NucNews September 7, 2006 -------- NUCLEAR -------- accidents and safety Fire Aboard Russian Nuclear Sub Kills 2 "There is no threat of nuclear contamination" The Associated Press By MIKE ECKEL September 07, 2006 http://www.topix.net/content/ap/1555438945412651458514762619471457962078?threadid=4T3EMP66DJET20K3 A fire broke out aboard a Russian nuclear submarine, killing two crew members and injuring another, but the navy said there was no radiation threat, Russian news agencies reported Thursday. The blaze ignited Wednesday night in a mechanics room on the Daniil Moskovsky submarine of the Northern Fleet, which plies Russia's northern and Arctic waters, the Interfax and ITAR-Tass news agencies reported. The ship's nuclear reactor was shut down automatically, the reports said. 'There is no threat of nuclear contamination,' Interfax quoted an unnamed Northern Fleet spokesman as saying. Russia's top naval officer, Admiral Vladimir Masorin, said the likely cause was a short circuit. A warrant officer and a sailor were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning, Interfax reported. Another sailor was injured in the incident. The submarine was later towed along the surface of the water to its base at Vidyayevo, news agencies reported. An investigation has been opened on charges of violation of navigation rules. 'We didn't notify our neighbors because there were rather enough ships, in particular, two rescue tugboats in the vicinity of the incident,' Masorin was quoted as saying by ITAR-Tass. 'We decided to do nothing while at sea, and instead tow it to its home port where it was launched.' No one could be reached immediately at Russian naval headquarters or the Northern Fleet for confirmation. The Northern Fleet has suffered a series of tragic accidents on its submarines in recent years. The navy suffered its worst post-Soviet disaster when the Kursk nuclear submarine exploded and sank in the Barents Sea in 2000, killing its entire crew of 118. In August 2003, nine members of a 10-man crew died when their submarine sank in gale-force winds in the Barents Sea as it was being towed to a scrap yard. ITAR-Tass said that the Daniil Moskovsky has a crew of 96, and that is it armed with PK-55 Granat cruise missiles, as well as Shkval and Vodopad torpedoes. ---- No nuke weapons for SA - state September 07 2006 UK Independent Online http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=14&art_id=qw115763040363B261 South Africa is investigating the possibility of enriching uranium locally, but there is "no ways" it will produce nuclear weapons from the enriched material, government said on Thursday. Briefing the media at Parliament following Cabinet's meeting on Wednesday, government communications head Themba Maseko said concerns about the initiative were unfounded. "One of the concerns raised was whether we will end up producing nuclear weapons. It's important for everyone to understand that there is no intention, and there is no ways this government will enrich uranium for the purposes of developing nuclear weapons." He said government policy was firm on this matter; uranium enrichment was being looked at "simply to meet our future energy requirements". There was nothing unique and unusual about this. "Many countries around the world... are exploring this particular avenue for meeting their energy requirements in the future, and... the legal framework internationally allows us to explore this... for peaceful means. "The fact that we are members of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) clearly is an indication that we understand the protocols, and will make sure we operate within the framework of those protocols." Maseko said a feasibility study would be conducted, and when it was concluded, it would be brought back to cabinet for a final decision. He was not able to offer a timeframe for this, saying he had not been briefed on this. Last month, Minerals and Energy Minister Buyelwa Sonjica announced government was looking at the feasibility of enriching uranium in South Africa. - Sapa -------- australia ANSTO to take nuclear 'responsibility' September 7, 2006 The Age http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/ANSTO-to-take-nuclear-responsibility/2006/09/07/1157222248351.html Australia's nuclear research organisation is set to take responsibility for dangerous radioactive material in the event of nuclear terrorism. ANSTO will be able to take control of radioactive material or waste if an Australian nuclear facility becomes the target of a terrorist or criminal attack or accident under changes passed by the House of Representatives. Under present laws, ANSTO can only provide advice to governments. Science Minister Julie Bishop said the legislation would also allow ANSTO to assist police and emergency services in event of a radiological incident. Ms Bishop said current legislation required a specific regulation to be made every time ANSTO was requested to provide waste management services. She said Labor was supporting the bill, although some Labor speakers had made opportunistic and blatantly false assertions. "The Australian government has no intention of establishing a long-term storage facility at Lucas Height for non-ANSTO waste," she said. "In July 2005 the government made clear its intention in relation to radioactive waste management when three potential sites in the Northern Territory were nominated for the Commonwealth radioactive waste management facility." Ms Bishop said any Australian government waste treated at Lucas Heights would be later transferred to the NT facility. She said any additional waste requiring treatment at Lucas Heights amounted to less than a quarter of what waste was already there. Labor attacked the government over the plan to establish a waste storage facility in the Northern Territory. "The decision of the Howard government to dump waste in the Northern Territory was a clear breach of an election promise," NSW Labor MP Peter Garrett told parliament. "There is no doubt the interests and rights of the people in the Northern Territory were both ignored and compromised by the Howard government." Mr Garrett said there was growing recognition it was not ethically acceptable for a society to impose a nuclear waste storage facility on an unwilling community. He said the government was pushing for a full-scale nuclear industry and wanted to offer up Australia as the world's storage base of all long-lived nuclear waste. The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) Amendment Bill 2006 now goes to the Senate. -------- depleted uranium Court Hearing on Suit Filed by Iraq Veterans Contaminated with Depleted Uranium Against U.S. Military Thursday, September 7th, 2006 Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/07/1643226 A U.S. District court in Manhattan held a hearing Wednesday on a lawsuit brought by soldiers from the New York National Guard who have been sick since being exposed to depleted uranium while serving in Iraq. Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez first broke the story in the New York Daily News. [includes rush transcript] Previous Democracy Now! coverage: - Broadcast Exclusive: U.S. Soldiers Contaminated With Depleted Uranium Speak Out - Daughter of Soldier Contaminated with Depleted Uranium in Iraq Born with Deformities RUSH TRANSCRIPT AMY GOODMAN: Before we move to this top story around President Bush and Guantanamo, Juan, yesterday you spent the day at a hearing that is related to Iraq. JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. It was a hearing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on a topic that Democracy Now! listeners know about: the soldiers from the New York National Guard who served in Iraq and who ended up being exposed to depleted uranium and who have been sick since coming back, they were finally -- had a beginning of a day in court. It was a hearing over their lawsuit, they and their relatives, their families, against the United States military, over their exposure to depleted uranium. And there was a hearing over the government's motion to dismiss the case completely. And it lasted for several hours. And amazingly, much of the discussion was around the Ferris Doctrine, which is a 1950s Supreme Court decision that basically does not allow soldiers while on active service, who have injuries as a result of active service in the military, from being able to sue the government. And it was quite a hearing, because you had the U.S. Attorney and the lawyers for the plaintiffs, for the soldiers, raising all of the atrocities of the military in the past: radiation exposure to soldiers during World War II, agent orange exposure, LSD tests that the military conducted on soldiers. These were all the legal precedents that were being debated as to whether these soldiers had the right to sue the government, because the government, according to their lawsuit, was negligent in exposing them, violating its own protocols for protecting our troops from depleted uranium exposure. And Federal Judge Koeltl asked some very tough questions on both sides. And he seemed to be sympathetic, but you know, it's always hard to judge how a judge is leaning when he's asking questions. But he also reserved judgment, so we'll have to wait actually several weeks to hear whether the case can move forward. AMY GOODMAN: And this unit of men were stationed at a depot in Iraq? JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, there was actually -- there were two groups. One was the 442nd military police. They were stationed all over southern Iraq, but mostly they believe their exposure came in the town of Samawa, when they were there for several months, when they all started getting sick. And then there's another separate soldier who we have interviewed here, Gerard Matthew, who after he came back from Iraq, he has been sick with illnesses that could not be diagnosed by the military. And then his wife becomes pregnant, and they have a child born with missing several fingers on one hand. And so, he was from a separate transportation company that was transporting destroyed or damaged tanks back from Iraq into Kuwait. And so, all the soldiers, eight of them in total, are involved in the lawsuit. AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will link the interviews that we did on Democracy Now! with these soldiers at democracynow.org. ---- Of opium and depleted uranium by Jerry West September 7, 2006 rabble.ca Toronto http://www.rabble.ca/columnists_full.shtml?x=52199 Afghanistan is good news for drug dealers. A recent report in the Associated Press says that opium production there is at a record high, up by more than 40 per cent from last year. Afghanistan produces about 90 per cent of the world's heroin courtesy of Uncle Sam and vassal countries like Canada and Britain. This despite hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into counter narcotics. No doubt much of that anti-drug money is going into one hand of the same people in various governments that are taking a cut from the opium trade with the other. Opium in Afghanistan is a big problem. Opium to Afghans is like timber to Canada's forest communities and salmon to its fishing fleet. The more that outsiders try to suppress it the more Afghans are driven into revolt against the foreign presence. Quite possibly the road to any kind of success for the occupying powers in Afghanistan is one that leads to facilitating the drug trade. Of course, being involved in dealing drugs is nothing new for U.S. government agencies which have been funding operations out of sight of Congress this way for decades. Somehow, though, I don't think that this is exactly the kind of business that Canadians want to see their country tangled up in. Perhaps they should think about it a bit before signing onto Mr. Harper's program for this country, because Mr. Harper has already bought into it. Ironically, the Taliban that Mr. Bush drove out of power when he so foolishly invaded the country had significantly curtailed opium production. Now, of course, they are into producing because they need the cash to carry out their insurgency against the invading powers. And the drug lords that were once their enemies are now their allies. It is a stinking mess and indications are that it will get worse before it gets better, if it ever does get better. Canadian deaths in Afghanistan have reached 32 with more to come. As the involvement increases so will the casualties. Canadians need to seriously ask themselves if the deaths and maiming are worth it and what price they want to pay for a role in Mr. Bush and company's lethal pipe dream. Perhaps they need to ask Mr. Harper to tell them how many deaths are an acceptable price to pay for the effort, tell them what number of lost lives has to be reached before he is not willing to throw away any more. Down in the States a revolt may be brewing in their forces as troops are being sent back to Iraq and Afghanistan time and time again. Just recently, the Marines announced that they were forcing thousands back to duty from the reserves, and the Army and National Guard have been holding people in indefinitely past their enlistments. This is a sure sign that volunteers are getting hard to come by and that public support for the war exists more in fantasy than reality. Not long ago, a Lieutenant at Fort Lewis refused orders to deploy to Iraq on the basis that the war was illegal. His court martial has the potential to raise some interesting questions if it is not tightly controlled. Meanwhile, down in California, the state Senate unanimously passed a bill establishing an outreach program to screen veterans for exposure to depleted uranium, otherwise known as DU. Depleted Uranium is U238, not quite as dangerous as the U235 used to make bombs and fuel rods, but dangerous nonetheless. Since 1991, the U.S. has been using DU in bombs, shells and other ordnance. It atomizes on impact, giving off a lethal radioactive dust that not only contaminates the area around it, but is carried on the wind. It is reported that after the 2003 shock- and-awe campaign by the Americans in Iraq, a toxic Uranium gas cloud was detected over Europe. Although the official line is that it is not terribly harmful there is a mountain of reports and studies linking it to such things as Gulf War Syndrome and the unusual occurrences of cancer among those exposed to it. There is also the precedent of Agent Orange whose long term effects on those exposed were denied for years after its use in Vietnam. Finally, it was admitted that the effects were real and compensation to veterans made available. It is reasonable to suspect that the same story may hold true eventually for DU. Canadians should be concerned because DU is an issue for troops in Afghanistan and anywhere else the Americans appear. Parliament should be asking the Prime Minister and his cabinet members what steps are being taken to monitor the troops for DU exposure, to prevent that exposure, and to provide proper treatment and compensation to those who develop problems from being exposed. Since DU is in reality a weapon of mass destruction, maybe Canadians should be asking why their troops would be anywhere near this stuff at all. Jerry West is the editor of The Record, an independent, progressive newspaper published every other Wednesday in Gold River, British Columbia. His columns regularly appear in rabble.ca. ---- Local War Vets Take Fight Against Government Over DU Exposure To Court September 07, 2006 NY1 News http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=8&aid=62389 They fought for their country in Iraq, and now they are fighting their government over an illness that they say can be directly linked to their service. NY1's Dean Meminger filed the following report. A group of New York Iraq war veterans are in a battle against their own military and government, and they are hoping the Federal courts will come to their rescue. On Wednesday a judge held a hearing to determine if the nine veterans have the right to sue because they were exposed to depleted uranium from U.S. military weapons and equipment while in Iraq. "This is not only for us, but for every soldier that is serving in Iraq right now that has a family. This affects everyone," said veteran Agustin Matos. The vets were a part of the New York National Guard when they were shipped to Iraq to be military police. They complain of numerous health problems, and they say depleted uranium, or DU, is to blame. DU is a slightly radioactive heavy metal left over in the process of creating nuclear fuel. The military uses it in missiles and tanks to make them stronger, but when it's hit or explodes, soldiers can get wounded by radioactive shrapnel or breathe in radioactive particles. The soldiers came forward in 2004 saying private doctors confirmed they had high levels of DU but the military has said the levels are safe. The vets say they were never trained correctly about DU and military doctors didn't diagnosis them correctly. "They knew about treatments and preventative measures," said veteran Jerry Ogeda. "The biggest danger that these guys faced, as it turned out, in their lives was from our own government," said attorney George Zelma. The government argues that the soldiers can not sue for injuries suffered while on active duty. But the soldiers' wives and children want to sue as well. Gerard Mathew says his daughter was born with a deformed hand because of his DU. "She can't really come out and say how she feels or what's going on," he said. "So to have this in the court today, regardless of what happens, will show that her father and her friends, who also came out to convey a message, do care. And that we not only care about ourselves, but about our fellow soldiers who are over there right now that don't even know what is going on." The soldiers say that if the judge rules against them, they will come up with other strategies to make the government and military compensate them for their DU exposure. The judge did not indicate when he'll make his decision. - Dean Meminger -------- europe Lithuania PM vows to build new nuclear power plant 07/ 09/ 2006 (RIA Novosti) http://en.rian.ru/world/20060907/53624786.html VILNIUS, September 7 - Lithuania's prime minister said Thursday a new nuclear power plant would be built in the republic to replace a Soviet-era station that will be closed on the European Commission's request. The current nuclear power plant at Ignalina, scheduled to be shut down by 2009, is similar to the one in Chernobyl, Ukraine, where the world's worst nuclear accident happened in 1986. The three former Soviet Baltic republics earlier agreed to build a new nuclear power plant to resolve an energy crisis expected in 2009 and meet the European Union's nuclear safety requirements. "Today I am already convinced that this project will be implemented," Gediminas Kirkilas said in an interview with the Lithuanian radio station Zinios. Kirkilas said he had discussed the issue with Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and the head of Czech power utility CEZ, Martin Roman. In addition to CEZ, E.ON Nordic, the Swedish division of E.ON, and France's nuclear reactor producer Areva have also displayed interest in the project. -------- japan Tokyo urged to consider N-bombs 07sep06 The Australian Peter Alford, Tokyo correspondent http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,20367451,00.html JAPAN should study the possibility of acquiring nuclear weapons, says former prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, because its US security blanket cannot be guaranteed to last forever. Mr Nakasone's call for the next government to consider nuclear weapons and to prepare an independent defence strategy comes from a man who as prime minister from 1982 to 1987 was the most outspoken Japanese leader in support of the US security alliance. Famed for his warm "Ron and Yasu" relationship with then US leader Ronald Reagan, Mr Nakasone remains strongly pro-alliance, but on Tuesday he warned: "Whether or not the US will maintain the same attitude is unpredictable. There is a need to study the option of nuclear weapons." Mr Nakasone, 88, now runs a think tank focused on security issues, the Institute for International Policy Studies, and is thought to be manoeuvring to become a mentor on international strategy to Shinzo Abe. Mr Abe, who is virtually certain to become prime minister on September 26, shares many of the older man's views of military priorities. The hawkish Mr Abe, 51, wants the US alliance to remain the bedrock of Japan's security arrangements, but for his country to develop a more independent defence strategy against direct threats, in particular from China and North Korea. Mr Abe has already promised to work towards a revision of Article 9 of the country's pacifist constitution to remove brakes on "normal" military activities by Japan's forces. But as the leadership changeover approaches, it seems many in Japan's security community and the right wing of the Liberal Democratic Party are pushing for a more thorough rethink of Japan's security options. The US administration, like its predecessors, is fundamentally opposed to Japan acquiring an independent nuclear capability because of the potential to destabilise a tense region. North Korea's July 5 test-firing of seven ballistic missiles - several of which were Rodongs, a type already aimed at Japan - has jolted forward this process and raised a fundamental question: whether the US is committed to defending Japan under every eventuality. Mr Abe's history shows him to be sympathetic to this thinking. After the July 5 tests, he repeated an interpretation of Article 9 adopted by the mid-1950s Hatoyama government that self-defence allows a pre-emptive strike at missiles that are menacing Japan. Four years ago, Mr Abe caused a stir when he said the constitution allowed Japan to possess "defensive" nuclear weapons, though he did not say whether he thought it should. Mr Nakasone does not advocate acquiring nuclear weapons - it is commonly estimated Japan could "go nuclear" within 12 months of a decision to do so - but says it must study the possibility. While Japan and the US remain in a partnership, he released a paper calling for a new fundamental law on security and said Japan should remain a non-nuclear power and work to strengthen the nuclear non-proliferation regime. -------- pacific Now come toxic waste Thursday, September 07, 2006 Manila Times EDITORIAL http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2006/sept/07/yehey/opinion/20060907opi1.html Still reeling from the damage of the oil spill off Guimaras province, our country was almost hit last week by another environmental disaster of a different kind but with similar deadly consequences. We refer to the foiled dumping of an estimated 500,000 to one million liters of liquid “nuclear waste” in Philippine waters. Fortunately, the vessel carrying the hazardous cargo was seized off the coast of Surigao by alert Customs operatives before it could dispose of the shipment. The waste, declared as “used oil,” is said to have come from a nuclear power plant in Palau and were consigned to Power Zone Corp. in Manila. Dumping of highly radioactive waste has far-reaching dangerous results. That is the reason it has been banned worldwide for more than three decades. We have outlawed it in the Philippines by passing the Antiwaste Dumping Law. The perils of nuclear waste disposal stem mainly from the threat it poses to plants, marine and human life. It kills fish with enormous social and economic costs to our fishing industry and the environment. In early 1993 when radioactive waste dumping was prevalent in Europe, fish poisonings were reported in the Barents Sea. It was found that seals were dying from blood cancer caused by nuclear waste dumped into the sea. What about the people who ate radioactive fish? The former Soviet Union had been blamed for much of the nuclear waste unloading into the Arctic Sea when it was running out of ground space to store them. This practice caused international problems. At one point, Norway assailed the dumping as a “security risk to people and to the biology of northern waters.” Since many Filipinos depend on fishing for livelihood, the dumping of a large volume of liquid “nuclear waste” by the ship seized by Customs operatives would have poisoned our fishing grounds, throwing thousands of fishermen out of work. The ship captain claims that the deadly cargo was destined for Malaysia but sources interviewed by Customs investigators said the shipment was “really intended” for the Philippines. It is highly unconscionable for an unidentified Bicol congressman to pressure the Bureau of Customs into releasing the vessel obviously to save the consignee from prosecution. The legislator has committed a disservice to his country by protecting a person or a company potentially involved in polluting Philippine waters with nuclear waste. The government should unmask the people behind the attempted dumping and prosecute them to the hilt for violations of the antiwaste dumping laws and of the Customs and Tariff Code of the Philippines and the Basel Convention. The attempted dumping underscores the vulnerability of the Philippines as a trash can for a variety of spoiled goods and waste. One reason is the lack of vessels and surveillance equipment with which to watch our porous borders. Another is the laxity of our customs, immigration and coast patrol personnel in guarding our coastlines. The government should stop the proclivity of many countries to dump their trash, rotten goods, spoiled meat, unwanted throwaways and all sorts of garbage in Philippine waters and at the Customs compounds. Even the trafficking of undesirable people is taking place under the noses of our immigration authorities. -------- russia Test launch of Bulava missile fails 07.09.2006 ITAR-TASS http://www.tass.ru/eng/level2.html?NewsID=10771193&PageNum=0 MOSCOW, September 7 (Itar-Tass) - The test launch of Russia’s newest generation intercontinental ballistic missile Bulava has failed, sources from the Russian Defense Ministry told Tass. They said “the missile deviated from its trajectory and fell into the sea”. The solid fuel submarine-launched missile Bulava was launched from board the strategic nuclear submarine Dmitry Donskoy at 7:50 pm, Moscow time, from the White Sea, the sources said. Four previous launches of the missile were successful. ---- Moscow wants to build 40 to 50 nuclear reactors abroad Sep 07, 2006 MOSCOW, (AFP) http://www.spacewar.com/2006/060907184938.bqwstfq2.html Russia plans to build 40 to 50 nuclear reactors abroad and up to 58 at home by 2030, the Ria Novosti news agency reported Thursday, quoting Sergei Kirienko, head of Russia's federal atomic energy agency. Russia currently has 10 nuclear power stations comprising 31 reactors for a total production of 23,242 megawatts. That amounts to between 16 and 17 percent of Russian electricity production. In January President Vladimir Putin said he wanted to see that figure rise to 25 percent by 2030. Atomstroyexport, the only Russian company involved in building nuclear power stations abroad, is currently building three plants: at Tiawan in China, at Kudankulam in India and, most controversially, at Bushehr in Iran. The firm is due to start work next year on a power station at Sinop in northern Turkey. ---- Fire on Russian nuclear submarine kills two Sep 07, 2006 MOSCOW, (AFP) http://www.spacewar.com/2006/060907160616.muz5t1wk.html Two submariners were killed and one injured in a fire aboard a Russian nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea close to Norway, naval sources said Thursday, adding that the incident posed no risk of radioactive contamination. "The fire was extinguished around midnight Moscow time" (2000 GMT Wednesday), Interfax news agency quoted a northern fleet press officer as saying. "The submarine's nuclear energy protection apparatus was activated. There is no kind of nuclear contamination threat," he said. The submarine, the Saint Daniel of Moscow, was on the surface of the Barents Sea north of the Rybachy peninsula at the time of the fire late Wednesday. The two victims, aged 35 and 28, were asphyxiated by burning material from the submarine's interior, said the navy's top admiral, Vladimir Masorin, on Russian television. They were taken out of the submarine still alive but died during efforts to resuscitate them. A third man who came to their aid suffered non-fatal poisoning, he said. They "apparently didn't have time to connect their respiration apparatus," Masorin told ITAR-TASS. A fleet spokesman said that the fire had broken out "due to a short-circuit in the energy supply system in one of the nose sections". There have been at least five incidents involving Russian nuclear submarines since 1992, including what authorities said was "a serious incident" aboard a Delta IV-class vessel equipped with intercontinental missiles, and the wreck of the K-159 submarine in the Barents Sea, killing nine. But the biggest catastrophe was the sinking of the Kursk in August 2000, also in the Barents Sea not far from the northern fleet's headquarters at Severomorsk. That incident, triggered by the explosion of a torpedo aboard the Kursk, claimed the lives of all 118 on board and focused attention on the riskiness of Russia's ageing fleet, as well as government attempts to cover up the news. Following the latest incident, the Saint Daniel of Moscow was towed to Vidyayevo, near Severomorsk. Masorin said the 16-year-old vessel had exceeded a deadline by which renovation work was due. In a statement, Russia's prosecutor general's office said it had opened an investigation for "violation of a ship's rules of conduct". At 107-metres (350-feet) in length, the Victor IV-class submarine was designed to carry 96 people, as well as cruise missiles, mines and torpedoes. ---- No energy blackmail, Russia to defend nuclear interests - Putin 07/ 09/ 2006 (RIA Novosti) http://en.rian.ru/world/20060907/53629877.html CASABLANCA, September 7 - Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday Russia would seek to defend its interests in the global nuclear-fuel market and dismissed suggestions that his country was using its vast energy resources to blackmail other countries. Russia has been looking to increase its presence on the world's market for nuclear fuel, but has encountered resistance, particularly in the United States. "We see no equality here and our interests are being infringed upon," he said. "We will seek to make our relations [in this sphere] more balanced so that they correspond to our interests." Restrictions on imports from Russia of low-enriched uranium have been in force since the Soviet era. Russia is currently allowed to operate on the U.S. market without a 116% import duty only through the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC), a special intermediary agent, under the HEU-LEU Conversion program. The U.S. International Trade Commission voted on July 18 to keep the 116% import duty on Russian uranium products, claiming that the lifting of anti-dumping restrictions would seriously harm the American economy. Putin earlier said Russia opposed U.S. discrimination against its nuclear companies and wanted to supply uranium directly. Putin, who is currently on a visit to Morocco, also denied allegations that Russia was using its huge energy resources to make other countries dependent on it. "We are increasing production and the share of energy resources on the world market," he said. "This is a significant contribution to restraining prices and resolving energy problems in general. Concerns [about Russia's use of its resources] have been dreamed up and are caused by the striving to use them in the competitive struggle." In a speech made in Vilnius in May U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney accused Russia, which has the world's largest natural gas and considerable oil reserves, of using its energy resources to blackmail and intimidate its neighbors. President Putin also reiterated that Russia had always been a reliable supplier of energy resources. "We have been and will be for all our partners," he said. -------- terrorism U.S. Nuclear Security Agency Combats Nuclear Terrorism Energy Department entity has expanded role in preventing nuclear terror 07 September 2006 usinfo.state.gov http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=washfile-english&y=2006&m=September&x=20060907161515adynned0.9757044&chanlid=is Washington –- Though fairly new and not well known, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plays a key role in U.S. efforts to prevent nuclear weapons and materials from falling into terrorist hands. Since the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, NNSA has doubled spending on nuclear nonproliferation programs, according to a September 6 fact sheet from the agency. NNSA was created by Congress in 2000 as a semiautonomous part of the U.S. Department of Energy. Its overall function is to “enhance national security through the military application of nuclear science.” It develops and implements programs to secure and/or eliminate nuclear weapons and nuclear materials internationally, while maintaining and enhancing “the safety, security, reliability and performance of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile without nuclear testing.” NNSA also maintains expertise for responding to nuclear and radiological emergencies, and provides training for foreign governments, as well as U.S. state and local authorities . The NNSA fact sheet cites the following accomplishments: • Returning 228 kilograms (502 pounds) of Soviet-origin nuclear material from vulnerable sites around the world. (See related article.) • Returning 3,300 kilograms (7,260 pounds) of U.S.-origin nuclear material. (See related article.) • Converting 43 research nuclear reactors around the world from using highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium as fuel. • Shutting down two additional research reactors using highly enriched uranium. • Training more than 500 foreign officials annually in proper physical protection of nuclear material and facilities. • Monitoring the conversion of enough Russian highly enriched uranium to make 11,038 nuclear warheads. • Disposing of nearly 90 metric tons (close to 200,000 pounds) of surplus U.S. highly enriched uranium. • Securing more than 80 percent of vulnerable Russian nuclear weapons material storage sites, including more than 170 buildings. • Enhancing security at all 39 Russian navy sites and at 14 Russian Strategic Rocket Forces sites, where hundreds of warheads are kept. Moreover, NNSA has a mandate to secure radioactive materials that, though not suitable to make nuclear weapons, could be used to make so-called "dirty bombs" in which a “jacket” of radioactive material is wrapped around a conventional explosive core. To this end, the agency has recovered about 3 million curies worth of radiological sources from 112 sites in Russia (and recovered more than 13,000 radioactive sources in the United States). NNSA also has improved physical security at 439 facilities worldwide containing vulnerable, radioactive material. In addition, it is upgrading an additional 245 sites in 40 countries. Preventing the movement and smuggling of nuclear materials is a vital part of its mission. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the agency has: • Held more than 180 workshops for foreign customs and border officials (as well as training more than 4,500 U.S. customs and border officials) on how to recognize elements of weapons of mass destruction and on key nonproliferation principles; • Installed radiation detection equipment at international seaports in six countries (with similar ports in 14 more countries at various stages of implementation); • Equipped 88 Russian sites with radiation detection equipment at borders, airports, and ports; and • Created nearly 4,400 jobs and “engaged” at least 12,000 former weapons of mass destruction scientists and engineers at 180 institutes across the former Soviet Union. For more information on U.S. arms control and nuclear nonproliferation efforts, see Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. The NNSA fact sheet is available on the agency’s Web site. (Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov) -------- u.s. nuc facilities Advocates laud safety of new nuclear reactors Global warming, fuel costs drive interest, but opponents warn of danger Sept. 7, 2006 Associated Press\MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14681100/ CORVALLIS, Ore. - Jose Reyes' research lab looks like a three-story tangle of pipes and instruments. But to nuclear engineers like him, it's evidence that generating electricity by splitting atoms can cost less and be done more safely than in the past. Reyes heads an Oregon State University team that's built a quarter-scale model of the Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear plant — which the company hopes will lead an atomic-energy renaissance in the U.S. and the rest of the world. Even though the lab looks complicated, the model is far simpler than the plants built in the 20th century. Without using radioactive material, it tests the AP1000's "passive-safety" system, which relies on gravity rather than a battery of mechanical pumps to carry water to a reactor in an emergency. "I think Oregon State was working much like the consumer products testing lab for nuclear power plants," Reyes said. The tests, conducted under contract with Westinghouse and the U.S. Department of Energy, were critical in the reactor receiving Nuclear Regulatory Commission certification last December. The lab can test other reactor models as well. The safety system, Reyes said, would make nuclear leaks far less likely, and virtually eliminate the threat of a meltdown of the nuclear core. The simpler, modular design will help bring down the cost of construction and make overruns less likely. The 1979 partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania contributed to a virtual halt in new plant construction — along with high costs and energy-demand forecasts that turned out to be wrong. There are currently 103 U.S. nuclear plants, producing about 20 percent of the nation's electricity. But fears of global warming and the rising cost of natural gas and coal may finally change the image of nuclear power as the industry markets a new generation of reactors, such as the AP1000 and General Electric Co.'s ESBWR, or Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor. Interest in new plants has increased sharply since August 2005, when President Bush signed an energy bill that streamlines applications and offers loan incentives, tax credits and federal insurance for new plants. Licensing could be approved within a few years, depending on when applications are filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But there are plenty of skeptics. They point out that, because the AP1000 and ESBRW have not yet been built, it's still uncertain how much they will cost or how safe they will actually be. "It's been tested in scale models," David Lochbaum, director of a nuclear safety project for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said of the passive-safety system. But if there's a gap between tests and actual operation, "it could be a nasty surprise," said Lochbaum. The model at OSU was built to test how the passive-safety design would hold up during all sorts of emergencies that would require a quick shutdown of the reactor — even without human intervention. The model uses no fissionable material. Instead, electricity heats water to temperatures reached in a nuclear plant, and the water is moved through the model, testing each of the safety features. The cooling system in the previous generation of reactors operated much like a car radiator, requiring constant pumping of cool water to prevent overheating. In the passive-safety designs, the cooling system is more like the tank of a toilet. Flip a single handle and cool water rushes down to the reactor if it overheats. Designers say that if the operator needs to leave the plant during an accident, that handle will be tripped automatically, and the reactor will cool itself. The passive-safety system also contributes to making this generation of power plant less expensive to build because there are far fewer parts, nuclear advocates say. The system eliminates the need for huge cooling towers, redundant pumps and backup diesel generators. The AP1000, according to Westinghouse, has 87 percent less cable, 83 percent less piping, 50 percent fewer valves and 36 percent fewer pumps than the previous generation of reactors. Estimates on the cost of new reactors vary widely, and it is difficult to compare current costs with past projects that required years to build and many design modifications, analysts say. "We say broadly the passive plants are simple and have fewer active components, and should cost less to build," said Ed Cummins, nuclear engineering manager for Westinghouse. "Utilities are not risk takers. Investors want steady earnings and low risk." GE has been racing with Westinghouse — a wholly owned unit of the United Kingdom's BNFL PLC — and other manufacturers, such as Areva NP in France, to build the next generation of nuclear reactors. (MSNBC.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and GE's NBC Universal News.) So far, Westinghouse has the U.S. lead because it has a design already certified by the NRC. A dozen new plants are under consideration. Nuclear opponents say that even if the new safety features work under all conditions, there's yet another problem to be resolved: As of yet, the United States has no permanent storage facility for spent nuclear fuel. Potential delays in site approval for new nuclear plants and licensing are also a concern. Reyes said the NRC needs to "expedite its new and untested process for a combined construction and operating license." On the construction side, Reyes said, "the U.S. has lost significant capability in fabricating key components for nuclear plants." Right now, Reyes said, "there's a single U.S. manufacturer of large nuclear components, and we're buying most large replacement components from France. We must also rebuild the skilled work force needed to construct nuclear plants." Reyes concedes these are "significant challenges," but says they are "being faced by an industry that is highly energized, disciplined with regards to safety and profit, and driven by goals of energy independence and environmental quality." But nuclear opponents are telling people not to get their hopes up. Among them is Portland attorney Greg Kafoury, a veteran of battles against atomic power in the Pacific Northwest. "We were promised that the plants could not explode and we got Chernobyl," Kafoury said. "We were told they could not melt down and we got Three Mile Island. Now the industry says they can get it right. Why on Earth should anybody believe them?" ---- Future won't favor new nuclear plants 07-SEP-06 Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=NUKEPLANTS-09-07-06 The climate for building new nuclear power plants in the United States hasn't been this good for decades. The Bush administration is solidly behind them. Some prominent foes have changed sides, embracing uranium-derived electricity as the best available answer to global warming. Boosters are wearing told-you-so smiles. And Congress is doing its best to help. After establishing liability limits and start-up assistance for new plants, it voted last year to offer utilities a variety of direct incentives and structured them to favor the first half-dozen plants to leave the drawing boards. Companies that design and build reactors are also said to be trying to jump-start new business by offering limited-time discounts. The results, so far? Exactly one utility, Constellation Energy in Maryland, has contracted to buy parts for a new reactor, the first such order since 1973. While the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been saying for months that perhaps two dozen new plants are getting active consideration, polls of utility executives find that most think any notion of a nuclear renaissance is fanciful _ that nuclear power will, at best, maintain its 20 percent share of U.S. power generation, with a dozen new reactors at the most. And the reasons have less to do with Three Mile Island or Yucca Mountain than with Wall Street. When utilities began canceling orders for new reactors in 1973, everyone still assumed the problem of storing spent fuel would be solved. The crisis at Three Mile Island was six years away; the first true nuke-plant catastrophe, at Chernobyl, wouldn't happen for seven years after that. Safety and environmental concerns have shaped public opinion, but the core reasons for America's 30-year hiatus in building new nuclear plants lie in unfavorable balance sheets. Industry analysts say the outlook is no brighter today despite the many factors _ tougher pollution caps for coal plants, higher natural-gas prices, pending controls on greenhouse gas emissions _ that theoretically should favor more cheap, clean nukes. But to consider nuclear power "clean," you have to ignore the pesky problem of permanent waste disposal, and to consider it "cheap" you have to focus only on the ultimate cost to make a kilowatt-hour of juice over a span of decades. Nuclear plants are more expensive than fossil-fueled counterparts to site, license, build, operate and secure; and they are slower to pay off on investment, for which the front-end needs are larger. These factors, plus additional uncertainties of regulation, make them harder to finance. For any kind of power plant, a utility typically tries to pre-sell the power before it breaks ground, and customers just aren't as quick to sign long-term contracts for their power supplies when the electricity will be coming from uranium. So for every utility like Constellation that opts for a new nuke, there will be multiple others that invest elsewhere _ like Constellation's competitor, PPL, which decided to invest $1.5 billion in cleaning up emissions from its coal burners. Besides environmental benefits, PPL expects further payoffs as pollution limits get tighter and, perhaps, as emissions reductions become tradeable assets. On a smaller scale, but at an accelerating pace, private investment is moving toward alternative technologies of sustainable power generation, conservation and efficiency. The nuclear era that began with promises of electricity "too cheap to meter" has given way to a time when a dollar invested in conserving electricity returns six or seven times value of a dollar invested in making more of it. So today the consensus seems to be that nukes have served their purpose, and will continue for a while to do so, but the future lies somewhere else. -------- utah Orrin Hatch: Skull Valley Plan 'Stone Cold Dead' kutv.com September 07, 2006 http://www.topix.net/content/cbs/3529298161014824501112472584190140364907 Senator Orrin Hatch says the long battle over a proposed nuclear waste site inside the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation is dead. That's according to a statement released by his office. The senator says he learned from the White House that the Bureau of Land Management denied Private Fuel Storage's plan to store spent nuclear fuel on the reservation located west of Tooele. The decision appears to be based on the thousands of letters and calls from Utahns who opposed the plan. "I just want to thank the 5,000 Utahns who wrote letters and made comments," said Senator Hatch. "As far as I can see it Skull Valley is now stone cold dead." But according to the chairman of Private Fuel Storage the deal is "not" dead. A spokeswoman for Private Fuel Storage says they will wait to read the decision before they make a formal statement on the decision or decide on further action. "I don't doubt that (Hatch) is correct that these decisions have been made, but we have not seen the decisions or figured out what our options may be," PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin said. "For that reason, I don't think it's safe to say that PFS is dead. "Hatch would want you to believe that PFS has no options, but I don't know if that's true," she said. A Martin also says PFS will wait to read the decision before they make a formal statement on the decision or decide on further action. The plan called for Private Fuel Storage to store 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel rods on the Skull Valley reservation, 50 miles to the southwest of downtown Salt Lake City. We'll have more on this as details come in. Press release from Senator Orrin Hatch's web site: Click Here. http://hatch.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressReleases.Detail&PressRelease_id=1646 ---- UTAHNS DELIVER KILLING BLOW TO SKULL VALLEY NUKE WASTE PLAN September 7th, 2006 Senator Hatch Press Release http://hatch.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressReleases.Detail&PressRelease_id=1646 Washington – The Department of Interior (DOI) today told Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) that it has denied Private Fuel Storage’s (PFS) plan to store spent nuclear fuel at the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation in Tooele, Utah. The DOI based its decision on letters and calls from thousands of Utahns who rejected the proposal to store nuclear material in Skull Valley – a site dangerously close to the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) where live ordnance is used directly under the low-level flight path of 7,000 F-16s every year. “PFS is dead. It’s that simple,” Hatch said. “Storing nuclear waste in Skull Valley would have put Utahns on a collision course with catastrophe. Transporting and storing nuclear fuel so close to an active military training ground was a recipe for environmental disaster. I’m relieved that the DOI realized that and killed the Skull Valley plan.” In December 2005, Hatch pushed the White House and the Department of the Interior to re-open a comment period to let Utahns have a say on PFS’s applications for transportation routes across Bureau of Land Management land. In a rare move, the government complied with the request and allowed Utahns to make the case for whether or not the applications were in the public interest. The DOI decided they were not. “We’re indebted to the thousands of Utahns who took the time to write the DOI on this issue,” Hatch said. “It proves that every citizen can make a difference – Utahns spoke, and the DOI listened.” The viability of the Skull Valley plan rested on the DOI’s approval of either a rail spur across BLM land to Skull Valley or an intermodal transfer facility on BLM land to transfer the spent fuel to trucks, which would transport the casks of spent fuel to the site along existing roads. Last year, the united Utah delegation, led by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), successfully passed wilderness legislation that blocked potential attempts to build a rail spur on federal lands near the range and the Goshute reservation. Today’s decision both blocks the option of fuel transportation via truck and makes constructing the site impossible. “Without a lease to store the fuel or permission to transport it, PFS is left without a leg to stand on,” Hatch said. “Some people may say there is still a chance that PFS could pull this off, but that’s hogwash. With today’s DOI decision, the PFS plan has been burned to the ground. We may need to sort through the ashes and put out a few embers, but other than that, it’s stone cold dead.” Last fall, Hatch convinced a majority of PFS shareholders to pull away from the company, which likely derails any reaction PFS might take to this decision. Contact: Peter Carr (202) 224-9854, Jared Whitley (202) 224-0134 -------- us nuc waste Markey backs nuke waste safety campaign UPI/Newscom September 07, 2006 http://www.topix.net/content/newscom/2901060275254541280212239196572554726156 Several members of Congress have called for intensified action to secure the nuclear waste generated by U.S. civilian power reactors. Members of Congress led by Rep. Edward Markey, D-MA, joined with the nationwide Nuclear Security Coalition to call for prompt actions to secure the U.S. commercial power reactors' nuclear waste storage system. The Nuclear Security Coalition is a national group of 47 U.S. public interest organizations advocating for improved security at nuclear power plants. Markey proposed implementation of a storage technology known as Hardened On-Site Storage , or HOSS, by which over-filled atomic waste storage pools at reactor sites are off-loaded into dry storage casks that have been hardened against terrorist attack. A 14-minute compact disc presentation entitled Nuclear Spent Fuel & Homeland Security: the Case for Hardened Storage was hand delivered to every member of Congress in support of the joint call, the NSC said in a statement Thursday. Markey, a senior member of the House Homeland Security and Energy and Commerce Committees, said, The NRC engages in faith-based nuclear security planning, choosing to ignore expert report after expert report. The Nuclear Security Coalition identified that 32 boiling water reactors around the United States that, it said, were particularly vulnerable. Those 32 reactors maintained their spent fuel storage pools six to 10 stories high their reactor building and outside th protective containment structures that housed the nuclear reactors themselves, the group said. These pools typically contain in excess of 400 metric tons of thermally hot and highly radioactive used reactor fuel, which must be continuously cooled in water 40-feet deep in the elevated pools, the NSC statement said. None of the nation's reactor fuel storage buildings are designed as containment structures to withstand attack by aircraft, rocket or a variety of improvised explosive devices, it said. -------- MILITARY -------- afghanistan For Americans, No Side Wins in Afghanistan September 7, 2006 Angus Reid Global Monitor http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/13057 Many adults in the United States are disappointed with the progress of the war on terrorism, according to a poll by Opinion Research Corporation released by CNN. 58 per cent of respondents think neither side is winning the conflict in Afghanistan. Afghanistan has been the main battleground in the war on terrorism. The conflict began in October 2001, after the Taliban regime refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Al-Qaeda operatives hijacked and crashed four airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people. At least 463 soldiers—including 329 Americans—have died in the war on terrorism, either in support of the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom or as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In November 2004, Hamid Karzai won the first-ever presidential election in Afghanistan with 55.4 per cent of all cast ballots. The former deputy foreign minister had been chosen to lead a transitional administration in November 2001. Afghan voters elected the 249-member House of the People in September 2005. On Sept. 5, U.S. president George W. Bush discussed the situation in Afghanistan, saying, "The experience of September the 11th made clear, in the long run, the only way to secure our nation is to change the course of the Middle East. (...) We’re standing with Afghanistan’s elected government against al-Qaeda and the Taliban remnants that are trying to restore tyranny in that country." Polling Data Who is winning the war in Afghanistan? The United States 28% The Insurgents 10% Neither side 58% Source: Opinion Research Corporation / CNN ---- NATO commander calls for reinforcements in Afghanistan 9/7/2006 KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-09-07-nato-afghanistan_x.htm NATO's top military commander said Thursday that he needs more troops to fight the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, where a widening insurgency has left hundreds dead, including 21 militants in the alliance's latest air and ground attacks. U.S. Gen. James Jones acknowledged NATO had been surprised by the "level of intensity" of Taliban attacks since the alliance took over from American-led coalition forces in the south in August. Iraq-style suicide bombings, highly organized ambushes and dogged resistance have become hallmarks of Taliban holdouts who are fueling Afghanistan's worst violence since the U.S.-led invasion toppled the hard-line regime in late 2001. NATO officials say current troop levels are enough to combat militants in southern deserts and mountain ranges, or crossing from neighboring Pakistan. But the vast battlefield in the south provides ample cover for insurgents familiar with the terrain and the region's tribes. Additional air support and as many as 2,500 new, highly mobile reserve troops would help finish the conflict faster, the officials said. Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf acknowledged Thursday that al-Qaeda and Taliban militants are crossing from his country to launch attacks in Afghanistan, but he denied his government sponsored them. "You blame us for what is happening in Afghanistan," Musharraf told Afghan government and army officials and lawmakers after an anti-terror summit in Kabul with his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai. He said neither the government of Pakistan nor its intelligence service "is involved in any kind of interference inside Afghanistan." Jones, speaking in Belgium after a visit to Afghanistan, said NATO needed "additional insurance in terms of some forces that can be there, perhaps temporarily, to make sure that we can carry the moment." That could take the form of helicopters, transport planes and "flexible" reserve troops able to move quickly to support NATO forces battling militants. Jones later told reporters at the Pentagon by telephone that he was seeking roughly 2,000 to 2,500 extra NATO troops for the south. He said they would bring the NATO contribution up to 100% — up from 85% — of the force level pledged by allied governments before the southern deployment. There are now about 20,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan. Jones said he was confident that generals from the 26 NATO nations, meeting Friday and Saturday in Warsaw, would authorize the reinforcements. "In the relatively near future, certainly before the winter, we will see this decisive moment in the region turn in favor of the troops that represent the government," he said. "It will help us to reduce casualties and bring this to a successful conclusion in a short period of time." Afghan officials and NATO commanders in Afghanistan welcomed the call for extra soldiers and air support for some 8,000 mainly British, Canadian and Dutch troops who took control of southern military operations from the U.S.-led coalition. At least 35 NATO troops have died since the handover. "More troops and air support means we can do more things more quickly and achieve our goals of security, stability and spreading the Afghan government's authority," said NATO spokesman Col. Nick Grant-Thorold. In the latest violence, some 21 suspected Taliban militants were killed Thursday in Kandahar province's Panjwayi district, the scene of a NATO-led campaign, dubbed Operation Medusa, that began Saturday. The deaths drove to 270 the number of militants NATO says have been killed in the operation — figures that have not been independently verified. Fourteen died in a NATO airstrike and seven others were killed in clashes with ground forces, said Maj. Scott Lundy, another alliance spokesman. In another example of the Taliban threat in the south, militants retook the Helmand provincial town of Garmser for the second time since July after police fled their compound late Wednesday, Police Chief Ghulam Nabi Malakhail said. Lundy confirmed clashes in the town of 50,000 — including NATO airstrikes — but said he was unsure if all police had left or if there were any casualties. "It is quite possible that some of the Afghan national police have vacated the area," Lundy said. "There is definitely fighting there." Taliban forces defeated 40 poorly armed police in Garmser after 16 days of fighting in July. U.S., British, Canadian and Afghan ground troops won it back and handed it over to reinforced Afghan security forces. Jones said he was disappointed by the lack of commitment by some member nations to supporting the alliance's military mission, or strengthening Afghanistan's government by promoting reconstruction and eradication of the country's thriving opium poppy industry — a source of funding for the Taliban. "The future of Afghanistan will not be determined by the military," he said. -------- africa Darfur Violence Intensifies as Deadline for Withdrawal of AU Peacekeepers Looms Thursday, September 7th, 2006 Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/07/1350238 A leading human rights group is accusing the Sudanese government of indiscriminately bombing villages in rebel-held regions of Darfur without regard for civilian lives. Human Rights Watch said firsthand sources report flight crews rolling bombs out the back ramps of Sudanese military aircraft flying over civilian areas. The Sudanese government recently launched a major offensive in Darfur believed to involve tens of thousands of troops backed by bomber aircraft and helicopter gunships. The attacks come as the African Union confirmed its decision to withdraw its peacekeeping troops from Sudan when their mandate expires at the end of September. The AU has said repeatedly that it wants to hand over its mission to the United Nations. The Security Council recently voted to authorize more than 20,000 troops and police officers for Darfur but the UN force was strongly rejected by the Sudanese government. The AU brokered a peace accord in May, but it was signed by the government and only one of the three main rebel groups in Darfur. Since then, the violence has intensified. Humanitarian groups say civilian casualties, rapes and looting have all grown more widespread. Meanwhile, aid workers have been forced to curtail efforts to distribute food and health care to the region amid increasing attacks. Since 2003, as many as 400,000 people have died in the Darfur region and as many as three million people have been left homeless. - Alex De Waal, a fellow of the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University and an advisor to the African Union. He is author of the book, "Darfur: A Short History of a Long War." AMY GOODMAN: We're joined now by Alex de Waal. He’s in Boston, fellow of the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University, advisor to the African Union, author of the book Darfur: A Short History of a Long War. We welcome you to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the latest situation in Darfur? ALEX DE WAAL: The situation at the moment is really rather bleak. What's happened is that in the months after the peace agreement was partially signed, which was four months ago in May, the -- various efforts were made to try and get on the side the two rebel groups that were not signatories. Now, these efforts were really rather half-hearted. I was closely involved in one of them, and we really had very little backup, very little diplomatic clout and very little to offer those groups that were really still quite interested in signing up to the agreement. And the failure to bring onboard those parties left Darfur in a very, very precarious situation. All the institutions that had been set up -- the ceasefire commission, the peacekeeping forces -- were all set up to monitor an agreement on the assumption that all parties had bought into it. And the situation then was untenable. There was an attempt to implement an agreement with only one of the three rebel groups, with one of the others still trying to get onboard and the other one mounting military action to try and undermine it. And the government, I think, did sign the peace agreement with some genuine attempt to try and settle the situation there. But then what happened was, without any progress on that, it decided on the military option. It put forward a plan for disarming the Janjaweed militia and then took that off the table. It hasn't done any disarmament of the Janjaweed. It was supposed not to reinforce its military forces in Darfur. It was actually supposed to withdraw them to garrisons several months ago. That didn't happen. And to the contrary, what's happened is, it’s reinforced, it’s brought in more troops, and it has made essentially a military alliance with the one group, the Sudan Liberation Army of Minni Minawi, the one man who did sign up. And they have been launching joint attacks, supported by the air force, against the holdout rebel groups. And that has led to massive destruction, burning of villages, aerial bombardment and many, many more killings. And there seems no way actually at the moment of stopping this. The offensive is due to continue. I don't believe there is a military solution. It will not defeat the holdout rebel groups. What it will do is, it will kill more people, create more hunger, create more displacement and make the situation even more intractable. JUAN GONZALEZ: And in retrospect, what might have been done differently when the negotiations were going on to incorporate the two groups that rejected the agreement and continue to fight? ALEX DE WAAL: I think the key thing to bear in mind is that the solution to Darfur is a political solution. No solution can be imposed by any amount of arm twisting, any amount of bluster, any amount of military force. Even if we sent 100,000 NATO troops, we would not be able to impose a solution. The solution has to come through political negotiation. And that, unfortunately, is a very slow process. The sides do not trust each other. There are a great deal of enmity and mistrust, and with good reason. They have been fighting each other, they’ve been killing each other. And while the government is responsible for the majority of the killings, the rebels are not angels either. They also have their own very, very serious problems of human rights abuse, and they have been fighting each other, too. What was needed, I think, was more time, more time to enable the text that came out of the agreements to be truly owned by the parties, rather than a rather well-crafted agreement, but an agreement that was essentially imposed upon the parties. And had we had another few months, I think we would have certainly got a more inclusive deal. We could certainly have got one of the other two rebel factions. The Sudan Liberation Army, headed by Abdul Wahid Nur, which has the largest popular support in Darfur, that I believe would have signed up. And then we would be on a rather different track. I think this thing was done in haste, and it was done in haste in part because there was a tremendous international impatience and impetus, which is quite understandable, to end the humanitarian suffering, to get troops on the ground, to bring an end to the abuses that occur every day. AMY GOODMAN: Alex de Waal, we're also joined on the line from Sudan by Suleiman Jamous, the former Humanitarian Affairs Coordinator for the Sudanese Liberation Army. He opposed the Darfur peace agreement. He was captured on May 20 by members of an SLA faction that signed the accord. He was held for a month before being released. He is speaking to us from Central Sudan. What do you think needs to happen right now, Suleiman Jamous? SULEIMAN JAMOUS: [inaudible] civilians of Darfur. The only option that we should be [inaudible] out of Sudan is to monitor the peace of the civilians, because what I feel that at the same time they are implementing the agreement achieved by [inaudible] -- AMY GOODMAN: I’m sorry, the line is too bad. We're going to try to call you back. Suleiman Jamous, former Humanitarian Affairs Coordinator for the Sudanese Liberation Army. Alex de Waal, the United Nations' relationship with the African Union, what is it? And what role do you think the U.S. should be playing now? ALEX DE WAAL: The AU-UN0 relationship is really very good. The African Union has recognized that the forces that it has on the ground are too few, too poorly equipped, and don't really have the mandate to be able to protect the civilian population. And the African Union Peace and Security Council, their equivalent for the African continent of the UN Security Council, has made a very clear resolution that because the AU force is not capable, a UN force should take over. And so, that is what they have insisted upon. And it was on the basis of that resolution, that the UN Security Council resolution passed its Resolution 1706 about a week ago, demanding that the Sudan government allow in a force of 20,000. The Sudan government has obviously rejected that and has said to the African Union: You can stay, but only if you reverse that. So, the Sudan government is essentially saying to the African Union: Yes, you can stay, but only if you stay in your current, less-than-capable capacity. Now, to me, this -- clearly the Sudan government is in the wrong. Clearly the Sudan government needs to back down, needs to allow a capable force. But, in a way, what we've got ourselves into is a cul-de-sac, a dead end of posturing on both sides, which is not helping a resolution of the situation. The reality is that, however many troops we bring into Darfur, they are not going to be able to protect all those civilians. They’re not going to be able to assist in the disarmament of the Janjaweed unless there is a political solution on the table that everyone has signed up to. And so, let us begin to get the politics, the politics of crafting a peace deal that actually involves everybody, that gets everybody around the table agreed on what the future of Darfur should look like. Let's put that first, and then let's put the international force that will be there for peacekeeping as an adjunct to that. JUAN GONZALEZ: But if the Sudanese government rejects any United Nations involvement, what recourse is left to the international community to be able to get the government to agree to some kind of ceasefire? ALEX DE WAAL: Well, essentially what President Bashir of Sudan has done is he’s called the bluff of the UN and the US. The UN and the US have said: We want to send a force. And they’ve implied that if the Sudan government doesn't agree, they will force it on them. But what is the reality of this? Are we really going to send an army to Darfur to invade against the wishes of the Sudan government, to face the military resistance of the Sudan government and its militias? And the answer, frankly, is no. Are we going to be able to impose sanctions that are tough enough on the Sudan government, which has after all been under sanctions of one form or another for 17 years, that will make them comply? This is a country that is an oil exporter that has good relations with all its neighbors now, has good relations with China and Russia. The answer, frankly, again is no. So, let's recognize that posturing and wielding a bigger stick, frankly, is not going to work. The bluff of that has been called. Let's get back to a discussion. Let's get back to negotiating a political solution that starts with a ceasefire, that starts with saying: We can solve this problem, but we can solve this problem only with the consent of all. And the first step is the fighting must stop. And I personally am confident that this is the only way. It may be a long shot. Time is very short. We're really very, very close to some deadlines, and if we pass those deadlines, if we pass the end of this month and the African Union forces withdraw, then we’re in a very, very dismal situation. But we do need to rescue this politically. AMY GOODMAN: Alex De Waal, we want to thank you very much for joining us, fellow of the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University, advisor to the African Union. His book is Darfur: A Short History of a Long War. We’re sorry we couldn't get Suleiman Jamous back on the line with us, former Humanitarian Affairs Coordinator for the Sudanese Liberation Army, speaking to us from Central Sudan. -------- arms Three Indicted for Sending U.S. Secrets, Equipment to Yemen Sept. 7, 2006 (Bloomberg) By Cary O'Reilly http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aKgFxkmSD29M Three naturalized U.S. citizens were indicted by a federal grand jury in California for allegedly acquiring secret U.S. defense information and stolen military equipment and conspiring to send them to Yemen. The four-count indictment for conspiracy to possess and transmit defense information, attempted unlawful export of defense articles and related charges was handed up Aug. 31 and unsealed today, U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott said. The men face five to 10 years in prison and fines of $250,000 to $1 million on each count. ``We will use all appropriate legal means at our disposal to detect, disrupt, and hold accountable those who seek to do us harm, whether they act within or outside our borders,'' Scott said in a statement. Ahmen Ahmed Ali, 56, of Bakersfield, California, allegedly received secret defense documents from a government undercover agent and transmitted them to Yemen by fax or courier between June 2005 and August 2006, according to the indictment. He allegedly conspired with Mohamed Al-Rahimi, 62, of Bakersfield, to receive stolen government property, and with Ibrahim A. Omer, of Fort Worth, Texas, to ship military items such as body armor and chemical protective suits to Yemen. Such items cannot be legally exported from the U.S. without permission of the State Department. Ali was arrested in Bakersfield today and will appear before Magistrate Theresa A. Goldner in Bakersfield on Sept. 8. Omer was taken into custody in Bossier City, Louisiana, and will make his first court appearance the same day in Shreveport, Louisiana. Al- Rahimi remains at large. No Answer Repeated calls to a number for Amen Ali in Bakersfield, provided by directory assistance, were not answered. A Yemeni cleric and his assistant were convicted in March 2005 in New York City of conspiring to support terrorist groups. The prosecution of Mohammed Al Hassan al-Moayad and his aide, Mohammed Moshen Yahya Zayed, angered Yemen, where al-Moayad was prominent, AP reported. That case attracted attention in November, 2004, when a prosecution witness set himself ablaze outside the White House. The man, Mohamed Alanssi of Falls Church, Virginia, told the Washington Post he worked as a federal informant on terrorism. The case is U.S. v. Ali at al, 06-292, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California (Bakersfield). To contact the reporter on this story: Cary O'Reilly in Washington at caryoreilly@bloomberg.net . -------- iraq Sunnis enraged as Iraq prepares to divide itself into regions By Oliver Poole, Iraq Correspondent (Filed: 07/09/2006) UK Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/07/wiraq07.xml The future of Iraq as a sovereign nation was thrown into jeopardy yesterday after a new law was introduced to parliament that would enable the break up of the country into semi-autonomous regions. If passed, a self-ruling Shia state is likely to emerge in the south, based on the autonomous region Kurds have already established in the north. It would not only be able to levy its own taxes and govern itself but, Shia politicians say, would have its own armed guards posted along its borders. Iraq's Sunni community, which is bitterly opposed to the prospect, has warned it will mark the first step in the break up of the country and could lead to the south of Iraq becoming a satellite of Iran. The introduction of the law was marked by a plea by the parliament's speaker that delegates must compromise and find agreement on the prospect of federalism, otherwise the country risked not only collapsing but descending into anarchy. "We have three to four months to reconcile with each other," said Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a Sunni. "If the country does not survive this, it will go under." The law is almost certain to pass as federalism is supported by both Shia and Kurd parties, who control two thirds of the seats in parliament, though it could be amended. Last night, the document was being considered by a committee of senior parliamentarians and its contents, including the powers of the new semi-autonomous regions, remained unclear. Hamid Mualla al-Saadi, a leading member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a party with historic links to Iran which drafted the proposal, said only that it would "define how the regions are formed." This would be done through either a vote in a governing council selected from the region's leaders or via a popular referendum, he said. The principle of a federalised Iraq was one of the key principles accepted in the country's constitution written last year. The law defining how this would work in practice had to be submitted by September 16. However the recent sectarian violence that has engulfed the country ever since the bombing in February of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, appears to have led to a marked radicalisation among Shia political leaders of what their federal state would involve. Last year the idea was for a moderate federal state consisting of loose political alliances of provinces with the central government still having control of oil and the country's armed forces. But Abdel Aziz Hakim, the head of the SCIRI, has in recent months advocated a nine-province "super region" in the Shia south, where 60 per cent of the country's oil reserves are located. It would have its own armed forces drawn from militias such as the Badr Brigade, which is run by the SCIRI, already operating in the region and have some control over oil exploration. "This is a guarantee to our sons and grandsons that injustice will not be revived," he said last month, referring to Shia persecution by Saddam Hussein. Khudair Khuzaie, the Shia education minister, recently laid a scenario that would in practice be semi-partition. "Federalism will cut off all parts of the country that are incubating terrorism from those that are upgrading and improving," he said. "We will put soldiers along the frontiers." Such talk inflames Iraq's Sunnis, whose leaders warn federalism is an attempt by the Shia to seize control of Iraq's oil and could lead to the south falling under the sway of Teheran. How Iraq Could Look http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/09/07/wiraq07.gif -------- israel / palestine Israel To Lift Lebanon Blockade Thursday, September 7th, 2006 Democracy Now! Headlines http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/07/1350218 Israel has announced an end to its nearly two-month old air and sea blockade of Lebanon. The move comes after weeks of protest the blockade has hampered Lebanon’s recovery and further crippled its economy. Israel says it will lift the blockade today, but warns its troops will remain inside south Lebanon until the deployment of a larger international force. * Israeli spokesperson Miri Eisin: "Israel has no interest to sit inside southern Lebanon. We would very much like to see all Israeli troops back inside Israel on the international recognised border. As soon as there are enough troops, the number that was talked about last week between the Secretary General (Kofi Annan) and the Prime Minister (Ehud Olmert) is 5,000 troops. As soon as there are enough international troops on the ground the Israeli troops will be out of south Lebanon." Israelis Rally Against Gaza Offensive Meanwhile dozens of Israelis rallied Wednesday against their government’s ongoing offensive in the Gaza Strip. The demonstrators marched on Israel’s border with Gaza. * Peace Now director Yariv Oppenheimer: "We came here to protest against the Israeli policy that doesn't talk with the Palestinian government. We think that the only way to solve the problem in Gaza and in the West Bank is by starting a political negotiations and eventually reaching an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians." According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, two hundred and forty Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. One in five of the dead were children. -------- prisoners of war Officials Relieved Secret Is Shared By Dana Priest Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, September 7, 2006; A17 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/06/AR2006090602055_pf.html Employees at CIA headquarters stood transfixed at television sets yesterday in a moment one senior official called "electric" as President Bush told the nation about the agency's covert prison system -- a program once considered so secret that even Bush did not know the details. "I know it's going to make a lot of people sleep well at night," one counterterrorism officer said of the disclosure. The feeling of relief by the very people carrying out the program was a striking indication of how deeply attitudes have changed within the government about the administration's unorthodox counterterrorism tactics and the need to shroud them in secrecy. "Finally the burden of this program will not rest only on the shoulders of the CIA," said James Pavitt, who headed CIA covert operations when the program was put in place, with White House approval, after Sept. 11, 2001. "This was a tough world and we were asked to do some tough things," he said, adding that such efforts were always within the law. Although it was a recent Supreme Court ruling that forced the program into legal limbo and probably pushed the president into going public, the administration had begun debating whether to suspend the CIA's so-called black sites at least a year ago. European allies as well as senior officials at the State and Justice departments and the CIA, along with a handful of lawmakers, lobbied to abandon the program for something more transparent and with more legal protections of detainees. In the past year, the CIA has studied more closely the effectiveness of harsh interrogation techniques that it and other agencies have used and concluded that some of those were worth discarding. CIA officials have eliminated some of those techniques and, within the past two months, have begun to consult for the first time with the full Senate and House intelligence committees about creating a new list of techniques. But the rules for a new CIA prison system are still unsettled. "Although there is no one in CIA custody today, it's our intent that the CIA detention program continue," said a senior intelligence official. "It's simply been too valuable in the war on terrorism to not allow it to move forward." The idea, said several administration officials, is to get Congress's political buy-in to a program that is fraught with some of the most difficult questions facing the government: how a country steeped in the rule of law should treat suspected terrorists it believes have valuable information. When it set up the program, the CIA -- at the urging of Vice President Cheney and a White House general counsel's office with an unconventional view of what constituted torture -- asserted that it needed to hide prisoners in secret locations around the world and to harshly interrogate them to extract time-sensitive information about possible terrorists attacks. Government professionals worried about the program's effectiveness and legality. As controversy spread within Congress and around the world through media reports, some argued that the program was becoming counterproductive. Some CIA employees refused to sit in meetings where the prisons or interrogation methods were being discussed. Others consulted lawyers. "This program has been the subject of so much controversy and suspicion and resentment against the U.S. that on balance, it is probably desirable" to disclose and discontinue it "and get it behind us," said Paul Pillar, a former CIA officer and now a Georgetown University professor. Administration officials said yesterday that the need for secret CIA prisons continues, but that they will seek legislation immunizing CIA employees from prosecution for anything they may have been asked to do that might now be considered illegal. At the same time, the administration will ask the intelligence committees to give it guidance to draw up a separate, shorter list of harsh techniques it might still employee under certain circumstances. The point, said one senior official, "is to make the program more durable" and not "subject to the pendulum swings" of Congress or the president. Several officials interviewed requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the program. Others were permitted by the administration to talk to reporters but not to disclose their identities. Part of the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, the prison system grew to include eight countries, including several in Eastern European democracies, according to current and former intelligence officials. A senior intelligence official said yesterday that the system held nearly 100 people over the life of the program, but no more than a couple of dozen at any one time. The prisons were made legal under U.S. law with a presidential finding allowing the agency to set them up. But they were illegal in the democratic countries in which they operated. Only a small handful of foreign intelligence officials -- and usually one or two top political leaders -- ever knew of their existence. Only CIA personnel were allowed on the sites, one of which was located on a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe. Others were once located in Thailand and Afghanistan. A written defense of the program issued by the administration yesterday said it would be "practically impossible" to act quickly on "information from one detainee in the questioning of another" if they were all in the custody of different foreign governments. But the statement did not explain why that couldn't also have been accomplished if the detainees had been held together at Guantanamo Bay. Prisoners were subjected to harsh interrogation techniques including feigned drowning, extreme isolation, slapping, sleep deprivation, reduced food intake, and light and sound bombardment -- sometimes in combination with each other. Human rights groups and many international legal experts have said these techniques amount to torture. The administration insists, as Bush did again yesterday, that it has never authorized or used torture. Secret prisons became a particularly sensitive issue in Europe after The Washington Post reported on their existence in Eastern Europe in November. The European Parliament and Council of Europe both have ongoing investigations, and virtually all governments there have been forced to address the matter. Some have made thorough attempts to make sure their intelligence services never engaged in such cooperation; others have not. European cooperation on counterterrorism is among the most productive relationships the CIA has and has resulted in the detainment of many top terrorists. European officials, too, though, have expressed deep concern that a system dependent upon such secrecy was not sustainable. "We obviously welcome the news that they'll be closed," said one British official. "We welcome any news that ensures detainees are treated under the Geneva Conventions." CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, who favored the administration's stance and pushed for a revision of existing policy, alerted employees about Bush's White House statement moments before it aired. Hayden advised that they watch and assured them he was working to protect the employees who handled terrorists. "The mood? It's good," offered one intelligence officer. Staff writers Karen DeYoung and Dafna Linzer and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report. ---- Bush Acknowledges Secret CIA Prisons For First Time Thursday, September 7th, 2006 Democracy Now! Headlines http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/07/1350218 President Bush has acknowledged for the first time the CIA has been operating a secret network of overseas prisons. Bush made the admission Wednesday as he ordered 14 prisoners previously held by the CIA to be transferred to Guantanamo Bay where they could be tried by a military tribunal. * President Bush: “Some may ask: Why are you acknowledging this program now? There are two reasons why I'm making these limited disclosures today. First, we have largely completed our questioning of the men -- and to start the process for bringing them to trial, we must bring them into the open. Second, the Supreme Court's recent decision has impaired our ability to prosecute terrorists through military commissions, and has put in question the future of the CIA program. " The transferred prisoners include alleged 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheik Muhammad. Bush said the CIA is no longer holding any detainees but that the secret prisons may be re-opened. He denied the U.S. ever uses torture but admitted the CIA has used what he described as alternative procedures to force some prisoners to talk. Bush also urged Congress to authorize his administration’s revised rules for military tribunals and to amend the War Crimes Act. The president said the new laws are needed because of the Supreme Court’s ruling in June the administration’s military commissions to try detainees were illegal. Commenting on the proposed changes, John Yoo, the former Justice Department official who helped develop the tribunals, told the Wall Street Journal: "It does not look like the procedures for these commissions differ in any significant way from the rules already in place before... The only difference is that [the president] is seeking Congress's explicit support." Pentagon Adopts International Humanitarian Standards on Detainee Treatment Bush’s comments come as the Pentagon announced Wednesday it is adopting international legal standards for the treatment of detainees. The new Defense Department Field Manual now explicitly outlaws such practices as forced nudity, hooding, military dogs and waterboarding. The Washington Post reports the changes mark the first time there has been a uniform standard for both enemy prisoners of war and so-called unlawful combatants. But the new policies will still not apply to those prisoners captured by the CIA and held in non-military facilities. ---- Bush Yields to Geneva Conventions on Detainees September 7, 2006 by Jim Lobe Inter Press Service http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=9663 In a major victory for the State Department and career military lawyers, the Pentagon Wednesday released a new Army field manual that requires all detainees held by the U.S. military, including suspected terrorists, to be treated according to the Geneva Conventions. At the same time, President George W. Bush announced that 14 so-called "high-value detainees" – those who have been held by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in secret locations around the world where they been subject to interrogation techniques that human rights groups have denounced as "torture" – are being transferred to the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for eventual trial. Among them are Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who is believed to be the highest-ranking member of al-Qaeda captured by the U.S. and the mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, as well as several other key senior al-Qaeda operatives, Bush said. He insisted, however, that they and other accused terrorists should not be entitled to full due-process rights when they are brought to trial. Under legislation proposed by the administration, hearsay testimony and evidence obtained as a result of coercive interrogations would be admissible in such tribunals. It would also bar defendants from reviewing evidence that could, in the government's opinion, compromise Washington's national security. In his remarks, Bush also defended the use of what he called "tough" but "safe" interrogation techniques of the kind used by the CIA in its so-called "black sites," and called on Congress to explicitly approve their use by the CIA in the future. "[A]s more high-ranking terrorists are captured, the need to obtain intelligence from them will remain critical – and having a CIA program for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting life-saving information," he said. And he called on Congress to amend the U.S. War Crimes Act, which criminalizes violations of the Geneva Conventions, to ensure that no U.S. personnel "involved in capturing and questioning terrorists could now be at risk of prosecution" under its provisions. The Pentagon's new manual and Bush's speech, the third in a series of major addresses designed to rally support for his administration's performance in the "global war on terror" in the run-up to the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, received a mixed reaction from human rights groups. "By announcing adherence to Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions for all detainees, the Pentagon has reaffirmed important protections found in international law," said Larry Cox, executive director of the U.S. section of Amnesty International. At the same time, Cox complained that the proposed legislation on military tribunals would deny "fundamental fair-trial protections" to defendants. He also called on Bush to "rescind any directive that gives the CIA 'extraordinary powers' to continue to detain people secretly outside the law." "The president sent a mixed message," said Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, a national lawyers' group "On the one hand, he announced a new army field manual which contains interrogation techniques which, with a few exceptions, comply with U.S. law and the Geneva conventions." "On the other hand, while declaring a commitment to a law-based approach, the president defended the system of secret CIA detentions and an 'alternative set of [interrogation] procedures'… that invite cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of suspects – treatment that amounts to a clear violation of U.S. and international law," she added. Bush's remarks and the release of the new army manual came two months after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the administration's 2002 directive, which was prepared by political appointees in the Justice Department and Pentagon over the objections of senior career military lawyers and the State Department, that suspected terrorists – or "unlawful enemy combatants" – were not entitled to the protections provided under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Article 3 provides that all detainees are legally entitled to humane treatment "in all circumstances" and may not be subject to "cruel treatment and torture" or "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment." Two weeks after the court's decision, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England issued a memorandum that called for "all DoD [Department of Defense] personnel [to] adhere to [Article 3] standards." In fact, the administration has always insisted that all detainees have been treated "humanely" despite a flood of reports by human rights groups, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, former detainees, and detainee attorneys about practices ranging from sexual humiliation and exposure to extreme temperatures to physical assaults and "water-boarding" – a technique used by the CIA, in particular, in which the subject is made to believe that he is drowning. Because of the way the administration had defined "humane" treatment to include such practices, England's memo, while broadly welcomed by the human rights community as an important step to comply with the Supreme Court's judgment, also provoked skepticism from some analysts that it would make any real difference. That skepticism was fueled as well by statements from senior administration lawyers who insisted in testimony before Congress on the same day of the memo's release that it was not meant to signal a change in policy. Indeed, the fact that Bush explicitly repeated his administration's insistence that the U.S. "does not torture" – like his demand that Congress amend the War Crimes Act to exempt U.S. personnel – is likely to provoke continued skepticism about the administration's intent, although the manual's explicit bans on specific techniques, at least by the military, offered some reassurance. Indeed, those bans – which were strongly opposed by political appointees at the Pentagon, Vice President Dick Cheney's office, and the Justice Department – marked a major victory for the State Department and career military officers and lawyers. The conflict had delayed publication of the new manual by one year. The same court decision that upheld Article 3 also found that the military tribunals established by the Pentagon to try suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo violated the Constitution because they were not approved by Congress. The administration's response – reiterated by Bush today – has been to urge Congress to pass legislation that would more or less rubber-stamp the Pentagon's original plans. Several Republican senators on the Armed Services Committee – notably its chairman, John Warner; John McCain, and Lindsay Graham – have argued, however, that those plans, particularly the rules of evidence, would violate defendants' due-process rights and thus should be amended to conform more with procedures used in U.S. courts-martial. Their position has been backed by most Democrats and by top career military attorneys, past and present. "The bottom line to today's announcements," said Scott Horton, an international law professor at Columbia University in New York, "is that the administration is giving up on some of the most controversial targets in its detainee treatment program, such as the use of highly coercive interrogation tactics by the military, but wants to keep its military commissions despite the fact that the Supreme Court essentially called them 'kangaroo courts.'" Horton also noted that the administration's call for amending the War Crimes Act in ways that would effectively exempt U.S. personnel engaged in the "war on terror" appeared primarily designed to protect senior policymakers, particularly those political appointees who were responsible for authorizing abusive treatment and interrogation techniques, from possible prosecution. ---- As CIA Detainees Transferred to Guantanamo, President Bush Acknowledges Secret Prisons Thursday, September 7th, 2006 Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/07/1350230 On Wednesday, President Bush acknowledged for the first time that the CIA has been operating a secret network of overseas prisons. President Bush made the admission as he ordered 14 prisoners previously held by the CIA to be transferred to Guantanamo Bay where they could be tried by a military tribunal. The prisoners include alleged 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheik Muhammad. Bush said the CIA is no longer holding any detainees but that the secret prisons may be re-opened. He denied the U.S. ever uses torture but he admitted the CIA had used what he described as alternative procedures to force some prisoners to talk. Bush also urged Congress to authorize the use of military tribunals and to amend the War Crimes Act. The president said new laws were needed because of the Supreme Court's ruling in June in the Hamdan case. - Barbara Olshansky, attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. She is the author of "Secret Trials and Executions: Military Tribunals and the Threat to Democracy." She is also the co-author of "The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office." RUSH TRANSCRIPT JUAN GONZALEZ: On Wednesday, President Bush acknowledged for the first time that the CIA has been operating a secret network of overseas prisons. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Many specifics of this program, including where these detainees have been held and the details of their confinement, cannot be divulged. Doing so would provide our enemies with information they could use to take retribution against our allies and harm our country. I can say that questioning the detainees in this program has given us information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks. JUAN GONZALEZ: President Bush made the admission as he ordered 14 prisoners previously held by the CIA to be transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where they could be tried by a military tribunal. The prisoners include alleged 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheik Muhammad. Bush said the CIA is no longer holding any detainees, but that the secret prisons may be reopened. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: But as more high ranking terrorists are captured, the need to obtain intelligence from them will remain critical, and having a CIA program for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting life-saving information. JUAN GONZALEZ: President Bush denied the U.S. ever uses torture, but he admitted the CIA had used what he described as alternative procedures to force some prisoners to talk. Bush also urged Congress to authorize the use of military tribunals and to amend the War Crimes Act. The President said new laws were needed because of the Supreme Court’s ruling in June in the Hamdan case. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The court determined that a provision of the Geneva Conventions known as Common Article 3 applies to our war with al-Qaeda. This article includes provisions that prohibit outrages upon personal dignity and humiliating and degrading treatment. The problem is that these and other provisions of Common Article 3 are vague and undefined, and each could be interpreted in different ways by an American or foreign judges. And some believe our military and intelligence personnel involved in capturing and questioning terrorists could now be at risk of prosecution under the War Crimes Act, simply for doing their jobs in a thorough and professional way. AMY GOODMAN: President Bush, yesterday. Barbara Olshansky joins us in the studio today, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, author of Secret Trials and Executions: Military Tribunals and the Threat to Democracy. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Barbara. BARBARA OLSHANSKY: Thank you for having me. AMY GOODMAN: Your response to President Bush's address. BARBARA OLSHANSKY: You know, there are several. The President’s speech came along with a series of documents: a Department of Defense directive, a new Army field manual that was revised, and this bill. If you put them all together, it says some very interesting things. First, there is the admission, like you said, of the existence of secret prisons, which we knew and they have categorically denied, all across Europe and all across the United States. But this idea of the CIA program, that language that the President used, we know that that program is a codeword for the use of torture. There's just no doubt about it, because we know how badly people were tortured in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo, and we know that not just from detainees' testimony, but from the testimony of FBI officials, CIA officials. Lots of people have come forward. And the President then is asking the American public and Congress to approve a program of torture going forward. And when he says the United States doesn't torture and I never authorize torture, that is a very interesting word play, because all of the government's documents, all of the White House documents, go to this issue of redefining torture in a way that we don't define it in the United States or in the world. And that definition says torture only occurs when someone’s at the risk of immediate full organ failure or death. So that's the word “torture” that the president is using. That's not our constitutional definition of torture. That's not the international definition of torture. And you know what? That's not the American people's definition of torture. JUAN GONZALEZ: And what about this whole issue of the War Crimes Act and having Congress revisit that? BARBARA OLSHANSKY: Well, that one is really on the same -- in the same arena. It is retroactive immunity for everyone that engaged in torture. And the fact is that torture policy really specifically came down from the highest on the high. And in fact, the President, in his speech yesterday, admitted that, that he authorized it, that Rumsfeld put it into effect. And so now we know everyone did it. They said it. And, you know, that idea of being authorized from the top, well, we now know that that happened. And soldiers who follow a policy that violates the law, you know what, we don't exonerate them, because that idea of “they told me to do it,” you know, that principle went out in Nuremburg in the Second World War when it was used by Nazi soldiers. We don't abide by that. No one in the world does. And that's what the President is asking for now: immunity for everyone who is going to say, “My superior told me so.” JUAN GONZALEZ: Why did all of this come now, this sort of a coordinated decision now to bring this to the forefront, to try to push it through Congress at this stage? BARBARA OLSHANSKY: I think that it is really fundamentally a political move. I think this is an administration that is very scared. There's an election coming up. I think the numbers for this president have been extremely low. I think there have been case after case in the Supreme Court, where the justices -- and these are conservative justices -- have said, “You can't do this. You don't get a blank check. You don't get to work outside the Constitution, outside the rule of law.” And they’ve said it -- they said it in Rasul v. Bush, about challenging the detentions. They said it in Hamdi, about giving someone the most basic due process. And they said it in Hamdan, about what our due process requires in any kind of court that we hold. And so now you have a bill, this huge 86-page bill, that is an attempt to overrule every Supreme Court decision that's come down in the war on terror. AMY GOODMAN: In what way? BARBARA OLSHANSKY: Well, it says that the Detainee Treatment Act fulfills all of our requirements under the Geneva Conventions to outlaw cruel and inhuman treatment. But the Detainee Treatment Act prohibits anyone from enforcing its prohibition. We can't ever go into court to stop cruel treatment or torture. So the idea that it fulfills our obligations is just unbelievable nonsense. And then it says the Geneva Conventions can't ever be enforced by an individual in court. Our courts have never said that. And no country around the world has ever said that. You know, if we can't go into court to enforce what our individual rights -- right? --your right to a trial, your right not to be brutally treated, all of those are individual rights. If we say people can't go into court to enforce them, what's going to happen to our soldiers in every other country where they are captured? They don't get to invoke those protections. How blind could this administration be to the effects on our own guys everywhere they’re fighting? JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, in the conversation we had before we went on the air, you mentioned also that the bill addresses this whole issue of whether American citizens can be held as enemy combatants and put in military tribunals versus being tried in regular American courts. BARBARA OLSHANSKY: Yeah. And this was something that really we have had a number of conversations about, you know, with people on the Hill, some people in the White House, about the fact that an administration bill that was leaked included the word “people” instead of the word “aliens,” because the President's November 13th military order in 2001 said “non-citizens.” Well, now, the language says an unlawful enemy combatant can be any individual. And it's very clear that that means Americans. It can mean anyone in the world. There is no exclusion, you know, for Americans. And the language of who can be an enemy combatant has been tremendously expanded. So it could be, you know, not only al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, but other associated forces and just others who are unnamed. And it's any hostile act, not necessarily a military act. Am I hostile by talking about what's wrong with this, by sitting here with you? How are we going to know that? And then I end up in Guantanamo in a military commission, where the death penalty can result? This is astounding stuff. AMY GOODMAN: The legislation that President Bush is proposing would limit the ability of prisoners to access all evidence. The Republicans, who are challenging the proposal, are very significant. I mean, you've got John McCain, who was a prisoner of war himself. You’ve got Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a former military lawyer, still serving in the Air National Guard as a reserve judge, and Senator John Warner of Virginia, chair of the Armed Services Committee. BARBARA OLSHANSKY: Yeah. I think these are people that are so familiar with our military justice system that they should know, and I think what they are saying means they do know that we have an existing military justice system that’s worked for more than 50 years. It's incredibly effective. It is a well thought out, well established, well ruled, you know, system that everyone believes in in the military. And people can't see any reason for permitting the President this new power to create a system wholly outside of everyone else, an entire new universe with new words and new terms and new offenses that are outside the law and that he has just fabricated. AMY GOODMAN: At the same time, the military held a news conference, the Pentagon, talking about new rules. What are they? BARBARA OLSHANSKY: Well, there are many more rules in here than were spelled out before. So they talk about some of the offenses for the first time, because in the first go-around, no offenses were set forth. So you had no idea what you would be tried for. And in fact, you'd be designated for a military trial, and, you know, a year later, they'd say, we think you did a, b, and c. So they sort of went back and crafted the crime based on what they thought you did. Now, there are some crimes that are specified in the bill. The problem is, there are many crimes that are not recognizable in the laws of war. And so, we're still doing that, creating things out of whole cloth, when we have a military justice system that specifies those crimes. What are the crimes that people commit when they are in the military? And for people that are not military soldiers, for civilians, we know what we can accuse them of: every kind of regular criminal act, including things -- war crimes, including genocide. We can go after terrorists for all of those things. And this is that fundamental divide that we come to again, which is, you know, the criminal justice system, being a perfectly valid system to try terrorists. And in the UK, what happened recently in London just shows that. They did an investigation. They stopped anything before it happened. Those people are able to be tried. There is nothing that is fundamentally tricky about this. What's tricky is when you hold people in indefinite detention and torture them. AMY GOODMAN: Barbara Olshansky, I want to thank you very much for joining us, with the Center for Constitutional Rights, an attorney who is author of the book, Secret Trials and Executions: Military Tribunals and the Threat to Democracy, also coauthor of The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office. ---- 3 Republican senators among critics of military tribunal plan 9/7/2006 By Joan Biskupic and Andrea Stone, USA TODAY http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-06-gitmo-senators_x.htm President Bush's long-awaited plan for military commissions to try foreign terrorist suspects was criticized Wednesday by fellow Republicans who said the proposal, which omits many of the usual safeguards of a military trial, doesn't go far enough to protect prisoners. "I do not think we can afford to again cut legal corners that will result in federal court rejection of our work product," said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who with fellow Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and John Warner of Virginia has been most critical of the president's position on tribunals. The three senators expressed optimism about a compromise. Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said he hoped to introduce a bipartisan bill soon and said Congress could pass a bill before members go home to campaign for the Nov. 7 election. He and the others refused to provide details of their plan, but Graham made clear that among the "points of contention" was the White House proposal to bar a defendant from seeing all evidence against him. Graham and others expressed concern about setting precedents that could be used against captured U.S. troops. Bush's plan would allow classified information to be shown to the jury but not the accused and would allow prosecutors to introduce hearsay evidence that traditionally is barred. Such evidence, under the Bush plan, would be allowed if it came from witnesses who were dead, imprisoned or otherwise unable to testify. As a result, the person on trial would not be able to sufficiently challenge the evidence against him. Some statements obtained "by coercion" could be used if a military judge found that they were reliable. Human rights groups offered the harshest criticism. They said Bush's plan too closely mirrored the tribunal arrangement struck down by the Supreme Court on June 29. "The draft may say it's modeled on the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but it's a pale imitation," said Deborah Pearlstein of Human Rights First. Similar criticism came from Georgetown University law professor Neal Katyal, who represented Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni national accused of being a driver for Osama bin Laden. His case led to the rejection of the original Bush plan for military tribunals. Katyal said the administration was shunning fundamental rules used in World War II tribunals. "We've had a tradition that we don't kick criminals out of their trials," he said. Others applauded the plan. Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice said the proposal will "protect the integrity of the process for all involved while at the same time protecting vital national security interests." Bush's first plan for trying foreign terrorism suspects was announced two months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The high court said it lacked sufficient safeguards, in violation of the U.S. military code of justice and the Geneva Conventions. Bush's new proposal tracks many of the procedures used in military trial and ensures a defendant's access to a lawyer. The plan would specify which war crimes could be heard by tribunals rather than allowing vague charges. The plan stops short of matching the code cited heavily by the justices. Bush said allowing detainees to see classified information to be used against them could jeopardize national security. He said hearsay evidence should be allowed because some foreign nationals are too dangerous to be brought to the USA or Guantanamo Bay to testify. ---- Military lawyers question Bush plan for trials Terror detainees should have access to all evidence, lawmakers told Sept. 7, 2006 Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14717778/ The Pentagon’s top uniformed lawyers took issue Thursday with a key part of a White House plan to prosecute terrorism detainees, telling Congress that limiting the suspects’ access to evidence could violate treaty obligations. Their testimony to a House committee marked the latest time that military lawyers have publicly challenged Bush administration proposals to keep some evidence — such as classified information — from accused terrorists. In the past, some military officials have expressed concerns that if the U.S. adopts such standards, captured American troops might be treated the same way. The lawyers’ testimony contrasted with the panel chairman’s assertion that the United States must take a harder line when prosecuting terrorists. Rep. Duncan Hunter, who heads the House Armed Services Committee, said at the hearing that any military commission established to prosecute terrorists must allow the government to protect intelligence sources. In saying so, the California Republican aligned himself with the White House position. “While we need to provide basic fairness in our prosecutions, we must preserve the ability of our war fighters to operate effectively on the battlefield,” Hunter said. Hunter presented the military lawyers with various scenarios in which it might be necessary to withhold evidence from the accused if it would expose classified information. But the service’s top lawyers said other alternatives must be explored — or the case dropped. “I believe the accused should see that evidence,” said Maj. Gen. Scott Black, the Army’s Judge Advocate General. Denying detainees a fundamental right Black and the other lawyers said such an allowance was a fundamental right in other court systems and would meet requirements under the Geneva Conventions. But Hunter suggested that such a requirement could hamper prosecutions. “Some of these acts of complicity in terrorist acts are very small pieces . . . and you don’t have a lot of evidence,” he said. The chairman repeated a scenario where the only piece of evidence would expose the identity of a secret agent and asked whether it would make sense to drop the case entirely. “You get to the end of the trail, then yes sir, you do,” Black responded. The hearing came a day after Bush acknowledged for the first time that the CIA had secret prisons overseas and defended the practice of tough interrogations to force terrorists to reveal plots to attack the United States and its allies. He revealed that 14 suspects, including the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, had been turned over to the Defense Department and moved to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for trial. Separately, State Department legal adviser John Bellinger III told foreign reporters Thursday that if additional members of the al-Qaida terror network were captured, “We reserve the right to have those people questioned by the CIA.” Bellinger said foreign governments were free to decide whether to look for the locations of any CIA prisons on their territory, but “we are not going to talk about that.” European lawmakers on Thursday demanded to know the exact location of the prisons. Proposal splits GOP The president proposed legislation Wednesday that would aid the government in prosecuting terrorists using secret military tribunals. The proposal left Republicans again divided over how the nation should treat its most dangerous terror suspects, setting up a showdown in Congress just weeks away from elections when all members will try to sell themselves as tough on terror. Bush’s announcement was immediately praised by those who said his policies were necessary to win the war on terror. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said he would like to take up the bill on the Senate floor as soon as possible, leaving open the door for a vote on the measure before lawmakers break at the end of the month for election campaigning. But some GOP moderates are challenging the proposal. They include three senators with hefty credentials: Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam; Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a former military lawyer who still serves in the Air Force Reserves as a reserve judge; and Sen. John Warner of Virginia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said Bush’s decision to prosecute the terrorists held by the CIA was long overdue. But, he added, the military commission system should be properly vetted through the Armed Services Committee. “The last thing we need is a repeat of the arrogant, go-it-alone behavior that has jeopardized and delayed efforts to bring these terrorists to justice for five years,” Reid said. -------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE -------- torture New Pentagon rules ban 'abusive' interrogation 9/7/2006 By John Diamond, USA TODAY http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-06-interrogation_x.htm WASHINGTON — The Pentagon issued new rules Wednesday for interrogating prisoners and terrorist suspects that forbid harsh questioning techniques such as using dogs, hoods, water dunking, forced nudity or total sensory deprivation. "No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices," said Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, the Army's chief intelligence officer. The rules were announced as President Bush said that 14 valuable detainees, including Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, had been moved to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That puts the terror suspects in military, rather than CIA, custody and makes them covered by the new Pentagon guidelines, including Geneva Conventions protections against physical abuse or "humiliating and degrading treatment." The prisoner transfer, carried out in secret on Monday, came in response to a Supreme Court ruling that said even terror suspects are covered by the code of the Geneva Conventions. The new interrogation rules are in the new Army field manual on "Human Intelligence Collector Operations," which updates the 1992 version of the document. The rules apply to all U.S. military interrogations, not just those by the Army. Congress approved a proposal by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., last December that led to the new rules. Newly approved questioning techniques involve mainly psychological approaches, such as making a prisoner fear he may never see his family. Three newly approved techniques require high-level approval: employing "good-cop, bad-cop" tactics; "false flag" approaches to make a prisoner believe he is being held by another country's military; and, only in the case of unlawful combatants such as terror suspects, separating prisoners so they cannot coordinate their stories. The moves end two separate systems of interrogation — one that involved secret procedures and locations by the CIA and the other an unclassified set of rules used by the military. "The current transfers mean that there are now no terrorists in the CIA program," Bush said. Future captures of high-ranking terrorists, Bush said, will require CIA interrogation under rules that remain secret. Bush is concerned about CIA interrogations continuing until Congress clarifies what he called "vague and undefined" language in the Geneva Conventions that could subject U.S. intelligence officers to war-crimes charges. That's because the officers might have mistreated detainees under some interpretations of the code of the Geneva Conventions. Both CIA and military interrogations have been sources of controversy for the Bush administration. In April 2004, photographs surfaced of Iraqi prisoners being abused and humiliated by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. The pictures depicted prisoners recoiling in terror from dogs, set upon by guards, and stripped and forced together in sexually suggestive poses. Last November, The Washington Post reported that the CIA maintained a network of secret prisons in Asia and Central Europe. The White House has never confirmed the locations of the CIA detention centers, and an investigation by the European Union found no proof that the CIA had established prisons in Central Europe. Without specifying their locations, Bush acknowledged the existence of such facilities for the first time Wednesday. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a five-page defense of CIA interrogation practices Wednesday that provided no detail on the techniques used by agency interrogators. The document suggested that harsher methods were used after Abu Zubayda, an associate of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, stopped cooperating with interrogators a few months after his capture in March 2002. "Over the ensuing months, the CIA designed a new interrogation program that would be safe, effective and legal," the document stated. -- REVISED MILITARY QUESTIONING TECHNIQUES The revised Army field manual for "Human Intelligence Collector Operations" made public Wednesday provides guidelines and restrictions for all U.S. military interrogations. Eight specific interrogation techniques are prohibited: • Forcing a detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner. • Placing hoods or sacks over detainees' heads; using duct tape over their eyes; total sensory deprivation. • Beatings, electric shock, burns or other forms of physical pain. • A technique called "waterboarding" in which a prisoner is repeatedly dunked under water. • Use of military working dogs to intimidate detainees. • Inducing hypothermia or heat injury. • Conducting mock executions. • Depriving a detainee of necessary food, water or medical care. The manual describes 16 permitted techniques that have long been allowed under Army guidelines. They include playing on a prisoner's anxieties, suggesting a prisoner may never see his family again if he refuses to cooperate, giving the prisoner the silent treatment, suggesting the prisoner may be punished for committing atrocities, posing rapid-fire questions, implying that the captors know all about the prisoner. The manual includes three newly approved interrogation techniques that require high-level approval to be used: • "Mutt and Jeff," a form of good-cop, bad-cop in which a prisoner is encouraged to identify with the more lenient of two interrogators. • "False flag" involves tricking a detainee into believing he is the prisoner of another country's forces. This may be useful if the prisoner is particularly hostile to the United States. But interrogators may not imply that failure to cooperate will result in harsh interrogation by non-U.S. organizations. • Separation may be used only on unlawful combatants, not prisoners of war from an enemy military force. This involves keeping multiple prisoners apart so that they cannot coordinate their stories. -------- POLITICS -------- investigations Armitage says he was first source in CIA leak Updated 9/7/2006 (AP) http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-07-armitage-cia-leak_x.htm WASHINGTON — The former No. 2 State Department official said Thursday he inadvertently disclosed the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame in conversations with two reporters in 2003. Confirming that he was the source of a leak that triggered a federal investigation, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said he never intended to reveal Plame's identity. He apologized for his conversations with syndicated columnist Robert Novak and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. For almost three years, an investigation led by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has tried to determine whether Bush administration officials intentionally revealed Plame's identity as covert operative as a way to punish her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for criticizing the Bush administration's march to war with Iraq. "I made a terrible mistake, not maliciously, but I made a terrible mistake," Armitage said in a telephone interview from his home Thursday night. He said he did not realize Plame's job was covert. Armitage's admission suggested that the leak did not originate at the White House as retribution for Wilson's comments about the Iraq war. Wilson, a former ambassador, discounted reports that then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger to make a nuclear weapon — claims that wound up in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. Armitage said he was not a part of a conspiracy to reveal Plame's identity and did not know whether one existed. He described his June 2003 conversation with Woodward as an afterthought at the end of a lengthy interview. "He said, 'Hey, what's the deal with Wilson?' and I said, 'I think his wife works out there,'" Armitage recalled. He described a more direct conversation with Novak, who was the first to report on the issue: "He said to me, 'Why did the CIA send Ambassador Wilson to Niger?' I said, as I remember, 'I don't know, but his wife works out there.'" Armitage, whose admission was first reported by CBS News Thursday, said he cooperated fully with Fitzgerald's investigation. He was never a target of the investigation and did not hire a lawyer. He agreed to speak to reporters after Fitzgerald released him from a promise of confidentiality. Armitage said he considered coming forward late last month when a flurry of news reports identified him as the leak. But he said he did not want to be accused of trying to get the story out during the summer's slow news cycle. "I did what I did," Armitage said. "I embarrassed my president, my secretary, my department, my family and I embarrassed the Wilsons. And for that I'm very sorry." I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, is the only administration official charged in the CIA leak case. He faces trial in January on charges he lied to authorities about conversations he had with reporters about Plame. Armitage said he assumed Plame's job was not a secret because it was included in a State Department memo. -------- propaganda wars Clinton Administration Officials Assail ABC's 'The Path to 9/11' By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, September 7, 2006; A09 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/06/AR2006090601819_pf.html Top officials of the Clinton administration have launched a preemptive strike against an ABC-TV "docudrama," slated to air Sunday and Monday, that they say includes made-up scenes depicting them as undermining attempts to kill Osama bin Laden. Former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright called one scene involving her "false and defamatory." Former national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger said the film "flagrantly misrepresents my personal actions." And former White House aide Bruce R. Lindsey, who now heads the William J. Clinton Foundation, said: "It is unconscionable to mislead the American public about one of the most horrendous tragedies our country has ever known." ABC's entertainment division said the six-hour movie, "The Path to 9/11," will say in a disclaimer that it is a "dramatization . . . not a documentary" and contains "fictionalized scenes." But the disclaimer also says the movie is based on the Sept. 11 commission's report, although that report contradicts several key scenes. Berger said in an interview that ABC is "certainly trying to create the impression that this is realistic, but it's a fabrication." Marc Platt, the film's executive producer, said that although it "does contain composite and conflated scenes and representative characters and dialogue, we've worked very hard to be fair. If individuals feel they're wrongly portrayed, that's obviously of concern. We've portrayed the essence of the truth of these events. Our intention was not in any way to be political or present a point of view." The former Clinton aides voiced their objections in letters to Robert A. Iger, chief executive of ABC's corporate parent, the Walt Disney Co., but the network refused to make changes or to give them advance copies of the movie. They were not interviewed by ABC; it hired as a co-executive producer Thomas H. Kean, the Republican who chaired the Sept. 11 commission, but no Democratic members of the panel. "In an undertaking this gargantuan," Platt said, "it's impossible to interview every single person available, and we didn't believe we needed to." He said that "maybe I'm naive" in thinking that hiring only Kean would not prompt criticism of a political slant. The fierceness of the debate reflects a recognition that a $40 million miniseries -- whose cast includes Harvey Keitel, Patricia Heaton and Penny Johnson Jerald -- can damage Clinton's legacy in the anti-terrorism fight on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the scenes that the Clinton team said are fictional: · Berger is seen as refusing authorization for a proposed raid to capture bin Laden in spring 1998 to CIA operatives in Afghanistan who have the terrorist leader in their sights. A CIA operative sends a message: "We're ready to load the package. Repeat, do we have clearance to load the package?" Berger responds: "I don't have that authority." Berger said that neither he nor Clinton ever rejected a CIA or military request to conduct an operation against bin Laden. The Sept. 11 commission said no CIA operatives were poised to attack; that Afghanistan's rebel Northern Alliance was not involved, as the film says; and that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet decided the plan would not work. · Tenet is depicted as challenging Albright for having alerted Pakistan in advance of the August 1998 missile strike that unsuccessfully targeted bin Laden. "Madame Secretary," Tenet is seen saying, "the Pakistani security service, the ISI, has close ties with the Taliban." Albright is seen shouting: "We had to inform the Pakistanis. There are regional factors involved." Tenet then complains that "we've enhanced bin Laden's stature." Albright said she never warned Pakistan. The Sept. 11 commission found that a senior U.S. military official warned Pakistan that missiles crossing its airspace would not be from its archenemy, India. · "The Path to 9/11" uses news footage to suggest that Clinton was distracted by the Republican drive to impeach him. Veteran White House counterterrorism official Richard A. Clarke, who also disputes the film's accuracy, is portrayed as telling FBI agent John P. O'Neill: "Republicans went all out for impeachment. I just don't see the president in this climate willing to take chances." O'Neill responds: "So it's okay if somebody kills bin Laden, so long as he didn't give the order. . . . It's pathetic." The Sept. 11 commission found no evidence that the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal played a role in the August 1998 missile strike, but added that the "intense partisanship of the period" was one factor that "likely had a cumulative effect on future decisions about the use of force against bin Laden." Clinton allies have complained that advance copies were sent to a number of conservative commentators, including Rush Limbaugh, but not to liberals. Limbaugh, saying that the screenwriter, Cyrus Nowrasteh, is a friend of his, told his radio audience that the film "indicts the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger. It is just devastating to the Clinton administration. It talks about how we had chances to capture bin Laden in specific detail." ABC said copies of the film were sent to media organizations and commentators without regard to ideology, and that Democrats and Republicans were invited to a screening in Washington. At the screening, Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the Sept. 11 commission, assailed the film as inaccurate. Nowrasteh, who has described himself as a conservative, told Frontpage magazine that the movie illustrates "the frequent opportunities the administration had in the '90s to stop bin Laden in his tracks -- but lacked the will to do so." Nowrasteh drew criticism from Reagan administration officials for his Showtime movie "The Day Reagan Was Shot." He told the Los Angeles Daily News then that he "made a conscious effort not to contact any members of the [Reagan] administration because I didn't want them to stymie my efforts." The assault on "The Path to 9/11" assumed the trappings of a campaign yesterday. Four senior House Democrats -- John Conyers Jr., Jane Harman, John D. Dingell and Louise M. Slaughter -- have written Iger to demand that the inaccuracies be corrected. Spurred by the Center for American Progress, which is headed by Clinton chief of staff John D. Podesta, 25,000 people have sent letters of protest to ABC. -------- us politics Senate Rejects Cluster Ban Thursday, September 7th, 2006 Democracy Now! Headlines http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/07/1350218 In news from Capitol Hill, the Senate has rejected a move to ban the use of cluster bombs near civilian areas. The Democrat-proposed amendment would also have barred arm sales to countries not respecting the same rules. The measure was defeated by 70 to 30 votes. Relief and human rights groups have alleged Israel used American-made cluster bombs in its attack on Lebanon. Senate Blocks Democrat Attempt To Dismiss Rumsfeld Meanwhile, Senate Republicans also blocked a Democratic attempt Wednesday to hold a vote on a resolution calling for the dismissal of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Poll: 58% Oppose Bush Foreign Policy Back in the United States, a new poll shows public opposition to the Bush administration’s “war on terror” is at its highest point to date. According to the annual Transatlantic Trends poll, 58% percent of Americans disapprove of President Bush’s handling of foreign policy. It’s the first time in the poll’s history more Americans disapprove than approve of the administration’s international policies. In Europe, the level of opposition is at seventy-seven percent – also the highest so far. -------- ENERGY -------- alternative energy Solar Power to Shine in Coming Decades - Report NORWAY: September 7, 2006 Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent REUTERS NEWS SERVICE http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/37995/story.htm OSLO - The tiny solar power industry is booming and could generate 2.5 percent of world electricity by 2025 in a shift from fossil fuels, a report by a business group and environmental lobby Greenpeace said on Wednesday. "Solar power...would represent the annual output from 150 coal-fired power plants" by 2025, the European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA) and Greenpeace said. The report said photovoltaic systems, which turn sunlight into power, now generate 0.05 percent of world electricity and could rise to 2.5 percent in 2025, the main horizon for the report, and then leap to 16 percent in 2040. "The solar electricity market is booming," it said in a report to be issued at a conference in Dresden, Germany, adding that global sales of the photovoltaic systems had been growing at an average annual rate of 35 percent. The predicted growth is far more optimistic, for instance, than by the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) which advises developed nations. Solar power has struggled to compete with fossil fuels, even with subsidies and oil at US$70 a barrel. Sven Teske at Greenpeace's Climate and Energy Unit defended the forecasts as realistic, saying the lobby groups' previous reports had underestimated growth to 2005. "We are in a crucial phase in the solar industry. It's now on a transition from a niche market to the mainstream," he said. EPIA groups about 70 solar photovoltaic firms including Solar World, Renewable Energy Corp and Q-Cells. The report estimated the world solar photovoltaic market was worth 8.1 billion euros (US$10.41 billion) in 2005 and would rocket to 113.8 billion in 2025. FREE ENERGY Many rich nations, from Germany to Japan, are promoting solar power as an alternative to fossil fuels, widely blamed for global warming. Solar radiation reaching the earth's surface is more than 10,000 times what is needed for human energy needs. It estimated that global power production from solar energy was 7 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2005 and would rise to 589 TWh in 2025 and 4,890 in 2040. Overall electricity demand would gain to 23,248 TWh in 2025 from 13,423 in 2005. By contrast, the IEA forecast in 2004 that electricity generation from solar power would reach just 119 TWh in 2030. It said 80 percent would come from photovoltaics and the rest from solar thermal plants, which trap the sun's rays, often to heat water rather than transform the light into electricity. A shift to solar power could help cut the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by burning coal, oil or natural gas. The gases are widely blamed for driving up global temperatures, threatening havoc with the climate. -------- OTHER -------- environment More 'Intersex Fish' Found in Potomac September 07, 2006 By Matthew Barakat, Associated Press http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=11210 MCLEAN, Va. — Some species of male fish in the Potomac River and its tributaries are developing female sexual traits at a frequency higher than scientists have seen before, raising concerns about pollutants in a waterway that provides drinking water for millions of people. The so-called "intersex fish," which produce immature eggs in their testes, were discovered in the Potomac rivershed in 2003 and have also been found in other parts of the country. But the frequency that the U.S. Geological Surveys found last year is much higher than what has been found elsewhere, said fish pathologist Vicki Blazer. In some Potomac tributaries, nearly all of the male smallmouth bass caught in last year's survey were the abnormal fish. In the Potomac itself, seven of 13 largemouth bass exhibited female characteristics, including three that were producing eggs. Although the frequency discovered was surprisingly high, Blazer cautioned that the sample size was relatively small, with about 10 male and 10 female fish taken from each of eight locations in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. Researchers were reluctant to remove large numbers of bass from the rivers because of conservation concerns, she said. Female fish caught in the survey did not develop any unusual sex traits, though fish of both sexes exhibited lesions and other pollution-related problems, said Blazer, who coordinated the survey. Smallmouth bass appear to be more susceptible to intersex development than largemouth bass, Blazer said. Blazer said researchers are still waiting on data that would help them determine the water quality at the time the fish were caught, but preliminary data taken from the Potomac found a variety of chemical pollutants. It is not exactly clear what is causing the changes, though it is likely a combination of pollutants, scientists say. Certain chemicals and pesticides are believed to stimulate estrogen production. Also, estrogen from birth control pills and human waste can make its way from sewage treatment plants to the waterways. The Environmental Protection Agency has been studying the issue of so-called "endocrine disruptors" since 1996, but currently does not issue guidelines to water treatment plants for allowable levels of estrogenic compounds. Jeanne Bailey, a spokeswoman for Fairfax Water, said the findings are a concern. The water authority, which draws from the Potomac and Occoquan rivers to provide service to roughly 1.5 million people, is working with USGS and other agencies to research and develop ways to improve water treatment to eliminate potentially harmful compounds. The water treatments used by Fairfax Water, including ozone and activated charcoal, have been shown to reduce levels of estrogenic compounds, she said. Bailey cautioned against drawing dire conclusions about the impact on human health. She said, "Fish are a great indicator of the health of our waters, but they are not a great indicator of what may translate to humans." ---- Ivory Coast Government Quits over Dumped Toxic Waste September 07, 2006 By Ange Aboa and Peter Murphy, Reuters http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=11207 YAMOUSSOUKRO/ABIDJAN — Ivory Coast's government resigned on Wednesday after toxic waste dumped around the main city Abidjan killed three people, made 1,500 ill and triggered street protests. Interim Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny offered the resignation of his cabinet to President Laurent Gbagbo during an emergency meeting in the political capital Yamoussoukro which had been meant to work out a response to the crisis. "I accept the resignation of your government but I ask you to manage current business and ask for your presence at the presidential palace tomorrow to form a new government," Gbagbo told Banny in a meeting at which a Reuters reporter was present. "At whatever level it may be ... those who are responsible must be hunted down and sanctioned. We have to know the nature of the damage. We cannot sit back and cross our arms," he said. Authorities said the pungent waste which contained hydrogen sulphide was unloaded from a Panamanian-registered ship at Abidjan port on Aug. 19 and then dumped in at least eight sites around the densely populated lagoon-side city. Hundreds of residents have complained of nausea, sore chests, vomiting and diarrhoea, doctors said. "The situation is very serious. That is why I am presenting you with the government's resignation," Banny said. Ivory Coast, split between a rebel-held north and government-run south after a brief 2002-2003 civil war, was already heading towards a political crisis with long-delayed presidential elections due at the end of October set to be postponed again. The government's resignation came a day after rival factions in the West African country failed to reach agreement on key steps towards holding the polls. UNKNOWN ILLNESS Angry youths earlier blocked some roads in Abidjan with branches and boulders in protest against the toxic waste dumping, preventing medical staff from getting to hospital where dozens lined up for treatment, some wearing paper masks. In TV broadcasts, the government appealed for the protesters to let medical personnel through and police later fired tear-gas to try to disperse them. "We don't know what we're treating. When they have stinging eyes or noses we give them drops. We want to know what it is so we know how to treat it," he said, adding the hospital was running low on some medicines and X-ray film. The government said three people had died and 1,500 fallen ill. It said it had requested international help to analyse the substance and work out how the city could be decontaminated. The French foreign ministry said it was sending a team from its office of geological and mineral research to help evaluate the environmental risks and that a second crisis management team would be sent by the weekend to help limit its impact. Ivorian state prosecutor Raymond Tchimou said three people linked to the firm responsible for unloading the ship had been arrested. Port documents seen by Reuters said the vessel, called the Probo Koala, had left Nigeria before coming to Abidjan. "All those who knew of this problem and allowed it to happen will be pursued," he said. Ivory Coast is the world's top cocoa producer and one foreign exporter, Barry Callebaut , said it had closed one of its warehouses near Abidjan's vast port because staff exposed to the fumes felt unwell. Other exporters said they were operating normally. (Additional reporting by Loucoumane Coulibaly) -------- health Study: 70 Percent of 9/11 Responders Suffer Lung Ailments Thursday, September 7th, 2006 Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/07/1350234 On September 13th, 2001 - two days after the 9/11 attacks - EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman made this announcement at Ground Zero: - Christine Todd Whitman, 9/13/01: "Everything we've tested for, which includes asbestos, lead, and volatile organic compounds, have been below any level of concern for the general public health." Now, a major new study of 9/11 health effects finds that nearly seven out of every ten first responders at Ground Zero suffer from chronic lung ailments. The report by Mount Sinai is the largest ever done on 9/11 health effects. For the past five years city, state and federal officials have downplayed the health dangers of the toxic dust that was released when the World Trade Center collapsed. Last week the city issued guidelines for doctors on how to spot and treat illnesses related to Ground Zero. The city was widely criticized for taking nearly five years to release the guidelines. On Tuesday, Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced the city will begin providing health treatment to anyone sickened by Ground Zero contaminants. - Dr. Jacqueline Moline, co-author of the Mount Sinai study. She is the Principle Investigator and Director of the World Trade Center Monitoring & Treatment Program at Mount Sinai Medical Center. - Lea Geronimo, one of the founders of the Beyond Ground Zero Network - an advocacy organization working with low-income and immigrant communities suffering health effects from the World Trade Center Disaster. JUAN GONZALEZ: On September 13th, 2001, two days after the 9/11 attacks, EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman made this announcement at Ground Zero. CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: Well, if there's any good news out of all this, it’s that everything we’ve tested for, which includes asbestos, lead and BOCs, have been below any level of concern for the general public health. JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, a major new study of 9/11 health effects finds that nearly seven out of every ten first responders at Ground Zero suffer from chronic lung ailments. The report by Mount Sinai is the largest ever done on 9/11 health effects. AMY GOODMAN: For the past five years, city, state and federal officials have downplayed the health dangers of the toxic dust that was released when the World Trade Center collapsed. Last week, New York City issued guidelines for doctors on how to spot and treat illnesses related to Ground Zero. New York was widely criticized for taking nearly five years to release the guidelines. On Tuesday, Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced the city will begin providing health treatment to anyone sickened by Ground Zero contaminants. Dr. Jacqueline Moline is coauthor of the Mount Sinai study. She’s the principal investigator and director of the World Trade Center Monitoring and Treatment Program at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Lea Geronimo also joins us, founder of the Beyond Ground Zero Network, an advocacy group working with low-income and immigrant communities suffering health effects from the World Trade Center disaster, both joining us in our Firehouse studio here in New York, just blocks from where the towers of the World Trade Center once stood. Dr. Moline, talk about the findings of your study. DR. JACQUELINE MOLINE: Well, in the nearly 10,000 people that we report on in our study, we found that seven out of ten people had respiratory effects when they were at the site. And of those 70%, 60% still had symptoms when they were seen up to two-and-a-half years after the event. We found that half of -- we found about 30% of people had abnormal breathing tests. That’s twice what we would expect in the general population. What's disturbing about that is, the people in our study aren't the general population. These are people who are in physically demanding jobs, so we would assume that their pulmonary function would be better than the general population, which includes everyone in our population, so people who aren't able to work, for example. We found that a specific breathing test of forced vital capacity, how much air you can take into your lungs, was five times more likely to be abnormal in our nonsmokers, when you compare them to the nonsmoking general population. This can explain perhaps why many of our patients feel short of breath to this day. So the findings show that there is persistent respiratory problems, persistent upper respiratory problems and objective evidence that pulmonary function tests, standards that we followed, following every guideline, show that these problems persist. They are severe. And we're concerned that people are going to have lasting health effects. JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, your study involved about 9,500, or just short of 9,500 people, who were people who worked directly at Ground Zero, now? This was firefighters, police, workers on the site, as well? DR. JACQUELINE MOLINE: The people included in our study are people who worked or volunteered at the pile, at the Fresh Kills landfill, people in the medical examiner's office, firefighters not from New York City, because there's a separate funding line for the FDNY, so they have an Allied program that’s also funded. These programs are funded through the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. So, police officers, construction workers, clergy, volunteers of all sorts. AMY GOODMAN: And when you say Fresh Kills, for people not from here, you mean in Staten Island at the dump. DR. JACQUELINE MOLINE: Right, where they brought all the debris. They sifted through the debris. So people there had similar exposures, because everything there was dusty as well. JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of the -- your expectation is that many of these people may have to be treated for the rest of their lives to some extent or could be suffering effects for the rest of their lives? DR. JACQUELINE MOLINE: This study reports through 2004. We've continued with the medical monitoring program and our treatment programs to see people who worked or volunteered at the site. And these people are still sick. And we're at the five-year anniversary now. And we can assume that people who have chronic ailments, these problems aren't going away. And it's likely that they will need ongoing treatment. AMY GOODMAN: Chronic ailments, like what? DR. JACQUELINE MOLINE: Like asthma, like chronic rhinosinusitis, irritation of the sinuses and the nose, chronic cough, chronic throat irritation. Our study doesn't report on the mental health findings, which will be coming out in the next few months. But we know that many of our participants have some severe mental health problems that result from their exposures down there: post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, panic attacks, generalized depression. So, these are all lifelong, potentially lifelong problems. And then, of course, we're concerned about the future for many of our patients. We don't know what's going to happen in the future, and we're concerned there are some cases where patients have lung scarring, you know, that we're right at the cusp of when we would expect to see a lot of these diseases start. The interstitial fibrosis, the medical term for lung scarring, for example, five years is really when you start to see it. We've seen it actually a little earlier in some patients. But is the next wave going to happen in the next few years? And that's why it's essential to continue the funding for these programs, which actually runs out in 2009. AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Moline is with Mount Sinai. She is running the study that looks at what has happened to the first responders now, five years later. We're also joined by Lea Geronimo, who is one of the founders of Beyond Ground Zero Network. Dr. Moline is talking about the rescuers, the first responders. Talk about who you represent. LEA GERONIMO: Actually, I am a resident of the Lower East Side for almost six years, and I’ve worked on Wall Street for about ten. So, clearly, the week after the tragedy, many of my co-workers and I were expected to come back to work the very next week, when it wasn't clean, the fires were still burning for a year and a half. So there’s a re-ignition of fires that were happening. AMY GOODMAN: On September 11th, where were you? LEA GERONIMO: I was lucky to be in my apartment, but I was still downtown. I live on 13th Street, so I was still below the 14th Street cutoff. I came to work. I had been exposed to all the fires. Within the first few months, I was experiencing heavy menstrual bleeding for almost six months. I started to develop bronchitis and now have become -- now this problem has become chronic. I’ve had it nine times since 9/11. I’ve also had psoriasis since I was young, but just little patches maybe on my scalp, and now it's to the point where I have it on my thighs, my back, my scalp. You can see a little spot here on my elbow. I’ve had to go to my dermatologist three times a week to get UV light treatments, as well as use various different topical creams. And I was relatively healthy. I’m a 35-year-old pretty young person that didn't have any significant health problems before 9/11. And I’m one of many people who have been forgotten, because many residents, as well as other workers, such as office workers in the downtown area, have no programming to go to, with the exception of the program that's at Bellevue, which is sort of the sister program to Mount Sinai. Unfortunately, our program has not been funded by the government, so it is very hard and a long wait for a lot of the undocumented population that are not being seen at Mount Sinai, as well as residents and other workers who worked downtown but are not cleanup workers. JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Mayor Bloomberg actually made an extraordinary announcement on the same day that your report came out, the Mount Sinai report, which is a little questionable in my mind, the timing of his announcement at the same time that the Mount Sinai report was coming out. But the Mayor announced that the city will now begin to fund health treatment at Bellevue for anyone who believes that they are sick as a result of 9/11 exposure, so that would include residents. It would include office workers. And he specifically said that the city's policy is not to deny treatment to anybody because of their immigration status. But the question is, of course, what the cost this will be to the city on a long-term basis. And he's trying now to see about federal funding. What's your perspective on this whole issue of the federal government's responsibility in assuring that people do not continue to be exposed, because in some of these buildings, because the city allowed owners to self-certify their cleaning, no one really knows how decontaminated some of these buildings are? LEA GERONIMO: Well, there's still the old Deutsche Bank building that's still up, which has, from my understanding, toxins that are a hundred times stronger than what was released at 9/11. So there are still toxins in the area. I don't know how easy this is going to be, since the cleanup wasn't done sufficiently from the beginning. I’m also concerned that there are a lot of people, who because their doctors weren't given, until recently, this list by the New York City Department of Health of symptoms of 9/11 diseases, that they weren't being recognized and connected. And a lot of people who do see doctors outside of Manhattan, you know, the other five boroughs, you know, they were having a very hard time getting their doctors connecting all of these problems. So we have the two problems. We have the cleanup, and we will have the health of people who aren’t even considered part of the affected group. JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Dr. Moline, your project is basically a monitoring program. Does it also do treatment? And what percentage of the workers that you've been dealing with have health insurance to be able to deal with some of these problems? DR. JACQUELINE MOLINE: Well, we have -- the initial funding was purely for monitoring, and it was actually a screening program that has morphed into a monitoring program, as we’re seeing people for repeat evaluations. Initially we received money for treatment from philanthropic sources, the generosity of the Bear Stearns Charitable Trust, the 9/11 Fund, New York Community Trust, a number of other charitable organizations, and then the American Red Cross, who has stepped up and has provided funding for both Mount Sinai, other clinics including Bellevue, to see -- for their limited program now that will be expanded now through federal funding. We recently -- AMY GOODMAN: I didn't hear you say federal government in that. DR. JACQUELINE MOLINE: I’m just about to add that. The federal government is providing treatment monies, most of it will be forthcoming in the next few months. It was from the $125 million reappropriation that was taken out of the President's budget, and then through the work of the New York Congressional delegation really and the work of organized labor in getting this funding back -- AMY GOODMAN: But for five years, you didn't have federal funding? DR. JACQUELINE MOLINE: For five years we did not have federal funding for treatment. AMY GOODMAN: For dealing with police, for example, who were suffering after the attacks. DR. JACQUELINE MOLINE: We didn't have any federal funding for treatment at all. We now will have some. We're waiting for it to come in. The money isn't adequate, certainly. We know that medical treatment costs are high. In our treatment program, 38% of the people in our treatment program have no health insurance. 42% are underinsured. Only 20% have full, full coverage. So what we're finding is that, while there's the Workers' Compensation system, which although these people have work-related problems, the system is difficult to navigate for anybody. And many of these people have had Workers' Comp claims that have been controverted, or they’ve been disputed, so there's delays in getting treatment. Once they do have a case, there may be delays in getting treatments authorized. So it's been a very difficult road for many of these patients. And the treatment program luckily, through the generosity of philanthropy, frankly, has been able to bridge that gap and provide treatment to people. We actually have seen many immigrants, day laborers, in the monitoring and treatment programs that are available, besides the Bellevue program. We have about 14% of our population in the screening program, English is not their first language. We have a large immigrant population within the monitoring program, and that's reflective of who worked down at the site. So many of the building cleaners, for example, the laborers, they are immigrant workers that we have been proud to be able to monitor and treat. AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Lea, can you talk about how race and class fits into this? LEA GERONIMO: Well, for me, I’m not sure if I see it on that level exactly, because there were all kinds of people from different ethic graphic groups that have been excluded. There have been all kinds of people from different class levels that have been excluded, because I think, one, the government is just recently saying that the air is toxic, finally. So that's one problem. And two, there was no bubble over the area. It didn't matter if you were rich. It didn't matter if you were from a certain group. You were affected. And getting back to what you were saying about that $125 million, part of the problem was when that money came from the federal government to the state, people were blocked out of those cases, because either they had surpassed the two-year statute of limitations or they were undocumented. And then, the government’s saying, well, you know, this is a surplus, so let's just give it back. But really what it did is it set up parameters that excluded residents from getting the money, it excluded undocumented population from getting the money. So in that respect, yes, there was definitely exclusions. AMY GOODMAN: So they didn't ask for their papers when they were cleaning, but now ask for their papers when they’re sick. LEA GERONIMO: Exactly. AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us: Dr. Jacqueline Moline, vice chair of the Mount Sinai Medical Center Department of Community and Preventive Medicine, she is principal investigator and director of the World Trade Center Monitoring and Treatment Program at Mount Sinai; and Lea Geronimo, one of the founders of the Beyond Ground Zero Network, an advocacy group working with low-income and immigrant communities suffering from the health effects at the World Trade Center disaster. Thanks for joining us. [break] AMY GOODMAN: Before we move on to our next segment, Juan, you’re going to be chairing a major town hall meeting tonight in New York around Ground Zero, is that right? JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes, I’m going to be moderating a town hall meeting at St. Paul's Church in the Financial District, where many of the medical experts, as well as residents and others, will be addressing what's happened five years later in terms of the health of folks. And, you know, it's very interesting now, you're getting all of this media coverage. The New York Times has produced a Ground Zero film that’s on the Discovery Channel. CBS News has produced a Ground Zero film that will be on the Sundance Channel. And there are all of these articles now about the terrible health effects of people. But five years ago, you know, the New York Times did almost virtually nothing. In fact, basically bought hook, line and sinker the EPA and the city's position on this issue and did very little coverage of the health effects, and so I -- AMY GOODMAN: You were really pioneering in that. I mean, you then ended up writing the book Fallout precisely about this issue. JUAN GONZALEZ: Right, precisely about this. And back then, there was enormous outcry from the business community, from the Mayor's office, from the EPA, about anybody questioning their results. And I keep wondering, all of these media that are now on a bandwagon of “let's do something about the health of all the people,” where were they when they were really needed by the public five years ago to question the government's role in all of this? AMY GOODMAN: Well, of course, we'll continue to cover this, as we move into this fifth anniversary of 9/11.