NucNews - November 7, 2005 -------- NUCLEAR -------- australia Pressure mounts to oppose nuke dump November 07, 2005 The Australian http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17168461%255E1702,00.html TRADITIONAL owners are stepping up pressure on Northern Territory senator Nigel Scullion to cross the floor over Federal Government plans to build a nuclear waste dump on their land. A group of eight representatives from Harts Range and Mount Everard, near Alice Springs, took their message to Parliament House today. They were joined by non-government politicians in presenting Senator Scullion, a member of the Country Liberal Party, with a petition of 9000 signatures opposing the proposed dump. Their protest came as Senator Scullion confirmed the federal government would allow a two-day Senate inquiry into the nuclear dump on November 21 and 22. Opposition parties want a month-long inquiry. NT Deputy Chief Minister Syd Stirling held last-ditch talks with Senator Scullion today in an attempt to get him to vote against the government's plans. Senator Scullion said although he had expressed concerns about the dump previously, information revealed during the Senate inquiry was unlikely to make him cross the floor and vote against the government's plans. "If at the end of the day people think my vote is going to change anyway, it won't," he said. Science Minister Brendan Nelson has compiled a short-list of three possible sites for the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Facility. These are defence department properties at Mount Everard, Harts Range and Fishers Ridge, near Katherine. The delegation of traditional owners said they held grave fears for the safety of up to 5000 Aboriginal people living in small communities and out stations should the building of the low-level waste dump go ahead. The group protested outside the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney yesterday, as NT Chief Minister Clare Martin conceded there were no grounds on which a legal challenge to the dump would be successful. Traditional owner William Tilmouth, from the Alcoota Aboriginal Corporation which ran cattle on two stations with a combined area of about 4000 square kilometres, today said his likelihood was at stake. "We're very concerned because of the rivers and the creeks - we pride ourselves on selling our cattle in regards to clean and green," Mr Tilmouth told reporters. "The traditional owners have said no and we'd like Senator Scullion to cross the floor and say no as well." Benedict Stephens, from Mount Everard, aid urgent action was needed from Senator Scullion. "We don't want a nuclear dump in our backyard," he said. "My elders back home there, they don't want this - we've got heaps of sacred sites around that area plus our hunting ground." Traditional owner Audrey McCormack said her land may be poisoned either by an accident on site or during the transport of materials. "This land, which has been ours for many thousands of years, may be poisoned," she said. "This is my kids' land and my grandkids' land where they learn about law, about hunting and about bush tucker." The Central Land Council (CLC), whose area covers Mount Everard and Harts Range, is bitterly opposed the waste dump proposal. But the Northern Land Council (NLC), whose region includes Fishers Ridge, offered to negotiate with the government about other possible sites on indigenous land. Mr Stirling, who accompanied the CLC's traditional owners, said the nuclear dump was designed to store low-level waste, but he feared it could be upgraded to handle highly radioactive material. Dr Nelson said he would consider the NLC's proposal to put forward other possible sites, provided traditional owners agreed and cultural issues were addressed. Legislation to allow the Federal Government to site a nuclear waste dump in the Northern Territory was introduced to the Senate today. The bills passed the House of Representatives last week. ---- Nation 'best site for N-waste dump' Dan Box, Tom Richardson November 07, 2005 The Australian http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17161171%255E2702,00.html AUSTRALIA is the best country to build an international nuclear waste dump, says the former head of Pangea, the British-backed company that tried to build a nuclear facility in outback South Australia. As pressure grows on Australia to build a desert dump, Charles McCombie, now executive director of the Association for Regional and International Underground Storage, a lobby group campaigning for an international nuclear waste site, plans to visit Sydney next year "and deliberately try to stir the pot". "You could put a map of Australia on the wall, throw a dart at it and have a 99 per cent chance of finding a site," he said. Mr McCombie's trip is part of a renewed campaign to re-establish Australia as an international nuclear waste site. The Northern Territory Government yesterday dropped a proposal to launch a High Court challenge against plans to build a dump in the territory. "It is disappointing that our legal advice has ruled out the option of a challenge against federal government legislation which tramples on the rights of Territorians," Chief Minister Clare Martin said. Traditional owners from central Australia will head to Canberra today in a bid to stop the proposed low-level nuclear waste dump in their region. William Tilmouth of the Alcoota Aboriginal Corporation, said: "That land is not vacant. There are over 5000 people living within that area, and the people don't want it poisoned." -------- business Dutch businessman defends nuclear exports to Pakistan THE HAGUE (AFP) Nov 07, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051107121011.p7wzhoa0.html A Dutch businessman and friend of the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb has admitted he shipped equipment used for uranium enrichment to Pakistan, according to Dutch public television. But Henk Slebos, who befriended Abdul Qadeer Khan when they were students at Delft in western Holland in the 1960s, denied the exports were illegal, said the producers of a documentary to be broadcast Monday night. Slebos, charged with an employee over the illegal export between 1999 and 2002 of parts for a nuclear centrifuge, faces an 18-month jail sentence and a 100,000-euro fine (120,000 dollars). Dutch prosecutors on Friday also requested Slebos's two companies be fined 250,000 euros (295,000 dollars). Slebos denies the shipments were illegal. The court verdict is due on November 18. "Who defines this illegality? The countries that have nuclear arms, therefore the United States," Slebos is quoted telling the television program. The businessman said he used a network comprising "hundreds of European enterprises" for the shipments and also discussed his friendship with Khan. In 1983, Khan was convicted in absentia to four years' jail for stealing secrets relating to uranium enrichment while working at Urenco, a Dutch enrichment facility. The verdict was overturned two years later on a technicality and the Dutch government declined to pursue the matter. Dutch and American intelligence services were aware of Khan's activities, Slebos told the programme. In January 2004, Khan admitted passing on nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, and was quickly pardoned by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. In August, former Dutch prime minister Ruud Lubbers admitted the Netherlands twice allowed the Pakistani scientist to leave the country, in 1975 and 1986. The decision to drop the court case was made on the basis of advice from the United States CIA spy agency, he said. A former CIA agent, Richard Barlow, told the programme the US did little to prevent Pakistan, a key US ally after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, establishing a nuclear programme. ---- Re-Energized Passed over for privatization, French firm Areva could still win big as global warming concerns and high oil prices put fission back in fashion BY PETER GUMBEL / PARIS November 7, 2005 Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/printout/0,13155,901051114-1126693,00.html If Anne Lauvergeon had been given the choice, the French nuclear-energy company she heads would have been the next state-owned firm slated for partial privatization. Earlier this year, she and her colleagues at Paris-based Areva jumped the gun by preparing all the official paperwork for a public offering, and lobbied the government hard to be next in line. Her insistence ruffled some feathers, especially in the Finance Ministry, according to people familiar with the behind-the-scenes maneuvering. And late last month, she officially lost her battle when Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and Finance Minister Thierry Breton announced that Electricité de France (edf), the huge state electricity supplier, would be next. Lauvergeon will no doubt get over her disappointment soon, since Areva emerges as a big winner even if its privatization is pushed back. That's because, as the price of selling 15% of its equity to the public, edf has agreed to invest as much as €40 billion over the next five years, mostly in France. Since nuclear power accounts for more than 75% of French electricity, a good chunk of that money is likely to go toward upgrading existing plants or building new ones. edf's dominant supplier: Areva, which has already picked up an order for a new-generation pressurized-water reactor to be built in the Normandy town of Flamanville from 2007. Lauvergeon and Areva are on a roll these days. Nuclear power, written off as dead throughout Europe and much of the rest of the world over the past two decades, is suddenly back in fashion. The public still shudders when recalling the accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant in 1979 and the disaster at Chernobyl seven years later, but these days, with worldwide demand for energy rising sharply, oil prices spiking at over $60 per bbl., and fears growing among the public at large about the lasting impact of greenhouse gases, the outlook for nuclear today is, well, quite radiant. This September, some 300 executives from the world of energy and politics clambered into a huge hole in the Finnish town of Olkiluoto to watch a laser light show as the climax to the ground breaking for the first nuclear plant to be built in Europe in 14 years. The winner of the €3 billion plant contract was Areva, in a joint subsidiary with Germany's Siemens. China currently has nine nuclear reactors in operation and says it will increase its nuclear capacity fivefold by 2020. The Chinese are expected to select a Western contractor for two new plants this year. The race is between Areva, Westinghouse and Russia's AtomStroyExport. Areva is well placed in the U.S., too. In September, it announced a joint venture with Baltimore, Maryland-based Constellation Energy to promote its new generation of nuclear plant, and expects orders for four reactors once the technology is approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Even in nuclear-resistant Europe, official attitudes are shifting. Bulgaria is currently holding a tender for two new reactors; British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who last week hosted an international conference on climate change, has called for a debate about the future of nuclear power amid signs that the government may order several new plants; and in both Germany and Sweden, public debates are raging as to whether to reverse a previous commitment to shut down existing reactors. It's no surprise that Lauvergeon talks about a "nuclear renaissance." Big obstacles remain, primarily the still-hostile public opinion in some countries and the unresolved problem of how to dispose of nuclear waste. Lars G. Josefsson, chief executive of the big Swedish utility Vattenfall, believes nuclear is on its way back, but cautions: "It will continue to be a very difficult question, especially in Europe, as many governments have taken very strong decisions in the past against nuclear." Areva is well placed to capitalize on any comeback because it is a one-stop shop for nuclear energy, with revenues last year of $13.5 billion and almost a one-third share of the market. Unlike its key competitors, Westinghouse and General Electric, Areva spans all aspects of the business. It mines and enriches uranium ore to make nuclear fuel; it designs and constructs reactors and helps operate them; and it recycles the spent fuel and packages the remaining waste. An engineer by training, Lauvergeon worked as an aide to the late French President François Mitterrand before joining the Lazard investment bank. In the late 1990s, the government asked her to take over Cogema, a state-owned nuclear reprocessing company. Convinced that nuclear had a big future, she orchestrated a merger with the other state-owned nuclear company, Framatome, which built plants and mined uranium, to create the French colossus. She has sought to create a positive image for the firm, and for nuclear energy in general, by sponsoring the French yacht in the America's Cup race and by launching a worldwide corporate-branding campaign that uses animated figures set to the 1980 disco hit Funkytown. The intended message, company officials say: nukes are cool. Claude Mandil, executive director of the Paris-based International Energy Agency, says that public-opinion considerations were never as high in France as elsewhere. And after 30 years of living with nuclear energy, the French have grown used to the idea — and enjoy stable electricity prices, especially at a time when oil and gas prices are shooting up. "The French are fond of their nukes," Mandil says. But even in France, nuclear is not free from controversy. Still, two other towns besides Flamanville actively lobbied to be the site of the new French reactor. Opinion surveys commissioned by Areva for internal use show that nuclear's reputation has been improving. As recently as 2002, more people stressed the drawbacks of nuclear power rather than its advantages, according to the surveys. But that trend has reversed, and a clear majority now cites the pros rather than the cons. Critically, the surveys show that most respondents say concern about greenhouse gases and climate change are the key reasons for their views. Just how big could nukes become? Jean-Jacques Gautrot, who heads Areva's international division, does a quick calculation. Taking into account the world's growing energy needs, and the fact that many existing plants will be coming to the end of their lives, he reckons at least 800 new reactors will be built over the next 25 to 35 years. If nukes were to double their share of the world's electricity generation, to 30% of the total, the number of new nukes would be somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500. That may be wishful thinking, but for now Areva is convinced it's in the right place at the right time — regardless of whether Lauvergeon wins her battle to privatize the firm. -------- depleted uranium The Unborn child of Iraq, victim of American callousness 11 7 2005 Kavkaz Center http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2005/11/07/4204.shtml Image: Two Iraqi children with similar deformities of the face. Dr. Gunther refers to this condition as “Zyklopie”. http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2005/11/07/4204.jpg Before I start on the disclosure of the horrifying impact of the extremely hazardous bombing materials thoughtlessly used by the US military during the gulf war, I would to like to substantiate these revelations by referring the crucial statement of Mr. Ross B. MirKarimi, at The Arms Control Research Center: "Unborn children of the region [are] being asked to pay the highest price, the integrity of their DNA." - Ross B. MirKarimi, The Arms Control Research Centre, from his report: ‘The Environmental and Human Health Impacts of the Gulf Region with Special Reference to Iraq.’ May 1992. Horrific birth deformities continue to occur at an alarming scale in Iraq. I urge all viewers to copy this page/ these pictures and circulate them as widely as possible and help expose the ghastly outcome of the chemical war initiated by the US during the Gulf war. In an act of harsh spitefulness under the US directive, the Sanctions Committee scandalously refuses to permit Iraq to import the clean-up equipment that they urgently require to neutralize their country of the Depleted Uranium ammunition that the US inanely shelled at them during the gulf war. Around 315 tons of Depleted Uranium dust was left by the use of this extremely hazardous ammunition. Displaying utter disregard to the plight of those whose lives continue to be affected by the exposure of deleterious chemicals used by the US in bombs and missiles, the Sanctions Committee even to this day shamelessly refuses to allow the much needed importation of anti-cancer treatments, ridiculously on the grounds that the minute “traces” of radio-isotopes present in these anti cancer prescription amount to nuclear materials! The majority of the pictures were supplied to Mr. Ross by a source who prefers to remain anonymous. However, Mr. Ross was unable to acquire either original negatives, or prints from negatives. According to Mr. Ross they arrived in the form of colour A4 copies. He scanned them into Photoshop and attempted to clean and sharpen them as best He could. There has not been any digital alteration other than the cleaning and sharpening process. Also, according to Mr. Ross the photographs were taken from 1998 onwards. Most scientists point towards Depleted Uranium as the definite cause of these terrible deformities and various cancers. Shockingly, both the Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defence publicly deny that there is any significant danger from exposure to “DU ammunition”. The growing number of these kinds of “grave” diseases in Iraq, mainly in the South region owing to the maximum absorption of Depleted Uranium fired from US missiles, is startling enough to cause a world wide emergency pressing for a rapid response to counteract the pandemic cal situation. But, the world continues to ignore the worst Humanitarian crises, owing to the “iniquitous command “of the USA in order to subjugate the region for its self- interest. Sadia Masroor Kavkaz Center 2005-11-07 16:32:46 ---- In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond by Jeremy Brecher and Jill Cutler and Brendan Smith November 07, 2005 Z Magazine http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=9069 [This is an edited excerpt of the Introduction to IN THE NAME OF DEMOCRACY: AMERICAN WAR CRIMES IN IRAQ AND BEYOND edited by Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler, and Brendan Smith. Metropolitan Books. www.americanempireproject.com] Brandon Hughey was a private at Fort Hood when he discovered that his army unit was about to be sent to Iraq. The eighteen-year-old from San Angelo, Texas, was desperate-not because he was afraid to go to war, but because he was convinced that the Iraq war was immoral. He considered solving the problem by taking his own life. Instead, he got in a car and drove to Canada. He explained, "I would fight in an act of defense, if my home and family were in danger. But Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. They barely had an army left, and [UN Secretary-General] Kofi Annan actually said [attacking Iraq was] a violation of the UN charter. It's nothing more than an act of aggression. You can't go along with a criminal activity just because others are doing it." If, as the Bush administration has maintained, the United States is fighting in Iraq to protect itself from terrorism, free the people of Iraq from tyranny, enforce international law, and bring peace and democracy to the Middle East, then war resisters like Brandon Hughey appear deluded if not cowardly and criminal. But what if Private Hughey is right? What if the U.S. operation in Iraq is "nothing more than an act of aggression?" What if it indeed constitutes "criminal activity"? What, then, is the culpability of President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other top U.S. officials? And what is the responsibility of ordinary Americans? Until recently, the possibility that top U.S. officials were responsible for war crimes seemed to many Americans nothing but the invidious allegations of a few knee-jerk anti-Americans. But as more and more suppressed photos and documents have been disclosed, and as more and more eyewitness accounts from prisons and battlefields have appeared in the media, Americans are undergoing an agonizing reappraisal of the Iraq war and the broader war on terror of which it is allegedly a part. the evidence There are three sets of questions regarding possible U.S. war crimes in Iraq. The first set of questions concerns the legality of the U.S. attack on Iraq under international law. Secretary-General Kofi Annan of the United Nations stated shortly before the attack that the UN Charter is "very clear on the circumstances under which force can be used. If the U.S. and others were to go outside the Council and take military action, it would not be in conformity with the charter." He subsequently stated that the invasion of Iraq was "not in conformity with the UN Charter, from our point of view, and from the Charter part of view, it was illegal." The U.S. admission that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and the growing evidence that the United States fabricated the evidence on which that charge was based, has provided added weight to Annan's view. The second set of questions involves the possible illegality of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and its conduct. The seriousness of such questions was recently underlined by the warning of Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, that those guilty of violations of international humanitarian rights laws-including deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, killing of injured persons, and the use of human shields-must be brought to justice, "be they members of the Multinational Force or insurgents." The military technology the United States is using in Iraq, such as cluster bombs and depleted uranium, may be illegal in itself. Under Article 85 of the Geneva Conventions it is a war crime to launch "an indiscriminate attack affecting the civilian population in the knowledge that such an attack will cause an excessive loss of life or injury to civilians." A UN weapons commission described cluster bombs as "weapons of indiscriminate effects." A reporter for The Mirror (United Kingdom) wrote from a hospital in Hillah, "Among the 168 patients I counted, not one was being treated for bullet wounds. All of them, men, women, children, bore the wounds of bomb shrapnel. It peppered their bodies. Blackened their skin. Smashed heads. Tore limbs. A doctor reported that 'All the injuries you see were caused by cluster bombs'...The majority of the victims were children who died because they were outside." The third set of questions has to do with the torture and abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody. This has been a huge but unresolved issue since it was first indelibly engraved in the public mind by the photos from Abu Ghraib prison. Cascading disclosures have revealed that torture and other forms of prisoner abuse have been endemic not only in Iraq but in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and many other U.S. operations around the world. facing the implications The possibility that high U.S. officials may be guilty of war crimes and may be preparing to commit more raises questions that few Americans have yet faced. These questions go far beyond technical legal matters to the broadest concerns of international security, democratic government, morality, and personal responsibility. Part IV presents perspectives from a variety of disciplines and political viewpoints designed to help us address those questions. The UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and the principles of international law, while all too often violated, have provided some basis for international peace and security. What is the likely result of following the advice of the Bush administration's John Bolton that it is "a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law"? Is it likely to be greater freedom and security, or an unending war of all against all? Are the American people-not to mention the people of the world-ready to abandon the international rule of law and return to what Justice Jackson called "a system of international lawlessness"? resisters Some of the most difficult issues are faced by those in the military and the government who may be directly complicit in war crimes. Some have said no to participation in the war in Iraq and the cover-up of related criminal activity. Specialist Jeremy Hinzman of Rapid City, South Dakota, joined the Eighty-second Airborne as a paratrooper in 2001. He wanted a career in the military and did a stint in Afghanistan. Then he was ordered to Iraq. "I was told in basic training that, if I'm given an illegal or immoral order, it is my duty to disobey it. And I feel that invading and occupying Iraq is an illegal and immoral thing to do." In September 2004, Stephen Funk, a marine reservist of Filipino and Native American origin was tried for refusing to fight in Iraq. "In the face of this unjust war based on deception by our leaders, I could not remain silent. In my mind that would have been true cowardice...I spoke out so that others in the military would realize that they also have a choice and a duty to resist immoral and illegitimate orders." In December 2004, the Hispanic sailor Pablo Paredes reported to his ship in San Diego Harbor wearing a T-shirt reading, "Like a cabinet member, I resign." Refusing to help take troops to Iraq, the Bronx native said, "I don't want to be a part of a ship that's taking three thousand marines over there, knowing a hundred or more of them won't come back...I'd rather do military prison time than six months of dirty work for a war that I and many others do not support. War should be an absolute last resort...Never in a million years did I imagine we would go to war with somebody who had done nothing to us." halting war crimes Under the principles established by the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals, those in a position to give orders are responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity conducted under their authority. But responsibility does not end there. Anyone with knowledge of illegal activity and an opportunity to do something about it is a potential criminal under international law unless the person takes affirmative measures to prevent the commission of the crimes. Crimes are ordinarily dealt with by the institutions of law enforcement. But those institutions are largely in the hands of people who may be complicit in the very crimes that need to be investigated. Can they be held accountable? Or can war criminals forever act with impunity? The problem of a government that is ostensibly democratically elected but that defies actual accountability is one that citizens in many countries have faced at one time or another. We can take inspiration from the way citizens from Serbia to the Philippines and from Chile to Ukraine have utilized "people power" to block illegal action and force accountability on their leaders. We can similarly take inspiration from resistance to illegitimate authority in our own country from the American Revolution to the Watergate investigations that ultimately brought the Nixon administration to account for its criminal abuse of power. in the name of democracy If war crimes are being committed, they are being committed in the name of democracy. Their ostensible purpose is to extend democracy throughout the world. They are committed by a country that proudly proclaims itself the world's greatest democracy. Such acts in Iraq and elsewhere represent, on the contrary, the subversion of democracy. They reflect the imposition by violence and brutality of a rule that is not freely chosen. Such acts also represent a subversion of democracy at home. They represent a presidency that has denied all accountability to Congress, courts, or international institutions. As Elizabeth Holtzman puts it: "The claim that the President...is above the law strikes at the very heart of our democracy. It was the centerpiece of President Richard Nixon's defense in Watergate-a defense that was rejected by the courts and lay at the foundation of the articles of impeachment voted against him by the House Judiciary Committee." It denies the constitutional constraints that have made the United States a government under law. It subverts democracy in the name of democracy. War crimes represent the defiance not only of international but also of U.S. law. The effort to halt them is at once a movement for peace and a struggle for democracy. -------- europe European Local Governments Fear Ultra-Hazardous Nuclear Shipments EDINBURGH, Scotland, November 7, 2005 (ENS) http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2005/2005-11-07-04.asp The transport of ultra-hazardous radioactive cargos near the shores of Scotland, England and Wales is worrying the governments of coastal communities, who fear terrorist attacks or fires would expose them and their environment to radiation. In a report issued Friday, the governments say European coastal communities are being treated as second class citizens when comes to the shipments of nuclear fuel. Known as KIMO for the initials of its Danish name, the Local Authorities International Environmental Organization, has 128 local member governments representing over six million coastal inhabitants in 10 countries around northern Europe. A report, issued by KIMO UK on Friday in Edinburgh, objects to the route chosen and the type of ship used by the British Nuclear Group to deliver mixed plutonium-uranium oxide (MOX) fuel assemblies to mainland Europe. The British Nuclear Group delivered the first four MOX assemblies it has fabricated in the Sellafield MOX Plant to Swiss utility Nordostschweizerische Kraftwerke in the spring of 2005, marking the start of a series of MOX and plutonium dioxide transports from the UK to mainland Europe. For the past decade, MOX has been transported to and from Japan using purpose built vessels owned by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. But for MOX shipments to Sweden and possibly other destinations in Europe, the company expects to use the Atlantic Osprey, an ex-roll on roll off ferry, a ship the local governments say is not safe enough for this use. “KIMO remains convinced that the transport of nuclear materials should be halted and that such materials should be stored above ground at the point of production," said newly elected KIMO International President Councillor Angus Nicolson. "However should these shipments go ahead they must also employ the Best Available Technology and compared to the ships which are used for MOX shipments to Japan, the arrangement surrounding these proposed shipments are flawed and second rate," Nicolson said. The recent announcement by the Swedish government to allow the Swedish company Studsvik-SVAFO, for first time in more than 20 years, to ship spent nuclear fuel to the British Sellafield plant on the Irish Sea for reprocessing, will increase the frequency of these shipments through the North Sea, the KIMO governments warned. After reprocessing, the radioactive material would be returned to Sweden as MOX fuel assemblies. Plans also call for shipping a load of 4.7 metric tons of metallic uranium from Sweden to Sellafield. The reprocessing will generate a total volume of 1,600 liters of highly radioactive waste, which will be shipped back to Sweden for final storage. Possible routes to Sweden could take the Atlantic Osprey through the English Channel and the North Sea, through the Irish Sea, or west of Ireland into the northeast Atlantic Ocean. The KIMO report points out that all of these routes pass through oilfields and/or fishing grounds and sensitive ecosystems. The KIMO UK report warns that whatever route is chosen, it will pass close to one of the most densely populated areas in the world and will cross some of the busiest shipping lanes, increasing the potential for collision and making it easier for a potential terrorist attack. "If an attack by terrorists succeeds in an incident involving a severe long-term fire, breaching shipping casks and/or sinking a nuclear transport vessel, the consequences would be comparable to the most severe accident that authorities insist is too improbable to be considered," KIMO emphasizes. Of special concern to the KIMO governments is an accident which first causes the rupture of many fuel rods and is then followed by a long-duration fire. "Even if the fire smolders at a low temperature, substantial oxidation of the fuel rods can take place if the package is ruptured or the seals fail. The amount of fuel oxidized would be limited only by the duration of the fire and the availability of oxygen," they warn. Nicholson said, "It is absolutely irresponsible in this day and age where we are requiring super tankers carrying oil to have double hulls to protect our marine environment that these dangerous cargos are being transported in an ex-roll on roll off ferry with a single engine and single hull through some of the most populated areas of Europe." KIMO UK says the organization has been campaigning for higher shipping standards for many years. The local governments said they worry about the lack of emergency planning in the event of a marine accident involving nuclear material. They expressed concern about "the questionable integrity of the flasks used to transport nuclear fuel." And their report points to evidence that "ship borne fires last longer on average and at a more intense heat than the safety criteria used in flask stress tests." The question of liability and compensation in the event of a nuclear accident at sea is also a major concern. The transportation of nuclear and toxic waste by sea is an issue of great concern to members of KIMO as the communities they represent depend on a clean environment and a the public perception of a pristine marine environment that produces fresh, clean and healthy resources. This is the basis of survival for many small remote rural and island communities. The irreparable damage to this image that could arise as a result of an accident involving a ship carrying nuclear waste could have disastrous consequences on local economies notwithstanding the environmental and health hazards that could occur. In Bergen, Norway in 2002, North Sea ministers recognized the concern about the potential for an accident during the transport of radioactive material by sea. In the Bergen Declaration the ministers called for efforts at every level of government to improve regulation of the international maritime transport of radioactive materials in harmony with the UN Law of the Sea Convention. They agreed to consider the issue of maritime transport of radioactive material at a ministerial meeting on the environmental impacts of shipping to be held in Sweden in 2006 at the latest. The KIMO governments fear that although armed escort ships accompany MOX fuel shipments to Japan, no plans for an escort have been confirmed for the Atlantic Osprey, and the Osprey itself has not been armed with naval guns. "No response times for reacting to a terrorist attack have been provided and in any case any assistance would likely be too late if the attack involved a missile or similar device," the KIMO report states. The local governments point out that the Atlantic Osprey will use the Port of Workington. "Compared to Barrow, which has high security measures installed due to nuclear submarine operations as well as civilian nuclear trade, Workington Docks is significantly more open and vulnerable, and has fewer safety measures in place," according to the KIMO report. The KIMO report questions the seaworthiness of the Osprey. Since it was acquired by the British Nuclear Group, the Atlantic Osprey has suffered a number of mishaps including an engine room fire that disabled the ship in the Manchester Ship Canal, KIMO warns. The British Nuclear Group has repeatedly defended the seaworthiness of all their custom-built ships on the basis that, given the nuclear cargos they have to carry, they have all been individually maintained and serviced to the highest levels throughout their operational lives. But the Osprey is not a custom-built ship, it is an ex-roll on roll off vessel built in Germany. The international marine transport of radioactive materials is essentially an unregulated practice, the KIMO UK report points out. Transport of radioactive materials was intentionally excluded from the Safety of Life at Sea convention, which is a binding international agreement mandating design specifications for ships carrying dangerous goods, as a result of intervention by the International Atomic Energy Agency, says KIMO. The Irradiated Nuclear Fuel Code, which was adopted by the International Maritime Organization in an attempt to narrow this loophole, is only a voluntary agreement. Even under this nonbinding code, it is acceptable to transport as much as about one metric ton of reactor-grade plutonium, or about 40 MOX assemblies, on vessels that were not built for that purpose. The full report is available on the KIMO website at: www.kimointernational.org -------- security Melting down computer hard drives full of nuclear secrets November 7, 2005 (AP) http://www.wate.com/Global/story.asp?S=4082540 OAK RIDGE -- Call it the 1,900-degree solution to old secrets. Officials of the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge have begun incinerating highly classified information. A plant engineer designed a tray and a tub that hold computer hard drives while they're melted in a furnace ordinarily used to treat steel. Engineer Lee Bzorgi says the computer parts end up as melted aluminum in the bottom of the tub and says the greatest scientist in the world couldn't get any information from it. So far, the process has resulted in about 300 pounds of aluminum, which can be recycled. The Y-12 plant has made parts for every weapon in the nation's nuclear arsenal and has specialized in nuclear warheads. The plant is also the principal repository for highly enriched uranium used in bombs. -------- u.n. ElBaradei says nuclear states too slow disarming Mon Nov 7, 2005 9:03 AM ET (Reuters) http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2005-11-07T140145Z_01_MOL750459_RTRUKOC_0_US-ARMS-NUCLEAR.xml&archived=False WASHINGTON - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog chastised nuclear powers on Monday for reducing their arsenals too slowly and said the international community has made little progress toward a post-Cold War world that was no longer dependent on nuclear weapons. Mohammed ElBaradei, who last month won the Nobel Peace Prize along with the International Atomic Energy Agency that he heads, said that "the slow progress of the nuclear-weapons states toward making good on their commitments to move toward nuclear disarmament -- with 27,000 warheads still in existence -- is creating an environment of cynicism among the non-nuclear weapons states." "Confidence in disarmament commitments would be measurably enhanced if nuclear weapons states were to take action toward reducing the strategic role currently given to nuclear weapons," he said in remarks prepared for delivery to the annual non-proliferation conference sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A copy of the text was made available to Reuters. The United States and Russia possess the overwhelming majority of nuclear weapons. While they are reducing their arsenals, they show no interest in abandoning them entirely. Other states with nuclear weapons are Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan and, according to most experts, Israel. Under the 1970 nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia promise to eventually disarm. The other three states have not signed the pact. ElBaradei lamented that the IAEA has no mechanism to monitor compliance with nuclear disarmament commitments and said his agency "operates on a shoestring budget" despite its burgeoning responsibilities. "For the IAEA to be fully effective, the national governments we serve must provide a level of support commensurate with the challenges we face," he said. He called for urgent action to establish a mechanism so IAEA members can systemically share information on the export of sensitive nuclear material and to improve controls over activities involving uranium enrichment and plutonium separation. ---- Baradei calls for wider powers UPI 7 Nov 2005 (UPI) http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20051107-023502-6258r WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- The International Atomic Energy Agency and United Nations Security Council need wider powers to combat nuclear proliferation. This was the message delivered by IAEA chief Mohammed el-Baradei to the Carnegie International Non-Proliferation Conference in Washington Monday. The global community had failed to respond adequately to changes in international security following the end of the Cold War, he said. In a comment clearly directed at the United States, Baradei expressed concern over a trend toward "selective invocation of international treaties and unilateral and 'self-help' solutions on the part of individual states." Experience had shown that multilateral diplomacy and verification could be effective in combating proliferation, he said. "When inspections are given adequate authority, backed by a credible compliance mechanism, the system works." Baradei called for two major changes the current non-proliferation regime: First, the IAEA's additional protocol, which allows the agency broad rights of inspection, should become the standard for the verification process. So far, only 56 of 184 designated non-nuclear-weapons states have accepted the protocol. Second, the International Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) should be amended to include a mechanism for response by the United Nations: "The treaty allows any member to withdraw with three months' notice. Any nation invoking this clause is almost certainly signaling its intent to develop nuclear weapons. At a minimum, notice of NPT withdrawal should prompt an automatic review by the Security Council," Baradei said. But new measures would only be effective in the short term if unilateralism continued to erode the legitimacy of the arms control and security structure, Baradei warned. "As we are collectively menaced, so we must collectively act," he said. -------- u.s. nuc facilities DOE to Remove 200 Metric Tons of Highly Enriched Uranium from U.S. Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Will Be Redirected to Naval Reactors, Down-blended or Used for Space Programs November 7, 2005 US Dept of Energy http://www.energy.gov/engine/content.do?PUBLIC_ID=19140&BT_CODE=PR_PRESSRELEASES&TT_CODE=PRESSRELEASE WASHINGTON, DC – Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman today announced that the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will remove up to 200 metric tons (MT) of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU), in the coming decades, from further use as fissile material in U.S. nuclear weapons and prepare this material for other uses. Secretary Bodman made this announcement while addressing the 2005 Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference in Washington, DC. The decision addresses future use of HEU that becomes available from nuclear weapons dismantlements and from significant reductions in the nuclear weapons stockpile as directed by President Bush in May 2004. The project represents the largest amount of special nuclear material to be removed from the stockpile in the history of the nuclear weapons program. “The President’s decision to reduce the nuclear weapons stockpile by nearly half—to the smallest size since the Eisenhower administration—enables us to dispose of a significant amount of weapons-grade uranium,” Secretary Bodman said. “This is material that will never again be a part of a nuclear weapon.” DOE will dispose of the additional HEU the following ways: *About 160 MT will be provided for use in naval ship power propulsion, postponing the need for construction of a new uranium high-enrichment facility for at least 50 years. *About 20 MT will be down-blended to low enriched uranium (LEU) for eventual use in civilian nuclear power reactors, research reactors or related research. Down-blending this material will eliminate its potential usefulness to terrorists. *Approximately 20 MT will be reserved for space and research reactors that currently use HEU, pending development of fuels that would enable the conversion to LEU fuel cores. HEU is stored at NNSA’s Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, TN. Bodman noted that DOE is expediting construction of a facility that will permit the consolidation of all HEU at Y-12 in a modern, highly secure building. Although DOE examined options to down-blend additional material to improve its security, it concluded that this new facility would be available before down-blending could be accomplished. Early down-blending, therefore, would add costs without improving security. Media contacts: Craig Stevens, 202/586-4940 Anson Franklin (NNSA), 202/586-8343 -------- new york West Valley, DOE in new deal The U.S. Department of Energy said Nov. 4 that it will extend West Valley Nuclear Services Co.'s contract to operate the West Valley Demonstration Project by a year. November 7, 2005 American City Business Journals http://buffalo.bizjournals.com/buffalo/stories/2005/11/07/daily1.html?jst=b_ln_hl WVNSCO has managed the project under contract to the DOE since 1982. The extension, effective Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 2006, will allow the Energy Department to complete a competitive acquisition for interim end-state completion of all project activities within the scope of its current regulatory and legal authority, the DOE said in a release. WVNSCO, a subsidiary of Boise, Idaho-based Washington Group International, will continue preparing the site for decommissioning. Its activities for the term of this extension will include processing and disposing of low-level and mixed radioactive waste; decontaminating a former nuclear-fuel reprocessing plant; and reducing site infrastructure. The 3,345-acre site is part of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority's Western New York Nuclear Services Center in the Town of Ashford. -------- north carolina Flag flyers posed no threat to nuke plant November 7, 2005 Associated Press http://www.tv7-4.com/Global/story.asp?S=4089092 RALEIGH, N.C. Officials say the person or people who hoisted a black flag at a North Carolina nuclear power plant last week never posed a threat. A spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says what happened at the Shearon Harris nuclear plant near Raleigh appears to have been "a prank." The five-by-eight-foot flag was discovered Friday on a 100-foot tower that has phone and Internet connections for the plant. The N-R-C says the area is patrolled but isn't vital to the plant's defense. It's about a mile from secured areas. The F-B-I's looking into it. -------- pennsylvania State DEP waste plan concerns officials By Wynne Everett VALLEY NEWS DISPATCH Monday, November 7, 2005 http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/trib/westmoreland/s_391873.html A state environmental agency should take another look at a plan to ship uranium-contaminated waste to a landfill in Westmoreland County, local officials say. "This maybe wasn't the best decision," said East Huntingdon supervisor Howard Keefer, who asked the state Department of Environmental Protection for another review of the plan. In October, DEP issued a permit to the Kiski Valley Water Pollution Control Authority to remove 12,000 cubic meters of uranium-contaminated ash from a former wastewater treatment lagoon in Allegheny Township. The ash is slated to go to the Greenridge Landfill in East Huntingdon before the end of the year. The ash was contaminated between 1978 and 1984 by uranium from the former Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. and its successor companies, Atlantic Richfield and Babcock and Wilcox. The companies manufactured nuclear material for military and industrial use at sites in Apollo and Parks Township, Armstrong County. The companies had a contract with the pollution control authority -- the Kiski Valley's sewage processing authority -- to treat wastewater from the sites. At least 400 area residents and former workers have died or have illnesses caused by the nuclear-fuel processing that happened at the sites, according to lawsuits and claims filed with the federal government. Resident Patty Ameno said she fears that those who live near the East Huntingdon landfill are about to inherit the Kiski Valley's nuclear problems. "People there need to scream," Ameno said. Keefer said the DEP officials notified the township that some waste would be headed to the local landfill but didn't say it was contaminated with uranium. A complex of Southmoreland School District buildings -- a high school, middle school and elementary school -- sits near the landfill, Keefer said. Trucks carrying the uranium-contaminated ash will share the road with school buses, he said. "The schools are within such a distance that we hope this decision wasn't made solely on an economic basis," Keefer said. Alvin Smith, of Beaver County, who works for EnviroCare of Utah, a nuclear waste disposal company, said economics is driving the decision. Smith's company disposed of some of the contaminated waste from the Parks facility. He said disposing of the ash in a municipal landfill should cost about $27 per ton. Putting it in a low-level nuclear waste facility would cost $50 to $300 per cubic foot, Smith said. He estimated disposing of the 12,000 cubic meters of ash would cost $19 million if put into a low-level waste facility. Disposal in the East Huntingdon landfill would cost less than $1 million. "That's the difference," Smith said. Since B&W ceased operation in 1984, several cleanup projects have aimed to rid the former sites of contamination, including the ash in the wastewater lagoon. The pollution control authority sought to remove the ash in 1993 when the lagoon was closed because it is full. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission stopped the cleanup plan, ruling that the uranium-contaminated ash could not be moved. Early this year, the NRC reversed its decision, declaring the ash is no longer a regulated material. The change in the commission's position is related to changes in the way the state and federal governments measure radioactivity, according to the chief of DEP's radioactive materials section. In 1994, the NRC ruled that the concentration of uranium in the ash was higher than acceptable for ordinary landfill waste. Today, however, the NRC measures uranium based on the amount of radiation a person would receive from the contaminated material. Under the new measure, the lagoon ash is considered safe. In essence, the change means the NRC now considers the ash the same as any non-contaminated soil, even though the amount of radioactive material in it hasn't changed. The change also meant the water pollution control authority and DEP could proceed with decade-old plans to move the ash into a municipal landfill. "This is an unusual decision," Smith said. Authority director Bob Kossak said the agency would carefully monitor the ash leaving the facility for nuclear contamination. Responding to concerns from Kiski Valley residents in August, the DEP added more precautions. It will require trucks carrying the ash to be lined and carefully cleaned. DEP spokeswoman Betsy Mallison said the precautions weren't designed to protect against nuclear contamination but because any dirt that falls on roadways is a driving hazard. Keefer said his township has a good working relationship with DEP. He stopped short of demanding the agency stop the transfer of the lagoon ash, but he said supervisors want DEP to address their concerns. Wynne Everett can be reached at weverett@tribweb.com or (724) 226-4676. -------- utah BLM blocks transports to Utah nuke waste site Agency cites need for Pentagon to study proposed wilderness By Paul Foy, November 7, 2005 Associated Press http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4207873,00.html SALT LAKE CITY - The Bureau of Land Management is refusing to give its approval for a rail spur to a proposed nuclear waste storage site in Utah's west desert. The utilities backing the project say they might resort to trucking the waste on a state highway, but the BLM official in charge said his agency had the power to veto that, too. "We're not able to bring anything to conclusion on their behalf," Glenn A. Carpenter, field manager for the bureau's Salt Lake district, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. The BLM's refusal is one of a series of bureaucratic obstacles erected by the state's congressional delegation to stop Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of out-of-state utilities that won approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September to build the way-station for nuclear waste. The Skull Valley band of Goshute Indians signed a lucrative contract to take the radioactive waste from other states' nuclear-powered utilities. The utilities call it a temporary solution pending a resolution of the troubled federal project at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, but Utah politicians fear it will become a permanent repository. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said the BLM's refusal to cooperate is a sign that the Bush administration is "on our side." In a statement issued Tuesday, Hatch said the agency has "jammed" the license authorized but not yet issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel would be stored about 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. "This is one of many administrative and legal hurdles we are raising that PFS has to clear for Skull Valley to ever become a reality," Hatch said. Carpenter said the BLM cannot authorize the construction of a Skull Valley rail line over government land because of restrictions Rep. Jim Hansen, R-Utah, wrote into a 2000 defense appropriations bill. Hansen's provision blocked the bureau from changing a land-use plan to grant a right of way across government land for the rail line. The BLM can't act until the Pentagon studies how proposed wilderness areas for Utah's west desert might affect operations at the Utah Test and Training Range. The Pentagon is nowhere near starting the study. John Parkyn, Private Fuel Storage chairman and chief executive, has said he may be able to get around the problem by shipping the waste by truck, but Carpenter said that was no certain bet. The two-lane highway is not wide enough to accommodate trucks hauling the steel casks holding the waste, he said, and BLM would have to grant a new right of way for any widening. -------- washington Richland fire alarm prompts emergency plan Monday, November 7, 2005 Seattle Times http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002608463_dige07m.html The U.S. Department of Energy activated its emergency-operations center at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation on Sunday evening after a fire alarm went off in a non-radioactive part of the nation's largest nuclear-waste site. There were no immediate reports of injuries. Hanford emergency personnel were responding to the alarm, and employees in the affected areas were directed to take steps to ensure their safety. Local and state emergency agencies were notified, and the Energy Department said people living near the site would be contacted if they needed to take any action. The fire alarm went off in what's called the 400 area of the Hanford site, where the department's newest reactor, the Fast Flux Test Facility, is located. It was used from 1982 to 1992 for national and international research, including the testing of advanced nuclear fuel and nuclear-power-plant operating procedures, and for production of numerous isotopes for medical and industrial use. ---- Fire alarm sounds at Hanford site SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER STAFF AND NEWS SERVICES Monday, November 7, 2005 http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/247382_hanford07.html RICHLAND -- The U.S. Department of Energy activated its emergency operations center at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation on Sunday evening after a fire alarm went off in a non-radioactive part of the nation's largest nuclear waste site. There were no immediate reports of any injuries, no fire and no spill, authorities said. A chemical reaction caused smoke to fill one area, they said. The fire alarm went off in the area where the department's newest reactor is located. -------- MILITARY -------- chemical weapons ITALIAN TV ALLEGES U.S. USED CHEMICAL WEAPONS IN FALLUJAH 07-Nov-05 18:05 (AKI) http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level.php?cat=Terrorism&loid=8.0.226404219&par= Rome, 7 Nov. - A documentary to be aired on Tuesday by Italian state satellite TV channel RAI News 24 alleges that US troops used chemical weapons during their assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah in November last year. The documentary - 'Fallujah - the hidden massacre' - uses witness accounts from former US soldiers, Fallujah residents, video footage and photographs, to support its claim that contrary to US State Department denials, white phosphorous was used indiscriminately on the city, causing terrible injuries to civilians, including women and children. "I heard the order being issued to be careful because white phosphorous was being used on Fallujah. In military slang this is known as Willy Pete. Phosphorous burns bodies, melting the flesh right down to the bone," says one former US solider, interviewed by the documentary's director, Sigfrido Ranucci. "I saw the burned bodies of women and children. The phosophorous explodes and forms a plume. Who ever is within a 150 metre radius has no hope," the former soldier adds. "A rain of fire came down on the city, and people targeted by the different coloured substances began to burn. We found people dead, with strange injuries, with their clothes intact," a biologist from Fallujah, Mohamad Tareq al-Deraji tells Ranucci. The evidence in 'Fallujah - the hidden massacre' claims to show the US forces did not use phosphorous in the legitimate way - to highlight enemy positions - but dropped the substance indiscriminately on the city, and on a massive scale. The documentary also shows the terrible damage wrought by the US bombardment of Fallujah, and the carnage to civilians, some of whom lay sleeping. Equally disturbingly, a document in the report claims to prove that the U.S. forces have used the MK77 form of Napalm - the chemical used with devastating effect on civilians during the Vietnam war - on civilians in Iraq. "I had gathered testimonials on the use of phosphorous and Napalm in Iraq from several refugees from Fallujah, and wanted to tell the world about it, but my kidnappers would not allow me to," said Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, held hostage in Iraq earlier this year, during the documentary. The use of white phosophorous and Napalm is prohibited by UN conventions. Moroever, the United States signed up to the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997. (Ajd/Aki) -------- europe Urban Unrest Escalates in France as Riots Continue for 11th Straight Night Monday, November 7th, 2005 Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/07/1438213 Urban unrest escalated around France this weekend as youths continued rioting throughout the country for an eleventh straight night. Over 3,300 cars had been destroyed throughout the country, along with dozens of public buildings and private businesses. More than 300 people have been detained. We go to Paris to speak with Christian Science Monitor correspondent, Peter Ford. [includes rush transcript] Urban unrest escalated around France this weekend as youths continued rioting throughout the country for an eleventh straight night. On Sunday, rioters opened fire on police in a working-class suburb of Paris, wounding ten officers. On Saturday night, rioting spread from the Paris suburbs into the more well-off districts. Also on Saturday, the rioting reached inside the French capital for the first time, with youths setting fire to more than 30 cars in central Paris. There were also reports of unrest in the cities of Cannes, Nice, Marseille, Lille and Strasbourg. By Sunday, 3,300 cars had been destroyed throughout the country, along with dozens of public buildings and private businesses. More than 300 people have been detained. The New York Times reports the unrest is one of the most serious challenges to governmental authority in France in nearly 40 years. Many politicians have warned that the unrest may be coalescing into an organized movement, citing Internet chatter that is urging other poor neighborhoods across France to join in. The violence started October 27 following the deaths of two teenagers - one of Mauritanian origin and the other of Tunisian origin - in the poor area of Clichy-sous-Bois. The two teens were electrocuted in a power grid while fleeing from police. The suburbs are home to a large West African and North African community, plagued by chronic unemployment and poverty. Unemployment in the neighborhoods is double and sometimes triple the 10 percent national average, while incomes are about 40 percent lower. France is home to the largest immigrant community in Europe, which makes up 10 percent of its 60 million population. One of France's largest Muslim organizations issued a fatwa condemning the violence saying, "It is strictly forbidden for any Muslim... to take part in any action that strikes blindly at private or public property or that could threaten the lives of others." Meanwhile, the French government has come under increasing fire for its handling of the situation. Opposition parties have called for Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to resign after calling the rioters "scum" last week. And French president Jacques Chirac was roundly criticized for not speak publicly about the unrest until yesterday after an emergency meeting with top members of his cabinet. * Jacques Chirac, French President, November 6, 2005. * Nicolas Sarkozy, French Interior Minister, November 6, 2005. We go to Paris to get a report from the ground. * Peter Ford, reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, speaking from Paris, France. RUSH TRANSCRIPT AMY GOODMAN: This is the French President, Jacques Chirac. PRESIDENT JACQUES CHIRAC: I just met with the home security council. That's the Prime Minister and the ministers concerned by matters of public order. We took a certain number of measures to further reinforce the actions of police and justice, because today the absolute priority is to reestablish security and public order. AMY GOODMAN: And this is Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking to reporters after the emergency meeting. NICOLAS SARKOZY: We met the Prime Minister, who thanked the forces of law and order for the quality of their work last night. It was a difficult night. Even if the police displayed a lot of presence on the ground, they worked to the degree of control that allowed us to avoid many, many incidents. There were more than 300 arrests. The order given by the Prime Minister is the same that I have given. Those who carry out these actions will be held accountable in front of the law. The plan is in place, and the orders that have been given remain the same. AMY GOODMAN: The Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who called the young people “scum.” Joining us from Paris is Peter Ford, a reporter with the Christian Science Monitor. Welcome to Democracy Now! PETER FORD: Hello. AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Why don't you start at the beginning, how this all began at the end of October? PETER FORD: Well, as you say, there was an incident in which two young boys of immigrant descent in Clichy-sous-Bois were coming home from a football match they had been playing, and it seems that they spotted a police patrol. They were afraid of one of the identity checks the police go in for heavily in these districts, and everybody scampered, fled. Two of the boys -- three of the boys hid in a substation. One was very badly injured. Two were killed. And the rumor spread that they had been chased into that substation by the police, the implication being, deliberately chased in, and that sparked the riot. I think what that speaks to -- although the preliminary reports suggest that they weren't being chased at the time, but the fact that they climbed over a six-foot barbed wire wall to hide from police speaks volumes about the state of relations between young immigrant-origin youth and police in these sorts of places and also, generally, about how difficult it is to live in these quarters. AMY GOODMAN: There have also been marches for peace in one of the hardest hit neighborhoods, thousands of silent marchers in Aulnay-sous-Bois chanted “No to violence! Yes to dialogue!” What kind of effect are they having? PETER FORD: Well, not much at the moment. As you heard Nicolas Sarkozy and President Jacques Chirac saying a few minutes ago, they are concentrating on law and order. The first priority, they said, is to restore order. Only then will the government start thinking about longer-term plans to attack the root causes of this problem. Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, is due to go on television in about six hours to announce some measures, but dialogue is a difficult thing to call for at the moment, because it's hard to see with whom one would really talk. The young men who are carrying out the violence are not answering, frankly, or listening to any figures of authority in their communities for the moment. The mosques, the imams are preaching against violence, the local social workers are trying to get through to them, but so far, they haven't had any effect and, certainly, none of these kids on the streets have any respect whatsoever for the government or for the police. AMY GOODMAN: Well, can you talk about the anger that they feel, the whole issue of police? I mean, the beginning of this, the two young people who died as they were fleeing from police. PETER FORD: Yes. Until recently, the police approach in these districts – as recently as two or three years ago -- had been on what the previous socialist government called “community policing.” It was based on the idea that the individual policemen should know their areas better, they should get on better with the kids, they should not just be seen as repressive forces of law and order, but as agents of the state there to help the kids who were not involved in criminalities stay away from criminality, as well as punish those who were found to be guilty. That approach is not popular with Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, who is a very heavy law-and-order man. And when you talk to young men in districts like Clichy-sous-Bois and the neighboring suburbs, their number one complaint is that they are constantly, constantly being asked for their papers by the police. They regard it as harassment. They’ll be hanging about in the lobbies of their apartment blocks, they say, and the police will come by and ask for their papers. The same policemen who asked for their papers a few hours ago will ask them for their papers again. And if they don't have them, they are locked away at the police station for four hours, and their parents have to come and get them often before they're allowed to go home. Or, for example, the police will stop youth -- and one man complained about this -- and feel the hood on his sweatshirt, and if it's sweaty, then he must have been running. And if he was running, he must have committed a crime. This is the sort of atmosphere that the boys themselves complain about. The police, on the other hand, say, of course, that they're in extremely difficult and sensitive neighborhoods where there's a lot of drug trafficking, there’s a lot of dealing in stolen goods of all descriptions, and that they are there to stop it. AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Peter Ford of the Christian Science Monitor. The issue of the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, calling the kids “scum,” saying that the government will wage a war without mercy against them. PETER FORD: Well, Nicolas Sarkozy is a front-runner in the conservative UMP Party for the presidency when the elections are held in 2007. His chief rival is the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin. And Sarkozy is clearly angling here for extreme right-wing votes, as well as standard conservative right-wing votes. But Sarkozy is a bit of an anomaly in French politics. While he has taken this hard-line law-and-order position, he has also broken a lot of taboos in French politics as regards immigration. He argues in favor, for example, of positive discrimination to encourage the integration of immigrant youth into French society. Now that is absolutely abhorrent to most of the French establishment. He is -- AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean when you say “positive discrimination.” Are you talking about what we say in the United States as affirmative action? PETER FORD: Yes, exactly, of deliberately setting aside quotas of jobs or places in schools, universities for disadvantaged immigrants. That runs directly counter to the French tradition of treating absolutely everybody equally. But, of course, that tradition is a myth. It's enshrined in French ideas of equality, fraternity and liberty. But it's certainly illusory if you come from one of these ghettos on the outskirts of Paris, and Sarkozy has recognized that. But at the same time he's playing, if you like, both sides of the gallery. And his hard-line language is designed to attract support from elsewhere in the political spectrum. It doesn't appear to be working that well. There was a poll released yesterday which showed that 50% of the French population don't think his action against insecurity has been effective. But he still retains a positive image amongst 57% of French voters. AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Peter Ford, a reporter with the Christian Science Monitor. We'll come back to him in Paris, riots throughout France now. [break] AMY GOODMAN: We continue for just a moment with Peter Ford in Paris, in France, where the riots continue. Peter Ford, the issue of -- what is soft integration? And also, the level of employment and the conditions in these poorer areas of the suburbs, not only of Paris, but now spread all over the country. PETER FORD: Well, it's very striking when you go to these housing projects. One must remember actually that these are pockets of extreme under-privilege in suburbs which themselves are not necessarily very well off, but perhaps lower middle class. We're not talking about huge swaths of territory. But, on these projects, the average income is half or a little more than half of the national average. For young men between the ages of 20 and 29, unemployment is three times higher than the national average. An interesting study was done earlier this year by a French professor, who was looking at discrimination, and he sent out nearly 2,000 fictitious applications for a sales job, coming allegedly from five or six different sorts of people. And he found that the obviously North African man, with an Arab name, was invited to a job interview five times less often than his white French counterpart. Even those who get beyond school, to university or to college, and do further education, are finding that even the diplomas they gain do not protect them against unemployment in the way that they used to. Racial discrimination is very real in France, but it’s not something that the authorities ever really wanted to face up to. AMY GOODMAN: And here you have the communities, particularly the elders of the communities, urging peace and to stop the violence. And yet, what is starting this conversation is the violence, the ongoing violence. I mean, the President hasn't even spoken until very recently. PETER FORD: Yes, it's unclear, frankly, how much authority the preachers and the Islamic organizations have over the kids who are committing the violence. They -- I don't think that the ones who are setting fire to these cars listen very carefully to what their imams tell them. In fact, the mosques in some of these suburbs have been themselves organizing in groups of faithful younger men, amongst their congregations, to go out on a nightly basis and try to calm spirits, try to argue with the kids to send them home, to stop them confronting the police or burning down schools. I mean, one of the things they're telling them, of course, is that they’re trashing their own neighborhoods, they're burning the buses that their neighbors use to get to work, they’re burning the schools that their little brothers and sisters go to, and that this is counter-productive. But I don't think, at the moment, anybody seems to have sufficient authority over them to stop them from doing what they're doing. And that is what has led Sarkozy to say, ‘There's only one thing to do: It’s to send in more riot police.’ But that, as we've seen over the last few nights, isn't the answer, either. It may tamp down violence in one or two places, even though it often provokes them, as well, but then it pops up somewhere else. AMY GOODMAN: Peter Ford, I want to thank you for being with us, reporter with the Christian Science Monitor, reporting from Paris. -------- latin america Bush Fails to Revive Free Trade Talks in Latin America Amid Mass Protests Monday, November 7th, 2005 Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/07/1438223 President Bush's trip to Argentina ended without any agreement on reviving talks to create a regional free trade zone. On Friday, as many as 40,000 demonstrators filled the streets of Mar del Plata. We go to Argentina to speak with Beverly Keene, one of the organizers the alternative People's Summit. [includes rush transcript] President Bush failed to persuade other leaders attending the Summit of the Americas meeting in Argentina this past weekend to resume talks around achieving a hemisphere-wide free trade agreement. Bush was hoping to persuade his Latin American and Caribbean counterparts to endorse the Free Trade Area of the Americas or FTAA plan. The FTAA would be larger than the European Union but without the free flow of labor and political integration. The plan would get rid of tariffs and other barriers that limit entry of American goods and services allowing American exports to the region to bloom. Critics have spoken out against the FTAA saying that it would do little to alleviate poverty in Latin America while opening up huge markets for American companies. Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez has called the agreement an "annexationist plan" which would destroy local industry, roll back social safety nets and labor protections and permanently extend American political domination of the region to the economic realm. On Friday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez led a rally of 25,000 people to protest Bush and the FTAA. * Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, November 4, 2005. The alternative People's Summit took place in Argentina last week as well. Thousands came from all over the continent to discuss issues such as opposition to imperialism, employment and wealth distribution, environmental degradation and debt forgiveness. * Beverly Keene, coordinator with Jubilee South/Americas and a member of the organizing committee for the People's Summit. RUSH TRANSCRIPT AMY GOODMAN: This is President Chavez. PRESIDENT HUGO CHAVEZ: The capitalist model, the developed model, the consumer model which comes from the North, which it has forced on the world, is falling apart on earth, and there is no planet nearby that we can emigrate to. AMY GOODMAN: The alternative People’s Summit took place in Argentina last week, as well. Thousands came from all over the continent to discuss issues such as opposition to imperialism, employment, wealth distribution, environmental degradation and debt forgiveness. We're joined on the phone now from Argentina by one of the organizers of the People's Summit, Beverly Keene. Welcome to Democracy Now! BEVERLY KEENE: Hello. Good morning. AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. You're a coordinator with Jubilee South, one of those who organized the People's Summit. Looking now at this weekend, what do you think you accomplished? BEVERLY KEENE: I think we have an enormously positive balance at the first sight. One of the reasons is because it's a massive turnout; participation in the People's Summit, during the three days of debates and more than 160 workshops and seminars and forums focusing on different aspects of a popular agenda was enormous, very enthusiastic, more than 12,000 people. And a lot of those people were from the very city of Mar del Plata, and that was very encouraging because the city of Mar del Plata has been, for the past six months, essentially under police alert, and the security net has been tightening and tightening and tightening, and the campaign, in a sense, of fright and of fear, telling people that they ought to stay home, that they ought to leave, that they ought to close their businesses, etc., was really tremendous. So it was very, very positive that so many people from Mar del Plata, in fact, turned out, participated very actively in events, including the march, which was a tremendously large march for the city of Mar del Plata. And that's a very good sign. I think the other good, very positive evaluation that we've made is that in the course of the three days, on an agenda that was very much focused on building alternatives, there was tremendous discussion in each of the sectoral forums and each of the thematic groups, and a number of very specific initiatives were launched and that are becoming part of what is the continental agenda, not just to say, ‘No to the F.T.A.A.! No to militarization!’ but how can we advance in some very, very concrete programs. So that was good news. I think also, obviously, part of our positive evaluation of what took place in Mar del Plata these days is the fact that despite the immense pressure from the U.S., from Canada and from other countries in the region, the -- at least U.S.'s proposal to move forward and put a date to resuming the negotiations towards the building of the F.T.A.A., that was not able to be pushed through. Undoubtedly, there is a continuing concern here in Argentina, in the continent and through all of those social movements and organizations that participated in the summit, the fact that the F.T.A.A. still appears in the document and the kinds of neoliberal policies that have been pursued against the interests and the rights of the people of the hemisphere over the past decade or 15 years are still very much present in the document itself, in the declaration of the presidents – AMY GOODMAN: Beverly Keene – BEVERLY KEENE: – so we have an agenda ahead of us. AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what Chavez was putting forward as he announced they had gathered at the gravesite of the F.T.A.A., the Bolivarian alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean, known as A.L.B.A., the Spanish acronym meaning “dawn,” to replace the F.T.A.A., and where do the other Latin American leaders come down on this? BEVERLY KEENE: Well, I think what Chavez said and what he was speaking to was, in fact, a hope and at least a partial reality, in the fact the U.S. wasn't able and hasn't been able thus far to impose its agenda, which we can all remember, as of the first Summit of the Americas which was held in Miami in 1994, from that time on, the U.S.'s agenda was to have the F.T.A.A. up and running by January 2005. Well, we are now in November 2005, and the F.T.A.A. is still on paper. So we're continuing in a sense to be able to hold it back. And Venezuela's position, the position of Chavez’s government, in that sense, has been very, very clear. And I think when he announces here in Mar del Plata that we have come to the gravesite, it's continuing to press in that respect. What maybe is most important coming out of the declaration of the presidents in Mar del Plata is, in fact, a very formal and a very official recognition of divided opinions among the governments of Latin America. And that means that there will be continued pressure, certainly on the governments here in the southern cone, Argentina and Brazil, Venezuela, itself, of course, Uruguay and Paraguay, to bring about change in those positions and is a subject of concern. Chavez and the Venezuelan government has a very clear alternative, a very clear position -- “No to the F.T.A.A. under any circumstances” -- and is moving alternatives forward, such as you mentioned, the question of really advancing with alternative forms of integration, both in the economic sphere, in science and technology, in education, in health, in a number of different areas. And that's a real challenge for the other governments of the southern cone, in particular, who have at base taken a firm step forward in this point to say that under existing conditions they're not willing to continue negotiating the F.T.A.A. Our fear and certainly part of our -- the target of our action over the next coming months here in Argentina and other countries in the southern cone will be to continue to bolster that opposition on the part of our governments, because the fear is that if there are, in a sense, some concessions, however minor, then indeed the floodgates may still be opened. AMY GOODMAN: Beverly Keene, what about the protests? Can you talk about the level, if there was violence, how people came together, how the state, how the police responded? BEVERLY KEENE: Well, I think, first of all, it's important to mention that there was an enormously large march and rally. You know, we’re talking – I’ve seen estimates of between 30,000 and 50,000 people. One of the things that many noted is that while we marched through the streets of Mar del Plata on the morning of November 4, there wasn't a police officer in sight. Quite different to what had been the reality in the three previous days as we had gathered in Mar del Plata. But the march was extraordinarily peaceful. It was, I would say, very enthusiastic. Certainly the target of the march was Bush and Bush's policies, not only in Latin America, but around the world. But it was an enormously festive occasion, as people were really feeling a sense of coming together from different parts of the continent, from different parts and different political organizations, different social organizations, different positions, certainly here in Argentina with respect to what is the local political scene, but there was a real sense of unity in terms of that, ‘No to Bush.’ The afternoon unfortunately saw a number of very, in a sense, minor incidents, in the sense that there were very few people actually engaged. There were large marches to the – I can't think of how you say this – the walls that had been set up by the police to keep people out of the presidential summit. There were massive marches from the stadium after Chavez’s speech back to the area where the presidents, themselves, were meeting. But most of the people who engaged in those marches, in fact, were not able to get as far as they had hoped because of eventual police repression. But at the time that there was acts of vandalism, certainly in Mar del Plata, what is very clear is that the police were nowhere to be seen, and they didn't show up for a long time. Here in Argentina, there’s a very clear sense, and this is what you can get if you talk to neighbors in Mar del Plata, if you read what's available in the media, that, in fact, a kind of liberated zone was set up. Police were nowhere in sight. They weren't brought in until well after the incidents of vandalism itself were finished. AMY GOODMAN: Beverly Keene – BEVERLY KEENE: – so there’s a sense is that it was, in a sense, part of efforts to really pressure the government itself and particularly part of an effort to, in a sense, cast a doubt or cast a shadow over what had been enormously successful four days of debate, discussion among social movements and organizations from the hemisphere and an enormously successful march and rally that very morning. AMY GOODMAN: Wasn't the Argentine president also actually critical of President Bush? Now, also, Bush went on to Brazil and is in Panama, where the President Torrijos supports the F.T.A.A. BEVERLY KEENE: President Kirchner was very critical in his opening address. I haven't actually heard it, nor had a chance to read it yet, but according to many accounts, it was a very strong address, and he was very critical, certainly, of positions, not only in relation to the commercial negotiations, but certainly in relation to I.M.F.'s role and stance in relation to Latin America. What is a challenge for movements and organizations here in Argentina, however, is to sift through, in a sense, what often we say is a distance between rhetoric and reality. It is certainly true that the policies of the government of Argentina are moving forward, are very different and a vast improvement over what we have known in prior decades, in the decades of the 1990s and certainly in the earlier part of this decade. But there is, I think, growing concern among many here in Argentina that while the government talks a stiff line, it's often – it's not always what is the reality of its policies. And this has certainly been true in relation to questions like the debt and its very relations with the I.M.F. So we'll – these are areas that we'll continue to be watching very carefully and working on very carefully and hoping to strengthen, indeed, what is both the rhetoric and also the reality of the government's policies. AMY GOODMAN: Beverly Keene, I want to thank you for being with us from Argentina, coordinator of Jubilee South and on the organizing committee for the People's Summit. ---- Panama Angry Over US Weapons Left Along Canal PANAMA: November 7, 2005 Story by Mike Power REUTERS NEWS SERVICE http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/33332/newsDate/7-Nov-2005/story.htm ESCOBAL, Panama - When the US military handed over control of the Panama Canal in 1999, it left behind thousands of unexploded weapons strewn across jungle firing ranges that are still killing people. Many Panamanians accuse the United States of ignoring the dangers and President George W. Bush will face protests over the controversy during a visit starting on Sunday night. Washington controlled the inter-oceanic waterway and a five-mile (eight km) strip either side of the canal for almost all of the 20th century, and used some of the land for firing ranges. It gave control of the canal to Panama at the end of 1999, but handover treaties only obliged it to clear up unexploded munitions as far as was "practicable." Around 30,000 acres were cleaned but 8,000 acres are still scattered with live mortars, grenades, bombs, rockets and Agent Orange residue. Outside the canal zone, seven mustard gas bombs weighing between 500 pounds and 1,000 pounds were abandoned on Panama's uninhabited Pacific island of San Jose. Officially, 21 people have been killed in the firing ranges over the years, although some believe the true figure is more than double that. Sabino Rivera was the most recent victim, killed in July 2004 near his home in the village of Escobal, three hours from the capital. "He had nine children, and was gathering bananas in the firing range - he had no work. He exploded when he stood on a mortar. He never came home," his mother Blasina said this week, cradling her grandchildren in a breeze block shack. The village is surrounded by bomb-infested rain forest ranges that poor locals still enter to hunt and farm. "The Americans must come and take away these bombs," said Sabino's sister Carmen. "If the don't, more people will die." Five people in Escobal have been killed by exploding munitions in the last 20 years, two of them children who found a grenade in a dump as they played near their homes in 1993. A local shopkeeper winces at the memory. "There were chunks of flesh hanging from the mango trees. It was horrible." MINIMAL SECURITY The restricted areas have minimal security beyond a few faded warning signs, and those near Escobal run alongside a national park renowned among bird-watchers. The United States says the jungle is too dense to cut a path through for bomb disposal experts, and warn that trying it would erode the topsoil and silt up the canal. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared the issue closed when he visited Panama last year, and US officials say Panama simply needs to keep people away from the former ranges. John Lindsay-Poland, an author who wrote "Emperors in the Jungle" about the US military in Panama, says many areas are easy to clean and that even zones of heavy vegetation could be made safe if Washington spent the time and money to do it. He said the US government should set a better example, especially in cleaning up the mustard gas bombs. "When the US has gone to war over weapons of mass destruction being in other country's hands, to abandon WMD in a country they used as a military training ground for nearly a century is irresponsible and hypocritical," he told Reuters. The United States tested mustard gas, phosgene and other chemical weapons on San Jose island between 1943 and 1948. No one has died as a cause of those weapons. The weapons cleanup controversy is not on the formal agenda for Bush's visit, but Panamanian Foreign Minister Samuel Lewis Navarro insisted last month that it was not over. "We do not consider it a closed case in the same way we did not consider the canal question closed for 74 years," he said. President Martin Torrijos is the son of Omar Torrijos, a populist military dictator still revered by many here for negotiating the 1977 treaty that bound Washington to handing over control of the Canal to Panama in 1999. Bush will be met in Panama by street protests against the war in Iraq and his free trade proposals for the Americas, as well as demonstrators demanding a munitions clean up. Panamanians like Vaneza Lozano, who lost her father to a mortar that exploded in 1985, say the United States doesn't care about the problem. "I want the United States to come and clean up. We are still in danger and so are our children. They leave us to die like animals," she said. "We are not animals. We are human beings." -------- spies The Yes-Man President Bush sent Porter Goss to the CIA to keep the agency in line. What he’s really doing is wrecking it. By Robert Dreyfuss Issue Date: 11.23.05 The American Prospect (found online November 7, 2005) http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=10472 Exactly as intended, Porter Goss has hit the Central Intelligence Agency like a wrecking ball. The former Florida congressman, who had an undistinguished career as a CIA operations officer in the 1960s, came to the agency in September 2004 after serving seven years as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. With his staff in tow -- a collection of Capitol Hill aides nicknamed “the Gosslings” -- Goss bowled into the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters, scattering senior officials like so many duckpins. In mid-September, Robert Richer, the newly installed deputy director of operations and a former Near East Division chief, quit in disgust. The newspapers duly reported Richer’s departure. But he is only the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg. Since Goss took over, between 30 and 90 senior CIA officials have made their exit, according to various sources, some fleeing into retirement, others taking refuge as consultants. Others, unable to retire, have stayed, but only to mark time at the agency. Morale, already low after several years during which the CIA was accused of a series of intelligence failures related to September 11 and Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, is now at rock-bottom. The agency’s vaunted Near East Division, in particular, which served as the “pointy end of the spear,” as one CIA veteran put it, in simultaneous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the “global war on terror,” has been decimated. And the agency has been locked down tight: After a decade during which the CIA prided itself on a new openness, shedding some of its legendary obsession with secrecy, neither Goss nor anyone else in the organization is giving interviews or bothering to explain the CIA’s workings. Appointed to lead the agency in the midst of a heated presidential campaign, Goss’ primary mission, according to numerous former CIA officials -- including some only recently departed -- was to yank Langley onto President Bush’s political team. His immediate goal in 2004 was to block what had been, until then, a stream of damaging leaks of information about CIA intelligence reports that ran contrary to the White House’s rosy optimism about Iraq and U.S. anti-terrorism efforts. More broadly, the Goss team clamped down on dissenting views and radically politicized the CIA’s leadership. Even worse, say former agency officials, Goss has acquiesced in the dismantling of the CIA itself, which has bowed too easily to the supremacy of the new director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, who spent his days in Baghdad contradicting the CIA’s clear-eyed battle reports. For liberals and leftists accustomed to viewing the CIA as a rogue agency prone to unaccountable covert actions abroad, it is ironic that since 9-11, the CIA has emerged as a bastion of opposition to George W. Bush’s imperial foreign policy. Further, since 9-11, the CIA has established itself as perhaps the primary U.S. system of defense against Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and its offshoots and co-thinkers in the Muslim world. That reality makes Goss’ wrecking-ball approach to the agency both irresponsible and dangerous. This article, based on more than two-dozen interviews with former intelligence officials from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department, along with ex–Capitol Hill intelligence staffers who worked with Goss, is the first comprehensive account of the CIA’s transition from George Tenet through John McLaughlin, the agency’s respected acting director in mid-2004, to Goss. It reveals that Goss may have put the final nail in the coffin of an agency whose expertise and analytical skills were cavalierly overridden by a White House obsessed with Saddam Hussein. From 2001 on, its covert operatives and analysts were ignored, pressured, and forced to toe the administration’s line; neoconservative ideologues considered those operatives to be virtually part of the enemy camp. Many of those who remain inside the CIA are distraught, convinced that their work is wasted on an administration that doesn’t want to hear the truth. “How do you think they feel?” asked one recently retired CIA officer with three decades of experience. “They’re watching a fucking idiotic policy, run by idiots, unfold right before their eyes!” * * * From 9-11 through the start of the Iraq War in March 2003, the neoconservative nexus in the administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, leaned heavily on the CIA to come up with intelligence to support the White House’s preordained determination to go to war against Iraq. The pressure directed at Tenet, McLaughlin, and scores of other CIA managers, analysts, and field officers was intense. Subsequent official investigations, by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and by the commission co-chaired by Lawrence Silberman and Charles Robb, blithely passed over the question of whether intelligence analysts were pressured by the administration. Both studies determined that analysts were not pressured, a conclusion that CIA and other U.S. intelligence professionals find laughable -- especially the idea that analysts would answer in the affirmative when asked by commissioners or senators if they had been pressured. “The senior guys got together and said, ‘You guys weren’t pressured, right? Right?’” says W. Patrick Lang, a former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Middle East section. In fact, analysts were pressured, and heavily so, according to Richard Kerr. A 32-year CIA veteran, Kerr led an internal investigation of the agency’s failure to correctly analyze Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities, preparing a series of four reports that have not been released publicly. Kerr joined the CIA in 1960, serving in a series of senior analytic posts, including director of East Asian analysis, the unit that prepared the president’s daily intelligence brief, and finally as chief of the Directorate of Intelligence. For several months in 1991, Kerr was the acting CIA director; he retired in 1992. A highly respected analyst, Kerr received four Distinguished Intelligence Medals; in 1992, President George Bush Senior gave him the Citizen’s Medal for his work during Operation Desert Storm. Two years ago, Kerr was summoned out of retirement to lead a four-member task force to conduct the investigation of the weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco. His team, which included a former Near East Division chief, a former CIA deputy inspector general, and a former CIA chief Soviet analyst, spent months sorting through everything that the CIA produced on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction prior to the invasion, as well as interviewing virtually everyone at the agency who had anything to do with producing the faulty intelligence estimates. The Kerr team’s first report was an overview of what the CIA said about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war compared with what Kerr calls the postwar “ground truth.” The second looked specifically at a classified version of the important October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which the administration used to build its case for war. The third looked at the overall intelligence process, and the fourth was a think piece that considered how to reorganize the management of intelligence analysis “if you could start all over again.” Kerr’s four reports, with a fifth now under way, were viewed as the definitive works of self-criticism inside the agency and were shared with the oversight committees in Congress, outside commissions, and the office of the secretary of defense. Unlike the outside reports that looked at the same issues, however, Kerr’s concluded that CIA analysts felt squeezed -- and hard -- by the administration. “Everybody felt pressure,” Kerr told me. “A lot of analysts believed that they were being pressured to come to certain conclusions … . I talked to a lot of people who said, ‘There was a lot of repetitive questioning. We were being asked to justify what we were saying again and again.’ There were certainly people who felt they were being pushed beyond the evidence they had.” In particular, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other administration officials hammered at the CIA to go back time and time again to look at intelligence that had already been sifted and resifted. “It was a continuing drumbeat: ‘How do you know this? How do you know that? What about this or that report in the newspaper?’” says Kerr. Many of those questions, which began to cascade onto the CIA in 2001, were generated by the Office of Special Plans and by discredited fabricators such as Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and a secret source code-named “Curveball.” As a result, says Kerr, the CIA reached back to old data, relied on several sources of questionable veracity, and made assumptions about current data that were unwarranted. In particular, intelligence on Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons program, much of which was based on data collected in the 1980s, early ’90s, and more spottily until the end of the United Nations inspection regime in 1998, was parsed -- and, some would argue, cherry-picked -- in order to reinforce the administration’s case. On and off the record, other former CIA officials say that despite the pressure, dissent against the White House was rife within the agency. The strongest opposition centered in the CIA’s Near East Division, few of whose officials supported the idea of war with Iraq. They clashed often with WINPAC, the CIA division focused on weapons proliferation and the part of the agency most responsible for the heavily skewed conclusions about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. “The Near East Division people didn’t buy into what the Bush administration wanted to do in regard to Iraq, but much of WINPAC did,” says Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who left the agency in 1989 and then served four years as deputy director of the State Department’s office of counterterrorism. “Bush, and the White House, favored WINPAC over [the Near East Division]. There were people in the agency who tried to speak out or disagree … who got fired, got transferred, got outed, or criticized. Others decided to play ball.” Michael Scheuer -- who gained fame in 2004 as Anonymous, the author of Imperial Hubris, and who exited the CIA as Goss came in -- headed the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit and saw the confrontation up close. “I know a lot of people in the Iraq shop who were dissenting,” he says. “There were people who were disciplined or taken off accounts.” Opposition flared, particularly when the controversial 2002 National Intelligence Estimate was being cooked. “There was a great deal of dissent about that [estimate],” says Scheuer. “No one thought it was conclusive. One gentleman that I talked to, a senior Iraq analyst, regrets to this day that he did not go public.” According to another former CIA official, as the war loomed, the CIA’s Iraq task force ballooned in size, from fewer than 10 analysts to 500. But some of the CIA’s best and brightest on Iraq asked to be given other assignments rather than play ball with an administration already set on war. “A lot of people from the Iraq shop asked to be transferred away from Iraq,” the former officer said. “You had all these people being transferred in, and the people who didn’t like the direction it was going transferred out.” * * * Despite the vise-like squeeze on the CIA by Cheney and the Defense Department, the agency still got a lot on Iraq right. Not once in the period up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 did the U.S. intelligence community determine that Hussein posed a threat to the United States. The CIA concluded convincingly that there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and that Hussein had no connection to bin Laden’s attacks. “We, at CIA, were convinced within days -- within hours, by midday on September 11 -- that we had evidence that it was al-Qaeda and had no reason to suspect that Iraq was involved,” says a former high-level official. “That was our position, and we held to it firmly.” According to Scheuer, after the CIA received repeated inquiries about Iraq–al-Qaeda links from Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s office, the agency reviewed more than 70,000 documents and pieces of data, concluding that there was no tie between Hussein and al-Qaeda. The CIA also correctly concluded that Iraq was not even close to developing nuclear weapons. And, long before the war, the CIA told the White House that if the United States invaded Iraq and carried out a prolonged occupation, it would spark an insurgency like the one now tearing Iraq apart. “We did predict this in papers that we wrote,” says a former CIA official. Paul Pillar was one of many inside the CIA who accurately foresaw the insurgency, according to Scheuer. A longtime CIA officer who served in battle-scarred venues such as Sri Lanka, Algeria, and Kashmir until becoming the national intelligence officer for the Middle East, Pillar “knows insurgencies inside out,” says Scheuer admiringly. “It’s no surprise that Pillar would understand that there would be an insurgency in Iraq.” By 2004, the CIA had issued a steady stream of finished intelligence products that, one after another, undermined the premises of the Bush administration’s basic assertions about the occupation. The team that put these together included McLaughlin, the bloodied Near East Division analysts, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Not only did the CIA’s work shoot holes in White House policy; several of its conclusions were leaked, finding their way on to the front pages of the major newspapers. More than anything else, it was these leaks that enraged Bush and Cheney and caused them to turn to Porter Goss as their enforcer. The fact that the agency was leaking isn’t denied by some. “Of course they were leaking,” says Pat Lang. “They told me about it at the time. They thought it was funny. They’d say things like, ‘This last thing that came out, surely people will pay attention to that. They won’t re-elect this man.’” The dissent within the agency, and the anger about being manipulated, were palpable by 2004. Equally palpable were the complaints about the agency emanating from the neoconservatives and other war supporters. In The New York Times, David Brooks was bloodthirsty. “If we lived in a primitive age,” he wrote, “the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes.” And Robert Novak, the principal conduit for the White House leak campaign against Plame and Wilson, concocted an indictment against Pillar for supposedly having leaked a CIA report that contradicted the most cherished assumptions of the administration about Iraq. The incident with Pillar, wrote Novak, “leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the president of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war with each other.” It made for a situation that Bush, facing re-election, wanted desperately to change. Brooks was about to get his wish. * * * Porter Johnston Goss is a well-bred Connecticut Yankee whose genteel family sent him to The Hotchkiss School and then to Yale University (class of 1960). The CIA that Goss joined in 1962 was still the Old Boys’ club, an insiders’ preserve for Ivy League grads and others of the “best and the brightest.” Goss married Mariel Robinson, daughter of a rich Pittsburgh industrial family -- “she’s an heiress,” says a former CIA colleague -- and amassed even greater wealth. In 1999, Goss listed his net worth as more than $20 million. Over the years, Goss has refused to say much about his career as a clandestine-services officer in the CIA, but several colleagues say that it was an undistinguished one, mostly in headquarters. “He was a nothing as a [Directorate of Operations] guy,” says one. “He served mostly a few [temporary duty] postings in Europe.” Goss apparently also served for a time in Mexico and the Caribbean, and likes to say things like, “I had some very interesting moments in the Florida Straits.” In any case, by 1971, stricken with a life-threatening staph infection, Goss quit the agency and moved to sunny Florida. For a time, he co-owned a chintzy newspaper, the Island Reporter, which he later sold for what he called an “obscene” amount. He drifted into local politics, and in 1988 was elected to Congress from Florida’s 14th District. Ensconced in the 14th, the state’s most Republican district, Goss frequently ran unopposed or won re-election by huge margins, with virtually all of his campaign contributions coming from business. Not surprisingly, he adopted the right-wing agenda. It wasn’t long before Goss was trading on his hush-hush CIA background. His first official brush with intelligence was to serve as a Republican member of the special task force assembled to investigate the 1980 “October Surprise” allegations claiming that Bush Senior and William Casey, the late CIA director, had struck a secret deal with Iran’s ayatollahs in advance of the November 1980 election to prevent the release of U.S. hostages held in Tehran. It was no surprise that Goss, acting to protect then–Vice President Bush, found no truth to the story. In 1994 he served on one of those what’s-wrong-with-intelligence commissions that turn up every few years. By 1996, Goss, having established an alliance with Newt Gingrich, got himself named to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). Gingrich’s support for Goss was critical to the Florida congressman’s success, because Gingrich -- far more than any other speaker of the House in recent times -- maintained an extraordinary interest in intelligence issues and, unusually, served as an ex-officio member of the HPSCI. Goss cemented his tie to Gingrich by chairing the subcommittee tasked with investigating ethics charges against the speaker. Within days of being mostly cleared, Gingrich selected Goss as chairman of the HPSCI, the post he would hold until being nominated to run the CIA in 2004. Another key bond was formed in this period: Gardiner Peckham, Gingrich’s right-hand man on intelligence issues, would eventually become a close friend of Patrick Murray, who off and on served as an HPSCI staffer under Goss. To many who worked with him on the Hill, Goss was seen as a prisoner of his staff -- above all, of Murray. During one confrontation over a controversial piece of legislation, when other members challenged Goss, he deferred to Murray. “Goss looked sad and apologetic, and he looked at us and said, ‘Pat runs the show,’” according to a source. “We all wondered, ‘What does Pat Murray have on Porter Goss?’” During his years as HPSCI chairman, Goss established himself as a friend of the CIA, preferring partnership to oversight. When Bush took over in 2001, it was Cheney who persuaded Goss not to retire from Congress, as he had pledged to do, and for a time Goss was viewed as a replacement for Tenet in the Bush administration. However, Tenet obsequiously cultivated the Bush family, going so far as to name the CIA’s Langley headquarters after George Bush Senior, and Tenet was asked to stay on. But Goss retained the support of Cheney. In May 2001, speaking about intelligence, Goss praised Cheney to The New Yorker. “You need to take risks,” he said. “We need leadership. Cheney is certainly the man who can provide it. He understands risk. He understands bold leadership. He understands purpose.” Meanwhile, Murray, according to former HPSCI staff, stayed even closer to Cheney’s White House office and the network of neoconservatives who’d taken up key posts in the Bush administration. “There was a sense that [Murray], even more than Porter, was close to the folks at the White House,” says a former HPSCI staffer. “And that [Murray] was making everything happen, with lots of meetings at the White House, with Cheney’s office, and House leadership.” And in 2004, with tempers flaring between the White House and the agency, Goss, despite his longtime advocacy for the CIA, turned on a dime and issued a report that blasted it for having lost its way. Seemingly overnight, Goss decided that the CIA was a “stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success.” The CIA, said Goss, is mismanaged, has a “political aversion to risk,” and “continues down the road leading over a proverbial cliff.” For many at the agency, it was a sign that Goss was auditioning for the job of intelligence reformer, but his newfound zeal for reform bemused CIA partisans. “He served on the HPSCI for eight years,” says Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. “What the fuck was he doing for the last seven years?” But if Goss lambasted the CIA, he never wavered in his fealty to the Bush-Cheney team. When David Kay, the CIA’s point man on searching for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, said that the weapons weren’t there, Goss told a packed news conference, “Those weapons are there.” He defended Bush-Cheney right down the line on Iraq policy, blocking efforts in the House or at the hpsci to investigate prewar intelligence about the weapons. He blocked an inquiry about Abu Ghraib, too. And when it became apparent that White House officials had leaked Plame’s name, Goss ridiculed the idea of investigating what was, according to nearly all intelligence officials, a significant breach of national security. “Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I’ll have an investigation,” sniffed Goss. His nomination didn’t exactly win plaudits, and four Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- including the ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller -- voted against it. But in the end, the Democrats rolled over, choosing not to make a fight on the eve of the elections. On September 24, he took over. * * * Within weeks of Goss’ arrival, it was clear that the agency had been plunged into turmoil. One after another, top CIA officials bolted: first McLaughlin; then Stephen Kappes and Michael Sulick, the top two officials in the Directorate of Operations; Jami Miscik, who headed the Directorate of Intelligence, and her deputy, Scott White; Buzzy Krongard, the CIA’s executive director; Mary Margaret Graham, a senior counterterrorism official; the heads of the European and East Asia divisions; and many more. Pillar, the Middle East national intelligence officer, took retirement. Many others, less prominent, also quit, were fired, or took jobs as consultants. Rockefeller, watching from the sidelines, said Goss “faces rumors of a partisan purge at the CIA.” Leading the purge were Murray, who followed Goss to Langley, and perhaps half a dozen other HPSCI staffers who joined them, including Merrell Moorhead and Jay Jakub. Nearly all of them had poor reputations at the HPSCI. California Democratic Representative Jane Harman, hardly a critic of the CIA, said Goss has assembled a “highly partisan, inexperienced staff,” noting that “[f]rankly, on both sides of the aisle in the committee, we were happy to see them go.” And the CIA, where they were referred to as the “Hitler youth,” was not exactly happy to see them arrive. Many of these departures made headlines, none more so than the confrontation between Murray and Mary Margaret Graham, who, according to a former colleague, was serving as the CIA’s chief of station in New York on 9-11. Murray treated Graham, a 27-year CIA veteran, so imperiously that the ensuring fracas led to the resignations of both Kappes and Sulick. According to several former CIA officers who served with Kappes and Sulick, both former Moscow chiefs of station who had only assumed the reins at the Directorate of Operations months earlier, the two men were among the most highly respected agency officers. “The real loss was Steve Kappes,” says Mike Scheuer. “He would have been one of the best [deputy directors of operations].” Says another clandestine-services officer with more than 25 years of experience: “Goss got rid of them like they were nothing. His attitude was, ‘You guys leaked stuff against the president. You’re disloyal, and you need to be punished.’” The purge was felt down the line, with various chiefs of station, division heads, and other top officials bailing out. No section was harder hit than the already rattled Near East Division. At least two consecutive Baghdad chiefs of station have quit or been fired, and division’s staff at headquarters has been nearly swept clean of its experienced officials. “All over the agency, the talk is about the steady stream of people leaving,” says one veteran CIA officer. “People are disillusioned, and there seems to be no relief from the sense that there is no fixing this.” In the Near East Division, especially in the section that focuses on Iraq, many are gone. “What you’ve got left is a bunch of kids,” this officer said. “You’ve got a bunch of newbies in there -- some very smart, but with no experience.” Another former CIA chief of station said: “There aren’t any Arabists left in the CIA. They’re gone. They weren’t with the program. It’s like Pol Pot, who killed anybody wearing glasses because they might be able to read.” Most troubling to agency watchers -- including Harman, who says that the CIA’s “free fall” is a “very, very bad omen in the middle of a war” -- is that the people exiting the CIA are those with decades of experience. “The intelligence process is based on experience,” says one grizzled CIA veteran. “It’s the 10,000 at-bat syndrome. It’s more an art than a science, and it is very difficult to teach. We’re talking about an agency that has no bench. When you take out the A-team, there’s no one.” Another retired chief of station, who maintains close ties inside the CIA, said that scores of top agency officials have scattered. Some have made deals with contractors, returning to the CIA sporting the green badge signifying that they are from the private sector, yet working alongside CIA officers doing the same job for half as much money. Others have taken jobs in the military-industrial complex. And still others are flocking to the new office of the director of national intelligence, led by Negroponte. “What’s left behind are what you’d call the less enlightened people,” he says. “Hot molecules escape; the cold ones are left behind.” Without a doubt, Goss’ team is the most highly partisan ever to run the CIA. The ex–HPSCI staffers were notorious for taking a Republican Party–oriented stance on many issues, especially Murray, who once tried to get classified information released so it could be used against the Democrats. Under Goss, the CIA public-affairs office has been nearly shut down, under the tight control of Jennifer Millerwise -- not an intelligence person, but a political operative who worked on the Bush-Cheney election campaigns and for Goss at the HPSCI. The partisan, pro-Bush nature of the current regime at the CIA was underlined when Goss issued a widely leaked memorandum telling agency employees to “support the administration and its policies in our work,” adding, “As agency employees we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.” The import of Goss’ memo to staff was not lost on agency veterans. “The meaning was that from now on, there is only one acceptable view, and that’s the neocon view,” said one. For many it was the final straw, convincing them that there was no hope of salvaging independent analysis. “At the [Directorate of Intelligence], they’re wondering, ‘What is our job now, now that our boss doesn’t seem to care about us anyway?’” says Gregory Treverton, who served on the National Intelligence Council under Bill Clinton. * * * On the seventh floor at Langley, Goss is reportedly isolated. His staff protects him from agency veterans. It is said that he doesn’t walk the halls or mix readily with the troops, doesn’t eat in the CIA cafeteria, and gets chilly stares from employees. Many of them are angry that Goss has quietly allowed Negroponte to usurp traditional CIA roles, such as briefing the president on daily intelligence. “He’s seen as a weak leader, not as an advocate,” says one recently retired Middle East CIA officer. “So the agency is losing its position of influence.” Having clashed early with the Directorate of Operations, Goss has alienated -- some say irreparably -- the heart of the CIA: its clandestine service. “Without the [Directorate of Operations], the CIA is the Brookings Institution with razor wire,” says one former agent. Another adds: “The [Directorate of Operations] won’t forgive Goss. With the [directorate], you are either an ‘us’ or a ‘them.’ With the start Goss made, he was firmly placed in the ‘them’ category.” Chas W. Freeman is a former assistant secretary of defense and U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. “What Goss is doing is an effort that originated outside the agency to impose a vision on it that its analysts and operatives reject as simply not based on reality,” he says. “It’s totalitarian. We are going to end up with an agency that is more right-wing, more conformist, and less prone to produce people with original views and dissenters.” Demoralized, weakened, and politicized, the CIA may yet recover. The agency, particularly the Directorate of Operations, has weathered storms before and knows how to hunker down. Goss will probably not remain at the helm for long. And despite him, the agency continues to produce reports on the U.S. predicament in Iraq that reflect a measure of reality-based pessimism. But there is anger, bitterness, and an unhealthy caution that ill serves America’s need for an agency that, as one former CIA officer says, “speaks truth to power.” Enormous damage has been done, and the rebuilding of the CIA will take many years after Goss departs. Robert Dreyfuss is a Prospect senior correspondent. He covers national security for Rolling Stone and writes frequently for The Nation and Mother Jones. His book, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, was published this fall by Henry Holt/Metropolitan. -------- us Recruits join armed forces seeking war By W. Thomas Smith Jr. SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published November 7, 2005 http://www.washtimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20051107-122440-6263r PARRIS ISLAND, S.C. -- Marine Corps recruit Steven Levine, 17, wants to be a sniper or a member of a "Force Recon" team, one of the Corps' special operations units. "If I'm going to war, I want to be with the best," says Mr. Levine, a Baltimore native whose parents had to sign an age waiver for him to enlist in the Marines. Mr. Levine has to get through boot camp at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, S.C., and then attend infantry training school, but, he says, it's the "fast track" to war. Going to war, more than job opportunities and money for college, is the post-September 11 allure for joining the armed services, military officials say. And, in a trend that bewilders and dismays those opposed to the war in Iraq, enlistment numbers are up and recruiting goals are mostly being met or exceeded. "There is a sort of vendetta because of 9/11," says Staff Sgt. Jose Guerreiro, a senior drill instructor at Parris Island. "Some recruits have even had family members killed in Iraq. We tell them chances are they'll be going," the sergeant said. "We explain to them that not everybody's going to be kicking down doors up front, but they know combat is likely for all Marines." The military's numbers seem to back him up for the active-duty services, although the Reserves and National Guard units are having more trouble attracting new recruits. For four out of the past five years, the Army has exceeded its goal for active-duty recruits, while regularly increasing the number desired. Fiscal 2005, which ended Sept. 30, was the first year it fell short, getting 92 percent of its 80,000 goal. The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps have all met or exceeded their annual recruiting goals for every year since September 11, although some monthly and quarterly shortfalls have occurred. For 2005, for example, the Air Force exceeded its active recruiting goal of 18,900 new airmen by 322; the Navy topped its goal of 37,635 recruits by 68; and the Marines exceeded their 32,917 target by 44. J.E. McNeil, executive director of the District-based Center on Conscience & War, an organization established to defend the rights of conscientious objectors, calls the figures "trumpetry" from the military. "I haven't looked at the numbers this time around, but I do know that [earlier this year] when the Army did not make its goal, they lowered goal numbers in order to make goal," she said. Airman 1st Class Brandon Consola, 20, from Albuquerque, N.M., enlisted in the Air Force in January after his scholarship program was discontinued at the University of New Mexico. Airman Consola's chances of front-line combat are less than those of the Army or Marines, but his military training instructors have prepared him for the possibility of action in a war with blurred combat lines. "During basic, we were often briefed on anti-terrorism," he says. "We also were given warlike scenarios to perform in the field." Ensign Ben Norkin, a Navy ordnance officer serving aboard the frigate USS McClusky, was already enrolled in Navy ROTC at the University of Wisconsin on the morning of September 11. The attacks did not deter him from service, but rather made him more personally committed. Today, he and his shipmates train for a war they joined to fight. "We train on the threats that are more in line with a war against a small terrorist group rather than an entire nation," he says. "Senior officers on my ship can still recite the capabilities of Russian ships and aircraft, but training is not like that right now. Today, we train to defend against a swarm of speedboats, or low, slow-flying aircraft." For Marine recruits, chances of seeing combat are high, and that's why they join. "I want to see action," says Christian Parker Dillard, 18, during a rare break in training at Parris Island. A former high school soccer player from Auburn, Ala., Mr. Dillard says he made the decision to join the military as he watched the September 11 attacks from his classroom TV. "I had to do something," he says, before engaging in a bit of interservice rivalry. "I'm above average and didn't want to join the Army and be like everyone else." -------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE -------- courts / tribunals Supreme Court steps into dispute over military trials 11/7/2005 12:27 PM (AP) http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-11-07-scotus-tribunals_x.htm WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider a challenge to the Bush administration's military tribunals for foreign terror suspects, a major test of the government's wartime powers. Justices will decide whether Osama bin Laden's former driver can be tried for war crimes before military officers in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Chief Justice John Roberts, as an appeals court judge, joined a summer ruling against Salim Ahmed Hamdan. He did not participate in Monday's action, which put him in the difficult situation of sitting in judgment of one of his own rulings. The court's intervention piles more woes on the Bush administration, which has already suffered one set of losses at the Supreme Court and has been battered by international criticism of its detention policies. "I think it's a black eye for the Bush administration. This opens a Pandora's box," said Michael Greenberger, a Justice Department attorney in the Clinton administration and law professor at the University of Maryland. In 2004 justices took up the first round of cases stemming from the government's war on terrorism. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who is retiring, wrote in one case that "a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens." Arguments in the Hamdan case will be scheduled next spring, in time for O'Connor's successor to take part. Bush has named Samuel Alito, an appeals court judge, to replace her. In his lower court decisions Alito has been deferential to government. The announcement of the court's move came shortly after President Bush, asked about reports of secret U.S. prisons in Eastern Europe for terrorism suspects, declared anew that his administration does not torture suspects. "There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again," Bush said during a joint news conference in Panama City with President Martin Torrijos. "So you bet we will aggressively pursue them but we will do so under the law." Hamdan's case brought a new issue to the court — the rights of foreigners who have been charged and face a military trial in a type of proceeding resurrected from World War II. Trials of Hamdan and three other low-level suspects were interrupted last year when a judge in Washington said the proper process had not been followed. The men are among about 500 foreigners, many swept up in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, who have been held at the U.S. military prison in Cuba. The government had planned to proceed with a military trial for another foreigner, Australian David M. Hicks, with a pretrial hearing later this month, but that will likely be stalled now. Guantanamo Bay has become a flash point for criticism of America overseas and by civil libertarians. Initially, the Bush administration refused to let the men see attorneys or challenge their imprisonment. The high court in 2004 said U.S. courts were open to filings from the men, who had been designated enemy combatants. Retired military leaders, foreign legislators, historians and other groups had pressed the Supreme Court to review the case of Hamdan, who like many Guantanamo inmates began a hunger strike over the summer. A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, including Roberts, ruled against Hamdan, finding that the 1949 Geneva Convention governing prisoners of war does not apply to al-Qaeda and its members. The ruling was handed down shortly before Roberts was named to the Supreme Court. Ethics experts have disagreed over whether Roberts should have recused himself from that case, because he was being interviewed for the Supreme Court while the matter was pending. The administration argued that it was unnecessary for the court to hear Hamdan's case because the Pentagon had relaxed the rules for tribunals, enabling classified information to be shared with defendants "to the extent consistent with national security, law enforcement interests and applicable law." The gov