Guards with it in July 2003.
Powerful former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is a front-runner candidate in next month's presidential elections, said last year that an upgraded version of Shahab-3 had a range of more than 1,200 miles.
Shamkhani has repeatedly said Iran is constantly improving the accuracy of its missiles in response to efforts by Israel to upgrade its missile systems.
Israel and the United States have jointly developed the Arrow anti-ballistic missile system in response to Shahab-3's threat.
Developed jointly by Israel Aircraft Industries and Chicago-based Boeing Co. at a cost of more than $1 billion, the Arrow is one of the few systems capable of intercepting and destroying missiles at high altitudes.
Iran launched an arms development program during its 1980-88 war with Iraq to compensate for a U.S. weapons embargo. Since 1992, Iran has produced its own tanks, armored personnel carriers, missiles and a fighter plane.
----
Iran Reports Gain in Test of Missile Fuel
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
June 1, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/01/international/middleeast/01iran.html?pagewanted=print
TEHRAN, May 31 - Iran said Tuesday that it had successfully tested a solid-fuel motor for its medium-range ballistic missile known as Shahab 3, raising concerns that it could reach its enemies, including American forces in the region and Israel, with more precision.
Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told state television the test was a success but did not say when it had been carried out.
"When you fill a missile with liquid, you have to use it quickly," he said. "With solid fuel, a missile can be stored for years. And in addition, it makes the missile more accurate and cheaper."
Iran's ambition to develop its nuclear program and its missile industry has been a major concern for the West. Iran announced large-scale production of the Shahab 3 last year. If Iran were to develop nuclear weapons, the missile would make it possible to deliver them to targets more than 1,200 miles away.
The new fuel technology is a breakthrough for Iran's military. Solid-fuel missiles can be stockpiled for much longer than liquid-fuel weapons, making mass production much more practical.
-------- japan
Monju plant OK'd, but safety not guaranteed
06/01/2005
Asahi Shimbun, May 31 (IHT/Asahi: June 1,2005)
http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200506010147.html
In Egyptian mythology, the phoenix is a symbol of immortality. It is said the holy bird sets itself on fire every several hundred years to rise anew from the ashes to start another long life.
More than 20 years ago, I visited the the Super-Phoenix fast-breeder nuclear reactor near the French city of Lyons on the Rhone river.
This type of reactor is said to yield more nuclear fuel than it consumes. I had a strong sense that the officials who explained how things worked were very proud to be on the cutting edge of nuclear technology.
At that time, the Super-Phoenix was the sole demonstration fast-breeder reactor in the world. But its operation was later halted because of a sodium-coolant leak and other accidents.
In 1998, a decision was made to dismantle it. It signified a policy change by France, which was known around the world for promoting the use of nuclear power.
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government in a lawsuit on the Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture. The ruling scrapped a lower court decision that had invalidated state authorization to build it.
For residents of Tsuruga who filed the suit in 1985, the eventual outcome of their 20-year court battle must be hard to accept after contradictory court rulings.
The top court ruled that authorization to build the Monju reactor was not given illegally because no serious errors were committed when safety inspections were performed.
I wish to point out, however, that the court's endorsement of the government's contention that it acted legally in approving the Monju's construction is not the same thing as whether the reactor can be operated without problems.
The name Monju is said to come from Monju Bosatsu, a Buddhist saint of wisdom and intellect. This is an exalted name, just like ``Super-Phoenix.'' The wishes underlying these names given to the fast-breeder reactors in France and Japan are understandable. But the nuts and bolts of daily operation are left to mere humans.
Harnessing nuclear energy is a difficult undertaking with many unknowns. Those who tackle it must always take a careful and humble approach.
-------- korea
U.S Pressures Saudi On Nuclear Monitoring - Diplomats
By REUTERS
June 1, 2005
Filed at 12:47 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-saudi.html?pagewanted=print
VIENNA (Reuters) - The United States is trying to persuade Saudi Arabia to drop its plan to sign an agreement that would severely curtail the United Nations' ability to monitor any Saudi atomic activity, diplomats said on Wednesday.
The ``small quantities protocol'' is an accord states which say they have little or no nuclear material can sign with the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Diplomats close to the agency say it is a dangerous loophole in the IAEA inspection regime.
``The Americans are putting pressure on the Saudis to drop their plan to sign the small quantities protocol, but it's unclear if the Saudis will agree,'' a European diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
Saudi Arabia said earlier this month it had formally asked the IAEA to sign the protocol. The IAEA board will discuss the request in June, diplomats said.
Several other Western diplomats on the IAEA's 35-nation board of governors confirmed that Washington was attempting to use its clout with Saudi Arabia to convince it to put its request on hold until the IAEA board made a decision.
If the Saudis do not voluntarily withdraw their request, it will be difficult for the board to turn it down without a formal change in policy regarding the protocol, something that would likely take months or years, diplomats said.
However, the Saudis have said they are prepared to allow the IAEA to conduct additional inspections that go beyond the protocol to allay any fears that Riyadh might be hiding anything, diplomats on the IAEA board said.
SAUDIS WOULD ALLOW EXTRA INSPECTIONS
``The Saudis are prepared to make a statement that they will allow inspections that go beyond the small quantities protocol,'' an EU diplomat said, adding that it was unclear how intrusive such additional inspections would be.
Saudi officials at their mission to the United Nations in Vienna were not immediately available for comment.
Welcome as this might be, it does not solve the underlying problem of the protocol -- an obsolete arrangement that dates back to the 1970s, before the discovery of covert nuclear activities in Iraq, North Korea, Iran or Libya, diplomats said.
Saudi Arabia does not have any nuclear reactors and does not plan on developing them.
Earlier this year, Pakistan denied media reports that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the disgraced founder of Pakistan's atomic weapons program linked to a global nuclear black market, had sold Saudi Arabia nuclear technology usable in atomic weapons.
An IAEA spokesman said the agency had begun consultations on possible solutions and would report to the IAEA board in June.
A confidential report the IAEA sent to the states on its board of governors in February said 86 countries had signed this protocol, nearly half the 188 parties to the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The report said the protocol curtailed its ability to monitor nuclear activities in a country and verify their declarations were accurate. It recommended asking all protocol states to give it up and not to sign new ones.
The protocol exempts NPT states from having to notify the IAEA of stocks of natural uranium of up to 10 tonnes, which experts say could be purified into fuel for at least one bomb.
One diplomat said this means that once a country has signed the protocol, U.N. inspectors virtually relinquish their authority to uncover any secret activities it is carrying out.
----
IAEA proposes Saudi accord despite concerns powers would be minimal
1 June 2005 (AP)
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2005/June/middleeast_June3.xml§ion=middleeast
VIENNA - The UN nuclear agency is asking member nations to back a plan meant to give it some overview of Saudi Arabia for the first time, despite reservations that the deal would give it only minimal inspection powers in a country with an ambiguous nuclear record, according to a document obtained by The Associated Press.
The document on International Atomic Energy Agency letterhead asks board members to “conclude ... and subsequently implement” the arrangement, which was requested by Saudi authorities. The document, provided by a diplomat accredited to the agency and familiar with the deal, says the IAEA would “reduce to a minimum” any policing of Saudi activities.
While giving the agency a formal report on a country’s status, the arrangement does not commit a country to allow verification of its statements.
Such deals have been reached in recent decades with about 70 countries, many in the developing world. The IAEA’s most senior officials now regard them as outmoded as they contain loopholes that can potentially encourage would-be proliferators.
But until the IAEA changes its procedures, countries can continue to request such deals.
The Saudis deny any plans to develop nuclear arms, and diplomats close to the IAEA say the agency has no firm evidence to the contrary.
But the Saudi push to formalize minimal monitoring for the country comes amid increased nuclear-generated tensions in the region, fed by suspicions that rival Iran might want to develop the bomb.
While the Saudi government insists it has no interest in going nuclear, in the past two decades it has been linked to prewar Iraq’s nuclear program, to Pakistan and to the Pakistani nuclear black marketeer A.Q. Khan. It also has expressed interest in Pakistani missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, and credible reports say Saudi officials have discussed taking the nuclear option as a deterrent in the volatile Middle East.
Several diplomats familiar with the issue said the agency preferred a more stringent monitoring mechanism and expressed concerns about possible abuses. The diplomats demanded anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to journalists about confidential nuclear agreements negotiated by the IAEA.
Phone calls seeking comment to the Saudi mission dealing with the IAEA went unanswered Tuesday.
‘Small quantities protocols’
The IAEA’s 35-nation board of governors routinely approves the so-called “small quantities protocols” which free countries from reporting the possession of up to 10 tons of natural uranium - or up to 20 tons of depleted uranium, depending on the degree of enrichment - and 2.2 pounds of plutonium.
Such agreements also allow countries to keep silent about work on nuclear facilities until six months before they are ready for operation. And once a protocol is signed, the country’s word is normally not questioned.
With precedents well in place, diplomats say the board will likely approve the arrangement, albeit reluctantly, at its next meeting on June 13.
IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky declined to comment on the Saudi case. But he said the agency had “recently drawn member states’ attention to a remaining weakness in the safeguards system - namely the problems posed by small quantities protocols.” He added that “possible remedies” would be proposed at the board meeting.
The protocols were aimed at freeing up IAEA resources to focus on superpower nuclear rivalries. But the climate has changed since revelations of other loopholes that allowed prewar Iraq, Iran, Libya and others to work secretly on known or suspected weapons programs.
Experts say 10 tons of natural uranium can be processed into the material for up to two nuclear warheads. Iran and South Korea both used substantially less uranium or plutonium in laboratory-scale experiments with suspected links to arms programs.
Saudi Arabia has never negotiated an agreement that would define IAEA controls, even though it is obligated to do so as a signer of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Such foot dragging has contributed to concerns.
“As has become clear over the last several years, states can conduct nuclear activities of proliferation concern with quantities of nuclear material much smaller” than allowed under the protocol, Pierre Goldschmidt, a deputy IAEA director general, said in a report in February. His comments have been echoed by IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei.
Gary Samore, director of studies of the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, also says reforms are overdue. “It’s important to beef up the agency’s credentials” at a time of increased evidence of proliferation, he said.
-------- mideast
France Offers to Help Develop Libya's Nuclear Energy
REUTERS FRANCE/LIBYA: June 1, 2005
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/31058/story.htm
PARIS/TRIPOLI - France will soon present Libya with a plan to develop the North African country's civilian nuclear energy programme, the French foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
"We have established the principle of cooperation in the area of peaceful nuclear energy but the details are still being worked out so we are still in an exploratory stage," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Jean Baptiste Mattei.
"We will soon propose an agreement to the Libyans about what can be done," he said in a statement.
In 2003, Libya promised to give up nuclear, chemical and biological arms and accepted the dismantling of proliferating installations. It also signed additional protocols with the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency.
Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi said at the time that he still hoped to develop a nuclear programme for peaceful means.
"Libya needs to develop its existing capacities in line with the country's needs," Mattei said.
Libya's official Jana news agency said in a statement France's ambassador to Tripoli on Monday handed Libyan Foreign Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalgam an official document stating his government's willingness to help.
The note was presented before a change of government in France on Tuesday.
"France announced Monday ...its interest in signing a bilateral cooperation agreement in this field, in appreciation of the courageous resolution taken by... (Libya) to voluntarily get rid of programmes and equipment that may lead to production of internationally banned weapons," Jana said.
Libya cast off more than a decade of international ostracism in 2003 when it accepted responsibility and began paying compensation for the bombing of airliners over Scotland and Niger in 1988 and 1989.
-------- space
Jonathan Schell on Crossing Nuclear Thresholds
Jonathan Schell, June 1, 2005 Tomgram
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=2837
This article will appear in the forthcoming issue of The Nation Magazine.
Call it Star Wars, parts VII-XXII; but last week, just as Revenge of the Sith was opening galaxy-wide -- multiplexes on Tatooine alone were expected to pull in billions -- reporter Tim Weiner revealed on the front page of the New York Times that a new presidential directive will soon essentially green-light the future U.S. militarization of space. (When, in December 2001, the administration withdrew from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which forbade the weaponization of space, it opened the way for exactly the kind of Pentagon R&D that now threatens to come to mutant fruition in the heavens.) Just three days before Weiner's piece appeared, military analyst William Arkin reported in the Washington Post that "[e]arly last summer, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a top secret 'Interim Global Strike Alert Order,'" preparing the way for devastating attacks against hostile powers developing weapons of mass destruction, air strikes that could be carried out more or less on demand anywhere on the planet and, if so desired, included a "nuclear option."
These two actions don't represent separate worlds of planning. One of the imagined future weapons for Rumsfeld's "global strike" force, for instance, turns out to be a CAV (Common Aero Vehicle) which, from space, could theoretically hit any target on Earth with a massive dose of conventional munitions on half an hour's notice. Of this weapon, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus wrote, "The first-generation CAV, expected to be ready by 2010, will have ‘an incredible capability to provide the warfighter with a global reach capability against high payoff targets,' Gen. Lance W. Lord, commander of Air Force Space Command, told the House Armed Services Committee… The system could, Lord said, ‘deliver a conventional payload precisely on target within minutes of a valid command and control release order.'"
Such "global strike" space weaponry, while not (yet) nuclearized, would not be far off in impact. For instance, according to Weiner, one such weapon, Hypervelocity Rod Bundles (nicknamed "Rods from God"), aims "to hurl cylinders of tungsten, titanium or uranium from the edge of space to destroy targets on the ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles an hour with the force of a small nuclear weapon." In this way, the boundaries between the previously almost unusable nuclear option and more conventional war-fighting options are slowly -- and quite consciously -- being blurred by the Bush administration.
Let's put a label on these developments: Proliferation. In space as on Earth, the Bush strategists have an almost primal urge to cross strategic and weapons barriers and thresholds of all sorts, and head into uncharted territory; or, as an old TV space opera used to put it, "boldly to go where no man has gone before." (On Star Trek, though, the voyages of the USS Enterprise were, at least theoretically, peaceful in nature, and the announcement of the next destination didn't automatically end with an explosion.)
Perhaps there's another label that might capture even better the administration's primal global urge -- in this case, a label much beloved by the Air Force Space Command, those "Guardians of the High Frontier" (as they so flatteringly like to call themselves): "dominance" or "space superiority." ("Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny," [Space Command's General Lord] told an Air Force conference in September. "Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future.") In the old Army Air Corps anthem, airmen sang of taking off "into the wild blue yonder, climbing high into the sun"; now I suppose it should be "the wild, black yonder."
There has been much on-line controversy lately about whether the new Star Wars movie is an attack on the Bush administration. One thing can certainly be said: Where Star Wars went long ago, Bush administration fantasies are now heading. After all, what is a CAV, but a little "Death Star," that terrible, planet-destroying instrument of the on-screen Evil Empire. As Theresa Hitchens of the Center for Defense Information pointed out in a recent article, "[O]rbiting 'death stars' to attack ground targets are being considered. Pete Teets, the former acting secretary of the U.S. Air Force has said: 'We haven't reached the point of strafing and bombing from space - nonetheless, we are thinking about those possibilities.'"
In fact, "thinking" turns out to be something of a euphemism, given that the first tests of parts of the CAV program are to be carried out later this year. Of course, the Bush high-frontiersmen and the high-frontiersmen of the military-industrial complex (into which so many space-based tax dollars are already flowing) are just dying to test new generations of threshold-busting weapons (can't wait!). And yet, most of these bizarre weapons are technologically daunting and deficit-bustingly expensive. As Weiner points out: "Richard Garwin, widely regarded as a dean of American weapons science, and three colleagues wrote in the March issue of IEEE Spectrum, the professional journal of electric engineering, that 'a space-based laser would cost $100 million per target, compared with $600,000 for a Tomahawk missile.'"
In addition, based on past history, such futuristic dream-weaponry is likely to be about as successful as our $100 billion (so far) Star Wars anti-missile system which has proved incapable of intercepting anything smaller than the Queen Mary or faster than a tractor; and -- irony of ironies -- the decision to test, and then try to deploy, such systems is likely not only to start a space arms race, but to make us all (and the satellites we now depend on for so much) far more vulnerable than at present. According to Demetri Sevastopulo of the British Financial Times, the Russian answer to the news in the New York Times piece was instantaneous and grim: "Russia would consider using force if necessary to respond if the US put a combat weapon into space, according to a senior Russian official."
Space domination -- meaning war-fighting in space -- is a form of Earthly madness. But the path of proliferation, once started down has its own mad logic. Bush's top officials have been stuck on global dominance since they took power. Dominance has just turned out to be a little harder to come by on Earth than advertised… but, ah, space… All those boys who grew up on sci-fi movies and moon shots, now have their moment. And a boy can always dream, can't he?
The only problem is that Bush's dreamers, having swallowed their inside-the-beltway global-power fantasies whole, turn out to play the dominance game like the global klutzes they are. Admittedly, they've been in their Darth Vader outfits breathing hard for quite a while -- every day another threat (and if John Bolton makes it to the UN, change that to a threat a second) -- but they seem to lack the power effectively to demand a pizza delivery for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
None of this makes what they're doing any less dangerous. As Jonathan Schell points out below (in his latest "Letter from Ground Zero" in the new issue of the Nation magazine), the new "global strike" plans revealed by Arkin represent part of a revolution in what passes for nuclear policy-making in this country.
So, proliferation planet? Sure, that's on the way. Now, though, we're intent on proliferating in the heavens as on Earth. Think of it as a package deal. Tom
A Revolution in American Nuclear Policy
By Jonathan Schell
A metaphorical "nuclear option" -- the cutoff of debate in the Senate on judicial nominees -- has just been defused, but a literal nuclear option, called "global strike," has been created in its place. In a shocking innovation in American nuclear policy, recently disclosed in the Washington Post by military analyst William Arkin, the administration has created and placed on continuous high alert a force whereby the President can launch a pinpoint strike, including a nuclear strike, anywhere on earth with a few hours' notice. The senatorial "nuclear option" was covered extensively, but somehow this actual nuclear option -- a "full-spectrum" capability (in the words of the presidential order) with "precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations)" -- was almost entirely ignored.
The order to enable the force, Arkin writes, was given by George W. Bush in January 2003. In July 2004, Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated to Adm. James Ellis Jr., then-commander of Stratcom, "the President charged you to ‘be ready to strike at any moment's notice in any dark corner of the world' [and] that's exactly what you've done." And last fall, Lieut. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, stated, "We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes."
These actions make operational a revolution in US nuclear policy. It was foreshadowed by the Nuclear Posture Review Report of 2002, also widely ignored, which announced nuclear targeting of, among others, China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya. The review also recommended new facilities for the manufacture of nuclear bombs and the study of an array of new delivery vehicles, including a new ICBM in 2020, a new submarine-launched ballistic missile in 2029, and a new heavy bomber in 2040. The review, in turn, grew out of Bush's broader new military strategy of pre-emptive war, articulated in the 2002 White House document, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, which states, "We cannot let our enemies strike first." The extraordinary ambition of the Bush policy is suggested by a comment made in a Senate hearing in April by Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, who explained that the Defense Secretary wanted "bunker buster" nuclear bombs because "it is unwise for there to be anything that's beyond the reach of US power."
The incorporation of nuclear weapons into the global strike option, casting a new shadow of nuclear danger over the entire planet, raises fundamental questions. Perhaps the most important is why the United States, which now possesses the strongest conventional military forces in the world, feels the need to add to them a new global nuclear threat. The mystery deepens when you reflect that nothing could be more calculated to goad other nations into nuclear proliferation. Could it be that the United States, now routinely called the greatest empire since Rome, simply feels the need to assert its dominance in the nuclear sphere?
History suggests a different explanation. In the past, reliance on nuclear arms has in fact varied inversely with reliance on conventional arms. In the very first weeks of the nuclear age, when the American public was demanding demobilization of US forces in Europe after World War II, the U.S. monopoly on the bomb gave it the confidence to adopt a bold stance in postwar negotiations with the Soviet Union over Europe. The practice of offsetting conventional weakness with nuclear strength was soon embodied in the policy of "first use" of nuclear weapons, which has remained in effect to this day. The threat of first use under the auspices of the global strike option is indeed the latest incarnation of a policy born at that time.
This compensatory role for nuclear weapons emerged in a new context when, after the protracted, unpopular conventional war in Korea, President Eisenhower adopted the doctrine of nuclear "massive retaliation," intended to prevent limited Communist challenges from ever arising. And it was in reaction to the imbalance between local "peripheral" threats and the world-menacing "massive" nuclear threats designed to contain them that, in the Kennedy years, the pendulum swung back in the direction of conventional arms and a theory of "limited war" to go with them. Meanwhile, nuclear arms were officially assigned the more restricted role of deterring attacks by other nuclear weapons -- the posture of "mutual assured destruction."
Today, though the Cold War is over, the riddle of the relationship between nuclear and conventional force still vexes official minds. Once again, the United States has assigned itself global ambitions. (Then it was containing Communism, now it is stopping "terrorism" and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.) Once again, the United States is fighting a limited war -- the war in Iraq -- and other limited wars are under discussion (against Iran, North Korea, Syria, etc.). And once again, nuclear arms appear to offer an all too tempting alternative. Arkin comments that a prime virtue of the global strike option in the eyes of the Pentagon is that it requires no "boots on the ground." And Everett Dolman, a professor at the Air Force School at Maxwell Air Force Base, recently commented to the San Francisco Chronicle that without space weaponry, "we'd face a Vietnam-style buildup if we wanted to remain a force in the world."
For just as in the 1950s, the boots on the ground are running low. The global New Rome turns out to have exhausted its conventional power holding down just one country, Iraq. But the 2000s are not the 1950s. Eisenhower's overall goal was mainly defensive. He wanted no war, nuclear or conventional, and never came close to ordering a nuclear strike. By contrast, Bush's policy of preventive war is inherently activist and aggressive: The global strike option is not only for deterrence; it is for use.
A clash between the triumphal rhetoric of global domination and the sordid reality of failure in practice lies ahead. The Senate, on the brink of its metaphorical Armageddon, backed down. Would the President, facing defeat of his policies somewhere in the world, do likewise? Or might he actually reach for his nuclear option?
Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World, is the Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The Jonathan Schell Reader was recently published by Nation Books.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Watchdog Group Urges Nuclear Materials’ Storage Be Consolidated At 7 Sites
By: By BILL JONES/Staff Writer
Source: The Greeneville Sun
06-01-2005
http://greene.xtn.net/index.php?table=news&template=news.view.subscriber&newsid=121859
A government watchdog group has recommended that U.S. storage of “bomb-grade” nuclear materials be consolidated at seven sites around the nation, including one in nearby Erwin, to boost security and save money.
In a report issued on May 19, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) recommended that the Nuclear Fuel Services (NFS) plant in Erwin be among seven sites in the United States at which highly enriched uranium and plutonium would continue to be stored.
Currently, according to a POGO press release, 13 sites around the country house “hundreds of metric tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium in quantities large enough to make nuclear bombs.”
Among those sites, according to the POGO report, is the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Erwin. That facility, according to the report, is one of only two commercially run facilities in the nation that store such materials.
Terrorist Threat Raised
“Security experts’ greatest concern is that a suicidal terrorist group would reach its target at one of the facilities and, in an extremely short time, create an improvised nuclear bomb on site,” the POGO report says.
“It is only now becoming known outside DOE (U.S. Department of Energy) how easily this could be accomplished: using a critical mass (about 100 pounds) of highly-enriched uranium, a terrorist could trigger a detonation of a magnitude close to that which devastated Hiroshima,” referring to the Japanese city destroyed by a U.S. atomic bomb in 1945 near the end World War II.
“One site alone stores 400 metric tons of this material,” the POGO reports says. “The possibility of this scenario was a primary motivation for the DOE’s decision to significantly increase security requirements at nuclear weapons facilities last year.”
NFS Discounts Report
During a telephone interview Tuesday, NFS spokesman Tony Treadway called the POGO report “speculation” and said he had heard nothing from U.S. government regulators that would lead him to believe that NFS would be designated a storage site for additional special nuclear material.
Treadway said NFS does use enriched uranium in the production of fuel for nuclear powered U.S. Navy submarines and surface ships. But he said the focus of NFS “is on processing, not storage.”
NFS also is involved in “down-blending” highly enriched uranium from U.S. Department of Energy stockpiles to a low-enriched state, suitable for conversion into fuel for Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear reactors that generate commercial electric power.
Treadway also said during the telephone interview that discussion of consolidating the storage of highly enriched uranium and plutonium has been ongoing since the mid-1990s.
He also said a Department of Energy committee is expected to make a recommendation about consolidation “in 30 to 45 days.”
An advisory task force to current (U.S.) Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman is scheduled to complete a report by late June, “evaluating the potential cost savings and security enhancements from consolidating the nation’s stockpiles of highly enriched uranium and plutonium,” the Associated Press reported in mid-May.
But Treadway said he could not comment on what recommendations that report might contain. Once that report is issued, he said, NFS would comment, if any recommendations apply to the Erwin-based company.
The other commercial facility at which special nuclear materials are stored and used, according to the POGO report, is the Nuclear Products Division of BWXT Corp., in Lynchburg, Va.
Both NFS and BWXT “contain weapons-grade nuclear materials, (but) have not been required to meet the security standards set for similar facilities by the Department of Energy,” according to the POGO report.
NFS and BWXT are overseen by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “which has less stringent security standards” than does the U.S. Department of Energy, according to the POGO report.
In addition, the POGO report says, security has not been tested at NFS since 1998.
NFS Data Reported
The POGO report states that the NFS complex in Erwin spans more than 60 acres and has a “21-acre protected area.”
“NFS contains tons of highly-enriched uranium for the production of naval reactor fuel, and down-blends highly enriched uranium (HEU),” the Project on Government Oversight report says.
“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licenses this site and is responsible for testing security, but it has not tested the site’s security since 1998. Although problems with security were identified at that time (1998), the Office of Naval Reactors reportedly fixed them quickly.”
In October 2004, the NRC announced that this site had started down-blending 33 metric tons of highly enriched uranium from the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site to produce fuel for a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) nuclear power plant, the POGO report notes.
NFS Recommendations
The POGO report recommends holding the NFS facility to the same “upgraded Design Basis Threat (standards)” that apply to U.S. Department of Energy sites.
The report also recommends shifting responsibility for testing security from the NRC to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Safety and Security Performance Assurance.
The Project on Government Oversight’s report estimates the cost of tripling the size of the security force at the NFS site to bring the facility up to Department of Energy standards to be “at least $180 million” over three years.
The report also lists as “unknown” the cost of improving the security infrastructure at NFS.
Two Oak Ridge Sites
Two other Tennessee sites where special nuclear materials are stored and used now, according to the POGO report, are the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge.
In 2004, according to the report, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which oversees most U.S. facilities where “bomb-grade” nuclear materials are stored (but not the NFS plant), announced enhanced security requirements for facilities where enriched uranium and plutonium are stored.
The security enhancements, according to the POGO report, will require that 11 of the 13 existing storage sites by 2008 be able “to protect against more than triple the number of armed attackers and more lethal weapons, than did pre-9/11 standards,” according to a POGO release.
As a result, the DOE security costs will increase dramatically, POGO says.
Could Be Terrorist Targets
Peter Stockton, a POGO senior investigator, said during a Tuesday telephone interview that his organization’s aim is to see a reduction of the amount of highly enriched uranium being stored and to improve security for the special nuclear material that remains in storage.
“Any high school student knows what you can do with highly enriched uranium,” he said.
The May 19 POGO release indicates that “interviews with experts throughout the nuclear weapons complex” have led to the conclusion that some U.S. sites no longer need to house nuclear materials.
POGO also has concluded, according to its release, that special nuclear materials, including plutonium and highly enriched uranium, should be moved to other locations.
“In addition, efforts to immobilize or down-blend excess nuclear materials would also help save taxpayer dollars,” the POGO report says.
Sites Urged To be Closed
Topping the list of sites that should be immediately de-inventoried (of special nuclear material) “is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory located outside San Francisco,” according to the POGO report.
“Department officials have confirmed POGO’s assertion that weapons protecting Livermore are not as lethal as they should be due to encroaching neighborhoods surrounding the facility, making it more vulnerable to an attack,” a POGO release says.
Other sites needing to be immediately “de-inventoried” of highly enriched uranium and/or plutonium, according to the POGO report, include:
• the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which has “almost no security to protect 1,000 cans of Uranium-233, an attractive material for terrorists intent on building an improvised nuclear device;”
• the Sandia National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory Technical Area 18 in New Mexico, “which have serious safety or security risks that merit speeding up existing relocation plans;” and
• the Hanford Reservation in Washington, “which failed a security exercise after 9/11 and has no plan for relocating plutonium from the Los Alamos Molten Plutonium Reactor Experiment.”
POGO Described
POGO, according to its Web site, “investigates, exposes, and seeks to remedy systemic abuses of power, mismanagement, and subservience by the federal government to powerful special interests.”
Founded in 1981, POGO says it is “is a politically-independent, nonprofit watchdog that strives to promote a government that is accountable to the citizenry.”
-------- colorado
Mineral production values soar in state
Part of $8.5 billion a windfall for schools, government services
By Gargi Chakrabarty, Rocky Mountain News
June 1, 2005
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/business/article/0,1299,DRMN_4_3820708,00.html
The total value of minerals produced in Colorado jumped from $6.65 billion in 2003 to a record $8.5 billion in 2004 - buoyed by record natural gas and coal production and robust prices.
That means more money for schools and governmental services. Taxes and royalties from mineral production flow directly back to the state and local governments.
The combined total of royalties on federal land, state severance taxes, Colorado State Land Board mineral royalties and rentals and county property taxes on mineral properties was $384.5 million in 2004 - a 53 percent jump from 2003.
The value of minerals production in 2005 will be even better, said James Cappa, chief of the Colorado Geological Survey's mineral resources section, which calculates the value of the state's mineral production each year.
"We will see increases in nonfuel minerals, especially molybdenum, with its prices continuing to be high," Cappa said. "We are seeing increased natural gas production, and with gas price remaining high, it will be the main focus this year."
The value of oil, natural gas and carbon dioxide production in 2004 totaled $6.75 billion of the $8.5 billion, up 35 percent from 2003. Much of that came from Weld and Garfield counties' deep wells and the coal-bed methane wells of southwest Colorado.
Record coal production in 2004 offset a slight drop in coal prices on federal leases to $18.09 a ton in 2004 from $19.59 in 2003. The state produced 40 million tons of coal in 2004, up from the previous year's 35.9 million tons.
Uranium production value in 2004 increased tenfold from $200,000 in 2003 to $2 million in 2004. Uranium prices are expected to continue to rise in 2005, which will most likely result in increased production in Colorado, the survey noted. Several new uranium mines are scheduled to open on the Western Slope in the near future.
Colorado's strong mineral production has provided a healthy income for the state and county governments in the form of federal royalties, severance taxes, county property taxes and mineral royalties and rentals on state-owned land.
The U.S. Department of the Interior collects royalties from oil, gas and mining companies that drill wells or mine on federal lands in individual states.
The fee usually is a percentage of the resource being produced, paid in cash or in kind. The agency splits the money equally with those states. Colorado's share of federal mineral royalties in 2004 was $89.9 million - a 42 percent increase from 2003.
The state earned $115.8 million in severance taxes, up 250 percent from 2003's $32.4 million. Severance taxes are state taxes that are collected on the production of oil, gas, coal and certain minerals. According to Colorado law, 50 percent of the severance tax revenue flows to local governments and 50 percent flows into a state trust fund to replace depleted natural resources and to complete water projects.
Estimated property taxes paid in 2004 to the counties from mineral properties totaled $153 million, compared with $138 million in 2003.
In fiscal year 2004, the Colorado State Land Board received $25.8 million, up from $17.19 million in fiscal 2003, from mineral royalties and rentals on state-owned land. The state owns more than 4 million acres of mineral land, and the revenues from these lands are distributed to the state's school districts.
"This is good news for the beneficiaries because most of that oil, gas and coal production has come from state school lands," said Mark Davis, minerals director of the state land board. "So (the royalties and rentals) go directly to help kindergarten through 12th grade through the schools in Colorado."
chakrabartyg@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2976
-------- new hampshire
Congressmen claim more Seabrook security problems
June 1, 2005 Associated Press
http://www.boston.com/news/local/new_hampshire/articles/2005/06/01/congressmen_claim_more_seabrook_security_problems?mode=PF
CONCORD, N.H. --Two Massachusetts congressmen again are questioning alleged security problems at New Hampshire's Seabrook nuclear plant.
Democrats Edward Markey and John Tierney said Wednesday in a second letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the agency "take immediate action to protect public safety."
Last week, Tierney and Markey said an intruder detection system wasn't installed correctly and did not work and the plant forced security guards to work overtime to compensate.
On Wednesday, they said additional safety issues were raised by a Seabrook employee regarding defective security cameras and the plant's failure to conduct a security analysis.
"Last week I learned that the security fence at Seabrook has been broken for months," Markey said.
"Now it turns out that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The fence is broken, the security cameras don't work, and some required security analysis hasn't even been performed. It seems the plant motto is 'see no evil, hear no evil, maybe no evil exists.'"
Plant spokesman Alan Griffith said federal law prohibits him from discussing security matters, but he said that "our safety system is vast, multilayered, not dependent on any one system. Public health or safety has never been compromised."
NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said the agency does not comment on safety issues.
-------- utah
Native Americans, Allies Resist Expansion of Utah Nuke Wasteland
by Megan Tady
June 1, 2005 New Standard
http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/1872
A small but resilient band of Indians surrounded by toxic waste sites, have drawn a line in the sand of the Utah desert; joined by politicians and activists, the Goshutes hope to fend off yet another waste dump in their backyard.
In a photograph of Margene Bullcreek, she stands next to a weathered sign that reads, "No Trespassing." She looks formidable, chin held high, proud and protective of the land laid out behind her.
She also looks tired. The warning sign and her watchful eye, have fallen short of warding off predators from her tribe’s reservation.
The reservation was carved out of the Utah desert in 1917 for the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes. The 124 surviving tribal members have scattered, leaving only Bullcreek and 24 other members to defend their homestead. In some respects, the reservation is a gated community. An invisible fence rings their 18,000 acres, a ring of toxic landmarks.
East of the reservation sits a storage facility for nerve gas. South of Skull Valley is the coal-burning Intermountain Power Project. To the northwest sits a low-level radioactive waste disposal site called "Envirocare." North of the valley chugs the Magnesium Corporation Plant, deemed the country’s worst polluting plant of its kind by the Environmental Protection Agency for the chlorine gas and hydrochloric acid it spouts into the air.
But that is not all. In 1968, the Dugway Proving Grounds tested VX nerve gas on traditional Goshute hunting grounds, causing the death of 6,000 sheep grazing in Skull Valley. Over 7,000 fighter jets based in the nearby Hill Air Force Base fly over the reservation every year to drop bombs for target practice on the Wendover Bombing Range.
With little outside economic opportunity and land already poisoned, the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes became an easy target for another project that would help the United States with its biggest hot potato: high-level radioactive waste. In 1996, Private Fuel Storage, a conglomeration of eight nuclear powerhouses, began courting the tribe to shelter 44,000 tons of irradiated nuclear reactor fuel on their land. Touted as an interim storage site for waste on its way to permanent storage at Yucca Mountain, a yet-to-be-built and highly contested storage facility in Nevada, the reservation would play host to 80 percent of the country’s nuclear waste for 40 years.
That same year, Leon Bear, the Washington’s federally recognized chairman of the Goshutes, signed a lease with PFS for an undisclosed but lucrative amount, and an eight-year licensing process has ensued. Many of the Goshutes claim the lease is illegitimate, given that Bear’s leadership is consistently disputed by tribal members. Bear has been indicted on federal charges for tax evasion and embezzlement of tribal funds.
Bear did not respond to interview inquiries for this article. But in a 2001 interview with the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), a networking center for citizens concerned about nuclear power and radioactive waste, he said: "We can’t do anything here that’s green or environmental. Would you buy a tomato from us if you knew what’s out here? Of course not. In order to attract any kind of development, we have to be consistent with what’s around us."
The nuclear power industry has strong motivations to find somewhere else to store the waste as the country looks for alternatives to coal- and gas-fired energy.
Now in the final stages of approval, the waste dump is edging closer to reality as activists opposing the site launch last-ditch efforts to thwart the project. Resistance to the waste dump has been fierce and divisive. Some members of the tribe contest the site, while a minority of the tribe has sided with Bear to welcome the dump, which has promised enough jobs to allow some members to come back to the reservation.
Skull Valley is 45 miles from Salt Lake City, and Utah lawmakers have been vociferous in their resistance to the dump. Joined by local and national public interest groups, the opposition is citing environmental racism, ecological and health hazards, risks to national security and the possibility that the temporary site will become a de facto permanent dump as reasons to reject the project. PFS, however, claims the dump would provide a revenue stream for the tribe, as well as infrastructure, health care and local jobs.
Over 420 organizations have signed a letter urging the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the body that will make the final decision regarding placement of the dump, to reject PFS’s license application.
"We are the caretakers of this land," said Sammy Blackbear, an outspoken leader for tribal opposition to the dump, and a resident of the Skull Valley reservation. "Our ancestors took care of it, and we have an obligation not to ruin it."
In April Utah filed for a motion of reconsideration with the Atomic Safety Licensing Board (ASLB), the judiciary arm of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), based on one of the last standing contentions against the site: the possibility of an aircraft crash or stray missile into the nuclear canisters from the F-16 flights made from the air force base.
As most, experts have deemed the chances for a crash or strike to 4 in 1 million. The ASLB ruled in favor of PFS on May 24, sending the final decision, and the fate of the Skull Valley Goshutes, to the NRC. As though personally on trial, Bullcreek, Blackbear and others await their sentencing, which could be handed down any day: life with or without a radioactive backyard.
Small Pox of the Nuclear Age
The Skull Valley dump is not the first time Native Americans have been approached to house the United States’ nuclear waste, but marks a trend by the government and the industry to target the population. In 1987, Congress created the Office of the Nuclear Waste Negotiator, which subsequently contacted federally recognized tribes attempting to convince them to host the dump.
"The government has no place to put their waste, so they’re turning to indigenous lands as the last place they can go," Bullcreek asserted.
In the event of an accident, a radioactive cloud is often invisible, odorless and tasteless, and fallout can contaminate water and food that will remain deadly for centuries.
When the government-funded project failed, the commercial nuclear power industry stepped in, again with the intent of finding what anti-nuclear activists call "nuclear sacrifice zones."
Currently, nuclear waste is stored on site at the 66 nuclear power facilities pock-marking the country. The nuclear power industry has strong motivations to find somewhere else to store the waste as the country looks for alternatives to coal- and gas-fired energy.
"Yucca Mountain was plan A and PFS was plan B," Kamps said. "They’ve put PFS on the fast track because plan B is now plan A. The nuclear industry needs to have the illusion of a waste solution to sell the public. They want to build new nuclear reactors and keep using the old ones. But they have a big PR problem of needing a place to put the waste."
The government also has an incentive to find a home for the nuclear waste, as it is legally bound to provide a permanent depository for radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel for nuclear energy companies.
When the opposition to the Skull Valley dump cited environmental racism as a major argument against PFS, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission refused to hear their arguments, on the grounds that the tribe was being fairly compensated with a profitable contract from PFS.
"Native Americans are the most politically and economically vulnerable population in the country, which is part of why this is so shameful," Kamps says. "We call this the small pox of the nuclear age, only it’s more sophisticated. It’s dumping the most hazardous poison ever created by humans on a population of color that didn’t benefit from its creation."
Native American reservations are also attractive to companies like PFS because their sovereignty exempts them from state environmental regulations.
"They target reservations because they don’t have to go through the red tape they do when they’re dealing with white people," Blackbear said. "This wouldn’t be happening in Salt Lake City."
Blackbear, who has often been asked why he doesn’t just take his share of the money from PFS and leave the reservation, is defiant. "Why should we move?" Blackbear said. "What does that say? We’re not the type of people to just pack up and move away."
Both Blackbear and Bullcreek said the waste dump threatened to further erode their culture and traditions.
"As Native Americans, we need to stick up for what we believe is right," Bullcreek said. "From the beginning, they’ve tried to take away our land, our language and our identity, but there were many people that wouldn’t let them do it. That’s the reason why we are saying no to the nuclear waste dump."
Living in the Shadow of the Valley
Health risks from accidents and daily exposure to radioactive waste are severe. Irradiated fuel emits gamma rays that pass through human tissue and can cause cancer, reproductive failure and genetic deformities. In the event of an accident, a radioactive cloud is often invisible, odorless and tasteless, and fallout can contaminate water and food that will remain deadly for centuries.
Both Bullcreek and Blackbear’s houses would be less than two miles from the proposed waste dump.
"If there was an accident, gamma materials would float downwind and deposit on the ground," said Marvin Resnikoff, senior associate at Radioactive Waste Management Associates, an independent consulting firm that advises on the technical aspects of radiation exposure and radioactive waste. "It would be like having an x-ray machine on the ground that you can’t turn off. You would be exposed to high levels of radiation as long as you stayed there, causing a strong likelihood of getting cancer."
Resnikoff developed the petition against the waste dump for the state of Utah.
Along with the environmental and health risks posed by the dump, opponents are also worried about the threat to national security.
Opponents of the PFS project predict that the radiological risks for the Goshutes could last longer than 40 years. While the Skull Valley dump is billed as an interim storage facility for waste en route to Yucca Mountain, the fate of that proposed repository, also slated for construction on Native American land, is uncertain.
Substantiating the claim that PFS would turn into a permanent site is the recently passed House Energy and Water Appropriations Bill. The bill provides $10 million to the DOE to begin focusing on federal interim storage facilities, signaling a shift away from the Bush Administration’s dedication to Yucca Mountain.
Even more problematic for the Goshutes is language in the nonbinding Nuclear Regulatory Commission report that says, "Should these or other [Department of Energy] sites prove impractical, the Department should investigate other alternatives for centralized interim storage, including other federally owned sites, closed military bases and non-federal storage facilities." PFS is the only non-federal storage facility in the licensing process.
"This has PFS written all over it," Kamps said.
Despite the complications surrounding Yucca Mountain, PFS is adamant that the Skull Valley site will be temporary.
"I understand their concern because Yucca is so iffy," Sue Martin, public affairs consultant for PFS, said in an interview with The NewStandard. "But there are several reasons why their concerns aren’t really valid. The facility isn’t designed to be permanent. Everyone agrees that a permanent facility should be deep underground."
Martin also said the lease signed with the Goshutes was only for 25 years, with a possible extension for another 25 years, and that financial incentives would drive private utility companies to close the facility as quickly as possible. Martin said the utility companies would be footing the bill for PFS, whereas if it is stored on a federal site, the government will pick up the tab.
"The utility company that stored the fuel will continue to own it," Martin said. "They have an obligation to be responsible for it until they turn it over to the federal government. They are liable under the licensing contract."
‘Nothing But Garbage Cans’
The Goshutes and the state of Utah aren’t the only ones at risk from the waste dump. PFS plans to transport 4,000 nuclear waste loads to Skull Valley via train routes that traipse through cities and towns all over the country.
"Why are they interested in putting communities at risk?" Kemp asked. "Who does this really benefit? This is really a case of industry running amok over people’s interests and safety."
Comparisons have been drawn between the risk of nuclear waste cargo on trains and the train accident that occurred in the Howard Street Tunnel in Baltimore in 2001. The train caught on fire in the tunnel after an axel broke and punctured a container of hazardous materials. The wreckage burned for five days and caused the evacuation of parts of the city.
Shortly after that accident, Resnikoff, with co-worker Matthew Lamb, wrote a report on the subject of nuclear fuel shipments. They estimated that had the Baltimore train been carrying nuclear waste, 390,388 residents in the area would have faced exposure to radiation. An estimated 4,972 to 31,824 of them would have died from cancer over the next five decades. The report projected the cleanup costs would have totaled $13.7 billion.
The nuclear industry has tried to calm fears about transporting waste, saying that the Holtec casks are designed specifically to protect radioactive materials. But according to Oscar Shirani, a 23-year nuclear industry vet, the casks are "nothing but garbage cans."
Shirani, who was the lead auditor for Exelon, Exelon, the largest nuclear energy corporation in the United States, blew the whistle on Holtec following a quality assurance review of their casks. In his audit, conducted in 2000, Shirani cited nine major quality assurance failures in a 199-page report explaining the deficiencies.
"Every cask I touched had a problem," Shirani told TNS.
The NRC had previously reviewed and accepted the casks.
When Holtec did not recognize Shirani’s report, he threatened to issue a "stop work order" on the casks. Before he could, Exelon removed Shirani from his department and subsequently fired him.
Shirani is suing Exelon and continues to fear the consequences of the Holtec casks.
"The public should know they are sitting around time bombs," Shirani says. "The dry casks are in our backyards. If one of them leaks or bursts… we don’t even need a terrorist attack or a 747 to crash. The structural integrity of the casks is unknown. There are a lot of unknown answers."
Thirty-three nuclear energy companies are currently using the Holtec casks to store their waste on-site at plants around the country.
PFS nevertheless claims to be certain of the project’s safety. "We filed an application for this site back in 1997, and the licensing process has been going on for almost 8 years," Martin said. "That tells you that this is a very rigorous process. All the arguments against the site have failed and we’ve been issued a favorable environmental impact statement. When all is said and done, the public should feel confident in how safe this will be."
Alternatives
As the NRC moves closer to making a final decision to approve the PFS waste dump, groups working to halt the process are offering alternatives to the Skull Valley site and finding creative ways to stop the dump altogether.
"We’re concerned about the safety and security of all nuclear waste storage sites," Kemp said. "But we should keep them where they are and work on increasing safety and security instead of dispersing these toxins throughout the country. We need to keep transportation to a minimum, and if we move it, we should move it only once."
Kamps believes the best solution is to phase out nuclear power and stop producing nuclear waste.
"If we don’t, we are just going to double or triple the waste we have," Kamps says. "For the waste that exists now, even if PFS opens in 2007 and Yucca in 2010, it will take many years to transport. There are also limits to how much each site can hold. So it needs to be protected where it’s at right now."
Members of the tribe and other concerned citizens of Utah plan to contest the NRC’s prior ruling against the environmental racism argument. Blackbear and twenty other co-plaintiffs have filed a lawsuit against the US Bureau of Indian Affairs, alleging that it violated its trust responsibility by approving the lease after only three days of consideration.
Utah's congressional delegation is also pushing legislation that would create a federally recognized wilderness area 50 miles west of Skull Valley, effectively cutting off PFS’ rail route to the waste dump.
According to Connie Nakahara, an attorney working on the case for the state, Utah has filed a petition of review to present to the NRC. Nakahara also said Utah is prepared to pursue other legal avenues if the dump is approved, including an appeal with a federal appellate court.
Resnikoff, however, is not as optimistic. "The die has been cast," he remarked. "It’s very difficult to stop a facility once the decision goes to the NRC board."
-------- vermont
House OKs bill on VY storage
By ROSS SNEYD
Associated Press
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102~8860~2898033,00.html
MONTPELIER -- The House approved a bill Tuesday that would allow Vermont Yankee to apply for Public Service Board permission to store spent nuclear fuel on the grounds of its Vernon plant.
The 113-5 approval of the bill belied the monthslong negotiations among legislative leaders and Yankee owner Entergy Nuclear that led to the deal.
In return for the opportunity to store more nuclear waste in casks in Vernon, Entergy would pay the state $2.5 million per year through the 2012 end of its current operating license. Those payments would happen only if the company also wins approval to increase by 20 percent the amount of power it can produce at Yankee.
Combined with a deal earlier negotiated by the Douglas administration, Entergy would pay an estimated $28 million into a new "clean energy fund" that would pay for the development of renewable electric-generating sources to replace the Yankee and Hydro-Quebec power that currently represents two-thirds of the state's energy supply.
Despite the wide vote of approval, the issue was not an easy one for many lawmakers, especially those from Windham County. Rep. Sarah Edwards, P-Brattleboro, reluctantly supported it because of the clean energy fund.
"I voted yes on this bill, trying to salvage something, because of the clean energy fund which will be created, helping us to get further away from our addiction to nuclear power," she said. "The further we move away, the less likely it will be that we are held hostage when this issue of storage of high-level nuclear waste re-emerges in 2012."
Some Republicans were reluctant to support the bill because they believed that legislative leaders forced Entergy to pay into the newly created fund as a cost of being allowed to continue doing business in Vermont.
The Vermont Yankee nuclear plant will run out of a place to store its waste as early as 2007 and needs the dry cask storage to continue operating.
"I do not believe in forced agreements where one party faces an ultimatum if they do not agree," said Rep. Kevin Endres, R-Milton, although he ultimately voted in favor because he said the low-cost electricity produced by Yankee was needed for the state.
Others were angry that the deal had been negotiated in secret among Entergy and legislative leaders.
"This bill was gutted and rewritten behind closed doors with Entergy and without the public," said Rep. Steve Darrow, D-Dummerston, who voted against it.
The House acted swiftly, completing its consideration of the bill in just a single afternoon and sent it on to the Senate, where it's likely to win approval later this week.
-------- washington
Fluor stops Hanford cleanup protest
Wednesday, June 1st, 2005
By Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald staff writer
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/6556929p-6439690c.html
Hanford appears finally to have a new contractor for cleanup of the river corridor after Fluor Corp. announced Tuesday that it has withdrawn its protest to the $1.9 billion contract award.
The status of the contract to clean up the Hanford nuclear reservation along the Columbia River has been in limbo since 2003.
Most recently, Washington Closure was awarded a seven-year contract to clean up the 210 square miles of the Hanford nuclear reservation along the Columbia River in March. But the transition of the work to Washington Closure was halted in early April after losing bidder Fluor questioned whether the contract had been properly awarded.
The Department of Energy told Hanford employees late Tuesday afternoon that Washington Closure, a limited liability corporation led by Washington Group International, will resume work toward the transition of the contract. That's expected to happen Monday.
"We've been standing by since April, and we're ready to resume exactly where we left off," said Jack Herrmann, a spokesman for Washington Group International.
Washington Closure will take over from Bechtel Hanford. Bechtel Hanford's contract has been extended 11 times to continue clean up while the Department of Energy worked to get a new contract awarded.
Fluor Corp., one of three finalists for the contract, concluded that DOE had conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the bids for the project, the company announced in a written statement Tuesday.
The protest made to the Government Accountability Office had questioned whether DOE made factual errors, treated bidders differently and departed from its announced evaluation criteria.
But after filing the protest, Fluor received substantially more information and more detailed information from DOE on the bid award, Fluor said.
"While Fluor does disagree with elements of the evaluation and ultimate award decision, Fluor has decided to withdraw its protest," Fluor said in a prepared statement. Fluor declined to elaborate on the statement, which also was sent to its employees Tuesday.
The price Fluor bid for the project was very close to Washington Closure's bid, and the technical and management proposals also were "extremely close," Fluor said.
"Having completed the review of the additional record provided as a result of the protest, Fluor believed it to be in the best interests of all concerned, and in particular, the Washington stake holders anxious for the risk reduction offered by this important cleanup work, to withdraw the protest," Fluor said.
Hanford produced plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program for more than 40 years.
The river corridor contract includes cleaning up reactor areas in northern Hanford and cleaning up the 300 Area just north of Richland where fuel was fabricated and processes tested for use at the production scale. Hundreds of contaminated buildings need to be torn down and waste sites and burial grounds dug up.
The contract includes placing several plutonium production reactors in safe storage. The reactors will be torn down to their radioactive cores, roofed and closed up. The contractor also will operate a huge landfill for radioactive waste in central Hanford.
DOE's goal is to clean up the river corridor by 2015, and the contract award includes incentives for Washington Closure to accelerate work and finish in 2012.
Washington Group International has teamed with Bechtel National and CH2M Hill to form Washington Closure. All three have a long history of doing work at Hanford.
The March award to the Washington Closure team was the Department of Energy's second attempt to award the contract. It named a contractor for the work in 2003, but that contract was successfully protested on the grounds that the award was based on unrealistic cost calculations. DOE then prepared a new bid solicitation and awarded the contract to Washington Closure this spring.
In 2003, the contract had been awarded to Washington Group, which had then teamed with Fluor Federal Services and Earth Tech. The successful protesters on the project were Washington Group's new partners on the work, Bechtel and CH2M Hill.
"We're glad the protest of the River Corridor contract has been resolved," said Nick Ceto, Hanford project manager for the Environmental Protection Agency. "It will take away all the uncertainty plaguing us the last two years."
EPA has had no position on which contractor should be given the work, but it has pushed for work to move forward.
"Moving forward with cleanup along the Columbia River is critical to achieving the environmental and human health protection goals of all of Hanford's stake holders," Ceto said.
A 90-day transition to Washington Closure was announced in April, and the transition was several days under way before Fluor's protest was filed and the transition stopped. Bechtel Hanford's latest contract extension is through the end of July.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
CIA Secretly Restores Ties to Sudan Despite Ongoing Human Rights Abuses in Darfur
Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/01/1440259
The Los Angeles Times recently revealed that the U.S. has quietly forged a close intelligence partnership with Sudan despite the government's role in the mass killings in Darfur. Charles Snyder, the U.S. State Department Senior Representative on Sudan, defends the Bush administration's policy on Sudan. [includes rush transcript] In a major expose, the Los Angeles Times recently revealed that the U.S. has quietly forged a close intelligence partnership with Sudan despite the government's role in the mass killings in Darfur. The Sudanese government has since publicly confirmed it is working with the Bush administration and the CIA. Eight months ago, former Secretary of State Colin Powell accused the Sudanese of carrying out a genocide in Darfur. Already 180,000 have died in the region from fighting or hunger. But relations appear to have since changed -- for the Sudanese government's benefit. One senior Sudanese official the LA Times that the country had achieved "complete normalization" of relations with the CIA. The Times reported that the CIA sent an executive jet in late April to Khartoum to ferry the chief of Sudan's intelligence agency to Washington for secret meetings sealing Khartoum's sensitive and previously veiled partnership with the administration. The Sudanese intelligence chief - Major General Salah Abdallah Gosh - has been accused by members of Congress of directing military attacks against civilians in Darfur. He also had regular contacts with Osama bin Laden during the 1990s.
We talk with Charles Snyder, the U.S. State Department Senior Representative on Sudan, about the report.
* Charles Snyder, the U.S. State Department Senior Representative on Sudan.
Meanwhile as violence continues in Darfur, students throughout California lobbied yesterday in Sacramento for a bill that would require state divestment from all companies doing business in the Sudan. Two California public pension funds have over $12.5 billion in Sudan-related holdings. Last week the Illinois state legislature became the first to approve divestment of state funds from corporations doing business in Sudan. ??
* Ben Elberger, a student at Stanford who is part of the group STAND, Students Taking Action Now: Darfur.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: We continue the latest discussion on Sudan, with the Medecins Sans Frontieres’ report on hundreds of women raped in Darfur. We are joined by Nicholas Detorrente, Executive Director of Doctors Without Borders here in New York. Charles Snyder, US State Department Senior Representative on the Sudan, is on the line with us on the phone in Washington. Charles Snyder, I wanted to stick with you for a moment. Months ago, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, came out further even than the United Nations in talking about the genocide that was being carried out by Sudan in Darfur. But then The Los Angeles Times did a report about a month ago that the CIA had sent an executive jet to Khartoum to ferry the chief of Sudan’s intelligence agency to Washington for secret meetings, sealing Khartoum's sensitive and previously veiled partnership with the administration. It was the Sudanese intelligence chief, Major General Salah Abdallah Gosh, who has been accused by members of Congress by directing military attacks against the civilians in Darfur, had regular contacts with Osama bin Laden during the 90s, that the US is now working with, so the government working with Darfur, with the Sudanese government. So presumably, you would have very high contacts to deal with what is taking place right now, for example, the latest report on the rapes.
CHARLES SNYDER: No, I mean, we have actually protested to him as well through other channels, basically saying to him, this is an outrage. But there's been this misimpression that somehow, you know, we are overlooking some of these humanitarian concerns, we are overlooking the genocide because of this intelligence cooperation, and that's simply not so. I mean, that was the sine qua non of this – the president allowing us to even negotiate with them way back in 2001 was they have to begin to cooperate on counterterrorism. That's a necessity, and they were cooperating with us at quite a high level before we called them on genocide. So, we didn't hesitate on the humanitarian side and on the, frankly, the human rights side to act when we saw it as necessary. We made it clear to them the intelligence cooperation is its own separate entity, and it's the minimum for any kind of continued progress with us. So we have not at all pulled back our punches. Certainly, Secretary Powell didn't pull his punches when he called it genocide. We have not at all pulled our punches based on what they're doing with us on the intelligence side. And I just wanted to correct that misimpression. It just isn’t so. And in fact our access to people like Gosh is enhanced by this, and we are making demands on him, which is allowing us to clarify the situation in a number of ways. For instance, one of the problems we’ve got, and we agree 100% with Medecins Sans Frontieres, if they turn over this report, what they will wind up doing is using the names and the people and of the women themselves that have actually been raped and they will charge them with crimes. This is just not acceptable and outrageous. And we’re saying that to them. If you want to have anyone believe there is any hope for Sudanese justice, if you want to turn off the international justice, you have go to prove to us you will arrest and prosecute some of these people, not prosecute the victims.
AMY GOODMAN: What about sanctions?
CHARLES SNYDER: The sanctions, you know -- we have sanctioned Sudan every way from Sunday and have for years, going back into the Clinton administration. Our ability to act unilaterally on these kinds of things simply is not effective in the modern world. That's the reason when we called it genocide, we took it to the security council, hoping that the security council would join us and call this genocide and said, as you know, as the commission of inquiry went out and it found high crimes, war crimes, things approaching genocide but did not call it genocide. And that leaves us unable and frustrated in many ways to impose the kind of sanctions that we would like to see imposed in this situation: truly universal, truly effective sanctions. You need the Chinese, the Russians, the Europeans and frankly, even the rest of the Africans to join us in that, and the security council in this commission of inquiry simply did not find it to be genocide. We still disagree. But again, it's an interdependent world. When we act alone, we’re important, but we're not able to squeeze the regime like this as effectively as we should be able to and would like to be able to.
AMY GOODMAN: Now Congress has issued a list of senior Sudanese officials who they claim have been involved in war crimes but the administration has not released its own list, as Congress has requested it do.
CHARLES SNYDER: We're in bit of a delicate position here. Everyone sees our opposition to the ICC as a mile wide and 12 miles deep, and we could be accused of prejudicing their actions by coming up with our own name and a list of names and then we get into this game where the ICC says, you know, these 51 and the Americans say that 51. We want to give the ICC some space to operate. So, we are a bit reluctant to get too far into the big names until we see where the ICC investigation goes.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, certainly, in other cases, the US names people they call terrorist, and the US is very busy not supporting the International Criminal Court, so it seems odd to use that as an example to respect the Criminal Court and not name people?
CHARLES SNYDER: Well, on the Security Council, this is the first time we acted on the ICC. We abstained, which said we would give it the space to operate. We just don't feel at this time naming names that may turn out to be a different list of names from what the ICC has or from somebody's professional judgment. Ocampo is a professional prosecutor. In his judgment, the case may not be valid against these 51 names, and we need to be careful. I mean we have also got a peace part of this that we have to balance against the justice. We cannot sacrifice either one to the other. And it's a delicate dance we are doing. We are not going to satisfy Congress on this in the short run, but I think in the longer run, I think they will be satisfied with the way we come out.
AMY GOODMAN: The Congress has requested a number of other steps also like targeted sanctions on people so that they're identified as having committed war crimes. Those that are would have their, for example, bank accounts frozen and be barred from operating on an international level. Your response to that?
CHARLES SNYDER: Well, the resolution has got its own committee enforcing the sanction. You know, 1591 is the particular UN Resolution involved in this. And it's just now begun to be set up under the Greeks and they're not far enough along yet to have a list of names. We'll provide names who we believe are responsible for this. You have also got the problem where a lot of these people, especially when you get down to the tribal chieftain level, this is something that makes us feel good as opposed to is this going to have any effect. These men don't have bank accounts overseas. They don't send their children abroad to school. So the kind of sanctions that we’re dealing with here are just not going to be effective against them.
AMY GOODMAN: What about an arms embargo? Those in Congress asking for an arms embargo on the government of Sudan?
CHARLES SNYDER: We pushed, as you know, in the security council, for an arms embargo. The trouble is to get 15 people to go along with that, you have to overcome the Russians, the Chinese, and several others that object to this, some on theoretical grounds and some on practical grounds, that they're actually selling weapons. But nonetheless we need a universal vote or otherwise it's a unilateral American arms embargo. And right now we have an arms embargo against Sudan: we do not sell weapons to Sudan.
AMY GOODMAN: What difference does it make -- let me put this question to Nick Detorrente, especially with two of your people in a very precarious position now, not allowed to leave the Sudan after the rape report was out -- what kind of pressure is put on the Sudanese government?
NICHOLAS DETORRENTE: Well, I think we’re concerned about the ability to be able to continue to provide humanitarian aid, you know, in Darfur, and we have to remember that, you know, in -- going back a little bit, that for many, many months when the attacks were at their peak in late 2003-early 2004, there was virtually no access at all to Darfur, and aid was completely blocked, and the region was inaccessible. The Sudanese government would not allow aid workers in. Since then it has been opened and political pressure has played a key part in that, in allowing at least humanitarian aid to be provided, and that has enabled a very significant aid effort to be undertaken, which has helped maintain the population above survival levels. I mean, the situation right now is a deep stagnation and stalemate. People are stuck in the camps. They're just above survival level. Assistance is coming in. It's very fragile and precarious. And that needs to be able to continue.
And this is our fear, because these attacks -- these arrests are the most high profile, you know, signs of intimidation of aid workers. But there have been a number of others. A lot of other aid workers have been detained for questioning, arrested at the local level, and we have to remember, most of the aid workers in Darfur are Sudanese. They -- we have international staff, in a way, they are, you know, more protected. These are high profile arrests. Paul Foreman and Vince Hoedt, you know, speak to the BBC. They're well known. But we have, you know, thousands of Sudanese staff who are out on the front lines of providing assistance to the people in Darfur. I frankly, I’m more worried for them right now, because if this gives a signal, kind of a green light for local officials to start intimidating and harassing aid workers at the local level, I think the aid effort could easily be undermined, and that would be very dramatic for the close to 2 million people displaced in camps in Sudan right now, who are utterly dependent on outside assistance as they cannot return to their homes. Their villages are have been burnt, and they're stuck in these camps just above survival levels, and they’re dependent on aid.
AMY GOODMAN: Charles Snyder of the State Department, Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, writes in The Washington Post, “Since January, Bush and Rice have met with leaders from NATO and UN security council member countries 29 times. They have mentioned Darfur publicly only once.” He says, “That's no way to convince the world and Sudan that America is serious.” Your response?
CHARLES SNYDER: We have been pressing in every channel, including the meetings you mentioned on this Darfur issue. The secretary herself, as you know, brought up on a personal level to the North Atlantic Council, as well as with the Russians in Vilmius the idea that NATO should be used, as well as potentially the European Union's defense procedures, to reinforce this AU presence. We have been the leader in pledging money and pledging funds and in taking action on the ground. 70% of the food aid is ours. 50% of the cash that's been expended in Darfur is ours. We have already spent $95 million on this first AU force. We have just pledged another $50 million, and we have offered airlift. We think that that in the long run is the answer. And the long run is not that -- I’m not talking years here, I’m talking months, over the course of the summer, getting a larger --
AMY GOODMAN: But, of course.
CHARLES SNYDER: -- African Union force on the ground.
AMY GOODMAN: But, of course, you know, the statements of the President of the United States and the Secretary of State are priceless.
CHARLES SNYDER: No, and I think the Secretary has spoken out on this, and in particular, deputy secretary Zoellick has taken the lead on this. And he has been quite active in his – and that was going back yet again. And he has made several phone calls in the interim.
AMY GOODMAN: But that's lower level, talking about, you know, the public statement of the President of the United States who is engaged in a, (quote), “war on terror.”
CHARLES SNYDER: Well, we have made these ideas present at the highest levels. The President has spoken privately to people about this. There will be an appropriate moment to speak out forcefully and openly. The secretary is now the level at which we are speaking out. And you will see the Pentagon take action in support of moving the AU in. This is an area where we are willing to actually be engaged effectively. And the question is what's most effective, and our judgment right now is what we're doing is the most effective.
AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Charles Snyder, US State Department senior representative on Sudan, also Nicholas Detorrente is with us, Executive Director of Doctors Without Borders here in New York. And for a moment we're joined by Ben Elberger of Stanford University. He’s with a group called STAND, Students Taking Action Now: Darfur. We only have a minute, Ben, but I wanted to ask about your lobby day yesterday in Sacramento for a bill that would require state divestment from all companies doing business in the Sudan. Two California public pension funds have over $12.5 billion in Sudan-related holdings. Last week, the Illinois State Legislature became the first to approve divestment of state funds from corporations doing business in Sudan. Ben Elberger, talk about what you are doing?
BEN ELBERGER: We actually, in our lobby day we went up to talk about the bill with state senators. It passed the California Assembly. Unfortunately, when it was in the California Assembly, it was amended and it was watered down to change from divestment to take action within fiduciary responsibility. So what we are really trying to push is for them to add back divestment, but really target the oil companies that are doing business there, because there are a lot of connections that are suggesting that oil companies and the oil royalties that goes to government are being used to fund weapons.
AMY GOODMAN: Which oil companies are there?
BEN ELBERGER: We know -- our research suggests that PetroChina, Sinopec, Tatneft, ABB Ltd., Total FA, Marathon Oil and London Petroleum, are really seven companies that are documented as doing business there.
AMY GOODMAN: And California pension funds are invested in them?
BEN ELBERGER: We know that California pension funds are probably invested in some of them. CalPERS has told us they are not invested in PetroChina or Tatneft at the moment, but we’re really trying to push to make sure that they put these companies on a “do not invest” list.
AMY GOODMAN: Charles Snyder, your response to these moves from Illinois to now California to go after companies that do business in the Sudan?
CHARLES SNYDER: The truth is, under the IEPA sanctions which have been in place against the government of Sudan, going back into the Clinton administration, no American company is permitted to spend money in Sudan that's in any way related to the government of Sudan's activities. For instance, he just mentioned Marathon Oil. The truth is Marathon Oil has not been allowed to spend any money in pursuit of its existing contracts and is in fact probably in violation as a technical matter of a whole number of agreements they have with other companies, because they simply cannot spend any money or do anything effectively in Sudan. And that's true across the board. I mean, recently, the Sudanese were after buying an airbus from China. The engines are GE engines. We blocked that export. The truth is the practical embargo by the United States is in effect against this kind of activity.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me put a question to Nicholas Detorrente. The issue of the arms embargo, would that make a difference on the ground if the US imposed an arms embargo against the Sudanese government?
NICHOLAS DETORRENTE: It's hard for me to comment on that, but I think that there are sufficient weapons and especially the will to carry out the kinds of policies of repression and scorched earth that have characterized the situation in Darfur at the moment, and so I think that the real issue right now is pressure on whoever is waging violence to stop that, especially directed at – obviously directed at civilians and specific crimes such as sexual assault and rape, and then, of course, is the -- to -- the pressures to allow for aid to continue. I think that's the precondition for anything else. The aid has to be able to continue. But it's not enough, and we are actually frankly concerned that just the trickle of aid that is being allowed to come in and very precarious, very fragile is, you know -- this kind of stalemate seems to be convenient for everyone at the moment. People are stuck in the camps. They cannot go back. But nothing is really done to enable them to return to their villages, to move on and the political solutions that need to be put in place for that to happen are really stalemated at the moment, at least from the perspective of the people in the camps and suffering in Darfur today.
AMY GOODMAN: And final time, Charles Snyder, again why the Bush administration is not pushing for an arms embargo against the Sudanese government, who itself -- who the Bush administration says is engaged in genocide?
CHARLES SNYDER: We did in fact push for such an arms embargo. Frankly, the security council will not go along with us. What we got was the best we could, which is a limited embargo.
AMY GOODMAN: But a US embargo, not UN, but US.
CHARLES SNYDER: There is a US arms embargo. We do not sell weapons to the Sudanese government. We have not. And to the degree we detect anybody, as a third party, selling US weapons, we take action against them. But the truth is the weapons are not coming from the United States. And as the Medecins Sans Frontieres guy already pointed out, there's enough weapons on the ground to fight this war another ten years without any new weapons. It's not us. It’s other parties that are selling these weapons, and as long as at security council chooses not to see this as a viable action, it's a unilateral action on our part that's relatively ineffective.
AMY GOODMAN: On that note, we’ll have to wrap it up, I want to thank you very much, Charles Snyder, US State Department senior representative on Sudan, Nicholas Detorrente, Executive Director of Doctors Without Borders in New York City, and Ben Elberger, Stanford student lobbying for divestment from companies to doing business with the Sudan.
-------- israel / palestine
Outgoing Israeli Army Chief Gloomy About Peace Prospects
By STEVEN ERLANGER
June 1, 2005 NY TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/01/international/middleeast/01cnd-yaal.html?pagewanted=print
JERUSALEM, June 1 - Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon ended his term as Israel's chief of staff today, a military leader praised for modernizing and revamping the armed forces and putting down the second Palestinian intifada. But as he leaves office, General Yaalon is gloomy about an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, despite the election of a Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who opposes violence against the Israelis.
"I can't offer now a simple, achievable solution," he said, taking note of the last four years of bloodshed. "So we have to manage a conflict. And we're strong enough to do it." After Israel pulls out of Gaza, General Yaalon added, another outbreak of violence in the West Bank is likely.
With the Oslo accords of 1993, through the Camp David negotiations until the intifada of 2000, Israel tried to move toward a two-state solution with the Palestinians by dividing the land, he said in a 90-minute interview on Friday in his Tel Aviv office.
"It was achievable," the 54-year-old general said. "But the Palestinian leadership and Yasir Arafat refused to recognize our right to exist as an Israeli state. The Palestinian answer was to initiate a war to avoid a political process and the end of conflict and the recognition of Israel alongside a Palestinian state, unfortunately."
Those basic questions remain unresolved among the Palestinians and will remain so until Mr. Abbas confronts the power of the Islamic radical movement Hamas, General Yaalon believes.
The Palestinians, of course, have their own interpretation of why peace talks failed at the end of President Bill Clinton's term, and why the second intifada began, out of popular frustration with a continuing Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.
But General Yaalon's views are widely shared in Israel and in the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Despite the general's soft demeanor, he is a tough man who once said that the lesson that terrorism would not pay "must be seared onto the Palestinians' minds."
But he also annoyed Mr. Sharon by saying that the government had not been generous enough with security concessions to help Mr. Abbas during his short-lived term in 2003 as Mr. Arafat's prime minister. Despite General Yaalon's desire to serve another year, to see through the Israeli pullout from Gaza this summer, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, his predecessor as chief of staff, told him that his services would no longer be required.
General Yaalon, a paratrooper who had a steady rise in 37 years with the Army, as head of intelligence, chief of central command and chief of staff, said he believed in Oslo.
"But looking back, I have every reason to suspect the Palestinians and not to trust them on security arrangements and keeping their side of a deal," he said. "It remains a problem for us, the principle of accountability. We want to make a deal in the evening and have it true in the morning."
As Israel prepares to leave Gaza, "I worry about the situation of the Palestinian Authority," he said. "I hope we'll face one Palestinian Authority with one law and one weapon," as Mr. Abbas cites as his goal. "But I'm not sure it will happen. What we see now is armed gangs. The reality is that there are two organizations still there, equipped and capable," with Hamas seeing itself as the equal to the Palestinian Authority, not subordinate. "And Hamas has been allowed by the new Palestinian chairman to participate in the political process, and even elections, without giving up its weapons."
Mr. Abbas has moved too slowly to assert the power he won in his landslide election, when he could have moved more quickly to take the guns away from Hamas, General Yaalon said. "He dithers too much, he's not firm," he said of Mr. Abbas. "There's a gap between his decisions and the reality on the ground. Terrorist groups like Hamas are taking advantage of the situation to regroup."
General Yaalon was reported to be against the Gaza disengagement plan when it was first discussed, but he quickly fell in line and, by all accounts, has planned the army's role with customary attention to detail, with emphasis on treating the settlers "as brothers," not as enemies. "There is no doubt that we will implement it," he said. "The price of not implementing a government decision in a democracy would be disastrous."
But he is reluctant to praise the plan or to predict that Israel will be safer the next day. "I'm not sure what will be the impact of the disengagement plan," he says warily. "There are too many questions about the day after," including how the Palestinians "write their narrative" and the lessons they draw - either Israel is seen as leaving Gaza because of its own interests, or it is seen as having been driven out of Gaza "because of terrorism," he said.
After disengagement, he expects Hamas to "keep peace and quiet in Gaza" as it concentrates on politics "and prefer to renew terror attacks in the West Bank," which Israel will continue to occupy. "But when we react to the attacks in the West Bank, they might use the weapons from the Gaza Strip as well," General Yaalon said, suggesting, "Maybe that's the reason Mahmoud Abbas lets them keep them."
Peace will only come through a change of values in the Middle East, he said, a process encouraged by President Bush and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. "This trend is positive," the general said. "The impact of democracy is more important than the other issues in the region. It's the only answer to stability here, or we'll face more groups like Hamas and Al Qaeda growing up in the madrassas," the Islamic religious schools.
He is particularly impressed with the Lebanese. "For the first time, the Arab street dared to express itself and threw the Syrians out of Lebanon," he said. "They did it, with the support of the United Nations, but they did it. And for the first time, Israel is not involved in the internal debate and we're not blamed."
Democracy is also coming to Egypt and the Palestinians, he said. "But to change values and attitudes will take time." It may also require a new leadership in Iran, "the most radical regime in the region," committed, he said, to the export of its Islamic revolution, the undermining of moderate Arab governments, the destruction of Israel and the attainment of nuclear weapons.
The main threat is not that Iran will use a nuclear weapon, but the power it will gain from having one, he said. "The threat is hegemony," as much a threat to Egypt as to Israel. He believes Iran can still be dissuaded by Western political and economic pressure. But as he moves aside for Dan Halutz, promoted today to lieutenant general, General Yaalon's advice, invoking an ancient Roman dictum, is relatively simple: "If you want peace, prepare for war."
-------- prisoners of war
Guantanamo Bay: A "Gulag Of Our Times" or a "Model Facility"? A Debate on the U.S. Prison & Amnesty International
Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/01/1441204
A week ago Amnesty International accused the Bush administration of being a "leading purveyor and practitioner" of human rights violations, debate has intensified over the U.S. war on terror. On Tuesday, Bush described the Amnesty report as "absurd." Today we host a debate between Amnesty's William Schulz and attorney David Rivkin. [includes rush transcript] Last week, Amnesty International issued a damning report blasting the Bush administration for ignoring international law and mistreating detainees held at military prisons. The report stated that human rights are in retreat worldwide and the United States bears most of the responsibility. It called the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "the gulag of our times." Amnesty called on foreign governments to uphold their obligations under international law by investigating all senior U.S. officials involved in the torture scandal. And, the group says, if those investigations support prosecution, the governments should arrest any official who enters their territory and begin legal proceedings against them.
This past weekend, General Richard Myers, and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice all dismissed Amnesty's report. And on Monday night Larry King aired an interview with Vice President Dick Cheney who said about the report, “Frankly, I was offended by it. For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don”t take them seriously.” He went on to say that "Occasionally there are allegations of mistreatment, but if you trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who had been inside and released to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated."
At a press conference yesterday, President Bush dismissed the report as well:
"I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd. It's an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that is -- promotes freedom around the world. When there's accusations made about certain actions by our people, they're fully investigated in a transparent way. It's just an absurd allegation.
"In terms of the detainees, we've had thousands of people detained. We've investigated every single complaint against the detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of -- and the allegations -- by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is."
??Joining us on the phone from New York is the executive director of Amnesty International USA, William Schulz. Also in our D.C studio is David Rivkin. He is is a partner in the Washington office of Baker & Hostetler He also served served in a variety of legal and policy positions in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush Administrations, including stints at the White House Counsel's office, Office of the Vice President and the Departments of Justice and Energy.
* David Rivkin, a partner in the Washington office of Baker & Hostetler LLP, a Visiting Fellow at the Nixon Center, a Contributing Editor of the National Review magazine and a member of the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights which as an expert body, supporting the UN Human Rights Commission.
* William Schultz, Executive Director, Amnesty International USA
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: At a news conference yesterday, President Bush dismissed the report, as well.
REPORTER: Mr. President, recently Amnesty International said you have established, (quote), "a new gulag of prisons around the world beyond the reach of the law and decency." I'd like your reaction to that, and also your assessment of how it came to this, that that is a view not just held by extremists and anti-Americans, but by groups that have allied themselves with the United States government in the past? And what the strategic impact is that in many places of the world, the United States these days under your leadership is no longer seen as the good guy?
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd. It's absurd allegation. The United States is a country that is -- promotes freedom around the world. When there's accusations made about certain actions by our people, they're fully investigated in a transparent way. It's just an absurd allegation. In terms of, you know, the detainees, we have had thousands of people detained. We have investigated every single complaint against the detainees. Seemed like to me, they base some of their decisions on the word of -- on the allegations by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that have been trained in some instances to disassemble. That means not tell the truth. So, it's an absurd report. Just is. And you know -- yes, sir.
AMY GOODMAN: That was President Bush speaking at a news conference yesterday. Joining us on the phone from New York is the Executive Director of Amnesty International U.S.A, William Schultz. Also in our D.C. Studio, David Rivkin, partner in the Washington office of Baker and Hostetler, also served in a variety of legal and policy positions in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, including stints at the White House counsel's office, office of the Vice President and the Departments of Justice and Energy, was also a visiting fellow at the Nixon Center and a contributing editor of the National Review magazine. Let's begin with William Schultz responding to what President Bush had to say about your report.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: Well, it's quite interesting that the Vice President doesn't take Amnesty seriously. The President calls us absurd. But, you know, when Amnesty International took on Saddam Hussein 20 years ago, when Donald Rumsfeld was courting him, and even in the run up to the Iraq war, when Amnesty International was regularly quoted by Mr. Rumsfeld and other officials about Saddam Hussein's brutality, under those circumstances, this president, this administration didn't think we were absurd at all. When we criticize Cuba, when we criticize North Korea, when we criticize China, as we have repeatedly, this administration applauds Amnesty International. But when we criticize the United States, we are suddenly absurd. I think the administration doth protest too much.
Let me clarify one point of your introduction, though, Amy. Amnesty International has urged that the United States undertake these investigations with a high-level commission and the appointment of a special prosecutor. And we have only said that if the United States fails to do its job, then other countries who are party to the Convention Against Torture and other international instrumentalities, have a legal obligation to investigate and, if appropriate, if they find evidence, then, of course, to prosecute.
AMY GOODMAN: David Rivkin, your response.
DAVID RIVKIN: Several things. First of all, Amnesty International indeed has a long and illustrious legacy. Amnesty International in the past has been an equal opportunity critic, if you will, bringing spotlight on abuses by many dictatorial and authoritarian regimes, including Cuba, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Iraq, etc., etc. Having said that, I think Amnesty International has unfortunately gone astray. It is not just the position of this administration. It's interesting that The Washington Post, that's been quite critical of many aspects of the administration's policies, the day after the report, issued a pretty scathing editorial pointing out a couple of things. First of all, rhetorically -- and, it's very important to look at the rhetoric, because we're inundated with news, in a way, the way you cast the context for your observations. In fact, your observations are very important. The Washington Post said that the word "gulag" is offensive. The gulags are outfits where political prisoners, dissidents are holed in, worked to death, starved to death. The gulags today are in places like North Korea, like China, like Cuba; in the past, of course, in the Soviet Union. Whenever you think about the administration's policy relative to Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, gulag is the wrong word, number one. Now, in terms of the facts – and by the way, Amnesty International report that goes for hundreds of --
AMY GOODMAN: Let me just let William Schultz respond to that, then we'll take it step by step. William Schultz.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: Well, I'm simply unwilling to get into an argument about semantics. I can certainly understand why some people feel that the secretary general's metaphor there was over the top. But, I think that it is important to say that whether or not this is a gulag in the Soviet sense, there certainly are some similarities. After all, we have an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret, in which people are being held in incommunicado detention and which they are being severely mistreated in some cases. And that --
DAVID RIVKIN: Forgive me, terms --
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: --that is the fundamental point.
DAVID RIVKIN: Forgive me, terms -- we're both adults. When you use words like "gulag" and one uses words like "holocaust," they have special responsibility not to cheapen those terms by promiscuous usage. You could have said "brutal prison." I wouldn't disagree with you there. You could have said "horrible prison conditions." To use the word “gulag,” you have special responsibility because everybody knows what it means. It's not even close. It's not even in the same universe. And that is utterly irresponsible of Amnesty International.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: Well, it's very fine, Mr. Rivkin, if you want to focus on that one issue at the expense of the substance of the concerns, which is --
DAVID RIVKIN: I did not choose this moniker, you did, sir.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: You are welcome to do that, but I'd like to discuss the substance of the concerns here.
DAVID RIVKIN: Okay, but the --
AMY GOODMAN: Why don't we talk about the substance of the concerns, William Schultz. A term like that was based on reports that Amnesty International has done. Can you talk about what you see as the most egregious violations at Guantanamo?
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: Well, I think what is important to say here is that Amnesty has been pointing out the systematic nature of what has been going on here, both in terms of denial of certain internationally recognized rights, but also in terms of mistreatment. Now, in a recent National Review online article, Mr. Rivkin claimed that the President had said, (quote), "clearly and unequivocally that prisoners should be treated humanely." But, that's not what the President said. The President said in his February 7, 2002, Executive Order that they should be treated in accordance with the conventions, (quote), "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity," (unquote). That opened the green light to a whole series of mistreatments, of misbehaviors that were ratified by 27 rules issued by Secretary Rumsfeld. Those included such things as the use of dogs. They allowed up to four hours of stress positions. These were implemented for a period of time, but at the advice of military lawyers, Rumsfeld then withdrew the authority for commanders at Guantanamo to do this kind of thing. And we know from reports that have been unearthed by the ACLU and others that it was not just groups like Amnesty or the ACLU that was concerned about this. We know that F.B.I. agents raised concern about this. We know that some people in the military community itself raised concerns about the treatment of these prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere.
Let me make the final point and then, of course, Mr. Rivkin can respond. If indeed all of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, some 670 originally, were enemy combatants and not prisoners of war, as Mr. Rivkin and his hard-right allies claim, then what about the more than 100 of them that have been released since they were taken into custody? If they were released, then one presumes that they were either wrongly detained in the first place or that the war against terror is over and that all should be released. Of course, that is not the administration's position. And that is the fundamental problem with holding people in incommunicado detention and failing to give them an opportunity to answer the charges against them. Because we simply don't know how many of those 670 now remaining -- a little more than 500 -- are in fact in the same category as the more than 100 that have been released.
AMY GOODMAN: David Rivkin.
DAVID RIVKIN: Let me take the last point first. It's ironic, to put it mildly, that the administration's policy of releasing people not because they are innocent, but the vast majority of people who have been released, indeed, are individuals who are enemy combatants, but basically been released because of the sense that they no longer pose danger, which inherently difficult and subjective determination. I wonder if Mr. Schultz would like to remind our listeners that at least two-and-a-half dozen of individuals who have been released have gone back to combat, including a senior Taliban commander in Afghanistan. How would you like to be a person to tell a family of an American soldier who has been killed by an individual who was released, or civilians whom they have killed because of this revolving door policy? So, bottom line is we are releasing people because we're humanitarian, we're compassionate, and, frankly, we have been pushed to do so for the rest of the world -- by the rest of the world. I wouldn't deduce anything from it. But let me give you the bottom line: I would not deny, and I don't think any reasonable person would deny, that some problems have occurred. But the facts, the statistics are very simple. We have close to 70,000 detainees. 70,000 detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. No more than 320 or 330 have alleged problems ranging from serious ones -- there have been some murders, there have been some beatings-- to more minor ones. About 120 have been investigated and found to have merits, and people are being prosecuted. These are better stats than the situation in any civilian penitentiary, Federal or State, anywhere in human history. The problem is that any time you detain people, any time you put them in captivity, there are going to be some mistakes. There are going to be some problems. There are going to be abuses. It's human nature. But the facts simply do not support the proposition that the wide-scale abuses attributed to government policy.
AMY GOODMAN: William Schultz.
DAVID RIVKIN: The final point. No, no. Let me --
AMY GOODMAN: Let him respond to that.
DAVID RIVKIN: The final point.
AMY GOODMAN: Ok, go ahead.
DAVID RIVKIN: Okay, just one sec -- Amnesty International and others have said many times, "Charges being brought." There's a fundamental problem here. Amnesty International and others did not understand, but this is war. These people are not criminal suspects who are entitled to speedy trial and adjudication. Even if they were P.O.W.s, which they are not, they would be entitled to be held for a duration of hostilities. They're not entitled to get charges brought against them. They are using the criminal law paradigm, which is the paradigm which came on September 11.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: Well, let me – of course, Mr. Rivkin is completely wrong about Amnesty's position on that. But let me just say that there's no way in the world that Mr. Rivkin or anyone else can know whether there are only 300 complaints, because, in fact, many of the thousands of people who are being detained are being detained in secret facilities. They are being detained incommunicado. There is simply no way for any of us to know exactly how much abuse is going on, because, I assure you, that unlike in the U.S. prison system where there is usually at least some kind of an appeal process or independent authority to whom a prisoner can appeal, including the court system, if they feel that they have been abused in prison, there is no such authority within this archipelago of prisons. So, there's no way that he can make his claim. Now, with regard to the Guantanamo prisoners who have been released, Amnesty International's position is not that they should just be treated as criminals, though, of course, if they are guilty of crimes, they should be prosecuted. Our position is that we don't know whether they are prisoners of war or whether they are enemy combatants, but under the Geneva Conventions, a competent tribunal is supposed to determine that. And at that tribunal, those who are charged with being enemy combatants are to be given the opportunity to answer their charges. That is what the U.S. government has denied them. And if, in fact, Mr. Rivkin's position on why those 100 or so have been released is correct, then the U.S. is acting irresponsibly. If, in fact, those are people who are liable to go back and commit crimes against the United States, then either they should be charged or they can be considered prisoners of war and held until a judgment is made by an independent authority as to whether the, (quote) "war" (unquote), is resolved or not. That is Amnesty's position. It is a subtle position. It is not as black and white as Mr. Rivkin is making it. I'm not surprised that Bush and Cheney don't see these subtleties, but Mr. Rivkin is a lawyer, and he ought to understand.
AMY GOODMAN: William Schultz, when you released the report, you said that Washington has become a leading purveyor and practitioner of torture and ill treatment, and that senior officials should face prosecution. Among the officials you named: Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Former C.I.A Director George Tenet, and other senior officials at U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo. Are you saying that President Bush should be tried for war crimes?
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: No. And let me make it clear, Amy. Amnesty never assumes the guilt of anyone. And we did not call for their prosecution. We called for the appointment of a special prosecutor by the Attorney General to investigate whether President Bush or any of these other officials, including Attorney General Gonzales, should be prosecuted. That is Amnesty's position, again, perhaps a subtle position, but a very important one. We are saying that there is reason to believe that the President gave a green light here, and that a high-level, truly independent commission, not just a military commission, a commission like the 9/11 Commission, independent, blue-ribbon commission, should be appointed by the Congress to investigate all of these questions. But we have not called for the prosecution until that investigation takes place. That's a simple -- you know, an elementary principle of due process.
AMY GOODMAN: David Rivkin, why not have this special prosecutor, and then if your arguments prove to be correct, it'll show that there's no reason to move forward with prosecutions?
DAVID RIVKIN: Amy, we have to be careful about terminology. A commission is one thing, a special prosecutor is another thing.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: We are calling for both.
DAVID RIVKIN: I understand that, but let me say this, there have been more investigations --
AMY GOODMAN: We have ten seconds.
DAVID RIVKIN: --and prosecutions then, again, in any war in human history. We are going to go forward. A number of people have already been indicted. To the extent senior officers are involved, they will be prosecuted. The facts simply do not support the proposition. There's been a wide-scale failure to comply with the laws of war.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there. David Rivkin, William Schultz, head of Amnesty International U.S.A., I want to thank you both for being with us.
-------- spies
Foreign spying in 2004 impaired U.S. military edge
June 01, 2005
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050531-110044-9888r.htm
Foreign spies from nearly 100 nations sought sensitive U.S. technology last year, and technology losses undermined U.S. military advantages, according to an annual U.S. counterintelligence report.
"The U.S. counterintelligence community judges that the technology lost as a result of these efforts has imposed a significant, but difficult to quantify, cost on the United States," stated the report on economic spying, the theft of trade secrets.
"Foreign access to sensitive dual-use and military technology has eroded the U.S. military advantage, degraded the U.S. intelligence community's ability to provide information to policymakers and undercut U.S. industry."
The report, submitted to Congress and made public several weeks ago, was produced by the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, a counterspy unit that recently was placed under new Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte.
The report did not identify the countries involved in economic spying but said they include the small number of nations that "perennially top the counterintelligence community's list of most aggressive collectors."
A senior FBI counterintelligence official, however, identified some of the nations most active in high-technology spying against the United States as China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Japan, France and Israel.
In one case, the official said, the Chinese stole the technology for an advanced metal used in U.S. military systems from a university laboratory in Iowa.
"Before the U.S. military could get it licensed, classified and manufactured, the Chinese had stolen it, stolen the marketing strategies, the customer list, and were manufacturing and selling it back to the United States," the official said.
The counterintelligence report said most corporate trade secrets and technology theft took place "without direct intervention by state actors, though most foreign governments involved have not discouraged such theft and themselves often benefited from the transfers."
Major foreign economic spies, however, continued to use their intelligence services and commercial enterprises in stealing or buying the most sensitive and difficult-to-obtain U.S. technology last year, the report said.
Economic spies were able to obtain the data by making direct requests of naive U.S. companies, in many cases by simply asking via e-mail, phone call, facsimile, letter or in person for the sensitive information, the report said.
High-technology targets included information systems, sensors, aeronautics, electronics, armaments and explosives.
The report said the United States remains the primary source of most of the world's advanced technology used for foreign militaries. U.S. technology theft also is used by foreign governments to help make their domestic businesses more competitive.
"The counterintelligence community expects no decline in foreign demand for sensitive U.S. technologies over the next few years," the report said.
-------- us
Fewer and Fewer Latinos Willing to Die in Iraq
by Diego Cevallos June 1, 2005
(Inter Press Service)
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/cevallos.php?articleid=6168
MEXICO CITY – A total of 215 Latino soldiers serving in the U.S. Army have already died in Iraq, but according to antiwar activists, this bad news comes with a silver lining: an ever smaller number of young people of Latin American descent are enlisting in the armed forces.
"I'm glad that the Army is no longer able to recruit as many soldiers, and that more people are raising their voices against this criminal invasion," said Camilo Mejía, a Nicaraguan-born former staff sergeant in the U.S. Army who refused to return to his unit in Iraq after spending five months stationed there in 2003.
While Mejía declared himself a conscientious objector, the United States deemed him a deserter, and sentenced him to nine months in prison.
Last year, 9,477 foreign-born residents of the United States signed up for the U.S. armed forces – 2,352 fewer than in 2003, according to official statistics from the George W. Bush administration.
"There are so many people dying in this senseless, criminal war that going to jail to oppose it or refusing to join the Army are not very big sacrifices when you compare them to all the innocent people killed in the war," Mejía told IPS.
"I didn't want to die in a war that isn't mine, a war that is unjust and immoral. That's why I turned myself in to my superiors," declared the soldier-turned-activist, the son of Nicaraguan singer-songwriter Carlos Mejía Godoy, whose music served as the "soundtrack" to the 1979 leftist Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.
Since the beginning of the occupation of Iraq in March 2003, a total of 1,653 soldiers from the United States have died there. Almost 15 percent of these casualties were of Latin American birth or descent, according to figures gathered by the Guerrero Azteca (Aztec Warrior) Project, a U.S.-based group that is demanding the return of the soldiers sent to the Middle East.
The proportion of Latino soldiers who have died in Iraq, most of whom were privates, is higher than the proportion of Latinos in the U.S. armed forces as a whole, which stands at 9.2 percent.
To join the U.S. Army, it is sufficient to be a legal resident of the United States, and not necessarily a citizen. In fact, non-citizens are encouraged to sign up by the Bush administration's promises to speed up the citizenship process and grant scholarships to those who enlist.
Monday was Memorial Day in the United States, a day for paying tribute to the soldiers who have lost their lives in war.
In his Memorial Day address, President Bush stated, "Another generation is fighting a new war against an enemy that threatens the peace and stability of the world, and thanks to their efforts, freedom is on the march."
"Freedom – real freedom, not the one sold by Mr. Bush – obliges us to say that the invasion of Iraq is a colossal deception, and the best thing to do is to get out of there," Mexican-American activist Fernando Suárez, the founder of Aztec Warrior, told IPS.
"More and more Latinos are dying in Iraq, and we weep for these deaths, because they are absurd, but thanks to the antiwar movement, and the prolongation of the occupation, there has been a major drop in willingness to join in the invasion, and that is good news," he stressed.
Suárez, whose son Jesús joined the U.S. Army and died in Iraq at the start of the occupation, maintained that the "irrational war" in the Middle East is "crumbling under the weight of its own immorality."
He spoke with IPS by telephone from a public school in California, where he was giving a presentation against the occupation. Mejía was also interviewed by telephone, but from his home in the state of Georgia.
Both are legal residents of the United States, and both are devoting themselves to traveling around the country to voice their opposition to the war and demand that the U.S. soldiers in Iraq be sent home.
"Because I have seen the war, because I have seen what the Army is doing, I feel I have the responsibility and the moral obligation to raise awareness, so that people will know what is really going on and will try to stop this war," said Mejía.
"I have received a lot of letters from the families of fallen soldiers who were against the war but who went over anyway, because they were afraid, or because they didn't feel strong enough to stand up to their superiors and say that they didn't want to take part," he recounted.
"They died while doing something that was against their principles, and that is very sad. But I tell their families to support the soldiers who are still over there and don't want to be in the war. I tell them to tell those soldiers not to be afraid, because going to jail for desertion is nothing when you are following your conscience," he added.
Mejía, like Suárez's son and hundreds of other young people of Latin American descent, were drawn to enlist in the U.S. Army by the promises of assistance and scholarships.
"At the time [1995], I was looking for somewhere to put down roots, because I had lived in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Cuba, and the United States, and I wanted to be a part of something," said the former staff sergeant , who is now a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.
But "going to war wasn't what I was looking for, and I was very critical of the invasion," he said.
"I went to Iraq, and being there raised my consciousness to the point where I was able to speak out and say that this is a criminal war. And the price I paid was a court martial and nine months in jail," he added.
According to Mejía, who was locked up on a military base in the United States until February, dozens of Latino soldiers do not want to be in Iraq, but they stay because they are afraid of going to jail and being branded deserters.
Nevertheless, he concluded, "That occupation is going to end, since more and more soldiers will dare to speak out, because they can't fool us anymore."
----
House Bill Targets Military Benefits
Measure Would Reduce Wait to Get Both Disability, Retirement
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 1, 2005; A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/31/AR2005053101536_pf.html
Some military retirees with service-related disabilities would have to wait less time to collect both their full retirement pay and disability compensation under legislation the House passed last week.
The measure, included in the Defense Authorization Bill by Rep. G. K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), would end by 2009, for some retirees, a system that requires their federal disability payments to be offset by dollar-for-dollar reductions in retirement pay. Under current law, that trade-off is scheduled to be phased out by 2014 for military retirees with more than 20 years of service and a disability rated at 50 percent or higher by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
"We have a responsibility to support the fighting men and women who put their lives on the line to protect our way of life," Butterfield said in a written statement.
His provision would allow military retirees who served for at least 20 years, and who are rated as both 60 to 90 percent disabled and unemployable, to collect their full VA disability and military retirement benefits at the same time beginning Oct. 1, 2009. That group includes about 30,000 retirees, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which estimated the cost of the change at $164 million over five years.
Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) is preparing an amendment that would match the House provision, said his spokeswoman, Tessa Hafen. Hafen said Reid, like Butterfield and other lawmakers of both parties, would prefer to eliminate the offset right away if they could.
"The goal is always 100 percent," she said. "He tries for a step at a time."
The political jockeying over the issue, known as "concurrent receipt," has been an annual affair on Capitol Hill in recent years.
Proponents of changing the system argue that disability compensation and retirement pay address two different issues, and that denying veterans the full benefit of both shortchanges their service and sacrifice.
Other critics say that some veterans are seeking more than their fair share, and that the issue is more nuanced than military retirees and their advocates let on.
In 2003, lawmakers agreed to eliminate the offset over a 10-year period for about 200,000 veterans who have 50 percent or higher VA disability ratings and served for 20 years or more. Last year, Congress decided the most severely injured among that group, those rated 100 percent disabled by the department, should not have to wait. They began collecting full disability and retirement pay in January.
But other veterans who say they have similar medical problems and years of service say that they were left out. They have formal VA disability ratings as low as 60 percent, but VA doctors say their service-related health problems render them unemployable. This group, the target of the new legislation, currently must wait out the 10-year period before collecting full compensation -- a delay that will cost each an average of $2,400 in 2010, according to the CBO.
Win Reither, a co-director of Vetspac, a political action committee that focuses on veterans' issues, said the proposed change is a marginal improvement because most benefits of the 10-year phase-out are already set to take place in the first five years.
"It's really of very little benefit to veterans," Reither said. "There's very little advantage, but, no less, it's a good move because there is some inequity there."
Critics of the proposed change point out that everyone who would benefit from the provision had to be fit enough to stay in the military for two decades. Other veterans whose injuries were so severe they had to leave the military before serving for 20 years can collect disability payments but will never get retirement pay.
They also note that service members with at least 20 years of service can collect retirement pay as soon as they retire, often in their late thirties or early forties. In this way, they say, the system compensates retirees for the wear and tear of a strenuous military career. Private-sector retirees often must wait until their late fifties or early sixties to begin collecting benefits.
Finally, some critics say the affected retirees often suffer from ailments that have as much or more to do with age as with military service, including high blood pressure, hearing loss and arthritis.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- human rights
Enforcing US Human Rights Laws
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 01 June 2005
From: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/060105X.shtml
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0506/S00024.htm
Challenging US Human Rights Violations Since 9/11
Ann Fagan Ginger, ed., Prometheus Books, 2005, 574 pp.
The Bush administration is using the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as an excuse to launch a massive assault on the human rights of people throughout the world. From the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, to the torture and inhuman treatment of prisoners in US custody, and the insidious profiling and harassment of Arabs and Muslims in the US, Team Bush has engaged in unprecedented violations of US and international law, under the guise of fighting "the war on terror."
Bush has done nothing to hide his contempt for the United Nations and our treaty commitments, which are part of US law under the Constitution. When Security Council approval for his war on Iraq was not forthcoming, Bush threatened the UN with becoming "irrelevant." Nothing exemplifies Bush's disdain for the United Nations better than his nomination of John Bolton, avowed UN-hater, for US ambassador to the UN. And although the 60-year anniversary of the founding of the United Nations will take place later this month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former President George H.W. Bush will not attend, and George W. Bush has not announced that he plans to travel to San Francisco for this momentous occasion.
The administration's terrorizing of people at home and abroad has been chronicled by Prof. Ann Fagan Ginger, Executive Director of Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, in her new book, Challenging US Human Rights Violations Since 9/11. For the first time, a listing of Team Bush's breaches of our laws since Sept. 11 has been amassed in one place. Ginger presents reports of 180 alleged violations, in 30 categories, by the White House; the Pentagon; the Departments of State, Justice, and Labor; the FBI; the Attorney General; immigration officials; and state and local police against people in the United States, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere. Each report includes the sources for the allegation, and each section lists the specific US and international laws allegedly violated.
In this unique book, Ginger has collected reports on the basic rights of all peoples under US jurisdiction: the right not to be killed or disappeared; the right not to be tortured or ordered to torture; the right peaceably to assemble and petition the government; the right to equal protection regardless of race or national origin; the right to equal protection for women; the right to free exercise of religion; the right of the media to report facts and not be killed; the right to privacy vs. surveillance and registration; the right of libraries not to report on readers; the right of universities to accept foreign scholars and students; and the right to travel.
Some examples of violations include the "disappearing" of 3,000 men in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban; the use of napalm in Iraq, cluster bombs in Afghanistan, and depleted uranium in both Iraq and Afghanistan; the killing and torture of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and abuse of prisoners in US prisons; the arrest of animal rights activists, hailed by the Bush administration as a blow against terrorism; the pepper spraying of environmental and antiwar activists in Portland, OR; the firing of journalists for criticizing Bush; and the failure of the US government to comply with its duty to report human rights violations to the US Civil Rights Commission, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, and the UN Human Rights Committee. Judge Richard Margolis said he personally saw police commit 20 felonies during anti-globalization demonstrations in Miami.
The US government has corresponding duties to we-the-people, also listed in Ginger's reports. They include the duty to count the votes accurately and report to the people honestly; the duty to obey the Constitution, the law of nations, and the laws of war; the duty to protect people's rights; the duty to properly fund the general welfare; and the duty to report violations to Congress and the UN.
Ginger cites the specific laws violated, and documents what people are doing to challenge those violations, both in the courts and in the political arena. She provides the basic text of the US Constitution, the UN Charter, and other ratified human rights and antinuclear weapons treaties. The specific statutes at issue, including the Patriot Act, are listed in each report.
The City Council of Berkeley, CA passed a resolution to submit Ginger's reports to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. On March 31, representatives of the National Lawyers Guild, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, Gold Star Families for Peace, and Center for Constitutional Rights, whose work is memorialized in the reports, were on hand for the presentation in New York.
Ann Fagan Ginger has compiled a shocking compendium of human rights violations by the Bush administration. But, unlike prior works, she presents remedies for these transgressions in a well-organized book accessible to activists, lawyers, students, teachers, union members, government officials and judges. This gripping work is an indispensable tool for citizens and lawyers defending civil liberties in the era of the Patriot Act and the War on Terrorism. Prof. Ginger is making several presentations per week, inviting listeners to share their experiences of violations, and fight backs, following some of the new paths for action in the book. She can be contacted at MCLI@mcli.org.
Marjorie Cohn, is a contributing editor to t r u t h o u t, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists.
-------- POLITICS
-------- us politics
Ex-FBI Official, Mark Felt, Exposed As Deep Throat
Wednesday, June 1st, 2005
Democracy Now! Headlines for June 1, 2005
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/01/1440248
One of the great mysteries of U.S. politics appears to have been solved: the identity of Deep Throat. On Monday the Washington Post confirmed former FBI official Mark Felt was the paper's secret source that helped unravel the Watergate scandal and topple President Richard Nixon. At the time, Felt was the number two man at the FBI. He is now 91 years old and living in California Vanity Fair broke the story Tuesday morning. Later in the day, after Felt's family spoke publicly, the reporters who unraveled the Watergate story -- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein -- confirmed Felt was their secret source. The Watergate scandal began on June 1972 when the D.C. police arrested five men for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel. It turned out the men were connected to President Nixon's re-election team. But it took years for the story to unfold. With the help of Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein uncovered a series of startling revelations that brought down the Nixon government.
# A $25,000 cashier's check earmarked for the Nixon campaign wound up in the bank account of one of the burglars.
# Attorney General John Mitchell controlled a secret fund for intelligence operations against the Democrats.
# Nixon's top aide John Ehrlichman oversaw a special covert unit known as the Plumbers that burglarized the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers.
By the end of the Watergate scandal, Nixon was forced to resign to avoid impeachment. In addition more than 30 government and Republican campaign officials were convicted of charges including perjury, burglary, wiretapping and obstruction of justice. On Tuesday Mark Felt's family said they hope he will now gain his proper place in history.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Italian 'Eco-Mafia' Booms, Outstrips Economy
June 01, 2005 — By Shasta Darlington, Reuters
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=7854
ROME — Italian Mafia activity that harms the environment -- from hazardous waste disposal to illegal construction -- enjoyed a boom year in 2004, an environmental report said on Tuesday.
"Eco-Mafia" business soared 30 percent last year to top 24 billion euros ($30 billion), putting its revenues on a par with Italy's biggest companies like Fiat, Italy's best known environmental group Legambiente said in its annual study of the racket.
"It's a performance without equal in Italy," Legambiente said, calling the eco-Mafia a financial "tiger".
Sicily's Cosa Nostra, the Naples-based Camorra and the increasingly powerful 'Ndrangheta from Calabria in the south are all players in the eco-Mafia racket.
Legambiente counted 194 Mafia clans involved in the illicit activities in 2004, up by 25 from 2003.
But Environment Minister Altero Matteoli was more upbeat about the outlook for Italy.
"I'm not saying that we have emerged from the difficult situation, but we're on the right path," he said of the report, according to ANSA news agency.
The number of crimes involving illegal garbage and hazardous waste disposal was up almost 40 percent.
Organised crime has been strong in Naples where a garbage disposal feud has repeatedly filled the streets with refuse and prompted riots.
In a sign that illegal waste dumps are taking their toll on the local population, a medical study last year showed residents near Naples were more susceptible to some cancers than the average Italian.
The Mafia also has a stranglehold on cement and construction businesses in parts of southern Italy and is behind much of the illegal erection of buildings in parks, archaeological sites, beaches band other protected areas.
Legambiente said 32,000 new illegal constructions went up in 2004, an increase of 3,000 over the previous year, boosted in part by a building law allowing property owners to be pardoned for illegal work by paying a fine.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protests planned for Talisman Sabre
Kathy Newnam, Darwin, June 1, 2005
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/628/628p2.htm
This month, 11,000 US troops will arrive in Australia to join with 6000 Australian troops for the Talisman Sabre military exercise in northern Australia. Protests across the country will take place on June 10 to mark the beginning of the exercise.
The national focus for the protests will be a three-day convergence in Shoalwater Bay, north of Rockhampton, where the military training base will be used by US and Australian troops for the exercise.
The base has long opposed by environmentalists because of its impact on the sensitive ecosystems of the bay and damage to the nearby Great Barrier Reef.
Last year, PM John Howard's Coalition government signed an agreement with the US to upgrade the Shoalwater Bay base, and two military bases in the Northern Territory, to make them suitable as regular US training facilities. Opposition to these new US bases will be a highlight of the protests against the Talisman Sabre exercise.
Talisman Sabre will also include military activities in civilian facilities such as Sydney, Rockhampton and Brisbane airports, and the use of military training bases in Townsville and Cowley Beach and the Northern Territory’s Delamere bombing range. The Tasman, Timor and Coral seas will also be sites for military exercises.
Protest organisers have expressed fears that depleted-uranium- coated weapons will be used during the exercise, an allegation that the Australian government has refused to deny.
For more information about the convergence on Shoalwater Bay, email . Protests are also being planned for Darwin, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne. Contact or for more information.
From Green Left Weekly, June 1, 2005.
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9/11 CitizensWatch Joins Downing Street Coalition
Wednesday, 1 June 2005, 2:19 pm Scoop (New Zealand)
Press Release: www.UnansweredQuestions.org
Distribution via the Unanswered Questions Wire
http://www.unansweredquestions.org/ .
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0506/S00021.htm
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Kyle F. Hence, 9/11 CitizensWatch [http://www.911citizenswatch.org]
9/11 CitizensWatch Joins Coalition - http://www.aterdowningstreet.org - to Support a Resolution of Inquiry into the Administration's pre-Iraq War Deceptions and Urges Sponsors to Broaden the Examination to also include Deceit and Possible High Crimes Surrounding the 9/11 Attacks
Washington, D.C. (May 27, 2005) - In response to the recently leaked Downing Street memo documenting that the White House was tailoring facts and intelligence to sell its Iraq war policy as early as July 2002, a coalition of citizen groups representing millions of Americans has formed to seek a formal Congressional Inquiry into possible High Crimes and Misdemeanors committed by the President and his Administration. (The presentation of a formal Resolution of Inquiry to the House Judiciary Committee is the first step toward possible impeachment of U.S. officials.)
Based on a review of the thousands of pages of 9/1l evidence compiled in the last three and a half years, CitizensWatch has concluded that the administration's systematic deception of the American people was well underway as early as September of 2001 when they repeatedly misrepresented the facts and circumstances of the attacks.
"Any Inquiry on the Hill must broaden to examine the campaign of deceit around 9/11, Abu Grahib, and depleted uranium as well as the now obvious duplicity in their selling of the war on Iraq," said, Kyle F. Hence, co-founder of CitizensWatch. "If the nation has learned anything in the past three years, it is that the Iraq invasion and occupation were in planning from the earliest days of this administration yet would have been politically impossible without the 9/11 attacks. It is worthwhile to isolate and document particular lies in the run-up to the war, but it is now far more critical to address the overall plan that needed a 9/11 to succeed and the pattern of deceit that ensued. The prima facie evidence for this administration's criminal wrongdoing is currently overwhelming and a broad congressional inquiry is certainly long overdue."
9/11 CitizensWatch maintains that the official 9/11 story as portrayed and defended in the Kean/Zelikow 9/11 Report is riddled with distortions, misrepresentations and critical omissions both regarding evidence they had on hand and that which they refused to seek. We stand with the 9/11 families who documented the Report failure to answer most of their questions about the murders of their loved ones and held no one accountable for any aspect of the tragedy or their subsequent lies. There is now a large body of scholarly work on these questions that a congressional inquiry could draw upon to expose the truth, seek accountability and demand justice.
For Rawstory's breaking story on the Citizens' Alliance please visit: http://rawstory.com/exclusives/alexandrovna/coalition_inquiry_downing_street_memo_526
You'll find the Resolution of Inquiry here Bonifaz Memo to Rep. John Conyers: http://rawstory.com/exclusives/alexandrovna/memo_bush_impeachable_offenses_526
More details on the alliance supporting the Resolution of Inquiry: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org
For a review by David Ray Griffin of documented lies of the 9/11 Commission Report: http://www.911citizenswatch.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=551
STANDARD DISCLAIMER FROM UQ.ORG: UnansweredQuestions.org does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in the above article. We present this in the interests of research -for the relevant information we believe it contains. We hope that the reader finds in it inspiration to work with us further, in helping to build bridges between our various investigative communities, towards a greater, common understanding of the unanswered questions which now lie before us.