NucNews - November 2, 2005



-------- NUCLEAR 



-------- australia

NT nuclear waste dump jumps first hurdle

November 2, 2005 Sydney Morning Herald

http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/NT-nuclear-waste-dump-jumps-first-hurdle/2005/11/02/1130823275859.html

Controversial laws have been passed by the House of Representatives to clear the way for a nuclear waste dump to be built in the Northern Territory despite widespread opposition.

The Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Bill passed on Wednesday, giving the federal government sweeping powers to override the Northern Territory's laws, have been labelled a joke by the NT government.

"Essentially what happened here was an exercise in political muscle, they picked us because they knew they could walk over us," a spokesman for NT Chief Minister Clare Martin said.

Amendments to the bill proposed by the government's only territory MP David Tollner, from the Country Liberal Party, were accepted.

The amendments included specifically banning the storage of high-level waste, allowing the territory government or a land council to nominate a storage site, and allowing territory waste to be stored without charge.

However, Ms Martin said the amendments could be ignored by the federal government.

"Central to the amendments is the suggestion the territory chief minister can nominate a waste dump site," she said.

"But the essential weakness with this amendment is it expressly says the responsible federal minister can override any site selected, as Canberra has already demonstrated they are willing to do."

ALP Senator for the Northern Territory, Trish Crossin, said there was no science to the selection of the three proposed NT nuclear dump sites.

"The three possible dump sites were selected by the Defence Department from their land holdings without reference to any scientific criteria for radioactive waste storage," Senator Crossin said.

The bill is a major step in the long search for a place to secure Australia's low and intermediate level radioactive waste, which was started by the Hawke government in the early 1990s.

The federal government decided to find a place for waste produced by its own agencies, while the states would have to deal with their own, after court action by South Australia forced a proposed national repository at Woomera to be abandoned last year.

Science Minister Brendan Nelson said detailed study of three sites on commonwealth land in the territory would be carried out at Mount Everard and Harts Range near Alice Springs and at Fishers Ridge, near Katherine.

Dr Nelson said the waste would be stored safely and it was wrong to see the purpose-built facility as a municipal tip.

Deputy Opposition Leader Jenny Macklin said Labor opposed the measures because they were "extreme, arrogant and heavy-handed".

Ms Macklin said communities should be consulted about radioactive waste being dumped in their backyards and backed the Central Land Council (CLC), which opposed a dump being built on either of the sites near Alice Springs.

The CLC said many Aboriginal people lived near the proposed sites and were extremely worried about the proposals.

"They fought hard to get their country back and they believe they are not the ones to have to live with radioactive waste on their land," it said.

However the Northern Land Council, whose region covered the other potential site, had offered to find an alternative if those on the short list fell short.

The bills now go to the Senate.

----

Nuclear power must be on agenda: govt

November 2, 2005 - 9:54AM Sydney Morning Herald

http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Nuclear-power-must-be-on-agenda-govt/2005/11/02/1130823241412.html

Politicians standing in the way of a nuclear power industry are guilty of "environmental vandalism", the environment minister has said.

Senator Ian Campbell is representing Australia at a major environmental summit in London, comprising the G8 nations, burgeoning powers China, India, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa plus other major nations such as Indonesia.

He described it as "a turning point" in environmental history, with nations becoming increasingly urgent in attempts to curtail the starkly-evident acceleration in global warming.

Prompting the urgency was the need to reduce carbon emissions while growing economies stoke up their burgeoning economies, with China alone to build 500 coal-fired power stations in the next 25 years.

The meeting addressed the need for such new power stations to employ 'carbon capture' technology that liquefy emissions for storage rather than release them as gas into the atmosphere.

Senator Campbell said Australian companies could capitalise on the need for these technologies, and predicted Australian governments - federal and state - will have to commit much more to nurturing private sector research and development in that area.

"I can absolutely assure you there will be a need for more," Sen. Campbell said.

"The imperative is to invest massive amounts of money in new technology.

"It's a do or die matter for the planet and that will involve public sector investment leveraging private sector investment."

The meeting here was called by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who himself had committed his Labour government to revisiting nuclear power plants.

Australia stood to benefit from a revival of the nuclear industry due to its position as repository of the world's biggest uranium supply, and Senator Campbell said there must not be political impediments to growing the industry.

"If it can create energy with zero emissions it has to be on the table," he said.

"You don't want to rule out any options for ideological reasons.

"Any politician who stands in the way of providing uranium to the world is committing an outrageous act of environmental vandalism."

The Kyoto protocol is due to expire in 2012, but the unforeseen explosion in China and India's economies required action well before then to curb emissions, with China set to become the world's biggest carbon emitter within 20 years.

It also recognised the failure of Kyoto to stem climate change as nations had sacrificed Kyoto targets at the altar of economic growth, with the new model favouring the expansion of counter-carbon technology and the growth of the likes of nuclear and alternative fuels.

"Binding caps are not likely to be part of the beyond-Kyoto agreements," Sen. Campbell said.

"I'm far more optimistic after the meeting than I was before it, because people really want to act now.

"It's a very important turning point, as the world moves forward to address this."

----

French stick from nuke man

Amanda Hodge
November 02, 2005 The Australian

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17110915%255E643,00.html

NO one likes to hear "I told you so", and as a seasoned player in the nuclear energy debate, Tim Gitzel is smart enough to know that gloating is particularly odious when it comes from a nuclear energy company. But the smooth-talking Canadian, now head of French nuclear and uranium giant Areva's mining business unit, can't help himself.

"We believe a nuclear renaissance is coming. It's on its way," he says.

"We're well positioned from the reactor to nuclear fuel cycle, but from the mining side, we need to speed things up.

"We need to put the turbo on because, if Areva's going to build new reactors in France, Finland, China and all these countries that have said they're going to build nuclear reactors, we have to be able to provide the fuel."

With that in mind, Gitzel's unit is ramping up.

Under what he calls Operation Turbo - a project title with a distinctly US flavour - his unit has begun to aggressively pursue prospective uranium resources worldwide.

And that goes for Australia as well.

Despite the political difficulties associated with developing new uranium mines in Australia - with all Labor states committed to some degree to the ALP's three-mines policy - the regional prospects are proving too hard to resist.

But this time, Areva is changing tack, shifting its exploratory focus away from the Top End, and its controversial Koongarra deposit in Kakadu National Park, to South Australia, where it hopes to establish a second in-situ leach uranium mine in the Curnamona province.

The French government-owned miner, which is awaiting ministerial approval to go public next year, has already carried out initial survey work in the region and is negotiating with several traditional owner groups for exploration rights.

Gitzel says Areva is keen to invest in exploration in South Australia, whose Government is still seen as the most predisposed to uranium miners, despite recently reaffirming its commitment to the three-mines policy. In fact, Michael Rann's Government has been so welcoming that Areva is now looking at establishing a base there. "It's a pure grassroots exploration program and we have a lot of work to do there," Gitzel says.

Areva has also been talking to junior explorers about potential joint ventures but is yet to strike an agreement.

It is also selling out of its minority 7 per cent shareholding in ERA, which owns the controversial Jabiluka mine in Kakadu National Park, in the Northern Territory.

Gitzel says the move was motivated by the desire for capital for new exploration projects.

"Through acquisitions, we ended up with an interest in ERA, but we have no right to the uranium they produce," he says. "We're cash-hungry now, to pay for investments in Canada and Kazakhstan, and we think now is the right time to divest that interest."

Areva is the world's third-largest uranium producer, behind Canadian miner Cameco and Olympic Dam owner BHP Billiton. It produces just over 6000 tonnes of uranium a year from its operating mines, mainly in Canada and Niger.

But Gitzel is under instructions to lift that to 10,000 tonnes by the end of the decade, and Areva will open a third area of production when its new mine in Kazakhstan begins delivering this month.

Areva has a patchy history in Australia, divesting its rights over the years to all but one of several major uranium prospects - the controversial Koongarra deposit, also in Kakadu and just a short distance from a sacred Aboriginal site and tourist attraction, Nourlangie Rock.

While the miner still hopes to begin negotiations for an exploration permit with the traditional owners there, Gitzel is not confident of success in the current political climate. A five-year moratorium on discussions over Koongarra was imposed by the Northern Lands Council in 2000, after objections from the site's Aboriginal owners. After it was lifted last April, the road to a new round of negotiations is now open.

Gitzel says Areva hasn't given up on Koongarra, but "we will not, and cannot, push without all the markers in place".

"The political context has to be right and I know that's in debate these days. We need to do a feasibility study and, finally, we need to have the approval of the traditional owners.

"Today, we don't have it."

The last thing Areva wants with Koongarra is the sort of national attention that ERA earned, as a result of a protracted protest campaign waged against the Jabiluka mine.

But its desire for a low profile wasn't helped last September, when Australian general manager Simon Mann told a parliamentary inquiry into the potential expansion of the uranium industry that Australia had a "moral obligation" to accept waste material from its mines.

It was a very public mis-step for a company still holding out hopes of gaining a foothold in the Australian uranium industry, and Gitzel is at pains to start reversing the damage.

"That was a comment Simon made that I wouldn't share, and I talked to him immediately afterwards. Clearly, that's not the position of Areva," he says. "Everyone has the right to be wrong. Simon is a very good, solid Australian representing our company in front of a not easy situation." Gitzel says he is "closely watching" the current debate in Australia over uranium mining and the three mines policy, which, he says, has caused widespread confusion among uranium players.

"It's spoken about a lot in the industry. Everybody knows Australia has a three mines policy, but we don't know exactly what that means and if it's to be strictly applied," he says. "If there are three mines going and they're 40-year projects, then we'll go elsewhere. I think Australia is advanced enough to see this is an issue that should be discussed."

In any case, any ambitions it holds for new mines in South Australia are long-term prospects. From exploration to commissioning, uranium mines can typically take more than a decade to begin production, and Areva is counting on policy change well before that time.

The company continues to talk up the prospects for nuclear energy and uranium oxide prices, which have more than trebled in the past year, from $US10 a pound to $US33 today.

That growth was built on the back of a growing belief that nuclear energy could be the solution to reducing greenhouse gas, and Areva has global warming and its own resourcefulness to thank - it is widely credited with spearheading the global campaign to reinvent nuclear energy's image as an environmentally sound alternative to burning fossil fuels.

From environmental pariah just a few decades ago, the nuclear industry is now hailed in some quarters as the potential saviour of a world facing dire climate-change consequences. For that reason, Gitzel rejects speculation among some analysts that the rally in uranium stocks is merely a bubble - driven by investor hype and a short-term fear of a uranium shortfall - that will eventually burst.

"I think it's structural and I think the prices are here to stay," he says. "There was a glut of inventory ... and that is disappearing and we're moving back to a market where primary production becomes more important," he says.

"Today, 40,000 tonnes are produced for a market that requires 70,000 and, while the shortfall is currently fed by inventory stock and Russian stockpiles (of highly enriched material), that is drying up and driving the price." In addition, Gitzel points out that after a decade of near zero investment in both the nuclear and uranium industries, there are now 25 nuclear power stations under construction and 32 in planning stages. "There's a perception that there isn't that much uranium out there and we need to bring on new production as soon as we can." 

----

'Essential' nuclear dump laws pass first hurdle

Wednesday, November 2, 2005 Australian Broadcasting

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200511/s1496209.htm

The Federal Government maintains it is essential that Australia has a centralised facility for nuclear waste, rather than storing it at sites around the country.

Legislation has been passed in the House of Representatives that overrides any attempts by the Northern Territory Government to oppose the facility being built in the Territory.

The Bill passed with amendments put forward by the CLP, which include the right for Aboriginal land councils to negotiate an alternative site for facility.

The proposed legislation is now expected to be debated in the Senate next week.

Federal Science Minister Dr Brendan Nelson has told Parliament the facility needs to go ahead.

"We are proposing to site a low level, an intermediate level nuclear waste facility on one quarter of one square kilometre," he said.

"It is one blade of grass on an oval."

Communication 'failures'

But the Federal Opposition says the Government has failed to negotiate with the Northern Territory over the proposed dump.

The Member for Lingiari, Warren Snowdon, told the Parliament there had been a lack of communication with Territory residents.

"Much of the uncertainty is in response to the failure of the Government to work with the Northern Territory community in a considered way," he said.

"I'm surprised, Mr Deputy Speaker, that when this announcement was made and the Minister was sitting on some 44-gallon drums at Lucas Heights, he didn't come to the Northern Territory to make the announcement."

He says Territorians should make any anger about the Bill known to the Federal Government.

"I think we've got to show our displeasure with the Commonwealth Government," he said.

"Territorians have long memories. They can pay this out on the CLP for as damn well long as they like.

"The fact is we've got two representatives of the Territory in Canberra who are voting directly against, and supporting motions directly against, the express wishes of the Northern Territory community."




-------- canada

Chiefs warn of nuclear waste plans for native territory 
Some are worried at possible moves to bury spent fuel in the Canadian Shield 

By BILL CURRY
Wednesday, November 2, 2005 Posted at 5:39 AM EST
From Wednesday's Toronto Globe and Mail

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051102.wxnatives02/BNStory/National/

Regina — Aboriginal chiefs gathered from across the country are being put on notice that plans are afoot to bury nuclear waste in their traditional territory.

Outside the Regina convention room where more than 600 chiefs of the Assembly of First Nations are gathered this week, the AFN has set up a large display, complete with pictures, of how nuclear waste could be buried inside the Canadian Shield in the coming decades.

"Yikes," said one woman at the convention as she scanned the display outlining the AFN's "Nuclear Waste Dialogue."

David Gorman, one of the AFN's four co-ordinators for the dialogue, has been visiting reserves to let chiefs and tribal council members know that key decisions are being made about storing nuclear waste that could affect native reserves in the coming decades.

"I'll talk about radiation and a little bit of the science. I'll talk about the proposed options for economic opportunities for regions," Mr. Gorman said, in describing his presentations.

"I would just say, 'Be aware that industry might approach [your community] to build a facility on your territory and they might sweeten the deal with economic opportunities and money.' "

The issue is being driven by the impact of the federal Nuclear Fuel Waste Act, passed by Parliament in 2002. The law created a new Nuclear Waste Management Organization, led by representatives of Canada's nuclear industry. The organization is scheduled to report in two weeks on its long-term plan for storing nuclear waste.

Mr. Gorman said earlier reports from the organization suggest it will likely propose that the current system of storing waste at the site of nuclear reactors should be continued for the next 60 years, after which deep storage facilities in the Canadian Shield should be ready for use.

The Canadian Shield is the deep rock bed that lies underneath most of Quebec and Northern Ontario. Parts of Saskatchewan are also being considered as potential locations for nuclear deep storage.

The AFN's nuclear dialogue is being paid for with money from the nuclear organization and Natural Resources Canada.

Mr. Gorman would not say how much money the AFN received from the nuclear organization, but the AFN's own summary report of its dialogue reveals the funding arrangement doesn't sit well with some.

"Some participants expressed discomfort at the idea that the AFN was there to promote the [nuclear organization's] objectives and obtain 'buy in' to the current process," says the summary report from the AFN to Elizabeth Dowdeswell, the nuclear organization's president.

John Beaucage, the grand council chief for the Union of Ontario Indians, which represents several native reserves on the Canadian Shield, said he would advise any community not to store nuclear waste on its territory.

Mr. Beaucage said promises of large amounts of money may be enticing for poorer communities, but the long-term impact should be considered.

"It might look good in the short term but when you're talking about nuclear waste, there's no such thing as short-term," he said. "It's just a very, very scary thought."

While reserves are relatively small and it would be highly unlikely that such facilities would be built on reserve land, each aboriginal community considers the broader surrounding area to be part of its "traditional territory," which may also be specifically defined by treaties.

Such land is also owned by the Crown, creating the possibility that such facilities could be built against the wishes of the closest reserve.

Mr. Gorman said that, so far, no community has volunteered to work with the nuclear industry.

He said his presentation is normally met with "a sense of shock" given there is little knowledge of nuclear-waste issues or that a plan is in the works that could involve traditional lands.

The debate comes as the Ontario government has signalled it will become more dependent on nuclear energy as it phases out coal power.

As chiefs wandered by the AFN display, Mr. Gorman said he has been told of many negative experiences that reserves have had with the uranium-mining industry.

One aboriginal community in the Northwest Territories, for example, used to be referred to as the Village of Widows after most of the men in the area died because they were hired to carry uranium from a local mine without any protection.



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

-------- depleted uranium

Has the nuclear catastrophe already arrived?

Blowin’ in the Wind
Directed by David Bradbury
From Green Left Weekly, November 2, 2005

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/647/647p26.htm

Limited national season commencing in Sydney and Melbourne at Dendy cinemas on October 27, other cities to follow

REVIEW BY LACHLAN MALLOCH

David Bradbury needs almost no introduction to Green Left Weekly readers: his lifetime of progressive film-making speaks for itself. Bradbury’s latest documentary — a film he says “you’ll never see on ‘your ABC’” — continues that tradition into perhaps his most dangerous subject yet, the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the era of the “war on terror”.

In production terms it might seem modest — just under an hour long and made for the equivalent of chicken feed — but its content is breathtaking, sensational and urgent.

Blowin’ in the Wind documents the increasing use of so-called “depleted uranium” (DU) in weapons around the world and forcefully reveals the devastating health and environmental effects of these “mini-nukes”.

The world authority on the devastation wreaked by DU is former US Army physicist Dr Doug Rokke, who suffers from radiation sickness due to his work in Iraq after the first Gulf War. Dr Rokke is one of the heroes of this film, tirelessly campaigning around the world against the criminal use of nuclear weapons.

The other great heroes are the dying children in Iraq, whose bodies are riddled with the minuscule deadly radioactive particles unleashed by US bombing 15 years ago and carried for kilometres by Iraq’s notorious, dusty winds.

The condemned children stare at us as if from the other side of a great abyss. It is impossible to look at them and not feel a burning guilt and shame at the nightmare visited upon them in our name.

The footage seen here, of dying children and grotesquely malformed foetuses, is not new. John Pilger’s 2000 TV documentary Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq eloquently exposed the West’s genocidal regime of economic sanctions and DU bombing in Iraq.

Before the Gulf War, few babies in Iraq were born with malformations. Now there are 7-10 per day, some of them so badly mutated that they are “just pieces of flesh”.

This medical nightmare can only be expected to worsen, with the US’s increasing use of DU on battlefields around the world. Yugoslavia was bombed with over 84 tonnes of DU, over 1000 tonnes were dropped on Afghanistan and Iraq was blasted with more than 2500 tonnes in the latest invasion.

Bradbury’s new and sensational thesis is that these deadly nuclear winds have come to Australia and are set to blow even harder, in several ways.

First, Australian military veterans are suffering from the euphemistically titled “Gulf War Syndrome” — more likely, radiation sickness. We meet Gulf War veteran Ed Grant, suffering an unexplained disease and battling the Australian government to take his case seriously. Not surprisingly he’s afraid of what poison he might have passed on to his children and eventual grandchildren.

Second, Bradbury outlines the Australian government’s enthusiastic plans for dramatically expanding uranium mining here. This is a double-edged sword: we’ll be faced with increased dangers of waste storage and accidents at mine sites, as well as increasing our complicity in the proliferation of nuclear weapons, by increasing the global supply of uranium.

But the centrepiece of Bradbury’s thesis is his examination of the secret treaty, or “Memorandum of Understanding”, that was signed by Australia and the US on July 7, 2004, setting the framework for intensified military cooperation between the two nations.

Bradbury argues that this agreement gives a 20-year-long, virtual blank cheque to the US to use all sorts of deadly weapons, including those with DU, in their testing and training exercises on Australian soil. It is likely that nukes were used in the June 2005 Talisman Sabre exercises at beautiful Shoalwater Bay on the Queensland coast, when 11,000 US troops joined the Australian military in live aerial bombardments, doing unknown levels of damage to such a precious environmental treasure.

Blowin’ in the Wind shows us that we are entering a new period in Australia’s long history of complicity with and support for imperial power, but it’s mostly taking place behind the backs of the Australian people.

The extremely truncated cinematic exhibition of this film means that activists will need to work hard to make it anything more than a voice in the wilderness. It asks urgent questions that we ignore at our own peril.

[Visit the film’s website at <http://www.bsharp.net.au>.]

----

New Oz Film -
Depleted Uranium Is Genocide
Blowin' In The Wind

Lynn Stanfield, www.rense.com
November 2, 2005

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m17404&date=02-nov-2005_18:09_ECT

Australia - I have just had the distinct privilege of viewing the Australian short film documentary titled Blowin in the Wind,.

Blowing in the Wind has been nominated for Academy Award; it premiered at a Newtown (Sydney) cinema, on Thursday, where it will run for one week, then moves to other major city centres (see www.bsharp.net.au ).

The cleverly produced documentary is a wake-up call to Australians, exposing the dreadful, horrible, inhuman use of the material known as Depleted Uranium, (DU), as a projectile warhead, on all manner of arsenal and weaponry, being used to annihilate nations around the world.

DU is the weapons material of choice for all of the guided missiles and Bunker-Buster, bombs being rained onto the Afghanistan and Iraqi citizens in the senseless, unlawful invasion of these Middle-East countries. Tank shells, heavy calibre machine guns, ship-to-shore rockets and heavy guns, have poured thousands of tons of the miserable compound into the cities and countryside of affected battlegrounds, producing a wasteland of radioactively contaminated earth, water and air,

DU has a half-life, which is rated in millions of years.

So, not only the poor sods who are murdered by the blast or are left dismembered and crippled for the rest of their lives, suffering the effects of the blasted DU, those who survive are also effected. The contamination lingers in their food, drinking water and the air they breath, causing grotesque deformities and diseases, especially in new-born children.

Blowin in the Wind, was produced by New South Wales, North coast film producers, David Bradbury and Peter Scott, who, together with a team of very talented technicians, have put together a most powerful expose, on the manufacture and widespread use of Depleted Uranium weapons, with special emphasis on U.S. and Australian Defence Forces use of the miserable material.

The film draws attention to the lack of awareness amongst Australian residents, regarding the amount of exposure we have in this country, to the effects of DU. Already, cases of horribly deformed new-born babies are occurring in Australia, due to the huge amounts of DU weaponry being dumped onto our countryside in some of the most absurdly stupid and careless acts anyone could possibly imagine. If you want to know more about this dumping of DU into Australia and other serious challenges to you and your family for the future, might I suggest you make it your business to get to see Blowing in the Wind.

Some of the more amazing facts which are exposed in the film, concern the huge amount of cover-up by deliberate lying and either no announcements or outright denials about Australia,s complicit involvement in furnishing the supply of DU into the World,s atmosphere, soil and water. You will be stunned when you learn the number of large American Military Bases which exist on this island and more are planned through the Memorandums of Understanding, which are held by our leaders with the United States of America. You will be staggered.

I give this film five stars. I recommend it to all Australians, especially young Australians and Australians with young families. The film is considered to be suitable for 15 plus, however, outside the ugliness in the scenes of maiming and disfigurement, there is nothing which is beyond the comprehension of early teen-agers and I would thoroughly recommend the whole family view what is after all, real life, real time, everybody should know, type drama. I bet there will be some serious family discussion after you see Blowin in the Wind.

----

British Tribunal Recognizes 'Gulf War Syndrome'

By Mike Wendling
CNSNews.com Correspondent
November 02, 2005

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/viewstory.asp?Page=%5CForeignBureaus%5Carchive%5C200511%5CFOR20051102e.html

London (CNSNews.com) - A veterans' group says the British government may be forced to pay thousands of former soldiers for ailments related to their service in the first Gulf War after a key ruling handed down this week.

Daniel Martin, 35, a former British Army reservist, won his case in front of Britain's Pensions Appeals Tribunal after proving he suffers from "Gulf War Syndrome."

The British Ministry of Defense has publicly denied that the syndrome exists, instead blaming the soldiers' symptoms on a variety of other factors and diseases.

Martin suffered from chronic fatigue, memory loss and concentration problems after serving in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq.

Shaun Rusling of the National Gulf Veterans and Families Association (NGVFA) said in a phone interview that the U.K. Ministry of Defense (MoD) could be forced to pay out thousands in compensation and disability benefits as a result of the ruling.

"The MoD is now boxed into a difficult position which they will struggle to get out of," Rusling said.

The NGVFA says 3,000 veterans who fought in the 1991 Gulf War have contacted the group with suspected symptoms. Of those, 1,500 have made a claim to the Ministry of Defense.

The numbers could be even higher, however. Rusling said 7,000 veterans have claimed disability benefits from the MoD, and because of the official line on Gulf War Syndrome, many were discouraged from listing it on their benefit applications.

"If the MoD has been shown to have lied or misled the public, let's have a full, open and public inquiry," Rusling said. "They've made serious mistakes and they're just hoping these mistakes go away and die rather than admit to them."

The tribunal ruled that the term "Gulf War Syndrome" is an "appropriate medical label" and stated: "It is highly regrettable that there was such a delay in the Ministry of Defense accepting this approach."

The panel also rebuked the MoD for failing to participate in the Lloyd Enquiry, an independent investigation into the causes of illnesses in Gulf War vets.

However, the tribunal pointed out that medical evidence indicates that Gulf War Syndrome is not a single disease or "discrete pathological entity" -- instead ruling that it is an "umbrella term" for a wide variety of symptoms.

In a statement, the MoD welcomed this part of the ruling.

"We have always accepted that some 1990/1991 Gulf veterans have become ill and that some of the veterans believe this ill health is unusual and related to their Gulf experience," the ministry said in a statement. "Whilst we acknowledge that the phrase 'Gulf War Syndrome' is popularly used, the overwhelming consensus of the scientific and medical community is that there are too many different symptoms reported for this ill-health to be characterized as a 'syndrome.'"

"The fact that there is, at present, no proper medical basis for recognizing 'Gulf War Syndrome' as a discrete medical condition does not prevent a Gulf veteran getting compensation for all disablement due to service under the War Pension Scheme," the statement read.

A spokeswoman said the ministry would continue to study the ruling and its impacts on the claims of other Gulf vets.

Veterans groups suspect the symptoms of "Gulf War Syndrome" are the result of a variety of factors, including vaccinations, depleted uranium shells, pesticides and even a possible unpublicized chemical or biological weapons attack by Saddam Hussein's regime.

In the United States, the Department of Veterans Affairs has identified a link between service in the Gulf and an increased risk of Lou Gehrig's disease. 




-------- iran

Iran Sends Mixed Signals on Nuclear Front

By GEORGE JAHN, Associated Press Writer Wed Nov 2, 2:34 PM ET

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051102/ap_on_re_mi_ea/nuclear_agency_iran_6

VIENNA, Austria - Iran met a key demand from the International Atomic Energy Agency and opened a high-security military site to U.N. inspectors looking for signs of a secret nuclear weapons program, diplomats said Wednesday.

But in a worrying sign, one diplomat said, Tehran also has told the U.N. agency it will soon convert more raw uranium into gas — the final step before an enrichment process that produces material that can be used either in generating electricity or in making atomic bombs.

The developments showed Iran is unwilling to meet international calls to give up enrichment and all linked activities, but at the same time wants to cast itself as conciliatory and ready to cooperate with the IAEA's investigation into past Iranian nuclear activities.

At its September meeting, the 35-nation IAEA board told Iran to suspend all activities related to uranium enrichment, including conversion, and to give agency experts access to research, experts, facilities and documents or be referred to the U.N. Security Council.

Iran says it has not proceeded to uranium enrichment, but insists the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty gives it the right to produce its own reactor fuel for a civilian power program. It also denies trying to make nuclear weapons.

A diplomat close to the IAEA told The Associated Press that a message from the Iranian government posted on the agency's internal Web site read: "The next (conversion) campaign will start" within weeks.

The United States and other nations have long accused Iran of working on atomic weapons in violation of the nonproliferation treaty, and other countries became concerned when Tehran disclosed three years ago that it had kept some of its nuclear work hidden from U.N. inspectors.

The IAEA has not found any firm evidence to challenge Iranian denial of having a nuclear weapons program. But in a document last year the agency expressed concern about reports "relating to dual use equipment and materials which have applications" in arms work.

Washington has linked Iran's Parchin military complex to alleged nuclear arms experiments, and the IAEA had been trying for months to follow up a January visit to conduct checks for traces of radioactivity that could indicate nuclear-related work.

Diplomats, who spoke with AP on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media about the sensitive investigation, said IAEA inspectors had gained access to previously off-limits buildings at Parchin in recent days.

An IAEA official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed inspectors had visited Parchin last week.

One diplomat said environmental samples were taken and would be analyzed at IAEA laboratories.

Finding indications of radioactivity would weaken Iran's description of its nuclear program as strictly civilian since Parchin is run by the military.

Iran also gave IAEA inspectors documents and granted interviews with several senior officials thought to be linked to black market purchases of uranium enrichment technology, the diplomat said.

At issue is how much technology Iran obtained beginning in the 1980s and where the equipment is. There are suspicions some of the equipment has not been declared to the IAEA and is being used by the Iranian military for weapons experiments.

Iran is under fire on several fronts, and permission to revisit Parchin was seen as part of its campaign to deflect the threat of being referred to the U.N. Security Council for breaching the nonproliferation treaty.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime has become increasingly isolated over his call last week for Israel to be "wiped off the map" as well as Western concerns over Iranian aid for militant groups in the Middle East and over Tehran's uranium enrichment plans.

Russia and China, Security Council members that also sit on the IAEA board, have opposed referral, hampering the joint U.S.- European Union push. But Ahmadinejad's comments on Israel have strengthened the U.S.-European hand by focusing on concerns over Iran's nuclear ambitions. Russia was among the dozens of nations that protested his statements.

On the Net:

International Atomic Energy Agency: http://www.iaea.org

----

Iran to process fresh batch of uranium: diplomats

Wed Nov 2, 2005 8:38 AM ET (Reuters)

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-11-02T133818Z_01_SIB247820_RTRUKOC_0_US-NUCLEAR-IRAN.xml&archived=False

BERLIN - Iran will process a new batch of uranium at its Isfahan nuclear plant beginning next week, despite pressure from the United States and European Union to halt all sensitive nuclear work, diplomats said on Wednesday.

"Beginning next week, the Iranians will start a new phase of uranium conversion at Isfahan. They will begin feeding a new batch of uranium into the plant," a European diplomat familiar with the result of inspections by the U.N. nuclear watchdog told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Accused by Western nations of running a covert atomic weapons program, Iran had frozen all work at Isfahan late last year under a deal with France, Britain and Germany. But it resumed work at the plant in August, prompting the EU's three biggest powers to suspend talks with the Islamic republic.

Iran denies wanting nuclear weapons, insisting its atomic ambitions are limited to the peaceful generation of electricity. However, it has acknowledged concealing many nuclear activities from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for 18 years.

A Western diplomat close to the IAEA said he was unable to provide details on how much uranium would be fed into the plant.

A report issued by IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei on September 2 said Iran had produced 6.8 tons of uranium hexafluoride (UF6) at Isfahan by the end of August, which nuclear experts said could theoretically be processed into fuel for a single bomb.

It is unclear how much more UF6 Tehran has produced since the September 2 report.

However, diplomats close to the IAEA said the quality of the 6.8 tons of UF6 produced at Isfahan was too low to be useable in centrifuges, casting doubts on Tehran's ability to make good on threats to begin work on the most sensitive part of the nuclear fuel cycle -- uranium enrichment.

However, the Iranians are eager to keep running the Isfahan plant so they can improve their ability to convert raw uranium into UF6 gas, the form of uranium that is fed into centrifuges for enrichment, several diplomats close to the IAEA said.

----

Italy-Iran tension grows over Israel, nuclear dossier

ROME (AFP) Nov 02, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051102190644.m0lojd8t.html

Italy's Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini urged the international community to deal firmly with Iran over concerns about a covert nuclear weapons programme, as diplomatic relations between Rome and Tehran worsened Wednesday.

Fini was speaking after Iran's foreign ministry called in the Italian ambassador to formally protest a planned pro-Israel rally outside its embassy in Rome on Thursday.

"We recognized a convergence of our positions on the need for a firm line on the part of the international community. Iran arming itself with nuclear weapons would pose a problem of international security," Fini said after talks here with Edmund Stoiber, Bavaria's prime minister and leader of Germany's Christian Social Union.

Fini and leaders from across the political divide are to attend the rally, to protest President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent call for Israel to be "wiped off the map."

"Our ambassador in Tehran was called in and he had to explain why Italy is angry at Ahmadinejad's call."

During a trip to Israel on Tuesday, Fini said that Iran's suspected push to acquire nuclear weapons should be referred to the UN Security Council.

The Iranian foreign ministry dismissed Fini's comments as "emanating from Israeli propaganda."

Fini, leader of the right-wing National Alliance party, will join leaders of the two biggest opposition parties, Piero Fassino and Francesco Rutelli, as well as Rome's left-wing mayor Walter Veltroni, for the torchlight rally.

The appeal was launched at the weekend by the right-wing daily Il Foglio, whose editor Giuliano Ferrara is a former spokesman for Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Berlusconi described Ahmadinejad's comments as "completely crazy and unacceptable," in a television interview screened Monday.

Amos Luzzatto, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, said he and members of his organisation would attend Thursday's rally.

----

UN inspectors visit sensitive Iranian military site

VIENNA (AFP) Nov 02, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051102181852.2cdgvw2l.html

Iran has allowed UN nuclear inspectors to visit the sensitive military site of Parchin, UN officials said Wednesday, but diplomats said it was also continuing fuel work at another site that has raised concerns of a covert atomic weapons program.

"We are pleased that we can confirm that IAEA inspectors got access to buildings at the Parchin site as we had requested," a spokesman for the UN watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency said.

Washington claims Iran may be testing high-explosive charges with an inert core of depleted uranium at Parchin, 30 kilometres (20 miles) southeast of the capital Tehran, as a dry test for how a bomb with fissile material would work.

Iran faces the risk of referral to the UN Security Council over its atomic program, after the IAEA in September found it to be in "non-compliance" with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The IAEA will discuss Iran on November 24 at its Vienna headquarters.

Tehran appears to be showing more cooperation in order to avoid a referral, as the Security Council could impose trade sanctions, diplomats said.

"We hope that Iran will continue to respond positively to our request for access and information to resolve outstanding issues," the IAEA spokesman said.

But diplomats said Iran is continuing to defy the international community by pushing ahead with uranium conversion, a preliminary nuclear fuel activity, at Isfahan, central Iran.

It is to begin processing some 37 new tons of uranium ore next week after having already processed 37 tons since August.

Conversion produces the uranium gas that is the feedstock for enriching uranium into what can be fuel for nuclear power reactors but also the explosive core of atom bombs. Iran is currently suspending uranium enrichment.

Iran notified the IAEA of its new conversion work in a letter "dated 24 October," the agency said in a message sent to its member states.

A Western diplomat said that the IAEA "has repeatedly called on Tehran to re-suspend uranium conversion," after breaking off the halt last August in a move that torpedoed talks with the European Union aimed at securing guarantees about a peaceful program.

"Instead of heeding international concerns, Iran has announced another round of conversion activity. This is yet another step by which the leadership in Tehran is isolating itself from the international community," the diplomat said.

"A lot of people are taking a good hard look at Iran and thinking that its statements and actions are on the wrong trajectory," the diplomat said.

Iran's hardline government announced Wednesday it was embarking on a major shake-up of its diplomatic corps, a move set to take out top diplomats engaged in key contacts with the West, including consultations on Iran's nuclear program.

France on Wednesday renewed its threat to haul Iran before the UN Security Council.

IAEA deputy director general for safeguards, Ollie Heinonen, and two other IAEA inspectors "went Tuesday to Parchin," a diplomat close to the IAEA told

The inspectors took "environmental samples," which are swipes to see if traces of radioactive particles can be found that would prove the presence of nuclear material.

Visits to sites like Parchin are beyond NPT safeguards requirements, which are limited to inspecting sites where there is sure to be nuclear material.

The diplomat said analysis of the swipes would take up to six weeks.

IAEA inspectors had first visited Parchin in January but saw only five out of what are a much larger number of buildings. The Iranian government had up until this week refused a follow-up visit.

Iran has also refused to let IAEA inspectors visit Lavizan in Tehran, where there is suspicion of nuclear-related activities and of dual-use equipment, which could be bought for civilian purposes but then utilized for military ends.

Satellite photographs show buildings at the Lavizan-Shia site have been torn down and the topsoil taken away, possibly to hide traces of work.

Tehran officials say the former military site has been given to the city of Tehran and is being remodeled.




-------- latinamerica

Bush: Venezuela Nuke Reactor Might Be OK

Wednesday November 2, 2005 8:16 AM
By NEDRA PICKLER
Associated Press Writer

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5386569,00.html

WASHINGTON (AP) - Despite tense relations with Venezuela, President Bush says it might be OK for the South American nation to have a nuclear reactor for peaceful energy uses.

Bush acknowledged he had not heard about Venezuela's request for a reactor when asked about it Tuesday in an interview with Latin American reporters in advance of his five-day trip to the region. But he didn't reject the idea, even though he has had numerous disputes with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

As Chavez, Bush and leaders from 32 other nations in the Western Hemisphere prepare to gather Friday at the Summit of the Americans in Argentina, the Venezuelan leader is trying to boost his profile by putting his disputes with the United States at center stage.

On Tuesday, Chavez said he would bring to the summit a message that the United States' ``capitalist, imperialist model'' was responsible for exploiting developing economies and ruining the global environment. He also warned he might share Venezuela's U.S.-made F-16 fighters with Cuba and China, accusing the United States of making it difficult for his country to obtain spare parts for the planes, which Venezuela originally purchased in 1983.

Chavez has said his government was preparing for a possible U.S. invasion aimed at taking over Venezuela's oil fields, an allegation that U.S. officials have denied. He also has denounced the U.S.-led war in Iraq and said world leaders should consider moving the United Nations headquarters out of the United States.

Chavez recently said he is interested in working with Iran to explore peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Chavez has insisted Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy despite opposition from the U.S. government, which fears Tehran may be developing a nuclear weapons program.

Venezuela has asked for technical help from Argentina to develop nuclear energy. Bush said he would be curious to know what Argentine President Nestor Kirchner has to say about the idea.

Kirchner and Chavez share left-leaning politics and have built close ties. Bush said he hopes Kirchner will agree with his position that international oversight of any nuclear development is important and noted that Venezuela already is an energy rich nation as one of the world's top oil producers.

``I guess if I were a taxpayer in Venezuela, I would wonder about the energy supply that Venezuela has,'' Bush said. ``But maybe it makes sense. I haven't really studied the proposal.''

Fred Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House, later said that any nuclear cooperation with Venezuela would have to be in accordance with international obligations and safeguards set by the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency. ``We have worked closely with Argentina to fight nonproliferation and look forward to continuing to do so in the future,'' Jones said.

Bush's trip to Argentina, Brazil and Panama follows what has been one of the worst week's of his presidency. One of his top advisers was indicted, he had to replace his widely criticized Supreme Court nominee, and U.S. military deaths in Iraq passed the 2,000 mark.

Bush even made light of the issue of reporter-source relationships that has been at the center of the investigation into who in his administration was responsible for leaking the name of a covert CIA operative to the media. The investigation led to Friday's perjury and obstruction of charges against I. Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

When an Argentine reporter said sources told him that Kirchner planned to ask Bush for help reaching a new financial agreement on its debts with the International Monetary Fund, Bush expressed mock surprise that government officials can act as secret-leaking sources.

``I'm not going to ask you who they are, of course,'' Bush said, drawing laughter from the U.S. contingent in the room. ``Inside joke here, for my team.''

He went on to say that he would listen to any request that Kirchner makes in their private meeting, but the populist leader elected after Argentina's 2002 economic collapse appears ``plenty capable of dealing with the IMF directly'' without the United States as a ``middleman.''

The agenda at the Summit of the Americas centers on poverty reduction, with Bush promoting increased trade and the creation of other economic opportunities as the best solutions.

But Bush acknowledged that he has been unable to accomplish what was once one of his highest trade priorities - the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas that remove tariffs and or barriers on all goods among every country in the Western Hemisphere except Cuba.

The talks have been at an impasse for months, with co-chairs Brazil and the United States remaining far apart on a number of issues, including U.S. protections for American farmers and Brazil's laws covering the protection of intellectual property rights.

On the Net:

http://www.whitehouse.gov

CIA World Factbook on Venezuela:

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ve.html#Intro 




-------- security

3-day mock disaster tests state's system

Dennis Wagner
The Arizona Republic
Nov. 2, 2005 12:00 AM

http://www.azcentral.com/news//articles/1102paloverde02.html

Gov. Janet Napolitano hunkered down Tuesday at the state's Emergency Operations Center, surrounded by disaster experts pointing at maps and talking about an evacuation around the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station.

"Let's do it," the governor declared. "We're going through the decision checklist."

So began a three-day drill to evaluate Arizona's preparedness for a catastrophe at the nation's largest nuclear power facility.

State, county and local officials are being evaluated by inspectors from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on their handling of a mock accident at the plant 55 miles west of Phoenix.

The scenario: A power failure and a broken backup generator cause the reactor in Palo Verde's Unit 1 to shut down. Minutes later, a leak develops in the cooling system. Superheated, radioactive steam fills the containment vessel, and some of it gushes outside in a deadly vapor cloud.

Working out of the National Guard armory at Phoenix's Papago Park, more than 60 officials studied computer screens, plume maps, weather reports and emergency plans. Communications by phone and radio were punctuated with a mantra - "This is a drill" - to make sure nobody panicked.

Napolitano and administrators followed guidelines in the state's Emergency Response and Recovery Plan.

"Where on the map are the schools?" the governor demanded. "Do we have a weather forecast?"

The imaginary radiation release was not considered severe. No injuries. No distribution of potassium iodide as an antidote to radiation poisoning.

In a bona fide calamity, 42 sirens would have wailed to warn residents living within 10 miles of the plant. About 150 people inside a two-mile radius would have been evacuated, along with 720 students and staff from nearby schools.

Sheriff's deputies and state police would have set up roadblocks. Local air space would have been closed.

Monitors from the Arizona Radiation Regulatory Agency would have begun testing air and soil for contamination.

Hazmat teams would have been deployed to decontaminate victims, and hospitals would have geared up to treat radiation sickness.

The Red Cross would have established a shelter at a local high school.

There are two emergency drills at Palo Verde each year. A major exercise is conducted every four years under the scrutiny of federal regulators.

The idea is to anticipate escalations, plan for every possible problem, and learn from mistakes.

If all goes according to plan, Arizona emergency teams can avoid the sort of fiasco experienced in Louisiana when Hurricane Katrina struck months ago.

Tuesday's initial response appeared to go smoothly, but a final evaluation will not be issued until weeks after the three-day scenario is over.



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


-------- georgia

Fire shuts Southern Co. nuclear plant

News services
Published on: 11/02/05 Atlanta Journal Constitution

http://www.ajc.com/business/content/business/1105/02southern.html

Southern Co.'s 851-megawatt Unit 1 at the Hatch nuclear power station in Georgia was shut down on Saturday because of a fire in a transformer outside the turbine building, the company said in a news release. The company said the fire did not damage the reactor.

A spokesman for the Atlanta-based company said he could not disclose a date for a possible return to service for competitive reasons. He said the company had a spare transformer on-site.

Electricity traders said it could take a week or two to replace the transformer depending on how much damage the fire caused.

The company declared a Notification of Unusual Event, the lowest of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's four emergency classifications, because of the fire. Companies declare an unusual event as a precaution to get emergency personal prepared to respond should the event escalate.

Site personnel and the transformer's automatic fire-suppression system extinguished the fire. In addition, the company called the Appling County Fire Department for backup.

The company said the fire damaged the immediate vicinity of the transformer, which is not located near the reactor building. The transformer is located in an outdoor area where the electricity leaving the plant goes to the electrical grid.

The company also said some mineral oil, used to cool the transformer, went into the Altamaha River through the plant's stormwater drains because of the fire-suppression activities. Personnel at the plant placed absorption booms in the river to help prevent the mineral oil and water mixture from spreading.

The unit was operating at full power before the fire.

The 1,739-megawatt Hatch station is located in Baxley in Appling County. Unit 2, meanwhile, continued to operate at full power.

One megawatt powers about 800 homes, according to the North American average.

Southern Nuclear, a subsidiary of Atlanta-based Southern Co., operates the station for its owners: Southern's regulated Georgia Power subsidiary (50.1 percent), Oglethorpe Power Corp. (30 percent), Municipal Electrical Authority of Georgia (17.7 percent) and the city of Dalton (2.2 percent).



-------- new jersey

In 9th District, candidates take on taxes, nuke plant, pay-to-play

Published in the Ocean County Observer 11/2/05
By DON BENNETT Staff Writer

http://www.ocobserver.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051102/NEWS/511020320

TOMS RIVER — The same problems New Jerseyans faced two years ago have only gotten worse according to a Democrat trying to break the Republican grip on a pair of Assembly seats in the 9th District.

Former Barnegat Mayor Dolores Coulter, 61, said when she ran two years ago the state needed property tax reform, something done about mounting traffic congestion and overdevelopment, and better security at the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant.

It still does, she said in her campaign, along with Beach Haven Commissioner James DenUyl to unseat Republicans Christopher Connors of Lacey Township and Brian Rumpf of Little Egg Harbor Township.

DenUyl, 50, is an attorney who says the current tax structure in New Jersey does not take into account the ability of people to pay.

The Democrats favor a citizens convention on property taxes to reform the way the government taxes are structured.

With more retirees than any other legislative district in the state living in the 9th District he said many are on fixed incomes, unable to afford rising property taxes without cutting spending someplace else.

Tax rebates are "Band-Aids...short-term fixes," for a problem that can only be solved by looking elsewhere for taxes and controlling spending.

He added that the promised tax relief proposed by Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Forrester is "four years away."

DenUyl said the state should consider a progressive income tax that would make those earning more than $200,000 a year pay more.

"We need a state comptroller," he said. Coulter, an analyst in the state Office of Management and Budget, agrees.

DenUyl said government should run like a private corporation, trimming the fat, maintaining services, and insisting on accountability.

"At the end of your term, if you didn't get it done — next please," should be the approach taken by voters, he urged.

While the Republicans want to change how much money is sent to the state's poorest school districts, Coulter said there is "no way you can refuse to fund them. It's a court decision."

She said she would send the state lawyers back to court to try to find a better way of lifting those districts up since huge amounts of state aid have failed to increase academic performance.

She also would focus on the "pet projects" of lawmakers that hike taxes and "fund what is essential."

Coulter said she opposes changes in pension and benefits for existing state employees, saying that is what attracts many people to low paying government jobs.

But she said any employee or official convicted of a crime should lose them.

And new government workers should be offered 401(k) pension plans.

"It's not fair to withdraw them (the benefits) from existing workers," she said.

DenUyl said in the wake of the federal response to Gulf Coast hurricanes and continued spending in Iraq a lot of federal aid is going to dry up, making the state responsible for paying for the programs they support.

"We're at a critical mass," he said, urging a convention where citizens can make the "hard choices" about taxes.

Coulter said a gas tax hike is off the table in any discussion of sources of new revenue because of the record prices already being charged for fuel.

"People are angry. Put new people in," DenUyl urged.

He said more attention needs to be paid to how homeland security funds are spent.

"Under the guise of homeland security everybody thinks they are entitled to a handout," he said.

He is unconvinced that Long Beach Island, for example, could be evacuated in the face of a strong hurricane or an accident at the Oyster Creek nuclear plant.

The evacuation plans "should be put under a microscope," he said.

Coulter said highways in the southern part of the county are already congested, making their use during an evacuation more of a challenge.

DenUyl said he would like to see a simulated evacuation to see of the plan will work or not, a drill done in February or March.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering a 20-year extension of the operating license for Oyster Creek.

DenUyl said that request should be put under an independent microscope. If it passes that independent review he said he would favor the relicensing.

He also wants a damage model done to reduce the toll from an attack or accident there to "body counts. Nobody wants to talk about that."



-------- new york

Indian Point inspections to increase

By GREG CLARY
gclary@thejournalnews.com
THE NY JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: November 2, 2005)

http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051102/NEWS09/511020330/1025

BUCHANAN — Federal nuclear regulators have followed through on a promise made last week to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to increase scrutiny at Indian Point, an extra effort to address a radioactive water leak at the site and the reliability of the nuclear plants' emergency siren notification system.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced Monday it will carry out additional inspections and wrote a "deviation memo" that notes that the extra oversight will be undertaken because of the two problems and despite the plants' overall high marks in 2003 and 2004 for safe operation.

"In the case of Indian Point, the staff considers it prudent to apply additional inspection focus to specific areas," said NRC Region I Administrator Samuel J. Collins, "even though licensee performance in these areas has not crossed any specific thresholds mandating additional regulatory oversight."

The change grew out of a meeting last week between NRC Chairman Nils Diaz and Clinton, D-N.Y., in which the senator outlined her concerns that a two-month-old leak could reach nearby drinking water sources, and the ongoing problem of a 156-siren emergency notification system that malfunctioned six times in the last three months.

"Now, the test will be in whether deeds meet words, and I hope that the NRC will keep its commitment to the communities around Indian Point," Clinton said yesterday. "This is an important step forward, but I will continue to monitor the situation to ensure that the NRC and Entergy address both the spent fuel pool leaks and the deficiencies of the emergency notification system."

In late September, the NRC began a special inspection at Indian Point into leaking from the spent fuel pool area at the Indian Point 2 nuclear power plant. The leak is about 2 liters of radioactive water per day and does not pose any immediate health or safety concerns for the public or plant workers, agency officials said.

Last month, tritium was detected in six of nine on-site locations. No tritium has been detected off-site. NRC officials dispatched to monitor the leak and repair efforts are expected to remain on-site for several more weeks.



-------- north carolina

Reactor mystifies campus

Posted: 11.02.2005
Tyler Dukes
NC State University Technician

http://technicianonline.com/story.php?id=012587

People often fear the mysterious.

And to the casual student, the PULSTAR nuclear reactor located in Burlington Complex is definitely mysterious.

Housed in a 15,000 gallon tank constructed with six-foot thick, high-density concrete, the reactor emits a bright blue glow as it generates one megawatt of thermal energy.

For many students, like freshman in electrical engineering Josh Brown, knowledge of the reactor is “very limited.”

And he's not alone.

"Honestly, I don't know anything about it," Brandon Crawford, senior in wood products, said. "All I've heard was that it's there."

"I really don't know a whole lot about it," Matthew Holmes, junior in English, said gazing up at the reactor's chimney. "I know if it blows up, it wouldn't take out too much."

But despite its mystery, a stringent set of security measures, heavily regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, have allowed the facility to operate “without incident for 35 years,” according to Engineering and Operations Manager Andrew Cook.

Regulated Research

Although the power generated by the reactor is around 3,000 times less than the Shearon-Harris nuclear plant in Wake County, the operation of a facility that uses radioactive material is no haphazard business.

In an industry heavily regulated by the NRC, nuclear engineers on campus must conduct their research with special emphasis not just on safety, but on security.

Every reactor, for example, has a physical security plan, approved by the NRC.

"It's what the facility will do to protect the material inside," Cook said.

Facilities also have an NRC-approved emergency plan, which spells out procedures for "every credible scenario," according to Cook.

According to Gerald Wicks, reactor health physicist, the nuclear program re-examines these plans every year to evaluate the effectiveness of the security measures in place.

"You evaluate what is credible,” Wicks said. “You can't evaluate what's incredible, like getting hit by a meteor."

The threat of terrorism has had its effect on the reactor program, most notably with the change in tour policy.

According to Cook, prior to 9/11, the program allowed open tours of the reactor. Afterward, the NRC issued "compensatory action letters," requiring a reassessment of the reactor's safety plan and an increase in security measures.

"We implemented these and went above and beyond," Cook said.

He said the current tour policy requires a two-week advance notice for visits to the reactor.

"It has to be for a legitimate reason...to promote and enhance science,” Cook said. “We review and approve the tour itself."

Controversial Criticism

Despite the regulations, ABC News recently targeted campus research reactors in an investigation, sending out a crew of undercover reporters to test the security measures in the 25 different nuclear research reactors in the country, including the reactor at N.C. State.

"Among our findings, unmanned guard booths, unlocked doors and again and again easy access with no background checks, no metal detectors, to reactors using the most dangerous materials in the world," ABC News' chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross said of the reactors during the program.

Although the report, aired on Oct. 13, did not reference the University reactor specifically, the program's “Loose Nukes” Web site did report on its findings in Burlington, pointing to an unlocked door to the Nuclear Materials Laboratory as well as a picture of the reactor schematic on the wall.

But according to Cook, the report's findings on NCSU were inconclusive. He said the schematic on the wall was from an old, decommissioned reactor and that the laboratory does not actually contain any radioactive material.

The report was also heavily criticized by the Nuclear Energy Institute in an Oct. 14 press release.

“ABC sensationalized the findings of its investigation by failing to assess the difficulty that even suicidal terrorists would face in trying to remove heavy, highly radioactive material from the small research reactors,” the release stated.

Wicks said although other schools may have “used some bad judgment” and failed to follow some procedures, one of the big issues with the report was that they did not clearly define the rules and regulations outlined by the NRC.

“The risk issue was not communicated – they overplayed it,” Wicks said. “Just because they park their van near a barricade, it doesn't mean that's a failure of security.”

The NEI specifically focused on one incident where Ross referenced the reactor at Texas A&M, stating that “an explosive thrown in [the reactor] could be the beginning of a dirty bomb.”

“The bottom line is that throwing a small bomb into a reactor pool is likely to damage the reactor core, and likely to cause some radioactivity to be released. However, I would not expect this contamination to pose a health risk to people nearby,” Andrew Karam, director of radiation safety at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said in the release.

Cook said the effect of an accident or explosion on the outside environment at NCSU would also be minimal.

“The dose to the public is negligible,” Cook said.

'Piece of mind'

Even in normal operation, which Wicks said is “all the time,” employees and staff are required to strictly adhere to safety and security requirements.

All employees are required to carry thermo-luminescent devices that detect both gamma and neutron radiation.

These badges, issued by NCSU's own Radiation Safety Division, keep track of the amount of radiation employees are exposed to and ensure their safety. The badges are sent off to a laboratory quarterly for examination.

Similar devices can be found in dentist and doctors offices with those who operate X-rays.

Visitors to the reactor also receive pocket ion chambers. These pen-sized tubes contain visual scale that can instantaneously measure the amount of radiation visitors to the reactor are exposed to.

Cook said this level is always zero.

"From a tour perspective, it's a piece of mind for the visitor, but it's also to make sure it's safe," Cook said.

Safe for the 'foot soldier'

Even on the back-end, University officials are serious about dealing with radioactive materials.

Bruce Stewart is the campus hazardous waste specialist and has been trained to be responsible for hazardous and low-level waste disposal from labs all over campus.

“There's a certain amount of waste the reactor generates and I'm responsible for the disposal of that waste,” Stewart said.

He said the campus reactor generates a small amount of waste, compared to the other labs around campus.

Because it is not cost effective to ship out the material, stored in large drums, as soon as it is received, Stewart said the waste is stored in the environmental heath and safety building, a concrete block building surrounded by a locked fence.

He said the material could be dangerous, under certain conditions of course.

“It's dangerous to the public if you're stupid,” Stewart said. “They'd have to physically stick their hands in radioactive waste.”

He said the environment's not dangerous to the workers either.

“If you walked around with a [radioactivity] meter, you would get almost background on the meter,” Stewart said.

Stewart said employees who work with the material go through extensive training for their positions and periodically participate in training simulations with Raleigh Hazardous materials.

In the event of a large-scale emergency, he said, there is an emergency-response network in Wake County “equivalent to FEMA.”

“Because of this, I can be used as a foot soldier,” Stewart said. “I stand around and wait until someone tells me where to go.”

Staying Power

As its fourth reactor, the PULSTAR marks more than 50 years of history with NCSU's nuclear program, which Cook said, was the first in the nation.

The department boasts projects with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, among others, with research affecting fields from food sterilization to medical imaging and textiles.

And although many students may not be familiar with the bright-blue spectrum of on-campus uranium, Cook said the 30-year-old glow won't be fading any time soon.

“There's no reason to suspect why [the reactor] wouldn't be here for another 30 years.” 



-------- utah

N-waste plan hits a new obstacle
Requirement: The Air Force must approve the route to the facility that would be located near a military test range

By Robert Gehrke
The Salt Lake Tribune
11/02/2005 

http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_3173888

WASHINGTON - Bureau of Land Management officials in Utah are blocking a company that wants to store high-level nuclear waste from building a rail spur to a Utah Indian reservation until the Air Force studies the plan, creating an indefinite delay for the nuclear waste site.

   The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has voted to approve Private Fuel Storage's license to store 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel on the Skull Valley reservation and is seeking BLM's approval for the transportation route to the site.

   But BLM can't sign off on the transportation issues until the Air Force studies whether the nuclear waste dump would impair the Air Force's use of the adjacent Utah Test and Training Range, because of language that former Rep. Jim Hansen added to a defense bill in 2000.

   "I view it definitely as a snag because we have a moratorium," said Glenn Carpenter, field manager of the BLM's Salt Lake office. "Whether the Air Force completes its study or if it's disposed of legislatively or otherwise doesn't matter much to me. We're restricted from completing any land-use planning activity until that requirement is met."

   Congress has not allocated any money to conduct the study and, although the Air Force could fund the study itself, it has not chosen to do so, leaving the BLM's approval in limbo.

   Carpenter notified the NRC of the BLM's position in a letter in August, but he said nothing has changed since then. The NRC voted in September to approve the PFS license.

   Sen. Orrin Hatch seized on the BLM's refusal to green-light the project as another indication the Bush administration opposes the PFS plan.

   "We're making headway on this. BLM has made this very clear this isn't going to happen," Hatch said in an interview Tuesday. "The White House made it very clear this isn't going to happen. The Department [of Energy] has told us it's not going to happen."

   PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin said the group was still reviewing the letter but disputed the impact.

   "Anything like this that gets inserted into the process and creates a delay is of course a concern for us," Martin said. "Will it will affect the issuance of a license? We don't know. We understand the NRC is preparing to issue a license."

   She added that the study should have been completed by now. "They have known for years now they have needed to do the study and they just haven't done it."

   The Air Force study requirement is one of the obstacles Utah's congressional delegation has been able to erect to hinder the planned nuclear storage site.

   The delegation also is fighting to include language in an upcoming defense bill that would create a wilderness area around the Skull Valley Goshute reservation, which would prevent BLM from permitting a rail line to the reservation.

   PFS has said that could force it to ship the waste in trucks along a highway to the reservation, but that could require additional environmental reviews.

   Carpenter said the BLM also has identified some historic resources - such as the path followed by the doomed Donner Party and the Lincoln Highway, the first-transcontinental highway built in the early 1900s - that the PFS rail line would cross.

   A mitigation plan has been proposed, which Carpenter said requires PFS to build a visitor center and invest in other costly projects. But he said it would be premature to approve an agreement binding PFS to spend the money to build those projects until the Air Force study is finished and obstacles to the site are cleared.

   "As far as we're concerned the matter is closed unless and until the moratorium is fulfilled in one manner or another," Carpenter said. "We're very serious and very concerned about the perception of us making a decision without following proper protocol, proper legal process."

   Tribune reporter Thomas Burr contributed to this report 



-------- washington

T Plant's work far from done

Published Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005
By Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald staff writer

http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/7159707p-7068877c.html

More than 60 years ago as the 7-foot thick walls of Hanford's T Plant were going up, the federal government didn't think the plant had a long future. It installed a surplus shipyard crane circa 1938 to travel the building's 800-foot length.

That crane still is operating and the plant's still being used.

"Today it is the oldest nuclear facility in the world that still performs a nuclear mission," said Michele Gerber, Fluor Hanford spokeswoman and Hanford historian.

T Plant now treats and packages radioactive waste left from the past production of plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program, and the plant could continue to be used for decades.

Most recently it began packaging K Basin radioactive sludge, and preliminary design work has begun to use the canyon to package and treat waste too radioactively hot for workers to handle.

"It's had quite a colorful life span," serving through World War II, the Cold War weapons buildup and the continuing cleanup and decommissioning of the Hanford nuclear reservation, said Bob Wilkinson, T Plant manager for Department of Energy contractor Fluor Hanford.

It was built in World War II as the nation raced to make the first atomic bomb.

B Reactor was the first reactor built along the banks of the Columbia River to irradiate fuel to produce plutonium. Then the fuel slugs were taken in railroad cars to processing plants in central Hanford to have plutonium removed through a chemical process.

T Plant was the first to be finished and ready to process B Reactor fuel.

"It is Hanford's second-most historic building," Gerber said. "Without it B Reactor would have been useless. The two together won the war."

Workers called it and the other processing plants "Queen Marys" because of their size and shape. They're also referred to as canyons because of the interior view down their windowless, shadowy gray length.

T Plant is 65 feet wide, 80 feet high and 800 feet long -- longer than the Seattle Space Needle is tall. Fuel processing was done in a series of cells below the floor or deck, each covered by a 6-foot-thick concrete lid weighing 35 tons.

The plant operated from 1944-56, when the new PUREX plant began processing fuel so quickly that T Plant no longer was needed.

Within a year, T Plant began the transformations that have kept it in near continual use and required a series of decontamination and clean-up efforts. Although the oldest, it's the cleanest of Hanford's five processing canyons, said Mark French, DOE project director.

The plant was reopened to decontaminate equipment from around the site on the canyon deck with a hot pressure wash, sometimes supplemented with acid or sand, Gerber said.

It was used that way into the early 1990s, with equipment sometimes moved there for decontamination and never retrieved.

After production of plutonium at the site ended and the limited decontamination needed was done elsewhere, a study by former contractor Westinghouse proposed using it for repackaging and handling waste.

Since 2000, about 55,000 cubic feet of the equipment and supplies left at the canyon during more than a half-century were removed to clear the space for the plant's new mission.

Tuesday, Hanford workers wearing face masks with filters and protective clothing were on the deck mixing grout with radioactive sludge from the K East Basin in 55-gallon drums to prepare it for permanent disposal. Behind 7-foot-thick walls in the operating gallery that runs the length of the canyon, other workers watched the work on banks of video screens to ensure it met strict nuclear processing criteria.

"One reason we're still here is the enormous deck area," Wilkinson said. It gives DOE the flexibility to move processing and packaging in and out quickly and efficiently to treat different wastes. The K Basin waste that will be treated in the canyon, which includes only a portion of the least radioactive waste, should be finished this spring.

But nearby in three modular buildings moved onto the canyon deck, other waste is being treated, including odd lots from around the nuclear reservation.

Planning has begun on the next big project for T Plant, preparing an area to process waste in oversized containers and waste that's classified as remote-handled, too radioactive to be handled except with mechanical equipment or in hot cells. Hanford lacks facilities to treat those types of waste.

The canyon continues to rely on its 1938 crane to move large waste containers and lift the concrete cell lids. It's so old that two long-time crane operators at T Plant guide their work through the same type of periscope that World War II submarines used.

"They operate 40 feet above the canyon and the can literally pick up a dime," Gerber said. They've tried, just to see if they can do it.

Fluor would like to upgrade the periscope but has not been able to find technology for the project. It could continue to be used as is as long as the canyon is needed. That's at least until 2018, and the canyon could continue to be used to support cleanup of Hanford until 2035.

---- 

Waste being cleaned from Hanford tank

Published Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005
By Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald staff writer

http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/business/story/7159725p-7068897c.html

Hanford workers started removing solid radioactive waste from the sixth of 149 old, underground tanks this week.

Work began on tank C-201, which was first used to hold waste in 1947 from the production of plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons system.

It is suspected of leaking waste into the ground beneath it in the past. All liquids that could be pumped out were removed after it was classified as an "assumed leaker" in 1982. But remaining were 580 gallons of dry waste that settled to the bottom of the 55,000 gallon tank.

Because the tank has the potential to leak, Department of Energy contractor CH2M Hill Hanford Group is using a vacuum retrieval method that adds little liquid to the tank, said CH2M Hill spokesman Mike Berriochoa.

A vacuum with a hose has been inserted into the closed tank and a high-pressure spray of water will be used sparingly to break up waste that will not dislodge or is too big to pull into the vacuum hose. The equipment was adapted for Hanford use from the petroleum industry.

Waste is being pumped from old single-shell tanks to 28 newer double-shell tanks until the radioactive waste can be processed. The most radioactive of the waste is planned to be turned into a stable glass form and sent to Yucca Mountain, Nev., for disposal.

Three tanks have been emptied of both solid and also liquid waste so far, all near C-201 in the area called the C Tank Farm. The last tank to be emptied of solids was similar to C-201 and required just six weeks of vacuuming.

Pumping on solids in two other tanks, S-112 and S-102, is under way.

The next major legal deadline on removal of remaining waste in the tanks requires all 16 tanks in the C Tank Farm to be emptied by the end of September 2006. It's the first group of tanks scheduled to be emptied.

An audit by the Department of Energy's Office of Inspector General projects the deadline will be missed by six months, but Hanford DOE officials say they are continuing to work toward the deadline and have not requested that it be renegotiated.



-------- MILITARY 


-------- russia / chechnya

Putin's 'chamber': a parallel parliament?

By Fred Weir | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
November 02, 2005

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1102/p01s01-woeu.html

MOSCOW – In a bid to save or reshape his country's troubled democracy, President Vladimir Putin is turning to 42 famous Russians - from ice skaters to nuclear scientists - who stand above the political fray.

President Putin ordered the creation of the Public Chamber, which some call a "parallel parliament," in the wake of last year's Beslan tragedy. Set to debut in January, it appears to be sidelining the unpopular but elected State Duma in favor of an appointed body.
		
The Chamber is tasked with personifying the public interest in supervising government, the Duma, media, and law enforcement. It may hold public hearings, call officials to account, and scrutinize draft laws. It might even draft legislation.

Supporters argue that the weak influence of public opinion, as well as institutions riddled with corruption, have given rise to the need for the chamber.

But critics argue that Putin, having muzzled the media, subordinated parliament, and cowed most independent social organizations, is aiming to replace genuine public opinion with a group of celebrities whose recommendations he can safely ignore.

"While the Kremlin is liquidating democratic freedoms, it is also busy creating institutions to imitate democracy," says Vladimir Ryzhkov, an independent deputy of the Duma. "It reminds me of Soviet times, when we had huge trade unions that did nothing to defend workers' interests, a peace movement that didn't criticize the USSR's arms buildup, and so on. I don't see how any good can come of this."

Star power

Last month, Putin selected captains of industry, science, sports, culture, and academia, who will in turn tap 84 more citizens to join them. Members include champion figure skater Irina Rodnina, nuclear scientist Yevgeny Velikhov, TV personality Eduard Sagalayev, children's doctor Leonid Roshal, and Russia's Chief Rabbi Berl Lazar.

"If society isn't able to put forth initiatives on its own, then we must stimulate it," said Vladislav Surkov, head of the Kremlin administration, on launching the Chamber last month. "There will be no place for crude lobbying in this body, because the people there will be honorable."

Alexander Shokhin, president of Russia's biggest private business lobby and one of the 42, says the body will not simply be a decorative institution.

"The mood is to turn the Public Chamber into a force that will exert real influence on the country," he says.

"The idea was to create a nucleus of famous people who could not be bought, self-made people who would establish a body that will be truly independent," says Pavel Gusev, editor of the feisty daily Moskovsky Komsomolets, who has also been named to the chamber. "You may say that a Kremlin-appointed body can't avoid becoming 'presidential soldiers.' But I answer you: I am no such person."

The Public Chamber has split Russia's fragile, and fractious, civil society down the middle.

"The authorities are dividing the public into two parts: loyal and disloyal," says Tatiana Stanovaya, an expert with the independent Center for Political Technologies. "The disloyal part is being written out of the political process, while the loyal part is being invited to come and work in the Public Chamber."

While some highly respected public figures have accepted Putin's invitation to join the assembly, others are adamant in their rejection.

"I call it the 'Ministry of Civil Society,' " says Svetlana Gannushkina, chair of Civil Partnership, an association of regional NGOs. "If it were a genuine public organization, it wouldn't be created by the authorities and given special working conditions. None of my colleagues have agreed to join it, though many were asked."

The Kremlin's need for an infusion of credibility was highlighted this week by a public opinion poll showing that more than half of Russians consider all state institutions to be "dishonest."

The survey, conducted by the independent ROMIR monitoring group, found that barely 3 percent trust the State Duma. Flying in the face of other polls that have shown Putin's approval ratings hovering around 70 percent for the past five years, the survey found that Putin holds the confidence of just 30 percent.

Dismay with government

In a televised question and answer session recently, Putin expressed dismay at the ineffectiveness of government. "I am not sure everything is being carried out as it should," he said. "The level of legal culture is fairly low on the part of those whose duty is to discharge the functions of the state."

Even some members of the new chamber seem uncertain about how it will work. "Democratic institutions don't emerge in perfect form in countries with no democratic tradition," says Vyacheslav Nikonov, chairman of Politika, an independent think tank, who says he wants to use his position in the chamber to produce assessments of presidential strategy. "Does Russia need this new body? We'll see."

Mr. Gusev says he will agitate for hearings in the chamber on Russia's dwindling press freedom, but he sees no point in trying to confront the Kremlin.

"I don't think Putin wants us to go out there and struggle for anything; that would be a bit utopian," he says. "But we do expect him to listen. After all, Putin created the Public Chamber, so he's going to have to accept at least some of our recommendations."
 


-------- spies

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644_pf.html

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military -- which operates under published rules and transparent oversight of Congress -- have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign governments and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month, when Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.

Although the CIA will not acknowledge details of its system, intelligence officials defend the agency's approach, arguing that the successful defense of the country requires that the agency be empowered to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists for as long as necessary and without restrictions imposed by the U.S. legal system or even by the military tribunals established for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent.

Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.

"We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy," said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. "Everything was very reactive. That's how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don't say, 'What are we going to do with them afterwards?' "

It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA's internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.

Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.

Some detainees apprehended by the CIA and transferred to foreign intelligence agencies have alleged after their release that they were tortured, although it is unclear whether CIA personnel played a role in the alleged abuse. Given the secrecy surrounding CIA detentions, such accusations have heightened concerns among foreign governments and human rights groups about CIA detention and interrogation practices.

The contours of the CIA's detention program have emerged in bits and pieces over the past two years. Parliaments in Canada, Italy, France, Sweden and the Netherlands have opened inquiries into alleged CIA operations that secretly captured their citizens or legal residents and transferred them to the agency's prisons.

More than 100 suspected terrorists have been sent by the CIA into the covert system, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials and foreign sources. This figure, a rough estimate based on information from sources who said their knowledge of the numbers was incomplete, does not include prisoners picked up in Iraq.

The detainees break down roughly into two classes, the sources said.

About 30 are considered major terrorism suspects and have been held under the highest level of secrecy at black sites financed by the CIA and managed by agency personnel, including those in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, according to current and former intelligence officers and two other U.S. government officials. Two locations in this category -- in Thailand and on the grounds of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay -- were closed in 2003 and 2004, respectively.

A second tier -- which these sources believe includes more than 70 detainees -- is a group considered less important, with less direct involvement in terrorism and having limited intelligence value. These prisoners, some of whom were originally taken to black sites, are delivered to intelligence services in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Afghanistan and other countries, a process sometimes known as "rendition." While the first-tier black sites are run by CIA officers, the jails in these countries are operated by the host nations, with CIA financial assistance and, sometimes, direction.

Morocco, Egypt and Jordan have said that they do not torture detainees, although years of State Department human rights reports accuse all three of chronic prisoner abuse.

The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners exist in complete isolation from the outside world. Kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being, said current and former and U.S. and foreign government and intelligence officials.

Most of the facilities were built and are maintained with congressionally appropriated funds, but the White House has refused to allow the CIA to brief anyone except the House and Senate intelligence committees' chairmen and vice chairmen on the program's generalities.

The Eastern European countries that the CIA has persuaded to hide al Qaeda captives are democracies that have embraced the rule of law and individual rights after decades of Soviet domination. Each has been trying to cleanse its intelligence services of operatives who have worked on behalf of others -- mainly Russia and organized crime.

Origins of the Black Sites

The idea of holding terrorists outside the U.S. legal system was not under consideration before Sept. 11, 2001, not even for Osama bin Laden, according to former government officials. The plan was to bring bin Laden and his top associates into the U.S. justice system for trial or to send them to foreign countries where they would be tried.

"The issue of detaining and interrogating people was never, ever discussed," said a former senior intelligence officer who worked in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, during that period. "It was against the culture and they believed information was best gleaned by other means."

On the day of the attacks, the CIA already had a list of what it called High-Value Targets from the al Qaeda structure, and as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attack plots were unraveled, more names were added to the list. The question of what to do with these people surfaced quickly.

The CTC's chief of operations argued for creating hit teams of case officers and CIA paramilitaries that would covertly infiltrate countries in the Middle East, Africa and even Europe to assassinate people on the list, one by one.

But many CIA officers believed that the al Qaeda leaders would be worth keeping alive to interrogate about their network and other plots. Some officers worried that the CIA would not be very adept at assassination.

"We'd probably shoot ourselves," another former senior CIA official said.

The agency set up prisons under its covert action authority. Under U.S. law, only the president can authorize a covert action, by signing a document called a presidential finding. Findings must not break U.S. law and are reviewed and approved by CIA, Justice Department and White House legal advisers.

Six days after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush signed a sweeping finding that gave the CIA broad authorization to disrupt terrorist activity, including permission to kill, capture and detain members of al Qaeda anywhere in the world.

It could not be determined whether Bush approved a separate finding for the black-sites program, but the consensus among current and former intelligence and other government officials interviewed for this article is that he did not have to.

Rather, they believe that the CIA general counsel's office acted within the parameters of the Sept. 17 finding. The black-site program was approved by a small circle of White House and Justice Department lawyers and officials, according to several former and current U.S. government and intelligence officials.

Deals With 2 Countries

Among the first steps was to figure out where the CIA could secretly hold the captives. One early idea was to keep them on ships in international waters, but that was discarded for security and logistics reasons.

CIA officers also searched for a setting like Alcatraz Island. They considered the virtually unvisited islands in Lake Kariba in Zambia, which were edged with craggy cliffs and covered in woods. But poor sanitary conditions could easily lead to fatal diseases, they decided, and besides, they wondered, could the Zambians be trusted with such a secret?

Still without a long-term solution, the CIA began sending suspects it captured in the first month or so after Sept. 11 to its longtime partners, the intelligence services of Egypt and Jordan.

A month later, the CIA found itself with hundreds of prisoners who were captured on battlefields in Afghanistan. A short-term solution was improvised. The agency shoved its highest-value prisoners into metal shipping containers set up on a corner of the Bagram Air Base, which was surrounded with a triple perimeter of concertina-wire fencing. Most prisoners were left in the hands of the Northern Alliance, U.S.-supported opposition forces who were fighting the Taliban.

"I remember asking: What are we going to do with these people?" said a senior CIA officer. "I kept saying, where's the help? We've got to bring in some help. We can't be jailers -- our job is to find Osama."

Then came grisly reports, in the winter of 2001, that prisoners kept by allied Afghan generals in cargo containers had died of asphyxiation. The CIA asked Congress for, and was quickly granted, tens of millions of dollars to establish a larger, long-term system in Afghanistan, parts of which would be used for CIA prisoners.

The largest CIA prison in Afghanistan was code-named the Salt Pit. It was also the CIA's substation and was first housed in an old brick factory outside Kabul. In November 2002, an inexperienced CIA case officer allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets. He froze to death, according to four U.S. government officials. The CIA officer has not been charged in the death.

The Salt Pit was protected by surveillance cameras and tough Afghan guards, but the road leading to it was not safe to travel and the jail was eventually moved inside Bagram Air Base. It has since been relocated off the base.

By mid-2002, the CIA had worked out secret black-site deals with two countries, including Thailand and one Eastern European nation, current and former officials said. An estimated $100 million was tucked inside the classified annex of the first supplemental Afghanistan appropriation.

Then the CIA captured its first big detainee, in March 28, 2002. Pakistani forces took Abu Zubaida, al Qaeda's operations chief, into custody and the CIA whisked him to the new black site in Thailand, which included underground interrogation cells, said several former and current intelligence officials. Six months later, Sept. 11 planner Ramzi Binalshibh was also captured in Pakistan and flown to Thailand.

But after published reports revealed the existence of the site in June 2003, Thai officials insisted the CIA shut it down, and the two terrorists were moved elsewhere, according to former government officials involved in the matter. Work between the two countries on counterterrorism has been lukewarm ever since.

In late 2002 or early 2003, the CIA brokered deals with other countries to establish black-site prisons. One of these sites -- which sources said they believed to be the CIA's biggest facility now -- became particularly important when the agency realized it would have a growing number of prisoners and a shrinking number of prisons.

Thailand was closed, and sometime in 2004 the CIA decided it had to give up its small site at Guantanamo Bay. The CIA had planned to convert that into a state-of-the-art facility, operated independently of the military. The CIA pulled out when U.S. courts began to exercise greater control over the military detainees, and agency officials feared judges would soon extend the same type of supervision over their detainees.

In hindsight, say some former and current intelligence officials, the CIA's problems were exacerbated by another decision made within the Counterterrorist Center at Langley.

The CIA program's original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the larger al Qaeda network. But as the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials.

The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. "They've got many, many more who don't reach any threshold," one intelligence official said.

Several former and current intelligence officials, as well as several other U.S. government officials with knowledge of the program, express frustration that the White House and the leaders of the intelligence community have not made it a priority to decide whether the secret internment program should continue in its current form, or be replaced by some other approach.

Meanwhile, the debate over the wisdom of the program continues among CIA officers, some of whom also argue that the secrecy surrounding the program is not sustainable.

"It's just a horrible burden," said the intelligence official.

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.



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


-------- drug war

Denver voters OK marijuana possession, but state rules

11/2/2005 (AP) 

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-11-02-denver-vote_x.htm

DENVER — Residents of the Mile High City have voted to legalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana for adults. Authorities, though, said state possession laws will be applied instead.

With 100% of precincts reporting early Wednesday, 54%, or 56,001 voters, cast ballots for the ordinance, while 46%, or 48,632 voters, voted against it.

Under the measure, residents over 21 years old could possess up to an ounce of marijuana.

"We educated voters about the facts that marijuana is less harmful to the user and society than alcohol," said Mason Tvert, campaign organizer for SAFER, or Safer Alternatives For Enjoyable Recreation. "To prohibit adults from making the rational, safer choice to use marijuana is bad public policy."

Bruce Mirken of the Washington, D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project said he hoped the approval will launch a national trend toward legalizing a drug whose enforcement he said causes more problems than it cures.

Seattle, Oakland, and a few college towns already have laws making possession the lowest law enforcement priority.

The Denver proposal seemed to draw at least as much attention for supporters' campaign tactics as it did for the question of legalizing the drug.

Tvert argued that legalizing marijuana would reduce consumption of alcohol, which he said leads to higher rates of car accidents, domestic and street violence and crime.

The group criticized Mayor John Hickenlooper for opposing the proposal, noting his ownership of a popular brewpub. It also said recent violent crimes — including the shootings of four people last weekend — as a reason to legalize marijuana to steer people away from alcohol use.

Those tactics angered local officials and some voters. Opponents also said it made no sense to prevent prosecution by Denver authorities while marijuana charges are most often filed under state and federal law.

The measure would not affect the medical marijuana law voters approved in 2000. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that medical marijuana laws in Colorado and nine other states would not protect licensed users from federal prosecution.

Also Tuesday, voters in the ski resort town of Telluride rejected a proposal to make possession of an ounce or less of marijuana by people 18 or older the town's lowest law enforcement priority. The measure was rejected on a vote of 308-332. 



-------- POLITICS


-------- investigations

Almost 1,000 Days After U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Democratic Senators Call in Secret Session for Investigation of Pre-War Intelligence

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 Democracy Now!

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/02/1546206

Democrats forced the Republican-controlled Senate into an unusual closed session Tuesday to question intelligence used by the Bush administration to justify the Iraq invasion. We speak with investigative journalist Robert Parry and Scott Armstrong of the Information Trust about how the CIA leak case indictment has highlighted questions about pre-war intelligence. [includes rush transcript] The issue of pre-war intelligence remains in the spotlight with last week’s indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby over the CIA leak case. Shortly before forcing the closed session, Democratic Senate Minority leader Harry Reid said, "The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions." He then invoked a little-used Rule 21 to request the closed session.

    * Sen. Harry Reid, “Mr. President, enough time has gone by. I demand on behalf of the American people that we understand why these investigations are not being conducted, and in accordance with Rule 21, I now move the Senate go into closed session.”

The Senate stopped work on legislation. The public was forced to leave the chamber, the doors were closed and the lights were dimmed. C-Span coverage was also turned off for the session which lasted over two-hours. It marked the first time in 25 years one party has closed the Senate to the public without consulting the other party. Republicans dismissed the move as a political stunt. It provoked a sharp public confrontation between the leadership of both parties.

    * Sen. Bill Frist, “Democrats used scare tactics. They have no convictions, they have no principles, they have no ideas. This is the ultimate. Since I have been majority leader, I’ll have to say not with the previous Democratic leader or the current Democratic leader, have I ever been slapped in the face with such an affront to the leadership of the grand institution.”

Frist went on to say, "For the next year and a half, I can’t trust Senator Reid." Reid later responded to Frist’s comments.

    * Sen. Harry Reid, “It’s a slap in the face to the American people that this has been – this investigation has been stymied, stopped, obstructions thrown up every step of the way. That’s the real slap in the face. That’s the slap in the face, and today, the mesh people are going to see a little bit of light.”

In the end, lawmakers agreed to name three members from each party to assess the state of the Intelligence Committee’s inquiry into prewar intelligence and report back by November 14th. Back in June 2003, Republicans on the Intelligence committee resisted calls to investigate the administration’s WMD claims. Finally in February 2004, they agreed to a two-step investigation.

In July 2004, the committee issued the first phase of its bipartisan report, which found the U.S. intelligence community had assembled a deeply flawed and exaggerated assessment of Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities. The second phase was to focus on the administration’s deliberations over the intelligence or how it was used. Democrats say there has been little examination of these topics to date.

    * Scott Armstrong, is executive director of the Information Trust. A former reporter for The Washington Post, he founded the National Security Archive and was a senior investigator for the Senate Watergate Committee.

    * Robert Parry, veteran investigative journalist and author of the book "Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq." For years he worked as an investigative reporter for both the Associated Press and Newsweek magazine. His reporting led to the exposure of what is now known as the "Iran-Contra" scandal.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: Shortly before forcing the closed session, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, said, quote, “The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions.” Reid then invoked a little-used Rule 21 to request the closed session.

      SEN. HARRY REID: Mr. President, enough time has gone by. I demand on behalf of the American people that we understand why these investigations aren’t being conducted, and in accordance with Rule 21, I now move that the Senate go into closed session.

      SENATOR: Mr. President, I second the motion. 

AMY GOODMAN: The Senate stopped work on legislation. The public was forced to leave the chamber. The doors were closed. The lights dimmed. C-SPAN coverage was also turned off for the session, which lasted over two hours. The move marked the first time in 25 years one party has closed the Senate to the public without consulting the other party. Republicans dismissed the move as a political stunt. It provoked a sharp public confrontation between the leadership of both parties. This is Senate Majority Leader, Dr. Bill Frist, speaking to reporters.

      SEN. BILL FRIST: Democrats use scare tactics. They have no conviction, they have no principles, they have no ideas, but this is the ultimate. Since I have been Majority Leader, I'll have to say, not with the previous Democratic leader or the current Democratic leader have ever I been slapped in the face with such an affront to the leadership of this grand institution.

AMY GOODMAN: Frist went on to say, quote, “For the next year-and-a-half, I can’t trust Senator Reid.” Reid later responded to Frist's comments.

      SEN. HARRY REID: It's a slap in the face to the American people that this has been – this investigation has been stymied, stopped, obstructions thrown up every step of the way. That's the real slap in the face. That's the slap in the face, and today, the American people are going to see a little bit of light. 

AMY GOODMAN: In the end, lawmakers agreed to name three members from each party to assess the state of the Intelligence Committee's inquiry into prewar intelligence and report back by November 14. Back in June 2003, when it became increasingly apparent that no weapons of mass destruction were being found in Iraq, Republicans on the Intelligence Committee initially resisted calls to investigate the administration's WMD claims. Finally in February 2004, they agreed to a two-step investigation.

In July 2004, the committee issued the first phase of its bipartisan report, which found the U.S. intelligence community had assembled a deeply flawed and exaggerated assessment of Saddam Hussein's weapons capabilities. The second phase was to focus on the administration's deliberations over the intelligence or how it was used. Democrats say there's been little examination of these topics to date.

We're joined now in our Washington studio by Robert Parry. He is a veteran investigative journalist, for years worked for both the Associated Press and Newsweek magazine. His reporting led to the exposure of what's now called the Iran-Contra scandal. He is author of the book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq. Scott Armstrong also joins us in Washington, Executive Director of the Information Trust. He is a former reporter for the Washington Post. He founded the National Security Archive and was a senior investigator for the Senate Watergate Committee. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!, and we begin with Scott Armstrong. Scott, can you talk about this very rare move in the Senate to close out the public, one party, the Democrats, surprising the other, demanding a closed session?

SCOTT ARMSTRONG: Well, it really was quite dramatic for what we have come to expect from the Senate Democrats, or for that matter, from any Democrats. After having voted for the war in March of 2003, they began to ask questions about the quality of intelligence and basically were held off. They got this study done, but the study didn't really get into what the administration had done with the intelligence, just the flaws within the intelligence. The Scooter Libby case has given them the opportunity to say, ‘Now there's evidence on the record that there were some unusual things going on, and the doctoring of intelligence, the piecing together and knitting together of very sparse intelligence, and we want to have the rest of this report, which has been put off because of the 2004 election.’ They want to get it, and they want to get it soon.

AMY GOODMAN: Bob Parry, the media's very much playing this as, you know, a partisan game that's going on right now, and now the Democrats are attacking the Republicans, and then the Republicans are attacking the Democrats, but, in fact, how serious is this and what can come of this? I mean, among the people who have been named to the inquiry, the Senator from New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who continued to support the war, voted for it and has not withdrawn that support.

ROBERT PARRY: Well, it's important that the American people know what happened. This is a war that has been going on now for several years. 2,000 American soldiers have died. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died. The American status and standing in the world has been put under question. So, knowing how we got there is certainly important, if for no other reason than having the facts presented to the American people.

This notion, which I think we go back to even to the first part of the report, that the information should be withheld from the American people until after the 2004 election was always quite remarkable. I mean, there aren’t many chances when Americans have to really weigh in and tell their government what they want done, but to withhold the second half of the report until after that election in 2004 suggests that the idea is never really to include the American people very meaningfully in the process to begin with. But at least now, there will be a chance to see if there can be evidence put forth to show what the administration did with the flawed intelligence they got. Clearly, it was a two-step process. There was flawed intelligence, and then there was exaggeration of the flawed intelligence, but knowing the details of that is important.

AMY GOODMAN: We're also joined in the New York studio by Gilbert Achcar. He is a long-time analyst of issues specifically concerning the Middle East, Iraq, from Beirut, but living in Paris now. Your response when you just fly into the country, and you see Democrats, many of them who authorized the invasion, saying now, “Well, maybe there was a problem with prewar intelligence.” You are based in a country now that never believed that prewar intelligence: France. France and Germany very much opposed and saying that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat.

GILBERT ACHCAR: Yes, in the sense that – well, they never stated that Saddam Hussein had had no weapons of mass destruction, because they had no means to assert such a thing, but they thought, and they were right on that, that the U.N. inspection procedure was quite enough to make sure that he hadn't. So, they saw in this issue of the weapons of mass destruction just a pretext for a war which they understood the United States wanted to wage for some other type of designs, linked with, you know, basically the strategic and economic very high value represented by Iraq and its oil.

AMY GOODMAN: Bob Parry, when you look at the way intelligence was used, and you link it up with the whole Valerie Plame being exposed story and the number of soldiers now who have died in Iraq -- we have passed the 2,000 mark, interestingly coming the same week, within the same period as the indictments against Scooter Libby. Can you talk about the connection between these two stories, the soldiers dead, not to mention how many Iraqis have died, and the indictment of Scooter Libby?

ROBERT PARRY: Well, clearly, the American people are more focused now on what's been happening, because the promises of first an easy war and then a war that would be eventually brought to some conclusion have turned out not to be true. Vice President Cheney was talking about the insurgency being in its last throes several months ago, and Americans have now seen one of the highest months of American fatalities in Iraq in October, so there are tremendous reasons to have doubts about what the public has been told, and I think going back to the Valerie Plame case, what you saw was essentially an additional step to that three parts, the bad intelligence, the misrepresentation of what was there, but then there was also the idea of punishing anyone who raised questions about that intelligence, which goes back really to before the war when you had people like Scott Ritter and even some celebrities like Sean Penn going to Iraq and raising doubts about what the administration really had as evidence.

Those people were largely dismissed. The French, of course, were attacked. We had french fries being changed to “freedom fries” in the United States. We had effectively a war hysteria that went on in late 2002 and early 2003. And now, we are beginning to see now there are consequences when a country loses control of information, where information has been manipulated and misrepresented. People die, and the country suffers dramatically. I think we're now seeing several parts of that, including the criminality that is alleged to have occurred in the White House relating to Valerie Plame as another facet of this larger picture, a picture of manipulated information, control of information, as a way to get the American people to do what the White House wanted done.

AMY GOODMAN: Scott Armstrong, you played an instrumental role in stopping the Official Secrets Act, a provision that would have criminalized information disclosures by federal employees or whistleblowers for the first time in history. Thanks in large parts to your efforts, Clinton, President Clinton, vetoed the Official Secrets Act. Can you explain what it is and how that fits into what is happening today?

SCOTT ARMSTRONG: Well, there's always been an attempt by the intelligence community and by certain people, elected officials, appointed officials in any administration to try and use intelligence, use information inside the government, for their own purposes, to leak it selectively. And what's happened over a period of time is each administration gets frustrated by the fact that they can’t control all of the leaks, and when they can’t, they propose that there be an Official Secrets Act. There are some things that are damaging to the national security that could get leaked out. By and large, they don't appear. By and large, those are taken out. Hopefully, the reader or the viewer gets the information they need, but journalists tend to take out the things that could be truly damaging, the little details that would reveal that somebody's been compromised or wiretapped or bugged in some other way.

So, what we have tried to do is keep the intelligence community in a position where the dissent within the intelligence community can continue to come forward. That's what this is really about. There was a leaking war going on in the spring and summer of 2003, and it continued on as the debate about who put the false information or incorrect information about the African yellow cake, the Niger uranium, into the President's speech and elsewhere in public statements, and this was a battle between the White House and the C.I.A. I think it's really less about punishing Wilson through his wife, Valerie Plame, than it was their attempt to demythologize and say he wasn't really there on such an important mission, he's just one of those people from the C.I.A.

The irony in this current report that they're arguing over, that they had the closed session about yesterday, is that the report has been basically watered down, first by the Senate majority, who have asked relatively irrelevant questions, really haven't got to the heart of the matter, and secondly, when they do get information – which frankly some of the analysts inside the C.I.A. are defending their turf, they're trying to show that they were not mistaken as much as they were misused – that information then is quashed by the senior people in the C.I.A. and in the administration. So, you have the irony of the Democrats, who haven't done very much to this point, but finally saying, ‘Look, this is – we have gone too long, this is – we don't have the information. We're not asking the right questions. And frankly, we need to get the raw information that the intelligence analysts have.’ That's what the public really needs to have to make a judgment.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Scott Armstrong, Executive Director of the Information Trust, and Bob Parry, who is a veteran investigative journalist. We're also joined in our New York studio by Gilbert Achcar, who often contributes to Le Monde Diplomatique in Paris. When we come back, I want to ask Scott Armstrong, who is the founder of the National Security Archive, about the federal shield law that, among many others, Judith Miller of the New York Times has been lobbying for, but Scott Armstrong is against it. We'll find out why in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Scott Armstrong, Executive Director of the Information Trust; Bob Parry, investigative reporter, used to be with A.P. and Newsweek, has written the book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq; and in our New York studio, Gilbert Achcar, who joins us from France, has written the book, The Clash of Barbarism: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder, among other books, just flew into New York. Scott Armstrong, New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, defended her decision to go to jail “to protect a source,” she said. She told the journalism conference in Las Vegas that reporters need a federal shield law so that others won't face the same sanctions. She was jailed for 85 days. Your response?

SCOTT ARMSTRONG: Well, the problem with the shield law as it's proposed now is it has an exception for national security reporting. So the very area in which you would want people to have their sources protected so that they can have a candid conversation -- I mean, you really can’t talk with government officials about national security issues without them -- technically unless they're totally authorized; if they're really giving you a candid view, they're violating the law. So the difficulty of being forced to identify your sources through a grand jury isn't really going to be alleviated by this shield law.

They did put in some good language about there needing to be imminent damage to the national security before they can call you, but Prosecutor Fitzgerald has already said, as some other people in the Justice Department, that Judy Miller would have been called before the grand jury under this new law anyway. So the question is: Are they going to try and get something? Are they going to toughen up other sanctions in return for a shield law that isn’t meaningful to the national security reporting? It’s only meaningful to gossip about inter-agency contacts over some domestic issue in which the fact of the matter that somebody is off the record isn’t particularly critical. The ones that are most critical would be the ones who would be called, so-called, before a grand jury.

AMY GOODMAN: Bob Parry, your response?

ROBERT PARRY: Well, it's a very difficult area. Because there are times you do have to go off the record with sources to get them to discuss what's really going on. The problem with the Judy Miller case, and frankly, a number of cases you see in Washington, is that these are not examples of whistleblowers divulging information that's really important for the American people to know. Often these are government officials using anonymity and often wanting to be treated anonymously to give more credibility to their attacks on people or attacks on political opponents. And so, it's more of a game.

When I was at Newsweek, we would often run into cases where sources would want to be treated this way, not because the information was that sensitive, but because they felt it had more sex appeal if it was