NucNews - December 29, 2005



-------- NUCLEAR 


-------- depleted uranium

Uranium suspected in Iraq merc's death

12/29/2005 (UPI)

http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20051228-094157-5463r

BAGHDAD, Dec. 29 -- The death of a Peruvian security guard who had worked in Iraq may have been caused by exposure to depleted uranium.

Wilder Gutierrez Rubio, 38, died a few hours after arriving in Lima, Peru, on Dec. 6. Days before, he had been diagnosed with severe leukemia at Ibn Sina Hospital in Baghdad and immediately flown back to his home country, World Socialist Web Site.Org reported Wednesday.

WSWS.org said Gutierrez was part of a 200-man Peruvian contingent sent to Iraq in early October to provide security for Baghdad's Green Zone. It is widely suspected in Peru that Gutierrez's leukemia was the result of exposure to high levels of uranium in Iraq, the site said.

Gutierrez was one of more than 1,000 Latin Americans recruited by U.S. private security contractors to work in different countries.

Since the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, about 20,000 people have been hired to work as private security contractors, WSWS.org said. This figure represented one private security guard for every seven uniformed American soldiers in these regions. In all, $30 billion was spent by the U.S. Government on private security contractors in 2004, the Web site said. 

----

Gulf War syndrome persists in US troops after 10 years: study

Thu Dec 29, 2005 11:29 PM ET (AFP)

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2005%5C12%5C31%5Cstory_31-12-2005_pg4_15

CHICAGO - 'Gulf War syndrome', a debilitating multi-symptom affliction identified in many soldiers after the 1991 conflict in Kuwait, is likely to strike US troops fighting in Iraq, a new study shows.

The syndrome, which proved hard to diagnose because it manifested itself in many different afflictions, remained widespread among US troops 10 years after the Gulf War ended, according to the study, lead-authored by Melvin Blanchard, assistant professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.

Blanchard's study will be published in January in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

A comprehensive medical evaluation of some 2,189 Gulf War veterans between 1999 and 2001 found that 28.9 percent of those deployed suffered from the affliction a decade after the war.

The rate for soldiers not deployed to the Gulf War was slightly more than half that, and usually not as severe.

The study's results suggest that soldiers fighting in Iraq today -- many of whose tours of duty are much longer than those in the previous war -- are likely to experience Gulf War syndrome as well.

"It's not unique to the Gulf," Blanchard told AFP. "It probably means there is a baseline in the (deployed) population, and the non-deployed reflect what happens in the general population."

"The military is trying to take better care of the soldiers' mental health in the field and that may have some bearing on the outcome, but I still expect to see CMI in those soldiers who are in Iraq now when they return," Blanchard said.

The long-term impacts could be severe, the study said, because those suffering from the syndrome were twice as likely to experience heart attacks, diabetes and liver disease.

Gulf War syndrome is the popular name for chronic multisymptom illness complex, or CMI. It was first identified by the Centers for Disease Control in 1994 after thousands of returning troops complained of numerous unexplained symptoms.

It is defined as having symptoms that fall into two of the three following groupings for more than six months: fatigue, mood and cognitive symptoms and musculoskeletal pain.

Blanchard said that a likely explanation for the illness is that the stress of combat released hormones that caused physiological changes.

Other high-stress situations such as divorce, job pressure or a death in the family could spark the syndrome, he said.

Earlier studies of Gulf War syndrome have examined the possibility of wartime stress, oil well fires and depleted uranium from US munitions, and a drug given to US soldiers to protect against nerve gas as the cause.

Some 100,000 of the 700,000 US soldiers who took part in the campaign to oust Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 have complained of experiencing at least one of the symptoms. British, French and Canadian troops were also affected.

In November, a British tribunal recognized for the first time that a former soldier was suffering from Gulf War Syndrome and should receive an invalid's pension.

Blanchard's study is the most comprehensive study of Gulf War syndrome to date. Comprehensive examinations including medical and psychiatric histories, general physicals, and neurological, pulmonary, nerve conduction, neuropsychological and clinical lab tests were performed on 1,061 deployed and 1,128 non-deployed veterans in the study.

While there was no evidence of an association of the syndrome with kidney, liver or lung disease, thyroid problems, blood abnormalities or neuropathy, the authors found that veterans with the syndrome were two times as likely to have metabolic syndrome.

Metabolic syndrome is a group of health risks that increase the likelihood of developing heart attacks, diabetes and liver disease. They include high blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose and weight levels.

The study did show that CMI can dissipate over time in some people. Earlier studies detected the syndrome in about 45 percent of returning Gulf War troops. But by ten years after the war, the level was down to just below 30 percent.

----

Uranium cylinder departures on hold
Remaining K-25 containers need travel exemptions

By FRANK MUNGER, munger@knews.com
December 29, 2005 Knoxville News

http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/local_news/article/0,1406,KNS_347_4348243,00.html

OAK RIDGE - The storage yards at K-25 are sparsely populated these days, and that's a sign of progress.

Over the past couple of years, about 4,800 cylinders of depleted uranium hexafluoride - weighing up to 14 tons apiece - have been shipped from the Oak Ridge plant to a site near Portsmouth, Ohio. The uranium compounds are supposed to be processed there into a more stable form for long-term storage or disposition.

However, the project is on hold for now because the rusty containers left here - about 1,200 of them in outdoor lots, some of them propped up with concrete cradles - need exemptions from U.S. Department of Transportation requirements.

Six different requests for exemptions are pending before the DOT. These would allow the U.S. Department of Energy and its Oak Ridge contractors to ship containers that are slightly overweight or have other issues that don't meet transportation rules for the 300-mile trip to Ohio.

"We expect them to be approved between late January and June 2006," Walter Perry, a DOE spokesman, said.

Shipments could resume in mid-February, Perry said.

About 900 of the remaining Oak Ridge cylinders will require protective "overpacks." Several types of the nuclear carriers are being designed and constructed by a company in Utah. Other overpacks are available but need DOT's blessing.

DOE also is dealing with the possible presence of phosgene, a toxic gas, in some of the oldest containers acquired from the Army's Chemical Warfare Service in the 1940s and '50s.

Earlier this year, DOE's Office of Inspector General raised questions about whether the chemical warfare agent might still be present in the so-called 30A containers at Oak Ridge and other sites, and whether it might be corroding the containers and posing additional concerns.

Oak Ridge has about 300 of the 30A cylinders acquired from the Army, but local officials said they do not believe there's a problem with them.

"We don't think any of them contained phosgene upon arrival at (the former K-25 uranium-enrichment plant) and have assembled documentation on all but two to demonstrate that the cylinders were washed, tested, inspected and refilled several times, which would preclude the presence of measurable phosgene quantities," DOE said in response to questions.

"The remaining two 30A cylinders probably don't contain phosgene based on several technical factors, but documentation on preparation, washing, inspection and testing has not been located," the agency said.

Perry said a request for an additional DOT exemption may be required if Oak Ridge officials are unable to show conclusively that the two cylinders do not contain phosgene.

Depending on the timing of the DOT approvals and resolution of the phosgene issues, the Department of Energy expects the project to be completed in the fall of 2006, perhaps as early as September.

Senior writer Frank Munger may be reached at 865-342-6329.



-------- iran

Nuclear Iran: A matter of time

By Joseph J Kurr, Thursday 29 December 2005 Aljazeera
  
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/06F048EE-2F16-4836-8AE1-8DEDD43C9923.htm

It is not a matter of if Iran will have the bomb - it is a matter of when.  With that in mind, the US needs to re-examine its current policy towards Iran.

Iran's motive for becoming a nuclear power is not purely political. Its desire to become the next nuclear power stems from a strong sense of nationalism and an equally strong distrust of US intentions.
 
Since Iran's revolution, the US has predicted that secular Iranians would eventually reclaim their country from the mullahs.

Well, we are still waiting and the latest election actually brought an even more radical leader to Iran's presidency.

Even more telling is that secular Iranians are as adamant as radicals about their country having every right to nuclear technology. This same nationalistic pride is also fuelling Iran's ambition to become a regional power.
 
Now place yourself in Iran's shoes. The US is occupying Iraq to your west, rebuilding Afghanistan to your east, and headquarters its Fifth Naval Fleet to your south.

This is the same US government that harshly criticises your foreign and domestic policies at every chance, continues to freeze your assets since the 1979 Revolution, and is currently leveraging its UN Security Council position to put the kibosh on your nuclear ambitions.

In effect, the US is undermining any chance of significant foreign investment coming your way. Is it any small wonder you distrust and dislike the US?
 
If Iran is clever, they will play nice and come into lock step with IAEA demands while insisting on rights to develop nuclear technology under strict international monitoring and safeguards.

Meanwhile, they will continue to gradually acquire the expertise, technology, and material necessary to produce nuclear weapons albeit on a much longer timetable.

Distrust of US

If the US is clever, we will anticipate this strategy and address the dangerous half of Iran's nuclear equation: Distrust of the US. Only by assuaging Iran's fear can the US hope to bring stability to that region of the world.
 
Naysayers will point to Iran's hardline government and demand the status quo. But the status quo painted the US into the corner in which we now find ourselves. Dealing with a hardline government is nothing new for the US, a prime example of which is China.

Each passing day strengthens the trade relationship between our two countries while the chances of armed conflict simultaneously decrease.

China's phenomenal growth is traceable to globalisation and its increasing connectivity with the world economy. In 1990, one year removed from the Tiananmen Square incident, any prediction of China becoming an economic powerhouse would have been laughable.

Today, Beijing is exploring ways to slow its economic growth.  Foreign investment and open trade is fuelling this remarkable growth.

This foreign investment is noteworthy, especially when one remembers hardliners in China are still running the show and that investors are wary of anything resembling risk.

Can we expect the same bright future for Iran? Not with the current US policy which essentially mirrors Iran's distrust.

Policy shift needed

US policy over the past 26-plus years, including unilateral sanctions, denouncements and other forms of coercion, is proving to be impotent. This same policy is arresting Iran's economic development and affirms its mistrust of the US.
 
The US needs a seismic shift in its Iranian policy and to make it perfectly clear that if Iran stops aggressively pursuing nuclear weapon technologies and threatening its neighbours (including Israel), the US will meet it halfway.

Meeting Iran halfway includes supporting Iran's ambition to become an advanced technological state and a regional power.

This can be accomplished by eliminating sanctions against non-US entities investing in Iran's oil and gas sectors, encouraging technological collaborative endeavours, and giving serious thought about releasing still-frozen Iranian financial assets.

Such a move signals to Iran that the US is an honest broker and will steer Iran down the path leading towards connectivity with the rest of the world.

In time, new foreign investment and trade will usher in a re-birth of Iran's economy, compelling it to adopt international rule-sets and mitigating any risk a nuclear Iran may pose. In short, Iran will avoid actions that may lead towards isolation. 
 
It would be nice if we could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, but we need to think more about how to live with a nuclear Iran. When that day finally arrives, do we want to deal with an angry and fearful Iran with nothing to lose, or with an Iran connected to the world economy?

Joseph J Kurr is an attorney living in the United States.  

The opinions expressed here are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position or have the endorsement of Aljazeera.



-------- israel

BMD Focus: Israel-Iran nuclear balance

By MARTIN SIEFF
UPI Senior News Analyst, Dec. 29, 2005 

http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20051229-013056-9028r

WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The most dangerous strategic nuclear arms race in the world today is the one between Israel and Iran -- far more complex than almost anyone realizes and vastly more dangerous.

Ironically, the number of weapons involved on both sides are miniscule, not only by the standards of the U.S-Soviet/Russian Cold War nuclear balance, but also even compared with the much more limited strategic nuclear stand-offs centering around North Korea or India and Pakistan today.

But that does not really matter: Far more important is the fact that the margin for error or miscalculation on either side is vastly smaller than in any other potential nuclear conflict in the world. And the danger that either party may react catastrophically to the fear that the other will attempt a devastating preemptive first strike is consequently far greater.

Israel today has a far greater proportion of its population protected by state-of-the-art ballistic missile defense systems than any other country in the world. But since Israel is so small and since such a disproportionately large part of its population is vulnerably concentrated in a single thermonuclear kill zone in and around Tel Aviv, that speaks less to the Jewish State's undoubted military and technological strengths than to its geographic and demographic vulnerabilities.

As Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and an influential adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told UPI recently, 70 percent of Israel's total population and 80 percent of its infrastructure is concentrated in the Tel Aviv region. No other modern industrial nation has its population and key infrastructure so densely packed into such a small area, he noted.

Ironically less than 60 years after the founding of the state in 1948 the Zionist dream, far from creating a state where large numbers of Jews were safer and more secure than anywhere else in the world, has created one where millions of them are now at more immediate risk of nuclear incineration than anywhere else in the world.

The reason for this is not merely Iran's relentless drive to acquire its own nuclear weapons and the delivery systems to carry them. It is the extreme rhetoric and truly unpredictable behavior of the new government in Tehran.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has publicly threatened to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. He has questioned the historic veracity of the Holocaust, the genocidal mass killing of six million European Jews by the Nazis through World War II. And at the same time, he has embarked on the systematic purging of the Iranian government and armed forces of more moderate officials.

The combination of Israel's physical vulnerability with Iran's political extremism has, therefore, produced a balance of terror that is now on a hair- trigger alert.

No one knows for sure if Iran yet has any nuclear weapons of its own. The best available assessments suggest it is not yet in a position to make them and won't have them for a few years yet, but no one knows for sure. And there is also the very real possibility that the CIA cannot confirm but cannot rule out either that Iran may have acquired at least four nuclear warheads some years ago illegally from stocks decommissioned and inadequately guarded following the disintegration of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.

There is no doubt that Iran already has nuclear-capable delivery systems capable of inflicting a first strike that could kill millions of Israelis, perhaps over the half the population in a single attack. Its Shehab-3 intermediate range missile has been successfully tested and is being continually upgraded. It is certainly reliable.

Also, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has confirmed that under the previous regime of President Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine quietly sold 12 nuclear-capable cruise missiles to Iran. They are far slower than the Shehab ballistic missiles but their computer-guided, ground-hugging unpredictable flight paths could make them far more dififcult to intercept and shoot down.

To guard against these threats, Israel has already developed or bought a formidable BMD arsenal. Its Arrow system anti-ballistic missile interceptor, co-built with Boeing, is the most advanced system of its kind in the world and was recently successfully tested against a simulated Shehab-3 attack. Israel also has acquired many batteries of the Patriot PAC-3 system from the United States.

Ironically, early Patriots got a raw deal in the press after they performed very impressively in defending Tel Aviv from Iraqi-launched SCUD missile attacks in the 1991 Gulf War. Some U.S. analysts believe that this was encouraged by Israel to try and get more funding for the Arrow. But there is no doubt that for close-in ABM defense the Patriot remains the best interception system by far in the world.

The Israelis are also aided by the limited amount of air space they have to defend.

Still, like the Americans and the Soviets before them in the 1950s and '60s, the Israelis have come to the conclusion that no defense succeeds better than deterrence. As long as their own nuclear facilities -- the Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert and Zacharias air force base south of Tel Aviv -- are limited in number and clearly known to their enemies, and since their main population is so concentrated and vulnerable, recent Israeli governments have recognized their need for a secure, survivable second-strike capability to guarantee a devastating response to any first strike, and they have deployed one.

It exists in the form of three German-built and supplied diesel-engineered submarines, or U-boats, that carry nuclear-capable cruise missiles. Israel seeks to ensure that at least one of these vessels is on patrol at all times. Indeed, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government is seeking to broaden and deepen this second-strike force by acquiring two more submarines to add to it.

The concept has impressed giant India so much that it has adopted it too as a second-strike deterrent against neighboring Pakistan. In India's case, the submarines are French-built Scorpenes.

Will it be enough? Against any rational national government, the answer would be certainly "yes." But with Ahmadinejad, the jury for obvious reasons is still out.

Ironically the Israelis and their strong friends in the Bush administration could yet prove to be their own worst enemies. For if there is one scenario where even previously rational national leaders, let alone extreme ones, might be tempted to press their nuclear launch buttons, it is when they are convinced that they are going to be attacked anyway and have therefore nothing to lose.

Judged from this perspective, Israel's previous exercises carrying out mock air attacks against a scale model of Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor in the Negev desert, and the tough moves of the Bush administration to confront Iran on the nuclear issue, clearly run the risk of provoking the very thermonuclear nightmare they are meant to prevent: They could convince the government in Tehran that it is under imminent threat of U.S. or Israeli attack and thereby panic it into launching any nuclear weapons it already has.

In that case, Israel's ultimate line of defense would be its Arrows and its Patriots. There is no doubt that operationally they will work well: The as-yet-untested question is whether they will work flawlessly with only seconds to spare and no margin for error whatsoever. The lives of millions will be on the line. 




-------- japan

Japanese utilities to disclose plutonium use plan in January

(Kyodo News International (Tokyo) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Dec. 29, 2005

http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/-japanese-utilities-disclose-plutonium-use-plan-january-/2005/dec/1246578.htm

TOKYO -- Japanese power companies are planning to disclose, possibly in early January, their plan to use plutonium for power generation to demonstrate they will not be holding a surplus inventory of the radioactive substance that may be used also to build nuclear weapons, officials of the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan said Thursday.">

The move comes after the Atomic Energy Commission of Japan has required electric power companies to disclose plans on when, where and how much plutonium they will use before a test operation of extracting plutonium from a nuclear fuel-reprocessing plant in the village of Rokkasho in Aomori Prefecture.

Power companies in Japan are planning to use plutonium reprocessed from spent fuel at nuclear reactors for plutonium-thermal power generation, or what they call the pluthermal method, that burns mixed uranium and plutonium oxide fuel, or MOX fuel.

Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. has a plan to start operations of a factory to produce MOX fuel in Rokkasho from 2012 by using plutonium.

But Tokyo Electric Power Co. and Kansai Electric Power Co. may have to delay disclosing their plans because local residents have withdrawn their approval of the pluthermal project after Tokyo Electric was penalized in 2002 for falsifying nuclear plant safety data, and a fatal nonradioative accident occurred at Kansai Electric's Mihama nuclear plant last year.

Niigata Gov. Hirohiko Izumida asked Tokyo Electric earlier this month not to include the Kashiwazaki Kariwa Nuclear Power Station in Niigata Prefecture in the pluthermal project.

The two companies may have to consider whether they can include in the utilization plan the name of the nuclear reactors involved in the project and when to start it.

The federation aims to have 16 to 18 pluthermal reactors by fiscal 2010, but the plutonium to be used at this stage is that reprocessed in Britain or France and will not be included in the utilization plan planned to be released in January, the officials said. 



-------- mideast

It's More Important Than Halting Nuclear Proliferation
Let's Stop a US/Israeli War on Iran

By BILL and KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
Former CIA analysts
December 29, 2005 CounterPunch 

http://www.counterpunch.org/christison12292005.html

The peace movements of the entire world should be in crisis mode right now, working non-stop to prevent the U.S. and Israel from starting a war against Iran. (See the James Petras article in CounterPunch on December 24, 2005 titled Iran in the Crosshairs for the best summary of the present situation.) The reckless and unnecessary dangers arising from such a war are so obvious that one wonders why normal political forces in the two aggressor countries -- both of whom love to glorify themselves as democracies -- would not prevent such a war from happening.

But the "normal political forces" in both the U.S. and Israel have become badly distorted. Democracy has been seriously undermined in both. The cowboy-like personalities and aggressive tendencies of both countries' leaders tend to feed on each other. Domestic political difficulties and coming elections in both countries probably add to the macho inclination of the ruling elites to use force to remove any problems facing them. The glue binding these tendencies together is the ever-strengthening institutional link between defense establishments and military-industrial complexes in both countries, as well as, in the U.S, the growing power and influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) over both major political parties. The entire mix increases the probability, against all common sense, that this absurd war will actually happen.

Nothing else more dangerous to the world, to the Middle East, to the oppressed Palestinians, or to the true interests of the United States is happening today -- anywhere. Americans who do not want an eruption of a new world war, started by our own government, ought to be strongly lobbying the Bush administration and all members of Congress against supporting any military action by the U.S. and Israel against Iran. Globally, people who oppose such a war should be lobbying their own governments in similar fashion.

Background

It is worthwhile to discuss briefly the broader context of why a war with Iran today seems a real possibility. During his all-out public relations effort in late 2005 to regain support for his policies in the Middle East, Bush has made it clear that he plans to continue his drive for complete victory in the "War on Terrorism," without making significant changes in his own, very aggressive, foreign policies. Those policies will make this planet a less safe, more unjust place to live for most people around the world, as well as for most of us living in the U.S. The special relationship between the U.S. and Israel has long played an important role in these aggressive policies.

Outside the United States, it is widely understood that one of the true motives -- not the exclusive motive but a real and significant one -- behind the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq was the desire of the neocons in Washington to conquer Iraq in order to benefit Israel. Although a few of the big-name neocons (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Lewis "Scooter" Libby) have left high-visibility positions for various reasons, many remain, and it is clear that Bush himself, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice have taken as their own the main tenets of neocon beliefs.

Inside the U.S., on the other hand, the pressure of the neocons for war on Israel's behalf, or any hint that Bush himself participates in that pressure, is hardly ever mentioned. This taboo on discussing the Israeli link to the war in Iraq, enforced by the threat of being labeled anti-Semitic, introduces major distortions into practically every effort to examine and change policies that are causing massive hatred of the U.S. around the world.

But right now, three of the long-existing "problems" in the Middle East (i.e., situations that have been made problems largely by our own actions) have reached critical stages that may, if Washington's policies do not change quite quickly, result in our losing even the remnants of stability and peace that remain in that region today. The world could face instead nuclear warfare or, at a minimum, a practically unending "clash of civilizations" and conventional warfare at a much higher level than exists now. The first, and the most important right now, of the three problems is the main subject of this article: the problem that arises from the determined U.S. and Israeli policy of preventing Iran from ever acquiring nuclear weapons. The second and third problems, also situations brought on by the U.S. itself, have to do with Syria and the Palestinians. In the long run, they are also very important, but they are less urgent for now. These other problems will be considered briefly at the end of this article.

As was the case with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, one of the underlying causes of all these "problems" in the Middle East has been the success of the neocons in persuading the Bush administration to support aggressively the goals of the Israeli government throughout the area. And here again, the fear of being charged with anti-Semitism causes many Americans quietly to accept the taboo on discussing the Israeli link to the Bush administration's foreign policies. This is an absurd situation. Criticizing Israeli (or U.S.) policies and urging specific changes in those policies is not anti-Semitic (or anti-American). The arrogance of anyone who suggests the contrary is appalling. The following paragraphs contain suggestions on how we should work to remedy those aspects of this absurdity that bear on Iran and nuclear weapons.


What should be done to change U.S. policy on Iran's nuclear program?

First of all, don't fall into the trap of accepting Iran's public claims that it is not attempting to acquire nuclear weapons. Many of the nations that now have such weapons made similar claims while they were developing the weapons. Israel did so throughout the first half of the 1960s, engaging in elaborate subterfuges even when dealing with U.S. inspectors who occasionally came looking for weapons work. The Israeli claims were so much garbage (see Israeli author Avner Cohen's book, Israel and the Bomb). Then, after it acquired its first nuclear explosive device almost 40 years ago now, Israel simply adopted a well publicized policy of ambiguity and stopped talking publicly about whether it had any weapons. India and Pakistan also both claimed not to be working on weapons when in fact they were. Their claims were garbage too, which they quickly threw away once they joined the nuclear club and possessed their own deterrent. Iran almost certainly intends to do the same, and its public claims to the contrary are also almost certainly worthless.

The principal point to start with is that, unless the U.S. and Israel (and other nations as well) all agree to work seriously toward eliminating their own nuclear weapons, any Iranian government will consider that it has as much right as the rest of us to such weapons. Essentially, even if Iran, under pressure, were to sign new agreements, now or in the future, to forgo nuclear weapons, the new agreements would be meaningless unless the U.S., Israel, and other nuclear nations ended their own monumental hypocrisy of insisting that they can keep and expand their nuclear arsenals, while non-nuclear nations may not acquire such arsenals. In the eyes of most Muslims around the world and many other people too, Iran, with a population of close to 70 million, has at least as much right as Israel, with a population less than one-tenth as large, to have nuclear weapons

Most supporters of the global peace movements by definition oppose the solving of international problems through warfare, and they also oppose the further proliferation of nuclear weapons. Most are also aware that the critical bargain reached in the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) -- the bargain that made the treaty possible -- was a trade-off: the acceptance of continued non-nuclear-weapons status by states without those weapons, in return for the simultaneous agreement by states possessing nuclear weapons to pursue good-faith negotiations on nuclear, and complete and general, disarmament. This latter provision had no teeth, and certainly many "realists" in the U.S. foreign policy establishment expected that it would not and could not be enforced. Nevertheless, the existence of this provision was necessary to the NPT's ratification by numerous countries, and it gives any state dissatisfied with progress toward nuclear disarmament an excuse to abrogate or ignore the treaty.

Most people will not bother to make the niceties of international law an issue in this matter, but the question of which is more important, stopping the further proliferation of nuclear weapons to Iran or stopping our own side from instigating a war against Iran, is vital. The answer should be clear: The single most urgent objective we should have right now is to prevent a war, possibly nuclear, from being started by the U.S. and/or Israel against Iran. To repeat, such a war would be disastrous, and we should be doing whatever we can, with the highest possible priority, to prevent it from ever happening.

Every peace activist on the globe ought to be in the streets and elsewhere lobbying in support of something very simple: do not attack Iran, even if this means allowing Iran to develop its own nuclear weapons. We should put out the message that it is simply not worth a war, with consequences impossible to foresee, to prevent Iran from obtaining such weapons. From 1945 until we invaded Iraq in 2003, we never once took military action to prevent other nations from developing nuclear weapons. We relied instead on deterrence and containment (to prevent other nations from using such weapons after they had been developed). These may not be perfect policies, but they have a successful track record and can probably be applied more successfully than other policies to subnational groups as well as nation-states. The point is that these are still better policies than the recklessness of preemption, and we should use these policies in lobbying against U.S involvement of any kind in military actions or coup attempts against Iran. We should also very definitely support an effort to tie future U.S. aid to Israel to Israel's not engaging in military action against Iran.

We are talking here about supporting (by our silence), or opposing (by vociferous lobbying), what could become major, serious warfare -- warfare that could easily become global, and also could easily cause greater difficulties for the peoples of the Middle East than any they have yet faced from U.S. policies. With an election campaign intensifying the political volatilities of Israeli politics, with possibly fast-moving new uncertainties and vulnerabilities arising among both Republicans and Democrats jousting for advantage in a U.S. election year, and with a new, inexperienced president in Iran who, so far at least, believes aggressive speech strengthens his political position, the dangers in the situation are evident. As each week passes and no movement occurs anywhere -- particularly in Washington -- to reduce tensions by changing policies, the risk grows of a mistake that will lead to new hostilities, and possibly nuclear warfare. How many Iranians might we and the Israelis kill? How many Israelis might die? How many Americans?


How should the U.S. change its policies with respect to Syria?

The issues of Syria and Palestine are related to U.S. policy toward Iran. Policy on Syria today is to put constant pressure on that country's ruler, Bashar al-Assad, with the ultimate objective of ousting and replacing him with someone (not yet named by the Americans) who would be even more subservient to U.S. and Israeli desires. Assad himself has moved a considerable way toward subservience, giving the U.S. considerable help on intelligence matters and accepting certain U.S. prisoners "rendered" to his regime for purposes of torture, but the U.S., unsatisfied, keeps intensifying the pressure. The U.S. and Israel have succeeded in making it more difficult for Syria to provide support for the Palestinian resistance against Israel's occupation, but Damascus still provides some refuge for Hezbollah personnel.

The recent assassinations of anti-Syrian leaders in Lebanon have provided new opportunities for the Bush administration to ratchet up its criticism of Syria still further, although the evidence of Syrian involvement in the assassinations is weak. It is at least possible that other groups, such as the Israel's Mossad or the CIA, are responsible.

Whatever the truth behind events in Lebanon, the events themselves could offer a U.S. president who is in some trouble at home the possibility of a low-cost, low-risk foreign policy victory if he could pull off, perhaps with the help of Mossad, a quick covert action that ousted Assad. Act II of a grand show might then proceed -- another U.S. occupation installed, another nation in the Middle East "democratized," elections held a year or two later and a puppet government set up, step-by-step takeovers of the economy implemented by U.S. and Israeli interests, further isolation of the Palestinians from other Arabs -- all in all, another great victory for the U.S-Israeli partnership.

Or so Bush, at least, might believe. In reality, the situation might turn into another morass like Iraq. But months might pass and the U.S. congressional election of November 2006 might be history before we knew that for sure. Might not a man like Bush who revels in chance-taking consider this a pretty good gamble? Meanwhile, how many Syrians would we kill? How many badly wounded Americans would come home to a questionable quality of life because bulletproof vests saved their lives? If Israeli military units moved into Syria (to help us, of course), how many Israelis would die?

We should all be lobbying members of Congress not to cast any votes in favor of aggressive U.S. policies toward Syria. Such votes cannot help, and will only take resources from, a majority of the world's peoples and a majority of Americans. Syria (and Lebanon) are not places where the United States benefits in any way from being a global policeman. While the neocons and probably some present top Israeli officials do see benefits to be gained from U.S. intervention in Syria, other senior and many ordinary Israelis do not. We also should urge members of Congress to tie further aid to Israel to Israel's not becoming involved in any military actions against Syria.


How should the U.S. change its policies with respect to the Palestinians?

We should make it as clear as we possibly can to members of Congress that the Palestine-Israel problem is the most central long-term issue to the peoples of the Middle East. Most Arab leaders have been so co-opted by the U.S. that they no longer object to our support for Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, but the peoples of the area are a different story. They do care about and object strenuously to that oppression.

Regardless of what happens anywhere in the Middle East, we will never end the "War on Terrorism" without, first, a solution to the Palestine-Israel issue that provides as much justice to the Palestinians as to the Israelis. Although many supporters of Israel try to compare the several-centuries-long U.S. conquest of American Indians to the Israeli attempt to conquer the Palestinians, there is no valid comparison. Quite apart from the immorality of any attempt to emulate the U.S. atrocity against its indigenous population, there are practical reasons why the comparison cannot be made. The population balances, for instance, are entirely different; there are proportionately far more Palestinians than there were American Indians.

Nevertheless, Israeli and U.S. policy in the West Bank, semi-hidden by a bogus withdrawal from Gaza, continues to seek permanent conquest of more and more territory. The daily injustices and cruelties imposed by Israel and the U.S. on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are today worse than they have been in the previous 38 years of occupation. This is not only a major human rights issue facing the United States. It is also a very large cause of the hatred against the U.S. throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.

What is new in the last few months is Israeli intensification of settlement activity in the West Bank, particularly in East Jerusalem; intensification of land-confiscation (with no recompense to Palestinians); a speed-up in construction of the separation wall and of new "Israeli-citizens-only" roads, both of which also require more land-confiscation; more demolitions of Palestinian houses; and new, harsh Israeli measures of other types aimed specifically at forcing Palestinians out of areas, in which they have lived for generations, in and near Jerusalem.

All of this takes place with little Western media attention; the media devoted considerably more attention to the carefully televised "suffering" of the relatively few Israeli settlers forced to move from their luxurious homes in Gaza. The Israelis, with heavy U.S. financing, are busily establishing more "facts on the ground" that will make any peaceful solution providing equal justice to both sides less possible. That does not mean that Israel will "win." Given the determination and inexhaustibility (and large numbers) of Palestinians, it just means more terrorism, killing, and cruelty on both sides. It is a shocking waste of lives, and the U.S. is prolonging it by its one-sided support of Israel. Let's put it baldly. U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine is simply immoral in its one-sidedness. It should take no one who investigates what is actually happening to Palestinians in the West Bank more than 30 seconds to decide that the oppression and cruelties that can be seen there daily should be stopped. Here too, further U.S. aid to Israel should be directly tied to Israel's stopping the oppression and cruelties to Palestinians.

The position we should take in lobbying members of Congress is simple and obvious: Stop the one-sidedness. It is a blot that will stain all our other activities and policies in the Middle East, and probably elsewhere, for years to come. The longer we avoid changing this situation, the larger the blot will become.


Conclusion

All of these issues -- Iran, Syria, and Palestine-Israel -- are interrelated, and each issue enhances the perception around the world that the U.S. is hypocritical, oppressive, and interested only in advancing Israel's interests. All grow out of the one-sided U.S. support for Israel, and none will be resolved without a change in the U.S.-Israeli relationship. To put it baldly again, the widespread perception of the U.S. as immoral and unjust interferes in a quite serious way with the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Neither we nor Israel "wins" if U.S. policy continues on the same path.

Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.

They both can be reached at christison@counterpunch.org. 



-------- russia

Swiss Court Extradites Former Nuclear Head Back to Russia

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 29, 2005; 2:48 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/29/AR2005122900536_pf.html

MOSCOW, Dec. 29 --Switzerland's highest court announced Thursday that Russia's former nuclear energy minister, held in a Swiss jail and facing charges from both the United States and Russia, will be sent to Russia for trial.

The decision reverses a decision by the country's Justice Ministry to transfer Yevgeny Adamov, 66, to the United States, where he has been charged with conspiracy to transfer stolen money and securities, conspiracy to defraud the United States, money laundering and tax evasion.

U.S. prosecutors contend that Adamov, a nuclear physicist, embezzled at least $9 million in U.S. government funds earmarked for the protection of Russia's nuclear facilities. The funds were allegedly diverted to private accounts, including in Pennsylvania, which were used to finance business projects in the United States, Ukraine and Russia.

The alleged fraud took place in the 1990s when he was head of a nuclear research institute that received American funding. He later became a minister in the government of then president Boris Yeltsin, overseeing military and civilian nuclear programs.

Adamov, who was dismissed by President Vladimir Putin in 2001, has said he put the money in private accounts to protect the funds from hyperinflation. He denies all the charges.

"Dr. Adamov is ready to come to the United States to fight these charges and he wants to clear his name both in Russia and the U.S.," said Lanny Breuer, Adamov's Washington, D.C.-based American attorney, who said his client tried to negotiate coming to the U.S. to defend himself but as a free man. "He's a great Russian patriot and has not stolen a penny."

Mary Beth Buchanan, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, said in a statement that her office, which issued the U.S. indictment, was "disappointed" by the Swiss ruling. "We acknowledge the Russian government's representations to the Swiss Court that it will prosecute Mr. Adamov upon his return to Russia, and we intend to honor any requests for cooperation from Russian prosecutors," she said.

An American business partner of Adamov's, Mark Kaushansky, has also been charged in the case. Kaushansky, a former Soviet citizen, moved to the United States in 1979, where he worked as a nuclear power plant engineer. He pleaded not guilty in May and is free on a $100,000 bond.

Adamov was arrested when he went to Switzerland to visit his daughter. Almost immediately after his arrest, Russian authorities charged him with separate crimes of fraud and abuse of office and sought to have him returned home rather than to the United States. Adamov agreed to be extradited to his homeland.

Some Russian officials feared that U.S. authorities could pump Adamov for information on Russia's nuclear programs and its nuclear cooperation with countries such as Iran.

Adamov himself fueled those fears. "If I spend at least a night in a U.S. jail, there will be problems with state secrets," Adamov said in a telephone interview this with Echo Moskvy radio earlier this year.

The Swiss Justice Ministry, explaining its decision, said that if Adamov were returned to Russia, he could not subsequently be extradited to the United States because he is a Russian citizen. But if he is extradited to the United States first, he could be sent to Russia later for prosecution.

Adamov appealed that decision. A five-judge panel of the Swiss Federal Court in Lausanne rejected the ministry's reasoning in a ruling made on Dec. 22, but released Thursday.

"With the extradition to Russia, it can be guaranteed that the crimes under investigation will be examined for overall judgment in the country primarily affected," a court statement state. The decision cannot be appealed by the United States.

The court also noted that the Russians filed their extradition request before the official U.S. request reached Switzerland almost two months after the arrest warrant was acted on.

The Russian charges relate to Adamov's period in public office, when he is accused of stealing $17 million in state funds. Russian prosecutors gave written guarantees to the Swiss authorities that they will also investigate the U.S. charges , according to the court ruling.

"We are satisfied with the decision of the federal court of Switzerland," said Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

----

ORNL helping Russia secure railways
Safeguarding nuclear materials in transport is a major priority

By FRANK MUNGER, munger@knews.com
December 31, 2005 Knoxville News

http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/local_news/article/0,1406,KNS_347_4353886,00.html

OAK RIDGE - A transportation security team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory is helping Russia protect its nuclear materials.

For the past few years, the focus has been on improving the security of Russia's rail system.
	
Because the highway infrastructure is poor to worse, trains are the primary means of moving strategic materials and weapons components around the vast nation. That makes them an enticing target for terrorism - particularly in the post-Soviet era.

"Under the old Soviet system, with closed borders, they didn't have a real problem or issue. Nobody crossed the line under the Soviet system. They knew what would happen," said Gary Sullivan, a 59-year-old engineer who's a member of the ORNL team.

"But once they opened the borders, theoretically at least, that all changed," Sullivan said.

ORNL's transportation security group, which involves a dozen or more researchers and nuclear specialists, has worked extensively with its Russian counterparts for nearly 20 years.

Traditionally this work has been arranged through the U.S. Department of Energy and Russia's atomic ministry on projects related to the shipment and protection of fissile materials: highly enriched uranium and plutonium.

More recently, the Oak Ridge team has worked through the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency on rail projects related to the transportation of nuclear weapons and the Russian guards who protect them.

Russia's older rail cars used to move cargoes of enriched uranium and plutonium "didn't have very much in the way of security," and many of those have been upgraded, Sullivan said.

"We're using any rail car that had at least 10 years of serviceable life left," he said.

The improvements included physical upgrades, such as adding steel reinforcements to harden the cars, and adding electronic warning sensors and other high-tech security devices.

In addition to refurbishing old cars, the ORNL team helped create designs for a new line of cars being manufactured at a production plant in Torzhok, about 150 miles northeast of Moscow.

"The new design is built from the rails up (with security in mind), Sullivan said.

On the outside, many of these specialized rail cars look no different than other drab cars used to transport passengers, equipment and baggage, he said. That's in keeping with Russia's traditional strategy of "maskarova," masquerading the cars to blend in and not attract unnecessary attention, he said.

Among the security features are "Z-strips," mechanical devices that prevent an external door from being opened even if the hinges are cut by intruders, Sullivan said.

Some changes, such as putting wire mesh on the windows and adding armor, are just practical improvements, not exotic at all.

But the Oak Ridge team also has helped install GPS systems and other technologies to track and safeguard the nuclear cargoes from tampering and alarm systems to alert Russian command centers if anything goes wrong.

"Some of these systems were developed jointly with us, but it's all designed and built in Russia by Russians, Sullivan said.

The U.S. government is funding these and many other non-proliferation projects to help reduce the spread of Russia's nuclear materials and capabilities.

"We don't want it growing mushrooms," Sullivan said, making reference to the clouds that result from an atomic explosion.

"Personally, I find the work very rewarding," he said. "If we give the wrong people enough opportunities, they'll make a mess. So we're trying to minimize their opportunities."

Sullivan has made about a dozen trips to Russia in recent years to participate in discussions and workshops on the security projects.

He has worked at ORNL as a subcontractor since 1988. He's an employee of Spectrum Inc., a small firm specializing in environmental and transportation programs.

As a former military man who served during the Cold War years, Sullivan finds a certain amount of irony in today's collaborations with Russia to make the world a safer place.

"The first time I went to Russia, it was in January, and I was standing in the middle of Red Square," he said. "I remember thinking that I never expected to be here without an M-16 in my hand."

Senior writer Frank Munger may be reached at 865-342-6329.



-------- security

Ernesto Zedillo: Nuclear Threat to U.S. is Real

Thursday, Dec. 29, 2005 NewsMax

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/12/29/110714.shtml

The detonation of a nuclear weapon in one of the world’s major cities could usher in the beginning of another "dark age” – but the U.S. isn’t doing enough to head off nuclear terrorism.

That’s the sobering opinion of Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico and director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.

Writing in Forbes magazine, Zedillo points out that there are around 30,000 nuclear weapons in the arsenals of nuclear states and hundreds of tons of enriched uranium and plutonium, ingredients for a nuclear device, in over 40 nations.

The bulk of the most vulnerable nuclear material is in Russia and some of the nations that formerly belonged to the Soviet Union, due to obsolete security measures, Zedillo states.

Story Continues Below

In the U.S., the threat of nuclear attack by terrorists is real, but an exclusive investigation detailed in the December issue of NewsMax Magazine revealed that America is better prepared to stave off such an attack than many believe.

That’s in large part due to drastically stepped-up security measures put in place after 9/11, NewsMax found.

But the U.S. needs to do more to secure the weapons and fissile material in other nations, according to Zedillo, who writes in Forbes:

"We are not confronting this crisis with the urgency it warrants. This is a big mistake. There will be no valid excuses if a nuclear atrocity occurs.

"It is the responsibility of all countries to address this risk. However, by virtue of its being the most powerful nation on earth – as well as the terrorists’ most desirable target – the U.S. must play a bigger role than any other nation.”

Zedillo suggests that the U.S. take a closer look at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an organization founded in 2001 by Ted Turner and former Sen. Sam Nunn.

The NTI calls for every nuclear weapon and all nuclear material around the world to be secured and accounted for as soon as possible.

"For this to happen, the U.S. would have to build an effective global nuclear security partnership, including an accelerated alliance-based approach with Russia, as well as develop a stringent global nuclear security standard and provide assistant to any state willing to meet this standard but lacking the means to do so,” Zedillo concludes.

"A plan like the NTI’s should be only the first major step in dissipating the risk of nuclear holocaust.”

----

Venezuela Recovers Stolen Radioactive Capsule

REUTERS VENEZUELA: December 30, 2005

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/34271/story.htm

CARACAS - Venezuela said on Thursday it had found a capsule of highly radioactive material that was aboard a truck stolen 10 days ago.

Officials had warned of a potential radioactive hazard after thieves seized the truck carrying the capsule in its lunchbox-sized protective container.

It was the third incident involving such devices this year.

"The radioactive capsule was found in Yaritagua in Yaracuy State thanks to the intelligence work of the National Guard," the Interior and Justice Ministry said in a statement.

Officials said an investigative police detective, two state security police agents and a salesman were arrested in connection with the theft.

The statement did not mention a possible motive. Officials previously said they thought it was simply a stolen vehicle case.

Energy Ministry specialists were sent to the region to examine the capsule, the statement said.

The device contains Iridium-192, which emits powerful gamma radiation and is used for industrial radiography, such as for detecting faults in underground industrial pipes.

Two Iridium-192 capsules disappeared in two Venezuelan states in March this year. One has been found and authorities suspect the other was dumped in Lake Maracaibo in western Venezuela.



-------- ukraine

Germany pledges new funds to help seal Chernobyl

BERLIN (AFP) Dec 29, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051229165720.62dybor3.html

Germany earmarked an additional 12.4 million euros (14.7 million dollars) Thursday to help Ukraine cope with the enduring effects of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster nearly 20 years ago.

The funds will go toward securing the outer shell of the mothballed reactor to prevent leakage of radioactivity, the German environment ministry said.

"We must not leave Ukraine alone in coping with the consequences of this catastrophe. International aid is still indispensable," Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said in a statement.

Gabriel said Germany had also urged Russia to step up its investment in the Chernobyl Shelter Fund, managed by the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, noting that the clean-up is expected to cost more than one billion dollars.

"With the new sum, German contributions to the Fund since 1998 will reach 60.5 million euros," the ministry said, in addition to the 28 percent of the European Union's total contribution of 240 million euros provided by Berlin.

Chernobyl's number-four reactor, in what was then the Soviet Union and is now Ukraine, exploded on April 26, 1986, sending a radioactive cloud across Europe.

The power station was completely shut down on December 15, 2000.



-------- u.n.

UN atomic agency marks 2005 with Nobel award and tussles with Iran

VIENNA (AFP) Dec 29, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051229034944.j74buv3e.html

The UN atomic agency spent much of 2005 campaigning against proliferation risks in Iran and North Korea, but also saw the year marked by the ultimate global recognition of a Nobel Peace Prize for its work.

The Iranian dossier reached a climax of sorts in September, when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) found Iran in non-compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) for almost two decades of hidden nuclear activities.

This conclusion requires eventual referral to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.

But the Vienna-based IAEA, which has been investigating Iran for almost three years, put off such a move in November after the European Union agreed to allow more time for diplomacy.

Still, European and Western diplomats fear that a planned meeting year-end meeting between the EU and Iran has little chance of getting Tehran to abandon nuclear fuel work that raises concerns it seeks to make nuclear weapons.

The talks come as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has launched a series of verbal attacks against Israel, calling for it to be wiped off the map, and also denying the Holocaust.

Diplomats say they hope the impasse will finally convince Russia, which backs Iran's claim that its nuclear program is peaceful, that more pressure is needed on Tehran, namely Security Council action.

Meanwhile, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has insisted there is still time for diplomacy.

ElBaradei, a 63-year-old former Egyptian diplomat, has become a symbol for the world's fight against non-proliferation and a choice of diplomacy over war, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on December 10.

He won a third term as IAEA director general in 2005 despite opposition from the United States which feels he is too soft on Iran, according to diplomats. ElBaradei, who first took the top job in 1997, had overwhelming support from the rest of the world community.

"If we hope to escape self-destruction, then nuclear weapons should have no place in our collective conscience, and no role in our security," he said as he collected the Nobel award.

He and the IAEA were jointly honored for "their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes", the Nobel Committee noted.

After emerging in the run-up to the Iraq war as the leading advocate of diplomacy rather than force to counter nuclear proliferation, ElBaradei spent much of 2005 at the center of crises concerning the other two arms of US President George W. Bush's "axis of evil": Iran and North Korea.

And while the IAEA has pushed hard with Tehran, it has had minimal leverage with North Korea since the country kicked out the agency's inspectors in December 2002.

It withdrew the following month from the NPT, the treaty that gives the nuclear agency a mandate for inspections.

North Korea is ready to return to talks on its nuclear program and would accept a visit by IAEA inspectors, US politician Bill Richardson said in October after four days of talks in the Stalinist state.

But no such visits have been scheduled or are expected soon as North Korea talks continue to be deadlocked.

The standoff with North Korea erupted in October 2002 when the United States said Pyongyang was running a secret uranium enrichment program.

North Korea now claims to have produced atomic bombs.


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


-------- alabama

Looking back at the third quarter of 2005

By Mazie Aldrich
The Scottsboro, Alabama Daily Sentinel 	
Published December 29, 2005

http://www.thedailysentinel.com/story.lasso?ewcd=148e3f8e8c46eed4

Ideas of a new beginning at Bellefonte Nuclear Plant were brought to the forefront in the third quarter of 2005.

In September, NuStart Energy announced that the plant was chosen as one of two sites nationwide for an advanced technology nuclear plant. NuStart Energy Development will seek a combined construction and operating license for that site and for the Grand Gulf Nuclear Station site near Port Gibson, Miss.

The Department of Energy, under its Nuclear Power 2010 program is helping fund work to bring at least one nuclear reactor online by 2015. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is one of 11 utility companies that make up the NuStart consortia. TVA is searching for a partner in the actual construction of the Westinghouse Advanced Passive 1000 reactor design chosen for the site.

Approximately 2,000 construction workers will be needed during the four years it would take to build a single reactor plant which is expected to cost between $1.5 and $2.5 billion. From 250 to 400 employees would be needed to operate and maintain one nuclear reactor.

Jackson County Economic Development Authority President and CEO Dus Rogers said, “We have had good news before, but this time we hope it will mean completion of the plant which will be a giant boost for the economy of Jackson County.”

U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a proponent of nuclear power for some time, called the Bellefonte site an “ideal location for a nuclear plant.”

“As we are faced with even greater energy demands and more complex environmental challenges we must pursue the nuclear power option in this country and Bellefonte can become the proving ground for a new generation of nuclear technology to meet needs,” Session said.

Development of the new Jackson County Industrial Park moved forward in July when the town of Hollywood voted to waive the franchise fee for the Scottsboro Water, Sewer and Gas Board.

The Scottsboro Water Sewer and Gas Board will service the development. The town also rezoned the property from agriculture to M1 for industrial use.

The Jackson County Sheriff’s Department took a break from meth busts to investigate three unrelated murders. The body of Jerry Wayne Gibson, 38, of Section was found Thursday, July 28 on Country Road 19. No arrest has been made in that murder. On August 7, a Dutton man, Willie Elton McClendon, 38, of Dutton confessed to the murder of his wife, Felicia Darlene McClendon, 32, also of Dutton. Mrs. McClendon’s body was found on Bluff Road in Section on August 6. On August 17 Hubert Burdett, 48, was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife, Joan M. Burdette, 58. The crime occurred on Ehrich Avenue in Bridgeport on August 16.

Weather also made headlines across the state, especially in the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Dennis hit the coast near Navarre Beach in Florida on July 10, and by July 12, northeastern Alabama saw minimal impact from the storm. It was Katrina, a category four hurricane that hit the Louisiana and Mississippi, that made itself known in Jackson County. The storm moved into the area on Aug. 29, causing downed power lines and trees. The North Alabama Electric Cooperative reported approximately 12,000 customers without electricity for a short period of time. Approximately 8,000 Scottsboro Electric Power Board customers lost electricity. Areas of Jackson County saw 20-30 mile per hour sustained winds with gusts between 50 and 60 miles per hour. Relief efforts to aid Gulf Coast residents after the storm are still ongoing.

Gasoline prices began soaring in the aftermath of Katrina and soared higher still with the anticipation of Hurricane Rita. Rita was expected to hit near the Houston/Galveston, Texas area. Minimal damage was done as Rita came ashore near the Louisiana/Texas border, but gasoline prices steadily rose. Area residents saw over $3.00 per gallon of gasoline for the first time.

CommScope announced its plans for closure in September. The company plans to consolidate its operations with plants in North Carolina, Belgium and China by the end of 2006. Approximately 185 people will lose their jobs. CommScope produces cable and connectors.

Scottsboro lost two of its own in the third quarter of 2005. Former Mayor Lonnie Crawford passed away September 14, 2005 at the age of 87. Crawford served as a Scottsboro Councilman from 1968-1980 and as mayor from 198-1988.

Sarah Betty Ingram, a retired home economics teacher, passed away July 28 at the age of 92. She was known for her efforts to beautify Scottsboro.

The Daily Sentinel saw a major change in July. Faye McBride, former publisher of the Rainsville Weekly Post was named publisher of The Daily Sentinel replacing Mike DeLapp. Former Sentinel Business Manager Rebecca Long was named publisher of The Weekly Post replacing McBride.


-------- michigan

Nevada's New Atomic License Plates

Dec 29, 2005, 06:28 PM KLAS-TV NV

http://www.klastv.com/Global/story.asp?S=4295950

If you are looking for a specialty license plate that packs a punch, the State of Nevada has just the ticket. A license plate that commemorates the contributions made by the Nevada Test Site is now on sale -- but approval for the new plate wasn't easy to get. The I-Team's George Knapp has the story.

Troy Wade said, "This is an icon that's now associated with evil" Troy Wade of the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation has been pushing for the approval of a specialized license plate for more than three years now, not only because he personally participated in several atomic weapons tests back in the day, but because of his involvement with the Atomic Testing Museum, a world-class exhibit dedicated to the history and importance of the Nevada Test Site and its role in the Cold War.

In 2002, a statewide contest selected the mushroom cloud design as the best representation of the test site's contribution. The DMV and the Nevada Highway Patrol gave their okay, but at the last minute a few state lawmakers grumbled that an atomic license plate might be seen as tacit support for the proposed nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain, so the governor nixed the idea.

Troy Wade said, "Strictly the cloud. The thought was the theme that the State of Nevada could oppose Yucca Mountain and allow people to walk around with a mushroom cloud on their license plate. Frankly, I didn't make that connection."

Nearly all of the nuclear waste slated to be buried at Yucca Mountain was generated by civilian power plants, not by the nuclear weapons program, so opposing the mushroom cloud plate because of Yucca Mountain seemed kind of silly to Wade and others. A better reason might have been because of post 9/11 national security concerns.

The new design, already approved and already on sale, features an outline of the same Nevada Test Site and the unmistakeable atomic symbolism, like its predecessor, but no cloud.

"This one, although it's part of the same thing, is okay, so..." Wade isn't about to gripe though. A portion of the proceeds from the sales of these plates will go to help support the Atomic Testing Museum, which has received rave reviews but is still struggling to attract visitors. Wade hopes that former test site workers, and others, will step up to the plate, as he has done. "The new license plates are available at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Low numbers are available. This is the lowest number. It's my car."

Darn. So, who's got number two?

The test site plates cost $61 dollars and $25 dollars from each sale goes to the Atomic testing Museum. 



-------- MILITARY 


-------- biological weapons

Scientists helping U.S. prepare for biological attack

By SUE VORENBERG
Scripps Howard News Service
December 29, 2005

http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=TERROR-GARBAGE-12-29-05&cat=AN

You can tell a lot about a biological terrorist by looking at their garbage.

Problem is, their garbage is much smaller than most people's. Typically it's made up of chunks of metal, chemicals and organisms that are 10 times smaller than a red blood cell.

Getting useful tips from such biochemical soup left over from an anthrax, plague or botulism toxin attack might sound like an impossible task, but scientists at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories are able to find many of them.

Both labs have started creating groups of expert scientists and unique technologies to help the federal government build its abilities in the relatively new field of bioforensics. The goal is to be prepared for an attack so terrorists can be captured quickly, said Luke Brewer, a Sandia bioforensic scientist.

"The idea is to create a tool kit for any future bioterror incidents," Brewer said. "We want to answer questions about how a weapon was made, where it was made, how it was used."

Sandia and Los Alamos are working with other labs in the Department of Energy complex to help create the Department of Homeland Security's new $4 million National Bioforensic Analysis Center in Maryland. The labs are pooling resources to create a battle plan and strategy for the center to fight biological attackers.

"We have several unique capabilities in specialty areas that aren't ready to be transferred to the national center because all of this is so new," said Babetta Marrone, a bioforensic scientist at Los Alamos. "There are a lot of approaches we can use to track information about a sample. For example, we can analyze the DNA of a strain of anthrax, get a genetic signature - like a fingerprint - and tell what part of the world that strain came from."

Los Alamos has a database full of genetic maps of different types of anthrax that can be quickly referenced through a lab supercomputer, she added.

If an attack were to happen, samples could be sent to New Mexico to take advantage of the technology and expertise at the state's two labs, Marrone said.

"Some samples could be sent here, although we can't take certain types of biological agents because we don't have a high enough level bio safety lab," she said.

Still that doesn't necessarily rule out samples of the leftover junk coming to the labs, Marrone and Brewer said.

Both Sandia and Los Alamos have several instruments that can look at tiny chemical components and shapes inside tiny samples.

"If I see a stainless steel particle in the garbage that comes with the sample, then that tells me something about the kind of containers it was processed in," Brewer said. "It's not just about the main organism used in an attack - it's about all the other stuff that comes with it. If you look through that stuff you can find a lot of clues that can lead you back to the attacker."

One way to tease information from a sample is by firing a stream of electrons at it and reading the information that bounces back, Brewer explained.

"We drag our beam back and forth like someone would drag their finger over braille writing," Brewer said. "Then we feed that into a computer and it pulls out what's in the sample just like pulling a needle out of a haystack."

With the increasing risk of global terrorism, pooling resources into a new department makes sense, although ultimately the technologies might move completely into the new Maryland-based Analysis Center, Brewer said.

"The idea is not to be caught off-guard," Brewer said. "We want to have tools set in place so if we have an incident we can quickly find the people that did this, apprehend them and prosecute them."

(Contact Sue Vorenberg of The Tribune in Albuquerque, N.M., at www.abqtrib.com.)



-------- prisoners of war

Rumsfeld Admits to "Ghosting" Detainee

By David Swanson
Thu, 2005-12-29 

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/6120

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has admitted that he "ghosted" a detainee, meaning that he made the decision to hold a prisoner without keeping any records of the fact.

While prisoners of war can be theoretically stripped of their rights by calling them other names (like "unlawful combatants"), they are probably most effectively stripped of all rights by keeping their imprisonment secret. That is what Rumsfeld says he did.

An account of what we know on this matter can be found on page 110 of a new report by Congressman John Conyers called "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Cover-ups in the Iraq War."

Following a catalog of evidence of other crimes sanctioned by top Bush Administration officials, the report reads:

"We also have an admission that George Tenet specifically approved the ghosting in Iraq of a specific individual, and that Mr. Rumsfeld admitted to approving of ghosting of detainees as a special matter. During a press conference in June 2004, Secretary Rumsfeld confirmed not only that he was asked by CIA Director George Tenet to hide a specific detainee, but also that he hid the detainee and that the detainee was lost in the system for more than eight months:

"Q -- Mr. Secretary, I'd like to ask why last November you ordered the U.S. military to keep a suspected Ansar al-Islam prisoner in Iraq [Hiwa Abdul Rahman Rashul] secret from the Red Cross. He's now been secret for more than seven months. And there are other such shadowy prisoners in Iraq who are being kept secret from the Red Cross.

"SEC. RUMSFELD: With respect to the -- I want to separate the two. Iraq, my understanding is that the investigations on that subject are going forward. With respect to the detainee you're talking about, I'm not an expert on this, but I was requested by the Director of Central Intelligence to take custody of an Iraqi national who was believed to be a high-ranking member of Ansar al-Islam. And we did so. We were asked to not immediately register the individual. And we did that. It would -- it was -- he was brought to the attention of the Department, the senior level of the Department I think late last month. And we're in the process of registering him with the ICRC at the present time . . ."

This is from June 17, 2004, and can be found here.

This is the Secretary of Defense publicly stating that the Director of the CIA told him not to register a prisoner with the Red Cross, and that he obeyed, and that several months later the prisoner was still not registered.

Why do Nuremberg Principles III and IV both come to mind?

Principle III
The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible Government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

Principle IV
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

Why was the CIA calling the shots here? Because they had taken Mr. Rashul out of Iraq for "questioning" at an undisclosed location. They were transferring him to military custody.

Rumsfeld agreed to keep Rashul off the books, and issued a classified order, that the New York Daily News reported on June 20, 2004, as reading: "Notification of the presence and or status of the detainee to the International Committee of the Red Cross, or any international or national aid organization, is prohibited pending further guidance."

General Sanchez issued his own order to implement Secretary Rumsfeld's order. Sanchez' order, as reported in the media, "accepts custody and detains Hiwa Abdul Rahman Rashul, a high-ranking Ansar al-Islam member;" orders that he "remain segregated and isolated from the remainder of the detainee population;" "[o]nly military personnel and debriefers will have access to the detainee. . . . Knowledge of the presence of this detainee will be strictly limited on a need-to-know basis." "Any reports from interrogations or debriefings will contain only the mininum [sic] amount of source information . . ."

The ghosting of Rashul can neither be blamed on low-ranking personnel nor be described as an isolated incident.

In a statement to investigators, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, said that in September 2003, the CIA requested that the military intelligence officials "continue to make cells available for their detainees and that they not have to go through the normal in processing procedures."

Army General Paul Kern testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in September 2004, that the U.S. had held as many as 100 ghost detainees in Iraq.

Rumsfeld himself has confirmed that this was no isolated incident:

"Q -- But then why wasn't the -- why wasn't the Red Cross told, and are there other such prisoners being detained without the knowledge of the Red Cross?

"SEC. RUMSFELD: There are -- there are instances where that occurs. And a request was made to do that, and we did."



-------- spies

Covert CIA Program Withstands New Furor
Anti-Terror Effort Continues to Grow

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 30, 2005; A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/29/AR2005122901585_pf.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/30/MNGVDGF5S91.DTL

The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources.

The broad-based effort, known within the agency by the initials GST, is compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, details of which are known mainly to those directly involved.

GST includes programs allowing the CIA to capture al Qaeda suspects with help from foreign intelligence services, to maintain secret prisons abroad, to use interrogation techniques that some lawyers say violate international treaties, and to maintain a fleet of aircraft to move detainees around the globe. Other compartments within GST give the CIA enhanced ability to mine international financial records and eavesdrop on suspects anywhere in the world.

Over the past two years, as aspects of this umbrella effort have burst into public view, the revelations have prompted protests and official investigations in countries that work with the United States, as well as condemnation by international human rights activists and criticism by members of Congress.

Still, virtually all the programs continue to operate largely as they were set up, according to current and former officials. These sources say Bush's personal commitment to maintaining the GST program and his belief in its legality have been key to resisting any pressure to change course.

"In the past, presidents set up buffers to distance themselves from covert action," said A. John Radsan, assistant general counsel at the CIA from 2002 to 2004. "But this president, who is breaking down the boundaries between covert action and conventional war, seems to relish the secret findings and the dirty details of operations."

The administration's decisions to rely on a small circle of lawyers for legal interpretations that justify the CIA's covert programs and not to consult widely with Congress on them have also helped insulate the efforts from the growing furor, said several sources who have been involved.

Bush has never publicly confirmed the existence of a covert program, but he was recently forced to defend the approach in general terms, citing his wartime responsibilities to protect the nation. In November, responding to questions about the CIA's clandestine prisons, he said the nation must defend against an enemy that "lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again."

This month he went into more detail, defending the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping within the United States. That program is separate from the GST program, but three lawyers involved said the legal rationale for the NSA program is essentially the same one used to support GST, which is an abbreviation of a classified code name for the umbrella covert action program.

The administration contends it is still acting in self-defense after the Sept. 11 attacks, that the battlefield is worldwide, and that everything it has approved is consistent with the demands made by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, when it passed a resolution authorizing "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks."

"Everything is done in the name of self-defense, so they can do anything because nothing is forbidden in the war powers act," said one official who was briefed on the CIA's original cover program and who is skeptical of its legal underpinnings. "It's an amazing legal justification that allows them to do anything," said the official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issues.

The interpretation undergirds the administration's determination not to waver under public protests or the threat of legislative action. For example, after The Washington Post disclosed the existence of secret prisons in several Eastern European democracies, the CIA closed them down because of an uproar in Europe. But the detainees were moved elsewhere to similar CIA prisons, referred to as "black sites" in classified documents.

The CIA has stuck with its overall approaches, defending and in some cases refining them. The agency is working to establish procedures in the event a prisoner dies in custody. One proposal circulating among mid-level officers calls for rushing in a CIA pathologist to perform an autopsy and then quickly burning the body, according to two sources.

In June, the CIA temporarily suspended its interrogation program after a controversy over the disclosure of an Aug. 1, 2002, memorandum from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel that defined torture in an unconventional way. The White House withdrew and replaced the memo. But the hold on the CIA's interrogation activities was eventually removed, several intelligence officials said.

The authorized techniques include "waterboarding" and "water dousing," both meant to make prisoners think they are drowning; hard slapping; isolation; sleep deprivation; liquid diets; and stress positions -- often used, intelligence officials say, in combination to enhance the effect.

Behind the scenes, CIA Director Porter J. Goss -- until last year the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee -- has gathered ammunition to defend the program.

After a CIA inspector general's report in the spring of 2004 stated that some authorized interrogation techniques violated international law, Goss asked two national security experts to study the program's effectiveness.

Gardner Peckham, an adviser to then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), concluded that the interrogation techniques had been effective, said an intelligence official familiar with the result. John J. Hamre, deputy defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, offered a more ambiguous conclusion. Both declined to comment.

The only apparent roadblock that could yet prompt significant change in the CIA's approach is a law passed this month prohibiting torture and cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody, including in CIA hands.

It is still unclear how the law, sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), will be implemented. But two intelligence experts said the CIA will be required to draw up clear guidelines and to get all special interrogation techniques approved by a wider range of government lawyers who hold a more conventional interpretation of international treaty obligations.

"The executive branch will not pull back unless it has to," said a former Justice Department lawyer involved in the initial discussions on executive power. "Because if it pulls back unilaterally and another attack occurs, it will get blamed."

The Origins

The top-secret presidential finding Bush signed six days after the Sept. 11 attacks empowered the intelligence agencies in a way not seen since World War II, and it ordered them to create what would become the GST program.

Written findings are required by the National Security Act of 1947 before the CIA can undertake a covert action. A covert action may not violate the Constitution or any U.S. law. But such actions can, and often do, violate laws of the foreign countries in which they take place, said intelligence experts.

The CIA faced the day after the 2001 attacks with few al Qaeda informants, a tiny paramilitary division and no interrogators, much less a system for transporting terrorism suspects and keeping them hidden for interrogation.

Besides fighting the war in Afghanistan, the agency set about to put in place an intelligence-gathering network that relies heavily on foreign security services and their deeper knowledge of local terrorist groups. With billions of dollars appropriated each year by Congress, the CIA has established joint counterterrorism intelligence centers in more than two dozen countries, and it has enlisted at least eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe, to allow secret prisons on their soil.

Working behind the scenes, the CIA has gained approval from foreign governments to whisk terrorism suspects off the streets or out of police custody into a clandestine prison system that includes the CIA's black sites and facilities run by intelligence agencies in other countries.

The presidential finding also permitted the CIA to create paramilitary teams to hunt and kill designated individuals anywhere in the world, according to a dozen current and former intelligence officials and congressional and executive branch sources.

In four years, the GST has become larger than the CIA's covert action programs in Afghanistan and Central America in the 1980s, according to current and former intelligence officials. Indeed, the CIA, working with foreign counterparts, has been responsible for virtually all of the success the United States has had in capturing or killing al Qaeda leaders since Sept. 11, 2001.

Bush delegated much of the day-to-day decision-making and the creation of individual components to then-CIA Director George J. Tenet, according to congressional and intelligence officials who were briefed on the finding at the time.

"George could decide, even on killings," one of these officials said, referring to Tenet. "That was pushed down to him. George had the authority on who was going to get it."

The Lawyers

Tenet, according to half a dozen former intelligence officials, delegated most of the decision making on lethal action to the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. Killing an al Qaeda leader with a Hellfire missile fired from a remote-controlled drone might have been considered assassination in a prior era and therefore banned by law.

But after Sept. 11, four former government lawyers said, it was classified as an act of self-defense and therefore was not an assassination. "If it was an al Qaeda person, it wouldn't be an assassination," said one lawyer involved.

This month, Pakistani intelligence sources said, Hamza Rabia, a top operational planner for al Qaeda, was killed along with four others by a missile fired by U.S. operatives using an unmanned Predator drone, although there were conflicting reports on whether a missile was used. In May, another al Qaeda member, Haitham Yemeni, was reported killed by a Predator drone missile in northwest Pakistan.

Refining what constitutes an assassination was just one of many legal interpretations made by Bush administration lawyers. Time and again, the administration asked government lawyers to draw up new rules and reinterpret old ones to approve activities once banned or discouraged under the congressional reforms beginning in the 1970s, according to these officials and seven lawyers who once worked on these matters.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, deputy director of national intelligence, has described the administration's philosophy in public and private meetings, including a session with human rights groups.

"We're going to live on the edge," Hayden told the groups, according to notes taken by Human Rights Watch and confirmed by Hayden's office. "My spikes will have chalk on them. . . . We're pretty aggressive within the law. As a professional, I'm troubled if I'm not using the full authority allowed by law."

Not stopping another attack not only will be a professional failure, he argued, but also "will move the line" again on acceptable legal limits to counterterrorism.

When the CIA wanted new rules for interrogating important terrorism suspects the White House gave the task to a small group of lawyers within the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel who believed in an aggressive interpretation of presidential power.

The White House tightened the circle of participants involved in these most sensitive new areas. It initially cut out the State Department's general counsel, most of the judge advocates general of the military services and the Justice Department's criminal division, which traditionally dealt with international terrorism.

"The Bush administration did not seek a broad debate on whether commander-in-chief powers can trump international conventions and domestic statutes in our struggle against terrorism," said Radsan, the former CIA lawyer, who is a professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn. "They could have separated the big question from classified details to operations and had an open debate. Instead, an inner circle of lawyers and advisers worked around the dissenters in the administration and one-upped each other with extreme arguments."

At the CIA, the White House allowed the general counsel's job, traditionally filled from outside the CIA by someone who functioned in a sort of oversight role, to be held by John Rizzo, a career CIA lawyer with a fondness for flashy suits and ties who worked for years in the Directorate of Operations, or D.O.

"John Rizzo is a classic D.O. lawyer. He understands the culture, the intelligence business," Radsan said. "He admires the case officers. And they trust him to work out tough issues in the gray with them. He is like a corporate lawyer who knows how to make the deal happen."

These lawyers have written legal justifications for holding suspects picked up outside Afghanistan without a court order, without granting traditional legal rights and without giving them access to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

CIA and Office of Legal Counsel lawyers also determined that it was legal for suspects to be secretly detained in one country and transferred to another for the purposes of interrogation and detention -- a process known as "rendition."

Lawyers involved in the decision making acknowledge the uncharted nature of their work. "I did what I thought the best reading of the law was," one lawyer said. "These lines are not obvious. It was a judgment."

Credit and Blame

One way the White House limited debate over its program was to virtually shut out Congress during the early years. Congress, for its part, raised only weak and sporadic protests. The administration sometimes refused to give the committees charged with overseeing intelligence agencies the details they requested. It also cut the number of members of Congress routinely briefed on these matters, usually to four members -- the chairmen and ranking Democratic members of the House and Senate intelligence panels.

John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, complained in a 2003 letter to Vice President Cheney that his briefing on the NSA eavesdropping was unsatisfactory. "Given the security restrictions associated with this information, and my inability to consult staff or counsel on my own, I feel unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse, these activities," he wrote.

Rockefeller made similar complaints about the CIA's refusal to allow the full committee to see the backup material supporting a skeptical report by the CIA inspector general in 2004 on detentions and interrogations that questioned the legal basis for renditions.

Some former CIA officers now worry that the agency alone will be held responsible for actions authorized by Bush and approved by the White House's lawyers.

Attacking the CIA is common when covert programs are exposed and controversial, said Gerald Haines, a former CIA historian who is a scholar in residence at the University of Virginia. "It seems to me the agency is taking the brunt of all the recent criticism."

Duane R. "Dewey" Clarridge, who directed the CIA's covert efforts to support the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s, said the nature of CIA work overseas is, and should be, risky and sometimes ugly. "You have a spy agency because the spy agency is going to break laws overseas. If you don't want it to do those dastardly things, don't have it. You can have the State Department."

But a former CIA officer said the agency "lost its way" after Sept. 11, rarely refusing or questioning an administration request. The unorthodox measures "have got to be flushed out of the system," the former officer said. "That's how it works in this country."

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.



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


-------- justice

Coaxing Out Whistleblowers - a New Appeal

Thu Dec 29, 2005 Antiwar.com

http://www.antiwar.com/blog/index.php?id=P2590

I am reprinting verbatim the following Dec. 30 press release from the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. In the wake of the recent uproar over NSA warrantless wiretaps, they are taking the opportunity to call for informed people to come forward and do their civic duty by speaking out about government abuses of power, crime and corruption, etc.

And I can take the opportunity to add that for those of you (or those you may know) with experience working in the Balkans (in international missions, in the military or related fields, or in any other informed capacity here), that we like hearing from new whistleblowers and sources, on or off the record. We've already lined some up juicy tidbits to come out in early 2006- a particularly crucial year for a lot of reasons in the Balkans.

So... now's the time, and here's the place.

Now, on to the press release:

December 30, 2005
NSWBC Call to Patriotic Duty
By Sibel Edmonds & William Weaver

Without whistleblowers the public would never know of the many abuses of constitutional rights by the government. Whistleblowers, Truth Tellers, are responsible for the disclosure that President George W. Bush ordered unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens. These constitutional lifeguards take their patriotic oaths to heart and soul: Rather than complying with classification and secrecy orders designed to protect officials engaging in criminal conduct, whistleblowers chose to risk their livelihoods and the wrath of their agencies to get the truth out. But will they be listened to by those who are charged with accountability?

The Whistleblowers Law of Congressional Hearings holds that the higher ranking the official who testifies the less the likelihood that the truth will be revealed. With this in mind, it is impossible to proceed to the viscera of what happened to whom and when without asking those who are charged with putting policy decisions into the actual stream of practice. High officials have perverse incentives to hide what is done in their orders by the employees below them. It is indispensable that Congress reach deep inside the National Security Agency and other agencies, seeking out employees at the operational level to determine how the President’s illegal order was carried into action. To assure that this occurs, we need for people with information from the agencies involved to come forward and ask to be interviewed by Congress. The National Security Whistleblowers Coalition calls on people with knowledge of unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens to contact NSWBC and let us know that they are willing to provide congress with information and testimony. Anonymity, if desired, will be scrupulously honored. NSWBC will provide contact information to Congress and investigative authorities, and will follow up to ensure that these witnesses were in fact interviewed in good faith by congressional staff and committees and allowed to participate in the hearing process. NSWBC will be the conduit between agents and Congress for those like Russ Tice, a former intelligence agent at the National Security Agency, who announced his willingness to disclose to Congress illegal acts by officials at his former employer. At NSWBC we know what we are asking people to do: Our organization is made up exclusively of veteran intelligence and law enforcement officers, agents and analysts.



-------- POLITICS


-------- propaganda wars

Pentagon Says Un-Credited Pro-US News Sites Legal

Thursday, December 29th, 2005
Democracy Now! Headlines

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/29/151210

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is saying a military program to fund news websites that pays journalists to promote US policies in Europe and Africa does not violate federal law. This according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. A review was ordered in February following disclosures the US was paying Virginia contractor Anteon to run websites without proper attribution to promote US policies in the Balkans and the Africa’s Maghreb region.

Meanwhile, an inquiry continues into the Washington, D.C.-based Pentagon contractor the Lincoln Group over the disclosure it planted pro-military stories in Iraqi newspapers. A Pentagon official who supports the program told the Times : "We have never been outgunned in any battle, but we are constantly being outmedia-ed. These are things we should be doing more of." 



-------- ENERGY 


-------- alternative energy

China Firm to Spend $2.5 Billion on Renewable Power

REUTERS CHINA : December 29, 2005

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/34248/story.htm

BEIJING - A Chinese state-owned energy firm plans to invest at least 20 billion yuan ($2.48 billion) over the next five years in biomass, garbage treatment and other alternative energy projects, state media said on Wednesday.

China Energy Conservation Investment Corp. made the plans to take advantage of a new law promoting renewable energy, which sets tariffs in favour of non-fossil energy such as wind, water and solar power and is due to take effect in January.

"We see tremendous business opportunities from the new law," the China Daily quoted Wang Yi, a senior company official, as saying.

Coal provides some 70 percent of electricity in China, the world's second-largest energy consumer and producer of greenhouse gases.

The state-owned company has started building two wind farms and a new facility that would harness steam generated from garbage and sewage treatment to produce power, the newspaper said.

The firm had budgeted 9 billion yuan to build the garbage-powered plant underway in eastern China and 10 others like it in other parts of the country over the next five years, Wang said.

Another 9 billion yuan would go towards constructing up to 30 biomass energy projects in major agricultural provinces, which use organic or woody material such as straw to make fuel or generate power.

China has set a goal of getting 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, though it has acknowledged that coal will remain its primary source of electricity for decades to come.



-------- ACTIVISTS

...Soldier, Spy
An SCSU peace protest shows up in a secret-and likely illegal-Pentagon database of suspected terrorist threats.

by Carole Bass, December 29, 2005 New Haven Advocate

http://newhavenadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:138124

For antiwar activists at Southern Connecticut State University, it was a triumph: Students pre-empted an Army National Guard recruiting drive on campus last February, handing out anti-military pamphlets and shouting until the recruiters packed up and left.

For the U.S. military, it was a threat--a serious enough threat for the Pentagon, using a secret surveillance program, to record the SCSU protest in a national database of "potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense."

Terrorist threat? A bunch of college kids trying to keep other students from getting suckered into killing and being killed in Iraq?

The Pentagon concluded that the reported threat at Southern was "not credible" and deemed the investigation "closed." And yet the Feb. 23 protest remained in the database at least until mid-December, when NBC News reported on the secret program of spying on American peace activists.

This Defense Department spying is separate from two other federal assaults on the privacy of American citizens undertaken in the name of the war on terror. Those other domestic spy programs, both exposed in the last two weeks, are the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretaps of phone calls and the FBI's surveillance of groups like Catholic Worker and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

SCSU antiwar organizers couldn't be reached last week for comment. In any case, NBC's report on Pentagon spying (at msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316) drew far less attention than the New York Times ' revelations of NSA wiretapping and FBI surveillance. But the DoD skullduggery is deeply disturbing.

Two legal experts contacted by the Advocate express alarm not only at what the Pentagon database contains--information about supposed violent threats by people who advocate peace--but also at who compiled it: the U.S. military.

"These are the guys with the guns," says Jonathan Freiman, a New Haven lawyer who specializes in civil liberties in post-9/11 America. "The whole reason the framers [of the Constitution] set up civilian oversight of the military was that they recognized that the guys with the guns shouldn't run the government."

Guys with guns generally don't like to answer questions. But questions abound. Questions like:

" Why is the Pentagon keeping tabs on nonviolent protests in the first place?

" Why did it keep information in the database for months after the alleged threats were determined to be unfounded?

" Where did Pentagon snoops get this information, and how did they attempt to confirm or discount it?

" Is any of this legal?

"I have grave doubts about" the legality, says Eugene Fidell, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who has taught military law at Yale and is president of the National Institute of Military Justice, a nonprofit organization that has taken on the Bush administration over torture, indefinite detention of terrorism suspects without charging them, and other post-9/11 outrages.

Fidell, like Freiman, knew about the NSA wiretapping and the FBI surveillance of political groups, but had not seen the NBC report on Pentagon spying. But, he points out, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 "keeps the military, broadly speaking, out of law enforcement. This will provoke litigation," he says. "And if the facts are as they claimed to be, I think the government will have a hard time defending its position."

As for the first three questions, NBC reports that the Defense Department two years ago ordered an agency called Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, to set up "a domestic law enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense." As part of that database, the Pentagon established a new reporting mechanism called Threat and Local Observation Notice, or TALON, in which military units around the country serve up "non-validated domestic threat information," NBC reports.

CIFA has handed out millions of dollars of contracts to private companies that mine government and commercial databases and troll the internet looking for threats, NBC says.

On Dec. 15, the day after the NBC report, the Pentagon announced it would review the TALON system. "It appears as if there may have been things that were left in the database that shouldn't have been left there," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.

An unnamed "senior official," quoted in the Washington Post, went further: "You can also make the argument that these things should never have been put in the database in the first place until they were confirmed as threats."

Bingo. According to NBC, the 400-page database contained reports of possible spying on military facilities, stolen military vehicles, bomb threats, and other potentially serious vulnerabilities. It also contained dozens of antiwar and counter-recruiting eventsincluding the one at SCSU on Feb. 23 and a December 2004 protest by elderly Quaker peaceniks in Florida.

It brings to mind visions of the Vietnam era, when the Pentagon got into deep doo-doo for widespread spying on American antiwar and civil rights protesters. But Freiman, the New Haven lawyer, reaches for an earlier historical precedent.

"When you realize that about half the country is against the war, you realize that the intelligence agencies and the military together are claiming the right to spy on more than half of American citizens," says Freiman. "To find the last time these kind of extraordinary claims were put forward, you have to go back to the McCarthy era."

Freiman works jointly at the law firm of Wiggin and Dana and at Yale Law School's Schell Center for International Human Rights. One of his clients is Jose Padilla, the U.S. citizen and alleged "dirty bomber" whom the government held incommunicado in a military prison for more than three years before finally indicting him in November.

"There are a lot of serious threats to the country," Freiman says. "But the president has a lot of tools. Antiwar protesters--if there's some kind of legitimate threat, assistant U.S. attorneys can get search warrants. Those of us who aren't involved in crimes shouldn't be subject to this."

Fidell, from the National Institute of Military Justice, calls for "serious congressional hearings, both on this and on the wiretapping. Deep down," he says, "this country is populated by civil libertarians. Deep down."

He may be right. In the '70s, congressional hearings into federal government spying and dirty tricksby the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, the White Houseled to sweeping reforms.

Donald Rumsfeld, a veteran of the Nixon White House, ran the Pentagon under President Gerald Ford in the mid-'70s, when some of those reforms were forced upon the nation's gumshoes, spooks and guys with guns.

Three decades later, as George W. Bush's defense secretary, Rumsfeld seems to have forgotten those lessons of the past.

Appearing on Larry King Live last week, Rumsfeld essentially called the American peace movement the country's opponent in the Iraq war.

In an article headlined "Rumsfeld: War can be lost only in U.S.," the Pentagon's official news agency paraphrased its boss as saying that "every U.S. conflict has had opponents and has caused divisions within the country... but if the government gave in every time someone expressed doubt, this country wouldn't exist as it does today."

In a direct quote, Rumsfeld continued: "I just am hopeful that people will reflect on our history as a country and the nature of conflictsprior conflicts . ... We have to constantly adjust our tactics to meet the changes that the enemy is imposing on themselves."

We have met the enemy, Rummy, and he is you. Database and all. 

----

Top 10 Antiwar Stories of 2005
From Cindy Sheehan to John Murtha

By KEVIN ZEESE, December 29, 2005 Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/zeese12292005.html

1. Cindy Sheehan stands up to President Bush in Crawford, TX and reawakens the anti-war movement. When the 'Peace Mom' was at the Veterans for Peace conference in Dallas,Texas this summer she decided she was going to Crawford to see the President. She went but only saw the President as he sped by to a fund raiser for Republican candidates. But Bush ­ and the world ­ heard her question: "Mr. President what was the noble cause for which my son Casey died?" The President is still having trouble with that basic question. Sheehan's stand awakened the nation in what Nancy Lessin of Military Families Speak Out described as "the acoustics of ditch." Sheehan usually appears on stage with other Gold Star Families, family members of soldiers serving in Iraq and veterans of the Iraq War recognizing that she is just one of hundreds of thousands of family members whose loved ones have been killed or seriously injured in the war and occupation.

2. The people speak with their feet and in the polls. A majority of Americans now believe the war was a mistake and want to see the U.S. beginning to withdraw troops from the country. In March more than 700 demonstrations were held throughout the country on the second anniversary of the invasion. On September 24, several hundred thousand people took action and demonstrated in Washington, DC against the war in Iraq. The march, co-sponsored by United for Peace and Justice and the ANSWER Coalition, featured speakers from a wide range of perspectives ­ geographic, political, ethnic and religious. The event was reported in the corporate media as a 'mere' 100,000 when DC police officials said the organizers at least met their goal of 100,000. After the march activities continued a United for Peace and Justice sponsored lobby day where more than 1,000 people lobbied elected officials. And, the several days of activities included civil disobedience where 40 people were arrested at the Pentagon and more than 370 people were arrested at the White House - three times larger then the previous record for arrests for civil disobedience at the White House.

3. The people of Iraq who have stood up for their nation's freedom ­ voting for political parties that call for the end of the occupation, with political leaders who signed the Cairo Statement that called for withdrawal of troops, for political forces putting forward the framework for a ceasefire and end to the war, and for Iraqis who have resisted the occupation. DemocracyRising does not support terrorism but recognizes the desires of Iraqis to see foreign troops leave their country as well as their ability to fight the world's most powerful military force to a standstill.

4. Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) puts forward an exit strategy. Murtha, who supported the invasion of Iraq and consistently advocates for a stronger military and larger defense budget, urged an immediate 'redeployment' of U.S. forces out of Iraq to be completed in six months. The proposal is more aggressive than any legislation introduced up to that time, and because of Rep. Murtha's reputation as a hawk, it immediately starts an aggressive discussion of the war in Congress.

5. Former military, intelligence and foreign service officers speak out against the war. Among those who have come out against the war are:

    - Brent Skowcroft, national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush and deputy to Henry Kissinger in the Nixon Administration, who described the Iraq War as a failing venture.

    - General William Odom, a Retired General, Former Head of NSA Under President Reagan, wrote an article "What's Wrong with Cutting and Running?" in which he argued all we fear is more likely the longer we stay in Iraq.

    - John Deutch, headed the Central Intelligence Agency from 1995 and 1996 and was deputy defense secretary 1994-1995 called for U.S. troops to immediately leave Iraq in June 2005.

    - Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter, describes President George W. Bush's foreign policy as "suicidal statecraft" in a Los Angeles Times commentary.

    - Melvin Laird, the Secretary of Defense for President Richard Nixon, calls for an exit strategy from Iraq saying the Bush administration is repeating mistakes in Iraq made by Richard Nixon during the Vietnam war.

    - Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and a retired Army colonel in a speech to the New America Foundation and a Los Angeles Times commentary accused Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld of leading a "cabal" that circumvented the formal policy-making and intelligence processes in order to take the country to a disastrous war in Iraq.

    - Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, a retired four-star general, was Commander in Chief of the U.S. Central Command (1991-94) and commanded the U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf after the 1991 war, described the Iraq War as "wrong from the beginning . . ."

    - Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan (ret.) has described Iraq as "the wrong war at the wrong time."

    - Edward Peck, the former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and Deputy Director of President Reagan's terrorist task force who served in World War II and Korea and then for 32 years as a diplomat describes the Iraq War as "unnecessary, poorly conceived and badly planned."

6. Republicans begin to break rank with the President. The anti-war movement began to see some breakthroughs in the Republican Party - most notably Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) who says, we're destabilizing the region. And, in the House. Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), known for renaming the Congressional French Fries "Freedom Fries," called for withdrawal and claimed he was misled when he supported the war. Rep. Ron Paul, a Republican with strong libertarian instincts, has criticized the "neocon global government" and said the U.S. is "ignoring reality in Iraq." Rep. John Duncan, Jr. (R-TN) argued that true conservatives should oppose the "undeclared and unnecessary war" in Iraq in a speech entitled "The Situation in Iraq" on the the House Floor on June 28.

7. Soldiers start to say no to the war, recruiters fail to meet recruitment goals, and mothers organize against the draft. The end of the Vietnam War came in part because U.S. soldiers lost faith in the war and their military leadership. In 2005 the U.S. began to see that starting in Iraq. Soldiers were leaving the country to avoid service and others faced prison for conscientious objection. Pablo Paredes statement upon his sentencing for refusing to return to Iraq said it clearly: "I am guilty of believing this war is illegal. I'm guilty of believing war in all forms is immoral and useless, and I am guilty of believing that as a service member I have a duty to refuse to participate in this war because it is illegal." Seeing the reality war creates anti-war activists willing to go to jail for their views. As Cynthia McKinney said of Kevin Benderman, another conscientious objector, "He was present when his superior ordered his unit to open fire on small children who were throwing rocks at the soldiers of his unit. He chased the hungry dogs from an open mass grave filled with the bodies of young children, old men and women. Kevin saw the burned child, crying in pain, while all around her ignored her injuries." Kevin's wife Monica continues to speak out against the war while her husband is incarcerated. Counter recruitment, already difficult because the Iraq War is unpopular and the commander in chief is not trusted, was made more difficult by counter recruitment efforts.

8. Congress stands up to the President and Vice President on torture. Three leading Republican Senators -- John McCain (AZ), John Warner (VA) and Lindsay Graham (SC) -- challenged the White House with legislation that would expressly prohibit cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees in US custody anywhere in the world. Both Houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to ban torture ­ even after a threatened veto by the President (it would have been his first of his presidency) and after intensive lobbying by Vice President Cheney. While lobbying to preserve torture, President Bush and other administration officials claimed the U.S. did not engage in torture.

9. The Downing Street Memos breakthrough in the corporate media. A concerted web based campaign by a coalition of organizations under the name, AfterDowningStreet.org forced the corporate media to cover the Downing Street Memos. A series of memos that added to the evidence that the Bush Administration manipulated intelligence to send the U.S. to war. As the evidence mounted the public came to support the impeachment of President Bush at levels higher than they ever supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

10. Anti-war Democrats, ignored the leadership of their party and have gotten organized and are speaking out more effectively than they had been through the 'Out of Iraq Caucus' in the House. House members deserving special recognition include Maxine Waters (D-CA), Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Neil Abrocrombie (D-HI), Jim McDermott (D-WA), Michael Capuano (D-MA) and Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) and Henry Waxman (D-CA). In the Senate Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Robert Byrd (D-WV) have spoken out for bringing U.S. troops home. And, Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic Leader deserves credit for closing the Senate to force debate on misuse of intelligence leading up to the invasion.


The Underreported Ten

1. Bush Family war profiteering on the war in Iraq. The extent of Iraq contracts going to corporations which involve members of President George W. Bush's family has not been investigated by the corporate media. Among the Bush family members profiting from the war are his brothers Neil and Marvin as well as Bucky and William. This involves contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Often Bush-related firms receive contracts where the corporations have no expertise and certainly the Bush family members have no expertise or experience in these areas.

2. Investigate the alleged war crimes in the assault on Fallujah. The city of Fallujah had once been quiet about the occupation, but U.S. soldiers killing of civilians protesting the military taking of a school led to an uprising. The result: two devastating assaults, accusations of indiscriminate bombings, killing of civilians and the use of chemical weapons. Today, as one unidentified U.S. solder says "Anyone in Fallujah can be an insurgent." Understanding Fallujah will explain why the U.S. cannot win the war in Iraq.

3. The environmental and human impact of depleted uranium needs investigation. The U.S. is using armaments with depleted uranium claiming that there is no risk involved. Yet, there is evidence of danger to U.S. soldiers as well as Iraqis and the environment.

4. Is the United States losing the war in Iraq? In his recent series of speeches consistently claimed that the U.S. will leave Iraq when we win the war. Further, he and the Vice President have been claiming that we are winning the war. They know that many Americans are willing to take U.S. casualties and spend billions of dollars if there is a chance of winning. Yet, there is strong evidence that the war cannot be won and that the U.S. is doing more harm than good by remaining in Iraq.

5. The under counting of U.S. casualties in Iraq demeans the sacrifice of U.S. soldiers and is an unpatriotic lie of the Bush Administration. While 15,000 soldiers are reportedly casualties of the war, in fact more than 100,000 have sought medical treatment. The administration undercounts casualties as part of their effort to hide the true costs of the war. The media should pierce this veil of dishonesty and tell the public the truth about the casualty count.

6. The need for a corporate withdrawal from Iraq as a first step toward giving Iraq back to Iraqis. The U.S. has been unable to rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq ­ electricity, oil production, sewage treatment, government buildings and other basic infrastructure needs ­ are not being rebuilt at a satisfactory pace. Evidence of widespread corruption by U.S. corporations is institutionalizing corruption in Iraq. Halliburton is a prime example of a government boondoggle ­ ineffective in its rebuilding efforts, unauditable in its billing practices and unfair in its treatment of workers ­ it is a prime example of the need for a U.S. corporate withdrawal from Iraq.

7. Impeachment of the President and Vice President needs to become a part of mainstream political dialog. The evidence of false statements by the administration, and especially Bush and Cheney, has grown in 2005. The public believes that if the President lied he should be impeached. More and more people are openly talking about impeachment, now it is time for the media to examine whether the President and Vice President are above the law. Rep. John Conyers issued a detailed report on these issues and submitted various impeachment-related bills at the end of the session.

8. Examine the real costs of the Iraq War ­ not just the hundreds of billions appropriated for the war, but what these appropriations are costing Americans in their daily lives. With the U.S. budget in high-level deficit spending continued occupation of Iraq ­ at a cost of $6 billion per month ­ means the U.S. cannot fund other projects. Sen. Edward Kennedy has put out a list of what the U.S. could do with the money ­ in health care, education, housing and other necessities of the people. It is time for the American public to know what this war is really costing.

9. Is the U.S. becoming the enemy we abhor? Reports of torture, civilian casualties, use of weapons of mass destruction make the United States more and more similar to Saddam Hussein's Iraq every day. Are these reports of U.S. military atrocities accurate? Shouldn't the U.S. media at least investigate these allegations?

10. The politics of the Iraq War in 2006. Are Democrats at risk of turning off their anti-war base by being unable to enunciate a position on Iraq? Are Republicans risking loss of control of either or both Houses of the Congress? How many voters feel like Cindy Sheehan who says she will not support any pro-war candidate ­ Republican or Democrat? Is the anti-war movement organizing to support anti-war candidates and oppose pro-war candidates?

Kevin Zeese is director of Democracy Rising and a candidate for U.S. Senate in Maryland.