NucNews - December 18, 2005



-------- NUCLEAR 



-------- africa

Uranium mining gets a new lease on life

JULIE BAIN
18 December 2005
South Africa Sunday Times

http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/articles/article.aspx?ID=ST6A157991

NEAL Froneman, the chief executive of Aflease Gold & Uranium — to be known as sxr Uranium One on the JSE from tomorrow — has put his faith in uranium, and so far it has paid off.

Sitting in his Johannesburg office, Froneman said that earlier this year he had predicted that the uranium price would climb to $35/lb. This week the price of the metal, which is used in nuclear reactors, was $35.25/lb, compared with $20 in February.

“I went out on a limb,” he said. But his bet has paid off and uranium prices are expected to rise as demand expands by 2% to 3% a year.

The future has not always looked so promising for Froneman’s company.

He left Gold Fields in 2003 to head what was then a small-scale gold-miner, Aflease.

In the same year the company’s only operating gold mine was closed and its share price tumbled 45%.

But, since Froneman decided to build a company focused on uranium, its fortunes have taken a dramatic upturn.

In the year to December 15, sxr Uranium One was the best performing company on JSE’s benchmark All Share index. The stock rose 235%.

And the changing of the Aflease name to sxr Uranium One on the JSE marks an important turning point in the reconstituted company’s history.

“Everyone who holds Aflease Gold & Uranium shares will see these shares transferred to shares in the renamed company, sxr Uranium One,” he said.

The sxr is a nod to the Toronto-based uranium mining company Southern Cross Resources, which Aflease merged with this year. Effectively, Aflease, the bigger company, reversed-listed into the Canadian company.

sxr Uranium One has its main listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange and what was Aflease has an 83% stake in that company.

“The metamorphosis of the company has been driven by the company positioning itself to endure the strong rand. We believe the rand is going to be strong for a long time,” Frone- man said.

“We needed access to the North American capital market to build our uranium mine here in South Africa.”

sxr Uranium One’s planned mine in South Africa will cost R1-billion to develop and should be producing uranium by the first half of 2007.

There are plans to raise capital next year of 60% debt and 40% equity. The equity portion will most likely take place through a placement with existing shareholders.

The uranium price has been boosted by increased demand as governments turn to nuclear power to meet their energy needs.

Froneman wants to take advantage of this by positioning sxr Uranium One as an energy company.

He holds the view that should South Africa’s pebble-bed nuclear reactor technology prove to be economically viable, sxr Uranium One’s product could be part of any deal selling the pebble-bed technology.

sxr Uranium One plans to grow, and through Southern Cross Resources the company already has uranium assets in Canada and Australia.

“We want to build a leading position in South Africa. We think there are opportunities in Australia and North America.”

Having stuck his neck out on the uranium price this year, Froneman says in the longer term he thinks it will hold above $40/lb.

But the market — which is currently experiencing a shortage — will change and sxr Uranium One needs to establish itself over the next three to four years.

After that, Froneman says, new capacity which is being brought on may make the entrance of new players more difficult.

sxr Uranium One will have a secondary listing on the JSE.

However, with the hiving-off of its gold assets through a reverse listing into a small gold company, the JSE-listed Sub Nigel, the name Aflease will live on.

It is expected that early next year Sub Nigel will be renamed Aflease Gold.

Froneman will be CEO of both sxr Uranian and Aflease Gold. Aflease Gold will hold the Modder East mine, which is being developed on the East Rand, among other gold assets.

“The gold business gives us flexibility in our uranium projects. We can leverage off gold,” Froneman said.

sxr Uranium One, which will have an 80% stake in the gold company, is not wedded to retaining a holding at that level.

The stake might be reduced, but Froneman says sxr Uranium One wants to remain in control of Aflease Gold. 



-------- iran

'Talks won't stop Iran's nuclear plans'

Herb Keinon, THE JERUSALEM POST, Dec. 18, 2005

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1134309602874&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter

Reflecting Israel's quandary regarding Iran, OC Intelligence Maj.-Gen Aharon Ze'evi (Farkash) told the cabinet Sunday that while he doesn't think diplomatic efforts will stop Iran from building a nuclear bomb, he believes these diplomatic efforts must continue.

Ze'evi, in his final cabinet briefing before his term of duty ends in January, said Iran has turned into a regional power and that by next September it could have the independent know-how to create a nuclear bomb. He said that having the know-how was more important than building the bomb itself, and predicted that this could come some six months after Iran begins enriching uranium, something he said could begin as early as March.

It may take Iran another five or six years after it reaches this stage to actually build a bomb, he noted.

"I don't see any real possibility of diplomatic efforts stopping Iran," Ze'evi said. He added, however, that the international community should not give up its diplomatic efforts, and that it should develop a common front in doing so.

Although Iran is one of the major threats looming for Israel in 2006, it is not the only one, Ze'evi said. He listed a number of other major concerns for Israel, including:

# A buildup of missiles in the Arab world that could strike at "the heart of Israel." This includes everything from the relatively primitive Kassam rockets from Gaza to the Iranian Shihab-3.
# The rise of Islamic radicalism in the Arab world through the ballot box, from Hamas in the PA to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt which recently went from 17 to 88 seats in the Egyptian parliament.
# A change in the agenda of world terrorism, with a focus - in addition to Western targets - on carrying out attacks in "the heart of the Levant," i.e. Israel, Syria, Egypt and Jordan.
# Syrian President Bashar Assad is facing the most difficult challenge of his political life as international pressure on Syria continues to mount. The US and France are interested in creating a new reality in Lebanon, and there is concern that Assad could use Hizbullah to significantly heat up the situation on the northern border in an attempt to relieve the pressure.
# The Palestinian Authority has lost effective control of Gaza, which Ze'evi said is turning into "Hamastan," while retaining control in the West Bank, which he referred to as "Fatahstan." As the PA loses control over the situation in Gaza, Israel will lose any leverage it has over events there.

On the positive side, Ze'evi said that radical Islamic groups such as Hamas, Hizbullah and Islamic Jihad were losing some of their legitimacy, as Arab leaders such as Jordan's King Abdullah come out against terrorism.

Ze'evi also said that at present there did not appear to be any coalition of Arab states interested in waging a conventional war against Israel. He also said that Israel's ability to fight terrorism had improved significantly, and said there was a marked decrease in both terrorist attacks and casualties this year.

Ze'evi also said that Israel's position in the world has improved as a result of disengagement and that there was greater understanding and legitimacy, even in some corners of the Arab world, for Israel's actions against terrorism.

Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) head Yuval Diskin also provided a security briefing, and said that the PA was not a significant factor in Gaza, where "everybody does what they see fit." He said that the Palestinians were trying to carry out attacks on the security road that runs parallel to the border with Gaza. In addition, he said, they were trying to smuggle terrorists through Rafah into the Sinai, and from there into Israel through the Negev.

When asked by Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra whether the release of Marwan Barghouti from prison would strengthen Fatah's position, Diskin said that it was "not worth" talking about his release since "he is a troublemaker who causes problems." Prime Minister Ariel Sharon cut off any debate on the matter, saying that "no one is talking" about releasing Barghouti.

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, meanwhile, told the cabinet that because of the security situation and continued terrorist threats Israel would not at this time start operating convoys for Palestinians from Gaza to the West Bank. According to an agreement worked out last month by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, these convoys were to begin on December 15.



-------- mideast

Gulf leaders won't take stance against Iran, says chief 

Dec 18, 2005, 16:41 GMT
Deutsche Presse-Agentur

http://news.monstersandcritics.com/middleeast/article_1069863.php/Gulf_leaders_wont_take_stance_against_Iran_says_chief__Updated_

Abu Dhabi - The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit opening Sunday will not take a stance against Iran regarding Teheran's nuclear programme, GCC Secretary General Abdul Rahman Al Attiya said.

The summit begins Sunday evening in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to discuss political, economic and security topics.

Al Attiya said GCC countries do not fear Iran's nuclear programme as long as it is limited to peaceful applications.

'However, if it is in contradiction with this, then the programme becomes unjustified and the issue will not be neglected,' he said.

'We have confidence in Iran, but we don't want to see the Iranian nuclear reactor, which is closer to our coast than the distance between it and Tehran, as a cause of perils and damages to us', Al Attiya said.

'We want Iran to be logical in dealing with the nuclear issue, in such a manner that it meets its peaceful purposes without inflicting damage on its neighbours,' he added.

The Secretary General also denied that Council countries would mediate between the U.S. and Iran on the nuclear issue, saying the U.S. has not requested GCC mediation.

Referring to Israel's suspected nuclear weapons programme, Al Attiya said that 'the superpower member countries in the U.N. Security Council should act to force Israel to subject its nuclear plants for inspection, so as not to continue a threat to the stability and security of the region.'

He added that a GCC initiative will be announced soon calling for conclusion of an agreement between the GCC countries and Iran, Iraq and Yemen to ensure a region free from nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction.

On normalisation of relations with Israel, Al Attiya pointed out that 'all Arab countries are adherent to the Arab League's resolutions.'

'We are not aware of any differences in this respect among the countries of the region, as we are looking forward for an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital,' he said.

The two-day summit will be inaugurated by UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan at the Emirates Palace hotel, where the opening session is to be followed by a closed first session.

The second session, also closed, is to be held on Monday, and the summit is to be concluded with the announcement of a communique.

On the political level, the summit is to look into the situation in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, GCC-Iran relations and the Iranian occupation of three UAE islands - Greater and Lesser Tunbs and Abu Moussa - as well as counter-terrorism, making the Middle East and the Gulf region free of weapons of mass destruction, and developments in Lebanon and Syria.

On economic issues, the summit will focus on requirements for the GCC market to be established in 2007, as well as steps related to the timeline for monetary union and issuing a unified currency by the year 2010.




-------- pakistan

Ted Turner urges nuclear disarmament on visit to quake-hit Pakistan

ISLAMABAD (AFP) Dec 18, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051218174754.rwjcokrr.html

US media mogul and billionaire philanthropist Ted Turner on Sunday urged India and Pakistan to give up their nuclear arsenals, as he visited areas of Pakistan devastated by a massive earthquake in October.

"We are very concerned about the nuclear arsenals of both India and Pakistan and we would love see the world without nuclear weapons at all," Turner told reporters in Islamabad after visiting the quake-hit zones.

"The Indian sub-continent would be a lot safer without nuclear weapons," the founder of Cable News Network (CNN) television said, adding that he would urge all nuclear-armed states to get rid of their arsenals.

Turner, who created the UN Foundation in 1998 with a one-billion-dollar donation to support UN causes, said he would raise the nuclear issue in talks with Pakistani officials.

He said the United States and Russia needed to take the lead in nuclear disarmament because they possessed more than 95 percent of all nuclear weapons in the world.

But he added: "Any serious disarmament would have to include all nuclear powers."

Turner, along with members of the foundations board of directors, arrived in Pakistan this weekend for a three-day visit to areas ravaged by the October 8 quake, which killed more than 73,000 people in Pakistan and 1,300 in India.

"The touring of earthquake-stricken areas was very saddening but on the other hands it was very inspirational too," Turner said, pledging his foundation's continued assistance.

The US philanthropist said he was touched by the "resilience, courage and strength of the Pakistani people", whom he saw clearing the wreckage of their destroyed homes.

The UN Foundation has so far contributed nearly one million dollars into the UN flash appeal for the South Asia earthquake, specifically earmarked for building temporary housing and strengthening aid coordination efforts.

Turner said the UN Foundation would also gear up its efforts to fight polio in Pakistan, saying: "We will eradicate it completely."



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


-------- colorado

Rocky Flats cleanup a model first step

12/18/2005 01:00:00 AM Denver Post

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_3313791

The federal government must clean 32 nuclear defense sites. The successful effort at the Flats could be a template, but some projects will be tougher.

Across the country, state governments and federal agencies look to the successful closure of Rocky Flats near Boulder as a model for how to clean up nuclear defense sites.

But, as difficult as it was to shut down the bomb trigger factory in Colorado, problems at other atomic facilities are even more complicated.

Altogether, the federal government must scrub clean all 32 nuclear defense sites, a mission that will take until 2035 and cost a staggering $150 billion. Any delays will lead to higher costs, bigger environmental headaches and exposure to unnecessary terrorism risks.

Mopping up the Cold War's legacy should be a bipartisan priority, as it was in Colorado. We got lucky: Rocky Flats' closure, which took nine years and was finished this fall, got started in an era of budget surpluses, so Congress readily supplied the needed $6 billion. It is the biggest cleanup finished to date by the U.S. Department of Energy, dwarfing the shutdown of a couple of labs in Ohio.

Now, though, the remaining nuclear cleanups compete for a chunk of a shrinking pie as Washington runs up record deficits. Against this backdrop, it would be tempting to ignore the Cold War's sobering environmental damage.

Wash. site "Stephen King scary"

The worst nightmare may be Hanford in eastern Washington state, where multiple reactors made plutonium for bombs from 1943 to 1987.

Covering an area half the size of Rhode Island, the Hanford site oozes radioactive particles toward the Columbia River upstream of popular recreation areas and the Portland, Ore., metro area. Some 177 underground storage tanks (of which 70 leak) contain 50 million gallons of toxic chemicals and highly radioactive wastes. Two indoor pools, called K Basins, hold 2,300 tons of corroded spent fuel rods. An observer familiar with the place called Hanford "Stephen King scary."

Washington and Oregon understandably want the site cleansed quickly. Instead, the $51 billion project is four years behind schedule. Rather than get the work back on track, the Bush administration asked Congress to give Hanford $626 million next year, down from $690 million in the previous three years. A House-Senate budget committee further cut the sum to $526 million.

The Hanford project is guided by the Tri-Party Agreement signed by the DOE, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Washington state officials.

A similar pact, the Rocky Flats Cleanup Agreement, protected Colorado's interests during that cleanup and gives our state some clout if future problems arise at the site.

Some members of Congress recently asked why the Hanford deal couldn't also include the flexibility contained in the Rocky Flats agreement. Certainly some practices could be imported to other sites, such as the good working relations between management and the unions that collaborated on work processes and accelerated the project.

Cleanup could be more tricky

But it may prove more difficult to craft other agreements along exactly the same lines.

For one thing, there were fewer liquid wastes at Rocky Flats, and so technical problems at the site proved relatively easy to work around. If a problem arose while dismantling one contaminated building, the DOE could take down another structure while figuring out how to handle the first one. But at Hanford, some tasks, particularly those handling radioactive liquids, must take place in a specific sequence.

Rocky Flats and Hanford are among 13 sites that will be fully closed. Another 19 facilities will have continued responsibilities for maintaining the nation's nuclear arsenal.

It's tough for cleanup crews to work around ongoing industrial activities when some sites also have growing environmental woes. At Savannah River, S.C., for example, cracks and leaks were found at 15 of 51 nuclear waste storage tanks.

Citizen activists also fear they don't know the full extent of contamination at some particularly secretive sites, like Pantex in Texas (which houses the nation's stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium) and the Los Alamos laboratories in New Mexico, where scientists must figure out how to stabilize deteriorating nuclear warheads.

Colorado benefited from the support that members of Congress from other states gave the Rocky Flats' project. Now, it's Colorado's turn to help other states ensure that the remaining cleanups don't vanish from the political radar. 



-------- florida

FPL says Turkey Point nuclear power plant is secure
In the post-9/11 era, FPL has turned Turkey Point into a heavily guarded encampment that managers are confident could repel a sneak attack.

BY CURTIS MORGAN
cmorgan@herald.com
Sun, Dec. 18, 2005 Miami Herald

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/13433571.htm

Terry Jones, the man in charge of Turkey Point, strides the nuclear power plant with the air of a captain walking the deck of a warship.

That's fitting, because Jones is a former naval officer and Turkey Point is girded for battle.

A small private army patrols the grounds. Each guard, clad in black body armor, totes an automatic weapon and is trained to drill holes in targets -- or torsos -- at long range through darkness, fog or smoke.

Bulletproof towers, painted gray, occupy strategic positions to scan the perimeter or lay down crossfire. The plant, east of Florida City and along the mangrove shoreline of Biscayne Bay, is ringed with barricades to stop vehicles and fencing to snare invaders.

''Should the bad guys penetrate our outside perimeter, they're going to encounter considerable resistance,'' Jones said. ``We're kind of running them through a maze here where the security forces can pick them off.''

DIRE SCENARIOS

Florida Power & Light executives insist that the likelihood of a terrorist assault, let alone a successful one, is almost nonexistent. The same holds for other dire scenarios, from accidents to equipment failures that critics warn could produce radioactive clouds from reactor meltdowns or spent-fuel pool leaks.

They are confident that Turkey Point and FPL's St. Lucie County nuclear plant are prepared to prevent the unimaginable from happening.

In June, for example, a transformer connected to reactor No. 4 burst into flames at 3:15 in the morning, the first big accident in years at Turkey Point, the state's oldest nuclear plant.

Ironically, the fire wasn't caused by aging equipment that critics questioned in 2002 before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved extending Turkey Point's operating license until 2033.

The fire was sparked by a design flaw in the new transformer that spewed mineral oil, an internal coolant. The blaze was snuffed in 28 minutes, and the reactor in a giant containment building was never threatened.

While the accident was serious and costly -- shutting down the reactor for 21 days to replace and check equipment -- Jones sees it as a real-world test of the plant's safety and security systems.

''This is the first time we've ever had a transformer fire in 20 years,'' he said.

Turkey Point has reported few operating problems since the late 1980s, when it was on the NRC's ''problem plant'' list for four years after a string of troubles -- from security lapses to equipment failures.

In 1990, FPL spent nearly $240 million on upgrades, and until last summer's fire, the plant had a stellar record, even weathering the brunt of Category 5 Hurricane Andrew in 1992. In 1997, the NRC named it one of the two safest nuclear plants in the nation.

SAFETY IS MAIN CONCERN

Regulators are currently weighing a safety violation over the capacity of reactor cooling pumps at Turkey Point, but NRC spokesman Roger Hannah described it as a relatively minor technical issue, and FPL is disputing it.

''When it comes to nuclear energy, our primary concern is safety,'' said Jones, FPL's site vice president. He pointed to an array of reactor controls in a training room, all equipped with multiple backups.

''Our engineering basis is redundancy,'' he added.

The record is less sterling at St. Lucie, which was issued seven NRC violations between 1996 and 1999 for a variety of equipment, operating and security problems.

Given that reactors run on uranium, material used in weapons of mass destruction, security has always been heavy. It has clearly been strengthened since Sept. 11, 2001, but FPL won't say much.

''Not unlike the military, it's really on a need-to-know basis,'' Jones said. ``As much as we'd like to tell the public about all our gear, it's not appropriate.''

Beyond visible defenses, there are explosive, metal and motion detectors, along with undescribed and unseen sensing systems. To enter a zone where there is radioactive material requires handprint scans and passage through heavy stainless steel turnstiles monitored by armed guards.

All of that doesn't reassure some groups that argue that nuclear plants will only become more attractive targets as spent-fuel stockpiles grow.

Mark Oncavage, a member of the Sierra Club in Miami-Dade County and longtime foe of nuclear power, argued that FPL brushed aside many potential problems when Turkey Point was relicensed in 2002. He questioned the structural integrity of the aging steel and concrete reactor towers and whether security could repel an aerial or water assault by a large force.

Jones is confident that Turkey Point can handle itself. Earlier this year, in a periodic test, the NRC staged a mock terrorist attack at the plant.

''The [raid] is a very robust and intense test,'' Jones said. ``We basically gave them our playbook, and our forces won easily.''


-------- us nuc waste

Power and peril
FPL and the rest of the nuclear power industry are running out of room to store radioactive waste, while critics fret about risk of attacks or accidents.

BY CURTIS MORGAN, Sun, Dec. 18, 2005 Miami Herald
cmorgan@herald.com

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/13433555.htm

Every 18 months, Florida Power & Light engineers load fresh fuel into one of the twin nuclear reactors at Turkey Point.

What they take out is the problematic byproduct of making electricity by splitting atoms -- some 30 tons of metal rods packed with uranium pellets, depleted fuel that will remain lethally radioactive for eons.

It is the world's most hazardous waste, and FPL, along with the nation's nuclear power industry, is running out of room to store it.

Deep pools of water where waste has been stored for three decades are nearly full at both Turkey Point, along south Biscayne Bay, and FPL's St. Lucie County plant, on Hutchinson Island.

With a national disposal site in Nevada a decade overdue and so mired in controversy that it may never be built, FPL either has to find new storage or shut down the reactors that power more than a million homes.

So, as early as next year at St. Lucie and by 2007 at Turkey Point, FPL will start to load waste into thick concrete and steel canisters called dry casks, which are used at 30 other plants around the nation.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the nuclear power industry call the casks a safe solution to waste that nobody wants -- at least until a permanent facility is approved, somewhere, someday.

''Dry cask storage is not only viable, but proven,'' said Robert Tomonto, an engineer supervisor at Turkey Point.

Nuclear critics acknowledge that the new system may be an upgrade over brimming storage pools. But they question their vulnerability to terrorist attacks or plant accidents. More broadly, they fear that Turkey Point and other plants will wind up as permanent dumps for ever-expanding stockpiles, ratcheting up risk factors to surrounding communities.

Eventually, FPL projects that Turkey Point could have as many as 54 casks -- each resembling a 20-foot-tall concrete thermos -- on the grounds. St. Lucie, with larger reactors and different fuel rods, could need more than twice as many.

''It's not a good place to keep it there, and it's not a good idea to move it around,'' said Mark Oncavage, a longtime anti-nuclear activist with the Sierra Club in Miami. ``It's an entire failure mode of what to do with nuclear waste, and it's a big bucket of worms.''

TURKEY POINT'S ORIGIN

Turkey Point, Florida's oldest nuclear power plant, went on line in 1972. St. Lucie cranked up in 1976.

Like most plants, they were never intended to hold decades' worth of what the industry prefers to call ''spent'' fuel. They were designed in an era when the federal government envisioned recycling depleted uranium, a plan abandoned over high costs and environmental concerns in 1977.

Instead, the U.S. Energy Department agreed in 1982 to build a federal repository. The site, deep under Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert, was supposed to open in 1998 but has been embroiled in lawsuits, political controversy and scientific debates. Ground has yet to be broken.

As a result, Turkey Point's fuel pools, 40 feet deep but otherwise not much bigger than the average backyard swimming pool, are filled with old fuel rods dating back to when the Miami Dolphins were winning Super Bowls.

Both FPL plants hold large volumes of what the government calls ''high-level'' radioactive waste -- about 2,000 tons between them, roughly 2 percent of the national total. FPL projects that the waste from Turkey Point's two reactors will run out of space in the storage pools in 2010 and 2012, St. Lucie's two reactors by 2007 and 2010.

In April, a National Academy of Sciences panel released a largely classified report echoing many activists' concerns and calling for evaluating waste storage nationwide.

Critics say the waste poses a number of potential threats. Small amounts of it could be used to create ''dirty bombs'' and spread low levels of radiation. Accidental radiation releases also could taint groundwater, a particular concern in South Florida.

But the single biggest worry is the vulnerability of pools to an attack or accident that could drain the demineralized water cooling the hot material, allowing heat to spike enough to ignite the fuel rods.

Under a worst-case scenario, such a ''cladding fire'' could release enough radioactivity to contaminate miles of surrounding environment and kill or sicken thousands, said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, which monitors the industry.

''Many spent-fuel pools have eight, nine times as much fuel as whatever is in the reactor at one time,'' Lochbaum said. ``It can still get hot enough to either melt down or catch on fire if compromised.''

Rachel Scott, nuclear communications manager for FPL, said critics dramatically overstate risks and ignore an unblemished record of waste storage.

Cooling pools, with concrete and steel walls five feet thick, are equipped with multiple water-pumping systems and are protected by intense security, she said.

''There has never been an issue with the safety of the fuel pools,'' she said.

FPL engineers say there also should be no safety concerns with dry casks. Though stored outside, they'll be arrayed in the most heavily guarded zones at both plants.

FPL also intends to use the dry casks to handle only the oldest, least radioactive fuel now in the pools. The transfer of the rods takes place underwater, preventing radiation releases, FPL engineers said.

Terry Jones, Turkey Point's site vice president, described the casks, which weigh about 100 tons each -- unloaded -- as tough enough to endure anything from hurricanes to collisions with locomotives.

''They've dropped these from railroad cars onto steel beams and they haven't failed,'' he said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission considers them safe to hold waste for nearly a century, said David McIntyre, an agency spokesman in Washington.

More than 700 dry casks already are in use around the country, some for 20 years, and the NRC projects that most of the nation's 63 reactor sites will be using them within a decade.

NEW RISKS?

Lochbaum and other critics say they also pose new security risks. The Los Angeles Times, for example, reported this year that a government test showed that a shoulder-fired missile could crack open a cask.

''These things are just parked in the open air in plain sight, and they're concentrated in one location like bowling pins,'' said Kevin Kamps, a nuclear waste specialist with the activist group Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington.

Kamps' group, which advocates phasing out nuclear power, doesn't see any good choices.

''We're pulled in different directions on this,'' he said.

Nuclear power proponents defend the casks for short-term use but say they want a long-term solution somewhere.

The industry blames fear-mongering by anti-nuke activists and federal foot-dragging and continues to support Yucca as a sound site.

For a dormant nuclear power industry re-energized by spiraling oil costs and support from the Bush administration to expand, resolving the waste issue could prove crucial.

''One of the favorite strategies of the anti-nuclear movement is trying to block the industry's progress by trying to get us to choke on our waste,'' said Rod McCullum, a senior project manager with the Nuclear Energy Institute. ``The bottom line is it's safe where it is now.''

Utilities, including FPL, have filed 66 lawsuits against the federal government for failing to open the Nevada dump, and are demanding billions they have already paid for its construction -- money from a tenth-of-a-cent surcharge per kilowatt hour collected from consumers.

The NRC's most optimistic projection for opening Yucca is 2010, but few expect that.

Even if Yucca does open, it will take years to move waste, and plants already have more on site than the depository can handle. Given that reality, the industry already has put together a second, also controversial, option -- a massive private dump.

INDIAN RESERVATION

In September, the NRC issued a license to a consortium of utilities, including FPL, to store as many as 4,000 casks on the reservation of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians, a poor tribe whose sparsely populated site is about 40 miles west of Salt Lake City.

Scott said FPL is evaluating whether it may eventually transfer waste casks there. The move would be more expensive than on-site storage and raise some of the same hot-button issues that have stalled Yucca. Activists also oppose the Utah site and the risk of transporting nuclear material across the county.

Either way, it's clear that the stockpiles at Turkey Point and St. Lucie won't be shrinking anytime soon.



-------- MILITARY 


-------- prisoners of war

Powell defends rendition, says move not new

Web posted at: 12/18/2005 3:14:49
Source ::: Reuters

http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=World_News&subsection=Americas&month=December2005&file=World_News2005121831449.xml

LONDON: Rendition, the controversial practice of moving terrorism suspects from one country to another, is not new and European governments should not be surprised by it, Colin Powell said yesterday.

The former US secretary of state was speaking to the BBC after his successor, Condoleezza Rice was forced to defend the practice during a recent trip to Europe. The trip was overshadowed by allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency ran secret prisons in eastern Europe and covertly transferred suspects via European airports.

“Most of our European friends cannot be shocked that this kind of thing takes place,” Powell told BBC World. “The fact that we have, over the years, had procedures in place that would deal with people who are responsible for terrorist activities, or suspected of terrorist activities. And so the thing that is called rendition is not something that is new or unknown to my European friends.”

Rice also said rendition was a decades-old instrument used by the United States when local governments could not detain or prosecute a suspect, and traditional extradition was not an option.



-------- spies

Bush admits giving spying orders
President Bush made a radio address on Saturday

Sunday 18 December 2005, 9:37 Makka Time, 6:37 GMT  

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/4A57D374-28F2-42C9-833D-45C91F1B1C40.htm

The US president has said he has no intention of stopping his personal authorisations of a post-September 11 secret eavesdropping programme in the United States, defending it as crucial in preventing future attacks.

"This is a highly classified programme that is crucial to our national security," President Bush said in a radio address delivered live from the White House on Saturday.

"This authorisation 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."

Members of Congress have demanded an explanation of the programme, revealed in Friday's New York Times, and want to know whether the monitoring by the National Security Agency without obtaining warrants from a court violates civil liberties.

Bush said the programme was narrowly designed and used "consistent with US law and the constitution". He said it was used only to intercept the international communications of people inside the United States who had been determined to have "a clear link" to al-Qaida or related terrorist organisations.

Review

The programme is reviewed every 45 days, using current threat assessments, legal reviews by the Justice Department, White House counsel and others, and information from previous activities under the programme, the president said.

"He's President George Bush, not King George Bush. This is not the system of government we have and that we fought for"

Without identifying specific politicians, Bush said congressional leaders had been briefed more than a dozen times on the programme's activities.

The president also said the intelligence officials involved in the monitoring received extensive training to make sure that civil liberties were not violated.

Appearing angry at points during his eight-minute address, Bush said he had re-authorised the programme more than 30 times since the 11 September attacks and planned to continue doing so.

"I intend to do so for as long as our nation faces a continuing threat from al-Qaida and related groups," he said.

Bush's remarks echoed those issued on Friday night by a senior intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity. His unusual discussion of classified activities showed the sensitive nature of the programme, whose existence was revealed as Congress was trying to renew the Patriot Act.

'Breathtaking'

Reacting to Bush's defence of the NSA programme, Russell Feingold, a Democrat senator, said the president's remarks were "breathtaking in how extreme they were".

Feingold said it was "absurd" that Bush said he relied on his inherent power as president to authorise the wiretaps.

"If that's true, he doesn't need the Patriot Act because he can just make it up as he goes along," he said.

"I tell you, he's President George Bush, not King George Bush. This is not the system of government we have and that we fought for."



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

Most money goes to terror training

By Sarah Linn
The San Luis Obispo Tribune
Posted on Sun, Dec. 18, 2005

http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/13435362.htm

Blue-suited rescuers move through the drizzle of a November morning, carrying the victims of a mock chemical terrorist attack at Camp San Luis Obispo.

They're taking part in the county's largest drill -- and practicing a scenario that experience suggests is far less likely to strike San Luis Obispo County than an earthquake, flood or catastrophic fire.

Still, nearly three-quarters of the county's disaster preparedness budget is tied to the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. The county is required to spend the bulk of that funding to plan for what emergency workers call the "extremely unlikely" threat of a terrorist attack.

Drills like NOVEX, an annual November exercise aimed at preparing first responders, state officials and the National Guard for hazardous material spills and bioterrorism, are just one piece of a local system that neglects natural disaster planning.

Over the past 30 years, the county has experienced five disastrous floods, three massive wildfires, two hazardous material spills and two major earthquakes. In that time, there was only one terrorist attack -- a 1976 bomb explosion at Hearst Castle in San Simeon that caused no injuries and about $1 million in damage.

That domestic terrorism incident was attributed to an affiliate of the Symbionese Liberation Army, which kidnapped heiress Patricia Hearst.

"Obviously I don't think we're No. 1 on anyone's target list," county emergency services coordinator Ron Alsop said. "But Rule No. 1 is 'Never say never.'"

Narrow focus

The county's attitude echoes a post-Sept. 11 emergency preparedness system only recently reawakened by Hurricane Katrina to the threat of natural disasters, experts say. According to Army Reserve Lt. Col. Al Fonzi, a former emergency services coordinator for the county, the Federal Emergency Management Agency once centered on helping people recover from natural disasters.

Fonzi also is former deputy director of the National Inter-Agency Civil Military Institute of the National Guard Bureau in Washington, D.C.

"Now the focus is on terrorism" almost exclusively, Fonzi said.

FEMA will provide about 7 percent of the county Office of Emergency Services funding for the 2005-06 fiscal year, Alsop said, through an Emergency Management Performance Grant. That money matches some general planning costs.

About 73 percent of the office's revenues -- $690,731 this fiscal year -- will come from nuclear power plant emergency preparedness funds. The California Emergency Services Act requires that money to be paid by Diablo's owner, Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

The county Office of Emergency Services is seeking an additional $718,678 in grants from the federal Department of Homeland Security, to be distributed to area agencies. Those funds are intended to "prevent, deter, respond to and recover from threats and incidents of terrorism," according to a Dec. 6 request to the county Board of Supervisors to accept the funds.

Although some of the emergency equipment and programs funded may be useful for conventional disaster response, the primary purpose is anti-terrorism efforts.

Public information efforts also single out the threat of a nuclear disaster. Fliers sent out annually by county emergency services focus on a Diablo Canyon emergency, and the SBC phone book dedicates 11 pages to "nuclear emergency information" -- versus three-quarters of a page for earthquake preparedness.

Grave threats overlooked

Meanwhile, wildfires and earthquakes top the list of threats to San Luis Obispo County.

An 1857 earthquake in the Cholame Valley remains the largest earthquake in California history, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The magnitude-7.9 quake killed one person and rattled folks as far as Sacramento and Las Vegas.

That section of the San Andreas Fault remains active and could rupture soon, said Tom Holzer, an engineering geologist with the Geological Survey's Earthquakes Hazard Team.

There's an 80 percent chance of a large earthquake shaking the Central Coast in the next 50 years, Holzer said. The temblor would measure magnitude-6.5 or above -- at least the size of 2003's San Simeon Earthquake, which resulted in two deaths and $239 million in damage.

According to Alsop, the county was gearing up for a full-scale earthquake drill when the San Simeon shaker hit. Since then, emergency services hasn't had the resources to do a drill, he said.

There are no regular flood- related exercises and the office has yet to drill on its new tsunami plan, Alsop said. County supervisors approved the plan Nov. 1.

"Our weakness is that we drill for Diablo a lot and we do for other exercises what we can," Alsop said.

Largest drills

FEMA requires local emergency preparedness planners to stage a full-scale exercise at Diablo Canyon every two years. About 300 first responders participated in a three-day drill in December 2004 at the power plant, said Tracey Vardas, another county emergency planner.

NOVEX, short for November exercise, is coordinated by the California Specialized Training Institute. It takes place every November. And every spring, about 100 city and county firefighters gather to practice fighting wildfires, CDF/County Fire Chief Dan Turner said.

"It works," Turner said. "It's really important for people to get on the ground with each other, working with each other and learning."

Emergency planners say drills like NOVEX help them train for all kinds of disasters -- not just manmade ones.

"Generally if you're ready for one type of disaster, you're ready for any disaster," Alsop said.

Experts agree that general disaster planning and training sets down rules for emergency response and strengthens relationships between public agencies.

But it's dangerous to focus on one or two scenarios while ignoring the rest, said Kathleen Tierney, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado.

"You guys have a nuclear power plant," Tierney said, "You have to worry about that, but that is one of a range of threats you have to worry about."

"I would rather expect that wildfires and earthquakes pose a greater threat than a nuclear plant attack with a dirty bomb," she said.



-------- prisons / prisoners

America kidnapped me

By Khaled El-Masri
December 18, 2005 Los Angeles Times

http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes986.html

KHALED EL-MASRI, a German citizen born in Lebanon, was a car salesman before he was detained in December 2003.

THE U.S. POLICY of "extraordinary rendition" has a human face, and it is mine.

I am still recovering from an experience that was completely beyond the pale, outside the bounds of any legal framework and unacceptable in any civilized society. Because I believe in the American system of justice, I sued George Tenet, the former CIA director, last week. What happened to me should never be allowed to happen again.

I was born in Kuwait and raised in Lebanon. In 1985, when Lebanon was being torn apart by civil war, I fled to Germany in search of a better life. There I became a citizen and started my own family. I have five children.

On Dec. 31, 2003, I took a bus from Germany to Macedonia. When we arrived, my nightmare began. Macedonian agents confiscated my passport and detained me for 23 days. I was not allowed to contact anyone, including my wife.

At the end of that time, I was forced to record a video saying I had been treated well. Then I was handcuffed, blindfolded and taken to a building where I was severely beaten. My clothes were sliced from my body with a knife or scissors, and my underwear was forcibly removed. I was thrown to the floor, my hands pulled behind me, a boot placed on my back. I was humiliated.

Eventually my blindfold was removed, and I saw men dressed in black, wearing black ski masks. I did not know their nationality. I was put in a diaper, a belt with chains to my wrists and ankles, earmuffs, eye pads, a blindfold and a hood. I was thrown into a plane, and my legs and arms were spread-eagled and secured to the floor. I felt two injections and became nearly unconscious. I felt the plane take off, land and take off. I learned later that I had been taken to Afghanistan.

There, I was beaten again and left in a small, dirty, cold concrete cell. I was extremely thirsty, but there was only a bottle of putrid water in the cell. I was refused fresh water.

That first night I was taken to an interrogation room where I saw men dressed in the same black clothing and ski masks as before. They stripped and photographed me, and took blood and urine samples. I was returned to the cell, where I would remain in solitary confinement for more than four months.

The following night my interrogations began. They asked me if I knew why I had been detained. I said I did not. They told me that I was now in a country with no laws, and did I understand what that meant?

They asked me many times whether I knew the men who were responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, if I had traveled to Afghanistan to train in camps and if I associated with certain people in my town of Ulm, Germany. I told the truth: that I had no connection to any terrorists, had never been in Afghanistan and had never been involved in any extremism. I asked repeatedly to meet with a representative of the German government, or a lawyer, or to be brought before a court. Always, my requests were ignored.

In desperation, I began a hunger strike. After 27 days without food, I was taken to meet with two Americans — the prison director and another man, referred to as "the Boss." I pleaded with them to release me or bring me before a court, but the prison director replied that he could not release me without permission from Washington. He also said that he believed I should not be detained in the prison.

After 37 days without food, I was dragged to the interrogation room, where a feeding tube was forced through my nose into my stomach. I became extremely ill, suffering the worst pain of my life.

After three months, I was taken to meet an American who said he had traveled from Washington, D.C., and who promised I would soon be released. I was also visited by a German-speaking man who explained that I would be allowed to return home but warned that I was never to mention what had happened because the Americans were determined to keep the affair a secret.

On May 28, 2004, almost five months after I was first kidnapped, I was blindfolded, handcuffed and chained to an airplane seat. I was told we would land in a country other than Germany, because the Americans did not want to leave traces of their involvement, but that I would eventually get to Germany.

After we landed I was driven into the mountains, still blindfolded. My captors removed my handcuffs and blindfold and told me to walk down a dark, deserted path and not to look back. I was afraid I would be shot in the back.

I turned a bend and encountered three men who asked why I was illegally in Albania. They took me to the airport, where I bought a ticket home (my wallet had been returned to me). Only after the plane took off did I believe I was actually going home. I had long hair, a beard and had lost 60 pounds. My wife and children had gone to Lebanon, believing I had abandoned them. Thankfully, now we are together again in Germany.

I still do not know why this happened to me. I have been told that the American secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, confirmed in a meeting with the German chancellor that my case was a "mistake" — and that American officials later denied that she said this. I was not present at this meeting. No one from the American government has ever contacted me or offered me any explanation or apology for the pain they caused me.

Secretary Rice has stated publicly, during a discussion of my case, that "any policy will sometimes result in errors." But that is exactly why extraordinary rendition is so dangerous. As my interrogators made clear when they told me I was being held in a country with no laws, the very purpose of extraordinary rendition is to deny a person the protection of the law.

I begged my captors many times to bring me before a court, where I could explain to a judge that a mistake had been made. Every time, they refused. In this way, a "mistake" that could have been quickly corrected led to several months of cruel treatment and meaningless suffering, for me and my entire family.

My captors would not bring me to court, so last week I brought them to court. Helped by the American Civil Liberties Union, I sued the U.S. government because I believe what happened to me was illegal and should not be done to others. And I believe the American people, when they hear my story, will agree.



-------- POLITICS


-------- us politics

Domestic Spying Issue Inflames Debate Over Patriot Act Renewal

By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 18, 2005; A09

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/17/AR2005121701113_pf.html

President Bush escalated his attack yesterday on Senate Democrats and four Republicans for blocking efforts to renew the USA Patriot Act, but key lawmakers insisted they will not budge until stronger privacy protections are added to the domestic surveillance law.

In a hard-hitting speech at the White House, Bush rebuked those senators for blocking action Friday to reauthorize the act's key provisions, which are set to expire in two weeks. "That decision is irresponsible, and it endangers the lives of our citizens," Bush said. "In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment."

The day before, the president charged that the "delaying tactics" in the Senate could benefit terrorists who "want to attack America again and kill the innocent and inflict even greater damage than they did on September 11th."

Democrats hit back yesterday, saying Bush's aggressive use of domestic spying must be curbed by Congress and courts to protect civil liberties. "There is going to be no breakthrough" in the Senate impasse, said Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), adding that "the act as written is bad, and we need time to work it out."

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the Judiciary Committee's top Democrat, said of Bush's speech: "Fear mongering and false choices do little to advance either the security or liberty of Americans."

The stalemate marks an increase in tensions between the administration and Congress over Bush's anti-terrorism and surveillance policies and the conduct of the war in Iraq. Although Democrats have led the criticisms, a number of Republican lawmakers have joined in, pressing for a troop withdrawal timetable, a curb on interrogation techniques for detainees and, now, stricter limits on the administration's powers to spy on residents of the United States.

Reid and Leahy want a three-month extension of the existing Patriot Act, which would give the House and Senate more time to negotiate changes that could be locked in for four years. Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) repeatedly have said they will not accept a short-term extension.

But some Republican aides said privately that with lawmakers eager to adjourn for the holidays, few viable options exist. If GOP leaders are pushed to the brink, they said, a temporary extension of the current law might be preferable to its expiration.

Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), a leader of the filibuster, said yesterday: "Nobody wants these parts of the Patriot Act to expire. We want to fix them before making them permanent, by including important protections for the rights and freedoms of innocent American citizens."

The Senate fell eight votes short Friday of the 60 needed to end the filibuster and allow a vote on the proposed renewal of the Patriot Act, which the House approved Wednesday. Four Republican senators joined all but two Democrats in voting to sustain the filibuster.

The Patriot Act, approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, has made it easier for the FBI to conduct secret searches, monitor phone calls and e-mail, and obtain bank records and other personal documents in connection with terrorism investigations. Critics say the proposed renewal would do too little to let targeted people mount a meaningful challenge to national security letters and special subpoenas used by federal agents pursuing records.

The bill's supporters, including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), say it strikes a reasonable balance between providing tools to fight terrorism and safeguarding civil liberties.

Greatly complicating the bid to renew the act was last week's New York Times article disclosing that Bush had signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on citizens and foreign nationals in this country.

Patriot Act provisions set to expire Dec. 31 include those permitting "roving wiretaps" of suspects, FBI access to their business and library records, and the pursuit of "lone wolf" suspects with no known ties to foreign powers or agents.

On Friday, Frist likened the bill's opponents to those who "have called for a retreat and defeat strategy in Iraq." He sounded more conciliatory yesterday, as he sought a way out of the impasse. "Democrats want to fight this war on terror," Frist told reporters at the Capitol. "They want to give our law enforcement appropriate tools as well."

"I really feel that if we work hard, we can pass the Patriot Act [renewal] as written today," Frist said. "If I could just get people to study it and examine it."

That's unlikely, Reid said. A temporary extension of the law, allowing renewed House-Senate negotiations next year, "is the only way to go," he told reporters. If the law "is not extended," he said, "the full blame is with the president and the Republicans. We have bent over backward to try to accommodate them."

----

Pushing the Limits Of Wartime Powers

By Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 18, 2005; A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/17/AR2005121701233_pf.html

In his four-year campaign against al Qaeda, President Bush has turned the U.S. national security apparatus inward to secretly collect information on American citizens on a scale unmatched since the intelligence reforms of the 1970s.

The president's emphatic defense yesterday of warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens and residents marked the third time in as many months that the White House has been obliged to defend a departure from previous restraints on domestic surveillance. In each case, the Bush administration concealed the program's dimensions or existence from the public and from most members of Congress.

Since October, news accounts have disclosed a burgeoning Pentagon campaign for "detecting, identifying and engaging" internal enemies that included a database with information on peace protesters. A debate has roiled over the FBI's use of national security letters to obtain secret access to the personal records of tens of thousands of Americans. And now come revelations of the National Security Agency's interception of telephone calls and e-mails from the United States -- without notice to the federal court that has held jurisdiction over domestic spying since 1978.

Defiant in the face of criticism, the Bush administration has portrayed each surveillance initiative as a defense of American freedom. Bush said yesterday that his NSA eavesdropping directives were "critical to saving American lives" and "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution." After years of portraying an offensive waged largely overseas, Bush justified the internal surveillance with new emphasis on "the home front" and the need to hunt down "terrorists here at home."

Bush's constitutional argument, in the eyes of some legal scholars and previous White House advisers, relies on extraordinary claims of presidential war-making power. Bush said yesterday that the lawfulness of his directives was affirmed by the attorney general and White House counsel, a list that omitted the legislative and judicial branches of government. On occasion the Bush administration has explicitly rejected the authority of courts and Congress to impose boundaries on the power of the commander in chief, describing the president's war-making powers in legal briefs as "plenary" -- a term defined as "full," "complete," and "absolute."

A high-ranking intelligence official with firsthand knowledge said in an interview yesterday that Vice President Cheney, then-Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet and Michael V. Hayden, then a lieutenant general and director of the National Security Agency, briefed four key members of Congress about the NSA's new domestic surveillance on Oct. 25, 2001, and Nov. 14, 2001, shortly after Bush signed a highly classified directive that eliminated some restrictions on eavesdropping against U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

In describing the briefings, administration officials made clear that Cheney was announcing a decision, not asking permission from Congress. How much the legislators learned is in dispute.

Former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Senate intelligence committee and is the only participant thus far to describe the meetings extensively and on the record, said in interviews Friday night and yesterday that he remembers "no discussion about expanding [NSA eavesdropping] to include conversations of U.S. citizens or conversations that originated or ended in the United States" -- and no mention of the president's intent to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

"I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy," Graham said, with new opportunities to intercept overseas calls that passed through U.S. switches. He believed eavesdropping would continue to be limited to "calls that initiated outside the United States, had a destination outside the United States but that transferred through a U.S.-based communications system."

Graham said the latest disclosures suggest that the president decided to go "beyond foreign communications to using this as a pretext for listening to U.S. citizens' communications. There was no discussion of anything like that in the meeting with Cheney."

The high-ranking intelligence official, who spoke with White House permission but said he was not authorized to be identified by name, said Graham is "misremembering the briefings," which in fact were "very, very comprehensive." The official declined to describe any of the substance of the meetings, but said they were intended "to make sure the Hill knows this program in its entirety, in order to never, ever be faced with the circumstance that someone says, 'I was briefed on this but I had no idea that -- ' and you can fill in the rest."

By Graham's account, the official said, "it appears that we held a briefing to say that nothing is different . . . . Why would we have a meeting in the vice president's office to talk about a change and then tell the members of Congress there is no change?"

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), who was also present as then ranking Democrat of the House intelligence panel, said in a statement yesterday evening that the briefing described "President Bush's decision to provide authority to the National Security Agency to conduct unspecified activities." She said she "expressed my strong concerns" but did not elaborate.

The NSA disclosures follow exposure of two other domestic surveillance initiatives that drew shocked reactions from Congress and some members of the public in recent months.

Beginning in October, The Washington Post published articles describing a three-year-old Pentagon agency, the size and budget of which are classified, with wide new authority to undertake domestic investigations and operations against potential threats from U.S. residents and organizations against military personnel and facilities. The Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, began as a small policy-coordination office but has grown to encompass nine directorates and a staff exceeding 1,000. The agency's Talon database, collecting unconfirmed reports of suspicious activity from military bases and organizations around the country, has included "threat reports" of peaceful civilian protests and demonstrations.

CIFA has also been empowered with what the military calls "tasking authority" -- the ability to give operational orders -- over Army, Navy and Air Force units whose combined roster of investigators, about 4,000, is nearly as large as the number of FBI special agents assigned to counterterrorist squads. Pentagon officials said this month they had ordered a review of the program after disclosures, in The Post, NBC News and the washingtonpost.com Web log of William M. Arkin, that CIFA compiled information about U.S. citizens engaging in constitutionally protected political activity such as protests against military recruiting.

In November, The Post disclosed an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, using FBI demands for information known as "national security letters." Created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, the letters enabled secret FBI review of the private telephone and financial records of suspected foreign agents. The Bush administration's guidelines after the Patriot Act transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.

The Post reported that the FBI has issued tens of thousands of national security letters, extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans. Most of the U.S. residents and citizens whose records were screened, the FBI acknowledged, were not suspected of wrongdoing.

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincided with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed.

Yesterday's acknowledgment of warrantless NSA eavesdropping brought the most forthright statement from the president that his war on terrorism is targeting not only "enemies across the world" but "terrorists here at home." In the "first war of the 21st century," he said, "one of the most critical battlefronts is the home front."

Bush sidestepped some of the implications by citing examples only of foreigners who infiltrated the United States -- Saudi citizens Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers. But the most fundamental changes undertaken in the Bush administration's surveillance policy are the ones that have broadened the powers of the NSA, FBI and Pentagon to spy on "U.S. persons" -- American citizens, permanent residents and corporations -- on American soil.

Roger Cressey, who was principal deputy to the White House counterterrorism chief when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and a wing of the Pentagon, said "the amount of domestic surveillance is an admission of fundamental gaps in our understanding of what is happening in our country."

Those anxieties about unknown threats have ebbed and flowed since World War I, according to a bipartisan government commission chaired by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. President Woodrow Wilson warned against "the poison of disloyalty" and another loyalty campaign created black lists of accused Communists in the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Army and the NSA collected files and eavesdropped on thousands of anti-Vietnam War and civil rights activists.

Congress asserted itself in the 1970s, imposing oversight requirements and passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said FISA "expressly made it a crime for government officials 'acting under color of law' to engage in electronic eavesdropping 'other than pursuant to statute.' " FISA described itself, along with the criminal wiretap statute, as "the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance . . . may be conducted."

No president before Bush mounted a frontal challenge to Congress's authority to limit espionage against Americans. In a Sept. 25, 2002, brief signed by then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, the Justice Department asserted "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."

The brief made no distinction between suspected agents who are U.S. citizens and those who are not. Other Bush administration legal arguments have said the "war on terror" is global and indefinite in scope, effectively removing traditional limits of wartime authority to the times and places of imminent or actual battle.

"There is a lot of discussion out there that we shouldn't be dividing Americans and foreigners, but terrorists and non-terrorists," said Gordon Oehler, a former chief of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center who served on last year's special commission assessing U.S. intelligence.

By law, according to University of Chicago scholar Geoffrey Stone, the differences are fundamental: Americans have constitutional protections that are enforceable in court whether their conversations are domestic or international.

Bush's assertion that eavesdropping takes place only on U.S. calls to overseas phones, Stone said, "is no different, as far as the law is concerned, from saying we only do it on Tuesdays."

Michael J. Woods, who was chief of the FBI's national security law unit when Bush signed the NSA directive, described the ongoing program as "very dangerous." In the immediate aftermath of a devastating attack, he said, the decision was a justifiable emergency response. In 2006, "we ought to be past the time of emergency responses. We ought to have more considered views now. . . . We have time to debate a legal regime and what's appropriate."

Staff writers Charles Lane and Walter Pincus and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

---- 

Bush: Eavesdropping helps save U.S. lives

Updated 12/18/2005 4:58 AM (AP)

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2005/12/18/ap/headlines/d8eia4mg0.txt

WASHINGTON — Facing angry criticism and challenges to his authority in Congress, President Bush on Saturday unapologetically defended his administration's right to conduct secret post-Sept. 11 spying in the U.S. as "critical to saving American lives."

One Democrat said Bush was acting more like a king than a democratically elected leader.

Bush's willingness to publicly acknowledge some of the government's most classified activities was a stunning development for a president known to dislike disclosure of even the most mundane inner workings of his White House.

Since October 2001, the super-secret National Security Agency has monitored, without court-approved warrants, the international phone calls and e-mails of people inside the United States.

News of the program comes at a particularly damaging and delicate time. Tonight at 9 p.m. ET, the president plans a national address, announced Friday to focus on Iraq.

Already, the Bush administration is under fire for allegedly operating secret prisons in Eastern Europe and shipping suspected terrorists to other countries for harsh interrogations.

The NSA program's existence surfaced as the administration and its GOP allies on Capitol Hill were fighting to save the expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the domestic anti-terrorism law enacted after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In a stinging failure to Bush, Democrats and a few Republicans who say this law gives so much latitude to law enforcement officials that it threatens Americans' constitutional liberties succeeded Friday in stalling its renewal.

So Bush scrapped the version of his weekly radio address that he had already taped — on the recent elections in Iraq — and delivered a live speech from the White House's Roosevelt Room on the Patriot Act and the NSA program.

The gravity with which the White House regarded the situation was evident by the presence in the West Wing on a normally quiet Saturday of many of Bush's closest aides.

Often appearing angry in his eight-minute address, the president lashed out at the senators who blocked the Patriot Act's renewal, branding them as irresponsible.

He also made clear that he has no intention of halting his authorizations of the NSA's monitoring activities and said the public disclosure of the spy operation endangered Americans.

Bush said his authority to approve what he called a "vital tool in our war against the terrorists" came from his constitutional powers as commander in chief. He said that he has personally signed off on reauthorizations more than 30 times since the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The American people expect me to do everything in my power under our laws and Constitution to protect them and their civil liberties," Bush said. "And that is exactly what I will continue to do, so long as I'm the president of the United States."

James Bamford, author of two books on the National Security Agency, said the program could be problematic because it bypasses a special court set up by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to authorize eavesdropping on suspected terrorists.

"I didn't hear him specify any legal right, except his right as president, which in a democracy doesn't make much sense," Bamford said in an interview. "Today, what Bush said is he went around the law, which is a violation of the law — which is illegal."

Susan Low Bloch, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University Law Center, said the president needs authorization from Congress for this kind of activity.

"He's taking a hugely expansive interpretation of the Constitution and the president's powers under the Constitution," she said.

"It's consistent with everything the White House has been doing since 9/11. And every time that any of these measures have been challenged in the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court has ruled against the administration. The administration just doesn't seem to learn from that."

That view was echoed by congressional Democrats.

"I tell you, he's President George Bush, not King George Bush. This is not the system of government we have and that we fought for," Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., told The Associated Press.

Added Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.: "The Bush administration seems to believe it is above the law."

Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Friday said the NSA program was inappropriate and he promised hearings soon.

Bush defended the monitoring program as narrowly designed and used "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution." He said it is employed only to intercept the international communications of people inside the U.S. who have been determined to have "a clear link" to al-Qaeda or related terrorist organizations.

Government officials have refused to provide details, including defining the standards used to establish such a link or saying how many people are being monitored.

The program is reviewed every 45 days, using fresh threat assessments, legal reviews, and information from previous activities under the program, the president said. Intelligence officials involved in the monitoring receive extensive training to make sure civil liberties are not violated, he said.

Bush also said members of the congressional leadership have been briefed more than a dozen times on the activities.

The program through the nation's largest spy agency is designed in part to fix problems revealed by the 2001 attacks, in which it came to be learned that two of the suicide hijackers were communicating from San Diego with al-Qaeda operatives overseas.

"The activities I have authorized make it more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time," Bush said. "The activities conducted under this authorization have helped detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad.

The president had harsh words for those who revealed the program to the media, saying they acted improperly and illegally. The surveillance, was first disclosed in Friday's New York Times.

"As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have," Bush said. "The unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk."

Bush has more to worry about on Capitol Hill than his difficulties with the Patriot Act. Lawmakers have begun challenging Bush on his Iraq policy, reflecting polling that shows half of the country is not behind him on the war.

On Sunday, the president was continuing his effort to reverse that by giving his fifth major speech in less than three weeks on Iraq. This latest one was a 15-minute address, set in prime time from the Oval Office, that was to focus on his vision for Iraq for 2006.

One bright spot for the White House was a new poll showing that a strong majority of Americans oppose, as does Bush and most lawmakers, an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. The AP-Ipsos poll found 57% of those surveyed said the U.S. military should stay until Iraq is stabilized.



-------- ACTIVISTS

Charges Dropped, War Protestors Step Up Efforts

December 18, 2005 North Country Gazette

http://www.northcountrygazette.org/articles/121805WarProtestors.html/

ULSTER---The management of Kings Mall weren't happy when anti-war protestors Joan Keefe, 84, and Jay Wenk, 79, stood peacefully in front of a military recruitment center in the mall handing out anti-war leaflets.

Now, instead of just two people, there's groups of protestors numbering about 30 handing out anti-military recruitment leaflets in front of the recruiting center which is the only one in Ulster County.

Mall management initially filed a complaint with the police against the pair and they were twice arrested in August for trespass. Those charges were dismissed last week by Ulster Town Justice Marcia Weiss on technical grounds. About 100 protestors appeared in support of the pair at the town hall.

Keefe of Saugerties and Wenk of Woodstock were arrested in August. They had hoped to be found guilty of the charges so that they could appeal the conviction on First Amendment grounds because they say the public should be able to go into a mall and exercise their First Amendment rights. They say they're going to press on and hope they get arrested again so they can challenge the issue in court on constitutional rather than procedural grounds.

Keefe served in the Woman's Army Corps during World War II and is a retired antique dealer. As the protests get larger and create more public attention, it could become the nucleus for a more organized assault on the First Amendment issue. Wenk is a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge and said that he's encouraged by the additional protestors and says they'll be "stepping it up", particularly in light of the revelations by President Bush that he authorized secret spying on U.S. citizens.

"Impeach Bush 4 stupidity", read one sign held by a protestor while another carried the message "Stop the war before one more mother's child is lost". The shopping crowd was reportedly receptive to the protestors and there were no verbal confrontations. 12-18-05