NucNews - December 16, 2005 -------- NUCLEAR -------- accidents and safety Chechen factory on brink of radioactive 'catastrophe' By Sam Knight and agencies December 16, 2005 UK Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1936347,00.html Loosely guarded radioactive materials in a chemical factory in Grozny, the bombed out capital of Chechnya, are threatening to cause a "catastrophic radioactivity situation" according to Chechen officials. Radiation in the factory, which is owned by a state-run Chechen energy company, exceeds safety levels by 58,000 times, according to the Chechen prosecutor's office, which has opened a criminal investigation into conditions at the plant. The levels of radiation equate to around half those experienced at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the immediate aftermath of the 1986 disaster, Rossiya state television reported. "It’s a threat to the population because the leadership of the plant is taking no steps whatsoever to remove the radioactive material or isolate access to the plant," said Valery Kuznetsov, the Chechen prosecutor. Mr Kuznetsov said the danger was posed by between 27 and 29 uncontrolled radioactive elements that are stored at the Grozny Chemical Factory. Some of the elements are believed to contain cobalt-60 isotopes. The factory, which is owned by the state-owned Chechenneftekhimprom, was damaged during the 1999 bombardment of Grozny by the Russian army, according to Russian television, and has been left largely unsecured. Radioactive materials enjoyed a broad range of industrial and agricultural uses in the former Soviet Union. Caesium-137, cobalt-60 and iridium-192 elements were used in lighthouses, large-scale measuring instruments, medical devices, sterilising equipment and even for germinating seeds on farms. As their radioactivity faded, thousands of elements were discarded and stored haphazardly. Vladimir Slivyak of Ecodefense, an environmental group in Moscow, told the Associated Press it was likely that the elements in Grozny had been unsealed from their original devices and were now leaking. Mr Slivyak said the reported radiation levels were a serious threat to local residents. Exposure for more than a few minutes would cause serious health problems and even death. He added that poorly guarded radioactive material was a perfect ingredient for a "dirty bomb", a mixture of conventional explosives and radioactive matter. "The fact that we haven’t yet heard of terrorists making a dirty bomb means that either we soon will or that radioactive elements have already been sold abroad on the black market," he said. # In a separate incident, a splash of molten metal killed a worker and severely injured two others at a nuclear power plant 50 miles west of St Petersburg. The accident, which occurred at a smelter in the Leningrad nuclear plant did not affect the reactors, according to the Russian nuclear agency. ---- France Hid Deadly Chernobyl Details — Report Created: 16.12.2005 MosNews http://mosnews.com/news/2005/12/16/francechernobyl.shtml The French authorities deliberately suppressed information about the spread of radioactive fallout from the May 1986 Chernobyl disaster over France, according to details of an experts’ report leaked on Thursday. Two independent physicists say in the report that the state-run Central Service for Protection against Radioactive Rays (SCPRI) knew of high levels of contamination in Corsica and southeastern France but kept the details under wraps, the AFP reported. The study was commissioned by magistrate Marie-Odile Bertella-Geffroy, who since 2001 has been examining allegations that the atomic cloud from Chernobyl caused a surge in cases of thyroid cancer in parts of France. This week Bertella-Geffroy handed over the report — originally completed in March — to civil plaintiffs in the case, who passed details to AFP. “Now we have proof that there was a breakdown in the system. So now the judicial case will succeed — I can’t see how it can do otherwise,” said Chantal Hoir, president of the French Association of Victims of Thyroid Cancer. The report states that the SCPRI issued imprecise maps that concealed the high levels of fallout in certain areas, according to sources who saw the document. It also states that with full information health authorities could have taken targeted steps to reduce the exposure of vulnerable people such as children and pregnant mothers. It was the first time an independent study gave substance to long-standing accusations from anti-nuclear groups that the French government deliberately played down the risk posed by the nuclear cloud. “There was a veritable campaign of lies instigated by the state in order to protect the image of the French nuclear industry,” said the campaigning organization Sortir du Nucleaire (Get Out of Nuclear Power), welcoming details of the report. “As in other European countries, people should have been told not to eat fresh vegetables and milk products, which absorb most radioactivity, or to let their children play in sand-pits and so on,” it said. Earlier this year anti-nuclear campaigners demanded that SCPRI’s director at the time of the disaster, Pierre Pellerin, be placed under judicial investigation in the case. However scientific opinion remains deeply divided, with several renowned physicists sending an open letter to President Jacques Chirac in June commending Pellerin for not giving way to panic in his handling of the crisis. In April, France’s high court of appeal confirmed a conviction for libel against leading Green party deputy Noel Mamere, who wrongfully accused Pellerin of claiming that the Chernobyl nuclear cloud stopped at the French border. Doctors also question the supposed link between Chernobyl and the rise in thyroid cancer, a trend which began in the mid-1970s. ---- Blast near nuclear reactors in northwest Russia Fri Dec 16,12:13 PM ET (AFP) http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051216/sc_afp/russianuclearenergy_051216171332%3b_ylt=A9FJqZV7.qJD1M8AdADPOrgF%3b_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl SAINT PETERSBURG - One person was killed in an explosion near the Leningrad nuclear power plant in northwest Russia, but the blast posed no danger to the reactors, an atomic energy agency spokesman said. "An explosion occurred on Thursday at a company located far from the reactors and did not affect the power station's operation. No increase in radioactivity was noted," Russian Atomic Energy Agency (ROSATOM) spokesman Nikolai Shingarev told AFP. Vladimir Vorobiyev, the regional representative of Russia's emergency situations ministry, said the blast went off in a nearby metal smelting facility, but not actually within the limits of the power station, which is located in the town of Sosnovyi Bor near Saint Petersburg. Vorobiyev said three workers were burned, one of them later dying in hospital. The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency said it had been informed of the explosion on Friday by Russian authorities and assured there was no risk to the power station or loss of radioactive material. "The Situation and Crisis Centre of ROSATOM, Russian Federation, has told us that the explosion was at a smelter located in the industrial zone of the city of Sosnoviy Bor, Russian Federation, about one kilometer from the power reactors which were not affected," Marc Vidricaire, a spokesman for the UN nuclear watchdog, said. The Leningrad power station dates from 1973 and is equipped with the same type of Soviet-built reactor as that at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine which suffered a meltdown in 1986 in history's worst civilian nuclear disaster. ---- Blast at Russian Nuclear Plant Kills One By IRINA TITOVA 12/16/05 07:36 (AP) http://channels.netscape.com/news/story.jsp?flok=FF-APO-1103&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20051216%2F0737633730.htm&sc=1103 ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - An explosion at a Russian nuclear power plant complex killed one worker and badly hurt two others, but Russia's nuclear agency said Friday no reactors were affected. The Rosenergoatom agency said radiation levels remained normal as the reactor in that part of the Leningrad nuclear plant was undergoing repairs and was not in operation. But Thursday's blast threw a spotlight on what environmentalists called uncontrolled operations at Russian nuclear sites. The blast happened in a smelter at the plant in the closed nuclear town of Sosnovy Bor, 50 miles west of the northern city of St. Petersburg. The smelter is operated by Ekomet-S, a company reprocessing scrap metal. ``The enterprise ... functions illegally because there was no mandatory (state) environmental impact assessment on its construction,'' Dmitry Artamonov, head of the St. Petersburg branch of Greenpeace, told The Associated Press. He said Greenpeace had complained against Ekomet-S to the Sosnovy Bor prosecutors' office but it took no action. The nuclear plant has four units, or reactors, in all. Rosenergoatom said that the smelter was on the grounds of the plant's second unit, and plant spokesman Sergei Averyanov said it was about half a mile from the reactor. Oleg Bodrov, a physicist who heads the Green World ecological group in Sosnovy Bor, said that the reactor was only some 700 yards from the smelter, which is about 50 yards from a liquid radioactive waste pond. A 33-year-old worker died of his injuries Friday morning, and two others were injured, Yuri Lameko, chief doctor of the Sosnovy Bor hospital, told the AP. ``There were no violations of safety levels and operating conditions of the energy units of the Leningrad nuclear plant,'' Rosenergoatom said in a statement. The second unit had been shut down for planned major repairs in July, it said. The plant spokesman, Averyanov, said that the blast had caused molten metal to spurt out of the smelter. Usually Ekomet-S reprocesses scrap with low levels of radioactivity, but on Thursday the metal was clear of radiation, Averyanov said. He blamed the blast on violations of technical and production rules. Bodrov said Ekomet-S began operating two years ago and was in violation of the law since it had undergone no state environmental impact assessment. When the firm was founded, the only environmental monitoring laboratory in the town of 65,000 was shut down for lack of funding, he said. ``There is no independent environmental monitoring in the nuclear city of Sosnovy Bor,'' Bodrov said. He said this was the second accident to occur at Ekomet-S. The first happened in summer 2003, injuring some workers. In March 1992, an accident at the Sosnovy Bor plant caused radioactive gases and iodine to be leaked into the air, according to nuclear watchdog groups. One of the reactors at the 30-year-old plant is of the same type as the one at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that exploded in Soviet Ukraine in 1986 in the world's worst nuclear accident. The station is the main supplier of electricity to St. Petersburg, and there are plans to transport some of its power to Finland. Sosnovy Bor, a center of nuclear technology, was founded 25 years ago and has 60,000 people. In addition to the nuclear plant, the town is home to a regional radioactive waste reservoir, and an experimental laboratory and training center for nuclear submarines. Almost everyone in Sosnovy Bor, which means Pine Forest, is connected with nuclear technology, and most are not native to the region. In an unrelated development, Chechen prosecutors said they have opened a criminal investigation into the improper storage of radioactive waste by a state-owned company, Prosecutors said a ``catastrophic radioactivity situation'' had developed at the Grozny Chemical Factory in the breakaway province in southern Russia. Grozny is Chechnya's capital. Radiation levels at one storage center at the plant are 58,000 times higher than normal, the Russian Prosecutor General's office said Friday. ``It's a threat to the population because the leadership of the plant is taking no steps whatsoever to remove the radioactive material or isolate access to the plant,'' Chechen Prosecutor Valery Kuznetsov said. -------- asia Indonesia taps into Korean nuclear expertise (Asia Pulse/Antara) Dec 16, 2005 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/GL16Ae02.html JAKARTA - State-owned electricity company PLN will team up with the Korea Electric Power Corp and the Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co to carry out a feasibility study on building the country's first nuclear power plant. The nuclear power plant was expected to solve the country's problem of power supply shortages, PLN primary energy generation director Ali Herman Ibrahim said. Ali said a memorandum of understanding had been signed with the two Korean companies to carry out the feasibility study, to be completed in a year. The nuclear power plant will use OPR-1000 class technology, which could generate up to 1,000 megawatts of electric energy, he said. The National Atomic Power Agency (Batan) had already carried out a feasibility study on the project, to be built at the foot of Mount Muria in Central Java. Earlier, PLN transmission and distribution director Herman Darnel Ibrahim said that nuclear power was not yet included in PLN's development program until 2015. However, the firm would be eager to have serious discussions if any investor was interested. -------- business Dutch businessman jailed for nuclear exports to Pakistan THE HAGUE (AFP) Dec 16, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051216151721.jutiaae4.html A Dutch court on Friday sentenced a Dutch businessman and friend of the father of Pakistan's nuclear program to 12 months in prison, eight of which were suspended, for shipping equipment used for uranium enrichment to Pakistan between 1999 and 2002. Henk Slebos, who befriended Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan while they were students at Delft in western Holland in the 1960s, was convicted of illegally exporting strategic goods by a court in Alkmaar. He was also ordered to personally pay a fine of 100,000 euros (xxx dollars) and two of his companies were fined for at total of 97,500 euros. The prosecution last month had asked that Slebos be sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined 100,000 euros. He has not denied the shipments of equipment for uranium enrichment, but he denied the exports were illegal, saying that was a matter of opinion, in a documantary aired on Dutch public television in early November. "The court blames the accused for breaking the rules meant to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction," the court said in press release. An accomplice of Slebos, Zoran Filipovic, was sentenced to 180 hours of community service and a 5,000 euro-fine for illegally exporting strategic goods. In 1983, Khan was convicted in absentia to four years in 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. In January 2004, Khan admitted passing on nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, and was pardoned by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. -------- china China starts construction of 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactor BEIJING (AFP) Dec 16, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051216032845.9wqylga5.html China has started construction of its first homegrown 1,000 megawatt nuclear power plant near the boomtown of Shenzhen in the southern province of Guangdong, state press said Friday. The Ling'ao II project will be comprised of two generating units, each with an installed capacity of 1,000 megawatts, with the first unit scheduled to start operation in December 2010, Xinhua news agency reported. The second unit will go online in August 2011, the report said, citing sources from the China Guangdong Nuclear Power Holding Co Ltd (CGNPC). On completion, the two units will generate 150 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year for the booming province which borders Hong Kong and has been driving the nation's robust export-driven economy. Ling'ao II is based on pressurized water reactor technology imported from France, but with improvements made by Chinese nuclear scientists, the report said. The new plant will be adjacent to the Daya Bay nuclear power plant and the Ling'ao I project which began commercial operation in 2003, with two 990-megawatt generating units. Reactors at both Daya Bay and Ling'ao are French made. China currently has nine nuclear generation units in operation, including four in Daya Bay and Ling Ao and five reactors at the Qinshan Nuclear Power Plant in east China's Zhejiang Province. Two other units, imported from Russia are under construction at the Tianwan Nuclear Power Plant in Jiangsu Province, east China. China gets just 2.3 percent of its energy from nuclear power plants and is hoping to increase that to 4.0 percent by 2020, which will make it the world's fastest developer of atomic energy. International tenders for four more nuclear reactors, two each to be installed at plants in Sanmen in the eastern province of Zhejiang and at Yangjiang in Guangdong province are being reviewed by officials. France's Areva and Westinghouse of the United States are the front runners in the bids expected to be worth between 6.0 and 7.0 billion dollars, but officials have said they needed better pricing and more technical details before a decision could be made. "These companies haven't given us satisfactory proposals on many key technical details, such as engineering and plant security," Chen Hua, director of the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), said. "It is unlikely that the talks will be finalized by the end of the year." Selection had been expected by this year as China embarks on an ambitious nuclear energy plan that calls for some 15 new 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactors to be built by 2020. "It now seems improbable that construction (of the plants) will start at the end of 2007 as we originally planned," Chen said. ---- Areva says favourite to win 20 bln usd nuclear reactor order in China 12.16.2005, 03:03 AM (AFX) http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/afx/2005/12/16/afx2396817.html PARIS - French nuclear group Areva is the favourite to win an order to build four EPR European pressurised water reactors and eight traditional nuclear reactors in China in a project worth 20 bln usd, La Tribune daily reported, citing Arnaud de Bouraye, head of Areva's business in China. 'The intensive discussions we are conducting have practically reached ripeness,' de Bouraye told the business daily. Areva is competing in China with Westinghouse of the US for an order to build four third-generation nuclear reactors worth a total of 8 bln usd. 'We are not worried about the price,' the Areva executive said, adding that the recent visit to France of Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, gave a new impulse go the existing goodwill. The agreement would cover a 'global nuclear cooperation' from the supply of uranium to the treatment of waste. Areva is also 'favourite' to build eight second-generation nuclear reactors for 12 bln usd, La Tribune said. equitynext@afxnews.com -------- depleted uranium The Night Before Christmas in Iraq 2005 By John Hall 12/16/2005 8:44:08 PM Molokai Island Times http://www.molokaitimes.com/articles/5121620448.asp 'Twas the night before Christmas and here in Iraq, Little sister had shrapnel removed from her back. The napalm had given young Jamal such a scare, That he climbed up the chimney with soiled underwear. While mom in her birka and I with prosthesis, Dragged our war-torn old bodies through Jamal's scattered feces. The children were nestled in a corner of the basement, While the baby played with severed limbs and shell casements. When out in the dirt there arose such a ruckus, Mama cried with despair: "Allah, don't let them **** us!" The scattered deposits of depleted uranium, Burned my retinas and scorched the remains of my cranium. When what to my wondering eyes came to view?, But Airforce One, filled with death and a crew. With a little old pilot who strutted his tush, I knew that it could be nobody but Bush. Then up to the housetop his coursers they came, And he whistled and shouted and called them by name. On Rumsfeld, on Rove, on Delay and Libby, Now Wolfowitz, Cheney, Gonzalez and Rice! To the top of the mosque, past the broken down wall; Now dash away, dash away, dash away all! As empty words that before the Mideast Holocaust fly; In a well-armed Stealth Bomber mount to the sky. And then on the roof came the stomping of heels; And exploding grenades of eight Navy Seals. As I drew in my head and was hobbling away; Down the chimney came George, with Jamal in his way. He was dressed in Armani from his smirk to his swagger; On a mission from God, with a sharp bloody dagger. He spoke not a word, but went straight to his mayhem; And, with white phosphorus bombs, gave us illumination. He arrested our grandma and winked at Karl Rove,; As he smart-bombed our house, up the chimney he rose. He hopped in the cockpit and said, "Let's get movin'; Mission's Accomplished!...Gawd, I'm so groovin' ". But I heard him exclaim 'ere he flew out of sight: "This sure beats snortin' coke, or the buzz from Bud Light!" Molokai Island Times PO Box 482123 Kaunakakai, Hawaii 96748 808.553.4443 -------- iran Growing Concern Over Iran's Nuclear Ambitions By Mil Arcega Washington, DC 16 December 2005 VOA News http://www.voanews.com/english/2005-12-16-voa34.cfm Iran's president renewed attacks against Israel this week, dismissing the Holocaust as a "myth". The latest anti-Semitic rhetoric brought quick condemnation from the international community. As VOA's Mil Arcega reports, it also raised new concerns about Tehran's drive for nuclear self-sufficiency. In a speech on state television, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suggested the murders of an estimated six million Jews between 1933 and 1945, never happened. The remarks, one week before scheduled talks on Iran's nuclear program, outraged many in the international community. Jose Manuel Barroso, who is head of the European Commission says the comments are shocking. "It's really shocking that a head of state that has a seat in the United Nations can say such a thing, and it only calls our attention to the real danger of that regime to have an atomic, a nuclear bomb." In October, Iran's president called for Israel to be "wiped off the map", and last week, described the Jewish state as a "tumor" that must be removed. Dr. Daniel Goure, a national security expert at the Lexington Institute think tank in Washington, D.C. says one such comment might be excused as excessive zeal or political inexperience, but Mr. Ahmadinejad is a larger, more calculating, threat. “What you have here is the worst possible situation, which is a regime headed by somebody who clearly has an irrational side, and a regime that is pursuing nuclear weapons. And it is in the intersection of those two issues that you could see a threat, not just to Israel, not even just to the region, but to the whole world." Although Iran insists its nuclear program is strictly for civilian use, the United States and others believe the real intention is to produce nuclear weapons. Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., says the nuclear program is in progress. "There's no question there's a nuclear weapons program underway, the issue basically is how committed are the Iranians, how large is the program, how easy is it to conceal things we don't know." Britain, France and Germany will meet with Iranian officials on December 21st to restart talks aimed at ending Tehran's nuclear drive, but Mr. Ahmadinejad says Iran is not prepared to compromise on its nuclear program. Dr. Goure warns that the world needs to find some way to address Iran's nuclear ambitions quickly or else. "We do not have much time. If it's not measured in a few months, it's measured in only a few years and if the international community does not act now, this is going to be as consequential as the League of Nations not acting against Italy in the 1930s or against Germany in the late 30's." The question is what can be done. Some analysts say the international community must put pressure on Russia and China, two Security Council members which have endorsed Tehran's nuclear program, meaning the Council might not be able to take punitive action against Tehran. There's been speculation that Israel, which has expressed its concerns about Mr. Ahmadinejad and Iran's nuclear program, might try pre-emptive military action similar to its destruction of Iraq's nuclear reactor in the 1980s. For now, there are calls for a diplomatic resolution through the talks with the European nations, and general denunciations of Iran and its president, such as from State Department spokesman Sean McCormack who remarked, "One can only explain it by saying that these statements and these actions reflect the true intentions and the true face of this government." -------- israel Israelis oppose attack on Iran nuclear facilities: poll JERUSALEM (AFP) Dec 16, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051216152742.7ohc66cn.html Most Israelis want their government to use diplomacy rather than military power with regard to the potential threat posed by Iran's nuclear ambitions, a poll suggested Friday. Asked what line of conduct Israel should adopt regarding Iran's nuclear plant, 58 percent of those surveyed said diplomatic paths, while 36 percent thought it necessary to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. The poll was published in the daily Yediot Aharanot newspaper, and the question did not refer to a specific nuclear facility. The survey was carried out by the Dahaf Institute and queried 510 people it said were representative of the Israeli population. Its margin of error was 4.5 percentage points. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sparked international outcry this month when he called the Holocaust "a myth" and suggested Israel establish its Jewish state in Europe or the United States. The ultraconservative president also drew worldwide condemnation in October when he called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." Israeli chief of staff General Dan Halutz warned on Tuesday that by March Iran will have acquired all the necessary technological know-how to build a nuclear bomb. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said that Israel would never allow Iran to come into possession of nuclear weapons but has insisted that diplomacy was the best way to confront Tehran. In 1981, Israel launched a strike against Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor, which the Jewish state suspected of developing atomic weapons. Following the downfall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in 2003, Israel has come to view Iran as its number one enemy. Iran is accused by Israel and the United States of using its civilian nucler program to cover a weapons program, something Tehran strongly denies. Iran agreed to suspend sensitive uranium enrichment activities in November 2004 under an agreement with Britain, France and Germany, but resumed its fuel-cycle work last August after rejecting a new offer from the European powers. Israel itself is believed to be the only nuclear power in the Middle East, although it has never admitted to having nuclear weapons. -------- korea North Korea agrees to implement nuclear accord JEJU, South Korea (AFP) Dec 16, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051216075319.xktwbrmj.html North Korea pledged Friday to implement an agreement reached in September on ending its nuclear weapons drive but made no promise to return to six-nation disarmament talks. The Stalinist country said it would cooperate actively to end the nuclear standoff peacefully, according to a joint statement at the end of three days of high-level talks between the two Koreas. "Sharing the view that the (September) agreement must be implemented as soon as possible for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, South and North Korea agreed to cooperate actively for the peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue," it said. But North Korea stubbornly refused to respond to repeated requests from South Korea to agree to the early resumption of disarmament talks grouping the two Koreas, China, the US, Japan and Russia. North Korea had insisted it would talk only with the United States about the nuclear standoff. The North said Sunday that stalled six-party talks last held in November would be suspended indefinitely because Washington had imposed economic sanctions on it over allegations of illicit financial dealings, including counterfeiting and money laundering. Back in September at the fourth round of six-party talks North Korea agreed in principle to dismantle its nuclear weapons program in exchange for diplomatic and economic benefits and security guarantees. But at the last session in November it said US sanctions were blocking any progress. The US Treasury Department in September told US financial institutions to stop dealing with a Macau bank, Banco Delta Asia, which it accused of being a willing front for North Korean counterfeiting. A month later the US blacklisted eight North Korean companies allegedly involved in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Earlier, North Korean delegates staged a silent protest to press a demand that South Koreans visiting North Korea be allowed to pay homage to the Stalinist regime. The 20-minute protest took place in the lobby of a hotel on the southern island of Jeju where the two Koreas have held three days of cabinet-level talks led by Unification Minister Chung Dong-Young, Seoul's chief delegate, and his North Korean counterpart Kwon Ho-Ung. While Kwon, a cabinet councillor, was locked in a tense one-on-one meeting with Chung, other North Korean delegates carrying their bags gathered in the lobby, followed by bewildered South Korean officials. South Koreans visiting North Korea must obtain permission in advance from their own government to visit politically sensitive sites such as statues and memorials to the state founder Kim Il-Sung. "The most contentious issue has been North Korea's demand" that South Korean citizens be allowed to pay homage to the communist country, a South Korean official said. The final statement vaguely reflected North Korea's demand by saying that the two sides should "respect and recognize each other's political system and ideology." The two sides, who fought a war from 1950-53, agreed to hold a new round of direct and video reunions of separated families early next year, as well as a new round of Red Cross meetings to discuss humanitarian issues such as prisoners of war. They agreed to hold high-level military talks at an early date next year. Though economic exchanges have greatly increased following an inter-Korean summit in 2000, North Korea has balked at holding more high-level military talks on easing tension after two initial rounds. The next round of cabinet-level talks will be held in March in Pyongyang. -------- missile defense Japan, US to share missile shield cost Friday 16 December 2005 Aljazeera http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/FB4F53D8-D619-432B-B680-1F28C587BE32.htm Japan will shoulder between a third and a half of the cost of building an estimated $3 billion joint missile defence shield with the United States, a top defence official has said. The project is expected to be spread over nine years beginning in fiscal 2006, according to news reports. Japan's share will total $1 billion to $1.2 billion, a Defence Agency spokeswoman said, quoting the agency's administrative deputy director, Takemasa Moriya. Tokyo and Washington are still negotiating exactly how much each country will cover, the spokeswoman said on condition of anonymity according to agency policy. It has been widely reported that the total cost of the joint missile defense program is estimated at $3 billion. US embassy officials could not immediately be reached for comment. Japan will also be responsible for building nose cones and rocket engines for the programme's missiles, the spokeswoman quoted Moriya as saying. Force realignment The system is designed to use defensive missiles to destroy attacking ones before they reach their targets. Tokyo and Washington agreed in October on the realignment of US forces in Japan, which included the deployment of a missile defense system. Since last year, the US navy has been patrolling the Sea of Japan, on the lookout for missiles from North Korea. The isolated, communist North shocked Tokyo and other nations when it test-fired a missile over northern Japan in 1998. Analysts say North Korea is developing long-range missiles capable of reaching Alaska, Hawaii or perhaps the US West Coast. Japan's cabinet is set to hold a meeting on 24 December to hammer out more details of the new missile-interception system, the Yomiuri newspaper reported on Thursday. Radar site Japanese media have reported that the project involves a larger, upgraded version of the Standard Missile-3 interceptor to be deployed on an Aegis warship. The Defence Agency said earlier this month that the US and Japanese militaries are looking at a site in northeastern Japan to base a radar system for the missile shield. The two militaries are considering stationing the radar system at a Japanese air force base in Aomori, 580km northeast of Tokyo. The high-resolution radar is supposed to have a superior ability to discriminate targets from decoys. -------- russia Radioactive stockpile in Chechen capital under investigation MOSCOW (AFP) Dec 16, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051216175252.cr5atiry.html Radioactive substances stored in a ruined state company in the Chechen capital Grozny are being investigated because they are a "threat for the population," a Chechen prosecutor said Friday. "They are a threat for the population because the administration has not taken any steps to isolate this radioactive material, or to clear or ban access to this garbage," Valery Kuznetsov told NTV television. NTV showed footage from the Radon depots which are owned by the state Chechenneftekhimport oil company and part of storage centers which have been approved by the Russian state agency monitoring and storing radioactive substances. "The investigation has established that there is a disastrous radioactive situation on the premises (of the destroyed combine)," the prosecutor's office said in a statement, dated Thursday, which was published on its Internet site. The statement specifically mentions cobalt 60, used in cancer therapy and in industry for detecting flaws in metal parts. "At the depot, radiation levels exceed authorized norms 58,000 times," it warned The Grozny company, like most in the rebel Russian republic in the Caucasus, was destroyed after heavy bombardments in the first Chechen war between 1994 and 1996 and at the start of the second war in 1999. People can still walk about it freely, said the prosecutor's office. "The Chechnya prosecutor's office has opened a criminal case for disrespect of stockpiling rules for radioactive substances," said the prosecutor's office. ---- Chechen factory on brink of radioactive 'catastrophe' By Sam Knight and agencies December 16, 2005 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1936347,00.html Loosely guarded radioactive materials in a chemical factory in Grozny, the bombed out capital of Chechnya, are threatening to cause a "catastrophic radioactivity situation" according to Chechen officials. Radiation in the factory, which is owned by a state-run Chechen energy company, exceeds safety levels by 58,000 times, according to the Chechen prosecutor's office, which has opened a criminal investigation into conditions at the plant. The levels of radiation equate to around half those experienced at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the immediate aftermath of the 1986 disaster, Rossiya state television reported. "It’s a threat to the population because the leadership of the plant is taking no steps whatsoever to remove the radioactive material or isolate access to the plant," said Valery Kuznetsov, the Chechen prosecutor. Mr Kuznetsov said the danger was posed by between 27 and 29 uncontrolled radioactive elements that are stored at the Grozny Chemical Factory. Some of the elements are believed to contain cobalt-60 isotopes. The factory, which is owned by the state-owned Chechenneftekhimprom, was damaged during the 1999 bombardment of Grozny by the Russian army, according to Russian television, and has been left largely unsecured. Radioactive materials enjoyed a broad range of industrial and agricultural uses in the former Soviet Union. Caesium-137, cobalt-60 and iridium-192 elements were used in lighthouses, large-scale measuring instruments, medical devices, sterilising equipment and even for germinating seeds on farms. As their radioactivity faded, thousands of elements were discarded and stored haphazardly. Vladimir Slivyak of Ecodefense, an environmental group in Moscow, told the Associated Press it was likely that the elements in Grozny had been unsealed from their original devices and were now leaking. Mr Slivyak said the reported radiation levels were a serious threat to local residents. Exposure for more than a few minutes would cause serious health problems and even death. He added that poorly guarded radioactive material was a perfect ingredient for a "dirty bomb", a mixture of conventional explosives and radioactive matter. "The fact that we haven’t yet heard of terrorists making a dirty bomb means that either we soon will or that radioactive elements have already been sold abroad on the black market," he said. # In a separate incident, a splash of molten metal killed a worker and severely injured two others at a nuclear power plant 50 miles west of St Petersburg. The accident, which occurred at a smelter in the Leningrad nuclear plant did not affect the reactors, according to the Russian nuclear agency. ---- Radiation alert at Chechen plant Russian forces launched heavy assaults on Grozny in 1999 Friday, 16 December 2005 (BBC) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4535452.stm Prosecutors in Chechnya have opened a criminal investigation after finding "catastrophic" levels of radioactivity at a chemical factory in the republic. Investigators say the radiation - in one place reportedly 58,000 times the usual level - poses a danger to people in the region's capital, Grozny. The case has also raised fears militants could take radioactive waste to use in a so-called "dirty bomb". The plant has reportedly not been secured since Russia bombed it in 1999. For years, rebels in Chechnya have been fighting a separatist struggle against Russian forces. They have been blamed for bomb attacks in Moscow and on Russian airliners, and the deadly sieges at a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, and in a Moscow theatre. 'No safety steps' Chechen prosecutors say radioactive materials have been improperly stored at the Grozny Chemical Factory, run by the Chechen Oil and Chemical Industry, and that a "catastrophic radioactivity situation" has developed. Fears over nuclear relics "It's a threat to the population because the leadership of the plant is taking no steps whatsoever to remove the radioactive material or isolate access to the plant," prosecutor Valery Kuznetsov said on Friday, according to the Associated Press. The Russian prosecutor general's office said between 27 and 29 radioactive elements had been identified at the plant, with the cobalt-60 isotope considered particularly dangerous. Radioactive materials have a variety of uses in the manufacturing industry. If not disposed of properly, they can pose a serious threat to people nearby. The radioactive cloud released by the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in 1986 may be responsible for 4,000 deaths, according to a recent study. The radioactivity at one storage centre in the Grozny plant is half that recorded at Chernobyl, Rossiya state television said. Vladimir Slivyak of the Ecodefense environmental group in Moscow urged the Russian government to remove and secure radioactive materials from the plant as a matter of urgency, warning of the dangers of them falling into the hands of "terrorists". The risk of nuclear material to unsuspecting people was illustrated in 2002, when three woodsmen, coming across cylinders giving off heat in the forest of Georgia, dragged them back to their camp. They grew seriously ill and received radiation burns from the containers, which were eventually recovered by a specialist UN team. -------- u.s. nuc facilities -------- california Regulators approve plan to extend life of SoCal nuclear plant Associated Press Posted on Fri, Dec. 16, 2005 http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/breaking_news/13421550.htm SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. - The California Public Utilities Commission approved a massive $680 million renovation that would extend the life of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station by at least 13 years. The commission on Thursday gave Southern California Edison the green light to replace four aging steam generators that power the two nuclear reactors at the seaside plant about 60 miles south of Los Angeles. Under the PUC's decision, Edison's ratepayers would be on the hook for up to $782 million, including possible cost overruns. Customers would pay about 50 cents extra on their monthly bills beginning in 2009. But the commission's decision was met with concern from both Edison and some representatives for electricity customers. Edison officials are concerned that the utility would have to pick up any costs in excess of $782 million. "We need to go through it and analyze it," said Edison President John Fielder. Ratepayers' groups, by contrast, wanted the reimbursement capped at $680 million, which already included a $141 million cushion for contingencies. "This is a dangerous sign of what is to come. Edison's history has been to underforecast and overspend," said Matthew Freedman, an attorney for the Utility Reform Network, a nonprofit consumer organization. Without the upgrades, the plant could have to close as soon as 2009 because the steam generators would no longer meet government standards. The PUC's decision also would allow Edison to apply for a license extension to operate the plant through 2042. Its current license expires in 2022. The plant in northern San Diego County provides 2,150 megawatts of power, enough for 2.2 million Southern California homes. -------- washington Study finds inconsistencies in vit plant safety procedure Published Friday, December 16th, 2005 By Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald staff writer http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/7290586p-7202273c.html Quality problems in the construction of Hanford's vitrification plant can be traced to weaknesses in the nuclear safety culture on the project, according to a Department of Energy analysis. Contractor Bechtel National has not had a consistent "culture that placed equal value on reliable production and operational safety," the new report said. Developing better training for workers who may not be familiar with nuclear quality issues and who are constantly changing as different skills are needed could produce the most improvement, the report said. It also said Bechtel needed to improve procedures, make sure workers follow them and foster "questioning attitudes" among workers. Over the past year, a series of work control or quality issues surfaced at the construction project, leading to the DOE assessment, said John Eschenberg, project manager for DOE's Hanford Office of River Protection. That included Bechtel's discovery last summer that part of the structural steel design for the project's analytical laboratory, one of the plant's four major facilities, did not meet standards of the Universal Building Code. Correcting the design was expected to put construction about three months behind schedule. To get to the root of quality problems, the report studied a dozen incidents from 2004 and 2005. They included installation of the wrong size piping, purchasing material from unqualified suppliers and welding done on a stainless steel tank using carbon steel weld material. Most of the errors were discovered and reported by Bechtel. "The government does not expect Bechtel to be perfect, but we do demand excellence," Eschenberg said. The quality and safety culture problems were not pervasive, but occurred in isolated pockets, said Jim Betts, Bechtel National project manager. At the peak of construction, nearly 4,000 workers were assigned to design and build the $5.8 billion plant for treating some of Hanford's worst radioactive waste from the production of plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program. The work force has constantly changed as different skills are needed as design and construction progresses, and most workers never have worked on a nuclear project and are not familiar with the rigorously controlled procedures and specifications. Bechtel National is making several changes to correct problems, including more classroom training, Betts said. Much of the training has been from required reading, the report said. The two engineers who made the errors in the structural steel design at the analytical laboratory had received little more training than being assigned reading on engineering procedures and none of the required indoctrination on codes and standards, the report said. "Required reading often results in poor retention," the report said. Bechtel National should have measured the effectiveness of its training, which likely would have revealed its weaknesses, the report said. In other cases, workers and, sometimes, managers were lax about procedures. "(Bechtel) management has recently emphasized to staff and workers the expectation that procedures will be followed," the report said. "However, this has usually taken the form of exhortations rather than instruction on how to do work correctly." Workers need to be better trained not only on what procedures must be followed on a nuclear project, but also to understand why the procedures are important. The incorrect weld materials were used on a tank when engineers assigned work to a supplier not qualified to work on the site. If the engineers had understood the reasoning behind the qualification procedure, the error likely would not have occurred, the report said. Some problems occurred when procedures did not cover unusual situations, so workers, including engineers, created solutions. While that initiative might be rewarded on other projects, it is not acceptable for nuclear quality work. Ad hoc processes are invisible to oversight, the report said. The report also recommended Bechtel National promote a "questioning attitude" and reward the discovery and reporting of errors. Too often managers did not promptly pursue potential quality issues when they were discovered, the report said. Bechtel National plans to start employee-led focus groups after the holidays to help identify improvements needed in training programs, to promote compliance with procedures and to foster a questioning attitude. In addition, Betts and Jim Henschel, the program director for Bechtel, will be meeting with nearly all employees in small groups in the next few weeks to discuss the issue and emphasize its importance. Bechtel also has brought in a team of experts to look at work control processes and is preparing to bring in a consulting organization to help plan better training. -------- MILITARY -------- arms Netherlands sells Chile 18 F-16s THE HAGUE (AFP) Dec 16, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051216163640.vrgf3fho.html Chile is to buy 18 F-16 warplanes from the Netherlands air force, which is getting rid of a number that are surplus to requirements, the Dutch defence ministry said Friday. The deal was agreed during a visit to The Hague by Chilean Defence Minister Jaime Ravinet de la Fuente on Thursday and Friday, the ministry said. The Chilean minister was also to take formal possession of two Dutch navy frigates that have been sold to Santiago. The Netherlands is disposing of 29 of its 137 US-designed F-16s. Three were recently sold to Jordan. -------- balkans Research shows Bosnian war deaths half earlier estimate BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Hercegovina (AFP) Dec 16, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051216165228.qxu8ds52.html Far fewer people were killed during Bosnia's 1992-1995 war than had been estimated so far, new research released Friday showed, after their numbers were believed to reach 200,000. "During the war in Bosnia 93,837 soldiers and civilians were killed," said Mirsad Tokaca, the head of the non-governmental Research and Documentation Center that compiled the report. Although there are no official figures, Bosnian and international officials have often used the figure of some 200,000 deaths in the inter-ethnic war. Sixty-nine percent of those killed were ethnic Muslims, 26 percent Serbs and five percent Croats, said Tokaca, adding that the Sarajevo-based organisation possesses more than 50,000 photographs of the victims. The research, financially backed by Norway's NGO Nansen Dialogue Centre, was conducted to "establish the truth and to prevent any manipulation" of the number of victims, he said. "Different estimates of people killed in Bosnia have been used and they ranged from denial of crimes by mentioning some 10,000 or 15,000 to exaggeration and mentioning of 300,000 even 350,000 victims," Tokaca said. The total was not a final figure and there could be minor changes to it, he said, calling on all families to report deaths of their loved ones. Tokaca, who criticised Bosnia's government for not supporting the project, said the total used by authorities was much higher because some names of those killed appeared in the official toll several times depending on the organisations. Asked to comment, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it "welcomes every initiative that can help to shed more light" on the number of victims. "This is not a final document but it can help official institutions which are working on it," Sanela Bajrambasic, the ICRC spokeswoman in Sarajevo, told -------- iraq General expects recommendations on Iraq force cuts in coming weeks WASHINGTON (AFP) Dec 16, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051216182451.cxthxxkw.html The commander of US forces in Iraq said Friday he will make recommendations in the coming weeks on whether US forces can be reduced below a baseline of 138,000 in the wake of Thursday's elections. General George Casey, speaking via video-link from Baghdad, said he expected US troops levels to drop from about 150,000 currently to 138,000 by the end of January. "And then, as I've said all along, we just had the elections, we're doing our assessments, and I'll make some recommendations in the comings weeks here about whether I think it's prudent to go below the baseline that you spoke of," he said. Political pressure has been growing here for deeper cuts in US force levels in Iraq amid ebbing public support for the war. Casey warned that the insurgency will not end quickly despite the heavy turnout and lower levels of violence in Thursday's elections. He said he expected insurgents to resume attacks to try to discredit the political process and show that they remain a force to be reckoned with. "But I think what you'll see is folks trying to use both means to achieve their ends and not renouncing violence totally but also working within the political process," he said. "So it'll be a much more complicated situation," he said. ---- General in Iraq expects troop levels to drop Posted 12/16/2005 11:37 PM (AP) http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-12-16-troop-levels_x.htm WASHINGTON — The top U.S. military commander in Iraq said Friday he would make recommendations in the next few weeks about troop withdrawals from Iraq, and he expects the force level will drop back to 138,000 by early February. That has been the usual number this year. Speaking from Iraq, Gen. George Casey told Pentagon reporters that by late next fall, the Iraqi military should be able to largely take the lead in the country's defense, with continued support from U.S. and coalition transition teams. "We just had the election, we're doing our assessments, and I'll make some recommendations in the coming weeks here about whether I think it's prudent to go below that baseline," said Casey, adding that the two extra battalions that were sent to Iraq for election security will be heading home in January. But he made it clear that U.S. forces will still be in the lead in portions of Iraq until sometime in 2007. Depending on the progress of the new Iraqi government ministries, he said it will take until then for Iraqi security to be able to completely take control of its forces across the country. As Iraqi security takes over, U.S. troops will be able to withdraw. And even with Iraqi forces in the lead, some levels of U.S. support would still be needed for support. There are about 153,000 U.S. troops in Iraq now. Casey also said the Iraqi police forces would not be able to take charge of internal security until late next year or early 2007. Coming on the heels of what U.S. officials have touted as a successful parliamentary election in Iraq Thursday, Casey tempered his comments saying he expects insurgents to escalate their attacks to demonstrate they are still a force to be reckoned with. "We should not expect the insurgency to just go away because of yesterday's great success," he said. "But we should expect it to be gradually weakened and reduced as more and more Iraqis adopt the political process and the root causes of the insurgency are addressed by the new Iraqi government and by the coalition." Meanwhile, President Bush said Thursday's parliamentary elections represented "a glorious day." "It was a remarkable day yesterday in the history of mankind and in the history of freedom," the president said in the Oval Office alongside Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Samir Sumaidaie. Sumaidaie pleaded with the United States to stick with Iraq until it is stable. "I believe that yesterday was a great day for Iraq. It was a great day for freedom," he said. "I think it was a turning point and the beginning of the end of terrorism in Iraq." Casey said conditions along Iraq's border with Syria have improved, leading to a decrease in suicide bombings. He said coalition operations have restored Iraqi control of the border and the Syrians appear to have taken steps to pick up foreign fighters coming through there. As a result, he said, suicide attacks declined from more than 60 last June, to less than one a day this month. In contrast, he said Iran appears to have meddled more than any other border country in the Iraqi election. "And I believe that they will continue to attempt to influence the formation of this government over the coming weeks to get a government that they believe is supportive of their interests," he said. "That is worrisome and it is a challenge for us." Battles between various factions of the insurgency, particularly in Sunni-dominated regions of the country, helped tamp down election-day violence, he said, as Sunni's fought back against al-Qaeda efforts to prevent them from going to the polls. In other comments, Casey said that an ongoing investigation into a Pentagon propaganda program that pays to plant favorable articles in the Iraqi media has not yet found anything that would prompt him to cancel or suspend the operation. The investigation will be completed in about a week, he said. Casey's discussion of troop levels came amid growing pressure from Congress and the American public to begin withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq. While the Pentagon has refused to publicly detail any withdrawal, defense officials have said the Pentagon has tentative plans to halt the scheduled deployment of two brigades to Iraq. Instead, smaller transition teams would be sent to support and train Iraqi forces, and much of one brigade, which is currently in Kuwait, would return to its home base in Germany. The officials did not want to be identified because the plans are not final. One of the officials said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is expected to announce next week that most of the 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, based at Fort Polk, La., will not go to Afghanistan as initially planned. A brigade normally numbers about 3,500. -------- latin america Police Kick Brazilian Indians Off Disputed Land REUTERS BRAZIL: December 16, 2005 http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/34061/story.htm SAO PAULO - Federal police moved to evict about 200 Indians from land in Brazil's Mato Grosso do Sul state on Thursday, carrying out a court order obtained by ranchers, police said. Indian rights groups say the expansion of agricultural business in the region has caused hunger and starvation in their groups as planting and hunting grounds shrink. The Guarani-Kaiowa tribes were spread across 3,212 acres 1,300 hectares of land near the Paraguay border that sits within a larger contested tract of 22,980 acres 9,300 hectares, said a spokesman for the Missionary Indian Council, a Catholic charity that works to protect Indian lands. There were no reports of violence during the raid by 150 federal and state police. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had signed a decree in March expanding the size of the tribes' reservation after a number of Indian children died of starvation in the region. But ranchers obtained a temporary ruling on Wednesday to ban Indian occupation of the area until all members of the Federal Supreme Court have a chance to rule on its validity, the court said in a statement. Mato Grosso do Sul is Brazil's biggest cattle producing state and the country has the world's largest commercial cattle herd. -------- spies Bush Lets Government Spy on Callers Without Warrants By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU, The New York Times (Dec. 16, 2005) http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20051215232809990023 WASHINGTON - Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials. Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications. The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches. "This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches." The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight. According to those officials and others, reservations about aspects of the program have also been expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters. Some of the questions about the agency's new powers led the administration to temporarily suspend the operation last year and impose more restrictions, the officials said. The Bush administration views the operation as necessary so that the agency can move quickly to monitor communications that may disclose threats to the United States, the officials said. Defenders of the program say it has been a critical tool in helping disrupt terrorist plots and prevent attacks inside the United States. Administration officials are confident that existing safeguards are sufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, the officials say. In some cases, they said, the Justice Department eventually seeks warrants if it wants to expand the eavesdropping to include communications confined within the United States. The officials said the administration had briefed Congressional leaders about the program and notified the judge in charge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret Washington court that deals with national security issues. The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted. Dealing With a New Threat While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it say the N.S.A. eavesdrops without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped, so the number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands since the program began, several officials said. Overseas, about 5,000 to 7,000 people suspected of terrorist ties are monitored at one time, according to those officials. Several officials said the eavesdropping program had helped uncover a plot by Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker and naturalized citizen who pleaded guilty in 2003 to supporting Al Qaeda by planning to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches. What appeared to be another Qaeda plot, involving fertilizer bomb attacks on British pubs and train stations, was exposed last year in part through the program, the officials said. But they said most people targeted for N.S.A. monitoring have never been charged with a crime, including an Iranian-American doctor in the South who came under suspicion because of what one official described as dubious ties to Osama bin Laden. The eavesdropping program grew out of concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks that the nation's intelligence agencies were not poised to deal effectively with the new threat of Al Qaeda and that they were handcuffed by legal and bureaucratic restrictions better suited to peacetime than war, according to officials. In response, President Bush significantly eased limits on American intelligence and law enforcement agencies and the military. But some of the administration's antiterrorism initiatives have provoked an outcry from members of Congress, watchdog groups, immigrants and others who argue that the measures erode protections for civil liberties and intrude on Americans' privacy. Opponents have challenged provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the focus of contentious debate on Capitol Hill this week, that expand domestic surveillance by giving the Federal Bureau of Investigation more power to collect information like library lending lists or Internet use. Military and F.B.I. officials have drawn criticism for monitoring what were largely peaceful antiwar protests. The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security were forced to retreat on plans to use public and private databases to hunt for possible terrorists. And last year, the Supreme Court rejected the administration's claim that those labeled "enemy combatants" were not entitled to judicial review of their open-ended detention. Mr. Bush's executive order allowing some warrantless eavesdropping on those inside the United States - including American citizens, permanent legal residents, tourists and other foreigners - is based on classified legal opinions that assert that the president has broad powers to order such searches, derived in part from the September 2001 Congressional resolution authorizing him to wage war on Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, according to the officials familiar with the N.S.A. operation. The National Security Agency, which is based at Fort Meade, Md., is the nation's largest and most secretive intelligence agency, so intent on remaining out of public view that it has long been nicknamed "No Such Agency." It breaks codes and maintains listening posts around the world to eavesdrop on foreign governments, diplomats and trade negotiators as well as drug lords and terrorists. But the agency ordinarily operates under tight restrictions on any spying on Americans, even if they are overseas, or disseminating information about them. What the agency calls a "special collection program" began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism. The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said. In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said. Under the agency's longstanding rules, the N.S.A. can target for interception phone calls or e-mail messages on foreign soil, even if the recipients of those communications are in the United States. Usually, though, the government can only target phones and e-mail messages in the United States by first obtaining a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which holds its closed sessions at the Justice Department. Traditionally, the F.B.I., not the N.S.A., seeks such warrants and conducts most domestic eavesdropping. Until the new program began, the N.S.A. typically limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions in Washington, New York and other cities, and obtained court orders to do so. Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their international communications, the officials said. The agency, for example, can target phone calls from someone in New York to someone in Afghanistan. Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that calls from that New Yorker to someone in California could not be monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court. A White House Briefing After the special program started, Congressional leaders from both political parties were brought to Vice President Dick Cheney's office in the White House. The leaders, who included the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House intelligence committees, learned of the N.S.A. operation from Mr. Cheney, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, who was then the agency's director and is now a full general and the principal deputy director of national intelligence, and George J. Tenet, then the director of the C.I.A., officials said. It is not clear how much the members of Congress were told about the presidential order and the eavesdropping program. Some of them declined to comment about the matter, while others did not return phone calls. Later briefings were held for members of Congress as they assumed leadership roles on the intelligence committees, officials familiar with the program said. After a 2003 briefing, Senator Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat who became vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that year, wrote a letter to Mr. Cheney expressing concerns about the program, officials knowledgeable about the letter said. It could not be determined if he received a reply. Mr. Rockefeller declined to comment. Aside from the Congressional leaders, only a small group of people, including several cabinet members and officials at the N.S.A., the C.I.A. and the Justice Department, know of the program. Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional, amounting to an improper search. One government official involved in the operation said he privately complained to a Congressional official about his doubts about the program's legality. But nothing came of his inquiry. "People just looked the other way because they didn't want to know what was going on," he said. A senior government official recalled that he was taken aback when he first learned of the operation. "My first reaction was, 'We're doing what?' " he said. While he said he eventually felt that adequate safeguards were put in place, he added that questions about the program's legitimacy were understandable. Some of those who object to the operation argue that is unnecessary. By getting warrants through the foreign intelligence court, the N.S.A. and F.B.I. could eavesdrop on people inside the United States who might be tied to terrorist groups without skirting longstanding rules, they say. The standard of proof required to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is generally considered lower than that required for a criminal warrant - intelligence officials only have to show probable cause that someone may be "an agent of a foreign power," which includes international terrorist groups - and the secret court has turned down only a small number of requests over the years. In 2004, according to the Justice Department, 1,754 warrants were approved. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can grant emergency approval for wiretaps within hours, officials say. Administration officials counter that they sometimes need to move more urgently, the officials said. Those involved in the program also said that the N.S.A.'s eavesdroppers might need to start monitoring large batches of numbers all at once, and that it would be impractical to seek permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court first, according to the officials. The N.S.A. domestic spying operation has stirred such controversy among some national security officials in part because of the agency's cautious culture and longstanding rules. Widespread abuses - including eavesdropping on Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists - by American intelligence agencies became public in the 1970's and led to passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which imposed strict limits on intelligence gathering on American soil. Among other things, the law required search warrants, approved by the secret F.I.S.A. court, for wiretaps in national security cases. The agency, deeply scarred by the scandals, adopted additional rules that all but ended domestic spying on its part. After the Sept. 11 attacks, though, the United States intelligence community was criticized for being too risk-averse. The National Security Agency was even cited by the independent 9/11 Commission for adhering to self-imposed rules that were stricter than those set by federal law. Concerns and Revisions Several senior government officials say that when the special operation began, there were few controls on it and little formal oversight outside the N.S.A. The agency can choose its eavesdropping targets and does not have to seek approval from Justice Department or other Bush administration officials. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, a former senior Bush administration official said. Before the 2004 election, the official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president. In mid-2004, concerns about the program expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it. For the first time, the Justice Department audited the N.S.A. program, several officials said. And to provide more guidance, the Justice Department and the agency expanded and refined a checklist to follow in deciding whether probable cause existed to start monitoring someone's communications, several officials said. A complaint from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, helped spur the suspension, officials said. The judge questioned whether information obtained under the N.S.A. program was being improperly used as the basis for F.I.S.A. wiretap warrant requests from the Justice Department, according to senior government officials. While not knowing all the details of the exchange, several government lawyers said there appeared to be concerns that the Justice Department, by trying to shield the existence of the N.S.A. program, was in danger of misleading the court about the origins of the information cited to justify the warrants. One official familiar with the episode said the judge insisted to Justice Department lawyers at one point that any material gathered under the special N.S.A. program not be used in seeking wiretap warrants from her court. Judge Kollar-Kotelly did not return calls for comment. A related issue arose in a case in which the F.B.I. was monitoring the communications of a terrorist suspect under a F.I.S.A.-approved warrant, even though the National Security Agency was already conducting warrantless eavesdropping. According to officials, F.B.I. surveillance of Mr. Faris, the Brooklyn Bridge plotter, was dropped for a short time because of technical problems. At the time, senior Justice Department officials worried what would happen if the N.S.A. picked up information that needed to be presented in court. The government would then either have to disclose the N.S.A. program or mislead a criminal court about how it had gotten the information. Several national security officials say the powers granted the N.S.A. by President Bush go far beyond the expanded counterterrorism powers granted by Congress under the USA Patriot Act, which is up for renewal. The House on Wednesday approved a plan to reauthorize crucial parts of the law. But final passage has been delayed under the threat of a Senate filibuster because of concerns from both parties over possible intrusions on Americans' civil liberties and privacy. Under the act, law enforcement and intelligence officials are still required to seek a F.I.S.A. warrant every time they want to eavesdrop within the United States. A recent agreement reached by Republican leaders and the Bush administration would modify the standard for F.B.I. wiretap warrants, requiring, for instance, a description of a specific target. Critics say the bar would remain too low to prevent abuses. Bush administration officials argue that the civil liberties concerns are unfounded, and they say pointedly that the Patriot Act has not freed the N.S.A. to target Americans. "Nothing could be further from the truth," wrote John Yoo, a former official in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and his co-author in a Wall Street Journal opinion article in December 2003. Mr. Yoo worked on a classified legal opinion on the N.S.A.'s domestic eavesdropping program. At an April hearing on the Patriot Act renewal, Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., "Can the National Security Agency, the great electronic snooper, spy on the American people?" "Generally," Mr. Mueller said, "I would say generally, they are not allowed to spy or to gather information on American citizens." President Bush did not ask Congress to include provisions for the N.S.A. domestic surveillance program as part of the Patriot Act and has not sought any other laws to authorize the operation. Bush administration lawyers argued that such new laws were unnecessary, because they believed that the Congressional resolution on the campaign against terrorism provided ample authorization, officials said. The Legal Line Shifts Seeking Congressional approval was also viewed as politically risky because the proposal would be certain to face intense opposition on civil liberties grounds. The administration also feared that by publicly disclosing the existence of the operation, its usefulness in tracking terrorists would end, officials said. The legal opinions that support the N.S.A. operation remain classified, but they appear to have followed private discussions among senior administration lawyers and other officials about the need to pursue aggressive strategies that once may have been seen as crossing a legal line, according to senior officials who participated in the discussions. For example, just days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Mr. Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer, wrote an internal memorandum that argued that the government might use "electronic surveillance techniques and equipment that are more powerful and sophisticated than those available to law enforcement agencies in order to intercept telephonic communications and observe the movement of persons but without obtaining warrants for such uses." Mr. Yoo noted that while such actions could raise constitutional issues, in the face of devastating terrorist attacks "the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties." The next year, Justice Department lawyers disclosed their thinking on the issue of warrantless wiretaps in national security cases in a little-noticed brief in an unrelated court case. In that 2002 brief, the government said that "the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority." Administration officials were also encouraged by a November 2002 appeals court decision in an unrelated matter. The decision by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which sided with the administration in dismantling a bureaucratic "wall" limiting cooperation between prosecutors and intelligence officers, cited "the president's inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance." But the same court suggested that national security interests should not be grounds "to jettison the Fourth Amendment requirements" protecting the rights of Americans against undue searches. The dividing line, the court acknowledged, "is a very difficult one to administer." Barclay Walsh contributed research for this article. ---- Bush acknowledges approving eavesdropping Posted 12/16/2005 6:27 PM Updated 12/18/2005 9:13 PM (AP) http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-12-15-bush-spying_x.htm WASHINGTON — President Bush said Saturday he personally has authorized a secret eavesdropping program in the U.S. more than 30 times since the Sept. 11 attacks and he lashed out at those involved in publicly revealing the program. "This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security," he said in a radio address delivered live from the White House's Roosevelt Room. "This authorization is a vital tool in our war against the terrorists. It is critical to saving American lives. The American people expect me to do everything in my power, under our laws and Constitution, to protect them and their civil liberties and that is exactly what I will continue to do as long as I am president of the United States," Bush said. "There is no doubt that this is inappropriate," declared Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He promised hearings early next year. Bush on Friday refused to discuss whether he had authorized such domestic spying without obtaining warrants from a court, saying that to comment would tie his hands in fighting terrorists. In a broad defense of the program put forward hours later, however, a senior intelligence official told The Associated Press that the eavesdropping was narrowly designed to go after possible terrorist threats in the United States. (Related video: Intel official speaks) The official said that since October 2001, the program has been renewed more than three dozen times. Each time, the White House counsel and the attorney general certified the lawfulness of the program, the official said. Bush then signed the authorization. At each review, government officials have provided a fresh assessment of the terrorist threat, showing that there is a catastrophic risk to the country or government, the official said. "Only if those conditions apply do we even begin to think about this," he said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the intelligence operation. "The president has authorized NSA to fully use its resources — let me underscore this now — consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution to defend the United States and its citizens," the official said, adding that congressional leaders have also been briefed more than a dozen times. Senior officials asserted that that the president would do everything in his power to protect the American people while safeguarding civil liberties. "I will make this point," Bush said in an interview with The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. "That whatever I do to protect the American people — and I have an obligation to do so — that we will uphold the law, and decisions made are made understanding we have an obligation to protect the civil liberties of the American people." The surveillance, disclosed in Friday's New York Times, is said to allow the agency to monitor international calls and e-mail messages of people inside the United States. But the paper said the agency would still seek warrants to snoop on purely domestic communications — for example, Americans' calls between New York and California. "I want to know precisely what they did," said Specter. "How NSA utilized their technical equipment, whose conversations they overheard, how many conversations they overheard, what they did with the material, what purported justification there was." Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said he wanted to know exactly what is going on before deciding whether an investigation is called for. "Theoretically, I obviously wouldn't like it," he said of the program. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., a member of the Judiciary Committee, said, "This shocking revelation ought to send a chill down the spine of every American." Vice President Dick Cheney and Bush chief of staff Andrew Card went to the Capitol Friday to meet with congressional leaders and the top members of the intelligence committees, who are often briefed on spy agencies' most classified programs. The Times said they had been previously told of the program. Members and their aides would not discuss the subject of the closed sessions Friday. Some intelligence experts who believe in broad presidential power argued that Bush would have the authority to order searches without warrants under the Constitution. In a case unrelated to NSA eavesdropping in this country, the administration has argued that the president has vast authority to order intelligence surveillance without warrants "of foreign powers or their agents." "Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority," the Justice Department said in a 2002 legal filing with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review. Other intelligence veterans found difficulty with the program in light of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed after the intelligence community came under fire for spying on Americans. That law gives government — with approval from a secretive U.S. court — the authority to conduct covert wiretaps and surveillance of suspected terrorists and spies. In a written statement, NSA spokesman Don Weber said the agency would not provide any information on the reported surveillance program. "We do not discuss actual or alleged operational issues," he said. Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, former NSA general counsel, said it was troubling that such a change would have been made by executive order, even if it turns out to be within the law. Parker, who has no direct knowledge of the program, said the effect could be corrosive. "There are programs that do push the edge, and would be appropriate, but will be thrown out," she said. Prior to 9/11, the NSA typically limited its domestic surveillance activities to foreign embassies and missions — and obtained court orders for such investigations. Much of its work was overseas, where thousands of people with suspected terrorist ties or other valuable intelligence may be monitored. The report surfaced as the administration and its GOP allies on Capitol Hill were fighting to save provisions of the expiring USA Patriot Act that they believe are key tools in the fight against terrorism. An attempt to rescue the approach favored by the White House and Republicans failed on a procedural vote. ---- A Half-Century of Surveillance New York Times December 16, 2005 http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/nyt150.html HISTORY Created in 1952, the National Security Agency is the biggest American intelligence agency, with more than 30,000 employees at Fort Meade, Md., and listening posts around the world. Part of the Defense Department, it is the successor to the State Department's "Black Chamber" and American military eavesdropping and code-breaking operations that date to the early days of telegraph and telephone communications. MISSION The N.S.A. runs the eavesdropping hardware of the American intelligence system, operating a huge network of satellites and listening devices around the world. Traditionally, its mission has been to gather intelligence overseas on foreign enemies by breaking codes and tapping into telephone and computer communications. SUCCESSES Most of the agency's successes remain secret, but a few have been revealed. The agency listened to Soviet pilots and ground controllers during the shooting down of a civilian South Korean airliner in 1983; traced a disco bombing in Berlin in 1986 to Libya through diplomatic messages; and, more recently, used the identifying chips in cellphones to track terrorist suspects after the 2001 attacks. DOMESTIC ACTIVITY The disclosure in the 1970's of widespread surveillance on political dissenters and other civil rights abuses led to restrictions at the N.S.A. and elsewhere on the use of domestic wiretaps. The N.S.A. monitors United Nations delegations and some foreign embassy lines on American soil, but is generally prohibited from listening in on the conversations of anyone inside the country without a special court order. OFFICIAL RULES Since the reforms of the late 1970's, the N.S.A. has generally been permitted to target the communications of people on American soil only if they are believed to be "agents of a foreign power" — a foreign nation or international terrorist group — and a warrant is obtained from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. EXPANDED ROLE Months after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush signed a secret executive order that relaxed restrictions on domestic spying by the N.S.A., according to officials with knowledge of the order. The order allows the agency to monitor without warrants the international phone calls and e-mail messages of some Americans and others inside the United States. -------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE -------- drug war Frontrunner Morales Wraps Up Election Campaign in Bolivia Friday, December 16th, 2005 Democracy Now! Headlines http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/16/1457226 In Bolivia, presidential front-runner Eva Morales closed his election campaign Thursday by declaring his election would be a QUOTE: “nightmare for the United States.” Morales, who has campaigned on a platform to legalize growth of the coca-leaf, is leading polls ahead of Sunday’s vote. If elected, he would become Bolivia’s first indigenous president. -------- human rights Workers in New Orleans Denied Pay, Proper Housing and Threatened with Deportation Friday, December 16th, 2005 Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/16/1457237 In the clean-up efforts following the devastation of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, many undocumented workers and homeless people were recruited to the area to work under large companies contracted by the federal government. We speak with Newsday reporter Tina Susman, who has investigated the case of a group of homeless men, and Bill Chandler, about subcontractors and workers' complaints. [includes rush transcript] In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina whipped the Gulf Coast region, companies like Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root - a Halliburton subsidiary - and EEC Operating Services were given huge contracts by the federal government to clean up hurricane debris and start rebuilding the area. Undocumented immigrants and other economically marginalized people were lured to the region by promises of work and good pay. But it turns out that many of those workers have never been paid and have little recourse in collecting their promised checks. Some undocumented workers were even threatened with deportation when they demanded their pay. An article on Salon.com stated that the problem is "a shadowy labyrinth of contractors, subcontractors and job brokers, overseen by no single agency, that have created a no man's land where nobody seems to be accountable for the hiring-and abuse of these workers." * Tina Susman, a reporter for Newsday. She followed the case of a group of homeless men from Atlanta who went to New Orleans to work and never got paid. * Bill Chandler, president of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance. Their group has filed complaints against five subcontractors in the Gulfport region on behalf of workers who weren't paid for the cleanup that they did. RUSH TRANSCRIPT AMY GOODMAN: We're joined now in our studio by Tina Susman, reporter for Newsday. She’s followed the case of a group of homeless men from Atlanta, who went to New Orleans to work and never got paid. We’re also joined on the phone by Bill Chandler, President of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance. Their group has filed complaints against five sub-contractors in the Gulfport region on behalf of workers who weren't paid for the cleanup they did. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s start with Bill Chandler of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance. Can you talk about the case of these immigrants? BILL CHANDLER: Well, as you stated, a large number of workers were recruited here from all over the country, mainly immigrants and many of them undocumented. And contractors, who we call the “bottom feeders” -- in other words, for example, a primary contractor like Halliburton or Bechtel receives a contract from FEMA to clean up the debris on the coast for about $24 a cubic yard. It is then sub-contracted down through a whole food chain of subcontractors to the bottom feeders, and in most instances, we found that they're getting around $4 a cubic yard. And those are the contractors that have been brought in and brought in immigrants to do the work. In many cases, not only the five contractors that we have filed complaints against on behalf of several hundred workers, but a large number more have used all kinds of devices to get out of paying their workers. One, they’ll just simply abandon them at a work site after recruiting them here with promises of housing and per diem and decent pay and so on, and they will leave those workers there. We found a group of thirty workers who were abandoned by a contractor in a remote trailer park. They were housed in three trailers, and there was no electricity, no furniture, no nothing, except for water, which at that time was contaminated in Gulfport. And they had been abandoned and not paid. And when we found them, they had gone three days without food. Needless to say we were able to round up food and bedding for those workers, and eventually we found them shelter in faith-based organizations’ facilities. AMY GOODMAN: Tina Susman, you recently went down to New Orleans. What did you find? TINA SUSMAN: Well, the workers that I encountered were men who had been recruited from a homeless shelter in Atlanta. There was several dozen of them. I actually met them at a tent city that had sprung up there that was housing people who had nowhere to live. Individually they started coming up to me and all told me the same story, being recruited by a gentleman who promised them, you know, good hourly wages doing hard labor, hauling debris, for the most part, some construction work in New Orleans. They got on this school bus that was provided. They came down, and most of them had worked several weeks, and each week when they asked for their pay, they were told, “It’s coming. It’s coming.” Eventually they got fed up and they left. I went to the house where they said that they had all been put in rather undesirable conditions, thirty or so men to the house. And there were more men there. They all told me the same story. The big problem with these men was just finding out who was actually supposed to pay them. Their assumption, of course, was that the man who had recruited them and promised them the pay should pay them. However when they asked him for the money, he said, “Well, I can't pay you because the company that recruited me hasn't paid me.” So I spoke to that company, and it said, “Well, the company that’s supposed to pay us hasn't paid us, so we can’t pay them.” I followed this all the way up the chain, and that is where the problem lies, with the number of subcontractors that are doing business in the Gulf region. A gentleman from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers I spoke to said, “It’s not unusual to have fifty subcontractors working beneath the prime contractors.” AMY GOODMAN: And who are these prime contractors? TINA SUSMAN: Well, there are several. In the case that I followed, the prime contractor is ECC out of Burlingame, California. It has about a $500 million contract with the Army Corps of Engineers. AMY GOODMAN: How much? TINA SUSMAN: $500 million. AMY GOODMAN: Half a billion dollars? TINA SUSMAN: Yes, and that’s not unusual. There are several prime contractors, and these are contractors, as you mentioned -- Halliburton is another -- who are frequently given contracts by the federal government in cases such as this, and then it’s understood that they are, therefore, going to hire subcontractors who will then hires subs and subs and subs. The problem begins when there is a glitch somewhere along the way. All it takes is one delay in payment; all it takes is one person somewhere on the chain to pocket their money, and it all ripples down. And the end result in every case, of course, is that the guys at the bottom, the bit players, don't get paid. AMY GOODMAN: Now, I think that students have taught us a lot about holding the primary contractor accountable in the organization, students against sweat shops around the country. They say that it’s not enough to say, ‘Well we didn't know that a sub subcontractor was not paying the workers fairly,’ that ultimately it is the responsibility of the primary contractor. Is this -- are they being held at all accountable? TINA SUSMAN: No, not really. I mean, if you speak to them, they do say that once they put out their subcontracts, there is really little that they can do to enforce what those businesses themselves are doing. The expectation is that any business that gets involved in this kind of thing is going to have the financial resources to pay its workers, no matter what level they are on the chain. Who is holding the prime contractors responsible, of course, is the people who actually are able to trace the money trail all the way to the top, which is extraordinarily difficult. In this case that I followed, this group of Atlanta workers finally did trace it all the way to the top, and they actually went to the ECC office in New Orleans and complained, and they were given some money, but the ECC people there explained that they had paid their subcontractors; therefore, there was a limit as to what more they could do. AMY GOODMAN: Bill Chandler, what about that issue of holding the top company responsible? Looking at the Salon piece, it talks about KBR security chief, Kevin Flynn, and it says, “Representatives of Halliburton/KBR do not acknowledge the existence of undocumented workers providing labor for their operations on the Gulf Coast bases. Flynn suggested speaking to the U.S. military, who he said ‘has real strict control’ and would know whether there were undocumented workers. He said, ‘We have workers from all ethnic groups on the base. To the best of my knowledge, there are no undocumented workers.’” BILL CHANDLER: Well, first of all, you know, from our point of view in Mississippi, from our group's point of view, it doesn't matter whether they're documented or undocumented, the issue is getting paid for the work that they were promised to be paid for. The problem is that there appears to be no oversight in this contract process, and when you look at the difference between $24 and $4, and you multiply it by tens of thousands of cubic yards, something is happening between the primary contractor and those that are actually performing the work, and that’s a tremendous loss of money that’s involved in subcontracting and paper shuffling that goes on with these contractors. It is amazing to me that so many contractors actually don't do the work, but they get paid for work that they don't do. AMY GOODMAN: When we were down in the New Orleans area, we went to one of the large areas set up by the Red Cross that had thousands of pets and also 1,000 evacuees, and the Red Cross ran the whole facility, working with the National Guard and other military. And it was in a place called Gonzales, right outside of New Orleans, on the way to New Orleans. When we wanted to talk to people at the facility, at the shelter, the Red Cross called in the military to tell us to leave, even though those inside of the facility wanted to talk to us. What about the Red Cross in dealing with both workers, immigrants, and overall the evacuee population? BILL CHANDLER: We have had some very, very serious problems with very overt racism on the part of the Red Cross, not only with immigrants, but with other people that were displaced by Katrina, as well. But with immigrants, initially in the application process for benefits, we had a considerable problem in Hadleyburg and in Laurel with people asking for too much information, going, you know, beyond what is required by the Red Cross to certify people for eligibility, and they were asking for documents, they were asking for all kind of things that was irrelevant to their victimization. We had a situation where undocumented or documented immigrants who had been living on the coast, and I think people need to know that Mississippi has a rapidly growing immigrant population, and we estimate that over 100,000 people are here working. But on the coast there's about 30,000 and of that there were a lot of people that were affected by Katrina. And like the Anglos and like the African Americans and Vietnamese, and so on, they were seeking shelter with the Red Cross. We had an incident late in September where the shelter manager in Long Beach decided he didn't want any of the Latinos to be there, and he called a number of law enforcement agencies, ranging from the Indiana State Police, who were here to supplement local law enforcement, to the ICE, which is the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement which we commonly know as “La Migra” or the INS, what used to be the INS, and had them come, and they pulled the Latinos out of the shelter. Several people were pulled out of showers and were not allowed to wrap themselves in towels, and were pulled into the parking lot and told that they would be deported in 48 hours if they didn't leave the shelter immediately. Following that, an organizer from our organization went to confront the shelter manager about that that night, and she was escorted from the premises by armed security. The next day, a delegation that included people from the Mississippi Workers Center for Human Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, Oxfam America and a number of other organizations, primarily African Americans, went to confront the manager about what had happened, and they were taking pictures, and the shelter manager wanted the camera and wanted the film and the people, of course, refused to give it to him. And so they were held hostage by local law enforcement for about 45 minutes, were not allowed to leave the shelter until they produced the film, which they refused. And finally U.S. Marshals came and advised the shelter manager to let them go, that they did have a right to take pictures. But later on, a few days later, the shelters all over the coast were demanding that Latinos leave the shelters, and they claim that they were all out-of-state workers and they had no right to be in the shelters. The National Council of La Raza and the National Immigration Law Center and other organizations alerted the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Representative Grace Napolitano, who is the chair of that, confronted the Red Cross. They denied those things were going on and said their policy is to take anybody who is homeless. But it never filtered down to the shelters here, and ultimately they evacuated all of the Latinos, regardless of status, regardless of where they lived before the hurricane, out of those shelters. So we have had some very serious problems with the Red Cross, and it is consistent with previous experience that we've had with them in the past. AMY GOODMAN: Tina Susman, final comment? TINA SUSMAN: Yes, actually, I was also told by some of the gentlemen that I got to know down in New Orleans, the men from Atlanta, that when they realized they weren’t going to get paid and they were looking for a place to stay, they tried to get in with some of these shelters and were told that because they weren't from the area, they were not allowed to stay in those shelters. But one thing that all of the labor advocates I interviewed did say is that this kind of thing happens all the time. The difference is, it has been magnified 100 times over now because of the need for labor in the Gulf, because of the number of businesses that are looking for workers, and because there are so many willing workers, be they homeless, be they undocumented, what have you, who are eager for a chance to make some money. In addition, when you have so many workers flooding in and so many businesses basically looking, you know, to make some money off of this disaster cleanup, the kind of vetting that should go on over these subcontractors simply doesn't. It is just not as close as it should be, and so that opens the door to much greater abuse than one might normally see. AMY GOODMAN: Well, Tina Susman and Bill Chandler, I want to thank you both very much for being with us. Tina Susman is National Correspondent for Newsday, has covered disasters from Sri Lanka in the tsunami to Southern Africa and has spent time in New Orleans. Bill Chandler, President of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, long-time union organizer, speaking to us from Jackson, Mississippi. -------- torture Last obstacle to US torture ban lifted, amid doubts about impact WASHINGTON (AFP) Dec 16, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051216183654.ki3kn1qv.html A key Republican in Congress on Friday lifted the final block on a bill that proponents say will formally ban the use of torture on detainees held by US forces anywhere in the world. The campaign for the ban has been led by Republican Senator John McCain, who secured a landmark agreement on the ban with President George W. Bush on Thursday, but doubts have been expressed whether it will really stop detainee abuse. Representative Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, had threatened to block the bill unless it gave sufficient legal protection to US forces. He had also sought guarantees that the law would not inhibit US intelligence gathering in the "war on terror". Hunter said he withdrew the threat to block the measure after John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, promised to provide a report on the impact of the new law within 180 days. US news outlets have expressed some scepticism that the new law would have a major impact on the international US reputation, tarnished by the Abu Ghraib scandal, reports of secret CIA prisons in Europe and alleged abuses at the Guantanamo Bay "war on terror" prison camp. "Mr Bush had barely announced his deal with Mr McCain before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made it crystal clear that the administration would define torture any way it liked," said a New York Times editorial. Gonzales told CNN television, "Congress has defined what torture is, and it is intentional infliction of severe -- I emphasize the word 'severe' -- intentional infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering." When questioned about the use of "waterboarding", a practice in which interrogators make detainees think they are drowning, Gonzales would not say whether it would be considered torture. "That would be something that would have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis," added Gonzales, who refused to talk about individual techniques. The Times said Hunter's objections to the law were "a smokescreen". Human Rights Watch charged that the same legislation that includes the McCain amendment also includes another provision that would deny detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay prison the right to legal action if they are mistreated and effectively allows the Department of Defense to consider evidence secured through torture or other inhumane treatment. "If passed into law, this would be the first time in American history that Congress has effectively permitted the use of evidence obtained through torture," the New York-based rights watchdog said in a statement. The Washington Post called the proposed law "an important step toward curtailing the systematic human rights violations committed by the Bush administration in its handling of foreign prisoners." But it called for an "aggressive" follow-up by Congress to make sure all CIA interrogation methods are reviewed. "Restoring the rule of law over an administration that deliberately chose lawlessness in its treatment of detainees may be an arduous process," warned a Post editorial. ---- Bush Administration Drops Opposition to Senate Torture Ban Friday, December 16th, 2005 Democracy Now! Headlines http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/16/1457226 In this country, the Bush administration says its dropped opposition to a Senate measure that bans torture of detainees in US custody. Republican Senator John McCain, who spearheaded the torture ban, made the announcement with President Bush Thursday. * Arizona Senator John McCain: “I'm very pleased that we reached this agreement, and now we can move forward and make sure that the whole world knows that, as the President has stated many times, that we do not practice cruel, inhuman treatment or torture. This agreement basically does two things: One, puts into the Army Field Manual the specific procedures for interrogations. And two, it prohibits cruel, inhumane [treatment] -- or torture.” In recent months, the White House had aggressively lobbied for an amendment that would have exempted CIA operatives from the torture ban. At one point, the Bush administration threatened to veto Congress’ entire defense bill if it included McCain’s provisions. But opposition has come even within the administration’s own party. On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House passed a non-binding resolution backing McCain’s effort. -------- POLITICS -------- us politics Senate refuses to renew several Patriot Act provisions Posted 12/16/2005 1:00 PM Updated 12/18/2005 9:15 PM (AP) http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-12-16-patriot-act-senate_x.htm WASHINGTON — The Senate on Friday refused to reauthorize major portions of the USA Patriot Act after critics complained they infringed too much on Americans' privacy and liberty, dealing a huge defeat to the Bush administration and Republican leaders. In a crucial vote early Friday, the bill's Senate supporters were not able to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster by Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and their allies. The final vote was 52-47. (Related video: Senate rejects portions of Patriot Act) President Bush, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Republicans congressional leaders had lobbied fiercely to make most of the expiring Patriot Act provisions permanent. They also supported new safeguards and expiration dates to the act's two most controversial parts: authorization for roving wiretaps, which allow investigators to monitor multiple devices to keep a target from evading detection by switching phones or computers; and secret warrants for books, records and other items from businesses, hospitals and organizations such as libraries. Feingold, Craig and other critics said those efforts weren't enough, and have called for the law to be extended in its present form so they can continue to try and add more civil liberties safeguards. But Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert have said they won't accept a short-term extension of the law. If a compromise is not reached, the 16 Patriot Act provisions expire on Dec. 31, but the expirations have enormous exceptions. Investigators will still be able to use those powers to complete any investigation that began before the expiration date and to initiate new investigations of any alleged crime that began before Dec. 31, according to a provision in the original law. There are ongoing investigations of every known terrorist group, including al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic Jihad and the Zarqawi group in Iraq, and all the Patriot Act tools could continue to be used in those investigations. Five Republicans voted against the reauthorization: Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, John Sununu of New Hampshire, Craig and Frist. Two Democrats voted to extend the provisions: Sens. Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Frist, R-Tenn., changed his vote at the last moment after seeing the critics would win. He decided to vote with the prevailing side so he could call for a new vote at any time. He immediately objected to an offer of a short term extension from Democrats, saying the House won't approve it and the president won't sign it. "We have more to fear from terrorism than we do from this Patriot Act," Frist warned. If the Patriot Act provisions expire, Republicans say they will place the blame on Democrats in next year's midterm elections. "In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without these vital tools for a single moment," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said. "The time for Democrats to stop standing in the way has come." But the Patriot Act's critics got a boost from a New York Times report saying Bush authorized the National Security Agency to monitor the international phone calls and international e-mails of hundreds — perhaps thousands — of people inside the United States. Previously, the NSA typically limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions and obtained court orders for such investigations. (Related story: More on the report) "I don't want to hear again from the attorney general or anyone on this floor that this government has shown it can be trusted to use the power we give it with restraint and care," said Feingold, the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act in 2001. "It is time to have some checks and balances in this country," shouted Sen. Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. "We are more American for doing that." Most of the Patriot Act — which expanded the government's surveillance and prosecutorial powers against suspected terrorists, their associates and financiers — was made permanent when Congress overwhelmingly passed it after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. Making the rest of it permanent was a priority for both the Bush administration and Republican leaders on Capitol Hill before Congress adjourns for the year. The House on Wednesday passed a House-Senate compromise bill to renew the expiring portions of the Patriot Act that supporters say added significant safeguards to the law. Its Senate supporters say that compromise is the only thing that has a chance to pass Congress before 2006. "This is a defining moment. There are no more compromises to be made, no more extensions of time. The bill is what it is," said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. The bill's opponents say the original act was rushed into law, and Congress should take more time now to make sure the rights of innocent Americans are safeguarded before making the expiring provisions permanent. "Those that would give up essential liberties in pursuit in a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security," said Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H. They suggested a short extension so negotiations could continue, but the Senate scrapped a Democratic-led effort to renew the USA Patriot Act for just three months before the vote began. "Today, fair-minded senators stood firm in their commitment to the Constitution and rejected the White House's call to pass a faulty law," said Caroline Fredrickson, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative office. "This was a victory for the privacy and liberty of all Americans." -------- voting Official: Voting machines hacked Associated Press December 16, 2005 http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/Headlines/03NewsHEAD01POLFL121605.htm TALLAHASSEE -- Tests show some Diebold voting machines used in Florida and elsewhere around the nation can be hacked by election office insiders to change results, Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho charged Thursday. Sancho said the tests on optical machines that scan paper ballots, conducted for his office and a monitoring group, also indicated they can be manipulated without leaving any evidence of tampering. "This is not supposed to be possible," Sancho said. "We did it." Diebold spokesman David Bear discounted the tests as unrealistic because they bypassed normal security procedures. "If I gave you the keys to my house and I turned off the alarm and told you when I wasn't going to be home, I don't doubt you can get into my house," Bear said. "But is that going to have any effect on the election? Absolutely not." The Ohio-based company has been criticized for its connections to President Bush, whose brother, Jeb Bush, is Florida's governor. Florida Acting Secretary of State David Mann said he couldn't comment on specifics because his department wasn't invited to participate in the testing but that he was confident in the state's process of certifying voting machines. Sancho, however, said the tests show the certification process is flawed and that the Department of State refused to act when initial tests earlier this year showed the machines' memory cards could be hacked. He was unable then, however, to test if altered results on the cards could be uploaded into his mainframe computer because he was afraid it might be contaminated. He said he performed the upload this week only after county commissioners approved his request to buy a new optical scan system from another company. The hacked results transferred into the mainframe although Diebold had contended its software would prevent that, Sancho said. Mann said he would like to discuss the tests with Sancho but it was up to the supervisor to ask for state involvement as decisions on what systems to use rest with supervisors. Sancho said he would bypass the Department of State and seek changes in the certification process by taking his results to the Florida Legislature. Mann also noted, and Sancho acknowledged, all attempts to hack into the system from the outside failed. Bear said the tests were unrealistic because polling places and vote-counting centers are filled with observers, including representatives of both major political parties, who are watching for such tampering. Sancho said the system could be hacked by an elections staffer or technician beforehand to produce faulty results. The tests involved optical-scan machines that use paper ballots voters mark with pencils. The ballots are fed into scanners that record the results onto the memory cards, which are then tabulated by a central computer. Some critics prefer the machines because any discrepancies can by recounting the paper ballots. Most of the debate over voting machines in Florida has focused on touch-screen computer systems because the state doesn't require that they also spit out paper records that can be counted by hand if needed. That makes Sancho's tests somewhat ironic, Bear said. "Now we're not trusting paper," he said. "Somebody could also steal the pencil and then you couldn't mark the ballot." Paper ballots are examined only during a recount triggered when results are very close, Sancho said. He said they would never come into play if an election thief made sure the difference was larger. One test was conducted for Sancho's office and the nonprofit election-monitoring group BlackBoxVoting.org by Herbert Thompson, a computer-science professor and strategist at Security Innovation, which tests software for companies such as Google and Microsoft. Another test was done by Finnish computer expert Harri Hursti. After BlackBox and Sancho announced the results in May, Diebold's senior lawyer, Michael Lindroos, sent a letter to Sancho that questioned the results and called the test "a very foolish and irresponsible act" that may have violated licensing agreements. In 2003, Diebold's then-CEO Walden W. O'Dell invited people to a fundraiser for President Bush with a letter stating he planned to help "Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." Ohio turned out to be the state that clinched Bush's re-election in 2004. The company since has prohibited top executives from making political contributions. Diebold supplies optical-scan voting systems to 29 Florida counties and touch-screen machines to one. -------- OTHER -------- environment China's toxic slick hits major Russian river, danger said under control VLADIVOSTOK, Russia (AFP) Dec 16, 2005 http://www.terradaily.com/2005/051216184632.hxha8y7m.html A toxic slick that threatened the water supply of millions of people in China entered Russia's far eastern Amur River on Friday, but officials said the danger was under control -- at least for now. "The water polluted with benzene today reached the Russian border and has flowed into the Amur River," Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu said in the city of Khabarovsk, near the Chinese border. This southeastern corner of Russia has been bracing for trouble ever since an explosion last month at a PetroChina chemical factory in China's Jilin province led to the spill of 100 tonnes of carcinogens into the Songhua River, which flows into the Amur. Millions of residents of several large Chinese cities saw their water supplies disrupted. However, initial tests by Russian experts showed the slick, which contains benzene and nitrobenzene, is not as highly concentrated as had been feared and is continuing to dilute, officials from the emergency situations ministry said. Chinese media also reported that the slick had significantly diluted ahead of entering the Amur, which forms part of the Russian-Chinese border and is known as the Heilong in China. Shoigu said the authorities were prepared to ensure safe drinking supplies all along the Amur, including in Khabarovsk, which has a population of 600,000. "Water reserves and carbon (filters) have been set up. Artesian wells have been reopened," he was quoted as saying in a statement after a meeting of local emergency situations ministry officials. "Khabarovsk's central water system would only be switched off in extreme circumstances." The first Russian community affected by the spill, which is flowing at a rate of about 30 kilometres (20 miles) a day, was expected to be the village of Nizhne-Leninskoye on Friday, with Khabarovsk being hit on Wednesday. The governor of the first affected region, Sergei Muzhetsky, said residents there were safe "because we do not use water from the Amur. The problems will mainly be in Khabarovsk." However, environmental experts say that while Russia may escape serious danger from the immediate arrival of the spill, there may be greater problems in spring when the ice currently blocking much of the waterway begins to melt. It is feared that Russia faces an environmental time bomb as poisonous substances trapped in ice are freed up and begin to spread. "Already now we must start preparing for the spring floods and the long-term effects of the accident," Shoigu said. China has been embarrassed by the accident and the risk posed to its giant neighbour, and Beijing has stressed its desire to minimise any damage. President Hu Jintao said earlier this month that China considered itself "highly responsible to the two countries and the two peoples." The country's top environmental agency ordered a nationwide inspection of major factories near rivers to prevent a similar disaster from happening in the future. China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported late Friday that workers had begun building a temporary diversion dam on the Fuyuan waterway, which joins the Heilong and Wusuli rivers along the common border near Khabarovsk. Beijing will foot the bill for the construction and dismantling of the dam, Xinhua reported. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said Beijing had sent Moscow additional water testing and purification equipment to help combat pollution, following an earlier shipment sent before the slick crossed into Russia. "China hopes that these materials, which are being transported to Russia, will help clean up the water," state-run news agency Xinhua quoted him as saying. "We are ready to increase contacts and consultations with the Russian side and take effective measures to minimize the impact of the pollution," he added. On Friday, Russian parliament deputy Boris Reznik called on China to offer compensation. China must "accept responsibility, including financial, for the pollution of the water systems that are used in common by China and Russia," he said. -------- imf / world bank / wto (economics) Argentina To Clear $10 Billion Debt With IMF Friday, December 16th, 2005 Democracy Now! Headlines http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/16/1457226 In other news from Latin America, Argentine President Néstor Kirchner has announced the country will pay off the entirety of its nearly $10 billion dollar debt to the International Monetary Fund. The Financial Times notes the payment promises an end to one of the most bitter and controversial relationships entered into by the IMF. Argentina borrowed over $13 billion dollars following a devastating economic collapse in December 2001 – a collapse many Argentines blamed on economic policies pushed by the IMF. On Thursday, Kirchner said the IMF had QUOTE “acted towards our country as a promoter and a vehicle of policies that caused poverty and pain among the Argentine people.” -------- ACTIVISTS Peace Bus Reunites Kashmir After Quake REUTERS INDIA: December 16, 2005 http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/34076/story.htm SRINAGAR, India - A bus linking Indian and Pakistani Kashmir halted by the devastating Oct. 8 South Asia earthquake resumed on Thursday, Indian officials said. "The bus has resumed its service from Srinagar to Kaman post with seven passengers on board," S.L. Srinramlu, a passport officer in the Indian state of Jammu and kashmir, told Reuters. The 170-km (105-mile) highway between the capitals of Indian and Pakistani Kashmir was reopened in April, connecting the two sides for the first time in almost 60 years. But the South Asia quake, which killed almost 75,000 people, blocked the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road and damaged the Aman Setu, or Peace Bridge. Kaman post is the last point on the Indian side. Indian officials said 15 passengers were cleared to travel but only seven, including five stranded passengers of Pakistani Kashmir, boarded the bus on Thursday. At least 10 passengers from Indian Kashmir stranded in Pakistani Kashmir since the quake were expected to return home. "It is not clear how the passengers from (the) other side would travel to the Peace Bridge, as the road on the other side is still in a bad condition," an Indian official said. The April revival of the bus run linking families divided for decades was one of the most tangible signs of progress in a painstakingly slow but steady peace process between India and Pakistan, both of whom claim Kashmir in full but rule it in part. After the quake, they opened five border points to allow relief supplies and survivors to cross. India and Pakistan came close to their third war over Kashmir in 2002.