NucNews - December 22, 2005 -------- NUCLEAR -------- accidents and safety SELLAFIELD SHAKE-UP FUELS FEARS OVER NUCLEAR SAFETY Published in Whitehaven News on Thursday, December 22nd 2005 By David Siddall, UK Business Gazette http://www.businessgazette.co.uk/viewarticle.asp?id=314439 CHANGES to the way Sellafield is managed have led the Government’s Nuclear Safety Advisory Committee to raise nuclear safety fears. The committee and the white-collar union Prospect were among those raising fears in the consultations to the NDA strategy, which was endorsed by the NDA board last Friday. The “distractions” of contracting out the operations of Sellafield led to some of the fears. The Nuclear Safety Advisory Committee warned: “There are many examples worldwide from the nuclear and other industries of safety-related events that can be traced back to a loss of operational focus during organisational change (the de-manning of Sellafield in the mid-1990s is an example of mismanaged organisational change)” On competition and tendering for work at Sellafield, the union warned: “Prospect has long-standing concerns about the proposed competitive framework. We remain strongly of the view that competition should not be on the same footing as other key objectives, such as safety and environmental performance, sharing of best practice, innovation and openness and transparency. “Setting site management agencies in competition with each other will certainly not be conducive to the free exchange of information that will be required in order to achieve synergy and the sharing of lessons learned.” In their letter to the NDA Prospect also warned that the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate is short of resources. Among the responses to the NDA was one from the Sellafield Churches Forum in Cumbria which urged “increasing the nuclear contribution to British electricity” and lambasted the NDA saying: “Despite the NDA’s professedly neutral attitude towards new nuclear generation, the whole tenor of the strategy document suggests a belief that the industry is dying and a desire to hasten its end.” In another submission, former Copeland councillor Marjorie Higham from Drigg stated that reprocessing should be ended. She said: “Unless there is a market for the products of reprocessing (uranium and plutonium), all this treatment is a waste of money and effort. “Dry storage of the original AGR fuel would reduce the growing stockpile of assorted radioactive waste which has to be processed, packaged, stored and kept safe. “I welcome any suggestion of dry storage... the problems of the old Windscale Pile ponds and B30 should be enough evidence against putting nuclear fuel under water as a cheap way to shield it... the idea of using Thorp ponds for storing AGR fuel until 2086 is totally unacceptable.” On Friday, the board of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority endorsed a proposed strategy to be submitted to the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and the Scottish Ministers for their consideration. The proposed strategy – which will be published once approved by Government – sets out how the NDA intends to shape its decommissioning and clean-up programme over coming years. It is the first time such a co-ordinated approach to the UK’s civil nuclear legacy has been taken. Sir Anthony Cleaver, chairman of the NDA, said: “We are grateful for all those people and organisations that took the time to respond to our consultation, and in time we will be able to show them how their comments were taken into consideration.” The strategy is based on the draft document which was the subject of a three-month consultation between August and November 2005, and which generated 275 responses. Most have been published on the NDA’s website as part of its drive for transparency. The Government now has until the end of March to approve the final strategy which will include the schedule for competing the contracts to run the NDA’s 20 sites, including Sellafield. -------- depleted uranium What ‘Mrs. Anthrax’ Told Me Saddam Hussein’s top aides just released from prison may have stories to tell. But when it comes to Iraq, who should we trust? WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY By Melinda Liu, Newsweek Updated: 1:25 p.m. ET Dec. 22, 2005 http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10575149/site/newsweek/ Dec. 22, 2005 - Shortly before the Iraq war began in March 2003, I didn’t believe Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash when she insisted, in an interview, that Saddam Hussein’s regime was not developing biological weapons. Dubbed by Washington “Mrs. Anthrax” or “Chemical Sally,” Ammash was then Iraq’s most powerful woman. She’d been accused by U.S. investigators of heading a program, into the mid-'90s, that involved the attempted weaponization of anthrax, smallpox and botulin toxin. On Monday, her Baghdad lawyer confirmed that Ammash was one of around two dozen Saddam-era officials released from jail without charges. A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad confirmed a number of so-called “high-value detainees” had been released because “they were not considered to be a security threat, and they were not wanted on charges under Iraqi law. So we no longer had any reason to continue detaining them.” Ammash and another woman, Dr. Rihab Rashid Taha, a British-educated biological-weapons expert that American officials called “Dr. Germ,” were among Saddam’s most notorious scientists. They were believed to have run the Baathist regime’s biological-weapons programs. When Ammash was detained in early May 2003, I simply assumed she would go on trial for war crimes as one of the masterminds of a WMD program that was, after all, the reason why the U.S. and British governments had insisted on regime change in Baghdad. When I interviewed Ammash, it was early March 2003 and Saddam was still in power. Ammash was tastefully dressed in Western clothes and jewelry—in contrast with the stern, headscarved image that later appeared as the Five of Hearts among the U.S.-issued deck of cards showing the 55 regime officials “most wanted” by the American-led Coalition. Ammash was the only woman in the deck, reflecting the fact that she was the only female on the ruling Revolutionary Command Council, Iraq’s top decision-making body. During the interview, she declared: “To end one’s career in defense of Iraq is an honor.” Ammash laughed while recounting the anonymous phone calls that were bombarding her and other Saddam aides, urging them to defect and abandon the regime for the sake of their families. She said she’d received e-mails filled with computer viruses, as many as 18 in a single day. “It doesn’t fit the image of the U.S.,” she complained, evoking the notion that gentlemen don’t mess with a lady’s e-mail. Articulate and well-mannered, Ammash had been educated in the United States; she received a masters from Texas Woman’s University in Denton and a doctorate in microbiology from the University of Missouri. She was said to have been a key figure in Saddam’s biotech and genetic research programs and to have been trained by Nassir al-Hindawi, the alleged father of Iraq’s biological weapons efforts. However Ammash told me her scientific work focused on the what she called the carcinogenic effects of depleted uranium, which had been present in some U.S. bombs and missiles during the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. Of course, I didn’t believe everything she said (and she probably didn’t believe I was a journalist acting in good faith, either). Although we talked for nearly two and a half hours over tea, this was hardly a normal interview. It was a chat on the eve of war. Ammash and I both knew that bombs would soon be falling on Baghdad and that Saddam’s regime was, most likely, in its last days. One thing Ammash said did stick in my memory. She stressed that Iraqis remained fiercely proud of their civilization despite decades of violence and deprivation. “This country is Mesopotamia. Ninety-nine percent of the American people don’t know the country they’ll soon be bombing is Mesopotamia,” she said. “This nation has been serving civilization for 6,000 years. We invented the first alphabet … every American who enjoys education owes that to us.” To be sure, the “Mesopotamia card” was part of a spiel that Saddam’s aides had propagated before the war in an effort to stir up international sympathies. But pride in their history is also one reason why even Iraqis who opposed Saddam remain so resentful of what they see as foreign occupation. When I was in Iraq on assignment for a couple of months this past summer, some Baghdad friends who’d welcomed the sight of American Marines in 2003 now nurtured a festering and deep-seated ambivalence about the U.S.-led occupation. Some said they actually preferred the yoke of an Iraqi autocrat such as Saddam to the rule of an American conqueror, even a benign one. Today it’s obvious that many aspects of the U.S. presence in Iraq have been far from benign. When Ammash’s husband, Ahmed Makki Mohammed Saeed, told me in 2004 that he’d been “tortured” while being detained by U.S. authorities, I wasn’t sure whether to believe him. Revelations about U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison had not yet surfaced. And his accounts sounded bizarre: being subjected to hours and hours of earsplitting American rap music laced with profanity and being doused with cold water, then forced to stand for hours in front of a freezing air-conditioner turned up full blast. Still, the sheer weight of detail suggested to me that he wasn’t making it up. And subsequent tales of torture from other former detainees indicated that he might actually have been one of the luckier ones among them. The Saddam-era officials who are now suddenly free will undoubtedly have their own stories to tell—assuming they feel safe enough to talk. (Some officials in the current Shiite-dominated government have already vowed to track them down.) Ammash’s husband earlier claimed that she had changed dramatically during detention. A petite woman to begin with, she’d lost nearly 20 pounds, and her once jet-black hair had turned white “nearly overnight,” he said. Her lawyer had argued for leniency on medical grounds because he said her detention brought on a recurrence of breast cancer. A number of those freed were reported to have been flown out of Iraq aboard U.S. military aircraft out of concern that their lives are in danger. In addition to Ammash and Taha, the detainees released include former education minister Humam Abd al-Khaliq, whom United Nations weapons inspectors accused of trying to coverup Iraq’s nuclear weapons program before the 1991 war; Hossam Mohammed Amin, who’d headed the weapons inspections directorate, and Aseel Tabra, a former Iraqi Olympic Committee official and secretary to Saddam’s late son Uday. Why now? In the wake of Iraq’s elections, U.S. officials hope to indicate to hard-line Sunnis and some former Saddam loyalists that they too have a stake in the new Iraq. Sunni insurgents often have demanded prisoner releases as a condition for ending their violent rebellion. A particularly ruthless group of Sunni kidnappers specifically demanded that Iraqi women detainees—Ammash and Taha key among them—be freed last year after Briton Kenneth Bigley was taken hostage. He was killed in September 2004 after the kidnappers’ deadline passed. It’ll take more than a few prisoner releases to convince Sunni insurgents to lay down their arms. On Monday, an extremist group calling itself the Islamic Army of Iraq posted video on a Web site purporting to show a man being shot in the back of the head. It was impossible to identify the victim, though the video also showed an identity card belonging to American contractor Ronald Allen Schulz. Eleven days earlier, the group had claimed to have killed Shultz. The timing of the gestures of leniency also came just a few days after President George W. Bush conceded that 2003 intelligence reports on Iraq’s purported WMD programs were flawed. Now we’re being told by media quoting a former Western arms inspector, that Ammash was cooperative in detention and provided U.S. interrogators with credible evidence that Saddam did not have an active WMD program before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. When Saddam was still in power, most of us journalists reporting in Iraq simply assumed it was impossible to get a straight story out of his officials. Now we know Saddam’s aides weren’t the only ones spinning the truth. It’s hard to know what to believe any more. -------- europe Energy report: no need for sixth nuclear plant Thursday, December 22, 2005 PeakOil.com http://peakoil.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=10165 Mikko Kara, the writer of a report on the electricity market in Finland and the Nordic region, feels that speculation of a sixth commercial nuclear reactor for Finland is unnecessary. In his study, presented to Minister for Trade and Industry Mauri Pekkarinen (Centre) on Wednesday, Kara says that he does not believe that industry will increase its use of electricity in Finland. He believes that Finland's fifth plant, which is being built in Olkiluoto on the west coast, will be the last such facility in Finland, and that it will also be the last major investment in power plants of any kind. ---- Estonia port is vying to win back the ships By Dan Bilefsky December 22, 2005 http://shaan.typepad.com/shaanou/2005/12/estonia_port_is.html SILLAMAE In the early 1960s, the Kremlin ordered the Soviet military to blow up the port of Sillamae to prevent enemy ships from infiltrating this industrial town of 18,500 where uranium was enriched to build nuclear bombs during the Cold War. Now, Tiit Vahi, a former Estonian prime minister and a leader of the country's revolution against Soviet rule, wants to lure the ships back. His aim is no less than transforming a place once nicknamed "Uranium Lake" into a commercial port that will allow Estonia, a European Union member since last year, to serve as a bridge between East and West and shake up European trade. "Even if we could transport the dust on the containers coming from China, we'd be happy, since the Chinese cargo flow is so huge," said Vahi, who helped lead Estonia's independence movement in 1989 before becoming transport minister and prime minister and then entering the business world. While European companies are lobbying the EU to rein in low-price Chinese imports - a move that culminated in thousands of containers of Chinese T-shirts and sweatshirts being held up at EU ports over the summer - European ports like Sillamae are frantically casting around for even a fraction of China's enormous trade. The money at stake is huge. In the past 25 years, EU-China trade has increased nearly thirtyfold, to E146 billion, or $173 billion. Officials reopened the port of Sillamae in October, revamped with a reconstructed berth, a railway station and 2.5 kilometers, or 1.5 miles, of metal pipes for pumping oil to and from ships. It is now the EU's most eastern port - so close to the Russian border that you can see the city of Ivangorod, 25 kilometers away, sparkling in a haze across the Baltic Sea. Vahi said this location was the key to attracting China, since Chinese companies could cut by more than half the time it took for their goods to travel to Europe by putting them on Russia's Trans-Siberian Railway. Today, most Chinese companies send their goods on giant container ships to major West European ports like Rotterdam, where they are loaded on to smaller ships that fan across the Atlantic. By sending goods to Sillamae via Russia, Chinese companies could bypass the slow passage through the Suez Canal and shrink their travel times to 14 days from 40. The prospect of such time and cost savings prompted President Hu Jintao of China to invite Vahi to meet him in Beijing this summer to present his plans. A delegation of Chinese companies from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing also visited Sillamae this month. "We are interested in how we can use Sillamae as a gateway and distribution center," said Liu Mingguo, commercial counselor at the Chinese Embassy in Tallinn. Yet even if Sillamae succeeds in attracting the Chinese, there are also logistical issues to contend with. Although Estonian port authorities do not expect Russia to object on political grounds, transport experts note that using Russia as a supply route from China to the EU could prove difficult, as the Trans-Siberian Railway has parts that are old and outmoded. The Kremlin has been slow to ..... ...... grant foreign companies access to its commercial railways. What is more, analysts say, Russian regulations governing the granting of foreign licenses are complicated, and foreign companies cannot be assured that Moscow will not interfere with their plans. Moscow has also imposed double tariffs through the next two years on goods that are shipped to and from Russia using non-Russian ports, making the use of Russia's commercial railways an expensive proposition. Then there is the Estonian port's Soviet-era image, straight out of a John le Carré novel. For 50 years, Sillamae was one of the most heavily guarded cities in Estonia because of the Kremlin's fears that nuclear secrets would leak out. Locals say KGB agents kept watch and arrested trespassers. Inside its gates, the town was preserved as a Soviet-style utopia, with uniform Stalinist architecture and palm trees stored in special greenhouses during the winter. Many Estonians recall it as a foreboding place where no one ever smiled. Still, with its strategic position on the Baltic Sea, Pavel Telicka, an EU official coordinating a multibillion-euro project to upgrade the Baltic railway system, said Sillamae was another small step in bridging the Baltic countries and the West. "The potential for Estonia - and the Baltics - to act as a gateway between East and West is strong, but the transport infrastructure needs to be integrated with the rest of the bloc while Russia has to liberalize its transport markets," he said. Also weighing on Sillamae is the need to rebrand a place once considered one of Europe's biggest environmental hazards. When the Soviet military withdrew in the early 1990s, it left behind 12 tons of greenish-brown radioactive waste. For years the sludge remained beside the Baltic Sea. With the help of EU funds, Estonia fortified the site with walls, covered it with 15 meters, or 50 feet, of concrete and planted soil on top. Today, the grassy mound sits vacant. But Sillamae remains better known for its nuclear history than its commercial prowess. Anton Gans, Sillamae's marketing manager, says that Sillamae is so environmentally friendly today that the port could build a golf course on the area where the nuclear waste was dumped - though the EU has forbidden any building on the mound for 100 years. "We can thank the EU for the fact that our teeth don't shine from standing here," he said. Sillamae can also thank the EU for one of its other main draws: a 600-hectare, or 1,480-acre, free trade zone where companies can store goods ranging from DVD players to oil for three years without paying taxes or customs duties. Rival ports already are grumbling that the trade zone gives Sillamae an unfair advantage. "If the EU doesn't shut it down, other ports will make a huge stink," said Minco van Heezen, spokesman for the port of Rotterdam. But Maria Assimakopoulou, the European Commission spokeswoman for taxation, said Sillamae was entitled to have the zone and noted that goods were taxed when they arrived at their final destination. Vahi is hoping that incentives like this will attract investment to Sillamae and help the town regain some of the cachet it had when the surrounding area was a favorite vacation destination of Russian aristocrats in the 19th century. But he acknowledged that Sillamae was still trying to shed its reputation as a Russian enclave. During Soviet times, the Estonian language was not taught in Sillamae's schools, and many Estonians grew up here without speaking their native language. Vahi said he was confident that the port would prosper as globalization opened the Chinese and Russian markets. And he is undaunted by critics who dismiss Sillamae as just another port in a country of 1.4 million people with 101 ports. "I am used to seeing potential where other people see nothing," he said. -------- iran Iran sees 'diplomatic victory' in nuclear talks Thu Dec 22, 2005 10:48 AM ET (AFP) http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051222/wl_afp/irannucleareu_051222154656 TEHRAN - Iran has voiced satisfaction at the revival of talks with the European Union over its controversial nuclear activities, saying the deadlock has been broken without Tehran being called on to suspend sensitive fuel work. However, EU and Iranian officials maintained that the two sides remain far apart, with Iran insisting on its right to make nuclear fuel and the West fearful that this could be used to manufacture atom bombs. "The impasse over the nuclear file has been broken" and "from now on we sense a clear perspective for arriving at a compromise," said Hossein Entezami, spokesman for the Supreme National Security Council which is in charge of Iran's nuclear projects. "The very fact that the dangerous process, which began with the resolution of September 24th, has stopped constitutes a diplomatic victory," Entezami said in comments published Thursday by the moderate daily newspaper Shargh. The International Atomic Energy Agency had on September 24 adopted a resolution leaving the door open to sending Iran before the UN Security Council over its refusal to keep up a freeze on uranium conversion activities, which it resumed in August. Also in August, European negotiators from Britain, France and Germany -- the EU-3 -- decided to break off negotiations with Iran, but a fresh round of talks resumed Wednesday with the parties agreeing to continue discussions next month in Vienna. Earlier negotiations had failed over Iran's refusal to accept European offers of trade and economic incentives in exchange for a halt to enrichment activities. As the fresh talks opened, Tehran reiterated what it described as its right to uranium enrichment, which it had suspended as a goodwill gesture in October 2003, under the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. "The message of the Iranian delegation is to insist on the need for a precise calendar for resuming enrichment inside Iran," Iranian negotiator Mohammad Mehdi Akundzadeh told the official state news agency IRNA. Iran's Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki also apparently rejected a Russian proposal that Iran to do some fuel work at home while enriching uranium only on Russian territory to keep this strategic activity out of Iran. "It is normal that when we speak of enrichment for the fabrication of nuclear fuel that this means enrichment activities and the nuclear fuel cycle on our own territory," the foreign minister said Wednesday. If talks fail, the EU, backed by the United States, has said it will take Iran to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. Iran has threatened to retaliate against such a move. Western members of the UN nuclear watchdog held off from demanding that Iran be sent before the Security Council in November, in order to leave negotiators another chance. Entezami, in his remarks published Thursday, cited another example of what he described as evidence that Iran's stance had shown results. "On the eve of the November meeting, some politicians advised us to stop uranium conversion at Isfahan (nuclear facility) to avoid a harsh reaction from the international community," Entezami said. "But our principled position gave results and the Europeans agreed to return to the negotiating table without any preconditions. This constitutes a diplomatic success." -------- japan Japan says China "considerable threat" TOKYO (AFP) Dec 22, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051222065829.u10yr2l5.html China is becoming a "considerable threat" because of its rising military spending and nuclear weapons, the Japanese foreign minister said Thursday in the latest rift between the neighbors. "It is a neighboring country that has nuclear bombs. Its military spending is posting two-digit growth and the content of that is not transparent," Foreign Minister Taro Aso told reporters, as quoted by Jiji Press. "I think it is becoming a considerable threat," he said. Aso, an outspoken hawk appointed in late October, sided with Seiji Maehara, head of the main opposition Democratic Party, who recently called China a "realistic threat". "I think it is true that (China) is a threat and stirring up worry," Aso said. His remarks came after the release of a new Chinese government paper reiterating Beijing's intention to rise peacefully into a global power. "Building a harmonious world of sustained peace and common prosperity is a common wish of the people throughout the world as well as the lofty goal of China," the Chinese document said. Relations between China and Japan have been badly strained of late, with Beijing angry over Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to a Tokyo shrine that commemorates war criminals among the remembered dead. China, which was invaded and occupied by Japan before and during World War II, says the pilgrimage shows Tokyo does not fully regret its militarist past. Japan and China are also bitterly divided over gas reserves in the East China Sea, with Tokyo planning a major increase in patrols in the disputed area. But China, with its vast labor pool and rising middle class, remains Japan's top trading partner. Data released Thursday showed Japan's trade surplus rising in November for the first time in eight months, with demand from China fuelling Japan's economic recovery. Prominent ruling party lawmaker Taku Yamasaki said Thursday he would visit China next month in hopes of holding talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao, who declined to meet Koizumi at two recent regional summits. Addressing business leaders later Thursday, Aso said Japan wanted to be the leader in Asia, where China's influence is steadily growing. "Japan is the first country in Asia to complete a number of achievements: modernization, democratization, realizing a market economy, suppressing rising nationalism and closing the gap between rich and poor. "As a democracy and market economy, Japan together with the United States has the power to be a stabilizing force," he said. Koizumi's government has taken an increasingly hard line with China this year as Beijing moved to scupper Japan's hopes of getting a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Beijing argued that Japan needed to show more regret for the past before it was admitted to the council, where China is the only Asian country with permanent membership and veto power. China saw some of its biggest rallies in years in April to protest Japan's Security Council bid and its approval of a history textbook that makes only passing reference to Japanese atrocities in the 20th century. Aso's comments were more direct than defense guidelines Japan issued a year ago that warned of China's growing military muscle without using the word "threat." The guidelines for defense policymakers said China was "pushing ahead with enhancing its nuclear and missile capabilities in modernizing its navy and air force" and said Japan needed to "watch these moves in the future." ---- China accuses Japan FM of irresponsible remarks BEIJING (AFP) Dec 22, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051222080621.r0oa3f2z.html China on Thursday accused Japan's foreign minister of making irresponsible claims that Beijing is becoming a "considerable threat" because of its rising military spending and nuclear weapons. "As a foreign minister, to so irresponsibly incite such groundless rhetoric about a China threat, what is the purpose?" foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said at a regular briefing. Qin insisted China's increasing economic might was no threat to anyone and had actually benefited Japan. "China insists on a path of peaceful development. China's development has made commonly acknowledged contributions towards the world's peace and stability, bringing East Asian countries, including Japan, great development opportunities," he said. Qin was responding to remarks by Japan's Foreign Minister Taro Aso as quoted by Jiji Press earlier Thursday. "It is a neighboring country that has nuclear bombs. Its military spending is posting two-digit growth and the content of that is not transparent," Aso said in the latest rift between the neighbors. "I think it is becoming a considerable threat," he said. The latest dispute comes just two months after Aso, an outspoken hawk, was appointed in late October. Relations between China and Japan have been badly strained of late, with Beijing angry over Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to a Tokyo shrine that commemorates war criminals among the other war dead. Anger at Koizumi's action triggered the cancellation of a trilateral meeting between leaders of China, Japan and South Korea on the sidelines of an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Kuala Lumpur this month. Asked by reporters whether there is likely to be a meeting between Japan and China's foreign ministers any time soon, Qin indicated it was unlikely and blamed Japan for the impasse. "Relations between China and Japan is in a grave situation, but...the responsibility is not with China," he said. "China believes that China and Japan should bolster dialogues, exchanges and cooperations. But in order to have these exchanges to take place, we need to have the appropriate atmosphere and conditions." -------- russia Moscow court extends ex-nuclear power minister's arrest 18:32 | 22/ 12/ 2005 http://en.rian.ru/russia/20051222/42644166.html MOSCOW, December 22 (RIA Novosti) - On the request of the Russian Prosecutor General, a Moscow court has extended until April 12, 2006 the arrest in absentia of Yevgeny Adamov, Russia's ex-nuclear power minister, who is currently in a Swiss jail waiting for a decision of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court in Lausanne on his extradition, Adamov's lawyer said Thursday. Timofei Gridnev said the case for extending his client's arrest was not convincing and that he would appeal the decision to a higher court, the Moscow City Court. Adamov, who served as Russia's nuclear power minister in 1998-2001, was arrested in Bern May 2 at the request of U.S. authorities on accusations of misappropriating the $9 million granted to Russia for improving the safety of its nuclear facilities. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office also launched proceedings against Adamov, charging him with embezzlement and the abuse of office. Both countries petitioned for Adamov's extradition. Although the U.S. requested his arrest May 2, Swiss authorities did not receive the extradition request until June 24. Moscow's request for extradition was received May 17. On October 3, the Swiss Federal Justice Department announced its decision to extradite the former Russian minister to the U.S. Adamov's defense team appealed the decision at the Lousanne court in November. Until the federal court, whose rulings are final, decides on the appeal, Adamov will remain in custody in Bern. The court is not bound by a deadline. -------- u.s. nuc facilities -------- california PGE to pay in Humboldt plant case; Diablo fuel accounted for Thu, Dec. 22, 2005 San Luis Obispo Tribune http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/13464081.htm The utility lost track of radioactive spent fuel at the defunct facility near Eureka; no spent fuel has ever been removed from Diablo Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has agreed to pay $96,000 in penalties for losing track of radioactive spent fuel at its defunct Humboldt Bay nuclear power plant. The utility was fined because it cannot account for three 18-inch segments cut from a fuel rod that was removed from the plant's reactor in 1968. PG&E and the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission believe the missing fuel is either still in the plant's spent-fuel pool or, more likely, was shipped to a reprocessing facility in New York. "We accept the violations and fine, which will be paid for by shareholders," said Jeff Lewis, PG&E spokesman. "We regret our past recordkeeping practices that date back 20 years. Everything now is much more tightly controlled." No fuel has ever been removed from the spent fuel pools at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant and all of the spent fuel there is accounted for. The Humboldt Bay plant near Eureka is one of three nuclear facilities nationally that cannot account for all of their spent fuel, which remains dangerously radioactive for many years. Similar problems have been discovered at nuclear plants in Vermont and Connecticut. "It is important that licensees maintain an accurate inventory of the content of their spent-fuel pools," said Bruce Mallett, who heads the NRC's regional office in Arlington, Texas. "Based on our inspections and review of their response to this incident, we are confident that PG&E has taken the appropriate corrective actions to ensure this." These cases of missing fuel prompted the federal Government Accountability Office earlier this year to investigate. The report called for better management by the nuclear industry and better oversight by the NRC. The problem at Humboldt Bay was discovered last year when records checks revealed conflicting reports about what happened to the fuel rods. This prompted an inventory, which revealed that four small devices that were used to measure the amount of radioactivity being generated by the reactor were also missing. These detectors collectively contained six thousandth of an ounce of radioactive material. PG&E believes the four devices are also either in the spent fuel pools or were shipped to the reprocessing facility. It is difficult to determine if the missing rods are still in the pool because they may have broken apart when fuel was rearranged in the pools in the 1960s and 1970s and may have been stored under other components. The NRC conducted special inspections at the plant from November of last year to August of this year to review the circumstances of the missing fuel and ensure that PG&E has corrected the problem. The agency concluded that it is highly unlikely that the missing radioactive materials were stolen or pose any public safety risk. The Humboldt Bay plant was shut down in 1976 because of earthquake concerns. PG&E is in the process of establishing a dry cask storage facility for the 390 used but still highly radioactive reactor assemblies generated there. David Sneed covers environmental issues for The Tribune. E-mail story ideas and comments to him at dsneed@thetribunenews.com. Read a letter from feds fining PG&E $100,000 at sanluisobispo.com http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/enforcement/actions/materials/ea05166.html -------- iowa Nuclear plant sale challenged State consumer advocate faults approval By FRANK VINLUAN DESMOINES REGISTER BUSINESS WRITER December 22, 2005 http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051222/BUSINESS04/512220375/1029/BUSINESS The state agency that represents customers of utilities is challenging a ruling that allows Alliant Energy to sell Iowa's only nuclear power plant. In documents filed with the Iowa Utilities Board this week, State Consumer Advocate John Perkins said the board erred when it voted last month to allow the $380 million sale of the Palo plant to FPL Energy of Florida. Perkins says that decision allows Alliant to set sales terms at customers' expense. "The regulated becomes the regulator and turns the regulatory process on its head when it dictates the alternatives to reorganization that may be considered in this proceeding," he wrote. Perkins has asked the board to put the decision on hold, pending an appeal. A utilities board decision is expected within 30 days of the Tuesday filing. Alliant spokesman Ryan Stensland said the challenge was expected. He said he saw no new arguments and believes the board's vote supports Alliant's case. "We have met all the legal requirements," Stensland said. Before the sale of a power plant can proceed, Iowa law requires the utilities board to determine whether the sale is in the public's interest. Alliant has said it wants to get out of the business of both owning and running nuclear plants - noting that ownership of plants is consolidating among several large companies. Alliant officials had said that if the board did not approve the sale, the company would not relicense the facility in 2014 - meaning it would close. Stensland said consumers benefit from a sale because proceeds from the deal help create a fund that will support construction of new power plants. "For every dollar we get out of the proceeds, that is one less dollar we'll have to ask from customers," he said. Perkins called Alliant's claim that it won't relicense the plant a "threat" that is not part of the current case. What matters, Perkins said, is that the sale hurts customers in the long run. Although Alliant has an agreement to continue buying power from FPL through 2014, Alliant must find other sources of power after that date. Most likely, Perkins said, Alliant would need to build a new power plant, which is more expensive than keeping the plant it already owns. Those costs would be passed on to consumers in the form of higher rates, he reasons. "Whether (Alliant) relicenses the plant or doesn't is another matter for another day," Perkins said. Although the utilities board approved the sale, all three members said they thought the best outcome would be for Alliant to continue owning the plant and relicensing it beyond 2014. In explaining their votes to approve the sale, members Curt Stamp and John Norris said they reluctantly approved the sale because a sale to FPL best ensures the plant is relicensed and continues to operate. Utilities board spokesman Rob Hillesland said the board staff is reviewing the matter. Stensland said Alliant expects to file a formal response to Perkins by the end of the week. Either party can appeal to Polk County District Court. If appeals extend beyond Jan. 31 , Alliant would lose money from the sale. According to the sale agreement with FPL, for each day beyond Jan. 31 that the deal does not close, the sale price drops $128,000. -------- MILITARY -------- iraq 'No evidence' Saddam was tortured The defendants sometimes refused to sit down Thursday, 22 December 2005 (BBC) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4551656.stm The Iraqi judge who prepared the case against Saddam Hussein says there is no evidence he was beaten in US custody, despite the former leader's claims. Saddam Hussein has said in court he has been tortured, and accused the US of "lies" for denying it abused him. His trial has been adjourned until 24 January after three witnesses and a brief closed session on Thursday. He and seven others face charges over the killing of 148 people in Dujail in 1982. They all deny responsibility. In Thursday's session, Iraq's former president repeated claims in court that he had been beaten "all over my body" while in US custody. The US has dismissed the idea as "preposterous". Saddam Hussein said the US denials could not be believed. He cited as proof America's pre-war claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and the fact that none were found. "We don't lie. It is the White House that lies," he told the court. Investigating magistrate Raed Juhi said Saddam Hussein had never before said he had been mistreated. "My job requires me to ask each of the defendants if he has been abused, and... I have received no complaints," the judge told reporters on Thursday. 'Grandstanding' The US said Saddam Hussein was treated very well in custody. State department spokesman Sean McCormack said his allegations that he was beaten and tortured were "highly ironic". "Look, he's been given to grandstanding in this trial, but where the focus should be is on the testimony of those people who were victimised. "That's what people should be listening to." The BBC's Quil Lawrence in Baghdad says the Iraqi people are more interested in the witness testimony than in Saddam Hussein's allegations. In the courtroom on Thursday, the judge dismissed a guard the defendants said had threatened them. There was a stand-up row between Saddam's co-defendant Barzan al-Tikriti and a prosecutor, whom he accused of being a former member of the governing Baath party. The prosecutor called the accusation an insult and asked to be relieved of his duties. The judge refused. Barzan al-Tikriti - Saddam Hussein's half-brother and former intelligence chief - praised the judge as "brave", "educated" and "smart", but repeatedly defied his order to sit down. He complained about the trial being televised with a 30-minute delay, which he said was an "undemocratic" means of editing out parts the authorities did not want heard. He later said he wanted to speak to the judge in private, prompting Rizgar Amin to clear the court. Shortly afterwards, the trial was adjourned until the new year, as expected. Families taken away Three witnesses testified on Thursday, speaking from behind a curtain to conceal their identities. The first said he was eight years old during the killings in Dujail. He said his grandmother, father and uncles had been arrested and tortured. He said his male relatives were taken away and he never saw them again. Saddam Hussein said the witness was too young at the time of the incident for his testimony to be reliable. On Wednesday, witnesses had described being taken away and tortured by Iraqi security forces. Saddam Hussein said on Thursday that he was sorry to hear accounts of torture. "When I hear that any Iraqi has been hurt it hurts me too," he said. "The wrongs that were done to those people were wrong and, according to law, those who did it should get what they deserve." The ousted president is expected to face further charges relating to his tenure as Iraqi leader and could be hanged if found guilty. -------- prisoners of war Saddam accuses White House of lying Thursday 22 December 2005, Aljazeera http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/3618B543-3249-4528-BA6E-A0002EED2765.htm Saddam Hussein has accused the White House of lying about his alleged stockpiles of chemical weapons as well as the claim that he was tortured in US custody. Speaking on Thursday at the start of the seventh session of his trial on charges of crimes against humanity, the former Iraqi president rekindled his battle of words with Washington. "Zionists and Americans, I mean officials, hate Saddam Hussein," Saddam said. "The man in the White House is a liar. He said there are chemical weapons in Iraq. "He later said that, 'We did not find anything in Iraq'." Referring to a White House statement that his claims that he had been tortured were preposterous, Saddam said: "They lied again when they said that what Saddam said was wrong." On Wednesday, Saddam accused the Americans of beating him in custody and said he had the bruises to prove it. Saddam said: "I had my injuries documented by three American [medical] teams." He did not say where or when he was allegedly beaten. Theatrics There were other theatrical moments during Thursday's hearings: the judge dismissed one of the courtroom guards after the defendants complained that he had threatened them. Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother and co-defendant, accused the prosecutors of being former fellow members of the Baath party and a prosecutor asked to be relieved of his duties because of insults from the dock - a request dismissed by the judge. Barzan also accused his jailers of abuse. "They asked me questions and when I asked to be able to explain things they demanded that I reply by yes or no and slapped me across the face while I had handcuffs on," he said. It was not immediately clear if he was referring to US or Iraqi interrogators. Witness too young The first witness to testify on Thursday - speaking from behind a curtain and with his voice disguised - said he was eight during the killings in Dujail. He said his grandmother, father and uncles had been arrested and tortured. The witness said he had never again seen his male relatives, implying that they had been killed. Saddam said the court should not depend on the testimony of witnesses who had not reached adulthood at the time of the alleged crime. Defence lawyers also questioned the reliability of the witness. "This is a waste of time," one said. "He was only a child." A second witness also gave evidence on Thursday and a third was due after a recess. Video editing Barzan repeatedly interrupted the court, protesting at one stage that much of what he was saying was being edited out of video footage of the trial which is being broadcast on televisions with a 20-minute delay. "If the sound is cut off once again, then I don't know about my comrades but I personally won't attend again, this is unjust and undemocratic," he said. Prosecutors have accused the defendants of grand-standing in an attempt to turn the trial into a political forum for their views. A prosecutor then offered to resign, saying the presiding judge was not keeping proper order in the court and was allowing defendants to speak out of order. Rizkar Mohammed Amin, the presiding judge, would not accept his resignation. Barzan then accused the prosecutors of being former members of the Baath, the ruling party under Saddam. "This is the biggest insult there is, accusing me of belonging to the bloody Baath," one of the prosecutors answered. Barzan then stood up shouting: "Long live the Baath." This incident was edited out of video footage broadcast from the courthouse. Bailiff ejected In another courtroom incident, Amin ejected a bailiff after defendants alleged he had threatened them. It was not immediately clear who had allegedly been threatened or in what way. Saddam and his seven co-defendants are charged with ordering the killing of 148 people from the mainly Shia village of Dujail, north of Baghdad, in the 1980s. Prosecutors say Saddam ordered the killings in reprisal for a failed attempt to assassinate him in the village in 1982. Scores of families from Dujail were rounded up and shunted between jails around Iraq for four years after the attack. The trial was adjourned until 24 January. ---- Federal judge rules Chinese Gitmo detainees can be held indefinitely Bernard Hibbitts at 7:39 PM ET Thursday, December 22, 2005 [JURIST] http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2005/12/federal-judge-rules-chinese-gitmo.php A federal judge ruled Thursday that two Chinese Uighur detainees held by the US at Guantanamo Bay could be detained there indefinitely even though their imprisonment was unlawful. US District Judge James Robertson said that the courts simply had no relief to offer the men, who are no longer deemed enemy combatants by the government [JURIST report] but who cannot be returned to China, where they could face death or torture because of their Muslim faith [Human Rights Watch report]. Robertson said an order requiring their release inside the United States was not feasible for a variety of security and diplomatic reasons. Read Robertson's memorandum ruling [PDF] and accompanying order [PDF]. AP has more. Robertson, who had previously been publicly critical of the Uighurs' continuing detention [JURIST report], made headlines earlier this week in another context when he resigned from on the 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court [JURIST report] after reportedly expressing concern about a program authorized by President Bush to conduct warrantless wiretaps on international communications by US residents with known links to al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations. -------- spies News of Surveillance Is Awkward for Agency By SCOTT SHANE December 22, 2005 New York Times http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/nyt169.html Testifying before a Senate committee last April, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then head of the National Security Agency, emphasized how scrupulously the agency was protecting Americans from its electronic snooping. "We are, I would offer, the most aggressive agency in the intelligence community when it comes to protecting U.S. privacy," General Hayden said. "We just have to be that way." It was one of General Hayden's favorite themes in public speeches and interviews: the agency's mammoth eavesdropping network was directed at foreigners, not Americans. As a PowerPoint presentation posted on the agency's Web site puts it, for an American to be a target, "Court Order Required in the United States." In fact, since 2002, authorized by a secret order from President Bush, the agency has intercepted the international phone calls and e-mail messages of hundreds, possibly thousands, of American citizens and others in the United States without obtaining court orders. The discrepancy between the public claims and the secret domestic eavesdropping disclosed last week have put the N.S.A., the nation's largest intelligence agency, and General Hayden, now principal deputy director of national intelligence, in an awkward position. While a few important members of Congress were informed of the special eavesdropping program, several lawmakers have said they and the public were misled. The episode could revive old fears that the secret agency is a sort of high-tech Big Brother. It was such fears - based on genuine abuses before the mid-1970's, hyperbolic press reports and movie myths - that General Hayden worked to counter as the agency's director from 1999 until last April. "The image of N.S.A. has been muddied considerably by this revelation," said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian who is writing a multiple-volume history of the agency. Mr. Aid said several agency employees he spoke with on Friday were disturbed to learn of the special program, which was known to only a small number of officials. "All the N.S.A. people I've talked to think domestic surveillance is anathema," Mr. Aid said. An agency spokesman, Don Weber, declined to comment, saying, "We don't discuss actual or alleged operational issues." At a news conference at the White House on Monday, General Hayden also emphasized that the program's operations had "intense oversight" by the agency's general counsel and inspector general as well as the Justice Department. He said decisions on targets were made by agency employees and required two people, including a shift supervisor, to sign off on them, recording "what created the operational imperative." An intelligence official who was authorized to speak only on the condition of anonymity said, "It's probably the most scrutinized program at the agency." The official emphasized that people whose communications were intercepted under the special program had to have a link to Al Qaeda or a related group, even if indirectly. The official also said that only their international communications could be intercepted. Other officials have said, however, that some purely domestic communications have been captured because of the technical difficulties of determining where a phone call or e-mail message originated. But many questions remain about the secret program, including some Mr. Aid said were raised pointedly by his contacts at the agency: ¶Did agency officials volunteer to perform the eavesdropping without warrants, or did the White House order it over agency objections? ¶Why was it not possible to use warrants, as the law appears to require, from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which granted 1,754 such warrants last year and did not deny a single application? ¶Or, if the court was considered too slow or cumbersome, why did the agency not ask Congress to adjust the law and legalize what it wanted to do? After all, officials who have been granted anonymity in describing the program because it is classified say the agency's recent domestic eavesdropping is focused on a limited group of people. Americans come to the program's attention only if they have received a call or e-mail message from a person overseas who is already suspected to be a member of certain terrorist groups or linked somehow to a member of such groups. And the agency still gets a warrant to intercept their calls or e-mail messages to other people in the United States. Had the agency openly sought the increased power in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, "I'm sure Congress would have approved," said Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, a former general counsel of both the N.S.A. and the Central Intelligence Agency. By concealing the new program, she said, the N.S.A. breathed new life into the worst imaginings about itself. "This makes it seem like the movies are right about N.S.A., and they're wrong," Ms. Parker said. For anyone familiar with the agency's history, the revelations recalled the mid-1970's, when the Senate's Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission exposed the agency's abuse of Americans' privacy. Under one program, called Shamrock, the agency and its predecessors for decades collected copies of all international telegrams leaving or entering the United States from the major telegraph companies. Another, code-named Minaret, kept watch lists of Americans who caught the government's interest because of activism against the Vietnam War or other political stances. Information was kept on about 75,000 Americans from 1952, when agency was created, to 1974, according to testimony. In reaction to the abuses, Congress in 1978 passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which banned eavesdropping on Americans unless there was reason to believe they were agents of a foreign country or an international terrorist group. In such cases, N.S.A. - or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which usually takes the lead in domestic wiretaps - had to present its evidence to a judge from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which then issued a warrant. Loch K. Johnson, an intelligence historian now teaching at Yale who served on the Church Committee staff, said the 1978 reforms were the result of lengthy bipartisan negotiations. "To pick up the paper and see that all of the carefully crafted language, across party lines, to put together FISA, has been dismissed by secret executive order is very disheartening," Mr. Johnson said. Mr. Johnson said he saw a link between the intelligence excesses of the 1970's and the N.S.A. program: fear. "Then the fear was of communism," he said. "Now it's terrorism." Even after the overhaul of the surveillance act, the N.S.A.'s combination of secrecy, power and size continued to produce intrigue. Movies like "Enemy of the State" (1998), in which the agency is portrayed as an out-of-control surveillance operation that carries out political assassinations and destroys the life of a lawyer played by Will Smith, distorted the agency's purpose and capabilities. Exaggerated reports on an agency program called Echelon asserted that the agency and its counterparts in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia somehow intercepted all world communications. But in real life, before the Sept. 11 attacks, N.S.A. officials, still stung by the Church Committee's findings, hewed closely to the law, according to many who worked there. "We used to say, 'Keep it simple: We don't collect against U.S. persons, and we don't do law enforcement,' " said Ms. Parker, the agency's top lawyer from 1984 to 1989. In fact, the national commission on the 9/11 attacks criticized the agency for being too cautious about pursuing terrorists on United States soil. But by the time of the commission's report in July 2004, the eavesdropping program had been operating for roughly two years. Secret Court to Be Briefed on Spying By The New York Times WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 - The judge who presides over the secret court that reviews surveillance requests in terrorism cases is setting up a classified briefing for the other 10 members of the court, The Washington Post reported Wednesday night. The session, arranged by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, will address questions about the legality of the domestic eavesdropping program established by the Bush administration, The Post said. The article said that some of the judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were concerned that information obtained through the eavesdropping program might later have been used to obtain authorization from the court for wiretaps. ---- Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants By David E. Kaplan 12/22/05 U.S.News & World Report http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11369.htm In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts. Federal officials familiar with the program maintain that warrants are unneeded for the kind of radiation sampling the operation entails, but some legal scholars disagree. News of the program comes in the wake of revelations last week that, after 9/11, the Bush White House approved electronic surveillance of U.S. targets by the National Security Agency without court orders. These and other developments suggest that the federal government's domestic spying programs since 9/11 have been far broader than previously thought. The nuclear surveillance program began in early 2002 and has been run by the FBI and the Department of Energy's Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST). Two individuals, who declined to be named because the program is highly classified, spoke to U.S. News because of their concerns about the legality of the program. At its peak, they say, the effort involved three vehicles in Washington, D.C., monitoring 120 sites per day, nearly all of them Muslim targets drawn up by the FBI. For some ten months, officials conducted daily monitoring, and they have resumed daily checks during periods of high threat. The program has also operated in at least five other cities when threat levels there have risen: Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York, and Seattle. FBI officials expressed concern that discussion of the program would expose sensitive methods used in counterterrorism. Although NEST staffers have demonstrated their techniques on national television as recently as October, U.S. News has omitted details of how the monitoring is conducted. Officials from four different agencies declined to respond on the record about the classified program: the FBI, Energy Department, Justice Department, and National Security Council. "We don't ever comment on deployments," said Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages NEST. In Washington, the sites monitored have included prominent mosques and office buildings in suburban Maryland and Virginia. One source close to the program said that participants "were tasked on a daily and nightly basis," and that FBI and Energy Department officials held regular meetings to update the monitoring list. "The targets were almost all U.S. citizens," says the source. "A lot of us thought it was questionable, but people who complained nearly lost their jobs. We were told it was perfectly legal." The question of search warrants is controversial, however. To ensure accurate readings, in up to 15 percent of the cases the monitoring needed to take place on private property, sources say, such as on mosque parking lots and private driveways. Government officials familiar with the program insist it is legal; warrants are unneeded for monitoring from public property, they say, as well as from publicly accessible driveways and parking lots. "If a delivery man can access it, so can we," says one. Georgetown University Professor David Cole, a constitutional law expert, disagrees. Surveillance of public spaces such as mosques or public businesses might well be allowable without a court order, he argues, but not private offices or homes: "They don't need a warrant to drive onto the property -- the issue isn't where they are, but whether they're using a tactic to intrude on privacy. It seems to me that they are, and that they would need a warrant or probable cause." Cole points to a 2001 Supreme Court decision, U.S. vs. Kyllo, which looked at police use -- without a search warrant -- of thermal imaging technology to search for marijuana-growing lamps in a home. The court, in a ruling written by Justice Antonin Scalia, ruled that authorities did in fact need a warrant -- that the heat sensors violated the Fourth Amendment's clause against unreasonable search and seizure. But officials familiar with the FBI/NEST program say the radiation sensors are different and are only sampling the surrounding air. "This kind of program only detects particles in the air, it's non directional," says one knowledgeable official. "It's not a whole lot different from smelling marijuana." Officials also reject any notion that the program specifically has targeted Muslims. "We categorically do not target places of worship or entitles solely based on ethnicity or religious affiliation," says one. "Our investigations are intelligence driven and based on a criminal predicate." Among those said to be briefed on the monitoring program were Vice President Richard Cheney; Michael Brown, then-director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration; and Richard Clarke, then a top counterterrorism official at the National Security Council. After 9/11, top officials grew increasingly concerned over the prospect of nuclear terrorism. Just weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, a dubious informant named Dragonfire warned that al Qaeda had smuggled a nuclear device into New York City; NEST teams swept the city and found nothing. But as evidence seized from Afghan camps confirmed al Qaeda's interest in nuclear technology, radiation detectors were temporarily installed along Washington, D.C., highways and the Muslim monitoring program began. Most staff for the monitoring came from NEST, which draws from nearly 1,000 nuclear scientists and technicians based largely at the country's national laboratories. For 30 years, NEST undercover teams have combed suspected sites looking for radioactive material, using high-tech detection gear fitted onto various aircraft, vehicles, and even backpacks and attaché cases. No dirty bombs or nuclear devices have ever been found - and that includes the post-9/11 program. "There were a lot of false positives, and one or two were alarming," says one source. "But in the end we found nothing." -------- un U.N.'s Inability to Avert Iraq War 'Haunts' Annan In a year-end review, the secretary-general also lashes out at reporters over their coverage of the oil-for-food scandal. By Maggie Farley Los Angeles Times Staff Writer December 22, 2005 http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes994.html UNITED NATIONS — Secretary-General Kofi Annan's biggest regret in his nine-year tenure as U.N. chief was not being able to prevent the war in Iraq, he said Wednesday during his annual year-end news conference. The United Nations' inability to head off the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 "still haunts me and bothers me," he said, because it caused divisions that still trouble the world body today. He said he had intervened personally with officials from many nations to try to head off the invasion, and wished that U.N. inspectors seeking to ascertain whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction had been given more time to do their work. "But we were not able to do that," he said. Annan has tried to appear neutral on the subject of the Iraq war, despite one slip during a BBC interview in which he declared the war illegal. The secretary-general, entering the final year of his term, revealed facets of his personality Wednesday rarely seen in public, alternately combative, wistful, hopeful and bitter. "The year about to end has been a really difficult one," Annan said, citing the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami that struck last December, continuing conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, and the U.N. oil-for-food scandal that sparked calls for his resignation. "Let us look forward to what we can and must do next year," he said, "and what we have to build on." Annan said he would focus on three priorities in his final year: fighting poverty; promoting peace and security; and reforming the United Nations. He said he would tell his successor that it was easier to give than to take advice, and urged his replacement to have "thick skin and a sense of humor." Moments later, Annan showed why those qualities were so important. He lashed out at reporters for their "obsessive" pursuit of the oil-for-food scandal, which exposed corruption in the U.N.-led program. The program was set up in 1996 to offset the effects on Iraqis of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime. Annan said he hoped the United Nations would "never be asked to take on a program like that again." He targeted one journalist in particular, James Bone of the London Times, who has asked the U.N. spokesman nearly every day about the whereabouts of a Mercedes that Annan's son allegedly purchased in his father's name to avoid import duties. There have been suggestions that the car was a reward from the son's employer, Cotecna Inspection, for winning a lucrative U.N. contract. Cotecna and the secretary-general's office have declined to comment about the car. When Bone posed the question to Annan again Wednesday, the normally soft-spoken secretary-general lost his cool. "Listen, James Bone. You have been behaving like an overgrown schoolboy in this room for many, many months and years," he snapped. "You are an embarrassment to your colleagues and to your profession. Please stop misbehaving, and please let's move on to a more serious subject." Bone walked out of the room after the tongue-lashing, which became a leading story on several international television news programs. "I've known Kofi Annan for more than 15 years, and his outburst surprised and amused me," Bone said. "I thought he was acting more like a tin-pot dictator than the world's top diplomat. He is, after all, a public official paid with taxpayers' money." Although the effects of the oil-for-food scandal will probably follow him, Annan said he hoped that his legacy would be a revitalized institution. "If there's one thing I would like to hand over to my successor when I leave office next year is that it should be a U.N. that is fit for the many varied tasks and challenges we are asked to take on today," he said. This month, he has overseen several pieces of the broad reform program that he helped inaugurate: the creation of a commission to help countries rebuild after conflicts; a new ethics office to tackle corruption; and a whistle-blower policy to protect those who point out wrongdoing at the United Nations. Annan cautioned that the reform program "hangs by a thread" because of a U.S. threat to block the U.N.'s budget if certain changes are not made by year's end, including the creation of a new human rights panel. "It would be very disruptive, and we may have to take some drastic measures," he said. "But I really, really hope the member states understand the implications of a budget crisis and will do everything to avoid it." Annan, with a smile, offered one suggestion to save money: Shut down the press room. -------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE -------- torture Secret Prisons, CIA Kidnappings & Torture: A Look At Europe’s Reaction to the Bush Administration’s Covert Actions Overseas Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/22/1521258 As UK Prime Minister Tony Blair rejects calls for an inquiry into whether the CIA secretly used British airports, Agence France Press editor Bernard Estrade joins us in our Firehouse studio to discuss the uproar in Europe over the CIA’s actions. [includes rush transcript] In Britain – Prime Minister Tony Blair rejected calls on Wednesday for an inquiry into whether the CIA used British airports to transport detainees to secret prisons or to third countries where they have may have been tortured. Blair said,"I have absolutely no evidence to suggest that anything illegal has been happening here at all." Blair added that he didn’t want to "add fuel" to stories about the practice of "extraordinary rendition". Human rights groups have charged that hundreds of secret CIA flights have passed through Britain and other European nations. The British Association of Chief Police Officers, however, has begun an investigation after receiving information about certain flights that landed in British airports. Today we are going to look at the response in Europe to the recent disclosures that the CIA has been running a series of secret prisons overseas and the controversial U.S. practice of extraordinary rendition. * Bernard Estrade, a chief editor at Agence France-Presse. RUSH TRANSCRIPT AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now in our New York studio by Bernard Estrade, a chief editor of Agence France-Presse, which is based in Paris. Welcome to Democracy Now! BERNARD ESTRADE: Thank you. AMY GOODMAN: Well, in these few days you’re here in the U.S., it’s great to have you with us. Can you talk about how Europe is responding to this whole continuing revelations around what’s called extraordinary rendition, what others call kidnapping? BERNARD ESTRADE: Well, first, Amy, allow me to outline that I am speaking here in my own capacity and I am not engaging my company in any way. To answer your question, yes, definitely, this extraordinary rendition and the jail had an incredible impact in all of Europe. It was quite amazing, and it’s quite amazing to realize that, if you had not been in Europe, it was major news, major front page news everywhere. For the European, you know, it was almost like the confirmation on an urban myth, you know, the urban myth that the CIA was snatching persons in the street, and then were sending them on black flights, you know, like the black helicopter somewhere in place where they were going to torture, and unfortunately, in the last few months this has been confirmed. It’s really happened, and that was devastating news and very, very important news in Europe. AMY GOODMAN: Now, this information that the European countries were transit points, Britain, perhaps hundreds of times, Germany, countries that -- well, Germany was opposed to the invasion. What about this? Now, Blair saying he doesn't know of this and won't investigate it. BERNARD ESTRADE: Well, that’s probably a bit playing on the word, because, in fact, it’s quite easy to identify this black flight, were flying around, and they have already been published, you know. We knew, for example, that just over 340 of these flights went through Germany, a bit less through Great Britain. Two even go through France, and dozen through Spain. They were part of a normal flight between the U.S. and a European country and other destination. And they were identified as a CIA or intelligence flight. What was not sure, that was who was on board. AMY GOODMAN: And what about Condoleezza Rice's trip? BERNARD ESTRADE: Well, Condoleezza Rice's trip to Europe was supposed to be -- not to be dealing on this problem. And, in fact, during this standard trip, everywhere she has to face incredibly harsh questions from the public and from her interlocutor. Even at the NATO conference, you know – AMY GOODMAN: At the NATO conference, where was it? BERNARD ESTRADE: At the NATO conference in Brussels, they were supposed to – the subject, the main subject was to talk about the next plan for Afghanistan. And, in fact, the main subject was always rendition flight and the jail, and especially the fact that jail had probably been set up, according to Human Rights Watch, in Poland and in Romania. That really didn’t go at all with European opinion. And the minister were a bit put on the wrong foot, because the government probably know very well what was going on. But it was impossible to accept that and to vouch for that for their opinion. AMY GOODMAN: Now, the Washington Post exposed the story of these secret prisons in your Eastern European countries, but at the request of the Pentagon, they didn't name them. Human Rights Watch has said Romania and Poland. Condoleezza Rice went to Romania. Can you talk about that? BERNARD ESTRADE: Well, she went to Romania. Romania was not still a full member of the European Union, and she always said – she refused to confirm that this prison exists, but the problem is that for European, maybe wrongly, you know, this prison exists, and the denial of the Romanian authority were not really very credible, and as you know, the situation was so bad that the commission, the minister of justice of the European commission, has to remind all the countries that if they had agreed to let this kind of jail on their soil, they will not be able to be a full member of the European Union, and more specifically, they will not be allowed to vote. AMY GOODMAN: Well, does this mean that the European Union will dissolve, because there will be no countries left? BERNARD ESTRADE: Not dissolve, but they will not -- the country who have let this kind of practice will not be allowed to participate in the vote. So they will be a member of the Union, but they will lose their right to vote. AMY GOODMAN: But it sounds like there may be a number of these countries. BERNARD ESTRADE: Well, up to now, there are only two countries who are supposed to have hosted this illegal jail. It’s Poland and Romania. AMY GOODMAN: What about France and the United States? France was opposed to the invasion, but the, what you’ve called the Alliance Base? BERNARD ESTRADE: Yes, that’s also a story that was first published by the Washington Post. The Washington Post this summer revealed that a special operation going on between France, the U.S. and other European intelligence service to fight against the terrorism. So the fight against terrorism is really a reality also for the European service, you know, and you have, let's say, an operational facility who are put together between service, you know, to be efficient in this kind of struggle, concern everybody. But they are not accepted politically, and they are very touchy. And when our government are shown, they have to deny that it exists. AMY GOODMAN: And in 30 seconds, what is it? What’s the relationship with France? BERNARD ESTRADE: Well, Alliance Base was a program, was engineered by the French equivalent of the CIA, the DGSE, was supposed to find and, in fact, found one very supposedly terrorist who are living in Saudi Arabia and managed to trick him out of Saudi Arabia in France, and in France to arrest him and to give him back to the CIA. AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us. When you come here for the few days you have been here, is there a difference in the approach of the U.S. press and European press on this issue? BERNARD ESTRADE: Yes, definitely. In the American press it didn’t seem to be a big issue. For the European press it’s an enormous issue. It’s a bit, you know -- the same sensitivity in France that the sensitivity that the American public show when they heard that following this administration decision they could be domestically spied by the NSA. That’s provoked here a huge outcry, the same kind of outcry that the illegal jail in Europe provoked. AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us, Bernard Estrade, one of the chief editors at Agence France-Presse. ---- Torture ban mends U.S. image among Europeans By David R. Sands The Washington Times Published December 22, 2005 http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20051222-103707-5517r WASHINGTON -- A sweeping new ban on the torture of detainees in U.S. custody will help the global war on terror and bolster America's frayed image among ordinary Europeans, according to Hungary's ambassador to Washington. The ban, authored by Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, and now endorsed by President Bush, "is very important for Europeans to see, something we can understand and respect," Ambassador Andras Simonyi said. In a wide-ranging interview at The Washington Times on Tuesday, Mr. Simonyi said the past year had seen a strong improvement in relations between the United States and the leading European Union powers after the divisions of the 2003 war in Iraq. Public opinion, however, is another story. "We definitely feel the political relationship has improved, but this has not translated yet into a massive change in the popular image of the U.S. in Europe," he said. "It is not an easy fix and we have to be honest with each other about this." The torture ban, following widely reported scandals such as at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and charges of secret CIA detention sites in Europe, can help repair that image. "I think respect for a government doesn't diminish but actually grows when people see the leadership can acknowledge past mistakes," he said. Echoing complaints from a number of governments in central and Eastern Europe, Mr. Simonyi said the post-September 11 difficulties in obtaining visas to travel to the United States were a major "headache" in bilateral relations. "It's hurting you. It's hurting us," he said. "It's not just about travel rights or convenience. It's about the feeling the ordinary Hungarian has about the openness and welcome he feels from the United States." The ambassador said 2005 was a strong year for U.S.-Hungarian relations, despite Budapest's decision to withdraw its contingent of 300 troops from the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq in March. U.S. direct investment in Hungary's expanding economy is strong, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week praised Budapest's recent donation of 77 Russian-made T-72 tanks to Iraq's fledgling security forces. "Hungary wants to help with the reconstruction of Iraq. We want to be involved," Mr. Simonyi said. Despite the troop pullout, Hungary has offered to train Iraqi diplomats and state officials. Mr. Simonyi said his country's experience with political and economic reforms after the collapse of the Soviet empire could be useful for an Iraq emerging from decades of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. The Iraq deployment was not popular in Hungary. "War is never popular," Mr. Simonyi said. But he added that most in his country thought it was critical to support the United States. "If you ask Hungarians if it was right for us to participate in the Iraq mission, the answer is overwhelmingly yes," he said. "Our people understand this is the kind of thing democracies from time to time are called on to do." -------- POLITICS -------- investigations On Wiretapping, Bush Isn't Listening to the Constitution By Edward M. Kennedy The Boston Globe Thursday 22 December 2005 http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/12/22/on_wiretapping_bush_isnt_listening_to_the_constitution/ http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/122205Q.shtml The president is not above the law; he is not King George. Yet, with sorrow, we are now learning that in this great land we have an administration that has refused to follow well-crafted, longstanding procedures that require the president to get a court order before spying on people within the United States. With outrage, we learn that this administration believes that it does not have to follow the law of the land. Not just above the law, this administration seems to be saying that it IS the law. It contends that it can decide on its own what the law is, how to interpret it, and whether or not it has to follow it. I believe that such an arrogant and expansive view of executive power would have sent chills down the spines of our Founding Fathers - as it does for every American hearing these startling revelations today. The president, the vice president, the secretary of state, and the attorney general tell us that the president can order domestic spying inside this country - without judicial oversight - under his power as commander in chief. Really? Where do they find that in the Constitution? Time and time again, this president has used his express, but limited, constitutional power to command the military to justify controversial activities - after the fact. The president is the commander in chief of the military. That doesn't give him the power to spy on civilians at home without any judicial oversight whatsoever, without ever revealing those activities to even well-established courts that review these matters in secrecy. Otherwise, every phone and computer in America should now come with a warning label: Warning: the privacy of your communications can no longer be guaranteed, by order of President Bush. The president has the constitutional obligation to protect and defend the American people. That is obvious - but he also took an oath of office, to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." With his arrogant usurpation of power and refusal to follow well-established wiretapping laws, I believe that this president is not living up to that oath. By shunning the oversight of the courts and ignoring the express language of the laws passed by Congress, this president is, in my judgment, defiantly and stubbornly ignoring the Constitution and laws passed by Congress. Our founders did not fight a Revolutionary War to give such expanded, unchecked powers to the executive. Quite the contrary. Their concern was precisely the abuse of executive power. The president has admitted, without any remorse, that he has repeatedly authorized his own advisers at the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on individuals inside the United States, without the prior court approval required under well-established laws. This president is focused on scapegoating The New York Times for breaking the story that brought this questionable spying program into the light of day. Once again, he's telling us - "trust us, we are doing whatever we can to protect you." Well, that's just not enough. We want real answers about this program. Why were the courts cut out of the process, when judicial oversight is required by law? Yesterday the vice president cut short his trip to the Middle East to break the tie in a vote on an irresponsible budget proposal that will hurt America's families, yet he couldn't find the time to level with the American people and tell them exactly where the president has the authority to spy on them. This is not a new debate. Years ago, with bipartisan support, I spearheaded the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which specifically requires the attorney general to obtain prior authorization from a judge, in a secret expedited proceeding, before engaging in domestic spying or wiretapping. Now, the president says that that law is "insufficient" and "outdated" to meet the current threats in the war on terror because it was passed nearly 30 years ago. The Constitution took effect in 1789 - and it is still good law today. I hope the president doesn't continue to hide behind such transparent and irrelevant justifications. Congress has amended the 1978 FISA law over time, most recently with the passage of the PATRIOT Act - and there is no reason to think we wouldn't do so again - if we knew what the administration is doing. If the president needs more powers to lawfully protect the American people from terrorism, then he should come to Congress to seek modification of current laws. The president has failed to provide a sufficient legal basis for his actions; instead he and his Cabinet spent the week refusing to negotiate with Congress and opposing bipartisan efforts to extend the PATRIOT Act for three more months. Just this past week there were public reports that a college student in Massachusetts had two government agents show up at his house because he had gone to the library and asked for the official Chinese version of Mao Tse-tung's Communist Manifesto. Following his professor's instructions to use original source material, this young man discovered that he, too, was on the government's watch list. Think of the chilling effect on free speech and academic freedom when a government agent shows up at your home - after you request a book from the library. Incredibly, we are now in an era where reading a controversial book may be evidence of a link to terrorists. Something is amiss here. Something doesn't make sense. We need a thorough and independent investigation of these activities. The Congress and the American people deserve answers now. Edward M. Kennedy is the senior US senator from Massachusetts. -------- us politics Cheney Casts Tie-Breaking Senate Vote Cutting $40 Billion to the Poor Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/22/1521254 Yesterday the senate narrowly passed a budget bill to cut $40 billion dollars of federal spending by ending funding for foster care, child support and student loans. The bill would also impose new fees on Medicaid recipients and new work restrictions on state welfare programs. We speak with Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities about details of the bill. [includes rush transcript] The $40 billion dollars in budget cuts is dwarfed by the $70 billion dollar cost of a Republican proposal expected to be voted on next year that would extend previous tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003. The contentious budget bill was passed by a 50 to 51 vote. Five Senate Republicans joined the Democrats in opposing the measure. Their combined votes would have led to a 50-50 tie. However, Vice President Dick Cheney cut short his trip to the Middle East in order to cast the tie-breaking vote. As president of the Senate, Cheney was able to break the deadlock and pass the measure. Critics of the bill note that the poor and middle class would bear the brunt of the cuts. Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid called it "an ideologically driven, extreme, radical budget. It caters to lobbyists and an elite group of ultraconservative ideologues here in Washington, all at the expense of middle class Americans.” The American Council on Education announced this is the biggest cut in the history of the federal student loan program. * Robert Greenstein, Executive Director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. RUSH TRANSCRIPT AMY GOODMAN: We are joined in Washington D.C. by Robert Greenstein. He is the Executive Director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Welcome to Democracy Now! ROBERT GREENSTEIN: Good morning. AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, tell us about this budget. ROBERT GREENSTEIN: This bill, as you noted, cuts over $40 billion over a five-year period, but you really can't get the flavor of it just from citing the budget numbers. If you take, for example, the Medicaid program, which is the principal health insurance program for tens of millions of low-income children, families, elderly people and people with disabilities, this bill makes very major changes in that program. It authorizes states to particularly raise the amounts that people just above the poverty line would have to pay each time they needed to go to the doctor or the hospital. You take a family of three that’s making, say, $17,000 a year, various procedures, inpatient, outpatient, for which they now are charged $3 per visit, under this new bill they could be charged, depending on the treatment, anywhere from $20 to $160 for each one of those treatments or procedures. We have a body of research, Amy, that is this high that demonstrates that when you put co-payments of even a fraction of that size on low-income people, that in many cases they forgo the treatment or they don't take the medication. Sometimes they will get better on their own, but the research shows that in many cases they get sicker, sometimes seriously so. The bill also authorizes states to substantially reduce the healthcare services that are covered under the Medicaid benefit package for various groups, such as working poor parents. The changes in Medicaid are pretty significant. Another change in Medicaid, under this bill, native-born U.S. citizens would have to provide birth certificates or passports to stay enrolled in the Medicaid program. This is expected to have a racially discriminatory effect, because studies show that as many as one in five elderly African Americans don't have birth certificates, in many cases because they couldn't be born in a hospital, because in the South in those days before World War II, blacks often couldn't be admitted to hospitals, and you often got your birth certificate triggered in a hospital. In the area of child support enforcement we have had a bipartisan consensus for 15 years in Washington with heavy Republican involvement that absent parents should pay their fair share, and there is a program, which the federal government helps fund, to make sure that child support payments are collected and provided to the children and their mothers. This bill substantially cuts federal funding for that program. The Congressional Budget Office, which is Congress's own official analyst of these things, has reported that as a result of this cut, $8 billion less in child support payments owed by non-custodial parents will be collected and provided to the children and their mothers over the next ten years. In other words, this will cause significant increases in poverty. The changes in welfare are also pretty profound. They’re the biggest changes since the 1996 welfare law, and they rewrite the ’96 welfare law to make it, in key respects, substantially harsher than the ‘96 welfare law itself was. There would be new requirements for the percentage of parents that have to be in workfare type programs that are set in such an unrealistic fashion that states couldn't meet them and would then face fiscal penalties; and the easiest way for the states to deal with, to ease those fiscal penalties, would be by cutting the rolls. In particular, for poor, two-parent families, married parent families, the new standards would be so unrealistic that not a single state in the United States could meet them. They would be required to have virtually every two-parent family in a work program virtually full-time every week of the year. If a parent had to miss a couple days from work because he or she was sick or their child was sick, they wouldn't meet the standard for that month; and if a small number of parents were in that circumstance, the state would fail to meet the standard and would be penalized financially by the federal government. Experts expect that many states will cut large numbers of poor two-parent families from their rolls in coming years in order to avoid these penalties. As you noted, there are also major cuts in the student loan program. There are major changes in the long-term care part of Medicaid that will make it harder for a number of people to get long-term care coverage when they need it. There are a variety of other changes, as well. What's striking is that the Senate had earlier passed a bill that didn't have a single low-income cut of this sort in it.. None at all. The House, by contrast, had passed an extremely harsh bill, and the difference was that the Senate got a lot of savings in the original Senate bill by restraining well known overpayments to managed care companies in Medicare and dealing with the very large mark-ups that the big drug companies get for drugs provided in Medicaid by reducing the prices Medicaid pays for drugs. What happened behind closed doors over the weekend was that the drug companies got protected. The cuts that affected them were taken out. The managed care companies got largely protected. Nearly all of the changes that would have restrained excessive payments to them got taken out, and the cuts got redirected more heavily towards low and moderate income families instead. Probably not an accident. If you look at the campaign contribution data, you find that every significant House Republican leader who has something to do with Medicare and Medicaid policy is among the top recipients of campaign contributions for the 2006 election cycle from both the managed care companies and the drug companies. AMY GOODMAN: Bob Greenstein, Executive Director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, we only have a minute, but I just wanted to touch on the level of burden on students right now. Nearly a third of all the savings in the final budget bill comes from student aid, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Under the bill, college students would pay higher interest rates on loans, banks receive lower subsidies, Education Department will work with the I.R.S. to ferret out students and parents who underreport incomes on financial aid applications. In this last minute, the effect on students. ROBERT GREENSTEIN: There will be effects on students, I think, both in terms of fees and interest rates. The other thing that should be said is that the savings from the students, from working poor families (who I think will actually be hit harder than students), and everybody else who suffers under this bill, not a dollar of those savings is going to reduce the federal deficit. Every dollar is going to offset a portion of the cost of tax cuts that’ll be passed when Congress comes back after its recess; and those tax cuts will go heavily to very high income people, and, in some cases, a large share of them will go to the people that make over a million dollars a year. So, it’s really a transfer in many – It’s not deficit reduction. We’re talking about a transfer from people who have greater needs to people at very high income levels and powerful forces that make large campaign contributions. AMY GOODMAN: Bob Greenstein, thanks so much for being with us, Executive Director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The website www.cbpp.org, and you can go to our website at democracynow.org for all links. I’ll end with a couple of paragraphs from the New York Times today: “Republican negotiators said virtually all the cuts in student aid would be borne by banks and other lenders, an assertion sharply disputed by Democrats and college administrators, who said two-thirds of the savings would be at the expense of students and their families. Even as it makes those cuts, Congress is creating a new program for students from low-income families who are eligible for Pell grants. The amount of aid will not be based on financial need. To qualify, students would have to be U.S. citizens, have completed a ‘rigorous secondary school program of study’ and be taking courses full-time at a degree-granting institution of higher education. The student would have to maintain a cumulative grade point average of at least 3.0. Juniors and seniors will be eligible only if they’ve declared a major in the physical or life sciences, computer science, math, technology, engineering, or a foreign language deemed critical to national security.” College and university groups, as well as most Democrats, oppose the overall bill. As it becomes harder for students to get money for college, it seems increasingly that it puts pressure on young people to go into the military as an avenue to get to college. ---- New Life for Patriot Act Is No Bush Win The Senate's six-month extension effectively kills a deal to make key provisions permanent. By Richard B. Schmitt and Mary Curtius Times Staff Writers December 22, 2005 Los Angeles Times http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes993.html WASHINGTON — In a major setback for the White House on a top domestic priority, the Senate on Wednesday passed a six-month extension of the Patriot Act, due to expire Dec. 31, even though President Bush had demanded that most of the law become permanent. The move effectively killed a House-Senate compromise that would have made permanent 14 of the 16 provisions of the statute, which gives law enforcement officials sweeping power to track and prosecute suspected terrorists. The House adopted the compromise last week. But senators from both parties balked, saying the compromise legislation failed to include enough safeguards of civil liberties and privacy. They began filibustering the measure Friday and sustained the filibuster through the end of a tumultuous session Wednesday night, withstanding blistering public attacks by Bush, Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who said that allowing the provisions to expire would put the American people at risk. Ultimately, the Senate agreed to the six-month extension without opposition. "We had a pretty broad coalition and it held together," said Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire, one of four Republicans who joined 43 Democrats on Friday to launch the filibuster. The Senate Democratic minority seemed delighted by the rare and hard-fought victory over a president who since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has built his presidency around the pursuit of terrorists. "The White House … couldn't break the filibuster, couldn't break the bipartisan group," said Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.), who led the fight against the House-Senate compromise legislation. "It was only the president, the White House and Atty. Gen. Gonzales who wanted to play that game of chicken — and they lost that game," Feingold said. The administration had made it clear, he added, that "it was their way or the highway, but they did not prevail." Frist, who said Tuesday that he would not agree to a temporary extension, said Wednesday night that he had changed his mind when faced by what he described as a decision by Democrats "to kill the Patriot Act." He said he decided that he wasn't "going to let the Patriot Act die." In a written statement late Wednesday, Bush said that he appreciated the Senate's work "to keep the existing Patriot Act in law" but that "the work of Congress on the Patriot Act is not finished." "The act will expire next summer, but the terrorist threat to America will not expire on that schedule," Bush said. If the House convenes today and agrees to the extension, as expected, and if Bush signs it, as expected, House and Senate negotiators will have six months to come up with a proposal. "This is the way legislation used to be done when I first came here," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, who worked with the committee's chairman, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), to negotiate the temporary extension. "There were many good things in this conference report, but not enough. Now we have six months to get it right." Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), another Judiciary Committee member, said the turning point came Wednesday morning when a bipartisan majority of senators — 52 — signed a letter urging Frist to support a three-month extension of the expiring measures. The letter touched off intense negotiations and high-level lobbying as the White House sought to persuade Republican senators to support the compromise legislation. The administration found stiff resistance among the senators, some of whom resented the haste with which the Patriot Act was pushed through Congress by the Republican leadership within weeks of the Sept. 11 attacks. "We should just extend it and if the White House objects, let them veto it," Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) told reporters Wednesday afternoon. Lott did not sign the letter but indicated that he had little patience with the Senate leadership's insistence that it would never agree to a temporary extension. "You always say what you're not gonna do till you lose, and then you do it," Lott said. "Nobody will remember tomorrow that we said we weren't going to extend it." Earlier Wednesday, Bush accused senators of engaging in an "inexcusable" obstruction of a law he said the nation could not afford to be without. "The expiration of this law will endanger America and will leave us in a weaker position in the fight against brutal killers," he told reporters in Washington. But the senators who said the House-Senate compromise did not offer enough safeguards of civil liberties insisted that there was an alternative. "We have a bipartisan majority of the Senate that says the choice is not one particular version or no Patriot Act, but rather to continue the present Patriot Act," Schumer said Wednesday afternoon. The Patriot Act was meant to tear down the wall between law enforcement and intelligence agencies that some said hampered detection of the Sept. 11 plot and to give law enforcement new tools to find and prosecute terrorists in the United States. But it has made civil libertarians uneasy because it gives the federal government great leeway to wiretap and search the homes, offices and business records of U.S. citizens with limited judicial review. The Bush administration says the law is a vital tool in its anti-terrorism arsenal and has pushed to make all its provisions — some of which were written to expire at the end of this year — permanent. After the House and the Senate passed different reauthorization proposals, negotiators came up with the compromise that they said struck a balance between the Senate's measure, which required more judicial review, and the House version, which required less. The White House supported the compromise. But on Friday, hours before the Senate was to consider the compromise, the New York Times reported that in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush had authorized wiretapping hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans without seeking warrants from a secret court that deals with terrorism-related cases. Several senators said the revelation spurred them to vote against the compromise. Bush has acknowledged authorizing the wiretaps and has said he has the authority to do so under the Constitution and a 2001 congressional resolution approving the use of force against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the former regime in Afghanistan. On the surface, the differences between the HouseSenate compromise and what dissident senators want do not seem huge. For instance, the Senate version of the so-called library provision, which grants the government broad powers to obtain business records in terrorism investigations, would prevent government fishing expeditions by giving some discretion to a neutral judge to decide whether the requests for records are reasonable. Opponents of the Senate version, including the Bush administration, said such changes would unnecessarily and dangerously tie the hands of law enforcement. The House version includes somewhat less judicial oversight. Some outside experts said they were perplexed by the increasingly vituperative debate over changes they considered subtle. "It is nonsensical," said Michael Greenberger, a former Justice Department official who now heads the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. "I think they are playing chicken with this thing." After the agreement on the six-month extension was announced, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said she was disappointed that the decision to extend the Patriot Act resulted in a delay in passage of a measure she sponsored to combat methamphetamine production. Her proposal, which was included in the compromise legislation, would have restricted the sale of products containing ingredients used in the manufacture of methamphetamine. "I am very disappointed combating the scourge of methamphetamine was not included in the compromise on the Patriot Act," she said. "This is a critical bill that has strong support in the Senate. The problem is that it got caught up in very difficult maneuvers at the end of the session. I will continue the fight to get this important legislation passed and am pleased that the Senate leadership has agreed to a vote in January or early February." ---- Key House Republican Balks at Patriot Act By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer Thursday, December 22, 2005 (AP) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/12/22/national/w115340S77.DTL (12-22) 13:09 PST WASHINGTON -- House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner threatened Thursday to block passage of six-month extension of the Patriot Act, Republicans officials said, leaving open the possibility that the anti-terror legislation enacted after the attacks of 2001 might expire at year's end. A spokesman for the Wisconsin Republican declined comment. Sensenbrenner's reticence sent the White House and congressional GOP leaders scrambling to prevent the expiration of the existing law, with most lawmakers already home for the holidays. One possibility included approval of a shorter extension, coupled with a decision to summon lawmakers back to the Capitol early next year. "Congressman Sensenbrenner needs to do what's right for Americans and agree to let the bipartisan Senate bill pass promptly," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. The Senate approved a six-month extension Wednesday night. Republican leaders reversed course to do so, after insisting for days they would accept nothing less than enactment of permanent legislation that incorporated changes in the powers granted law enforcement to pursue suspected terrorists. President Bush has long demanded Congress send him permanent legislation, but he sidestepped the issue of an extension when he spoke with reporters during the day. "It appears to me that the Congress understands we've got to keep the Patriot Act in place, that we're still under threat," he said before boarding a helicopter headed to Camp David, Md., for a long holiday weekend with his family. Under House rules, Sensenbrenner has the power to block enactment of the six-month law. Officials who described his position did so on condition of anonymity, citing a need to keep the matter confidence. That left the White House and GOP leaders with a dwindling set of options to prevent the expiration of the law. Among them was passage of a short-term extension, possibly one month, a step that would require lawmakers to reconvene earlier than they anticipate in January. Bush also has the authority to call Congress back into session to prevent the expiration of the existing law before Dec. 31. Several Republican officials said earlier in the week he had been prepared to do so if Congress adjourned without acting on the renewal. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who had led the Democratic-led fililbuster against permanently renewing most of the law's expiring provisions, said the six-month extension "will allow more time to finally agree on a bill that protects our rights and freedoms while preserving important tools for fighting terrorism." 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 permanent the rest of the Patriot Act powers, like the roving wiretaps which allow investigators to listen in on any telephone and tap any computer they think a target might use, has been a priority of the administration and Republican lawmakers. Some civil liberties safeguards had been inserted into legislation for renewing that law but Senate Democrats and a small group of GOP senators blocked it anyway, arguing that more safeguards were needed. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said he had no choice but to accept a six-month extension in the face of a successful filibuster and the Patriot Act's Dec. 31 expiration date. "I'm not going to let the Patriot Act die," Frist said. Bush indicated that he would sign the extension. "The work of Congress on the Patriot Act is not finished," Bush said. "The act will expire next summer, but the terrorist threat to America will not expire on that schedule. I look forward to continuing to work with Congress to reauthorize the Patriot Act." Frist said he had not consulted with House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., yet on the six-month extension. Senior Republicans there have opposed any temporary extension of the current law, insisting that most of the expiring provisions should be renewed permanently, but it would be difficult for the House to reject a plan agreed to by the Senate and President Bush. The six-month "extension ensures that the tools provided to law enforcement in terrorist investigations in the Patriot Act remain in effect while Congress works out the few differences that remain," said Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., one of a small group of Republicans who crossed party lines to block the Patriot Act legislation. Republicans who had pushed for legislation that would make most of the expiring provisions permanent said the agreement only postpones the ongoing arguments over the Patriot Act for six months. "We'll be right back where we are right now," said a clearly frustrated Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. Special Correspondent David Espo contributed to this report. -------- ACTIVISTS Nun Who Defaced Missile Silo Released from Prison Returning to Jonah House in Baltimore, Platte Vows to Continue Protests by Matt Apuzzo Published on Thursday, December 22, 2005 by the Associated Press http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1222-11.htm A pacifist nun convicted of using her blood to deface a Colorado missile silo said after her release from federal prison today that she has no plans to stop protesting. Ardeth Platte, 69, and sisters Jackie Hudson and Carol Gilbert were convicted in 2003 of obstructing national defense and damaging government property. After a breakfast of wheat toast with jelly at a Danbury diner where supporters gathered to celebrate her release today, Platte left for Baltimore and the Jonah House, a Catholic organization founded by Philip Berrigan that is dedicated to nonviolence and social and political resistance where she will stay for now. She must serve three years probation, she said, during which she must check in with officers in Maryland and Colorado. The nuns cut a chain link fence surrounding a Minuteman III silo in northern Colorado, then used baby bottles to draw a sign of the cross in their own blood. Because she has a long history of such protests, Platte got the longest sentence and was the last to be released. She spent more than two years in Danbury Federal Correctional Institution. Some of Platte's fellow prisoners worried that, if she kept protesting, she would die in prison. But Platte said she won't stop working, even though that might mean a longer sentence next time. And she's not worried about dying behind bars. "So be it," she said. "It's my religious commitment. I don't know how long I'm going to live." The site the nuns were accused of damaging held weapons that could be launched within 15 minutes of a presidential order, court documents said. "The charges remain bogus," she said. "It was, 'If you're not with us, you're against us.' And be assured, I would never stand with this government in any kind of killing." The nuns are members of the Dominican Sisters order in Grand Rapids, Mich. They said their protest was a symbolic disarmament, prompted by an imminent war with Iraq because the United State has never disavowed nuclear weapons. "God forgives us for what we are doing in this country," she said. TAKING A STAND Platte insists that she will not pay the government any restitution, which her sentence includes, because too much of every dollar is spent on war and defense. A federal judge criticized the nuns, and Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, a Catholic, said their sentences were fair because nobody is above the law. "These Catholics have not understood, or studied deeply enough, the stance against the crimes of the government," Platte said today. A low-security facility with an adjacent minimum-security prison camp, Danbury is home to 1,300 women. Platte lived in the camp, where she said she worked as a chapel clerk and ministered to women of many faiths. She received as many as 30 letters a day, she said, from people offering support and describing their protests. Mary Novak, on activist from Voluntown, exchanged letters with Platte. And though they had never met, Novak drove to Danbury for Platte's breakfast today. She said Platte's long history of protests inspires others to follow similar paths and to be strong during the difficult times. "One of the difficulties with the work of peace and justice is seeing yourself through the long haul," Novak said. "There's not the same system set up to support you the way there is in corporations or the military." ---- ACLU asks state if it is providing data to FBI Group concerned after Iraq meeting at Stanford watched Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer Thursday, December 22, 2005 http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/22/BAGAKGBM2C1.DTL The American Civil Liberties Union asked the state Wednesday to reveal whether law enforcement agents were gathering information on California activists, in light of revelations that the federal government monitored a conference on Iraq at Stanford University and an anti-war protest at UC Santa Cruz. The ACLU asked whether local and state law enforcement officials were providing information to the FBI about a variety of groups, including Greenpeace, United for Peace and Justice, Code Pink, UC Santa Cruz Students Against the War, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Three California affiliates of the ACLU filed their request with Attorney General Bill Lockyer, citing the state Public Records Act. The FBI has said it conducts investigations legally and according to Justice Department rules. Lockyer spokesman Nathan Barankin had not yet seen the request Wednesday but said the office would comply. The ACLU seeks any intelligence compiled by the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, a clearinghouse of information about domestic intelligence. Lockyer reorganized the center in 2003 after concerns that it was collecting intelligence on activists conducting peaceful demonstrations. The ACLU is concerned that because federal officials have greater leeway to investigate organizations than do their California counterparts, state and local agents could be conducting surveillance for Washington that would be illegal under California law. "The Bay Area has a rich tradition of opposing various activities of the government and having a robust debate on current issues," said Mark Schlosberg, police practices policy director of the ACLU of Northern California. "The prospect of the government monitoring that peaceful activity is disturbing." On Tuesday, the national ACLU released FBI documents it had obtained that the group said "showed the FBI expanding the definition of 'domestic terrorism' to include citizens and groups that participate in lawful protests and civil disobedience." Included in the thousands of pages were documents showing that FBI agents had obtained a contact list for "attendees at the Third National Organizing Conference on Iraq," a 2002 event at Stanford University at which activists and academics discussed the effect of sanctions on Iraq. Though the report was heavily redacted, the documents said the event was "affiliated with (the) American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee," a 25-year-old civil rights organization that was one of the co-sponsors of the conference. "Why would you have surveillance of a conference at a respected university?" said Mary Rose Oakar, a former Ohio congresswoman and president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, who noted that no one involved in the event had been arrested. "Do we not have academic freedom in this country?" The FBI files released this week by the ACLU also showed that the government had been monitoring the activities of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Noting the group's penchant for street theater, PETA general counsel Jeff Kerr said, "The FBI ought to be able to tell the difference between a terrorist and a guy in a chicken suit handing out leaflets." Last week, MSNBC obtained 400 pages of Pentagon documents revealing that the U.S. military had listed 1,500 "suspicious incidents" across the country over a 10-month period dating back to 2004, including dozens of anti-war meetings and protests. Among the incidents was an April 6 anti-military recruiting protest at UC Santa Cruz. The military, which defended its intelligence as "properly collected" to MSNBC, listed the Santa Cruz protest as a credible security threat. "If the Pentagon is gathering information about students and labeling nonviolent protest as a threat, then what is the average American going to feel about picking up a sign and getting out to the streets to protest the war?" said Josh Sonnenfeld, a UC Santa Cruz student and anti-military recruiting organizer who attended the demonstration. E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com.