NucNews November 19, 2006 -------- NUCLEAR -------- australia Greenpeace releases nuclear energy brief Sunday November 19, 2006 AAP http://au.news.yahoo.com/061119/2/11hia.html Greenpeace has gone on the offensive two days before Prime Minister John Howard's nuclear energy taskforce releases a report on the viability of nuclear energy. The environmental lobby group on Sunday released the deliberations of an international panel which was brought together by Greenpeace to answer concerns about the nuclear industry. Greenpeace Australia Pacific CEO Steve Shallhorn said the answers from the panel proved nuclear energy was neither environmentally or economically sound. Instead, the Greenpeace report points to renewable energy as the key to powering Australia in the future. Mr Howard first put nuclear energy on the agenda during a visit to the US earlier this year. At the time it was seen as a ploy to take attention off the lavish reception afforded Mr Howard by his US ally President George W Bush. But on returning to Australia, Mr Howard continued the debate by forming the nuclear energy taskforce, headed by former Telstra chief and scientist Ziggy Switkowski. Mr Shallhorn said the government report was an easy option at a time when immediate action was needed to curb the escalating costs of global warming. "The government should stop taking the easy options of inquiries and reports and get on with immediate action to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy," he said. Former US Nuclear Regulatory Commission member Peter Bradford sat on the Greenpeace panel and says nuclear energy should not be considered a magic bullet for climate change. "Those who tell you things like it (nuclear energy) could save the earth ... are inviting you into a dangerous la-la land in which nuclear power will be over-subsidised and under-scrutinised," Mr Bradford wrote. Dr Switkowski will release the taskforce's report, which also looks at uranium mining and processing, on Tuesday at the National Press Club. -------- depleted uranium Is Depleted Uranium the suspect behind Military Suicides? Greg Mitchell November 19, 2006 Global Research Editorial Note http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m28384 Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has become an epidemic amongst soldiers/sailors serving and veterans who have returned from the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. The reasons are being depicted as purely psychological, but this seems to be very misleading. The general public in the United States, Britain, and the rest of the world, including much of the Arab World, are unaware of one of the greatest war crimes and criminal acts against humanity that has been unfolding since the Gulf War from the Balkans to the Middle East and Afghanistan. Depleted uranium has been used for military use from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia to the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The use of depleted uranium (D.U.)—more properly nuclear waste—and other substances in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be ruled out as a cause of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) reported by U.S., Coalition, and NATO veterans. Veterans who have served in Anglo-American occupied Iraq and NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan are coming back in sizeable numbers with medical, stress, and psychological problems, but there are undoubtedly more factors involved than just the theatre of military service or the war zone. It is now known that Gulf War Syndrome was caused by the large-scale use of depleted uranium against Iraq in 1991. Additionally, about 70% (even possibly more) of Gulf War Veterans have had children born after the Gulf War with mutations, deformities, genetic disorders, and severe medial illnesses. Causal analysis of the increasing rates of mutation, medical problems, and cancer in both foreign troops and local populations alike in Iraq and Afghanistan indicates that it is the military application of nuclear waste (D.U.) being used against civilian populations and resistance movements that is the cause. There have been omissions to this such as the use of dosimeters by troops in Afghanistan. Dosimeters are measuring devices worn around soldiers’ necks that record exposure to radioactivity. Although it replicates the U.S. and NATO claims that depleted uranium (D.U.) is safe and posses no health hazards to human beings, the Toronto Star, the newspaper with the largest number of circulations in Canada, published a revealing piece by Bruce Campion-Smith that gives an indirect omission of the horrors that foreign troops and local populations alike have been exposed to in the war zone. Although the rudimentary causes of Jeanne Michel’s PTSD are not know, there is no doubt these causes at a minimum can be attributed to the war in Iraq, warfare, and the occupation of Iraq by American troops. The article writes that "Iraq killed her just as certainly," meaning it was because of the occupation of Iraq that Jeanne Michel died. This statement should proceed deeper—the regressive foreign policy of the United States dictated by interest groups concerned with their own profiteering and luxury is what killed Jeanne Michel and thousands of others. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the citizens of the United States, Britain, Iraq, and Afghanistan paradoxically suffer together because of war criminals in Washington D.C. and London. -------- india India urges support for nuke plans November 19, 2006 The Australian http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20784359-1702,00.html INDIA today called on Australia to support plans to increase its reliance on nuclear power to fuel its economy and to allow uranium exports to the rapidly industrialising country. Indian Finance Minister Shri Palaniappan Chidambaram says India wants to lift the proportion of nuclear energy it uses to 10 per cent, from a current three per cent of its energy supplies. But Mr Chidambaram admitted that getting Australia's support would be hard. "Australia takes a very different view presumably because public opinion here is against nuclear power," Mr Chidambaram said in an interview during a break on the final day of the group of 20 (G20) meeting in Melbourne. "I would like Australia to support India in its nuclear case and supply uranium to India." Mr Chidambaram said he spoke with Prime Minister John Howard last week about the nuclear issue and that the Australian leader had heard him out "carefully and patiently." "We are a non-proliferator and India's record in impeccable," he added. Mr Chidambaram also said he would like to improve India's relationship with Australia, with more air traffic between the two countries. "Tourism is booming between India and Australia and last year we issued 75,000 to 80,000 visas to Australians," he said. Mr Chidambaram said that figure could increase fourfold in next few years. He also dismissed fears in Australia about back-office jobs in companies such as banks and other financial institutions being sent to India. He said the value of offshoring from Australia to India was worth around $A250 million a year and pointed out that the trade balance between the two countries was $5 billion in favour of Australia. "We have around 7,000 students who come from india to Australia every year and I believe the value they bring to Australia is far in excess of $250 million," Mr Chidambaram said. "The argument about Australia outsourcing to India and losing in the bargain is completely misplaced." The G20 meeting of finance minister and central bankers from 19 countries and the European Union concluded in Melbourne today. ---- India test-fires nuclear-capable missile Updated 11/19/2006 (AP) http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-11-19-india-missile_x.htm BHUBANESHWAR, India — India on Sunday successfully test-fired a nuclear-capable missile with a range of up to 180 miles, a defense ministry official said. The Prithvi missile was fired into the Bay of Bengal from a test range in Chandipur in the eastern state of Orissa, the official said on condition of anonymity as he is not allowed to reveal his identity under ministry rules. India's Prithvi test comes three days after rival Pakistan carried out a similar test of its nuclear-capable Ghauri missile, also known as the Hatf 5. The official described Sunday's test as "routine" and "part of the country's air defense exercises," the Press Trust of India news agency quoted an unnamed official as saying. India routinely test-fires missiles it is developing for military use, as does Pakistan. When either country tests larger missiles they normally inform the other before the launch. Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said Sunday that India had informed Pakistan ahead of time about the test. She declined to make any further comment. On Saturday, district authorities in Chandipur evacuated about 2,750 villagers living near the missile testing range to two large shelters about 1 mile away, PTI said. Sunday's test also comes days after longtime nuclear rivals India and Pakistan concluded a crucial round of peace talks in New Delhi aimed at resolving their differences, including the thorny issue of their territorial dispute over the Himalayan region of Kashmir. The two countries have fought three wars — two of them over Kashmir_ since independence from Britain in 1947. -------- iran Iran urges nuclear-free Korean peninsula Sun Nov 19, 2006 (AFP) http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061119/wl_mideast_afp/nkoreairannuclear_061119114611 TEHRAN - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for the Korean peninsula to be free of nuclear weapons, the state news agency has reported. "The Islamic Republic of Iran wants nuclear weapons disarmament all over the world, including the Korean peninsula," he was quoted by IRNA as saying in a meeting Saturday with visiting North Korean parliamentary speaker Choe Thae-Bok. Ahmadinejad, whose own country is at loggerheads with the international community over its nuclear program, said that he believed talks could resolve the crisis triggered by Pyongyang's atomic bomb test in October. "Different issues in the world including the problems of both Koreas can be solved through talks," he said. North Korea's nuclear program took center stage at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam, where member states expressed "strong concern" Sunday at the nuclear test and urged Pyongyang to resume disarmament talks. According to IRNA, Choe Thae-Bok called for an expansion of ties and cooperation with the Islamic republic, which was lumped in "the axis of evil" along with North Korea and Iraq by US President George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks on the United states. The United States and others Western nations believe Iran's uranium enrichment program is ultimately aimed at producing fissile material for nuclear weapons. Washington is seeking to impose tough UN Security Council sanctions on Iran after it refused to halt enrichment in return for an international offer of incentives. However Russia, a staunch supporter of both Iran and North Korea, warned the world community against pushing them "into a corner." "I think the world community must go very carefully -- firmly but carefully -- on resolving the problem of the Korean peninsula and resolving the Iranian nuclear problem," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in Vietnam. Iran insists it will use the enriched uranium only to fuel nuclear power stations, something it is permitted to do as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. -------- korea Six-party talks on N. Korea nuclear issue could restart in Dec. 19/ 11/ 2006 RIA Novosti http://en.rian.ru/world/20061119/55781995.html The six-party talks on the North Korea nuclear issue could restart in December, the Russian foreign minister said Sunday. The talks with North Korea, which began in the summer of 2003 with the aim of persuading the country to give up its controversial nuclear program after Pyongyang withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, involve the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Sergei Lavrov's statement followed a meeting of the Russian and U.S. presidents in the Vietnamese capital. "As for the nuclear problem of the Korean peninsula, the presidents confirmed the instruction to work towards the quickest resumption of six-party talks. I believe this could be done already next month," Lavrov said. -------- pacific Pacific leaders firm but careful about N. Korea nuclear issue 11/19/2006 Associated Press http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-11-19-apec-nkorea_x.htm?csp=34 HANOI (AP) — Pacific Rim leaders, worried about nuclear proliferation, urged North Korea on Sunday to take concrete steps to live up to its commitments to stop developing atomic bombs. "We express our strong concern over the July 4-5 missile launches and Oct. 9 nuclear test conducted by (North Korea), which poses a clear threat to our shared interest of peace and security and our shared goal of achieving a nuclear weapons-free Korean peninsula," said a statement by the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. The statement was presented orally at the end of an annual closed-door summit, underscoring sensitivities over the issue and concerns by some APEC nations about interfering in other countries' affairs. It later was read by Vietnam's president at a news conference after reporters asked him about it. North Korea is not an APEC member. U.S. National Security Council official David McCormick denied that getting only an unpublished, oral statement from the summit represented a setback, and said the White House was pleased with the toughness of the wording. "The statement was very firm in the need for full implementation" of U.N. resolutions on North Korea, McCormick said. "What was important was that the members of APEC came together on a common statement." Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he didn't know why the statement wasn't included in the final statement. "We are seeking an explanation for that," Harper told reporters. "We don't understand why it wasn't included since it was a joint statement and it was unanimous." The issue was intensely discussed during a flurry of high-level meetings last week on the summit sidelines and dominated a forum that is supposed to focus on economic issues. The U.S., China, Japan, Russia and South Korea are preparing to resume six-nation nuclear negotiations with the North a year after the reclusive country walked out. The talks could resume as early as next month. U.S. nuclear envoy Christopher Hill is going from Hanoi to Beijing as an apparent follow-up to the intensive discussions here, according to a diplomat from one of the five countries involved in the negotiations with the North, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the issue. China has been hosting the six-party talks. U.S. President George W. Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao met Sunday and agreed that "North Korea should get the message that possessing a nuclear bomb will not have the support of the international community, but rather will meet opposition," said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao. It appeared that the U.S. did manage to get one North Korea-related addition in the summit's final written declaration, a veiled reference to the financial sanctions that Washington imposed on North Korea over alleged currency counterfeiting and money laundering. The sanctions sparked North Korea's boycott of the six-party talks. "We acknowledged the need to take appropriate individual and joint actions, consistent with each economy's circumstances, to further those commitments, including the need to protect legitimate financial and commercial systems from abuse," the declaration said. The line was added to a paragraph in earlier drafts about commitments to stymie nuclear proliferation and other "direct threats to the security of our region." The five countries negotiating with North Korea have been trying to craft a unified strategy and decide what they can offer the North in aid and security guarantees in exchange for steps toward dismantling its nuclear program. While virtually everyone agrees that North Korea's first nuclear weapon and missile tests could lead down a dangerous path to further proliferation, differences remain on the best strategy for dealing with the North, which has used brinksmanship to gain aid and security guarantees. South Korea — reluctant to ratchet up tensions with the North — and China prefer a softer approach of engagement, while Japan and the U.S. want to see tough enforcement of U.N. sanctions that were approved after the nuclear test. U.S. President George W. Bush failed to win a pledge from South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun to fully participate in a U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative that is largely aimed at stopping North Korean weapons traffic at sea. South Korea suggested Friday that the U.S. needs to show more flexibility at the six-party talks. Both countries have tried to downplay their divisions. -- APEC STANCE ON N. KOREA "We reiterate our commitment to peace and security on the Korean peninsula and in Northeast Asia, and our resolve toward a peaceful resolution of the North Korea nuclear issue. We express our strong concern over the July 4-5 missile launches and Oct. 9 nuclear test conducted by the DPRK (North Korea), which poses a clear threat to our shared interest of peace and security and our shared goal of achieving a nuclear weapons-free Korean peninsula. We stress the need for full implementation of Security Council resolutions 1695 and 1718. We emphasize our strong support for the six-party talks and are encouraged by the recent progress on resuming the talks. We call for concrete and effective steps toward full implementation of the Sept. 19, 2005, joint statement and the early resumption of the six-party talks." The above is the text of Sunday's statement from the 21 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders. The statement, read at the end of their closed-door summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, was released by South Korea. -------- u.s. nuc facilities -------- michigan Michigan teen creating nuclear fusion at home November 19, 2006 Contra Costa Times http://www.topix.net/content/kri/0650320115244690776042686858170750332109 On the surface, Thiago Olson is like any typical teenager. He's on the cross country and track teams at Stoney Creek High School in Rochester Hills, Mich. He's a good-looking, clean-cut 17-year-old with a 3.75 grade-point average, and he has his eyes fixed on the next big step: college. But to his friends, Thiago is known as 'the mad scientist.' In the basement of his parents' Oakland Township, Mich., home, tucked away in an area most aren't privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two years and 1,000 hours to research and build -- a large, intricate machine that, on a small scale, creates nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion -- when atoms are combined to create energy -- is 'kind of like the holy grail of physics,' he said. In fact, on www.fusor.net, the Stoney Creek senior is ranked as the 18th amateur in the world to create nuclear fusion. So, how does he do it? Pointing to the steel chamber where all the magic happens, Thiago said on Friday that this piece of the puzzle serves as a vacuum. The air is sucked out and into a filter. Then, deuterium gas, a form of hydrogen, is injected into the vacuum. About 40,000 volts of electricity are charged into the chamber from a piece of equipment taken from an old mammogram machine. As the machine runs, the atoms in the chamber are attracted to the center and soon -- ta da -- nuclear fusion. Thiago said when that happens, a small intense ball of energy forms. He first achieved fusion in September and has been perfecting the machine he built in his parents' garage ever since. This year, Thiago was a semifinalist for the Siemens Foundation's National Research Competition. He plans to enter the Science and Engineering Fair of Metropolitan Detroit, which is in March, in hopes of qualifying to be in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in New Mexico in May. To his mom and dad, he's still reminiscent of the 5-year-old who toiled over a kid-friendly chemistry set and, then at age 9, was able to change the battery in his older brother's car. Now, in a small room in the basement, Thiago has set up a science lab -- where bottles marked 'potassium hydroxide' and 'methanol' sit on shelves and a worn, old book titled 'The Atomic Fingerprint: Neutron Activation Analysis' is piled among others in the empty sink. Thiago's mom, Natalice Olson, initially was leery of the project, even though the only real danger from the fusion machine is the high voltage and small amount of X-rays emitted through a glass window in the vacuum chamber -- through which the fusion in action is videotaped. But, she wasn't really surprised, since he was always coming up with lofty ideas. 'Originally, he wanted to build a hyperbolic chamber,' she said, adding that she promptly said no. But, when he came asking about the nuclear fusion machine, she relented. 'I think it was pretty brave that he could think that he was capable to do something so amazing,' she said. Thiago's dad, Mark Olson, helped with some of the construction and electrical work. To get all of the necessary parts, Thiago scoured the Internet, buying items on eBay and using his age to persuade manufacturers to give him discounts. The design of the model came from his own ideas and some suggestions from other science-lovers he met online. Someday, he says, he hopes to work for the federal government -- just like his grandfather, Clarence Olson, who designed tanks for the Department of Defense after World War II. Thiago, who is modest and humble about his accomplishment, said he knew from an early age what he would do for a living. 'I was always interested in science,' he said. 'It's always been my best subject in school.' But, his mom had other ideas. 'I thought he was going to be a cook,' Natalice Olson said, 'because he liked to mix things.' -------- utah Blighted Homeland A peril that dwelt among the Navajos During the Cold War, uranium mines left contaminated waste scattered around the Indians. Homes built with the material silently pulsed with radiation. People developed cancer. And the U.S. did little to help. By Judy Pasternak, Times Staff Writer judy.pasternak@latimes.com November 19, 2006 http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-navajo19nov19,0,4003854,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines Oljato, Utah -- Mary and Billy Boy Holiday bought their one-room house from a medicine man in 1967. They gave him $50, a sheep and a canvas tent. For the most part, they were happy with the purchase. Their Navajo hogan was situated well, between a desert mesa and the trading-post road. The eight-sided dwelling proved stout and snug, with walls of stone and wood, and a green-shingle roof. The single drawback was the bare dirt underfoot. So three years after moving in, the Holidays jumped at the chance to get a real floor. A federally funded program would pay for installation if they bought the materials. The Holidays couldn't afford to, but the contractor, a friend of theirs, had an idea. He would use sand and crushed rock that had washed down from an old uranium mine in the mesa, one of hundreds throughout the Navajo reservation that once supplied the nation's nuclear weapons program. The waste material wouldn't cost a cent. "He said it made good concrete," Mary Holiday recalled. As promised, the 6-inch slab was so smooth that the Holidays could lay their mattresses directly on it and enjoy a good night's sleep. They didn't know their fine new floor was radioactive. Fifty years ago, cancer rates on the reservation were so low that a medical journal published an article titled "Cancer immunity in the Navajo." Back then, the contamination of the tribal homeland was just beginning. Mining companies were digging into one of the world's richest uranium deposits, in a reservation spanning parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. From 1944 to 1986, 3.9 million tons of uranium ore were chiseled and blasted from the mountains and plains. The mines provided uranium for the Manhattan Project, the top-secret effort to develop an atomic bomb, and for the weapons stockpile built up during the arms race with the Soviet Union. Private companies operated the mines, but the U.S. government was the sole customer. The boom lasted through the early '60s. As the Cold War threat gradually diminished over the next two decades, more than 1,000 mines and four processing mills on tribal land shut down. The companies often left behind radioactive waste piles and open tunnels and pits. Few bothered to fence the properties or post warning signs. Federal inspectors seldom intervened. Over the decades, Navajos inhaled radioactive dust from the waste piles, borne aloft by fierce desert winds. They drank contaminated water from abandoned pit mines that filled with rain. They watered their herds there, then butchered the animals and ate the meat. Their children dug caves in piles of mill tailings and played in the spent mines. And like the Holidays, many lived in homes silently pulsing with radiation. Today, there is no talk of cancer immunity in the Navajos. The cancer death rate on the reservation — historically much lower than that of the general U.S. population — doubled from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, according to Indian Health Service data. The overall U.S. cancer death rate declined slightly over the same period. Though no definitive link has been established, researchers say exposure to mining byproducts in the soil, air and water almost certainly contributed to the increase in Navajo cancer mortality. The government has never conducted a comprehensive study of the health effects of uranium mining on the reservation. But individual scientists working on their own have documented sharply elevated cancer rates near old mines and mills. High concentrations of uranium, arsenic and other heavy metals have been found in one out of five drinking-water sources sampled. Particularly toxic were the "hot" houses built with radioactive debris. In every corner of the reservation, sandy mill tailings and chunks of ore, squared off nicely by blasting, were left unattended at old mines and mills, free for the taking. They were fashioned into bread ovens, cisterns, foundations, fireplaces, floors and walls. Navajo families occupied radioactive dwellings for decades, unaware of the risks. Over the years, federal and tribal officials stumbled across at least 70 such homes, records show. The total number is unknown because authorities made no serious effort to learn the full extent of the problem or to warn all those potentially affected. After years of delay, they fixed or replaced about 20 radioactive houses and then walked away from the problem. Navajos continued to use mine waste as construction material, and the homes were passed down from one generation to the next. Not until 2000 did the Holidays learn that their hogan was dangerous. By then, the couple had raised three children and sheltered a host of other kin while the uranium decayed. The resulting alpha, beta and gamma rays were invisible; the radon gas was odorless. But the combination greatly increased the chance of developing fatal lung cancer, according to a radiation expert who sampled air in the hogan. "It brings chills when you're told that your house is like this," said Mary Holiday, now in her early 70s. "All the years that you've lived here," she said, her voice trailing off. Unsuspecting, she had gone about her chores in the Navajo way, clad in the customary velveteen blouse, long skirt, thick socks and dusty shoes. She chopped wood for the stove, cooked tortillas and brewed tea. She set up her loom to weave rugs under a juniper tree while the grandchildren played dress-up for hours inside the old hogan. By the time of the discovery that now torments her, she had lost her husband, Billy Boy, to lung cancer and congestive heart failure. He didn't smoke, but he'd worked in uranium mines by day and slept, unknowing, in the equivalent by night. Her grandnephew, too, would soon die of lung cancer, at age 42. He had neither smoked nor mined. But he had lived in the hogan for three years as a teenager. The dwellings in the Holiday family compound faced east toward dawn, in accordance with Navajo tradition. Behind them loomed the mesa, with a pale green uranium stain that started at the old mine and pointed down the cliff. 'Where is our guardian?' More than 180,000 people live scattered across the region bounded by the Navajos' four sacred peaks. More than a homeland, it is their holy land. The tribe's creation stories are set here, among the painted deserts, ponderosa highlands and layered sandstone cliffs. The U.S. government appealed to both Navajo patriotism and self-interest when it asked the tribe to open its land to uranium exploration in the 1940s. The mining would aid the American war effort and provide jobs, federal officials said. Some of the mining companies were conglomerates like Kerr-McGee Corp. Some were small like A&B Mining, a Utah firm that was the last to mine the mesa near the Holidays' hogan. Early on, federal scientists knew that mine workers were at heightened risk for developing lung cancer and other serious respiratory diseases in 15 or 20 years. Many did, and eventually their plight drew wide attention. In 1990, Congress offered the former miners an apology and compensation of up to $150,000 each. But pervasive environmental hazards remained. Starting in the late '50s, government scientists and inspectors had written memos and journal articles calling attention to the dangers posed by open mines and exposed tailings. But the warnings failed to spark vigorous action. Pleading lack of funds, officials at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Indian Health Service dodged responsibility, declining to study the health threats comprehensively, much less eliminate them. Navajo leaders tried sporadically to force federal action, usually without success. On occasion, they withheld information about uranium-related dangers from their own people, reasoning that there was no point stirring up fear if there was no money for a solution. Efforts to repair the environmental damage finally began in the 1980s but have been fitful and incomplete. Unable to agree on a thorough cleanup under the federal Superfund program, the tribe and the U.S. government settled for half-measures. From 1984 through 1995, the Department of Energy spent $240 million to cover tailing piles at the old uranium mills as part of a nationwide program. Tailings are the fine sand left over when ore is ground up to extract uranium. They retain most of the radioactivity and give off large quantities of radon, an odorless, cancer-causing gas. But the tailings cleanup, though important, was limited to the mills. It did nothing to ease the hazards posed by the abandoned mines. Over the last decade, the tribe has used money from a federal mine-reclamation fund to seal entrances and fill pits at most of the old mines. But the cleanup was incomplete. At many of the sites, radioactive rubble lies along cliffs and on hillsides. Erosion compounds the problem. Desert winds constantly wear away the earthen caps at the mines, exposing chunks of radioactive ore. Gullies eat into buried pit mines, allowing rainwater to course through irradiated soil and contaminate groundwater. Now, with a renewed push for nuclear power driving up uranium prices, the mining industry wants to extract more from the still-vast Navajo reserve. Tribal leaders are resisting. By treaty and law, the United States is responsible for the tribe's welfare, Navajo President Joe Shirley Jr. noted. But the government's response to the Cold War contamination has been half-hearted, he said. "It's an emergency that is not being treated like an emergency," he said. "Where is our guardian?" On their own In 1975, Joseph M. Hans Jr., an EPA radiation expert, was sent to inspect an abandoned uranium-processing plant in Cane Valley, on Navajo territory near the Arizona-Utah line. Vanadium Corp. of America had operated the plant and an adjacent pit mine in the 1950s. A successor company, Foote Mineral, closed everything down in 1969. Federal mining inspector Howard B. Nickelson reported that the local manager had assured him that "the area would be cleaned up. No final inspection is planned." But Foote left behind piles of tailings and mine rubble. When Hans arrived, Congress was weighing the proposal to cover tailings at closed uranium mills across the country. The EPA was assessing the scope of the task. As Hans worked, he noticed a small community of hand-built houses nearby. He began to worry that the residents might have used Foote's leftovers as construction material. A few months later, he and some EPA colleagues returned with hand-held radiation scanners, air samplers and other equipment. Berlinda Cly was 9 when the inspectors visited the home where she lived with her parents and eight siblings. "The meter went BEEEEP," she recalled. To Hans' dismay, at least 17 of 37 homes tested contained radioactive ore or tailings. Hans said he wrote to EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., recommending that the agency clean up the most contaminated homes or relocate the occupants. "You've got two risks — gamma radiation and you've got radon," he recalled. "It wasn't acceptable." His higher-ups said no. "I still felt uncomfortable," Hans said, so he urged the Indian Health Service to act. The response was the same. "Finally, we got the message," said Hans, now retired and living in Las Vegas. "We didn't have the money to go decontaminating sites." Still, he wanted to warn homeowners. Most spoke Navajo and were uncomfortable with English. So Hans went back with a translator. "All we could say is, 'You got a problem.' " He could offer no hope that the government would fix it. Just 200 miles from the reservation, in Grand Junction, Colo., residents faced the same situation. But there, the government was moving with urgency to eliminate the health risk posed by homes, schools and churches made with tailings from the Climax Uranium Co. State health authorities had armed themselves with research and demanded federal action. The local congressman, Democrat Wayne N. Aspinall, was chairman of the House Interior Committee. He held hearings and helped secure funds for a thorough cleanup, which ultimately cost more than $500 million. The Navajos had no such champion. Nor did they mobilize politically around the issue. In their small, widely scattered settlements, people were only vaguely aware of a radiation problem. In Grand Junction, canvassers went door to door, checking for contamination. Contractors replaced foundations and floors, uprooted trees and cleaned tainted soil. As a bonus, they upgraded substandard electrical systems. The Navajos were left on their own. Hans made one more try in 1977, two years after his first visit. He recommended that the Department of Energy clean or replace the nine most-contaminated houses in Cane Valley. More than a decade later, the department fixed three. Drawing a technical distinction, it passed over the other six for lack of proof that the building materials came from Foote Mineral's mill, as opposed to the mine. Juanita Jackson's house was one of those six. Despite Hans' warning, she stayed put, stringing beads for jewelry and weaving rugs until she died in 1992. She was 59. The cause was lung and breast cancer, her daughter said. Jesse Black, his wife and their eight children remained in their uranium house for 15 years. Black died of lung cancer in 2000 at age 78. A daughter was diagnosed with breast cancer at 27. Oscar Sloan, too, hung on in Cane Valley, raising three boys. One of them, Hoskey, now 54, says that both of his parents and his grandmother developed serious respiratory disease. "If given a different place to live, we would have, I guess," he said. "But it was the only dwelling we had." More contamination Similar problems soon became evident in other parts of the reservation. In 1979, employees of the tribe's newly created environmental commission escorted a television crew to the hamlet of Oaksprings, Ariz., to interview former miners. In one house, a tribal staffer offhandedly stuck a Geiger counter against a wall. It screamed. By April 1980, the tribe had found 16 more Oaksprings houses with uranium. The tribal chairman, Peter MacDonald, called together representatives of Navajo agencies, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service, and "directed that the homes be replaced immediately," recalled Harold Tso, then the Navajo environmental director. "We were to work together and get a plan." Tso cobbled together enough federal money to replace a handful of houses. The tribe evicted the other families in the spring of 1981. They were left to find shelter wherever they could. There was no money to dismantle the condemned structures. Many still stand, including the log cabin that Clifford Frank built in the early '60s for his family of eight. He mixed cement for the foundation with rocks from the uranium mine where he worked. Then he invited a Christian Reformed minister to bless the house. When the tribe padlocked the cabin years later, Frank was furious. But there was little he could do. Frank, a nonsmoker in his 50s, was in the Indian Health Service hospital in Shiprock, N.M., slowly succumbing to lung cancer. A family in the dark The Holidays had no inkling of a problem. Their hogan in Oljato had become the center of a bustling family compound. Dogs and chickens ran between an assortment of earthen and stucco dwellings. An array of aging trucks and cars sat in the dirt. By the late '70s, Mary and Billy Boy had moved out of the hogan and into a two-room house 15 feet away that they painted a bright teal blue. But the old place wasn't empty. Mary allowed her niece, Elsie Begay, to move in with her seven children after Elsie's marriage broke up in 1978. Elsie and her brood ate their meals on the floor. At night, they rolled out their sheepskins and went to sleep. After three years, they left for a smaller dwelling on the Holiday property. The hogan wasn't vacant long. Two of the Holidays' grown children, Daisy and Robert, returned to Oljato and moved in. Daisy had taken a husband. He'd grown up on the mesa where the old mine was. He turned the story of their courtship into family lore: He slipped one day while herding sheep, fell down the slope, found Daisy at the bottom and married her. The uranium stain on the cliff marked the path of his slide, he liked to quip. Robert had taken a bride. Mary was a witness, signing the marriage certificate the only way she knew how, by dipping her right thumb in ink and affixing her print. The two couples, and soon enough three children, lived together under the green-shingle roof. From the front door, they could watch the setting sun wash Monument Valley's spires of stone in red. Members of the family took jobs catering to tourists. The paved road that had first attracted Mary and Billy Boy to the hogan led to a historic lodge. They cleaned rooms there and tended the register at the grocery store next door. They guided visitors to the rock formations and sold turquoise and silver jewelry from plywood stands. In 1989, Elsie Begay's son Lewis died of a brain hemorrhage caused by a tumor. He was 25. The next year, Billy Boy died, suffering from lung cancer and other diseases. He was in his early 60s. During the 1990s, touches of modernity seeped into the compound. Daisy and her husband, Frank Haycock, bought a trailer and hooked it up to electricity. They even got a TV. Robert left the reservation to join his older brother, John, in Salt Lake City, lured by a good job installing air conditioners and heaters. But the hogan still had its uses. The Holidays stored cans of beans, sacks of flour, extra blankets and toys there, along with garden tools and blue plastic water barrels. The door was padlocked, but the children liked to stand on one another's shoulders and climb through the windows. They'd tear into the folded clothes and don them for long games of pretend. Once a month, Robert's family came down from Salt Lake for the weekend. There was only one place to stay: the hogan. Everyone took to calling it "the rabbit house" because one of the toddlers pronounced "Robert" that way. U.S. 'lack of interest' In 1981, 10 of the reservation's local governments, called chapters, asked the tribe to inspect houses for signs of uranium contamination. But "we had our old nemesis — money," Tso said. His appeals to federal agencies were met with "a real lack of interest." The prevailing attitude was expressed in a December 1986 memo by Charles A. Reaux, an Indian Health Service official stationed in the Navajo region. Ticking off mining-related hazards, he wrote: "Radon in homes is another significant but resource consuming endeavor." The tribe had surveyed 96 homes and found 37 with radon levels above the EPA's safety threshold, he wrote to his superiors. Many areas near abandoned mines had yet to be tested, including Monument Valley-Oljato, where the Holidays lived. But he recommended against getting involved because of the cost. The health service, he wrote, "should only monitor tribal efforts." Reaux offered his bosses the same advice for nearly all of the environmental problems confronting the Navajos: Keep your distance. "The true risk assessment of the radiation problems may never be performed due to the vast cost," he wrote. In a recent interview, Reaux, now a consultant in Las Vegas, said that if the same contaminants "were in the middle of Los Angeles, something would be done about it because there would be thousands of people living around them." But Navajo shepherds moving through the desert with their herds and the locals in their far-flung hogans were not numerous enough to warrant government action. "That's life," Reaux said. Cancer on the rise Richard M. Auld Jr. arrived on the reservation in 1982, fresh from his residency in internal medicine at UC San Diego. He was posted to the Indian Health Service clinic in Shiprock, N.M., at the edge of the uranium belt. Over the next two years, he treated six cases of stomach cancer. Two of the patients were women, 18 and 20 years old. Auld thought this highly unusual. He won a two-year fellowship in gastroenterology at the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, to try to find an explanation. He worked with William S. Haubrich, a prominent gastrointestinal specialist. Their review of Indian Health Service medical charts showed that stomach cancer on the reservation had increased sharply in 1975 — which suggested, given cancer's latency period, that something had changed during the '50s. The increase kept up through the mid-'80s. Patients typically died within five months. The doctors' research ruled out hereditary factors, medications, alcohol and smoking as possible causes. But when the locations of cases were plotted on a map, they clustered around the sites of uranium mines and mills. They discovered that incidence of stomach cancer was 15 times the national average in some areas near uranium deposits and mills. And the disease was not limited to former miners. In two western parts of the reservation filled with old pit mines, stomach cancer was 200 times the U.S. average for women ages 20 to 40. New evidence shows that gastric cancer rates rose 50% during the '90s among Indians in two New Mexico counties salted with Navajo uranium mines. "I don't know quite what to make of it. It's not what's happening regionally," said Charles Wiggins, director of the New Mexico Tumor Registry, who analyzed the data for the Los Angeles Times. Diet or bacterial infections could play a role, but so could an environmental insult, Wiggins said: "All three of those things are what I would want to look at." Uranium mining could be connected to reproductive cancers as well. In 1981, the tribe's health department reported a sharp increase in breast, ovarian and related cancers among teenage girls. Rates 17 times the national average were found. In 2001, Navajo graduate students and reservation elders asked scientists at Northern Arizona University to investigate whether the old uranium mines might explain the increase in cancers. Biologist Cheryl A. Dyer was intrigued but skeptical. "I didn't believe this for a long time," she said. Dyer specializes in the female reproductive system. She and a Navajo doctoral candidate, Stefanie Raymond-Whish, fed uranium-tainted water to mice. They discovered that uranium mimics the hormone estrogen, causing changes in reproductive tissue. Increased estrogen has been linked to breast and ovarian cancers. The findings "changed my research," Dyer said. "Now all I do is uranium." She has discovered that uranium speeds the growth of human breast cancer cells. "Instead of killing them," she said, "it makes them happy." Closer to the truth A helicopter rumbled low and loud across the sky over Oljato in the late summer of 1997. Mary Holiday took little notice. She had heard that, under pressure from the tribe, the EPA was finally gathering data on potential radiation hazards throughout the reservation. She did not know the copter's onboard scanner had picked up high levels of radiation on her property. The helicopter was forgotten until 1999, when a filmmaker from Chicago showed up looking for Mary's niece, Elsie Begay. Elsie, it turned out, had been featured as a young girl in a silent movie from the 1950s set in Navajo country. She had never seen it. The man from Chicago, Jeff Spitz, had come into possession of a copy and was recording her reaction to it for a documentary. Someone mentioned the helicopter and the radiation sampling. Curious and a bit worried, Spitz called the EPA when he got home. He eventually pried a map from the agency. Unfurling it on his kitchen table, he studied the bright purple splotches marking high radiation. One of the largest and darkest spots was over the Holiday compound. "Look at this!" he blurted. "That's Elsie's house!" He got a message to her. She was concerned but unsure what it meant. Around the same time, Elsie's youngest son, Leonard, learned that he had lung cancer. He was 38. Leonard had been 16 when his mother sought refuge with her children in the Holidays' cozy hogan. He grew into a handsome man with a broad face, a dark mustache and glossy black hair. He took up carpentry and played drums at the Pentecostal church. He passed a note during services to a young woman named Sarah. She became his wife. After the children came along, Leonard installed a trailer at the Holiday compound. Their daughter was 7 and their son 12 when Leonard was diagnosed. He sought a second opinion; the doctor concurred. He got a third with the same result. "We were supposed to grow old together," said Sarah Begay. "He just started getting into his Bible. He told me not to tell nobody at all." A tainted home In January 2000, specialists from the Army Corps of Engineers showed up in Oljato to sample drinking water for the EPA. They were part of the same project that had sent the helicopter overhead. The leader, Glynn R. Alsup, was worried by what they were finding. One in five water sources tested was polluted with dangerous amounts of uranium and other mining byproducts. "Nobody could believe it was that bad," he said. Alsup briefed local officials and residents about his work, and offered to screen homes for radiation. At Oljato, he visited the Holiday compound and talked to Elsie Begay. He told her he had permission from the chapter to sample anything she wanted. She wanted a check of her aunt's hogan. She knew the history of its concrete floor. Alsup held a radiation detector up to an outside window. The needle jumped to the top of the scale. "I'd gotten readings that high at the entrance to uranium mines," recalled Alsup, now retired. Leonard and Sarah Begay heard his voice quaver as he circled the hogan, calling out numbers. Inside, emissions reached 1,000 microroentgens per hour, 75 to 100 times the radiation level deemed acceptable by the EPA. Leonard was losing weight. The pain was getting bad. A sudden suspicion struck him and his wife. Mary Holiday and Daisy Haycock were also on hand for the radiation readings. Daisy called her brother Robert in Salt Lake City to break the news about the "rabbit house." Reluctant to act Navajo officials in the tribal capital of Window Rock, Ariz., did not like Alsup informing locals of the dangers he was uncovering. Alsup only wanted to help. But the tribe's environmental staff believed nothing good would come of it. There was no money to fix the problems. "It's just a fancy, nice-looking report that's going to sit on a shelf," Derrith Watchman-Moore, then the tribe's environmental director, remembered thinking. Frightened Navajos, she said, "would be coming to us: 'What are you going to do about it?' " The situation revived long-standing tensions. Despite years of appeals from the Navajos, the U.S. government still had not committed to pay for a comprehensive cleanup of the reservation. Alsup's visit to the Holiday hogan was the last straw, as far as the tribal government was concerned. The Navajos demanded that the EPA pull Alsup off the reservation. He was gone within weeks, and the sampling ground to a halt. The hogan was left standing. Six months later, in June 2000, Elsie Begay wrote to the EPA to inquire about its fate. "The kids were still going in it," she recalled. "We recommend that people stay out of that hogan," Sean P. Hogan, an EPA official, wrote back after three more months had passed. "We also recommend that the hogan be removed from the area so that no one is exposed to those levels of radiation." But treading carefully after the blowup with Navajo officials, he added that the EPA would not take action unless the tribe asked. The Oljato chapter appealed to the tribal government, which in October 2000 authorized the EPA "to take the steps necessary to eliminate this risk." It was not until April 2001 that the EPA destroyed the place, along with a radioactive house miles away. The grand total of government demolitions still stands at two. Where the Holidays had lived for decades, the wrecking crew wore moon suits and radiation badges for a single day's work. The U.S. government gave Mary Holiday a corrugated-metal shed to compensate her for the loss of storage space. Uranium's deadly toll On Dec. 7, 2003, two days after his lung began bleeding profusely, Leonard Begay collapsed and was flown to University Medical Center in Tucson. "This patient lives in Monument Valley, UT, near the uranium mines," the attending physician noted in his records. Leonard knew what to expect. Sarah's father, a veteran of the mines, had died of lung cancer the month before. "He was aware that he was going," Sarah recalled. "He would talk to me: Take care of yourself. Stay in the Word. Take the kids to church." He kept hugging and kissing his family and asked his wife to lie beside him. Sarah said he instructed her "to build a house for the kids and then for the grandkids that he'll never see." On Dec. 19, he died at 2:50 a.m. He was 42. Sarah told her children that they all had something in common: She had lost her dad to uranium, and she was certain they had lost theirs to uranium too. -------- MILITARY -------- britain ‘Secretive’ officials erode public trust By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor November 19, 2006 UK Sunday Herald http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.1030641.0.0.php PUBLIC TRUST in government has declined sharply in the past year because of revelations about the secretive behaviour of officials exposed by freedom of information legislation. Only 46% of people in Scotland think the public should have more confidence in the decisions made by public authorities, compared with 53% a year ago. And there has been a similar drop, from 67% to 60%, in those who think public authorities are becoming more accountable. The Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act, which came into force in January last year, was meant to boost confidence in government decision-making by making it more transparent. But an opinion poll of more than 1000 people for the Scottish information commissioner, Kevin Dunion, suggests that so far it has had the opposite effect. "A lot of the stories that have come about because of freedom of information are stories the authorities would have previously withheld and weren't keen on releasing," said Dunion. Details of the taxi receipts that led to the downfall of David McLetchie MSP, the former Tory leader at Holyrood, were initially kept secret by the Scottish parliament, though all MSPs' expenses are now put online. And it took Northern Constabulary more than 15 months to say how much they paid for two Land Rovers - and only when they were ordered to do so by Dunion. "When information has to be dragged out of authorities, we should not be surprised that the public is not wholly impressed," Dunion said. Other factors, such as the government's reasons for invading Iraq, could also have damaged public trust. The opinion poll is due to be unveiled at a major conference on freedom of information in Edinburgh tomorrow . It was conducted by telephone in October by the Scottish social research agency, Progressive. It comes as Dunion faces the first court challenges to his decisions. Next month, he is being taken to the Court of Session in Edinburgh by the Scottish Executive in an attempt to overturn two rulings ordering the release of ministerial correspondence about legal reform and a quarry in Ayrshire. Earlier this month the National Health Service was in court arguing that obeying Dunion's instruction to release details of childhood cancer cases in Dumfries and Galloway would breach patient confidentiality. A verdict is not expected until the New Year. Since January 2005, Dunion has issued 300 decisions. In a clear majority of cases - 191 - he found either wholly or partly in favour of the applicant and against the public authority, either requiring information to be released or criticising the procedures used. The opinion poll he commissioned showed 73% of people had heard of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act, up from 44% in 2004. As many as 68% agreed "more public authority information is available now than before". Despite declining confidence in decisions made by public authorities, the poll suggested there was a growing belief that freedom of information law was working. The proportion of people agreeing "public authorities will find a way round the act and won't provide information they don't want to" dropped from 66% last year to 57% now. Because of concerns about the burdens on public authorities, ministers have been reviewing the operation of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act, though they have not yet decided what changes to make. " We have found the public's response to freedom of information to be positive," an executive spokeswoman said. Dunion added that increased confidence in decision-making was the "big prize" politicians had wanted freedom of information legislation to bring. He was hopeful this would still be the outcome in the longer term. "We've come a long way in a short time, but we've still to get the culture change the Act envisages," he told the Sunday Herald. "We've embarked, but we've not yet arrived." -------- iran Hersh: CIA Analysis Finds Iran Not Developing Nuclear Weapons Agence France-Presse Sunday 19 November 2006 http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/111906Z.shtml http://www.afp.com/english/news/stories/061119034024.d010tlyg.html Washington - A classified draft CIA assessment has found no firm evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White House, a top US investigative reporter has said. Seymour Hersh, writing in an article for the November 27 issue of the magazine The New Yorker released in advance, reported on whether the administration of Republican President George W. Bush was more, or less, inclined to attack Iran after Democrats won control of Congress last week. A month before the November 7 legislative elections, Hersh wrote, Vice President Dick Cheney attended a national-security discussion that touched on the impact of Democratic victory in both chambers on Iran policy. "If the Democrats won on November 7th, the vice president said, that victory would not stop the administration from pursuing a military option with Iran," Hersh wrote, citing a source familiar with the discussion. Cheney said the White House would circumvent any legislative restrictions "and thus stop Congress from getting in its way," he said. The Democratic victory unleashed a surge of calls for the Bush administration to begin direct talks with Iran. But the administration's planning of a military option was made "far more complicated" in recent months by a highly classified draft assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency "challenging the White House's assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb," he wrote. "The CIA found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency," Hersh wrote, adding the CIA had declined to comment on that story. A current senior intelligence official confirmed the existence of the CIA analysis and said the White House had been hostile to it, he wrote. Cheney and his aides had discounted the assessment, the official said. "They're not looking for a smoking gun," the official was quoted as saying, referring to specific intelligence about Iranian nuclear planning. "They're looking for the degree of comfort level they think they need to accomplish the mission." The United States and other major powers believe Iran's uranium enrichment program is ultimately aimed at producing fissile material for nuclear weapons. Iran insists it will use the enriched uranium only to fuel nuclear power stations, something it is permitted to do as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The major powers have been debating a draft United Nations resolution drawn up by Britain, France and Germany that would impose limited sanctions on Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile sectors for Tehran's failure to comply with an earlier UN resolution on halting enrichment. On Wednesday, Israel's outgoing US ambassador Danny Ayalon said in an interview that Bush would not hesitate to use force against Iran to halt its nuclear program if other options failed. "US President George W. Bush will not hesitate to use force against Iran in order to halt its nuclear program," Ayalon told the Maariv daily. Israel, widely considered the Middle East's sole if undeclared nuclear power, views Iran as its arch-foe, pointing to repeated calls by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to wipe the Jewish state off the map. -------- israel / palestine Gaza: Use of human shields continues Nov. 19, 2006 YAAKOV KATZ and KHALED ABU TOAMEH, THE JERUSALEM POST http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1162378435257&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull Palestinian residents flocked to the home of a Hamas operative Monday to prevent the Israeli army from carrying out an airstrike. It was the latest instance of Palestinians volunteering to serve as human shields to protect a home of a targeted terror operative. # Tell the truth about peace (editorial) The protest began shortly after Wael Rajab received a phone call from the army ordering him to leave his home. In recent months, the army has frequently issued such warnings ahead of airstrikes against weapons-storage sites and other militant targets, saying it wants to avoid casualties. The army had no immediate comment on Monday's incident. But military officials have said they do not yet know how to deal with the issue. Fearing terrorists will continue to exploit civilians as human shields around terror targets in the Gaza Strip, a high-ranking officer said Sunday that the IDF was prepared to launch ground raids into the Palestinian territory to demolish buildings that could not be destroyed in airstrikes. Late Saturday night, hundreds of Palestinians, including women and children, surrounded the home of Mohammedweil Baroud - head of the Popular Resistance Committees' (PRC) Kassam rocket cell - after he received a warning from the IDF late Saturday night giving him 30 minutes to leave his house in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya. Out of fear that innocent bystanders would be injured, the IDF called off the air strike. Calling residents ahead of airstrikes on suspected weapons-storage and manufacturing sites is a routine tactic the IDF employs in the Gaza Strip and also used over the summer during the month-long war in Lebanon during which thousands of targets were struck by Israeli missiles. The incident in Beit Lahiya on Sunday however, was the first time Palestinians have tried to prevent such an air strike and represents, officials said, a change in tactics to try and prevent the IAF missile strikes. "These human shields will not stop us from reaching every target of ours," an IDF officer told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday. "If we can't get to the target by air due to the human shields, we will reach it by ground and the Palestinians will pay a heavy price." The officer said that the Air Force as well as the Operations Directorate has not given up using the "phone-call tactic" and would continue to call Palestinians before bombing a civilian area. The IDF might however, he added, change the amount of time it gave the Palestinians to evacuate the area. "We are obligated to reach every single target whether from far or up close," the officer said. "It might be harder now due to the human shields and require more planning but we will not give up our moral values and principles." Palestinians said the decision to resort to the new "human-shield" tactic was taken over the weekend, when the IDF destroyed a house belonging to Ala Akailan, commander of the Hamas-controlled "Executive Force" in the Shati refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. "Since July, Israel has destroyed 58 houses in the Gaza Strip," said a senior Hamas official. "More than 240 people have been left without a roof." In the last three days alone, eight houses were targeted, as well as two workshops, a library and a charity run by Rasha Rantisi, widow of slain Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi. The demolition of the houses has created tremendous pressure on the Hamas-led government, which is being forced to find alternative housing for those who lost their homes. The plight of the new "refugees" is amplified by the fact that most people in the Gaza Strip are afraid to host the fugitives and their families for fear that their houses would also be targeted by the IDF. Most of the displaced families have sought shelter in tents supplied by UNRWA and the International Committee of the Red Cross. At Friday prayers, several Hamas-affiliated preachers called on worshippers to "occupy" every house that is threatened with demolition. The preachers noted that the IDF always phones the owners of the houses and warns them that they must leave within 15 to 30 minutes. "Instead of running away, the owners must stay inside their homes and call the neighbors and as many people as possible," said one of the preachers. "The human shields are the best way to protect the houses." Buoyed by Saturday night's success in Jabalya refugee camp, several armed groups called on Palestinians not to leave their homes after receiving warnings from the IDF. "We have won," said Abu Mujahed, a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees. "From now on we will form human chains around every house that is threatened with demolition." Khaled Abu Hilal, spokesman for the PA Ministry of Interior, lauded the behavior of the Jabalya residents as "wonderful," describing the Israeli policy of targeting houses in the Gaza Strip as a "blow to stability." He also criticized the international community for "remaining silent" toward Israel's actions. -------- latin america Israeli army disobeyed order not to use cluster bombs: TV Sun Nov 19, 2006 (AFP) http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061119/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflictlebanon JERUSALEM - The Israeli army disobeyed an order from its chief of staff and used cluster bombs in its summer war on the militia of Lebanon's Shiite group Hezbollah, public television said. The television, which did not give a source, said an enquiry had been ordered into why thousands of the bombs had been used despite a prohibition by Lieutenant General Dan Halutz. For its part, the Internet site of the Yediot Aharonot daily said an initial probe by the army had determined that Israeli artillery used the munitions contrary to a ban by Halutz. It was not clear from either report whether this was a blanket ban on the use of cluster bombs in any conflict, or just in the 34-day war against Hezbollah. Since the August 14 end to the campaign, 23 people have been killed and another 136 injured in Lebanon after stepping on or handling unexploded components of cluster bombs, according to an AFP count. Thousands of the bombs, which contain dozens of smaller explosive devices that spread over a wide area, were dropped on south Lebanon during the conflict. -------- POLITICS -------- us politics Embittered Insiders Turn Against Bush By Peter Baker Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, November 19, 2006; A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/18/AR2006111801076_pf.html The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney's residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the "cakewalk" Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. "It was a euphoric moment," Adelman recalled. Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that "the president is ultimately responsible" for what Adelman now calls "the debacle that was Iraq." Adelman, a former Reagan administration official and onetime member of the Iraq war brain trust, is only the latest voice from inside the Bush circle to speak out against the president or his policies. Heading into the final chapter of his presidency, fresh from the sting of a midterm election defeat, Bush finds himself with fewer and fewer friends. Some of the strongest supporters of the war have grown disenchanted, former insiders are registering public dissent and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame him for losing Congress. A certain weary crankiness sets in with any administration after six years. By this point in Bill Clinton's tenure, bitter Democrats were competing to denounce his behavior with an intern even as they were trying to fight off his impeachment. Ronald Reagan was deep in the throes of the Iran-contra scandal. But Bush's strained relations with erstwhile friends and allies take on an extra edge of bitterness amid the dashed hopes of the Iraq venture. "There are a lot of lives that are lost," Adelman said in an interview last week. "A country's at stake. A region's at stake. This is a gigantic situation. . . . This didn't have to be managed this bad. It's just awful." The sense of Bush abandonment accelerated during the final weeks of the campaign with the publication of a former aide's book accusing the White House of moral hypocrisy and with Vanity Fair quoting Adelman, Richard N. Perle and other neoconservatives assailing White House leadership of the war. Since the Nov. 7 elections, Republicans have pinned their woes on the president. "People expect a level of performance they are not getting," former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in a speech. Many were livid that Bush waited until after the elections to oust Rumsfeld. "If Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference," Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said on television. "I'd still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee." And so, in what some saw as a rebuke, Senate Republicans restored Trent Lott (Miss.) to their leadership four years after the White House helped orchestrate his ouster, with some saying they could no longer place their faith entirely in Bush. Some insiders said the White House invited the backlash. "Anytime anyone holds themselves up as holy, they're judged by a different standard," said David Kuo, a former deputy director of the Bush White House's faith-based initiatives who wrote "Tempting Faith," a book that accused the White House of pandering to Christian conservatives. "And at the end of the day, this was a White House that held itself up as holy." Richard N. Haass, a former top Bush State Department official and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said a radically different approach to world affairs naturally generates criticism. "The emphasis on promotion of democracy, the emphasis on regime change, the war of choice in Iraq -- all of these are departures from the traditional approach," he said, "so it's not surprising to me that it generates more reaction." The willingness to break with Bush also underscores the fact that the president spent little time courting many natural allies in Washington, according to some Republicans. GOP leaders in Congress often bristled at what they perceived to be a do-what-we-say approach by the White House. Some of those who did have more personal relationships with Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld came to feel the sense of disappointment more acutely because they believed so strongly in the goals the president laid out for his administration. The arc of Bush's second term has shown that the most powerful criticism originates from the inside. The pragmatist crowd around Colin L. Powell began speaking out nearly two years ago after he was eased out as secretary of state. Powell lieutenants such as Haass, Richard L. Armitage, Carl W. Ford Jr. and Lawrence B. Wilkerson took public the policy debates they lost on the inside. Many who worked in Iraq returned deeply upset and wrote books such as "Squandered Victory" (Larry Diamond) and "Losing Iraq" (David L. Phillips). Military and CIA officials unloaded after leaving government, culminating in the "generals' revolt" last spring when retired flag officers called for Rumsfeld's dismissal. On the domestic side, Bush allies in Congress, interest groups and the conservative media broke their solidarity with the White House out of irritation over a number of issues, including federal spending, illegal immigration, the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, the response to Hurricane Katrina and the Dubai Ports World deal. Most striking lately, though, has been the criticism from neoconservatives who provided the intellectual framework for Bush's presidency. Perle, Adelman and others advocated a robust use of U.S. power to advance the ideals of democracy and freedom, targeting Hussein's Iraq as a threat that could be turned into an opportunity. In an interview last week, Perle said the administration's big mistake was occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. "If I had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation, then I'd say, 'Let's not do it,' " and instead find another way to target Hussein, Perle said. "It was a foolish thing to do." Perle, head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board at the time of the 2003 invasion, said he still believes the invasion was justified. But he resents being called "the architect of the Iraq war," because "my view was different from the administration's view from the very beginning" about how to conduct it. "I am not critical now of anything about which I was not critical before," he said. "I've said it more publicly." White House officials tend to brush off each criticism by claiming it was over-interpreted or misguided. "I just fundamentally disagree," Cheney said of the comments by Perle, Adelman and other neoconservatives before the midterm elections. Others close to the White House said the neoconservatives are dealing with their own sense of guilt over how events have turned out and are eager to blame Bush to avoid their own culpability. Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative at the American Enterprise Institute, said he is distressed "to see neocons turning on Bush" but said he believes they should admit mistakes and openly discuss what went wrong. "All of us who supported the war have to share some of the blame for that," he said. "There's a question to be sorted out: whether the war was a sound idea but very badly executed. And if that's the case, it appears to me the person most responsible for the bad execution was Rumsfeld, and it means neocons should not get too angry at Bush about that." It may also be, he said, that the mistake was the idea itself -- that Iraq could serve as a democratic beacon for the Middle East. "That part of our plan is down the drain," Muravchik said, "and we have to think about what we can do about keeping alive the idea of democracy." Few of the original promoters of the war have grown as disenchanted as Adelman. The chief of Reagan's arms control agency, Adelman has been close to Cheney and Rumsfeld for decades and even worked for Rumsfeld at one point. As a member of the Defense Policy Board, he wrote in The Washington Post before the Iraq war that it would be "a cakewalk." But in interviews with Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and The Post, Adelman said he became unhappy about the conduct of the war soon after his ebullient night at Cheney's residence in 2003. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction disturbed him. He said he was disgusted by the failure to stop the looting that followed Hussein's fall and by Rumsfeld's casual dismissal of it with the phrase "stuff happens." The breaking point, he said, was Bush's decision to award Medals of Freedom to occupation chief L. Paul Bremer, Gen. Tommy R. Franks and then-CIA Director George J. Tenet. "The three individuals who got the highest civilian medals the president can give were responsible for a lot of the debacle that was Iraq," Adelman said. All told, he said, the Bush national security team has proved to be "the most incompetent" of the past half-century. But, he added, "Obviously, the president is ultimately responsible." Adelman said he remained silent for so long out of loyalty. "I didn't want to bad-mouth the administration," he said. In private, though, he spoke out, resulting in a furious confrontation with Rumsfeld, who summoned him to the Pentagon in September and demanded his resignation from the defense board. "It seemed like nobody was getting it," Adelman said. "It seemed like everything was locked in. It seemed like everything was stuck." He agrees he bears blame as well. "I think that's fair. When you advocate a policy that turns bad, you do have some responsibility." Most troubling, he said, are his shattered ideals: "The whole philosophy of using American strength for good in the world, for a foreign policy that is really value-based instead of balanced-power-based, I don't think is disproven by Iraq. But it's certainly discredited." -------- OTHER -------- genetics Annan warns of ‘catastrophic’ biotech danger Sunday, November 19, 2006 Daily Times (pakistan) http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006\11\19\story_19-11-2006_pg4_11 ST GALLEN: UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that potential dangers from the rapidly growing biotechnology industry were increasing exponentially and urged creating global safeguards. Annan, speaking on Saturday in the Swiss university town, warned of “catastrophic” results if recent advances in biotechnology, including gene manipulation and work with viruses, fell into the wrong hands. “As biological research expands, and technologies become increasingly accessible, this potential for accidental or intentional harm grows exponentially,” he said in the text of a speech. “Even novices working in small laboratories will be able to carry out gene manipulation.” Annan’s warning comes after he called in May for a global forum on biological terrorism, saying current treaties were too weak and governmental and commercial initiatives too scattered. Annan likened the current consensus-building phase over life-sciences rules to the debate around nuclear technology in the 1950s that preceded the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “We lack an international system of safeguards to manage those risks. Scientists may do their best to follow rules for responsible conduct of research. But efforts to harmonize these rules on a global level are outpaced by the galloping advance of science itself,” he said. Annan was speaking at an event where he received the Max Schmidheiny Freedom Prize. -------- ACTIVISTS No-nuke nuns risk more prison time By Valerie Richardson THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published November 19, 2006 http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20061118-105839-4882r DENVER -- Three Dominican nuns who broke into a Colorado nuclear-missile silo say there's no chance of them paying restitution to the U.S. Air Force -- even if it means serving more prison time. Instead, the no-nukes nuns are trying to settle their $3,082 tab by holding a canned-food drive in downtown Denver outside the U.S. Attorney's Office. They plan to truck at least 4,000 food items on Nov. 28 to Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colo., to help military families in need. "For me, it's a matter of conscience. It's a moral issue. 'Thou shalt not kill' means 'Thou shalt not kill,' " Sister Ardeth Platte said as she tallied donations on the steps of the office plaza. "So we cannot give money to the military complex for that reason." Whether a federal judge agrees with the nuns' restitution plan is another matter. The U.S. Attorney's Office issued a statement last week saying the food could not be accepted in lieu of restitution. But Jeff Dorschner, a spokesman for the office, praised the nuns for their good works. "Donating food to help military families and others in need is a tremendously thoughtful act," he said. The office is keeping a tally of items donated by the nuns' supporters, just in case U.S. District Court Judge Robert Blackburn decides to accept the alternate restitution. Last year, the judge rejected the nuns' initial plan to log community-service hours instead of paying damages, saying that the restitution must directly benefit the Air Force. Since the nuns are banned from entering a military site, they decided the best way to make good on their debt was through food donations. On a recent afternoon, more than a dozen supporters delivered bags of cans to Sister Platte, Sister Carol Gilbert and Sister Jackie Hudson outside the U.S. Attorney's Office. "They're modern-day prophets, and we're Catholic Christians, and we want to bring about peace in this world," said George McShea, who drove from Littleton to drop off a pallet of canned vegetables. "I think it's a very fair settlement, but then again the judge and prosecutor are intent on punishing these people instead of solving the problem." The nuns were well-known in the peace movement before they staged their 2002 break-in. The women cut through a lock on a chain-link fence surrounding a silo that contained a Minuteman III missile. The nuns, who described the protest as a "symbolic disarmament," tapped on the silo's rails with small hammers and poured baby bottles of what they said was their own blood on its cement casings. In 2003, Judge Blackburn sentenced each of the women to 30 to 41 months in prison, calling their actions "incredible and inexcusable" and scolding them for endangering the security teams that responded to the protest. After rejecting their last alternate restitution plan, Judge Blackburn warned that they could go back to prison unless they comply with the terms of their sentence. The nuns say they're prepared to do more time if necessary, even though they're not as young as they used to be: Sister Platte is 70, Sister Gilbert is 59, and Sister Hudson turns 72 today. But Sister Hudson said she's optimistic about their chances. "I feel really good this is going to be accepted. I think they're going to recognize our sincerity," she said. Buckley spokesman John Spann said he hadn't heard of the sisters' plans to deliver food to the base. "If that's the deal they work out with the judge, then I'm sure we'll work with them at that point," he said. ---- A Cafe Opens to Serve a Mission to End the War By MICHELLE YORK November 19, 2006 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/nyregion/19coffee.html?ei=5070&en=ac6617350020390d&ex=1167022800&pagewanted=print On Veterans Day, John Hartlaub wandered into the newest cafe in Watertown, N.Y. It was sparsely furnished, with three Internet stations, a black sofa and an offering of hot or cold cider. A customer who actually wanted coffee would have to buy it a few doors away. Mr. Hartlaub stayed most of the afternoon anyway. He browsed a few dozen military books for sale, then pulled up a folding chair to watch “Poison Dust,” a documentary about the health effects of depleted uranium weapons on soldiers returning from Iraq. He left with mostly positive feelings. “It could end up being very informative and helpful,” said Mr. Hartlaub, 41, who has served in the military on and off since 1985. The organizers of the cafe were hoping for such a reaction. But, being not far from the largest military installation in the Northeast, they are prepared for backlash, too. They say theirs is the country’s first G.I. coffeehouse for the war in Iraq. It is a project of the peace movement that is focused on changing opinions within the military, with an ultimate goal of ending the war. During the Vietnam War, about 20 G.I. coffeehouses, as they were known, operated around the country. Each was close to a large military base and was intended to support the efforts of soldiers who were against the war. The coffeehouses were incubators for war resistance and part of the counterculture. Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix were on the jukebox. A decent cup of coffee was on the menu. “It was extremely important,” said David Zeiger, the writer and director of “Sir! No Sir!” a 2005 documentary about the G.I. movement to end the Vietnam War. “One thing coffeehouses will do is link civilians and soldiers.” The idea is that the two can meet, learn about movements against the war and talk about the contradictions of what the public hears versus what soldiers have witnessed, he said. In the past, coffeehouse patrons were sometimes subjected to arrests and intimidation. A cafe in Mountain Home, Idaho, was firebombed, and another near Camp Pendleton, Calif., was shot up. But the main organizer of Watertown’s new coffeehouse, called Different Drummer Internet Cafe, said he did not expect such confrontations this time around. “The military today is very different, and we have to adapt to that,” said Tod Ensign, the organizer, who is also a lawyer and director of Citizen Soldier, a veterans advocacy group in New York City. “The soldiers are all volunteers. The Vietnam protests were driven very much by the draft.” After Mr. Ensign decided this year to open the coffeehouse, he sent out a few dozen letters asking for financing, including one to the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation. “They talk a lot about peace,” he said. The appeals went unanswered. Undeterred, he used small donations from activists, farm workers and war resistance leagues to start the project, which he estimates will cost $50,000 a year. He chose Watertown, a city of 27,000 people near the Canadian border and Fort Drum, home of the 10th Mountain Division. The division has deployed more soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan than any other in the Army. Mr. Ensign has three goals for the cafe. They are to allow the free exchange of ideas, to provide accurate information and to be an enjoyable gathering place, with live bands and karaoke. He and his supporters have not decided whether they will serve coffee. Most in the community do not seem to know what to make of the cafe, several people said. Watertown’s mayor, Jeffrey E. Graham, said he did not attend its ribbon cutting on Oct. 27. In part, because it was inconvenient and in part because he was not sure of the cafe’s purpose. “I don’t think people want to be openly antiwar for fear of dissing the families that make that sacrifice,” he said. “On the other hand, I don’t see any harm.” In the cafe’s first three weeks, foot traffic has been minimal. Its manager, Cinthia Mercante, who served for eight years in the military before the Persian Gulf war started, recently found herself calling out to a few soldiers hovering near the entrance: “Folks, you can come in. We won’t bite.” Paul Foley, a volunteer who works in highway design, said he hoped the community would warm up to the cafe. “There’s been a little talk,” he said. “But the people who come will see that we’re not dangerous rabble-rousers. We’re just giving people a place to talk.”