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NUCLEAR
British Energy begs for more government money
Victim blows lid on uranium risk
EU Ministers Pick French Site for Fusion Project
Iran rejoices over nuclear "victory"
Iran: Bring on nuclear inspectors
UN Probes Possible Iran - Pakistan Nuclear Link
UN 'Strongly Deplores' Iran Nuclear Cover-Up
U.N. Atom Agency Gives Iran Both a Slap and a Pass
U.N. Agency Censures Iran Over Secrecy
U.S. to Shift Some Experts From Arms to Antiterror
IAEA chief urges Israel to scrap nuclear weapons
Italy Scraps Nuclear Waste Site Plans After Protest
Japan confident in contest for nuclear fusion project
US BLUEPRINT FOR NORTH KOREA
Pushing Technology And Fighting Skeptics
Russia Praises IAEA Iran Resolution
DOE predicts nuke reactions in casks
Nuclear Energy, Senator Hillary Clinton and Ostrichism
Senator: Military must review vaccine use
Broad Bills Stuffed With Lawmakers' Pet Items
On Secret Iraq Trip, Bush Pays Holiday Visit to G.I.'s
MILITARY
Fate of Idle Ex-Fighters Poses Challenge for Liberia
Bombing Anywhere On Earth In Less Than Two Hours
Consultant on Iraq contracts employed president's brother
Boeing could face widening crisis over ethics breakdown
Northrop Grumman Takes Aim At Hypersonic Weapon Delivery System
Lockheed Martin Wins $600 Million Air Force IT Contract
China Warns Taiwan Again On Issue of Independence
Taiwan Passes Independence Referendum Law
Taiwan Passes Independence Referendum Law
Iraq Road Map to Be Changed to Mollify Shi'ites
Attacks on G.I.'s in Mosul Rise as Good Will Fades
U.S. Plan in Iraq to Shift Control Hits Major Snag
Top Cleric Faults U.S. Blueprint For Iraq
U.S. Wanted to Avoid 'Occupier' Label
Israeli Soldiers Kill 3 Palestinians in Gaza Strip
An Uphill Road for Bold Mideast Peace Plans
Turkish Town's Despair Breeds Terrorists, Residents Fear
NATO chief Robertson fires parting shots in Balkans
US to brief NATO allies on worldwide troop levels
Bulgaria, US to discuss setting up NATO bases in Bulgaria
Officer 'leaked email to save lives'
Countries ready to agree on UN accord
U.S. May Slow Push for U.N. Plan
US looking for small flexible troop bases in Europe: US official
3 Marine Battalions Are Called to Iraq
Cooperation on Iran shows US can work with others: Powell
Mexico Orders First Arrests in 'Dirty War'
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
9/11 Panel May Seek Extension
ENERGY AND OTHER
Wind Power Tax Credit Expires in December
U.S. products to carry new "made with renewable energy" logo
Without Energy Legislation, Grid, Power Policy in Limbo
Billions of people may suffer severe water shortages as glaciers melt
H.I.V. Infections Continue Rise, Study Says
AIDS Resurging Among Gay Men, CDC Data Show
Chronic Hunger Is Increasing
ACTIVISTS
Italy backtracks on nuclear waste decision after mass protests
Group Wants Investigation of Police Tactics at Miami Trade Talks
Smithsonian extends its reach
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- britain
British Energy begs for more government money
Story by Andrew Callus
REUTERS UK:
November 27, 2003
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22953/story.htm
LONDON - Britain's biggest power producer, British Energy, has begged the government for more credit as problems at two of its atomic reactors and volatile power prices tip it back into financial crisis.
Rescued from insolvency last year by a state bail-out, the loss-making nuclear producer of a fifth of Britain's power said yesterday it had asked for more cash on top of its existing 200 million-pound emergency loan.
British Energy BGY.L hit a crisis last August after deregulation of an oversupplied UK power market forced prices below its cost of production.
The government and private sector creditors agreed a debt forgiveness package just seven weeks ago. But European Union competition officials are still checking whether the package violates rules limiting state aid, and ministers have warned they may renationalise the firm if the rescue plan collapses.
A government spokeswoman confirmed that the stricken firm had its hand out once more, but said talks were continuing.
"No agreement has not been reached," she said.
A 650 million-pound state loan was paid off in full in March through the sale of assets. Ministers nevertheless provided a reduced 200 million-pound facility to be repaid "as soon as the company is in a position to do so".
Three weeks ago, British Energy said it had already used about half of this. Although prices have risen in recent months, price volatility has forced it to pay extra collateral for trading, while temporary plant shutdowns are costing it more as well.
This week the projected cost of two reactor closures - at Heysham on the Lancashire coast, and Sizewell on the Suffolk coast - rose to 50 million pounds from 30 million.
Heysham 1 has been shut since late October for work on cooling pipes. Sizewell B was restarted last week, getting a clean bill of health after a six-week outage to check for cracks in pipework. "Unplanned" outages like these are set to cost about three million terawatt hours this year, over four percent of expected annual production, British Energy has said.
CAN'T MANAGE
Anti-nuclear campaigners who want the bail-out declared illegal seized on the renewed crisis.
"It seems they can't manage their plants effectively and they've managed to use up 200 million pounds in less than eight months," said Greenpeace campaigner Jim Footner.
"How are they going to pay back this increased loan bearing in mind they are making a loss at the moment?"
Under the bail-out plan, state-owned fuel and reprocessing firm British Nuclear Fuels has agreed to accept a lower price for reprocessing British Energy's fuel, a cost that feeds directly back to the taxpayer.
Taxpayers will also pick up the bill for nuclear clean-up. Together these burdens will cost 200 million pounds a year, a bill that could stretch for over a generation into the future.
Bondholders and other creditors owed about 1.3 billion pounds will forgive about 65 percent of their debt in exchange for a 97.5-percent equity stake in a relaunched firm.
Existing bonds were trading little changed yesterday at about 90 percent of face value.
Shareholders, at the bottom of the credit pile, have lost almost everything. Many are private individuals who bought into nuclear privatisation in 1996.
The EU Commission opened a complex probe in July and is expected to decide next year. Rules aimed at preventing state aid from distorting competition may clash with the Euratom treaty, a nuclear deal allowing special nuclear investments.
-------- depleted uranium
Victim blows lid on uranium risk
By Lawrence Smallman
Thursday 27 November 2003
Al Jazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/7C50EB84-1D75-43FD-832D-C44F2DE01CDA.htm
A British man is suing a civilian company over radiological contamination allegedly suffered while unknowingly working with depleted uranium.
Richard David was an engineer and machinist from 1985 to 1995 in an aerospace firm based in England.
His job required him to fine finish metal components with a scouring pad, producing a dust resembling talcum power.
David now believes this powder was an alloy which included depleted uranium - a material of which ordinary workers had no knowledge.
His throat caused him immense pain even after the first few months of work, but when he eventually left for health reasons - his lungs and wind-pipe had suffered irreparable damage.
Toll on health
Fifty-year-old David has seen his health deteriorate over the last 15 years and has watched former middle-aged work-mates die of all types of cancers and disease.
His manager died within months of retiring - a victim of throat cancer.
The daily breakfast routine includes pain killers, a steroid inhaler, medication for lowered potassium, and diuretic tablets.
By 2000, he was also faced with chronic fatigue, various lumps growing upon his skull and a rare kidney disorder called Gitlemans syndrome.
But as news of depleted uranium and its effects on Iraqis and veterans of the first Gulf War began to seep out, the engineer began to suspect what may have happened to him.
No doctors had been able to explain his breathing problems, his joint pain, muscular spasms and lung scarring, despite consultations with London specialists.
But no one had considered radiological contamination.
Proving his case
Now, independent testing from the Uranium Medical Research Centre in Canada, run under the auspices of Professor Durakovic, has proven undisputedly that his body was contaminated with depleted uranium.
Further testing in Berlin shows chromosomal damage - which can only occur through exposure to radiation.
But as David sought compensation, he stumbled across the much bigger picture.
DU is not only a military concern. The stark reality is this waste material is a danger to the general public and surrounds them in places they do not even know.
Many unsuspecting victims have been contaminated without realising.
DU for civilian use
After the El Al plane (with still unknown cargo) crashed in Amsterdam in 1992, over 800 families and many clean up workers reported similar symptoms to those of Iraqis and Gulf veterans.
Hundreds of kilograms of DU counterweights in the plane burned in the crash, contaminating the neighbourhood with deadly uranium oxide smoke.
The aerospace industry still uses this heavy metal, but this is only the tip of the ice-burg.
Uranium based metals are increasingly used within civilian life.
In the US, some advocates of recycling DU have hinted that such metals could be used in everyday house-hold products, with DU reportedly having been used some years ago in the dental industry, and within the building industry also.
In the UK, this concern is already being realised with some union representatives claiming these metals have already proliferated into a vast array of various products such as flywheels and car clutches.
Effects
No amount of exposure to radiation is too small to cause damage. DU is an alpha-particle emitter that remains radioactive for hundreds of millions of years.
The findings and case studies from Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Iraq - where DU and uranium weapons were and are used - fully illustrate that the long term prognosis is very bleak indeed.
Use of depleted uranium in weapons is illegal according to the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights.
In particular, the 2002 and 2003 reports prepared by Chief Justice Yueng Sik Yuen clearly indicate that weapons with depleted uranium are necessarily indiscriminate and cause superfluous and unnecessary suffering.
This makes their use incompatible with existing rules of armed combat.
But no matter if DU is vaporised in the heat of battle, or when metal is drilled or sanded in a factory, or when aircraft crash into residential areas - the physical effects are the same.
Richard David's body is failing him now, he describes how he exists rather than lives - robbed of the joys of being a husband, father and friend. Aljazeera
-------- europe
EU Ministers Pick French Site for Fusion Project
REUTERS BELGIUM:
November 27, 2003
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22952/story.htm
BRUSSELS - European Union ministers chose a French site yesterday as their candidate for the world's biggest nuclear fusion reactor.
"There has been an agreement between all member states to promote the site at Cadarache," a diplomatic source said. Cadarache is near Marseille in southern France.
Spain dropped out of the contest to build the project to strengthen the European position against contenders Canada and Japan, the source added.
The mayor of Marseille, Jean-Claude Gaudin, announced the news of the choice of Cadarache to journalists in the city.
"Today's good news is that we have ITER," he said.
The 10 billion euro ITER project aims to create the world's first sustained nuclear fusion reaction, which would last for several minutes, in an attempt to harness the source of the sun's power and tame it for the benefit of humanity.
Fusion is low in pollution, has a virtually limitless supply of fuel in the form of sea water and is less prone to weather conditions than sea or solar power.
(Additional reporting by Tom Heneghan)
-------- iran
Iran rejoices over nuclear "victory", despite warnings of trouble ahead
TEHRAN (AFP)
Nov 27, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031127150426.v27tkd8v.html
Iran has gleefully welcomed a UN nuclear watchdog's resolution on its atomic programme as a victory over arch-foe Washington, ignoring warnings that international pressure on Tehran may have only just begun.
"The United States did not achieve a single one of its objectives concerning Iran's nuclear activities," said Hassan Rowhani, who as secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council handles the country's nuclear affairs.
Foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said: "What has taken place these past few days is the failure of unilateral policies ... and a victory for cooperation, politics and dialogue."
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Wednesday condemned Iran for 18 years of covert nuclear activities but stopped short of taking Tehran to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions, as Washington had previously hoped.
The resolution was a compromise between the US call to censure Iran and demands from Britain, France and Germany that Iran be rewarded for cooperating since October with the IAEA.
But while voices both inside and outside Iran warned that Tehran has only earned a temporary breathing space, officials in the Islamic republic rushed to claim a diplomatic coup against the United States.
"The United States wanted to send the Iranian nuclear issue to the UN Security Council ... and wanted to say in the resolution that Iran had turned its nuclear activities towards making an atomic weapon," said Rowhani.
"But they were forced to see their isolation and understood that they could not prevent the adoption of this resolution," he added.
Washington accuses Iran of using its nuclear energy programme as cover for plans to build atomic weapons which could be directed at Israel, claims fiercely denied by Tehran.
IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei has also said in a report that there is so far no evidence that Iran has been developing nuclear weapons, a claim disputed by Washington as "simply impossible to believe".
But the text of the resolution also contained harsh words for Iran, in particular a passage warning that any further Iranian breaches of non-proliferation would be met by stern action from the IAEA's board of governors using "all options at its disposal."
Rowhani played down the significance of the warning, saying it contained "nothing new and did not worry Iran" as Tehran would continue to insist on the peaceful nature of its nuclear activities.
But his confidence was not shared by other observers.
Western analysts said the United States would pounce on the discovery of any further secret nuclear facility as a chance to bring up the subject again and take Tehran to the Security Council.
And at home the Jomhuri Eslami daily -- which had been against any concession by Tehran to the international pressure -- went as far as to describe the resolution as a "sword of Damocles" for Iran.
"The very frank relations between the United States and Europe and the introduction of the White House's positions into the resolution has transformed this into a sword of Damocles over Iran's nuclear activities," it said.
It said the resolution in effect warned Iran that it would be brought before the Security Council if any further nuclear infringements were discovered.
"Iran is in a difficult position as the situation is such that ... the conditions required by the Americans to pressure Iran could be fulfilled very easily," it said.
----
Iran: Bring on nuclear inspectors
November 27, 2003
(UPI)
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20031127-092644-5263r.htm
TEHRAN, Iran, Nov. 27 -- Iran's national security chief said Thursday he is not worried at all about a United Nations threat of tougher nuclear inspections.
Iran's supreme national security council chief, Hassan Rohani, was quoted by Iran's official news agency, IRNA, as saying Iran has no fear about tougher inspections of its nuclear facilities.
His remarks came on the heels of Wednesday's vote by the International Atomic Energy Agency warning Iran it would not tolerate any future violations of its rules, Voice of America reported.
Rohani said such inspections would prove its nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes.
On Wednesday the IAEA condemned Iran for what it called an 18-year cover-up of nuclear research that included uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing, both of which are needed for the development of nuclear weapons.
Washington had been pushing for the issue to be sent to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions against Tehran for failing to meet its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
----
UN Probes Possible Iran - Pakistan Nuclear Link
November 27, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear-designs.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear agency is probing a possible link between Iran and Pakistan after Tehran acknowledged using centrifuge designs that appear identical to ones used in Pakistan's quest for an atom bomb, diplomats say.
Diplomats said the agency was trying to determine whether the drawings had come from someone in Pakistan or elsewhere. Tehran, accused by Washington of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, told the U.N. nuclear agency it got the blueprints from a ``middleman'' whose identity the agency had not determined, a Western diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
It was unclear where the ``middleman'' got the drawings. The U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said in a report Iran told the IAEA it got centrifuge drawings ``from a foreign intermediary around 1987.''
Centrifuges are used to purify uranium for use as fuel or in weapons. Experts say the ability to produce such material is crucial for an arms program and the biggest hurdle any country with ambitions to build a bomb must overcome.
Several diplomats familiar with the IAEA said the blueprints were of a machine by the Dutch enrichment unit of the British-Dutch-German consortium Urenco -- a leader in the field of centrifuges.
Iran's ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Akbar Salehi, told Reuters he had no knowledge a Urenco design had been used by Iran. ``This is new information to me,'' he said.
In a statement to Reuters, Urenco said it had not supplied any centrifuge know-how or machinery to Iran.
``Urenco would like to strongly affirm that they have never supplied any technology or components to Iran at any time,'' it said.
PAKISTAN, IRAN DENY NUCLEAR COOPERATION
Pakistan, which non-proliferation experts and diplomats say used the Urenco blueprint, and Iran have repeatedly denied any cooperation in the nuclear field.
Iran had long insisted its centrifuge program was purely indigenous and that it had received no outside help whatsoever -- not from Pakistan or anywhere else.
The father of Pakistan's atom bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, worked at the Urenco uranium enrichment facility in the Dutch city of Almelo in the 1970s.
After his return to Pakistan he was convicted in absentia of nuclear espionage by an Amsterdam court, but the verdict was overturned on appeal. He has acknowledged he did take advantage of his experience of many years of working on similar projects in Europe and his contacts with various manufacturing firms.
But David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and head of the Institute for Science and International Security think-tank, said: ``Khan is widely believed to have taken these drawings and developed them.''
Khan is known to have visited Iran, but the diplomats said there was no proof of a link involving him and his laboratories in Pakistan.
The United States accuses Iran of using its nuclear power program, parts of which it kept hidden from the IAEA for 18 years, as a front to build an atom bomb. Tehran denies this.
On Wednesday, the IAEA Board of Governors unanimously approved a resolution that ``strongly deplores'' Iran's two-decade concealment of its centrifuge enrichment program, while praising its promises to be transparent from now on.
The IAEA is still investigating Iran's enrichment program in order to identify the origin of traces of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) inspectors found at the Natanz enrichment plant and the Kalaye Electric Co.
But when IAEA experts visited Iran's pilot enrichment plant at Natanz earlier this year, they saw it bore the marks of the centrifuges outlined in the Urenco designs, diplomats said.
They said Tehran later acknowledged it had used the Urenco designs and recently showed them to the IAEA. Iran also admitted to a massive procurement effort to get centrifuge components.
Iran says some of these components, purchased through ``middlemen'' in the middle of 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, were contaminated with HEU. This, the Iranians say, is why the IAEA found HEU traces at Natanz and Kalaye, where centrifuge parts were tested and manufactured.
Diplomats and non-proliferation experts say Iran's centrifuge program based on the Urenco design appears to have been more successful than Pakistan's. They say Pakistan eventually abandoned the Urenco model and chose another one.
----
UN 'Strongly Deplores' Iran Nuclear Cover-Up
REUTERS AUSTRIA:
November 27, 2003
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22954/story.htm
VIENNA, Austria - The United Nations nuclear watchdog condemned Iran Wednesday over an 18-year cover-up of sensitive atomic research and said any future breach of nonproliferation obligations would not be tolerated.
The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency stopped short of reporting Iran to the Security Council, which could have imposed sanctions. However, some countries think Tehran has more secrets and will eventually face the U.N.'s supreme body.
The IAEA governing board adopted a resolution that "strongly deplores" Iran's cover-up over the past 18 years of a program that involves uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing - both of which could be pointers to a nuclear arms program.
The resolution, which passed after more than a week of tough negotiations between its sponsors France, Germany and Britain, and Washington over how to balance encouragement and condemnation, also praises Iran's promises of "active cooperation and openness."
The United States has described Iran as part of an international "axis of evil" - together with North Korea and prewar Iraq - and believes it has been using a secretive atomic energy program to hide development of nuclear arms, which Tehran denies.
IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei told a news conference he was pleased with the resolution, but added: "The board is sending a very serious and ominous message that failures in the future will not be tolerated and that the board will use all options available to it to deal with these failures."
Iran's Foreign Ministry hailed the resolution as an "achievement" for Tehran.
However, Iran's ambassador to the IAEA was disappointed the text left out the IAEA's conclusion in a recent report on Iran that there was "no evidence" of a weapons program.
IRAN SAYS KEY POINT OMITTED
"The most important conclusion of the report ... was not incorporated in the resolution," Ali Akbar Salehi said.
The IAEA report, however, had also said the jury was still out on whether there was a nuclear arms program.
Washington, which was infuriated by the IAEA's "no evidence" conclusion, saw the resolution as both a clear rejection of Iran's nuclear cover-up and a U.S. victory. "Iran today is at a crossroads," U.S. ambassador to the IAEA Kenneth Brill said in a statement.
"They can ... continue down the well worn path of the past almost 20 years of denial, deception, deceit, or they can turn toward the path of a new chapter wherein they really do come clean and meet their commitments in a verifiable way."
The United States had hoped to send Iran to the Security Council for possible sanctions for "non-compliance" with its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Europeans opposed this and Washington finally acquiesced.
White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan, traveling with reporters in Texas where President Bush has a ranch, said the United States welcomed the resolution.
"We welcome that resolution and believe that it underscores the international community's serious concerns with Iran's nuclear activities and the urgent requirement of Iran to come into full compliance with nuclear nonproliferation obligations.
"We feel that this is a strong resolution. We welcome it and there is no doubt that it means referral to the United Nations ...to be dealt with."
BRITAIN WELCOMES RESOLUTION
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw issued a statement welcoming the adoption of the resolution as "an important step forward in the international community's efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons."
The French Foreign Ministry said of the resolution: "Its content is balanced, it makes a very firm judgment on Iran's past activities in the nuclear area and encourages it to continue and confirm its move toward a new policy of transparency and cooperation with the international community."
Russia also welcomed the resolution, saying it was pleased the matter would not be taken up by the Security Council.
But the Council threat is strongly implied. The resolution contains a so-called trigger clause; if further breaches are uncovered, the IAEA board will meet immediately to consider "all options," one of which is the Security Council.
Some disarmament experts think Iran still has some secrets.
"It's very likely that Iran has more skeletons in its closet," said Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a U.S.-based think-tank. (Additional reporting by Francois Murphy and Marcus Kabel and the Warsaw, Tehran and London bureaux)
----
U.N. Atom Agency Gives Iran Both a Slap and a Pass
November 27, 2003
New York Times
By MARK LANDLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/international/europe/27IRAN.html
VIENNA, Nov. 26 - The International Atomic Energy Agency passed a much-debated resolution on Wednesday that condemns Iran for covering up its nuclear program for nearly two decades but stops short of urging action by the United Nations Security Council.
The resolution, drafted by Britain, France and Germany, sets the stage for a verification process that could be every bit as contentious as the tussle this past week over the wording of the declaration.
The resolution warns of unspecified action against Iran if the agency's inspectors uncover "further serious failures" in its disclosures about nuclear activities.
While the United States and Britain say further deception would prompt a referral to the Security Council, the wording is vague. What constitutes a serious failure is also open to debate, though the agency said it planned to hold Iran to a strict standard.
"The board is sending a very serious and ominous message that failure in the future will not be tolerated," Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the agency, said after the measure was adopted by consensus by the 35 nations on the board. "Our work in the next few weeks will be very intensive."
Noting that the agency wanted to do that work without interference, Dr. ElBaradei said in an interview at his Vienna headquarters, "I would like to ask the member states to sit back and relax."
But the United States had pushed unsuccessfully for a much stronger resolution, and diplomats said Washington would track the inspections closely, seizing on any evidence of Iranian deception as a way to step up the pressure on Tehran.
"There must be a very robust verification," said Kenneth C. Brill, the United States ambassador to the agency. "The international community rejects 18 years of Iran's denial, deceit and deception."
Privately, American officials say they expect further disclosures of hidden nuclear activity by Iran, pointing to unexplored areas in Iran's recently disclosed use of laser technology to enrich uranium.
Iran reacted calmly to the resolution, but said it was disappointed that it left out what it called the most important conclusion of a recent agency report on Iran: that there is "no evidence" of an arms program.
For the United States, which had wanted matters referred to the Security Council, the resolution capped a frustrating week in which it found itself again at odds with Germany and France, as well as with its usually stalwart ally, Britain.
In talks over the weekend, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was able to win a tougher condemnation of Iran. The resolution "strongly deplores Iran's past failures and breaches of its obligation" under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Mr. Powell, however, could not persuade the foreign ministers - Jack Straw of Britain, Dominique de Villepin of France and Joschka Fischer of Germany - to include an explicit threat to go to the Council.
A senior European diplomat said Iran had put heavy pressure on the three nations to leave out such a warning. The Europeans, he said, did not want to jeopardize the diplomatic overture they made in October to Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, which resulted in a pledge to suspend enrichment of uranium, which is crucial in the manufacturing of nuclear weapons.
The main beneficiary of the trans-Atlantic haggling appeared to be Dr. ElBaradei, who had appealed for a strongly worded resolution that nevertheless did not elevate the Iran dispute to the Security Council.
An Egyptian diplomat with a methodical manner, Dr. ElBaradei has often had tense relations with the Bush administration. Some Bush officials believe that he was not aggressive enough in hunting down evidence of a weapons program in Iraq in the months before the war.
With no illicit weapons having been uncovered in Iraq so far, however, Dr. ElBaradei's cautious approach has been vindicated, in the opinion of some delegates here. He regularly invokes the Iraq example.
"Iraq has been a very sobering experience," he said. "Everybody is learning from that experience."
Among the lessons, he said, is that people should not jump to the conclusion that having an atomic research program is proof that Iran is seeking a bomb. Another lesson is that "inspections take time," he said.
"Even if you have 1,200 people and $1 billion, it can take over a year," Dr. ElBaradei added, referring to the weapons search the American-led alliance is conducting in Iraq. He said he would send no more than 10 inspectors to Iran for the next phase of the verification process.
----
U.N. Agency Censures Iran Over Secrecy
Associated Press
Thursday, November 27, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16618-2003Nov26.html
VIENNA, Nov. 26 -- The U.N. atomic agency censured Iran for 18 years of secrecy, issuing a resolution Wednesday that its director said gave him greater authority to monitor the country for evidence of nuclear weapons ambitions.
Director General Mohamed ElBaradei of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency said the measure sent an "ominous message that failures in the future will not be tolerated."
The resolution, adopted by consensus by the 35-nation IAEA board of governors, did not directly threaten Iran with U.N. sanctions, as the United States had initially sought. Key European powers opposed a direct threat, worried that Tehran would stop cooperating.
The final resolution was a compromise, containing a more implicit threat. It says that if "further serious Iranian failures" occur, the IAEA board would meet to consider actions allowed by its statute -- which include U.N. Security Council action.
A senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Washington was "pretty happy" with the compromise text. The source added that the U.S. is skeptical that Iran has stopped it covert nuclear weapons program.
-------- iraq / inspections
INTELLIGENCE
U.S. to Shift Some Experts From Arms to Antiterror
November 27, 2003
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/politics/27WEAP.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 - Dozens of the American intelligence experts and linguists sent to Iraq to search for illicit weapons have been reassigned to an expanding effort to learn more about the insurgents attacking United States troops, senior government officials said Wednesday.
The shift in the last two weeks appears to reflect a decision that the hunt for insurgents is becoming a more urgent task than the quest for chemical and biological weapons, which has so far proved unsuccessful despite the involvement of hundreds of people in the search.
In recent weeks as many as 40 attacks a day have been conducted against American troops in Iraq, and American commanders have acknowledged that they know relatively little about the attackers.
The question of whether to assign some of the intelligence experts to counterinsurgency has been debated for weeks within the Bush administration. Government officials say the work for now is being carried out informally, with no decision yet on whether to make the reassignment official or permanent.
But they said the switch meant that some of the linguists, intelligence analysts and other experts on the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group were now reporting only to Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, a top official of the Defense Intelligence Agency who heads the survey group.
Previously they reported further up the chain of command to David Kay, the civilian American official who oversees the weapons hunt as a special adviser to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence.
A Defense Department official said the group had been reinforced in recent weeks with "additional assets" focused on counterinsurgency.
The group's main focus until now has been the search for illicit weapons, but its members have been told in the last two weeks to "broaden their perspective and not to stay so focused on weapons that they miss the counterinsurgency stuff."
A large portion of the Iraq Survey Group is made up of support and security personnel, so the reassignment of even a relatively small number of people directly involved in intelligence work was described by the officials as significant. At least several dozen people could be affected, and perhaps several hundred, one government official said.
American commanders have said they believe that there are about 5,000 Iraqi insurgents, nearly all of them former members of the Iraqi intelligence service and other organizations loyal to Saddam Hussein. But nearly seven months after President Bush declared an end to major combat, American intelligence officials say they know little about how they are organized and directed.
The officials have acknowledged that their resources, particularly in terms of Arabic speakers, were stretched thin by the demands of the weapons search and other intelligence priorities.
In an interim report to Congress in early October, Dr. Kay acknowledged that his team had failed to find evidence in Iraq of the chemical and biological weapons and the reconstituted nuclear weapons program that the Bush administration cited as a principal reason for going to war.
Dr. Kay, whose work has been conducted in secret, said at the time that the search might take another six to nine months. But although Dr. Kay provides regular updates by videoconference to Mr. Tenet, a senior United States official said Dr. Kay did not plan to issue any further update to Congress soon.
Dr. Kay and other administration officials have defended continuing the weapons hunt. They say they have found evidence that Iraq put in place an infrastructure that could produce chemical and biological weapons on short notice, and that the lethality of the substances makes it imperative that they uncover even small quantities of hidden weapons or weapons material.
But while Congress has appropriated an additional $600 million to continue the weapons hunt into next year, some on Capitol Hill are losing patience.
Even in advance of Dr. Kay's next report, the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, at the direction of Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the panel's Republican chairman, is planning to draft a report next month critical of American intelligence agencies for misreading the threat posed by illicit Iraqi weapons, Congressional officials said this week.
Senior military officers have argued that the immediate threat to American troops makes the counterinsurgency campaign the most urgent effort, according to government officials. But the Central Intelligence Agency has argued that it would be dangerous to abandon the search while highly lethal illicit weapons might still be hidden in Iraq.
-------- israel
IAEA chief urges Israel to scrap nuclear weapons
Thursday, November 27, 2003
By Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2003-11-27/s_10834.asp
VIENNA, Austria - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Wednesday he wanted Israel to dismantle its nuclear weapons arsenal and he believed all Middle Eastern states would benefit from ridding the region of nuclear weapons.
Israel has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has never officially admitted to having the bomb. But nonproliferation analysts estimate Israel has between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons.
Asked about a meeting with Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom last week, International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei hinted Israel should sign the NPT, the global pact designed to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
"We obviously discussed ... efforts to try to move forward toward application of safeguards (on) all nuclear activities in the Middle East, including in Israel, and the possibility of moving forward toward establishing a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East," he told reporters.
The U.N. General Assembly and IAEA General Conference have adopted 13 resolutions since 1987 appealing to Israel to sign the NPT and all have been ignored.
"In my view every country in the Middle East, including Israel, will benefit from establishing a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East as part and parcel of a comprehensive peace in the region," ElBaradei said.
Since the 1991 discovery and later dismantling of Iraq's secret nuclear weapons program, Iran is the only Middle Eastern country suspected of developing nuclear weapons - apart from Israel.
Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons and have not signed the NPT. North Korea is suspected of having built at least one atom bomb and withdrew from the NPT on New Year's Eve last year.
-------- italy
Italy Scraps Nuclear Waste Site Plans After Protest
November 27, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-environment-italy.html
ROME (Reuters) - Italy on Thursday scrapped plans to dump nuclear waste near a southern town in one of the country's poorest regions, bowing to weeks of pressure from protesters.
The government had intended to store the waste in a specially built underground vault near Scanzano Jonico in the southern region of Basilicata, saying years of geological surveys showed it was the safest place in Italy to dump it.
But residents said the waste was being palmed off onto the poorer south and that such a decision would not have been tolerated in the wealthier north.
``This is the happiest day of my life. They just consider us sheep not capable of fighting. But we have shown how tough we are and that local pride is unbeatable,'' Carlo Carlucci, a resident, told Italian news agency Ansa.
Italian government officials urged a speedy resolution to the issue, saying things were much more dangerous as they were.
``We have this terrible situation with more than one hundred sites that are a danger to the population. There's even talk of radioactive waste in hospital waste tips,'' said Carlo Giovanardi, minister for relations with parliament.
At a Thursday cabinet meeting the government decided to drop Scanzano Jonico from a decree concerning nuclear waste storage and charged a team of experts with investigating alternatives.
But later Giovanardi did not rule out the possibility that the Scanzano Jonico site might be resurrected.
``The team of experts ... will evaluate all the options, including Scanzano,'' the minister said in a statement.
-------- japan
Japan confident in contest for nuclear fusion project
TOKYO (AFP)
Nov 27, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031127052050.ty54caqt.html
Japan said Thursday it remained confident of winning the race to host a multi-billion dollar new-generation power project a day after EU ministers chose France as Europe's sole challenger.
Japan's northern town of Rokkasho-mura is widely seen as the only serious contender against Europe for the 4.5 billion-dollar (5.3-billion-euro) scheme designed to replicate the sun's nuclear fusion.
The site for the planned International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is due to be decided before the end of the year. Japan's main challenger is the southern French town of Cadarache since funding problems are seen to be a major flaw in a Canadian bid.
The project aims to replicate the kind of nuclear fusion seen in the sun to deliver clean energy from hydrogen.
"We want to compete fairly and squarely to the best of our ability," said Hidekazu Tanaka, an official with the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry.
"As this is very important for the energy of the future, we want to make sure our country succeeds," he said.
Tanaka said the Japanese site was closer to a port, the rocky ground was better for the scheme with services already in place for foreign scientists, Tanaka said.
Japan is also willing to pay a hefty portion of the construction cost with 8.6 billion yen (79 million dollars) earmarked for the first year in a 10-year construction plan.
"If our site is chosen, Japan will cover the costs that are needed," he said.
France has so far pledged to invest 400 million euros of state funding to the project, backed by the EU, Japan, the US, Canada, Russia and South Korea.
Paris saw off a rival bid by Spain's Vandellos in the northeastern Catalonia region, after experts decided the French site had better infrastructure. The final decision on the site is expected to be announced next month.
Hydrogen, which is in virtually limitless supply, is seen as a crucial next step in developing nuclear power because of the limited reserves of plutonium and uranium used in current reactors, Tanaka said.
-------- korea
US BLUEPRINT FOR NORTH KOREA
27.11.2003.
Special Broadcasting Service
http://www9.sbs.com.au/theworldnews/region.php?id=73899®ion=2
The United States has prepared a comprehensive plan for the dismantling of North Korea's nuclear weapons program, according to Japanese media reports.
Kyodo news and a the Yomiuri Shimbun daily reported that Washington is seeking the aid of the world's five declared nuclear powers to monitor the process.
Britain, China, France, Russia and the US would collectively work to verify its completion.
The plan is based on a similar initiative undertaken to end South Africa's nuclear program a decade ago.
Unnamed sources, a senior US official and a diplomat, were said to have revealed the plan that will be put to the Communist regime at the next round of six-party talks.
Should an agreement follow, the US hopes that all North Korean nuclear activities would be declared.
This would then clear the way for UN inspectors to enter the country, and for the transfer of spent fuel and plutonium for external monitoring.
The US government has said that it is prepared to put into words a verbal promise not to attack North Korea in return for a commitment to scrap its nuclear weapons program
-------- missile defense
Pushing Technology And Fighting Skeptics
Missile Defense to Be Deployed in Election Year
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 28, 2003; Page A39
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17459-2003Nov27?language=printer
On his desk in a spacious corner office looking down on the Pentagon from a nearby hill, Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish keeps a model of the plane the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.
It reminds him of the skepticism the brothers confronted, a parallel that he sees with his own circumstance as director of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency.
"The Wright brothers faced the same problem that we face with missile defense," he said in a recent interview. "They had eminent scientists of the day saying that man would never fly, and they were proving them wrong."
Kadish has been overseeing the controversial program since June 1999, having survived the change in administration from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush. He is on track to becoming, after April, the longest-serving head of the missile defense program since President Ronald Reagan set up a separate Pentagon organization to manage the effort nearly 20 years ago.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has extended Kadish's tenure twice, keeping the general in place to prepare for the planned deployment in September 2004 of antimissile interceptors in Alaska and California.
"The secretary is interested in longevity in key positions," Kadish said. "And I think this is one area that he pays particular attention to."
Low-key and genial, with a round face and stocky build, Kadish came into the job with a reputation as a kind of Mr. Fix-It. He had turned around the Air Force's troubled C-17 cargo jet program, impressing Rumsfeld's predecessor, former senator William S. Cohen (R-Maine), who picked Kadish for missile defense.
The assignment has presented Kadish with what he describes as his most difficult career challenge.
"We know how to operate tanks and airplanes, but handing a long-range missile defense system to the services to operate requires a whole new set of thinking," he said.
The system that the Pentagon plans to deploy next year will rely on interceptor missiles launched from silos to chase down enemy warheads in space, a concept known as "hit to kill." Technical glitches and quality control problems in designing new boosters for the interceptors have slowed development and resulted in more than a year's delay in flight intercept tests.
Nonetheless, Kadish remains confident that President Bush's deployment deadline can be met. The timetable has the system starting as the 2004 presidential campaign enters its final weeks, although Kadish and other defense officials insist politics was not a factor in determining the schedule.
Critics in Congress, scientific circles and the arms control community continue to warn that the administration is rushing ahead with an approach that has yet to be adequately tested and is likely to prove unworkable or quickly become obsolete.
They complain that the administration has lowered the threshold for what is technologically acceptable, justifying its plan on grounds, as Rumsfeld has said, that something is better than nothing. They also accuse Kadish of pulling a veil over the program since last year.
"The program is not at all transparent," said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Armed Services Committee. "I think General Kadish has instructions to be as minimally cooperative as he can be."
Kadish said the program must be cloaked in greater secrecy as it moves toward deployment to avoid revealing too much to potential enemies. But he insisted that members of Congress continue to receive ample information. "When it comes to the Hill, we bend over backwards," he said.
Kadish is widely credited, by opponents as well as proponents of the program, with showing care in public statements not to overstate what the planned system will be able to do. He has stressed that the initial setup will have very limited ability -- enough to shoot down only a handful of relatively simple warheads.
But while acknowledging technical limitations, Kadish has declared that the basic hit-to-kill approach is sound and ready for deployment. His detractors accuse him of adjusting his views to suit the administration's political aim of erecting some kind of system after decades of research and billions of dollars. The fiscal 2004 defense budget sets aside $9.1 billion for missile defense.
Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, likens Kadish's willingness to endorse the administration's missile defense goal to CIA Director George J. Tenet's readiness, before the Iraq war, to support the view that Iraq's weapons programs posed an imminent threat to U.S. interests.
"Kadish has an obligation to be technically and scientifically honest about what the program can do, just as Tenet had an obligation to present honest assessments before the war," Kimball said.
Kadish said he has come under no pressure from the administration to shade judgments about system capabilities.
A source familiar with internal Pentagon deliberations on missile defense said some on Kadish's staff had shown "cultural resistance" to moving toward an operational system next year, preferring to stay focused on research. But Kadish favored turning a planned new test site in Alaska into an operational facility while continuing to use the site to test and improve the system.
Since the early months of the Bush administration, Kadish has worked closely with Rumsfeld to widen the range of technological options being explored, from ground- and sea-launched interceptors to airborne lasers and space-based weapons. At Kadish's urging, Rumsfeld last year freed the missile defense program from the detailed requirements that usually govern the development of major weapons.
The current plan calls essentially for Kadish and his team to build the best system they can in the near term, then improve on it in phases, or developmental "blocks," spaced in two-year intervals. No ultimate system architecture is specified. Instead, Kadish and other defense officials speak in broad terms of erecting a multilayered network of land-, sea- and air-based weapons that would target enemy missiles in all phases of flight.
Kadish said he reads as much history as he can -- biographies, military stories, accounts of past scientific and technological programs -- looking for ideas. But one of his biggest frustrations remains finding a way to avoid production quality problems.
The last attempted intercept test, for instance, failed because of a broken metal pin connecting a computer chip in the interceptor built by Raytheon Corp. More recently, the mixing of rocket propellants at a Pratt & Whitney facility triggered two accidental explosions, one killing an employee in September. This interrupted development of a new booster by Lockheed Martin Corp., leaving the Pentagon to proceed with an alternative rocket designed by Orbital Sciences Corp.
"What's been frustrating to me is that we've been failing on the quality side of technologies we've used before," Kadish said. "That I find totally unacceptable. . . . We'll just have to keep after it."
-------- russia
Russia Praises IAEA Iran Resolution
November 27, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Iran.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia's Nuclear Energy Ministry said Thursday the resolution adopted by the U.N. nuclear agency this week on Iran should foster closer cooperation between Russia and Iran on nuclear power.
Russia is building a nuclear reactor for power in the Iranian city of Bushehr under a $800 million contract the United States has said would help Iran develop nuclear weapons.
The ITAR-Tass news agency quoted ministry spokesman Nikolai Shingaryov as saying that Wednesday's resolution from the International Atomic Energy Agency ``provides an opportunity to step up Russian-Iranian cooperation in nuclear power engineering.''
But the prospect of increased cooperation is likely to raise further concern in the United States, which is skeptical that Iran has stopped its covert nuclear weapons program.
Shingaryov said the resolution ``gives all grounds to believe that no problems will arise between the IAEA and Iran, and the U.N. Security Council will not have to consider the question of the Iranian nuclear problem,'' according to ITAR-Tass.
Facing U.S. pressure, Russia has said it will not ship nuclear fuel to Iran until the two countries sign an agreement under which all spent fuel would be returned to Russia -- a measure aimed to prevent it from being used for weapons -- and that deal has been bogged down by disagreements.
Russian Nuclear Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev is expected to visit Tehran in January for talks on the completion of the first reactor at Bushehr and prospects for further cooperation, Shingaryov said. Rumyantsev said earlier in November that it could take months to finalize the nuclear fuel return agreement.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
DOE predicts nuke reactions in casks
Nevadans worry about danger at Yucca
By Suzanne Struglinski
LAS VEGAS SUN
November 26, 2003
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/archives/2003/nov/26/515926524.html?Suzanne+Struglinski
WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department predicts up to 60 uncontrolled nuclear reactions would take place inside nuclear waste casks stored at power plant sites should the casks corrode, according to a department study obtained by Nevada officials.
After a review of the documents, state officials say they believe the same thing would happen at the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The state wants the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent board set up by Congress to review the potential dump, to look into the matter.
"We were amazed to learn, after finally obtaining some of the pertinent documents from the Department of Energy through the Freedom of Information Act, that DOE's own studies anticipate that, if the repository operates as is now planned, up to 60 nuclear criticalities may plausibly occur inside the mountain, and that (the) conditional probability of occurrence may be greater than one in 1,000 per year," Bob Loux, executive director of the state's Agency for Nuclear Projects wrote to board Chairman Michael Corradini.
Criticalities are uncontrolled nuclear reactions that could occur if water -- or other liquids -- got inside the casks. It could start a mininuclear reaction inside the casks and cause a steam explosion, said Washington attorney Joe Egan, who represents the state on Yucca matters.
The issue of water seepage at Yucca Mountain has been a critical point of debate over the planned nuclear waste repository. Scientists are still studying how water moves through the mountain. With or without water, the casks are eventually expected to corrode over a period of thousands of years.
State officials expressed surprise that the report wasn't disclosed as part of the Yucca Mountain debate.
They say Energy officials have said that the issue won't affect Yucca Mountain and state officials say this study shows that it does.
But Allen Benson, a Yucca Mountain project spokesman in Nevada, said the documents the state received do not relate to Yucca Mountain but are from a 4-year-old report looking at on-site waste storage facilities at nuclear power plants.
Benson said the department was glad Loux sent the letter to the board since it can now choose to review the matter, but that on-site storage and storage inside Yucca "are two different things."
Benson said that since the report shows that criticalities can take place inside above-ground storage containers at the 103 nuclear power plants throughout the country, especially if water gets in them, it makes even more sense to store the waste in Yucca, which is in the desert.
But state officials say the fact that the Energy Department acknowledges in this report that criticality is an issue is a huge threat.
Egan and Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval filed petitions with the U.S. Court Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, asking the court to include the FOIA documents in the court record. The state's major court arguments on the site will take place there on Jan. 14.
Loux said the department only predicated an "extremely low probability of occurrence" of such reactions in the Final Environmental Impact Statement issued last year. He quotes the document's specific text to that effect in his letter to Corradini.
State officials had Michael Thorne, a criticality expert, review the report and found that an expected 60 chain reaction events would occur throughout the lifetime of the repository since the department anticipates the waste packages will degrade over time.
"A criticality occurring in the repository could severely compromise the entire facility, vastly increasing radionuclide releases and making waste packages irretrievable," Loux wrote.
The department documents do not have a timeline for the events to occur, according to the letter.
"These are not nuclear explosions," Egan said. "We are not trying to scare anyone ... we are not saying this is going to happen, but DOE's own analysis notes it was a nonspeculative scenario."
But if the casks were to burst, the radioactive material would go with it. "It's literally a dirty bomb, a conventional explosion with radioactive materials," Egan said.
"Their maximum accident scenario in transport is $18 billion in clean-up (costs) and 44 early fatalities, and that's with a small puff of radiation not an explosion -- they call it a 'violent event' which is a euphemism for explosion," Egan said.
-------- us politics
Nuclear Energy, Senator Hillary Clinton and Ostrichism
by Mina Hamilton
November 27, 2003
Dissident Voice
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles9/Hamilton_Hillary-Nukes-Ostrichism.htm
Something to be happy about this Thanksgiving: The billion dollar give-away to the nuclear, oil, and gas industry that was the Energy Bill bit the dust on November 24.
To the dismay of the Bush administration this disastrous legislation crafted in secret committee meetings by Senators Pete Domenici and Congressman "Billy" Tauzin was at the last minute knocked out by a Democrat-led filibuster. As Paul Gunter of the Nuclear Information and Energy Service says, the bill's supporters "were bitterly disappointed not to have this turkey for Thanksgiving."
The bill - long coveted by huge donors to the Republican Party -- is not dead. It will be back to haunt us in 2004.
Come the New Year the US Congress will be poised to pass the bill and dole out taxpayer money to needy corporations. Each section of the bill is more egregious than the last, but the insanity of Section 45L that calls for a first-ever $6 billion tax break for operating NEW nuclear reactors takes one's breath away.
The lunacy is stunning. As the US government supports policies that are generating more and more terrorists, it also wants to build more nukes, one of the forms of energy most vulnerable to a terrorist attack. Just how vulnerable is embodied in the three words: spent fuel pool. These are the virtually unprotected pools in which tons and tons of unimaginably toxic irradiated fuel sits at reactors across the land.
Yet our politicians remain blithely oblivious to the terrorist threat to spent fuel pools. Or they support weak, half-measures to address the threat.
An example: On November 12th Senator Hillary Clinton asked the Federal Government to consider flying air patrols over New York State's nuclear power plants. In a letter to Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, Clinton listed Indian Point (the reactors only 24 miles north of New York City), Nine Mile Point and Ginna as the plants that need protection.
Along with many legislators, Senator Clinton is guilty of ostrichism.
Ostrichism. This word was coined by the military theorist and Rand think tanker, Herman Kahn, when he, in 1962, wrote the book, Thinking about the Unthinkable. At the time the unthinkable was the actual use (as opposed to threatened use) of nuclear weapons in a war. Thinking about the Unthinkable was vigorously attacked, as had been Kahn's earlier book, On Thermonuclear War.
In his books Kahn dared to open and examine the Pandora's box of the catastrophic consequences of nuclear warfare. At the time many critics claimed that plumbing this unpleasant topic was callous and would breed indifference. They argued only military strategists should focus on the topic -- in secret.
For those critics who opposed his books, Kahn counter-attacked saying they suffered from ostrichism.
Whatever one thought of Kahn's original work he broke through an information barrier. Soon subsequent studies by Jonathan Schell and Helen Caldicott spread the word about such depressing topics as nuclear winter and radiation poisoning. These studies - and the activist movements they helped to spawn -- generated support for nuclear test moratoriums and opposition to the use of nuclear bombs. These, in turn, have helped to control hawks in the Pentagon who ever since the murderous quagmire of Vietnam have yearned to use nukes.
Today much of the American public is too terrified to think about another unthinkable: a terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant. The notion of a nuke going up in flames sends shivers down our spines. It's almost unbearable to imagine a radiation-drenched cloud rising up into the sky and then blowing contamination towards nearby cities, towns, water reservoirs, rivers and farms.
The reaction of a lot of folks: "Don't tell me about it. There's only so much bad news I can handle."
This proverbial ostrich head-in-the-sand technique is very dangerous. It leaves policy decisions up to the uninformed or to those unwilling to confront powerful electrical utilities. It leaves us with the absurdity of a few extra flights by the US Air Force over nuclear power plants.
Kyle Rabin, Senior Policy Analyst for the Riverkeeper, an environmental organization fighting to close down Indian Point politely says over flights represents "an important first step." He quickly adds, "It should be coupled with hardening of the spent fuel pools."
Why "harden" a pool? Here's the problem: Spent fuel pools are virtually unprotected against a ground attack. Why? Because the pools are not located inside those reassuringly thick concrete containment domes we've all seen pictures of. Only simple corrugated metal roofs cover the pools. (Some reactors have pools located inside the reactor containment building, but this construction poses a separate set of risks.)
In the case where spent fuel pools are outside the reactor domes, they were built as temporary and therefore quite shoddy structures. In fact, according to one expert, the roofs on these pools are a "step above a metal shack."
Hold it. Wait a minute. "A step above a metal shack"? Let this phrase sink in. "A step above a metal shack."
We're talking about a pool that contains a massive inventory of radioactivity, an inventory that, if released, would make Chernobyl look like a picnic. At Indian Point we're speaking of an inventory that could permanently contaminate - depending which way the wind was blowing - three-quarters of New York State.
Alarmingly, these highly vulnerable "metal shacks," sometimes also described as Butler-type, Quonset-hut type buildings dot our fair country from coast to coast.
Over flights may reassure some citizens, but let's face the brutal facts: the pilots of said planes would not be able to spot the terrorist who creeps towards a spent fuel pool with a deadly weapon.
Thus far Senator Hillary Clinton has opted for the ostrichism of over flights. Although she has raised serious questions regarding the viability of evacuation plans at Indian Point, she has failed to advocate the only responsible action: shut down Indian Point and the 102 other nuclear power plants scattered throughout New York State and the US.
Only after shutdown will the nukes stop churning out more and more irradiated fuel. Only then can the already-accumulated fuel sitting in vulnerable pools be shifted into sturdy casks made terrorist-proof by underground burial and/or berms.
Senator Clinton is not alone in her ostrichism. Of the 100 Senators in the US Senate, not one has had the courage to call for the shutdown of any one particularly unsafe reactor or for the shutdown of all reactors in the US.
Over Congress's Christmas recess, I, for one, am headed to the local offices of my US Senators to have a little chat about this matter.
Mina Hamilton is a writer in New York City. She can be reached at minaham@aol.com.
----
Senator: Military must review vaccine use
By Mark Benjamin
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
November 25, 2003
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20031124-045156-7401r.htm
WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 (UPI) -- A week after the Pentagon acknowledged one soldier's death might have been caused by a vaccine reaction, a U.S. senator is calling on the military to reconsider mandatory anthrax and smallpox vaccinations that he says could be causing "grievous" harm.
Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., plans on Tuesday to introduce a "Sense of the Senate" resolution asking Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to review the vaccine program amid growing reports of serious side effects. He also argues that U.S. troops face less risk of a biological attack since the overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
"There is a growing number of disturbing reports about how some of our servicemembers have contracted health problems shortly after receiving the anthrax and smallpox vaccines," Bingaman says in remarks prepared for delivery in the Senate Tuesday.
"These illnesses include mysterious pneumonia-like illnesses, heart problems, blood clots, and other medical conditions that have stricken otherwise young, healthy, and strong military personnel. It has even resulted in deaths."
On Nov. 19, the Pentagon acknowledged vaccinations might have led to the April death of Army nurse Rachael Lacy, who died after receiving shots for anthrax, smallpox and three other diseases. The Pentagon said her death might have been due to an underlying disorder that was triggered by one or more vaccines.
"Vaccinations are important tools to keep our servicemembers protected and healthy. Specialist Lacy's case was rare and clearly tragic," Dr. William Winkenwerder, assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs, said last week. "We plan to continue to carefully administer our vaccination programs, including careful monitoring of adverse events that follow administration."
Bingaman acknowledges in his prepared remarks that "vaccines are an important factor in ensuring protection of our nation's military personnel from health threats -- both natural or from biological weapons -- in overseas conflicts."
But he said he is concerned "our current Department of Defense policies may be failing them, with grievous consequences."
"An estimated 84 percent of the personnel who had anthrax vaccine shots ... reported having side effects or reactions," says Bingaman's resolution, a copy of which was obtained by United Press International.
The resolution also notes that a government advisory committee withdrew its support for expanding the smallpox vaccination program for first responders "after finding that 1 in 500 civilians vaccinated for smallpox had a serious vaccine event."
The resolution calls for the military to reconsider punishments given to servicemembers who refuse to take the vaccines. Some have been court-martialed for refusing the vaccinations and others have left the military rather than receive them.
Prospects for the resolution do not look promising -- Bingaman introduced the measure without any co-sponsors. But the issue is getting increased attention among veterans groups and soldiers' families.
Bingaman's statement cites UPI and CBS News reports that "have identified a growing number of deaths and severe illnesses that point to the anthrax and smallpox vaccines." It also quotes from UPI's reporting on problems of sick, injured and wounded soldiers, many of whom served in Iraq, who have been stuck for weeks and months in "medical hold" awaiting treatment.
"At Fort Knox, according to a UPI story, 369 of the 422 soldiers did not deploy to Operation Iraqi Freedom because of their illnesses. This includes, according to the story, 'strange clusters of heart problems and breathing problems (also experienced by) soldiers at Fort Stewart and other locations,'" Bingaman said.
"These are health problems that are often cited as adverse events accompanying the anthrax and smallpox vaccines," he said.
"We certainly do not know whether these cases have been caused by the anthrax or smallpox vaccine at this point. In fact, these personnel desperately await any medical treatment and that must be addressed."
----
Broad Bills Stuffed With Lawmakers' Pet Items
November 27, 2003
New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR and MICHAEL JANOFSKY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/politics/27LOBB.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 - In public, members of Congress have spent hundreds of hours debating the future of Medicare and the need for a national energy policy. Behind the scenes, they have spent even more time working on little-known provisions of the legislation that would benefit specific health care providers and energy companies.
Tucked inside the Medicare bill is an assortment of provisions that have nothing to do with providing prescription drug benefits to the elderly. The energy bill and the annual spending bills for federal agencies are also stuffed with pet projects, intended to win votes for the legislation.
Congress gave final approval to the Medicare bill on Tuesday, but is still wrestling with the energy measure.
The two bills - top priorities for President Bush and the Republican leaders of Congress - provided convenient vehicles for spending narrowly focused on special interests. Hundreds of health care providers and colleges now receive such largess, and the numbers have soared in recent years.
A provision benefiting a specific hospital in Tennessee was added to the Medicare bill at the last minute in an effort to get the vote of Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., Democrat of Tennessee.
The hospital was not named in the bill, but was described in terms that apply to only one hospital in the United States, the Regional Medical Center at Memphis. Mr. Ford's father, a former congressman, is a lobbyist for the hospital.
In the end, Mr. Ford voted against the bill. Bush administration officials now say they will probably not provide any extra money, even though the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, is urging them to do so because the hospital is in his state.
"We are the largest charity hospital in Tennessee," said Dr. Bruce W. Steinhauer, the hospital president. "We also provide millions of dollars worth of care to poor people from Mississippi and Arkansas."
The Medicare bill also increases payments for doctors in Alaska for a cancer treatment known as brachytherapy and for health maintenance organizations that have been dropping out of the Medicare market.
The energy bill includes $1 billion for a new nuclear reactor in Idaho, $800 million in federal loan guarantees for a coal gasification plant in Minnesota and tens of millions of dollars in subsidies for timber companies to log national forests for energy production.
Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said "parochial projects" were siphoning money away from higher priorities at many agencies.
Timothy M. Westmoreland, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said: "Big bills become larded with whatever bait it takes to get a majority vote. A lot of money in the Medicare bill is spent on things that have nothing to do with a prescription drug benefit."
For decades, it has been common practice for lawmakers to designate money for specific military bases, post offices and waterways. In recent years, they have funneled increasing amounts to specific hospitals, medical schools and health care projects.
Data collected by The Chronicle of Higher Education shows that spending on pork barrel projects at colleges and universities topped $2 billion this year for the first time. In a recent report, the Democratic staff of the House Appropriations Committee said the number of projects designated for assistance under the health and education spending bill nearly quadrupled, to 1,850, in the last three years.
Frank Clemente, director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch, a consumer group founded by Ralph Nader, said, "The Medicare bill is a grab bag of special interest provisions benefiting a large number of industries."
Public interest groups criticize pork barrel projects as shameful. But lawmakers often take credit for their handiwork back home.
Just before the Senate gave final approval to the Medicare bill on Tuesday, Dr. Frist displayed a chart listing 358 organizations that supported it.
Members of many of those groups stand to benefit from the bill and participated in a lobbying campaign coordinated by Susan B. Hirschmann, a former chief of staff to Tom DeLay of Texas, now the House Republican leader.
The push for special interest provisions to ensure passage of the Medicare and energy bills led, in some cases, to new variations on the traditional relationships between lobbyists and lawmakers.
Lobbyists have long tried to influence members of Congress. But increasingly members of Congress have put pressure on lobbyists to support their legislative priorities. E-mail messages obtained from recipients provide details of such reverse lobbying.
On Sept. 12, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, the chairman of the Finance Committee, sent a "wake-up call" to hospital executives around the country, asking for their help in fighting cuts proposed by the House.
"I met with Washington representatives from the American Hospital Association, the Federation of American Hospitals, the Catholic Health Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges and the National Association of Public Hospitals," Mr. Grassley wrote. "I asked them to stand with me in opposing these cuts."
Senator Grassley was successful. Hospitals were spared, and rural hospitals received substantial increases in payments.
Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California, the main author of the Medicare bill, tried to minimize the number of special interest provisions. But lobbyists say those provisions are sometimes needed to increase access to lifesaving medical technology.
The Medicare bill establishes a "special payment for brachytherapy," a procedure that uses radioactive "seeds" to treat a wide array of cancers. The bill stipulates that Medicare will pay for the seeds, in addition to the procedure required to implant them.
Two Georgia Republicans, Senator Saxby Chambliss and Representative Nathan Deal, proposed the new method of payment. Theragenics, which produces and sells seeds for use in brachytherapy, is based in Buford, Ga. It led a coalition of manufacturers and doctors who lobbied for the change, noting that some patients were more costly than others because they needed more seeds.
In the last week, Congress also agreed to a proposal to help a Missouri company, Briggs & Stratton, one of the world's largest producers of gasoline engines for lawn mowers and other outdoor equipment.
The provision was added to a catch-all spending bill by Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri. He wanted to prevent states from adopting tough new air pollution standards for small engines of the type made by the company.
Mr. Bond said the legislation would avert the closing of two Missouri plants and save 22,000 jobs around the country.
But Senator McCain said it was "an egregious provision that would have detrimental effects on air quality in many states, including my own."
The energy bill includes a section that would make it easier for a consortium of European and American companies, Louisiana Energy Services, to build a $1.2 billion uranium processing plant for nuclear energy near Hobbs, N.M.
The provision would speed up a federal review of the environmental effects of the project and would allow the Energy Department to transport radioactive waste from the plant to storage sites.
Senator McCain criticized the project as "the epitome of corporate welfare." The federal costs, he said, could reach $500 million to $1 billion. But a spokesman for the consortium, Marshall Cohen, said that it would pay for transporting the waste and that taxpayers would not have to bear any of the costs.
State officials in New Mexico said the project came about through the efforts of Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, who urged the consortium to build the plant there after local opposition blocked similar efforts in Tennessee and Louisiana. Mr. Domenici said the plant could generate 600 jobs.
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On Secret Iraq Trip, Bush Pays Holiday Visit to G.I.'s
November 27, 2003
By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/international/27CND-BUSH.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 - In a stunning mission conducted under enormous secrecy, President Bush flew into Baghdad today aboard Air Force One to share Thanksgiving dinner with United States officials and several hundred astonished American troops.
His trip - the first ever to Iraq by an American president - had been kept a matter of absolute secrecy by the White House, which had said that Mr. Bush was to spend the holiday weekend at his ranch outside Crawford, Tex.
Even his wife, Laura, and his parents, the former President George Bush and his wife, Barbara, who had also come to Crawford, received only a few hours' notice of the trip, officials said later.
The mission was an extraordinary gesture, with scant precedent, and was seen as an effort by Mr. Bush to show the importance he attaches to the embattled United States-led effort to pacify and democratize Iraq.
He told the troops that the United States would not back down in the face of stern resistance in Iraq.
The trip also carried a powerful public relations message, coming on a day when millions of Americans traditionally are at home before their televisions to watch parades or football games.
The presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, speaking on CNN, called the trip "a perfectly executed plan" that would be "one of the major moments in his biography." It would have provided "an incredible thrill" for the Americans, he said.
Mr. Bush was spirited out of Crawford on Wednesday in an unmarked car, without his customary motorcade, and boarded Air Force One, which left under the pretext that it was flying to Washington for maintenance work.
He then flew to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, where a few advisers and a small number of reporters sworn to secrecy awaited him. Boarding a second, identical, airplane, the group then flew on to Baghdad International Airport, arriving around dusk.
The president spent 2 hours 32 minutes in the country before heading back to Crawford, where he was due around daybreak Friday.
About 600 startled soldiers, most of them from the Army's First Armored Division and the 82nd Airborne, had arrived at a heavily guarded hangar at the Baghdad airport under the impression that they would be dining with L. Paul Bremer III, the chief United States administrator there, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition forces in Iraq.
Mr. Bremer told the troops that he was supposed to read a message from the president, but then said that normally "the most senior person" present should read it.
With a barely suppressed grin and almost glazed look on his face, he said, "Let's see if we've got anybody more senior." Mr. Bush then appeared from behind a curtain, wearing a gray army exercise jacket, and strode to the microphone.
The troops jumped to their feet to give him a tremendous cheer, and many held up cameras to snap his picture.
"Thank you," he said, adding with a grin, "I was just looking for a warm meal somewhere." He later helped serve the Thanksgiving meal.
Mr. Bush also met with four members of the Iraqi Governing Council.
The trip must have raised enormous concerns for the president's security team. A DHL cargo plane using the same airport on Saturday was struck in the wing by a shoulder-fired missile, forcing it to make an emergency landing. But such missiles, reliant on visual contact with their targets, are considered ineffective after dark.
"It's not real risky," Don Shepperd, a retired general, said on CNN. "At night, the risk is minimal."
The president's specially outfitted Boeing 747 flew with its lights out, aides said.
The trip, nonetheless, was clearly not free of risk, taking the president into the heart of a country where coalition forces have been the targets of dozens of attacks a day. More than 60 American troops have been killed in hostilities there this month, many of them in helicopter crashes.
The trip underscored the extraordinary ability of this administration to keep even the most dramatic of secrets.
Presidential aides later said Mr. Bush had conceived of the idea five or six weeks ago, but only informed Vice President Dick Cheney, the White House chief of staff Andrew Card, and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, on Wednesday.
Officials said afterward that if word of the trip had leaked out - even while Air Force One was in the air approaching Baghdad - the visit would have been canceled.
The president, who at times has been criticized for not responding publicly to the daily news of American casualties in Iraq, told the troops today that the American losses simply strengthened his determination:
"We did not charge hundreds of miles through the heart of Iraq, pay a bitter cost of casualties, defeat a ruthless dictator and liberate 25 million people only to retreat before a band of thugs and assassins," he said.
"We will prevail," he said. "We will win because our cause is just. We will win because we will stay on the offensive. And we will win because you're part of the finest military ever assembled."
News of the trip came out around noon, Washington time, or 8 p.m. in Baghdad, as Americans prepared to gather around Thanksgiving tables, assuming that their president was doing the same in Texas.
White House officials had given no hint that anything else was happening.
"The president will be spending Thanksgiving at his ranch here in Crawford, Tex.," a White House spokesman, Claire Buchan, said Wednesday. "He'll be joined by family and friends, including his mother and father, former President Bush and Mrs. Bush."
She even announced the menu, starting with "free-range turkey" and ending with "Prairie Chapel pecan pie made with pecans from the president's ranch."
She added, apparently unaware herself of the impending trip, "If there are updates, additionally, to what he does on Thanksgiving, we'll try and keep you posted."
The president's father had visited American troops at a desert outpost in Saudi Arabia on Thanksgiving Day in 1990, during the coalition buildup ahead of the first Gulf War. He was the first American president to visit a front-line area since President Richard Nixon visited Vietnam in 1969.
The younger Mr. Bush had earlier shown a flair for the dramatic gesture.
On May 1, wearing a flight suit, he piloted a navy S-3B Viking jet and landed on the deck of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, off the California coast.
There, in a scene since made controversial by the continued violence in Iraq, he stood before a banner that read "Mission Accomplished" and asserted that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."
Among earlier presidential trips to war zones were those of Dwight David Eisenhower, then president-elect, to Korean battle fronts in December 1952; trips to Vietnam by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966 and 1967; a 1969 visit with troops south of Saigon by President Richard Nixon; and President Bill Clinton's 1999 meeting with Kosovar refugees and NATO military personnel in Macedonia.
Other dramatic wartime missions included President Franklin D. Roosevelt's meeting on Aug. 8, 1941, with Winston Churchill aboard the H.M.S. Prince of Wales, in waters off Newfoundland; and Roosevelt's 1943 meeting in Tehran with Churchill and Stalin.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Fate of Idle Ex-Fighters Poses Challenge for Liberia
November 27, 2003
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/international/africa/27ARMS.html?pagewanted=all&position=
MONROVIA, Liberia - Schooled in the jungle insurgency of Sierra Leone, drafted into one of this country's most dreaded fighting units, Tejan Fofanah now spends his days peddling cigarettes on street corners.
A recent morning found him emerging from his sunless room in the basement of a burned-out hotel and ranging across this pummeled, once bitterly partitioned city in search of customers.
The day's journey brought him face to face with old friends and foes alike: one of his old AK-47 boys, now selling bottles of eau de Cologne; a mercenary from Sierra Leone, left homeless; a soldier from the rebel camp, now a regular customer.
It was the civilians now that got to him most. A former fighter for the exiled President Charles G. Taylor, he felt the razor's edge of their taunts. Everyone here knows that the men who not long ago went around looting and terrorizing on behalf of the man they called "Papi" have been left behind with nothing.
"I have many regrets," confessed Mr. Fofanah, quiet, gaunt and weary-eyed at 28. "I feel Charles Taylor deceived us."
As Liberia tries to move on from its latest and most devastating bout of war, what to do with men like Mr. Fofanah is the country's most formidable challenge. The repercussions of its success - or failure - are likely to be felt far beyond Liberia.
For over a decade, ragtag mercenaries recruited and trained in Liberia have roved across West Africa, feeding off of one conflict after another. Stopping that flow once and for all, experts say, is vital to any hopes for the region's stability.
Precise numbers are not available. But the United Nations mission in Liberia estimates there are 38,000 former combatants from among Mr. Taylor's loyalists and their two rebel adversaries. About 40 percent are believed to be under 18.
Under the latest peace deal, leaders of all three factions have agreed to disband their forces and turn in their guns to the United Nations, but many fighters are holding on to their mortars and AK-47's. With barely 4,700 peacekeepers here, the United Nations mission is hardly in a position to disarm them by force.
"It is the last leverage the fighting factions have - their fighters," said a senior United Nations official. "Yielding the rifle is the ultimate thing for any fighter. One has to be sure of his or her political future, economic future and security."
[About 800 Liberian fighters have disarmed voluntarily, United Nations officials announced Wednesday. The formal disarmament effort starts Monday.]
Disarmament could pose the biggest test for the United Nations mission in Liberia. Its proposal carries a price tag of more than $49 million.
Former combatants are to receive $300 each for joining the disarmament program and giving up their weapons. They are supposed to get vocational training, subsidized employment, seeds and tools to work the land. Ultimately, they would be urged to go back home.
Homecomings are likely to raise new challenges for a country divided and damaged by 14 years of conflict. Will civilians accept soldiers who wreaked such havoc? Will child soldiers be embraced by their families? Will they find a place in Liberia's ruined economy?
Liberia has tried to disarm its fighters before, and it has failed. Soldiers loyal to one warlord have switched their loyalties to another, torn up their former combatant identity cards and chucked the sacks of cooked, ground wheat, known as bulgur wheat, that they received in exchange for their guns and picked up new ones.
"I can't eat bulgur wheat!" Muhammad Jalloh, a 38-year-old former fighter, recalled bitterly the other day. "I wanted them to do something for me. They don't give me a job. They don't give me nothing."
His anger was directed at the disarmament process in 1997, after Mr. Taylor was elected president. Barely two years later, he took up another gun, on behalf of an anti-Taylor insurgency called Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy.
One recent afternoon, Mr. Jalloh, a bullet wound in his left shoulder and an AK-47 in his lap, sat guarding his group's headquarters in Tubmanburg, north of here, holding out for more this time. "I want them to give me a job," he insisted. "I got to do something for myself. I can do business. Dry goods."
The rickety transition from war to peace is on stark display at the Ducor Hotel, a onetime four-star establishment with panoramic views of the sea. Throughout the latest war, it was the headquarters of Mr. Fofanah's antiterrorist unit. Artillery positions were erected on the rooftop. The floor-to-ceiling windows offered a strategic view of the two bridges leading into downtown, the war's most fearsome front line.
Soldiers occupied three floors of sea-view rooms, turning the place into a Liberian version of a New York City crack den. The stairwells turned into toilets. Stray bullets sometimes came whizzing in.
Once, an unruly fighter who calls himself Peter Tosh was tortured in the hotel foyer, for shooting a young woman in the knee. Tubes of hot plastic were pressed against the flesh of his back, leaving dark, almond-shaped welts.
Since Mr. Taylor left the country on Aug. 11, his men began clearing out of the hotel. The Ducor's caretakers cleaned the stairwells and corralled the handful of remaining fighters into a subterranean corner.
The soldiers began quieting down, more out of shame, their civilian neighbors figured, than anything else. They had been promised a reward after the second rebel attack on Monrovia last June. But it never came, only a third devastating assault. Mr. Taylor went into exile.
"They realized the man never left them a penny," said Moses Youlo, a former Ducor Hotel security guard who still keeps watch over the place. "Civilians started mocking them. `Oh, you're a soldier, you're with A.T.U. and you don't have a cent.' "
Liberia being a small country, the past of a fighter-turned-cigarette- vendor like Mr. Fofanah is well-known. A high school graduate from Kenema, Sierra Leone, he joined the dreaded Sierra Leonean rebel group, Revolutionary United Front, which Mr. Taylor supported.
Later, Mr. Fofanah came to Liberia at the behest of one of Mr. Taylor's principal allies, Sam Bockarie, a Sierra Leonean warlord. Mr. Fofanah joined the unit, run by Mr. Taylor's American-born son, Chuckie, and raked in $150 a month.
Mr. Taylor has since been indicted by a war crimes tribunal on charges that he aided the Sierra Leonean rebels. Mr. Bockarie, also indicted, was killed this year.
Mr. Fofanah's version of his past contains an important - but easy to understand - elision. He denies any role in the Sierra Leonean rebel force, saying only that he joined the Liberian unit, because he saw it as a modern, professional army.
Much of his time, he said, was spent keeping records. Only during the most terrifying final days of the battle for Monrovia earlier this year was he compelled, he said, to fight on the front line. In exchange, he could dip into the goods that his men had stolen from the shops on their side of the city. It was the only way he and Patricia Johns, a fishmonger whom he calls his wife, could eat. He had not been paid in months.
He said he turned in his gun in mid-October under orders from a commander; the claim is impossible to verify. He is waiting for something in return. He said his goal was to attend a university (there are none now in the country) and study criminal justice. Most of his comrades, he said, want money. "If people say they want to disarm without money, I for one know the problem will not be solved," he said.
On his cigarette run this morning, Mr. Fofanah is among a long line of pedestrians crossing one of the old front-line bridges. Head down, keeping himself inconspicuous, he marches past the peacekeepers and under the billboards polka-dotted with bullet holes and glances across the lagoon at the market stalls, where just a few months ago, in the heat of war, his men had decapitated a rebel soldier and brandished the head for all to see.
On this morning, he runs into one of those old rebels, who happens to be one of his former buddies, Moses Vanery, 20, of Sierra Leone.
Mr. Vanery, too, started out with the Sierra Leone rebel force. "They kill my mother, they kill my father, so I join them," was his explanation. He, too, was drafted into Mr. Taylor's elite unit. Mr. Fofanah helped train him.
Mr. Vanery did not last long. Unpaid, disenchanted, he returned home, signed up for a disarmament program run by the United Nations and learned how to be a carpenter. But earlier this year, he dropped his tools and came back to Liberia - this time, to fight with Mr. Taylor's enemies. He was offered $500 up front. He was promised more if his side ousted Mr. Taylor.
He is still waiting on that promise. For now, he tells Mr. Fofanah, he must find a place to sleep every night, still holding on to his Kalashnikov, his only bargaining chip. "Besides my arm, I got nothing," Mr. Vanery told him.
Later, Mr. Fofanah said he felt sorry for his old friend, who now, he noted disapprovingly, sleeps in a tin-roofed house in the swamp. Also, he looks unkempt. "Look at his nails," Mr. Fofanah said. "They're dirty."
-------- arms
Bombing Anywhere On Earth In Less Than Two Hours
Force projecion world wide 24/7 is the goal of the US Air Force
Washngton - Nov 27, 2003
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/rocketscience-03zzr.html
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the US Air Force share a vision of a new transformational capability that aims to provide a means of delivering a substantial payload from within the continental United States (CONUS) to anywhere on Earth in less than two hours.
This capability would free the U.S. military from reliance on forward basing to enable it to react promptly and decisively to destabilizing or threatening actions by hostile countries and terrorist organizations.
The US Government's vision of an ultimate prompt global reach capability (circa 2025 and beyond) is engendered in a reusable Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle (HCV). It is envisioned that this autonomous aircraft would be capable of taking off from a conventional military runway and striking targets 9,000 nautical miles distant in less than two hours.
It could carry a 12,000-pound payload consisting of Common Aero Vehicles (CAVs), cruise missiles, Small Diameter Bombs (SDB) or other munitions. HCVs as part of the future U.S. force structure will provide the country dominant capability to wage a sustained campaign from CONUS on an array of time-critical targets that are both large in number and diverse in nature while providing aircraft-like operability and mission recall capability.
The US Government is interested in innovative HCV concepts utilizing novel technologies that mitigate heat load and extend range. Such innovative concepts could enable effective prompt global reach missions and potentially provide a reusable first stage of a two-stage-to-orbit (TSTO) access to space vehicle. This vision is consistent with the goals of the DoD/NASA National Aerospace Initiative.
The United States, however, needs a prompt global reach operational capability in the much nearer term (see AF Space Command Operationally Responsive Spacelift and Prompt Global Strike Mission Need Statements).
This near-term operational capability is embodied in the CAV munitions delivery system integrated with a low-cost, operationally responsive, rocket booster. Essentially, CAV is an unpowered, maneuverable, hypersonic glide vehicle capable of carrying approximately 1,000 pounds in munitions or other payload. This concept has been studied since the mid-nineties and conceptual designs utilizing existing technologies have been developed that offer substantial capability.
CAV designs based on existing technologies are predicted to have a downrange glide on the order of 3,000 nautical miles. Advanced CAV designs have also been developed that offer substantially greater downrange (approximately 9,000 nautical miles) and improved maneuverability (approximately 3,000 nautical miles cross-range). This enhanced performance CAV, henceforth referred to as the Enhanced CAV, requires significant technology development particularly in the areas of thermal protection and guidance, navigation, and control.
In the far-term, the HCV itself could deliver CAVs to multiple targets. In the near-term, CAV requires a launch vehicle or other means of attaining its pierce point conditions in terms of geo-location, altitude, attitude and velocity. Expendable rocket boosters offer adequate near-term capability.
However, existing booster systems are costly and in limited supply. As a consequence, The US Government intends to develop a low-cost, responsive launch vehicle called the Small Launch Vehicle (SLV) under the FALCON program. The program envisions the SLV design being integrated and developed in parallel with the Enhanced CAV design.
The SLV should serve a two-fold function in that it will also provide a low-cost, responsive launch capability for placing small satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO). A total cost per launch (not including payload specific costs) of five million dollars or less is desired. Taken together, the two objectives satisfied by the SLV are a significant spiral in the development of an Operationally Responsive Spacelift (ORS) capability currently being pursued by the Air Force.
Substantial commonality exists between the key technologies that will enable the Enhanced CAV in the near-term and the HCV in the far-term. As a consequence, CAV (using available technologies), Enhanced CAV, and HCV are viewed to lie on a common evolutionary design and technology maturation path.
Therefore, the FALCON program will be an incremental program in that as key capabilities are matured and demonstrated in flight, opportunities will be generated to spiral them into Systems Development and Demonstration (SDD) programs that will provide successive enhancements to the country's capability to perform prompt global strike missions from CONUS (or equivalent reach from alternative US basing).
Recent military engagements in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq have underscored both the capabilities and limitations of United States air forces in terms of placing ordnance on military targets. While advancements in target identification and precision strike have been abundantly demonstrated, deficiencies in engaging and defeating time-critical and high value, hard and deeply buried targets (HDBT) have also been revealed.
Moreover, the current and future international political environment severely constrains this country's ability to conduct long-range strike missions on high-value, time critical targets from outside CONUS (OCONUS).
This restriction coupled with the subsonic cruise speed limitations of the current bomber fleet translates to greatly extended mission times. Consequences include failure to successfully engage and destroy a large subset of high value, time-critical targets, severe reduction in the tonnage of ordnance that can be placed on targets within a given timeframe, and excessive physical and emotional fatigue levied upon bomber crews.
The US Strategic Command has a critical need for responsive, effective, and affordable conventional strike to provide deterrence, power projection and coercion, delivering munitions in minutes to hours globally from CONUS (or equivalent reach from alternative US basing). The intent is to hold adversary vital interests at risk at all times, counter anti-access threats, serve as a halt phase shock force and conduct suppression of enemy air defense and lethal strike missions as part of integrated strategic campaigns in the Twenty-First Century.
During the high-threat early phases of an engagement, critical mission objectives include the rollback of enemy Integrated Air Defenses (IADs) and the prosecution of high-value targets. Throughout the remainder of the campaign, a continuous vigilance and immediate lethal strike capability are required to effectively prosecute real-time and time-critical targets and to maintain persistent suppression of enemy IADs. A system capable of responsively and effectively performing these mission objectives would provide a "no win" tactical deterrence against which an enemy's defenses would be ineffective.
The US Government acknowledges the differences between past research and development programs, and the FALCON vision. However, the importance of leveraging the lessons learned from past programs should not be minimized.
The US Government expects the Offeror to utilize to the maximum extent possible the knowledge base gained from past programs. This leveraging of capabilities can be accomplished, in part, through teaming with partners that possess expertise in critical technology areas.
One important deviation from past approaches will be the major emphasis upon incremental flight-testing in the FALCON program. The US Government desires technologies be developed in the context of a "building block" flight test approach and that the FALCON program remain demonstration-focused.
The US Government seeks to open up the design space and provide a catalyst for exploring "clean sheet of paper" system design philosophies and global strike mission scenarios especially for far-term approaches. Creative integration of the latest advances across a broad suite of component technologies, and innovative CONOPS will enable a revolutionary advance in global strike capabilities.
The Offeror is encouraged to "think out of the box" and propose unique collaborative design methodologies, analysis tools, processes, capabilities, concepts, innovative teaming arrangements and business practices to reduce the cost of product development.
-------- business
Consultant on Iraq contracts employed president's brother
By Stephen Fidler and Thomas Catįn in London
November 27 2003
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1069493552660&p=1012571727172
Neil Bush, a younger brother of US President George W. Bush, has had a $60,000-a-year employment contract with a top adviser to a Washington-based consulting firm set up this year to help companies secure contracts in Iraq.
Neil Bush disclosed the payments during divorce proceedings in March from his now ex-wife, Sharon. The divorce was finalised in April and the court papers were disclosed by the Houston Chronicle this week.
Mr Bush said he was co-chairman of Crest Investment Corporation, a company based in Houston, Texas, that invests in energy and other ventures. For this he received $15,000 every three months for working an average three or four hours a week.
The other co-chairman and principal of Crest is Jamal Daniel, a Syrian-American who is an advisory board member of New Bridge Strategies, a company set up this year by a group of businessmen with close links to the Bush family or administrations. Its chairman is Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush's campaign director in the 2000 presidential elections.
Other figures at New Bridge include Ed Rogers, its vice-chairman and a senior official in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, and Lanny Griffith, with whom he works in the lobby firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers. Lord Charles Powell, adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, is listed as an advisory board member.
On its website, New Bridge describes itself as being created to "take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq".
In his deposition, Neil Bush said he provided Crest "miscellaneous consulting services". This included "answering phone calls when Jamail [sic] Daniel, the other co-chairman, called and asked for advice".
There is evidence that the relationship between Mr Bush and Mr Daniel goes further. Joseph Peacock, Crest's company secretary, is one of the original investors in Ignite, Neil Bush's educational software company based in Austin, Texas.
In 1996, Mr Daniel and his wife hosted a $1,000-a-plate fund-raising dinner at their Houston mansion for the Texas Alliance Against Alcohol Abuse. The event was chaired by Sharon Bush, while George H. W. Bush, the former president, and his wife Barbara were to be present, according to the Houston Chronicle in 1996.
Other investors in Ignite, which was founded last year, include George H. W. and Barbara Bush, and Winston Wong, a Taiwan businessman who started the Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. The court papers further show Mr Bush benefits from a contract with Grace, a company also backed by Jiang Miangheng, son of Jiang Zemin, the former president of China.
Under the deal, signed on August 15 2002, Grace would pay Mr Bush $2m in shares over five years, issued in annual $400,000 increments.
In return, according to the Los Angeles Times, Mr Bush agreed to "provide GSMC from time to time with business strategies and policies; latest information and trends of the related industry, and other advice", according to the contract.
A call to New Bridge in Houston went unanswered yesterday, a holiday in the US. Previous attempts to contact Mr Daniel through the office were unsuccessful.
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Boeing could face widening crisis over ethics breakdown
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Nov 27, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031127113433.liwvcueb.html
Already rocked by a series of ethics problems, Boeing could be facing a deeper crisis that would affect the bottom line for the aerospace giant and one of the largest US defense contractors.
Earlier this week, Boeing sacked chief financial officer Mike Sears for improperly recruiting a US Air Force official to join the firm at the time she was involved in decisions that affected the company.
The case involved the hiring of Darleen Druyun, who retired late last year as the Air Force's principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and management, and joined Boeing in January.
Druyun, believed to be a key official in crafting a controversial tanker leasing deal with Boeing while at the Air Force, was fired by Boeing this week along with Sears.
Boeing said it had hired former US senator Warren Rudman to review the company's ethics procedures to avoid a repeat of the latest incident.
But the turbulence may only be starting for the aviation giant, which had been sanctioned by the Pentagon earlier this year following the discovery that it had obtained secret documents from its chief competitor, Lockheed Martin Corp., for a bid on a rocket project.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said his staff was investigating if the Pentagon should suspend the 18 billion dollar deal with Boeing to lease 100 commercial wide-body jets and convert them into refueling tanker aircraft.
Asked if the contract should be delayed pending review, Rumsfeld replied: "At a senior staff meeting this morning, I asked our senior folks to ask themselves that question and to look into it."
Senator John McCain, a critic of the leasing plan, said the shakeup this week at Boeing confirmed his concerns about the company's conduct in the leasing contract.
"I am awaiting the completion of a full and complete investigation by the (Pentagon) Inspector General," McCain said. However, it strains credulity to assume that this action has nothing to do with the tanker lease deal."
The Boeing lease cost almost six billion dollars more than an outright purchase, but it allowed the Air Force to buy now and pay later. Critics termed the contract a Boeing bailout.
Other woes could be in Boeing's future as well. Federal law prohibits a company from offering jobs to public officials while the official is overseeing government business with the company, and violations can result in prison terms as well as fines.
Boeing's image meanwhile is taking a battering.
The problems with the tanker deal in the wake of the Lockheed scandal "make it clear that Boeing's ethical problems go right to the very top of its management," Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a watchdog group.
"After being hit with a billion-dollar sanction earlier this year by the Defense Department for unethical contracting practices, Boeing cannot assert that its ethical problems are the result of a few corrupt middle managers."
Boeing chairman and chief executive Phil Condit said the company was committed to rooting out ethical problems.
"Boeing must and will live by the highest standards of ethical conduct in every aspect of our business," Condit said. "When we determine there have been violations of our standards, we will act swiftly to address them."
Meanwhile, the Times of London reported that EADS, the European aerospace group that owns Airbus, is weighing up legal action against Boeing in the wake of the tanker deal row.
The report said the Franco-German group has told Pentagon investigators that its contract offer for the same deal suffered "collateral damage" because, it was claimed, Boeing had access to details of its bid.
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Northrop Grumman Takes Aim At Hypersonic Weapon Delivery System
Nov 27, 2003
SPACEWAR
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/rocketscience-03zzp.html
El Segundo - Northrop Grumman Corporation will help the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Air Force develop a concept for a high-speed, unmanned aircraft and related "glide weapons" that could deliver conventional, non-nuclear weapons from the U.S. to anywhere on the globe in about two hours.
This hypersonic cruise weapon system would allow the U.S. to conduct effective, time-critical strike missions on a global basis without relying on overseas military bases.
Northrop Grumman's six-month cost-sharing study contract will support the system definition phase (Phase I) of the joint DARPA/Air Force Application and Launch from the Continental United States (FALCON) technology demonstration program.
"This project continues the investments that Northrop Grumman has made in recent years to help the U.S. government reach its goal of affordable, reusable access to space," said Doug Young, director of space access programs for Northrop Grumman's Integrated Systems sector.
"The company's heritage of innovative, advanced technology strike systems and its global leadership in unmanned air vehicle systems will provide critical momentum to the nation's efforts to define, develop and deploy a military space plane."
The DARPA/Air Force vision for FALCON is to develop, by 2025, a reusable hypersonic cruise vehicle that could take off from a conventional military runway and strike targets 9,000 nautical miles away in less than two hours.
Flying at speeds up to eight times the speed of sound (Mach 8), the hypersonic cruise vehicle would carry a 12,000-pound payload comprising several unpowered, maneuverable, hypersonic glide vehicles called common aero vehicles; cruise missiles; small diameter bombs or other munitions. Each common aero vehicle would carry approximately 1,000 pounds in munitions.
As a step toward implementing the hypersonic cruise vehicle concept, DARPA and the Air Force propose developing, by 2010, a global strike capability that would launch common aero vehicles on a low-cost, mission-responsive small launch vehicle. DARPA and the Air Force are developing the small launch vehicle under a separate contract.
During Phase 1, Northrop Grumman will develop concepts for demonstration and operational versions of the hypersonic cruise vehicle and identify technologies required to develop and deploy each.
The team will design a hypersonic cruise vehicle with a high lift-to-drag ratio and adequate flight control surfaces; define a thermal protection system that will allow the vehicle to fly at extreme speeds; and resolve guidance, navigation, communications, and command and control issues caused by the ionized boundary layer that forms at extreme speeds between the vehicle and the atmosphere.
The team will also perform subsystem and system-level trade studies to produce preferred design concepts for demonstration and operational versions of the common aero vehicle.
The demonstration common aero vehicle system will be able to fly 3,000 nautical miles in approximately 800 seconds and deliver a 1,000-pound penetrator munition. An enhanced version of this demonstration system will be able to fly 9,000 nautical miles in approximately 3,000 seconds. The common aero vehicle and its enhanced version will also be able to "turn" to hit targets up to 800 and 3,000 nautical miles, respectively, off a straight trajectory.
For the most part, common aero vehicles require the same technologies as hypersonic cruise vehicles, but also need a more rigorous thermal protection system to prevent their payloads from melting at re-entry speeds as high as Mach 25. By comparison, the hypersonic cruise vehicle will return to its base at speeds of approximately Mach 3-4.
In addition to its hypersonic cruise vehicle and common aero vehicle system-definition work, Northrop Grumman will also develop high-level concepts of operation for basing and deploying the hypersonic cruise vehicle and common aero vehicles to achieve the desired global strike capability.
The current six-month system definition phase, which includes multiple contracts, is the first of three phases planned for the FALCON program. At the conclusion of Phase I, DARPA and the Air Force will decide whether to proceed with Phase II, a 36-month system design and development phase, and a subsequent Phase III, a 30-month weapon system demonstration phase.
Northrop Grumman's FALCON program team is led by its Integrated Systems sector, but includes significant roles for the company's Mission Systems sector, Reston, Va., and Electronic Systems sector, Baltimore. The team also includes subcontractors Aerojet-General Corporation, Sacramento, Calif.; Space Works, Atlanta, Ga.; Textron Systems, Wilmington, Mass.; HITCO Carbon Composites, Gardena, Calif.; and Pratt & Whitney, East Hartford, Conn.
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Lockheed Martin Wins $600 Million Air Force IT Contract
Nov 27, 2003
Space Daily
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/milspace-comms-03zv.html
Seabrook - Lockheed Martin has won a contract valued up to $600 million to support U.S. Air Force information technology requirements in the National Capital Region of Washington, D.C. The new contract will support the Air Force Pentagon Communications Agency (AFPCA) by providing managed services and classified voice, video and data assistance.
A full range of services include call center operations, enterprise IT management, VIP requirements, classified systems support, program management and engineering, and information assurance.
Supporting about 7,500 Defense Department users in the region, AFPCA provides a full range of unclassified and classified, mission-essential IT services. The Information Technology Services contract involves a 10-year program with funding to include a transition period and nine 1-year options.
Linda Gooden, president of Lockheed Martin Information Technology, said, "We have assembled a powerful team poised to give the best, most comprehensive support possible to meet the critical requirements of the U.S. Air Force and its customers. We are proud to have been selected to work and succeed with AFPCA in this important national mission."
Customers served by AFPCA include officials at Headquarters Air Force, the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Military Command Center (NMCC), plus several other government agencies who work with DoD. The contract consolidates some 50 existing contracts with multiple vendors.
The lead company is Seabrook, Md.-based Lockheed Martin Information Technology, whose managed services and enterprise-level systems integration capabilities serve a wide variety of Defense and civil government agencies. The company's teammates include General Dynamics IS&T, SAIC, Titan, Booz Allen and Hamilton, SI International, SII, TDS, ESS, GMSI, Trawick, DSD Labs, NOC Technologies, AlphaTech, Tessada, and Phoenix Systems.
-------- china
China Warns Taiwan Again On Issue of Independence
Official Vows 'Strong Reaction' If Referendum Law Is Passed
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 27, 2003; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16617-2003Nov26.html
BEIJING, Nov. 26 -- China warned Taiwan on Wednesday that it would deliver a "strong reaction" if the island passed a law allowing its citizens to vote on proposals that could lead to independence. But the main Taiwanese political parties immediately dismissed the threat and pushed ahead with plans to adopt the referendum legislation as early as Thursday.
The Chinese warning and the swift response in Taipei appeared to set the stage for a showdown after more than a week of steadily escalating rhetoric by Chinese officials, who have threatened war if Taiwan continues taking what they describe as gradual steps toward formal independence.
"If a referendum law that sets no limits passes, I believe we will make a strong reaction," Zhang Mingqing, a spokesman for the Chinese government's Taiwan Affairs Office, said during a televised news conference. "Without a doubt, we will have a strong reaction. As to what the reaction will be, you will know in a few days."
Zhang declined to elaborate when asked whether a military response was possible.
For more than a week, Chinese officials, including Premier Wen Jiabao, have been attacking Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian's plan to pass a referendum law, draft a new constitution and put it up for an island-wide vote in 2006. They accuse Chen of trying to use the process to define Taiwan as an independent state, and have called on the United States to help stop him.
But Zhang's statements represent the clearest attempt yet by China to draw a line for what would trigger a Chinese response. Zhang said China would react if Taiwan adopted a referendum law that sets no limits on what issues the public could decide, and he specified that the law should prohibit referendums to change Taiwan's official name -- the Republic of China -- its national flag and the definition of its national territory.
Zhang said China supported the Taiwanese people's "demands for democracy" but warned that a referendum law that set no limits on content could "create the legal basis for Taiwan independence" and would provoke a strong response. "We will not sit by and do nothing faced with provocative activities aimed at splitting the motherland," he said.
Chinese officials have argued that changes to Taiwan's name, flag or the definition of its territory would amount to a declaration of independence and force China to attack the self-governing island of 23 million people where Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party fled in 1949 after the Communist Revolution. China maintains that Taiwan is part of Chinese territory.
The Bush administration has said it does not support Taiwanese independence and opposes moves by China or Taiwan that would unilaterally change the status quo and upset peace and stability in the region. But Bush has also promised to do "whatever it takes" to defend Taiwan, and Chinese officials complain that the United States has encouraged Chen by not taking a clear position on his referendum proposal.
Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party and its two main opposition parties denounced Zhang's warning as bullying and interference in the island's domestic affairs. Within hours of the news conference, legislative leaders in Taiwan announced plans to open debate on the referendum legislation Thursday morning and call a vote by late afternoon.
Taiwan's opposition Nationalist and People First parties had opposed a referendum law in the past, arguing that it would destabilize relations with China. But they suddenly reversed course earlier this month in a bid to seize the moral high ground from Chen in the run-up to presidential elections in March.
"We are a party which follows democratic principles, so there is no reason to stop this legislation," Alex Tsai, a Nationalist Party spokesman, told the BBC. "The opposition accuse us of following the Chinese communists' will, but we are not going to fall into that kind of trap."
Emile Sheng, a scholar of Taiwanese politics at Soochow University in Taipei, said Chen and his rivals were "trapped in a game of chicken. Because of the election, I don't see anyone backing down."
Taiwanese legislators were engaged in last-minute negotiations Wednesday night about the wording of the referendum law.
Cabinet spokesman Lin Chia-lung said the government's bill did not specifically prohibit or permit referendums on Taiwan's name, flag or sovereignty. But it does allow referendums on changes to the constitution, where such issues are now settled, and it also gives the president the power to call referendums on national security issues when Taiwan's sovereignty is threatened by outside forces.
Chen's supporters argue that the referendum law should cover issues of national identity and sovereignty, not because they want to use it to declare independence -- polls show that a majority of Taiwanese surveyed favor the status quo -- but because they want to ensure that the public has the final say over any reunification deal struck with the mainland.
The opposition, on the other hand, has traditionally insisted that any referendum law include language barring votes on such issues. In recent weeks, though, it has retreated on this point, hoping to check a slide in the polls.
Su Chi, a professor at Tamkang University who served as Taiwan's top mainland affairs official when the Nationalists were last in power, said his party decided to endorse a broad referendum law to force Chen to back down. Before, Chen could always play to pro-independence voters without accepting responsibility for his proposals, which were always blocked.
"Now, we want him to show his true colors," Su said. "We want him to back down and take the situation more seriously."
Special correspondent Tim Culpan in Taipei contributed to this report.
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Taiwan Passes Independence Referendum Law
November 27, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Taiwan-Referendum-Law.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- Taiwanese lawmakers passed a historic proposal Thursday that gives the president the power to hold an independence vote if China tries to use force to make the island unify with the mainland.
The passage of the ``defensive referendum'' article with a 108-82 vote was a major show of defiance to Beijing, which has warned the island that such moves could lead to a devastating war between the rivals.
Beijing insists that self-ruled, democratic Taiwan -- 100 miles off the mainland's coast -- is part of China's territory.
Chinese leaders fear the Taiwanese will hold a referendum to reject eventual unification with China. Beijing also opposes other changes that deal with the sensitive sovereignty issue, such as adopting a new flag or changing the island's official name, the Republic of China.
But on Thursday, lawmakers soundly rejected radical versions of a broader referendum bill that placed no restrictions on holding votes on the touchy sovereignty issues that worry China the most.
Legislators passed a more watered-down version that gives the legislature the power to screen potential referendum issues that might involve changes to the constitution. The version was written by the opposition, which holds a majority in the legislature and opposes independence.
Under the new law, lawmakers can block a referendum if the legislature does not approve the proposed referendum issues that involve the constitution, which includes sovereignty issues. The opposition also defeated the ruling party's proposal that the government could initiate a referendum. Instead, lawmakers supported the opposition's demand that only the public and the legislature could initiate a vote.
The island's jittery stock market closed down sharply by 2 percent on Thursday amid fears the vote on the referendum proposal would provoke China, dealers said.
But a few hundred referendum supporters held a rally outside the legislature. One protester, who only gave his surname, Wu, said, ``Any country, including America, Japan and China, shouldn't interfere with our referendum rights. It's our basic right.''
Referendums have been a major issue in the presidential campaign. President Chen Shui-bian, who is seeking re-election in the March vote, has pushed hard for a referendum law.
Chen has long said that he wouldn't hold a referendum on sovereignty issues as long as China doesn't attack. The ``defensive referendum'' now gives the president a legal mechanism to hold such a vote.
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Taiwan Passes Independence Referendum Law
November 27, 2003
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/international/asia/29TAIWAN.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan, Friday, Nov. 28 - Taiwan's legislature took a half-step back on Thursday night from an immediate confrontation with China, passing a bill that would allow national referendums on constitutional and sovereignty issues only under very narrow circumstances.
Chinese officials had tried to dissuade Taiwanese politicians from endorsing any bill to provide for referendums, but had devoted most of their criticisms to a rival measure, supported by President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan, that would have made it easy for him to call referendums. Most provisions of that bill were defeated in the legislature on Thursday night.
Chinese and American officials had feared that legislation permitting a referendum on Taiwanese independence from the mainland would lead to a showdown in the Taiwan Straits that neither China nor the United States wants now.
China is trying to pay more attention to economic growth, especially in its interior provinces, while the United States has been preoccupied with Iraq and with seeking China's cooperation in trying to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program.
The Bush administration has reaffirmed repeatedly the principle that there is one China encompassing Taiwan and the mainland, but Chinese officials have called for the United States to do more. China regards Taiwan as a renegade province and has threatened to use military force to prevent it from becoming a fully independent nation.
Mr. Chen and his Democratic Progressive Party have tried to move Taiwan gingerly toward somewhat greater independence status and had sought a referendum bill for that purpose. But most of the provisions in the final bill came from amendments by the opposition, which opposes full independence and has more seats in the politically fractured legislature than Mr. Chen's party. Even a narrowly written referendum bill could still irk Beijing's leaders, by establishing a precedent for holding any referendums at all on what Beijing regards as Chinese soil.
The final bill bars referendums on changing the flag of Taiwan or Taiwan's official name, the Republic of China. The legislation also makes it extremely hard to hold a referendum to amend the constitution and bars referendums to draft a new or completely rewritten constitution.
Following approval of the bill, lawmakers from Mr. Chen's party were so upset that they tried to schedule additional votes to undo it. They contended the law involved an unconstitutional transfer of power from the executive branch to the legislature, by allowing the legislature to call referendums but making it hard for the president to do so.
"There are certain items we find unacceptable," Hsiao Bi-khim, a member of the legislature who is the director of the party's international policy division, said in a telephone interview. She said President Chen might veto the bill if it survives.
A government spokesman said the executive branch would issue no comment on the legislation at least until Friday.
A provision that could still cause some dismay in Beijing is one allowing Taiwan's president to call a referendum on "national security" if the island were faced with a clear foreign threat to national security that could erode Taiwan's territorial integrity. Even this provision stopped short of explicitly allowing a referendum on independence.
Dozens of other provisions were adopted at the suggestion of the Nationalist Party and its smaller ally, the People First Party, which favor an eventual reunification with the mainland.
Justin Chou, a spokesman for the Nationalist Party, said that the party was "very happy with the result" of Thursday's voting. The party was not acting because of the threats from China but because of what it saw as the best course for Taiwan, he added.
There was no immediate reaction to the bill from Beijing, where officials sometimes mull events in Taiwan for a day or two before issuing a response.
Zhang Mingqing, a spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office of China's State Council, had warned in a televised news conference on Wednesday in Beijing that if the legislature passed a broad bill allowing a referendum on independence with no limits, "We will make a strong reaction."
The Nationalist Party and People First Party have long resisted the passage of any referendum bill, describing it as unnecessary and possibly dangerous given President Chen's separatist tilt. They changed their position earlier this month, favoring a referendum bill provided it were carefully circumscribed.
The parties changed tack after the lead in the polls for the presidential candidate from the Nationalist Party, Lien Chan, and his vice-presidential running mate from the People First Party, James Soong, started to evaporate as Mr. Chen appealed to anti-China sentiment. Polls this month have suggested that while Mr. Lien and Mr. Soong may still have a lead, the race is too close to call.
The most important provision of Thursday's bill would make it hard for President Chen to hold a referendum to amend the constitution, unless the amendments had already been approved by three-quarters of the legislature and the legislature scheduled the referendum.
Assembling even a simple majority of the legislature, much less three-quarters, is very hard in Taiwan's faction-ridden politics. Mr. Chen had originally pushed for a bill allowing national referendums partly on the grounds that the will of the people, expressed through a referendum, could be used to make changes to the constitution even without a three-quarters majority of the legislature.
Chinese officials and newspapers have been very critical of Mr. Chen, accusing him of leaning too far toward a separate Taiwan. The official New China News Agency said on Thursday that an article today in a government-controlled Chinese newspaper described Mr. Chen as "a troublemaker in international society."
-------- iraq
Iraq Road Map to Be Changed to Mollify Shi'ites
Thu November 27, 2003
(Reuters)
By Joseph Logan
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=2ILCAHOSO0NTUCRBAEOCFFA?type=topNews&storyID=3902309
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A new U.S.-backed plan to hand sovereignty back to Iraqis will be changed after objections from the country's most revered Shi'ite Muslim leader, the head of Iraq's Governing Council said Thursday.
The U.S.-installed council's leader said the plan would be modified to ensure a central role for Islam and to take account of the cleric's wish that a planned transitional assembly be elected directly.
There was no immediate comment from Washington, which said earlier it would send thousands more Marines to Iraq next year to fight insurgents it blames for attacks on U.S.-led occupying forces.
"The agreement remains, but there's to be an appendix, with other texts. The agreement is developing," Governing Council President Jalal Talabani told reporters after meeting Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in the holy city of Najaf.
Sistani's approval is seen as crucial to getting Iraq's 60 percent Shi'ite majority to back the political timetable. The elderly cleric rarely makes public pronouncements on politics but most Iraqi Shi'ites look to him for guidance.
Under the U.S.-backed plan, regional caucuses would select an interim assembly by the end of May and this body would pick a transitional government the following month. The government would take over sovereignty from the U.S.-led administration, formally ending the occupation, although U.S.-led foreign troops were expected to remain.
"(Sistani) requested that the allies make good on the promises they made to Iraqis. He believes, correctly, that this is democracy," Talabani said. "There's an appendix that says Islam is the religion of the majority and it must be respected and considered a main source for the constitution."
ITALIAN EMBASSY ATTACKED
While planning for the transition, the United States said it would send thousands more Marines next year to fight insurgents it blames for violence against the occupying forces.
Guerrillas fired a rocket-propelled grenade at Italy's Baghdad embassy overnight.
No one was hurt in the attack, which came two weeks after 19 Italians died in a suicide blast in southern Iraq, in Italy's worst military death toll since World War II.
Guerrillas have mounted persistent attacks on foreign targets in Iraq in recent months, and have killed 184 U.S. soldiers since Washington declared major combat over on May 1.
U.S. officials blame the attacks on diehard Saddam Hussein supporters and foreign Muslim militants.
The U.S. Army said Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush, an air defense officer during Saddam's rule, had died of natural causes Thursday during questioning by American troops.
"Mowhoush said he didn't feel well and subsequently lost consciousness. The soldier questioning him found no pulse, then... called for medical authorities," a U.S. statement said.
"A surgeon responded within five minutes to continue advanced cardiac life support techniques, but they were ineffective. According to the on-site surgeon it appeared Mowhoush died of natural causes."
MARINE DEPLOYMENT
The Pentagon said it would send thousands more U.S. Marines to Iraq to bolster the next wave of American troops being deployed to counter insurgents.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the Marine Corps to send three additional battalions, along with assorted support units, as part of a troop rotation plan for early 2004.
The Pentagon said earlier this month it envisaged 105,000 U.S. troops in Iraq by next May, down from the current 130,000. But the additional Marines will raise the total again.
Members of a Japanese military fact-finding mission to southern Iraq returned home Thursday to report to the government on the feasibility of sending troops to the area to help with humanitarian and reconstruction work.
The team was sent to assess security after the suicide bombing of the Italian base in Nassiriya. The Tokyo government is considering nearby Samawa as a base for its troops and Japanese media said the mission was likely to find there were no major problems with sending troops there.
Diplomats at the United Nations said it was unlikely a new U.N. Security Council resolution sought by U.S.-appointed interim Iraqi leaders would be put forward before March.
The United States and ally Britain had considered but not yet drafted a resolution welcoming the U.S.-Iraqi timetable and diplomats said Washington was in no mood to bargain with opponents of the war -- Russia, France and Germany.
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Attacks on G.I.'s in Mosul Rise as Good Will Fades
November 27, 2003
By DEXTER FILKINS
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/international/middleeast/27MOSU.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
MOSUL, Iraq, Nov. 26 - Since the Americans came to town seven months ago, the firefighters in this northern Iraqi city have gotten new trucks and new uniforms, American training and salaries 10 times larger than they used to be.
But when word came Sunday afternoon that two American soldiers had been shot in the head and killed a block away, the men of Ras al Jada fire station ran to the site and looked on with glee as a crowd of locals dragged the Americans from their car and tore off their watches and jackets and boots.
"I was happy, everyone was happy," Waadallah Muhammad, one of the firefighters, said as he stood in front of the firehouse. "The Americans, yes, they do good things, but only to enhance their reputation. They are occupiers. We want them to leave."
It was not supposed to be this way in Mosul, an ethnically diverse city of two million people and the economic and cultural center of northern Iraq.
As places like Ramadi and Falluja and Tikrit burned and their residents rebelled against the American occupation this summer, Mosul stayed calm, the one city with a Sunni Arab majority where most people still seemed to regard the Americans as their friends. A vigorous and far-reaching effort by the 101st Airborne Division to rebuild the city's roads, schools and public buildings seemed to cement an unusually warm bond.
That appears to be changing very fast. The money the American occupiers once doled out freely has dried up, and other reconstruction aid has yet to arrive. Attacks on Americans, which have killed more than 25 in the Mosul area this month, have highlighted what local Iraqis say is a rapidly deteriorating relationship.
While Iraqi leaders once saluted American soldiers as their partners in building a new country, many now say their complaints go unheard. Moderate Iraqis cooperating with the Americans say the young men of Mosul are increasingly heeding the calls of militant clerics. With three prominent Iraqi civil servants killed in recent weeks, the Iraqis say, they are paying a steadily higher price for their cooperation.
It is not too late, residents say, to rebuild trust, but few Iraqis express much hope. Since the attacks against Americans increased, commanders have sent more troops into the city and detained dozens of suspected militants. The result appears to be a descending spiral, in which the crackdown is draining away much of the good will that remains.
"I want the Americans to succeed, and I want every American soldier to go home safely," said Raad Khairy al-Barhawi, a city councilman and a Sunni Arab. "But the Americans have completely misunderstood the situation. I am trying to help the Americans, and I am getting death threats. I am stuck in the middle."
The situation in Mosul, once so promising, now seems the object of drastically differing perceptions.
American commanders say the situation is still very much in their control, and they insist that they still have the overwhelming support of the people. They say the attacks on their men, while serious, are the work of perhaps a few hundred malcontents, most of them members of Saddam Hussein's old government.
"I reject the idea that things have gone bad here," said Col. Joe Anderson, who commands about 5,000 men in the heart of the city. "Most of the Iraqis are glad we are here, and they are cooperating with us."
Indeed, the progress in Mosul, even with the recent spate of attacks, still strikes a visitor from Baghdad as remarkable. The sidewalks are jammed with shoppers. The telephone, electricity and water networks are in good working order, thanks in large part to $33 million in projects carried out by American soldiers since April. A 28-member city council brings together the city's remarkable mix of Arabs, Christians, Kurds, Shabaks and Yazidhis.
The current attacks in and around Mosul, which number from 6 to 10 a day, are the work of a small number of bitter-enders, the Americans said. Colonel Anderson said the Americans had identified three cells here of about 100 fighters each, a small number given the city's size. Other officers said many of the attacks had been staged by Iraqis who had come from Baghdad and other parts of the so-called Sunni triangle, the region north and west of the capital that is generating most of the violence.
In assaults last week, American troops zeroed in on what they described as a "rat line" of houses and sympathizers stretching south toward Baghdad, a line that assisted militants in traveling north to Mosul. The Americans detained 89 suspected guerrillas in those raids, and more than 100 in others across the city. Among those recently seized, they say, are three members of Al Qaeda and two of another militant Islamic group, Ansar al-Islam.
"What I think is that this is a case of people coming from the outside trying to spoil a good thing," Maj. Trey Cate said.
But many local Iraqis say the Americans' problems run deeper and broader. Expectations that the Americans would rapidly generate prosperity in Mosul have been met with disappointment, and vast numbers of Iraqis still find themselves unemployed. The pool of money the American military used here to employ hundreds of Iraqis for local projects has dried up, and the large sums recently approved by Congress for reconstruction have yet to arrive.
A network of former members of Mr. Hussein's Baath Party, stretching from the universities to government offices, openly flout the Americans' edicts and, some Iraqis say, quietly support the resistance.
"I would say that the number of people who are opposed to the Americans here numbers in the thousands, the tens of thousands," said Hunien Kadu, a professor of economics at Mosul University and a city council member. "There are deans and assistant deans who were high-ranking members of the Baath Party. There are Baathists all through the government. The Americans can't continue to let these people operate."
Many Iraqis complained that the recent American crackdown had pushed potential supporters away. Mr. Barhawi, for instance, cited a local cleric detained on suspicion of encouraging attacks against the Americans in his weekly sermons. He said American troops had handcuffed, hooded and slapped the cleric. Word of that, he said, was helping to alienate many Iraqis here who were still more or less receptive to the American enterprise.
The cleric, Abdul Satar al-Jawiri, was released after a search of his home turned up nothing, Mr. Barhawi said. A spokesman for the 101st Airborne said Wednesday that he could not confirm the incident.
"I am not defending the cleric, but he was humiliated in public," Mr. Barhawi said. "Do you realize what he is going to say in his sermons now?"
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U.S. Plan in Iraq to Shift Control Hits Major Snag
November 27, 2003
By JOEL BRINKLEY and IAN FISHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/international/middleeast/27IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 26 - The American plan to turn over power in Iraq more quickly was thrown into disarray on Wednesday when the country's most powerful cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, made public his opposition to a proposal for indirect elections.
"All of us are groping around right now," an administration official said in Washington, acknowledging that the plan worked out earlier this month by the Iraqi Governing Council and L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator of Iraq, would have to be revised.
Spokesmen for Ayatollah Sistani, who exercises strong influence over Iraq's majority Shiites, said he insisted that the election, planned for June, be a direct ballot and not the caucus-style vote called for in the American plan. He also insists that the new Iraqi government have a more overtly Islamic character.
"The people should have a basic role in issues concerning the destiny of their country," Abdul Aziz al- Hakim, a Shiite cleric and politician, said in an interview. Mr. Hakim said he discussed the American proposal with Ayatollah Sistani on Tuesday.
Shiites account for about 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people and so could benefit from a direct vote.
Under the current plan, which has been fraying almost since it was approved by both sides on Nov. 15, council members and local governments are to choose a transitional assembly - several hundred Iraqis from every region and social sector. That assembly is to choose an interim government in June, and that indirectly elected interim government is supposed to draft a constitution.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Hakim also spoke at a news conference in Najaf, Ayatollah Sistani's home, and said the ayatollah "expressed concern about real gaps that must be dealt with, or the plan will lack the ability to meet the hopes of the Iraqi people."
In Washington, administration officials said a plan establishing Iraqi self-rule by June 30 would have to at least partly accommodate the ayatollah's insistence on a popular vote.
Such a ballot in the next several months is widely seen as impractical, however. Instead, administration officials said, a system of provincial and local elections, town meetings and caucuses of civic leaders throughout Iraq might be acceptable to Ayatollah Sistani.
"The nub of this is, how do we get to enough elections in enough places to satisfy the ayatollah's insistence on elections," one official said. "We should be able to do it."
Mr. Hakim is a leading member of the Governing Council, which was appointed by the United States to help run Iraq, and recent experience has shown that the council is unwilling to act against Ayatollah Sistani.
Ayatollah Sistani's objections were a further blow to a plan that had already begun to unravel. Earlier this week, leaders of the Governing Council said they would like to back away from their agreement to dissolve the council as soon as elections are held in June, and instead to preserve it as a second legislative body, a kind of senate.
But there were signs on Wednesday that other members of the council were still backing the original plan, in part because Ayatollah Sistani's call for direct elections could mean the new Iraqi government would be dominated by Shiites, a fear among many Sunni Arabs and Kurds.
On Wednesday evening, Kubad Talabani, a senior aide to Jalal Talabani, a Kurd who is serving this month as president of the Governing Council, said the council and American authorities "are going to great lengths to meet Sistani's request for an Iraqi constitution by direct elections."
"I do not see any reason for concern from His Eminence Sistani or anyone else about the process we have," he added.
American officials left room for compromise.
"We have said all along that this was a framework, and we would have to work out the details, and that is what we are going to do going forward," said Dan Senor, a spokesman for Mr. Bremer.
Earlier this year, objections from Ayatollah Sistani forced the Governing Council to abandon its original plan, pushed by Washington, to write a constitution and then hold elections. Ayatollah Sistani issued a religious edict in June saying a constitution must be drafted by an assembly directly elected by the Iraqis. Twelve of the council's 24 members are Shiites, and many refused to go along with a plan that Ayatollah Sistani did not endorse.
That same edict, it appears, is behind the objections made public Wednesday. Yet Ayatollah Sistani was silent earlier this month when the plan to install an Iraqi government by June was announced.
When the Governing Council announced the plan 11 days ago, its leaders said the council had reached unanimous agreement - including Mr. Hakim and others close to Ayatollah Sistani. At the time, Shiite leaders seemed to be saying Ayatollah Sistani supported it, but he issued no direct statement.
A senior Shiite leader said Ayatollah Sistani did not make his objections known before because the plan "was misrepresented by whoever saw him," and until recently he did not have an Arabic version of it.
"He has been following the subject," Mr. Hakim said in a telephone interview. "When the draft was submitted to him, he wrote several notes on it. But when I saw him yesterday, he discussed with me the objections that he had."
Communications between official Iraqis and official Americans have been difficult from the start of the occupation in May. On Wednesday, for example, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the first American administrator, acknowledged in an interview with the BBC that his office had made a "bad job" of communicating with Iraqis.
American officials have insisted that a direct election cannot be held now because there are no voter rolls. A census must be taken first, and that cannot be completed until late next year at the earliest.
But a senior Shiite leader on Wednesday pushed a United Nations proposal to use its food-rations registry as a voter list so elections could be held next spring.
Both American and Iraqi officials have said they believe the real motivation for insisting on direct elections is that the clerics hope the nation's Shiite majority will empower religious leaders to form an Islamic government, an idea the United States opposes.
Mr. Hakim himself said one of Ayatollah Sistani's objections was that "there is no emphasis on the role of Islam and the identity of the Muslim people."
"There should have been a stipulation which prevents legislating anything that contradicts Islam in the new Iraq," Mr. Hakim added, summarizing the ayatollah's views.
In their statement Nov. 15 announcing the agreement, the Governing Council proclaimed that the new Iraqi state would respect "freedom of religion and religious practices." But it added that the government would also "respect the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people."
Unlike some other Shiite clerics, Ayatollah Sistani has been tolerant of the United States occupation and has refrained from openly criticizing the occupation authorities. But on Wednesday his aides took cautious steps in that direction.
"Some Iraqis perceive the process as being too rushed to fit the American presidential elections," said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a member of the Governing Council who is close to Ayatollah Sistani. "We don't mind helping our partners. We understand their requirements. And we will consider helping them."
The view that the United States elections play a major role in shaping Iraq's political future is widely held among council members.
Ahmad Chalabi, another council member, said: "The whole thing was set up so President Bush could come to the airport in October for a ceremony to congratulate the new Iraqi government. When you work backwards from that, you understand the dates the Americans were insisting on." American officials deny that electoral concerns played a role in their planning.
The Bremer plan, hastily put together with Iraqi leaders after his rushed meeting with President Bush in early November, also called for the Governing Council to set up a kind of bill of rights - including religious freedom and free speech, women's rights and civilian control of the military - by Feb. 28.
That part is unlikely to be changed, administration officials said. Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting for this article from Washington.
--------
Top Cleric Faults U.S. Blueprint For Iraq
Shiite Cites Need For Citizens' Role, 'Islamic Identity'
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 27, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15791-2003Nov26?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Nov. 26 -- Iraq's most influential Shiite Muslim cleric believes a new American plan to form a sovereign provisional government in Iraq does not give Iraqis a large enough role in shaping the transition and lacks safeguards for the country's "Islamic identity," a prominent Shiite political leader said Wednesday.
Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani expressed "deep concern over real loopholes" in the plan "that must be dealt with, otherwise the process will be deficient and will not meet the expectations of the people of Iraq," Abdul Aziz Hakim, a member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, said at a news conference in the holy city of Najaf. Officials with Hakim's political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said he recently met with Sistani.
Sistani's reported displeasure with the U.S. plan for the transfer of power in Iraq could complicate the Bush administration's efforts to create a transitional government that would assume sovereignty by next summer, allowing the United States to end its occupation of the country.
The grand ayatollah has a broad following among Iraq's Shiites, who account for about 60 percent of the population. His earlier demand that drafters of Iraq's constitution be chosen through a general election effectively forced the U.S. occupation administrator, L. Paul Bremer, to rework his previous transition blueprint, which called for drafters to be selected by means other than a general election and for the document to be written before a formal end to the occupation.
Under the new plan -- crafted in part to appease Sistani -- Iraqis will be able to elect delegates to write a constitution. The document will be written after power is transferred to a provisional government.
Sistani's reported comments could influence ongoing discussions between Bremer and members of the Governing Council about the process of forming the transitional government. Some members of the U.S.-appointed council, including Hakim, want clear statements about the role of Islam in society to be written into a basic law that will govern the country until a constitution is written. Hakim also wants changes in the way the transitional government will be selected.
Bremer's plan calls for caucuses in the country's 18 provinces to choose representatives to serve on a transitional assembly, which would form a provisional government. Participants in the caucuses must be approved by 11 of 15 people on an organizing committee, which will be selected by the Governing Council and U.S.-appointed councils at the city and province levels.
Hakim and other Shiite leaders, who worry that the organizing committees may exclude religious figures, want assembly members to be directly elected. At the very least, they are demanding that the organizing committees be disbanded and any qualified candidate be allowed to participate in the caucuses.
One of Sistani's main objections, Hakim said, "is the absence of any role for the Iraqi people in the transfer of power to Iraqis." Although U.S. officials have argued that holding elections would be too disruptive, time-consuming and complicated in the absence of an electoral law and accurate voter rolls, Hakim insisted elections for the transitional assembly would be possible in 80 percent of Iraq.
High-ranking Shiite clergy across southern Iraq have become more vocal in their demands for elections sooner rather than later as a way to enfranchise a majority community that had long been marginalized in Iraqi politics. Some Shiite leaders remain suspicious of U.S. intentions and express concern that the transition plan would keep power out of the hands of the influential religious leaders.
Hakim said Sistani supported an explicit articulation of the role of Islam in the interim government. Bremer's plan, which was agreed to by the Governing Council, said only that the basic law would respect "the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people with the guarantee of the right of other religions and sects."
Hakim said Sistani "didn't find anything that assures Islamic identity" in the agreement. "There should have been a stipulation that prevents legislating anything that contradicts Islam in the new Iraq, in either the interim or permanent phase," Hakim said.
Shiite political leaders regard Sistani's reported displeasure as instrumental in persuading Bremer to support changes to his plan. "It's a trump card," one Shiite member of the Governing Council said. "For this process to work, for Shiites to support it, it needs to have Sistani's blessing."
Officials with the U.S.-led occupation authority said the plan was agreed to by the council and that the Bush administration has no intention of revising fundamental elements of the transition arrangement. "The process was agreed upon. It was signed by the Governing Council. As far as we're concerned, those events stand on their own," a senior U.S. official here said.
But American officials said they are willing to discuss the matter with council members, some of whom have complained that the agreement was rushed though by Bremer.
Daniel Senor, a spokesman for Bremer, said the occupation authority looks forward "to reaching consensus on these [issues] through dialogue."
The depth of Sistani's unhappiness with Bremer's plan is not clear. Sistani, who rarely makes public appearances, has not issued any written comments about it. In June, when he sought to influence the constitutional process, he issued a religious edict calling the earlier American plans "fundamentally unacceptable."
He has not answered written questions about the plan submitted to his office in Najaf, about 90 miles south of Baghdad.
Because religious edicts are typically not revised or rescinded, Sistani could be choosing to mold a fluid process without issuing an unchangeable demand. His comments as relayed by Hakim did not suggest that he had rejected the plan outright.
"This is a negotiation," Hakim said. "We're looking for compromise."
Meanwhile, in the town of Samarra, about 70 miles north of Baghdad, U.S. troops detained the wife and daughter of Izzat Ibrahim, one of former president Saddam Hussein's top lieutenants, a military spokesman said. Ibrahim, who has not been captured, was the vice chairman of Hussein's Revolutionary Command Council.
U.S. officials have said they believe Ibrahim, who is No. 6 on the military's list of 55 most wanted Iraqis, has organized some of the resistance attacks against American forces. Last week, the occupation authority offered a $10 million reward for information leading to his capture.
The military provided no details about why Ibrahim's wife and daughter were seized, although American forces have detained relatives of fugitives to glean information about the whereabouts of their family members and to pressure the fugitives to surrender.
In Baghdad, the Italian Embassy was attacked late Wednesday with a rocket or mortar round that hit the second floor of the structure, news agencies reported. The attack came two weeks after a suicide attack on an Italian military post in southern Iraq in which 19 Italians were killed.
In a radio interview with the BBC, Bremer's predecessor, retired Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, said more troops should have been deployed in Baghdad to control looting and restore order immediately after the fall of Hussein's government. "If we did it over again, we probably would have put more dismounted infantrymen in Baghdad and maybe more troops there," Garner said in response to a question about what the biggest mistakes of the occupation had been.
Garner also said his successors made a mistake in disbanding the Iraqi army. "You're talking about around a million or more people . . . that are suffering because the head of the household's out of work," he said.
--------
U.S. Wanted to Avoid 'Occupier' Label
November 27, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Armys-Appraisal.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- American military commanders did not impose curfews, halt looting or order Iraqis back to work after Saddam Hussein's regime fell because U.S. policymakers were reluctant to declare U.S. troops an occupying force, says an internal Army review examined by The Associated Press.
As a result, the Bush administration's first steps at reconstruction in Iraq were severely hampered, creating a power vacuum that others quickly moved to fill, and a growing mistrust on the part of ordinary Iraqis, the report said.
Since those first days, the U.S. effort in Iraq has been hampered by a growing insurgency with persistent and deadly attacks against U.S. forces.
The review, a postwar self-evaluation by the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), said the political decision to call the U.S. forces that arrived in Baghdad ``liberators'' instead of ``occupying forces'' left the division's officers uncertain about their legal authority in postwar Baghdad and other cities. Under international law, the report says, the troops were indeed an occupation force and had both rights and responsibilities.
``Because of the refusal to acknowledge occupier status, commanders did not initially take measures available to occupying powers, such as imposing curfews, directing civilians to return to work, and controlling the local governments and populace. The failure to act after we displaced the regime created a power vacuum, which others immediately tried to fill,'' says the report.
The report, marked ``For Official Use Only,'' was obtained by The Associated Press, the Washington security think tank Globalsecurity.Org and other outlets. A spokesman for the 3rd Infantry Division, Maj. Darryl Wright, characterized it as a candid effort to find ways to improve the division the next time it is called to fight. Its authors are not identified.
Wright said the final version was not complete. It reflects multiple, sometimes disparate, points of view from officers and troops who took part in the fighting, he said.
In many ways, it mirrors recent criticisms by Jay Garner, the retired American general who briefly headed the first occupation government in Iraq. Garner said in a BBC interview aired Wednesday that the military did not act quickly enough to restore law and order and key services in Baghdad, and should have tried harder to win support from the Iraqi people.
Between 12,000 and 15,000 3rd Infantry Division troops fought in Iraq, and 44 were killed in action, Wright said. The division, along with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, comprised the bulk of the ground advance north from Kuwait to Baghdad during late March and early April.
In the section regarding legal matters facing the division, the report said unidentified ``higher officials'' constrained the occupation effort and did not prepare for the fall of Saddam's government.
``Despite the virtual certainty that the military would accomplish the regime change, there was no plan for oversight and reconstruction, even after the division arrived in Baghdad,'' the report says. ``State, Defense, and other relevant agencies must do a better and timelier job planning occupation governance and standing up a new Iraqi government.''
The division confiscated $1 billion from palaces in Baghdad, but was not permitted to use that money to help the city on its feet, despite having the legal authority to do so, the report says.
``The money could have been used to hire, train, and equip the police force; clear the rubble from government buildings and city streets; hire sanitation workers and other municipal employees; clean up the courts and hire judicial personnel. ... At first, the people were anxious to get started and looked to the U.S. for assistance. They soon saw us as being unable or unwilling to get anything done,'' the report says.
The hunt for evidence of Saddam's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear programs -- the Bush administration's key reason for going to war -- also was problematic from the start, the report says.
``During the transition from combat operations to support and stability operations, we did not attempt to secure these key facilities before looting started,'' the report says. ``The visible clues that may have provided a detailed analysis on WMD production, research and development, or storage were either destroyed or carried away by the local populace.''
The report recommends troops be sent to quickly secure such sites during future conflicts.
The report does suggest the division had unprecedented battlefield coordination with special operations forces, the Central Intelligence Agency (referred to only as the ``Other Government Agency'') and ``information operations'' aimed at making Iraqi generals and troops switch sides or not fight.
But the results were a mixed bag. ``The use of e-mail to contact the generals urging them to surrender and contacting Iraqi governmental decision makers offering them deals to leave the country was a great idea in planning,'' the report says. ``But the U.S. failed to understand the Iraqi government was based on Stalinism and the fear of reprisals was greater than they had anticipated.''
Much of the intelligence on senior members of Saddam's regime targeted for capture came from walk-ins or casual relationships established by troops on the streets, the report says.
But sometimes division officers were left out of the loop.
``Open source reports suggested the President of the United States was receiving continuous reporting from a source with eyes on Saddam Hussein, assuring him that he was inside a building targeted for a strike,'' the report says. ``That building was in the division's battlespace, however, information like this did not always reach the division staff level at a point where it could have contributed to the bigger picture intelligence assessment.''
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Soldiers Kill 3 Palestinians in Gaza Strip
November 27, 2003
New York Times
By GREG MYRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/international/middleeast/27MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Thursday, Nov. 27 - Israeli troops shot dead three Palestinians on Wednesday night after they were spotted near a road leading to a Jewish settlement in the southern Gaza Strip, according to Israeli military officials and Palestinian medical workers.
Israel described the men as militants.
Palestinians said the three men, aged 28 to 33, were civilians from the same family.
The shooting came at a time when Israel and the Palestinians are attempting to restart negotiations that broke down three months ago in a swirl of Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli military raids.
With the political talks stalled, groups ranging from Israel's left-leaning Labor Party to right-wing Jewish settlers have been working on their own peace proposals, to the chagrin of the Israeli government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
In Gaza, an Israeli military official said, soldiers spotted four Palestinians on foot on Wednesday near a road used by soldiers and Jewish residents near the Gush Katif settlement. As soldiers pursued the men, two ran to a car, where they were shot, along with the driver, the official said. Two were killed and a third was wounded.
The injured man later died of his wounds, according to hospital officials in Deir al-Balah, a Palestinian town. All were members of the Ismiri family, the hospital said.
The other two Palestinian men on foot escaped and Israeli troops continued to search for them into the early hours Thursday, the military official said.
The region has been relatively calm in recent weeks, and Mr. Sharon and the new Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, have been exploring the possibility of holding talks, though no date has been set.
But informal peace proposals seem to be emerging by the day.
The Labor Party, the official opposition in Parliament, is working on a plan that would call for a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Israel would withdraw from most of its settlements in the West Bank, according to the plan, which has not been completed.
The Settlers Council, which represents the 230,000 Jewish settlers, is working on its own plan, which reportedly calls for abolishing the Palestinian Authority and for Israel to annex the West Bank.
In addition, Israeli and Palestinian politicians who reached an informal, symbolic peace deal last month plan to hold a signing ceremony next week in Geneva.
Mr. Sharon's government has been particularly critical of this so-called Geneva Accord.
"Everybody is free to talk and come up with their own plans, but only the elected government can negotiate on behalf of Israel," said Zalman Shoval, an adviser to Mr. Sharon. "We think some people are trying to undermine the government."
--------
An Uphill Road for Bold Mideast Peace Plans
Grass-Roots Campaign and Leaders' Initiative Both Tackle Toughest Issues Head-On
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 27, 2003; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16577-2003Nov26?language=printer
RANTIS, West Bank -- Palestinians Fahed Abu Elhaj and Saleh Balut walked down the street of this besieged town and cajoled residents to sign a petition calling on Palestinian and Israeli leaders to make peace. It was a hard sell.
"I'll sign, and what will happen in the meantime?" said Nasir Zaydan, 65. "They'll take more land and build more settlements."
On trendy, secular Shenkin Street in central Tel Aviv, Israeli signature collectors Judy Duaniss and Ofry Levy confronted similar problems with their countrymen.
"All the territories are ours!" diamond merchant Yossie Kube, 32, yelled at them. "The greater land of Israel!"
"I have sympathy for the Palestinian people," said Rona Hirschon, 60, an English teacher who refused to sign. "All they have to do is stop the terror."
For the People's Voice campaign, the past five months have been a long, hard slog. But despite the hardened attitudes on both sides, 113,000 Israelis and 65,000 Palestinians have signed petitions demanding that Jewish settlers get out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, that Palestinians give up their claim to the right to return to Israel and that the decades of hostilities between the two peoples be ended with the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
The unprecedented grass-roots campaign is running in parallel with another initiative -- the Geneva Accord, an unofficial, 9,930-word plan negotiated by current and former Israeli and Palestinian leaders -- to revive Israel's long-dormant peace camp.
The two initiatives have generated much debate for their willingness to tackle topics that are often ignored because they are divisive: Jewish settlements; the Palestinians' claim to a right of return to areas in Israel that they left in 1948; and the status of Jerusalem, which both peoples claim as their capital.
Many peace plans -- including the U.S.-backed "road map," which is now stalled -- have deferred negotiations on tough topics. But the Geneva Accord and the People's Voice campaign stress that those issues must be addressed upfront so both sides know what they would get for ending the conflict, in which more than 900 Israelis and 2,500 Palestinians have been killed since the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation began in September 2000.
Noting that under current demographic trends, Palestinians could soon outnumber Israelis, retired Maj. Gen. Ami Ayalon, the Israeli head of the People's Voice campaign, said, "We are trying to activate the Israeli audience to influence our administration to change the direction we are moving in now, because we understand that the status quo is leading us to a place that a majority of Israelis don't want to be, which is one political entity from Jordan to the sea, which is not a state for Jewish people, and this would be the end of Zionism."
Ayalon, a former head of Israel's Shin Bet security agency, initiated the petition drive with Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University and a leading Palestinian advocate of negotiations.
The two peace plans, which were drafted independently, lay out what many analysts and moderates see as the inevitable solution if a Palestinian state and Israel are to live side by side in peace: Israel gives up most of its Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, except for a few large, well-established ones, for which Palestinians would be compensated with a land swap; the Palestinians give up their demand to return to lands they owned in Israel, with some type of compensation; and the two countries would share Jerusalem as their capitals.
The framers of the plans said they hope they will eventually be the basis for a comprehensive, final peace accord. Neither government has accepted either plan.
The two initiatives have created a stir that is putting intense pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to demonstrate a greater willingness to compromise. He has recently talked of unilateral concessions that could include the evacuation of some settlements, according to Israeli news reports.
The peace push is also being helped by renewed U.S. pressure on Israel to moderate its policies toward Palestinians, outspoken criticism of Sharon's policies by current and former high-ranking Israeli security officials, and rising impatience among people on both sides with leaders who, after three years of bloodshed, have made no headway toward resolving the conflict.
"These agreements are flourishing because people, I think, are sick of [the situation]; they're ready for a change," Elisheva Leibler, 32, an American who moved to Israel two years ago, said while tending to her two children at a Jerusalem mall. "Too much blood has been shed, and there is a sense that we're stuck in a quagmire."
"For the first time in Palestinian history, an initiative is coming up from the street instead of being imposed on the people from above," said Abu Elhaj, one of the top coordinators for the People's Voice in the West Bank. "We want to convince people to be involved in determining their future."
Yossi Beilin, the senior Israeli negotiator on the Geneva Accord and an architect of the 1993 Oslo peace agreements, said that immediate, scathing attacks against him and his new plan by Sharon's government and its allies provided unexpected publicity and legitimacy.
"They became our best PR people," he said. The publicity bonanza continued last week when Israel's High Court ordered the Israel Broadcasting Authority to lift a ban on airing commercials on state radio about the People's Voice petition drive and the Geneva Accord, so named because of the Swiss government's active promotion of the negotiations.
On the Palestinian side, radical groups including Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, staged a rally in Gaza City last week that drew thousands of protesters to denounce the Palestinian negotiators of the Geneva Accord as traitors for giving up the right of return.
In a documentary aired last week on Israeli television, the top Palestinian negotiator on the Geneva Accord, former cabinet minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, was asked if he was not betraying a Palestinian dream.
"I am not, as a leader and as a politician, responsible for dreams," he replied. "I am responsible that the dreams shall not become nightmares."
Here in Rantis, about 20 miles northwest of Jerusalem, workers for the People's Voice campaign said they are engaged in more than simply gathering signatures. They said they see their mission as educating and lobbying the public to change its ways, which often means spending hours in debate to gather a few signatures.
A suicide bomber who killed nine Israeli soldiers at a bus stop outside Tel Aviv 10 weeks ago hailed from this town of 3,100 Palestinians. After the Palestinian uprising began about three years ago, most Rantis residents who worked in Israel lost their jobs. The main entrance to town was barricaded by the Israeli army, and the only way in and out is by a dirt road.
Unemployment is at about 70 percent, town officials say. There is no telephone service. More than half the homes have no running water. And last week, Israeli bulldozers and dump trucks arrived to begin work on the barrier system that Israel is building around the West Bank. People here said it will carve off much of their agricultural land.
"We spend two or three hours arguing with someone that there's a possibility for peace, and the same person has to go to the doctor and tries to leave the village and is stopped by the Israeli military and changes his mind, and we have to start all over," said Balut, the top People's Voice official in Rantis. "Getting them to sign is only the beginning of convincing them in the direction of peace."
Special correspondents Samuel Sockol and Hillary Claussen contributed to this report.
-------- mideast
Turkish Town's Despair Breeds Terrorists, Residents Fear
November 27, 2003
By FRANK BRUNI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/international/europe/27TURK.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BINGOL, Turkey, Nov. 25 - One of the men believed to be behind the Istanbul bombings of the past two weeks was just a toddler when his father was killed in political violence here. According to acquaintances, the boy grew up with a hurt and a confusion that never went away.
One of the other men implicated in the suicide bombings watched his mother fall sick and die when he, too, was just a boy. He came to live with his aunt here, said a family friend, and remained with her even after his father remarried and had more children with a new wife.
Those painful personal circumstances may tell part of the story of how the men ended up on the path they apparently chose.
But many local residents suggested that there was another, larger factor: Bingol itself. Whatever sorrows the men had were nourished in this devoutly Muslim, predominantly Kurdish, utterly remote town in eastern Turkey.
It is a desolate and desperate place where good jobs are almost nonexistent, money is scarce, a sense of oppression pervades people's lives and extreme ideologies, religious and otherwise, sometimes provide a purpose and succor that young men find nowhere else.
Some residents even say the government feeds extreme fervor among Turks who are prepared to repress local Kurds.
"These people have no identity, no personality," Servet Beki, the mayor's secretary, said in an interview. "On the one side, there is poverty. On the other side, there can be a very serious religious pressure. It can make people easily manipulated."
At least two of the suicide bombers who struck Istanbul last week were reared and spent much of their lives in and around Bingol, Turkish law-enforcement officials said.
They were Mesut Cabuk, 29, and Gokhan Elaltuntas, 22, who were positively identified by officials as the drivers of trucks that exploded outside two Istanbul synagogues. Mr. Cabuk was the motherless boy.
A third man from Bingol, Azad Ekinci, 27, has been accused of helping to plan those attacks and, some investigators said, may have been one of the suicide bombers who later struck British targets in Istanbul. He is the man who never knew his father.
Some local officials and investigators have said these men, identified by the authorities as Turks, spent time in Pakistan and had strong connections to Turkish Hezbollah, a militant Islamic group that thrived here, though not so much in recent years as a decade ago.
To the extent that the group still exists, most local residents at least publicly denounce it, and they also denounced the Istanbul bombings. Since those attacks, residents have shunned the families of the men who were implicated in them, and they have pushed reporters away from Mr. Elaltuntas's freshly dug grave.
But some residents have also acknowledged that Bingol, with its economic hopelessness and history of factional violence, may be as potent a cradle for terrorists as any other.
"I was not surprised that they came from Bingol," said Ferhat Ozdaglar, an unemployed 24-year-old.
Isolated by the mountains that surround it, Bingol has about 70,000 people, Mr. Beki said, although its crude concrete buildings look like they can accommodate only half that number.
Unemployment here fluctuates between 70 and 80 percent, local officials and residents said. Bingol has no real industry, and many people here survive on summer jobs in Istanbul and money sent by relatives in Germany.
The Kurds here lived for decades under the iron grip of the Turkish military, which stamped out expressions of Kurdish culture and battled Kurdish militants. Although that war is more or less over, the military still maintains checkpoints on the narrow roads to and from Bingol.
Many residents said the Turkish government, in the past, actually encouraged and aided Islamic extremists in the area, because those radicals were fighting Kurds.
There was fighting as well between right-wing Turkish nationalists and people with left-wing beliefs, and Mr. Beki said Mr. Ekinci's father belonged to the latter group.
But the precise ways in which all of that left a stamp on Mr. Ekinci, Mr. Cabuk and Mr. Elaltuntas remain murky. Many residents either claimed not to know them or gave contradictory accounts about what they were like.
In interviews this week, relatives of Mr. Elaltuntas insisted that he was not affiliated with any militant or radical groups, describing him as a conventionally devout, gentle man who must have been duped into whatever he did.
"When we would go hunting and shoot birds, he would hesitate to cut off their heads," said Ramaran Elaltuntas, a cousin. "He was that soft."
But those relatives had a curious reaction when, on several instances Monday, they ran into local police officers. They turned their backs on the officers or waved them away, as if angry at them.
Residents of Bingol with relatives who have been pulled into Islamic extremism often blame the government. Many people here say they have been manipulated and mistreated by their own country and have seldom enjoyed much control over their lives.
Those grievances deepened after a devastating earthquake hit Bingol in May, killing more than 170 people in the area. Residents complain that the government was slow and stinting in its assistance.
"There is a special attitude toward Bingol," said Halis Tasan, a businessman here. "People here are left alone, pushed back, and some people look to religion to rescue them."
The Muslims in Bingol are conservative. Mosques are jammed at prayer time. All but a few women wear head scarves, and many older women cover themselves in black from head to toe.
The dawn-to-dusk Ramadan fast is taken so seriously here that residents cautioned one visitor not even to chew gum in public, because it would infuriate people.
Residents say they abhor Islamic extremism, which betrays the religion's commitment to peace. But it does exist here, and several residents said Mr. Ekinci embraced it.
Ahmet Kara, who knew him, said that in recent years, Mr. Ekinci had grown his beard long, donned a white religious robe and voiced anger at Israel and the United States. Mr. Kara described him as lonely and resentful.
"Children who lose their fathers early, in our society, feel oppressed, discriminated against," Mr. Kara said. "He was a walking bomb."
Mr. Elaltuntas's relatives said he had become friendly with Mr. Ekinci in recent years. Last year Mr. Elaltuntas's father and Mr. Ekinci's brother opened an Internet cafe here. Mr. Elaltuntas worked there until about six months ago, when Mr. Ekinci persuaded him to move to Istanbul to try to establish a cellular telephone business there, Mr. Elaltuntas's relatives said.
The family's neighborhood fits Bingol's forlorn tone. Amid a mass of rudimentary four-story apartment buildings is a dusty lot, strewn with debris, where residents use stone pits walled with corrugated tin to bake bread. Outside a mosque nearby, a bony cow grazed Tuesday on a pile of garbage.
The family's business interests had not bought them anything better, and Mr. Elaltuntas's relatives suggested that such a life might help explain the kind of death he met.
"Look at this," said an uncle, Vahit Besgul, as he drove on Monday afternoon through the outskirts of Bingol, on the way to his nephew's grave. He was pointing to shanties and refuse on the side of the road.
"If people had education, if they had money, then they would not become the tools of others," he said.
-------- nato
NATO chief Robertson fires parting shots in Balkans
SARAJEVO (AFP)
Nov 27, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031127174804.00996lav.html
NATO Secretary General George Robertson had some stern advice for the Balkans on Thursday as he made his last visit to the war-torn region as the leader of the Euro-Atlantic military alliance.
The outgoing NATO chief pulled no punches as he described Bosnia's defence structures as "schizophrenic" and warned the country that its integration into Europe depended on the apprehension of fugitive war criminals.
He also told Serbia that it had a "duty" to arrest top war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic, and reminded Croatia's nationalists, who won a general election on Sunday, that extremism had no place in the region.
Robertson will step down as NATO chief in January but thousands of alliance troops will remain on duty in Bosnia and the southern Serbian province of Kosovo after he is gone.
Robertson applauded the peacekeepers' efforts to hunt fugitve war crimes suspects like Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb political leader who is wanted by the UN tribunal at The Hague.
"Their support networks are being weakened, their bank accounts are being blocked, their freedom of movement has been limited. Slowly but steadily the noose around them is tightening," he wrote in a letter to Sarajevo's Dnevni Avaz daily.
Without speaking directly to the Serb authorities, he said Bosnia had to do more to bring war criminals to justice and cooperate with the UN tribunal.
"The fact that (war crimes suspects) are at large slows your way toward Europe. NATO and the EU want Bosnia as a partner, and possibly as a member, but only as a member that shares our values," he said.
Robertson told a press conference after meeting senior Bosnian and international officials that NATO "will not rest" until all war crimes suspects are apprehended.
On military reform, he said Bosnia's two armies -- one for the Serbs and one for the Muslim-Croat Federation -- were "politicaly divided, economically exhausting and militarily useless."
"No country is able to maintain this kind of defence schizophrenia," he wrote in the newspaper, warning that the country could not join NATO until its defence structures were sorted out.
Bosnia was divided into two entities -- the Serb-run Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation -- after the brutal inter-ethnic war that cost more than 200,000 lives in the 1990s.
NATO airstrikes against Bosnian Serb forces helped end the war in 1995 and some 12,000 NATO-led troops are still needed to ensure the country's stability, although their numbers are expected to be cut to around 7,000 next year.
Roberston's Balkan trip began late Wednesday in the Serbian capital Belgrade, a city bombed by alliance jets only four years ago as the West sought to drive Yugoslav forces, under then-president Slobodan Milosevic, out of Kosovo.
The first NATO chief to visit Belgrade since the 1999 bombing, Robertson said Serbia was now being "welcomed by all the Euro-Atlantic community."
But he said the reformist authorities who sent Milosevic to The Hague in 2001 also had a "duty and obligation" to hand over former Bosnian Serb military chief Mladic.
"There are undoubtedly people in Serbia who know where Mladic is," Robertson said after talks with Serbia and Montenegro Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic, despite Belgrade's repeated claims that Mladic is not in Serbia.
The former British defence secretary also warned the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union party, which won weekend elections, that nationalism had no future in the region.
"We will say to the new government of Croatia that nationalism and extremism are a thing of the Balkan past and have no place in the Balkans' future," he said.
----
US to brief NATO allies on worldwide troop levels
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Nov 27, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031127184623.leqxopjh.html
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell will brief NATO counterparts on a planned overhaul of its troop levels worldwide in Brussels next week, a senior official said Thursday.
US President George W. Bush announced Tuesday that Washington is stepping up discussions with key European and Asian allies about the overhaul of US global military deployments.
Rumsfeld is due to visit NATO headquarters for a meeting with his Alliance counterparts next Monday and Tuesday, followed by Powell on Thursday and Friday for talks with his opposite numbers.
"Secretaries Rumsfeld and Powell will come to Brussels and brief the allies on the major outlines of what this study is," said the official, adding that "the US has embarked on a global review of its force structure."
Senior US officials will then continue discussions with NATO in Brussels and in a number of national capitals.
The Brussels official underlined that Washington had made no decisions yet. "There is no plan," he said, but added: "We're entering serious consultations."
At the start of this year NATO's top military official in Europe, US General James Jones, said he was holding intensive discussions with NATO allies on how to reduce US troops numbers in western Europe, which number 116,000 including 70,000 in Germany, and on a partial redeployment towards eastern Europe.
At the time Jones talked about a network of bases where troops would be stationed for short periods depending on military needs.
On Tuesday, a US official said Washington was not accelerating the process of revamping deployments, just moving ahead with planned consultations with key allies on where best to position US forces.
Bush came to office in January 2001 with plans to overhaul US forces to make them more mobile as well as revamp where they are stationed abroad.
----
Bulgaria, US to discuss setting up NATO bases in Bulgaria
SOFIA (AFP)
Nov 27, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031127181827.nia9e7zr.html
Bulgaria and the United States are due to hold talks next month on possibly setting up NATO bases on Bulgarian soil, Foreign Minister Solomon Passi said Thursday.
"In the first half of December, a high-level expert team led by people from the State Department (will arrive) to explore the possibility for setting up bases in Bulgaria," Passi told AFP.
He stressed that no decision had yet been taken but appeared optimistic that the choice could be an air base at the port of Burgas on the Black Sea.
The choice would be made by military experts, he said.
"But our (first) evalution shows that the seaside offers some of the best capacities," he added referring to air transport, sea and infrastructure.
The Burgas base has twice been offered to US forces during military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.
French and Italian NATO forces also use facilities in Bulgaria for training.
Bulgaria, a former communist state, is set to join NATO next year along with Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia and Slovakia.
A spokesman for the US embassy in Sofia confirmed the forthcoming visit by the US delegation but declined to give details.
Bulgaria is considered a loyal ally of the United States.
Bulgaria has 470 soldiers serving with a multinational force operating under Polish command in central and southern Iraq.
"It is our duty, Iraq is in our immediate neighbourhood," Passi said.
-------- spies
Officer 'leaked email to save lives'
Nov 27 2003
IC Wales
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0600uk/content_objectid=13668061_method=full_siteid=50082_headline=-Officer--leaked-email-to-save-lives--name_page.html
A British intelligence officer charged with leaking a top-secret memo to the press has appeared in court.
Katharine Gun, 29, is charged under Section 1 of the Official Secrets Act.
Mrs Gun, from Moor End Road, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire worked for the Government communications headquarters GCHQ as a translator at the security services main monitoring centre in Cheltenham.
It is claimed she leaked an email from American spies asking British counterparts to tap telephones.
Mrs Gun appeared in the dock at Bow Street Magistrates Court, central London only to confirm her name and address.
Ben Emmerson QC, representing Mrs Gun, said: "We will be entering a not guilty plea. I shall make it clear that she does not dispute she is responsible for leaking an email, the subject of this charge.
"Her defence will be her actions were justified by a defence of necessity. The disclosure made by her was a sincere attempt to prevent what she believed to be an unlawful war and saved the lives of British servicemen and women and Iraqi citizens."
Edward Brown, prosecuting, said the case raised some potentially very complex issues and legal questions. The court heard that there were issues over what instructions the defendant can give to her defence solicitors.
Mrs Gun was sacked from GCHQ in June. She was charged on November 13.
Senior district judge Timothy Workman granted unconditional bail to Mrs Gun until January 19 for a further appearance at Bow Street before the matter is transferred to Crown Court.
-------- un
Countries ready to agree on UN accord to clear up unexploded arms after war
GENEVA (AFP)
Nov 27, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031127155040.r44ih853.html
Members of an international weapons convention were ready to agree on Thursday that countries should clear up unexploded arms left behind by war in the territories they control, the United Nations said.
The 92 member states will approve the so-called Protocol on Explosive Remnants of War during negotiations later in the day, said India's ambassador for disarmament, Rakesh Sood, who is presiding over the talks.
"It is the first international treaty which requires the parties to an armed conflict to clear all unexploded weapons that pose a threat to civilians when the war is over," Sood told a news conference in Geneva.
"With this protocol, states will have a clear responsibility to clear or assist in such clearance. It will no longer be possible for parties to a conflict to just walk away," he said.
The protocol, which has been under discussion for less than a year, will enter into force once it is ratified by at least 20 members of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, Sood explained.
This would mark the first legally-binding treaty on disarmament adopted at the United Nations since the anti-personnel landmines text of 1996, he noted.
In a message to the negotiators -- who are gathered in Geneva on Thursday and Friday -- UN Secretary General Kofi Annan described the leftovers of war as "sleeping killers which continue to threaten men and women in fields and children at play, endanger the lives of aid workers, and hold back reconstruction and development."
The protocol covers in particular mortar or artillery shells, landmines, grenades, rockets, missiles and sub-munitions coming from cluster bombs.
Weapons experts met in Geneva last week to discuss the accord.
----
U.S. May Slow Push for U.N. Plan
Delay Expected Until Iraq Sets Up 'Basic Law,' Officials Say
By Colum Lynch and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 27, 2003; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16619-2003Nov26.html
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 26 -- The Bush administration is seriously considering deferring its plans to seek U.N. Security Council support for a new resolution blessing its plan to transfer power to Iraqis this summer, U.S. and U.N. officials said Wednesday.
Administration officials are concerned that France, Germany and Russia will reopen their bid to secure a greater role for the international community in Iraq's political transition, the officials said.
Just one week ago, senior U.S. officials expressed a desire to obtain the council's quick endorsement of a recent U.S.-Iraq pact that would pave the way to a hand-over of power to an Iraqi transitional government by June 30.
U.S. officials are now indicating that they would not bring such a request before the Security Council until March. By that time, Iraq will have established a new "basic law" enshrining the essential principles that will guide Iraq's political transition.
"The time to have this discussion is maybe in the spring of the next year," said a Security Council diplomat familiar with U.S. thinking. "More things will be certain. The United Nations may be more in a position to engage."
But other diplomats said that it is too soon to rule out the possibility of a compromise leading to a council acknowledgment of the U.S.-Iraq timetable for a political transition. Britain and other coalition members have been particularly eager to lock in the council's formal endorsement of the latest development in the political transition before the momentum is lost. They continue to favor the adoption of a series of resolutions recognizing key stages of the political process as they unfold over the coming year.
Senior U.S. officials are assessing the prospects for successfully implementing their plan for the political transition. Robert Blackwill, the top National Security Council official dealing with Iraq, is in Baghdad for discussions with L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, and Iraqi leaders.
On Monday, the president of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, Jalal Talabani, requested in a letter to the Security Council that the United Nations "adopt a new resolution taking into consideration the new circumstances."
But James Cunningham, the deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, questioned the need for a new resolution in a closed-door council meeting Monday afternoon, diplomats who attended the meeting said. Instead, he persuaded the council to send Talabani a message confirming receipt of the letter and pledging to give it consideration.
U.S. officials said Wednesday that Talabani informed the United States that the letter presented to the council was only a draft and that they expected the Iraqi council to present an amended letter without a call for the resolution. "There doesn't seem to be any support in the Governing Council, the [U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority] and the rest of the [U.S.] government for going ahead with a resolution at this time," said an administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Not at this moment."
The United States and Britain put out feelers last week to determine whether they could persuade key council members to support the adoption of a simple resolution endorsing the U.S.-Iraqi timetable for a political transition that would culminate with a ratified constitution and national elections by the end of 2005.
But representatives of France, Germany and Russia demanded Friday that the United States grant the United Nations and foreign governments more authority over the country's political transition in exchange for their support.
"There's always a rankling or criticism when they [Russians, French and Germans] speak out. It doesn't affect very much right now," a senior U.S. official said. "The Russians want an international conference. The French want a faster turnover and an immediate and more prominent U.N. role."
U.S. officials expressed concern that many of those ideas would find a new outlet for consideration at a U.N.-sponsored meeting on Iraq's political future.
The meeting, which will be convened by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, will draw together representatives of 17 nations, including Iraq's neighbors, Egypt, the five permanent members of the Security Council and five nonpermanent members.
-------- us
US looking for small flexible troop bases in Europe: US official
PLOVDIV, Bulgaria (AFP)
Nov 28, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031128194938.xvm9uth9.html
The United States is looking for small flexible bases for possible deployment of its forces in Europe, the US naval attache in Bulgaria said here Friday.
"We are looking for small bases which should be flexible," US navy commander Chris McDonald told AFP.
"If air and land forces come here, they would wish to be near an airport and runway so that they can move off to where they need to go," he said.
A training area for land troops with a rail network and an airbase nearby would also be preferrable, he said speaking on the sidelines of a conference on the possibilities in Bulgaria for US bases.
A Bulgarian defence ministry official, Nikola Yankov, told the conference that bases in eastern Europe would not be on the same scale as those currently used in western Europe.
The camps in the east would be more for training purposes and short-term exercises, he said. "It will not be a question of bases on the same scale as those currently in Germany."
McDonald also said the White House would soon be sending delegations not only to Bulgaria and Romania but throughout the world to discuss strategy.
US President George W. Bush said this week that he would send delegations to new allies in Europe and Asia after the next NATO ministerial meeting in Brussels to lay the ground for the redeployment of US forces in the world.
Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Passi told AFP Thursday that a high-level expert team led by the State Department would come to Bulgaria in the first half of December to explore the possibility for setting up bases in Bulgaria.
McDonald said US experts had already visited several sites, at Koren in the south-east, Novo Selo in the east, Graf Ignatievo near Plovdiv in the south and the northeastern air base at Bezmer.
-----
3 Marine Battalions Are Called to Iraq
November 27, 2003
New York Times
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/politics/27MILI.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has approved the deployment of three more battalions of marines to Iraq next year and has alerted about 7,900 National Guard and Reserve forces that they may be called up for the mission, the Pentagon announced Wednesday.
The three battalions, 2,000 to 3,000 marines in all, will slightly increase the size of the American force in Iraq next year. beyond the 105,000 figure announced earlier this month.
Between February and May, that force is scheduled to replace approximately 130,000 troops there now.
The announcement of "alert" orders brings to 66,531 the total of National Guard and Reserve personnel from all the services who have been told to prepare for possible yearlong duty in Iraq. Of those, 56,504 have been mobilized for service in Iraq or Kuwait next year.
Pentagon officials said the increases were "the result of further detail planning" and did not reflect changes in the security situation since the rotation plan was developed. When the plan was first announced this month, Pentagon officials said reservists should expect further orders.
The Pentagon statement said the orders for the National Guard and Reserve forces were intended to "alert early to provide predictability" and "mobilize as late as possible" to ease the burden on families and employers.
-------- propaganda wars
Cooperation on Iran shows US can work with others: Powell
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Nov 27, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031127192709.e1c05v5j.html
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said that US-European cooperation on fighting Iran's nuclear program shows that the United States can work well with its allies.
"I think this shows that, when we can work together toward a common purpose, that the United States can be as multilateral as anyone," he said in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) aired Thursday.
"We have worked within the international community, with the International Atomic Energy Agency. We have worked with our European Union friends, and especially, as they're called, the EU 3 -- France, Germany and the United Kingdom -- to come up with a good resolution," Powell told NPR.
He stressed that "it was the United States who kept telling our European Union friends and our Russian friends and other friends around the world: Iran is developing nuclear weapons."
"We kept insisting that we had good information, and everybody thought that the United States was just playing that 'axis of evil' card," Powell said, referring to the moniker given by President George W. Bush to Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
"Well, guess what? Finally, the world saw the evidence," he said.
"And the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), under Dr. (Mohamed) ElBaradei, showed that Iran has been failing in its obligations to the Nonproliferation Treaty and the other obligations they have, and they have been working on programs that could lead to the development of a nuclear weapon, and now they have been called to account."
The UN nuclear watchdog unanimously condemned Iran Wednesday for nearly two decades of covert nuclear activities but did not recommend that Tehran face possible UN sanctions.
Iran hailed the resolution adopted by the IAEA as a diplomatic victory, saying it showed that Tehran had been honest about its nuclear program despite "the uproar from certain oppressive circles," a reference to the US push for a tougher response.
ElBaradei said the resolution by the agency's board of governors was meant as "a very serious and ominous message" for Iran to comply with the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which seeks to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
The resolution, drawn from a report prepared by ElBaradei, said Iran had failed "over an extended period of time" to meet obligations on "the reporting of nuclear material and its processing and use," including separating plutonium and enriching uranium.
-------- war crimes
Mexico Orders First Arrests in 'Dirty War'
November 27, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/international/americas/27MEXI.html
MEXICO CITY, Nov. 26 - A Mexican court on Wednesday ordered the arrest of a former policeman for the abduction of a leftist in 1974, the first such order related to the "dirty war" decades ago, Human Rights Watch said.
The rights group said a judge in Guerrero State, long a hotbed of leftist movements, ordered the arrest after the charges were presented by a special prosecutor for such crimes.
The judge and prosecutor could not be reached to confirm the arrest order and Human Rights Watch did not identify the policeman.
It would be the latest breakthrough for the special prosecutor, Ignacio Carrillo, who was named by President Vicente Fox two years ago to investigate and punish atrocities committed by government forces in the 1970's and 1980's under the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Activists said the policeman to be arrested was involved in the case of Jacob Najera, a grade school teacher who was picked up by federal police in 1974 and never seen again.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
9/11 Panel May Seek Extension
Pressure Mounts as Investigation of Attacks Bogs Down
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 27, 2003; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16614-2003Nov26.html
Amid fears that it can no longer meet a spring deadline, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is coming under increasing pressure to seek an extension of its work into the 2004 election season.
Although the panel's leadership says it can still complete its investigation on schedule, a growing number of commissioners believe that is unlikely and are pushing the group to consider asking Congress for more time, several officials said. An influential group of relatives of Sept. 11 victims, the Family Steering Committee, also issued a statement yesterday recommending that the commission seriously discuss an extension.
"Unfortunately, the production of a timely report no longer seems to be possible, in large part because of the delays caused by the administration and the agencies that report to it," the group's statement said.
Any attempt to move the May 27 deadline, however, would require the approval of Congress and President Bush and could make the commission -- which has tried to remain above the political fray -- an issue in the presidential campaign. The White House, which opposed the commission's formation for more than a year, successfully fought to impose a deadline that is five months before the November elections. Commission officials and members of Congress expect the administration to oppose a request for an extension.
Calls to the White House for comment yesterday were not returned.
The 10-member panel, created a year ago today, has been bogged down for months in battles over access to government material related to the attacks, which culminated in a subpoena earlier this month to New York City that is likely to end up in a court battle. The conflicts have already forced the commission to postpone one of its key hearings and to schedule more time for staff to conduct investigations on weekends and holidays.
In addition, officials announced this week that one of the commission's most outspoken members, former Georgia senator Max Cleland (D), is leaving to join the Export-Import Bank's board. Cleland has accused the Bush administration of trying to undermine the commission's work and sharply condemned a deal that restricts the panel's access to presidential briefings. Cleland's replacement has not been named.
Any extension in the commission's deadline would require more funding and staff for the commission, because many of those detailed to the effort are required to return to their jobs after May, officials said.
Presidential candidate Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), a Senate sponsor of the legislation that created the commission, said he would support a request for more time. "It is unfortunate that, because of White House intransigence, we may have to wait even longer for a full accounting," Lieberman said in a statement. "But it will be worth the delay to learn why the terrorist attacks were not prevented and how we can improve our defenses against future attacks."
The commission first raised the issue of an extension in an October statement, when it warned that continued delays might "prevent the commission from completing its work and issuing its report within the time frame set by statute." Several commissioners said in recent interviews that their concerns have only heightened since then and that they expect the issue to be central to internal discussions in coming weeks.
Commissioner Timothy J. Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said he is leaning toward the view that the investigation may be running out of time.
"I think it's going to be extremely difficult, given the obstacles we've had on access issues with the White House, to make the deadline," Roemer said. "We're having to compress the schedule to the back end. It might be in the interest of the commission to be on the record requesting an extension."
Another Democratic member, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, said, "I think we're at a point that we need to take stock of where we are and make a determination."
The Family Steering Committee and other relatives who have been monitoring the commission's progress said they fear that the tight timeline would compromise the panel's findings and will sow doubts in the minds of those who lost family members in the attacks.
"We want a thorough report," said Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband, Ronald, was killed at the World Trade Center. "If the report is going to be lacking in information because they run out of time, that's ridiculous."
But the commission's leadership has said in recent weeks that the deadline can still be met, in part because of increased cooperation from government agencies. In response to subpoenas, both the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration agreed to turn over air defense materials, and the panel has reached an agreement with the White House that gives four commission members restricted access to intelligence documents known as the President's Daily Brief.
"Our view at the moment is that we can get the job done on time," Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said yesterday. "That assumes we're not going to be taking many more delays in getting the information we need."
One Republican appointee, former Navy secretary John F. Lehman, said that meeting the May deadline would benefit the commission, because it would allow the findings to be debated by political parties and presidential candidates.
"We can use the momentum of an election year to get real endorsement of reforms," Lehman said. "It would be likely to have less momentum after an election."
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Wind Power Tax Credit Expires in December
REUTERS USA:
November 27, 2003
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22956/story.htm
NEW YORK - The shelving of the energy bill until next year may hurt the wind power industry by making an extension of its tax credit uncertain, an industry group said yesterday.
The $31 billion energy bill, which included tax breaks, grants and funding for virtually every kind of energy production, collapsed this week amid a Senate deadlock.
A 3-year extension of the wind credit, which pays developers 1.8 cents for every kilowatt-hour of wind energy they produce, had been included in the energy bill. The credit is set to expire on Dec. 31.
The world's top wind turbine maker Vestas Group (VWS.CO: Quote, Profile, Research) put off its decision to build a wind turbine plant in Portland, Oregon, this year because of the uncertainty of the credit.
The tax break, first approved in 1994, has sometimes suffered months-long gaps, most recently in 2001, when it expired ahead of Congressional renewal.
Wind industry backers say the gaps have created a roller coaster in U.S. wind production growth because companies become fearful of investing in the alternative energy source. They say the tax-break gaps hamper wind power growth in the United States which grew last year at a rate of only 10 percent compared to global growth of 28 percent.
"We've been looking to establish a manufacturing facility in the U.S. but have not done that only because of the boom and bust cycle of the wind energy industry in the U.S." Scott Kringen, a sales representative with Vestas in Oregon, told Reuters.
Vestas makes wind turbines in Australia, Germany, Denmark, and Scotland among other countries. Kringen said most of those countries offer more stable, longer-term policy support for wind than does the United States.
"Failure to extend the (credit) means that contracts are put on hold, workers are laid off, and the momentum that had built up this year in the U.S. wind energy market is once again brought to a halt," Washington, D.C.-based American Wind Energy Association Director Randall Swisher said in a statement.
Wind provides energy for about 1.3 million people in the United States, where it produces more than 5,325 megawatts of energy. It makes up just a few percentage points of total U.S. electric production.
----
U.S. products to carry new "made with renewable energy" logo
Thursday, November 27, 2003
By GreenBiz.com
http://www.enn.com/news/2003-11-27/s_10599.asp
CHICAGO, Ill. - At the recent 8th National Green Power Marketing Conference, the nonprofit Center for Resource Solutions introduced an initiative to place the Green-e logo on packages of consumer products manufactured by companies purchasing certified renewable energy.
With 10,000 businesses and 110,000 households using Green-e certified renewable energy, the Green-e logo has become a leading symbol for certified renewable energy.
"Consumers are accustomed to seeing the recycling logo on product packaging," said Gabe Petlin, Green-e program manager for CRS. "Now when you see the Green-e logo on a product you'll know that a significant portion of the energy required to produce that product came from or was offset by high-quality renewable energy."
An increasing number of consumer-product manufacturers are purchasing significant amounts of certified renewable energy for their headquarters and factories. Many businesses have already applied for authorized use of the Green-e logo, including White Wave (Silk brand soy milk products), Interface Fabrics Group, Choice Organic Teas, and Lundberg Family Farms (rice).
"In response to the growing demand for use of the Green-e logo by companies and institutions, we've launched the 'made with renewable energy' labeling program," said Kėri Bolding, CRS communications director. "We invite companies to take advantage of public relations and branding opportunities that emerge from communicating their purchase of renewable energy."
Certified renewable energy is now available to every household and business, and increasing numbers of high-quality options are offered as new suppliers regularly enter the growing green power market. Businesses are becoming the largest share of that market, as numbers of diverse companies purchase renewable energy to lessen their impact on the environment and uphold stated environment missions. Through the promotion of renewable energy purchases, these companies are realizing the public relations opportunities of communicating a compelling message on company environmental stewardship.
"By placing the Green-e logo on product packaging, businesses show their customers that they are taking action to protect the environment through the purchase of certified renewable energy," added Petlin.
-------- energy
Without Energy Legislation, Grid, Power Policy in Limbo
By Peter Behr and Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 27, 2003; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16633-2003Nov26?language=printer
Congress's failure to enact new energy legislation has left the nation's electricity grid as it was on the day of the huge Northeast blackout Aug. 14, with no enforceable operating rules aimed at preventing cascading power failures.
Federal regulators began moving into that vacuum this week, issuing a preliminary order Tuesday that would link the largest utility in Ohio into a tightly run power-pooling organization in the Mid-Atlantic region.
The decision by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission seeks to ensure better control over heavy flows of electric power that routinely move east and north through Ohio, where the August blackout began. FERC's order, if made final, would link American Electric Power Co. in Columbus, Ohio, with PJM Interconnection, based near Valley Forge, Pa.
Other actions are coming from the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), an industry group whose voluntary operating guidelines for the grid were not followed before the blackout, according to a government investigation.
NERC is pushing utilities to check their systems for the kinds of faulty monitoring equipment that plagued grid control centers in Indiana and Ohio as the blackout began to spread.
But in shelving the energy bill until next year, at least, lawmakers have left federal electricity policy in disarray. Without a bill, tax credits and other federal subsidies will expire at year-end on wind and solar power generators and hybrid vehicles that run on motor fuels and battery power.
The bill would not have added much to U.S. oil and gas production in the next few years, critics said. Its most ambitious provisions -- including research on hydrogen-powered fuel cells and clean coal production, a loan guarantee for a $20 billion natural gas pipeline from Alaska, and as much as $6 billion in incentives to encourage construction of new nuclear power plants -- would not have paid off for a decade or more.
But in returning home with no energy bill, lawmakers have no answer if energy problems return this winter, said Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Domenici, a principal author of the unsuccessful bill, told colleagues Tuesday: "I hope and pray that during the ensuing months, without an energy bill, that we don't have high, high spikes in natural gas prices and the people of our country ask, 'What have we done about it?' And our answer is 'nothing.' "
On Monday, President Bush and Republican congressional leaders gave up the three-year campaign to pass comprehensive energy legislation. It had become clear that supporters could not muster the two additional Senate votes needed to call the legislation up for a final roll call.
In a last-ditch attempt, Bush called House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), seeking a way to end an impasse involving production of the fuel additive methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE).
The additive is blamed for polluting groundwater, and DeLay insisted on keeping a House-passed provision protecting MTBE manufacturers from "defective product" lawsuits. Senators from states with MTBE pollution refused to go along with DeLay, and no compromise was found.
The White House's preoccupation over the weekend with the Medicare legislation dimmed chances for a late deal, GOP aides said. Democrats were in no mood to compromise after their failure Monday to block a successful vote on the Medicare bill.
Republican officials said it was unlikely that key, noncontroversial sections of the bill could be pulled out and approved separately when Congress reconvenes. That is because the legislation was carefully structured to include a mixture of sweeteners and bitter pills.
Popular provisions such as tax breaks for industry and the mandatory grid operating rules were included in part to overcome opposition to much more controversial provisions affecting mergers and acquisitions in the utility industry.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (R-La.) said Tuesday that he was still confident the measure would pass.
"With energy prices rising and America's dangerous dependence on foreign oil growing, the need to enact a comprehensive national energy bill is crystal clear to everyone except for a handful of disgruntled senators," he said.
But half a dozen Republican senators voted to block a final vote on the measure last Friday, and they have shown no sign of changing their minds. Five were New Englanders who object to the MTBE provisions as well as favors for the nuclear power and coal industries.
-------- environment
Billions of people may suffer severe water shortages as glaciers melt: WWF
MILAN (AFP)
Nov 27, 2003
http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/031127103048.5e256pvn.html
Billions of people will face severe water shortages as glaciers around the world melt unless governments take urgent action to tackle global warming, the environmental group WWF said Thursday, ahead of a UN conference on climate change.
"Increasing global temperatures in the coming century will cause continued widespread melting of glaciers, which contain 70 percent of the world's fresh water reserves," it warned in a new study.
"An overall rise of temperature of four degrees Celsius before the end of the century would eliminate almost all of them," it said.
Average temperatures have risen between 0.6 and 0.7 degrees Celsius since 1860, according to WWF, which urged countries to curb emissions of carbon dioxide to ensure the increase stays well below a threshold of two degrees.
The Switzerland-based conservation group released its study on climate change and global glacier decline in Milan where more than 180 countries are due to gather from December 1-12 for the UN Climate Change Convention to assess progress in addressing problems concerning global warming.
"The melting of glaciers will lead to water shortages for billions of people, as well as sea levels rising and destroying coastal communities worldwide," WWF said.
Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, where major cities rely on glaciers as their main source of water during dry seasons, would be worst affected, it predicted.
In the Himalayas, there was a grave danger of flooding, the group said, noting that glacier-fed rivers in the region supply water to one third of the world's population.
"Glacial meltdown is a clear sign that we must act now to fight global warming and stop the melting," said Jennifer Morgan, director of WWF's climate change programme.
The environmental organisation called on the ministers who will attend the Milan conference to act faster to combat global warming, urging those from developing nations in particular to demonstrate their will to tackle the issue.
WWF wants strong rules governing the use of forests, which play a vital role in absorbing carbon dioxide.
The group also asked governments to ensure Russia ratifies the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which establishes a set of goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Already ratified by 119 countries, the text just needs a commitment from Moscow to become international law, it said.
On Tuesday, Italian officials said the European Union has pledged 390 million dollars (325 million euros) a year to help developing countries from 2005 fight the damaging effects of climate change.
In 2001, 20 countries including the 15 EU members pledged to provide 410 million dollars annually to poorer countries until 2005.
-------- health
H.I.V. Infections Continue Rise, Study Says
November 27, 2003
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/national/27AIDS.html
The number of new H.I.V. cases diagnosed in the United States is continuing to climb, and the most significant rise has been among Hispanics and gay and bisexual men, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The study by the centers, which appeared in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, looked at data from 29 states that included a confidential system that was started in 1999. The picture of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, might even be much worse than the data indicate because states with the highest populations and possibly the highest rates of infection, like New York and California, were not included in the four-year study.
From 1999 through 2002, the number of new H.I.V. cases soared by 26 percent among Hispanics and by 17 percent among men who have sex with men, while the increase in new cases over all for that period was 5.1 percent, according to the study.
"Because more effective treatments are available, there seems to be a perception particularly in the gay community that H.I.V. is a manageable disease," said Dr. Robert Janssen, director of the division of H.I.V. and AIDS prevention at the centers. "Most of the increase in the Latino community is due to men having sex with men. I think the disease just doesn't have the fear that it once carried."
Several other groups also showed increases in the rate of diagnosis. African-Americans still make up the largest portion of new cases, at 55 percent, while whites accounted for 8 percent of the new cases, the study found. The numbers for men in general went up 7 percent.
Whether the study's findings reflect higher rates of H.I.V. infection is difficult to say because some cases are not diagnosed immediately.
But if that was a factor, Dr. Janssen said, the study would have detected more cases that had progressed to AIDS. Instead, he said, rates of testing have stayed about the same and many of the recently detected H.I.V. infections were caught in the earlier stages.
"We're seeing an increase in people with H.I.V. but not necessarily an increase in simultaneous diagnoses of H.I.V. and AIDS," he said.
The new findings reinforce the notion that there is a growing sense of complacency among groups at the highest risk for contracting the disease. Advances in AIDS treatments in recent years, some experts are saying, could be undermining efforts to promote safe sex. The latest figures, in that case, might reflect a more widespread willingness to engage in risky behaviors.
Earlier this week, for example, the centers released figures showing that rates of syphilis infections had risen sharply in 2002 for the second consecutive year. Gay and bisexual men accounted for a disproportionate number of those cases, Dr. Janssen said, and in most cities more than half the men involved in the outbreak also had H.I.V.
Dr. Jeffrey Laurence, program consultant for the American Foundation for AIDS Research in New York, said: "Even among populations targeted for outreach, it's as if people think they can become infected because there's a pill to take care of them. There needs to be a stronger message that it's not a picnic to be on these drugs and that even when you're being treated you can still transmit this disease."
Efforts to promote AIDS prevention and convey the gravity of the disease have not reached Hispanics and other minorities, experts say. Too often, Dr. Laurence said, AIDS education programs rely on blanket messages that are too weak to combat the widespread images of healthy, resilient AIDS patients in drug advertisements.
"There's such a striking disparity among Hispanics and blacks that we're obviously not doing a good enough job of targeting them and conveying the right idea," he said. "Here's a population that is not responding to the messages we're sending. Perhaps it is because that message is getting stale."
More than 850,000 Americans are infected with H.I.V., the greatest number since the AIDS epidemic started in the early 1980's. According to the centers, about 40,000 people in the United States are infected with H.I.V. every year.
--------
AIDS Resurging Among Gay Men, CDC Data Show
Number of Newly Diagnosed HIV Cases in High-Risk Group Was 17% Higher Last Year Than in 1999
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 27, 2003; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16608-2003Nov26?language=printer
The number of newly diagnosed HIV infections in gay men was 17 percent higher last year than in 1999, according to data released yesterday by government epidemiologists. The increase provides more evidence that the epidemic is resurging in that high-risk group of people.
Among ethnic groups, Hispanics had the largest rise in cases, with 26 percent more first diagnoses of the human immunodeficiency virus last year than four years ago. Among whites, the number of new diagnoses in 2002 was only 8 percent higher than the number of new diagnoses in 1999. The number of blacks and Asians whose HIV was newly diagnosed in those two years remained stable.
The information, announced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, comes from 29 states that count all new positive HIV tests each year. The data are considered to be the best window onto the state of the AIDS epidemic nationwide. The trends are similar to ones announced earlier this year from fewer states.
"We need to remind not just the groups at risk, but the American public, that HIV and AIDS is not over in the United States," said Ronald O. Valdiserri, a physician and epidemiologist at the CDC.
Several European countries and Australia have also seen a rise in the number of new HIV diagnoses in gay men in recent years. Experts attribute the trend to a complacency about risky behavior that arose in the wake of life-saving antiretroviral therapy and the coming of age of a new generation of gay men with no memory of the early, devastating years of the epidemic.
"We have to continue to work with communities, and medical care providers, to reinforce the importance of maintaining safer behaviors," Valdiserri said.
The unusually steep rise among Hispanics is seen for the first time in this report. About two-thirds of the Hispanics in which HIV was newly diagnosed last year were gay men.
The report includes data from Florida and New Mexico, both with large Hispanic populations, but not from New York or California, which also have them. "I don't think we can say it's a valid national sample yet for Latinos," Valdiserri said.
Nevertheless, spokesmen for two activist groups found the numbers ominous.
"The messages of a decade ago may not be reaching the groups that are impacted today," said Carole Bernard of the National Minority AIDS Council. "What is needed, really, is 'HIV/AIDS 101,' explaining what the disease is, how it's transmitted and how people can protect themselves."
Carlos Velazquez, director of national prevention programs at LLEGO, the National Latina/o Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Organization, in Washington, called the increases "alarming, but not surprising."
"There have been tremendous efforts to prevent AIDS in white gay communities, and in white communities as a whole. But efforts that focus on Latino communities, and gay Latino communities in particular, have been minimal," he said.
Information about the course of the AIDS epidemic in the United States is surprisingly sketchy.
Before the arrival of life-extending treatments in 1996, the number of deaths from AIDS each year gave a good -- if very delayed -- indication of the number of infections that occurred each year in the past. But since then annual AIDS mortality has been cut by about 90 percent. Because many HIV-infected people never progress to AIDS, death rates from the disease are no longer an indicator of annual infection rates.
Because of privacy and stigma concerns, in the early years of the epidemic states did not require mandatory reporting of people testing positive on AIDS tests. Now many states collect such information confidentially or through systems that mask a person's identity. But because not all states do so, epidemiologists cannot say whether the information from those that do reflects national trends.
The CDC is setting up a program that will estimate the number of new infections each year through national sampling, but it is not ready.
Although the new HIV diagnoses in gay men reported by the 29 states are not necessarily all recent infections, CDC researchers believe most are. That is because the number of new AIDS cases each year is not rising substantially, indicating that the new diagnoses are generally not in people who are tested for the first time when their disease has progressed to AIDS.
In addition, numerous cities are seeing a rise in syphilis cases in gay men. About half of gay men in which that venereal disease is newly diagnosed are also infected with HIV, Valdiserri said.
Among the 29 states, the number of gay and bisexual men whose cases were newly diagnosed in 1999 was 9,988. It rose to 11,686 in 2002, an increase of 17 percent. Overall, 42 percent of people whose HIV was diagnosed in that four-year period contracted the infection through male homosexual contact, 17 percent through use of injection drugs and 35 percent through heterosexual contact, with the remainder unknown.
Epidemiologists estimate that one-quarter of the 750,000 to 1 million Americans infected with HIV do not know they carry the virus.
-------- hunger
Chronic Hunger Is Increasing
Report Cites More Undernourished People in Last Half of '90s
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 27, 2003; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16578-2003Nov26.html
UNITED NATIONS -- The number of hungry people in the world increased during the last half of the 1990s by 18 million, to a total of 842 million, reversing a steady drop over the past three decades, according to a new study by a U.N. agency.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which on Tuesday published the new figures in a report titled "The State of Food Insecurity in the World," warned that the increase is undermining efforts by the United States and other governments to reduce the number of hungry people in the world to about 400 million by 2015. That goal was set at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome.
More than one in seven people in the world endure chronic hunger, which is measured by a daily intake of less than about 1,700 calories and a lack of access to safe and nutritious food. The vast majority -- about 798 million -- live in poor, developing countries. About 10 million reside in the world's wealthiest industrialized nations.
Despite the setback, the report's chief author, Hartwig de Haen, noted that the scale of world hunger has fallen dramatically over the past quarter-century. The share of the developing world's population facing chronic hunger decreased from 37 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 2000, he said.
Even throughout the 1990s, the overall number of hungry people fell by 19 million, thanks to an initial drop of 37 million in the first half of the decade.
Nineteen countries, including China and Brazil, achieved a decline of 80 million chronically undernourished people over the decade. China, which has experienced unprecedented economic growth in the 1990s, was responsible for reducing the number of hungry people by 58 million.
But those successes were largely offset by the increase of 60 million hungry people in 26 countries, including Congo, Afghanistan, Somalia, Zambia, Burundi, North Korea, Yemen and Liberia.
De Haen said it is too early to judge whether the recent increase represents a major shift in the historical decline of global hunger or a short-term spike caused by a series of crises and conflicts.
He noted that Congo, which has faced a decade of misrule and civil war, had seen an increase in the number of hungry from 12 million to 38 million at the end of the 1990s.
"We do hope this is a temporary divergence from a declining trend," de Haen said in an interview. He also noted that the overall decline would have continued if Congo and India, which saw an increase of 19 million hungry in the second half of the 1990s, were removed from the list. "I think we would like to emphasize the fact that so many countries have done better," he said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Italy backtracks on nuclear waste decision after mass protests
ROME (AFP)
Nov 27, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031127161210.uzgrwlym.html
The Italian government Thursday went back on a decision to construct Italy's first nuclear waste repository in a town in the extreme south of the country, after massive local protests.
The government struck the town of Scanzano Jonico -- the proposed site for the dump -- from a November 13 decree authorising the construction of a single nuclear waste storage site.
It ordered a scientific committee to come up with a new site within 18 months.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators in the Basilicata region, which depends on agriculture and tourism as its livelihood, had regularly protested the government's plans.
The Italian government has since January sought to consolidate its nuclear waste storage facilities in order to better protect against a possible terrorist attack.
Almost 55,000 cubic metres of highly radioactive nuclear waste and nearly 300 tonnes of spent fuel are currently stored at 19 sites throughout Italy.
----
Group Wants Investigation of Police Tactics at Miami Trade Talks
November 27, 2003
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/national/27MIAM.html
MIAMI, Nov. 26 - Amnesty International called on Wednesday for an investigation into police tactics during last week's Free Trade Area of the Americas meetings here, joining a swelling chorus of complaints that the police used unwarranted violence to stifle mostly peaceful demonstrators.
Also on Wednesday, a coalition of labor, environmental and antiglobalization groups detailed an array of violent police actions against protesters, reporters and others trying to navigate downtown streets last Thursday and Friday.
At a news conference, members of the coalition said the police had fired on unarmed protesters with rubber bullets that left large welts, forced them to the ground and handcuffed them at gunpoint and used pepper spray on them. They said the police also stopped hundreds of people on the streets, searched them without cause and sometimes seized their possessions.
Dozens of protesters were jailed for hours or even a few days, and the coalition members said many had been denied water, food and, in some cases, medical treatment.
"This was a paramilitary assault," said Naomi Archer, a leader of South Floridians for Fair Trade and Global Justice, adding that the police seemed intent on violating the civil rights "of anyone who has an opinion that runs counter to those in power."
In a statement, Amnesty International, the human rights group, called for an independent investigation into reports that some of the more than 200 people jailed during the protests were badly mistreated.
The Police Department press office did not answer the phone on Wednesday afternoon, and an officer who answered a call to the chief's office said the department would have no comment.
The talks drew 8,000 to 10,000 protesters to downtown Miami, the police said. Though the Miami department, which has about 1,000 officers, led the security effort, about 40 law enforcement agencies and 2,500 officers participated. The federal government provided $8.5 million to help Miami with security expenses.
Lynn Norman-Teck, a spokeswoman for Mayor Alex Penelas of Miami-Dade County, said that by all indications, the police had done a good job of "balancing between the rights of lawful protesters and the need for safety for all our citizens." She added, "If there are complaints, the mayor assures the county will look into them."
Since the trade meetings ended, a number of groups who came to protest free trade have expressed outrage at how the police treated them. Although a few dozen protesters threw bottles, rocks and smoke bombs at police officers and set trash fires, a majority was not looking for trouble, these groups say.
The United Steelworkers of America has called for a Congressional investigation into the police tactics, saying officers systematically intimidated its members who participated in a peaceful rally and march sponsored by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. last Thursday.
The trade talks came in the midst of a fierce competition among Miami and several other cities to be named the headquarters for a planned free trade zone stretching from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Miami has aggressively lobbied for the designation and planned the large police presence to prevent the kind of violence that erupted during trade talks in Seattle in 1999.
Critics have accused the city of using whatever means necessary to ensure that its downtown remained calm and attractive for the trade ministers.
John J. Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., released a statement on Wednesday saying that the police had violated "virtually every agreement" made with the union in advance of its protests and adding that the union might sue.
The Florida Alliance for Retired Americans complained earlier in the week that the police had turned away 13 of 25 buses of retirees it sent to the labor rally and abused a number of retirees who did arrive there.
In a letter to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. on Tuesday, Police Chief John F. Timoney said he was conducting a review of police actions, but he also defended them. He wrote that the department had reneged on some of its promises to the union because the union allowed nonunion, potentially dangerous protesters into its events.
Chief Timoney explained that after some protesters tried to take down the tall fence blocking off the hotel where the trade ministers were meeting on Thursday morning, "the tenor of the day was changed and police were compelled to adopt a more defensive posture."
Nonunion protesters who attended the rally began attacking officers with projectiles after it ended, Chief Timoney wrote, adding that "a firm, rapid response was necessary to prevent severe injuries and significant property damage."
--------
Smithsonian extends its reach
By ANDREW P. MOISAN
Nov. 24, 2003
(UPI)
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20031121-051413-9746r
CHANTILLY, Va. - Not far from the runways of Dulles International Airport, where roaring jetliners come and go, a very different fleet of aircraft sits mute and unmoving. They don't wait for passengers, but for visitors to the Smithsonian Institution's newest museum, when it opens in December.
Work is nearly complete on the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, a companion to its very popular facility on the National Mall. The new complex in Chantilly, Va., is much larger than the mall facility, allowing the museum to display parts of its collection too large to have been shown previously.
"It can house most of our very large artifacts -- artifacts people would never get to see downtown," said Bob van der Linden, curator of air transportation exhibits for the museum. "This will give millions of people a chance to see these artifacts."
The new complex, which is scheduled to open Dec. 15, features a massive hangar-like structure -- about 900-feet long, 248-feet wide and 103-feet tall. Admission is free. There are fees only for parking.
The $311-million facility was named for one of the Smithsonian's most generous donors, Steven F. Udvar-Hazy, who in 1999 gave it $60 million. Udvar-Hazy is president and chief executive officer of International Lease Finance Corp., which leases commercial airplanes throughout the world.
Arranged inside the massive hangar are 82 aircraft and 35 large space artifacts. Eventually, there will be more than 200 aircraft and 135 large space artifacts.
"We're very lucky ... we'll get most of our collection on display," van der Linden said.
The largest craft there will be the space shuttle Enterprise, which will have its own hangar. While that location won't be open to the public until later, the shuttle will be visible as restoration work is done.
The facility on the mall, which opened in 1976, houses such notable air- and spacecraft as the Wright brothers' 1903 Flyer; the "Spirit of St. Louis," which Charles A. Lindbergh flew to Paris in 1927 in the first solo trans-Atlantic flight; and the Apollo 11 command module, which took astronauts to the moon in 1969.
Although a large building, and one of the most popular museum stops in Washington, Air and Space spokesmen say, the mall facility can display only about 10 percent of the Smithsonian's collection. The annex will provide more space for display and areas for storage away from the mall and the museum's Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility in Suitland, Md., which still holds much of the collection.
Lin Ezell, a historian and project coordinator of the new museum, calls this "display storage," which allows artifacts to be safely stored and, at the same time, enjoyed by the public.
"We're going to have the best of both worlds," Ezell said, adding that she had no concerns that the new facility will cut attendance at the mall museum.
"They complement each other rather than compete with each other," Ezell said.
Museum officials anticipate the new facility will see about 3 million visitors a year. Its December opening will coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' first flight.
Though not all the artifacts and features planned for display at the new center will be ready by the opening, museum officials feel that what will be there, and the promise of more to come, will be enough to keep the public interested.
"I was at first disappointed that we weren't going to open with everything in place," Ezell said. But, she added, "It's a way to lure people back."
Among the artifacts visitors will see are several large, fully assembled aircraft, such as an Air France Concorde, which is too big to fit in the mall facility.
Smaller aircraft are positioned on the floor beside -- and in some cases beneath the wings of -- the larger planes. Some of the smallest aircraft hang from the arching trusses of the 10-story-tall ceiling.
Guests will enter the hangar complex on the second level, and will first see hanging above them "The Little Stinker," an aerobatic plane that was the smallest of its kind when built in 1946. Walking straight ahead and peering over the railing, visitors will see the black Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, a type of aircraft still used for military reconnaissance.
Walkways about four stories from the floor will allow visitors to examine up close the aircraft suspended from the ceiling, many of which are positioned to appear as though in mid-flight so visitors can "experience the sensation of soaring along with the aircraft," according to statements from the museum.
Guests can use ramps to explore the larger airliners on the floor.
Among the large artifacts on the floor is the Enola Gay, which in 1945 dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in the first of two such attacks credited with ending World War II in the Pacific. It is the first time in more than four decades the Boeing B-29 Superfortress has appeared fully assembled, though it is not the first time the museum has attempted to display it. And, as in times previous, the current exhibit has spurred criticism.
"You have to talk about human victims," said Kevin Martin, executive director of Peace Action, an anti-war organization. "And you have to talk about (the atomic bombing) being controversial, about whether it was justified."
Peace Action joined a group of scholars, veterans, authors and others in arguing that the museum's description of the plane focuses too much on its technological achievements and not enough on the damage it caused after dropping an atomic weapon.
Peter Kuznick, a history professor and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, has led a petition to convince the museum director, retired Marine Corps Gen. John R. Dailey, to change the exhibit and engage in open discussions about the history and future of nuclear warfare. Critics fear the exhibit glorifies the bombing and, in doing so, justifies future use of nuclear warfare.
"What we're saying is history has consequences," Kuznick said. "We see this as part of a dangerous attempt to get more acceptance of nuclear weapons."
Despite a petition drive, the museum has indicated it will not change the exhibit. Spokesmen declined to answer questions about the plane, referring reporters to a statement on the museum's Web site.
"This type of label is precisely the same kind used for the other airplanes and spacecraft in the museum," the statement says. "Its intent is to tell visitors what the object is and the basic facts concerning its history."
The museum considers itself an educational institution, though, and teachers from Fairfax, Loudoun and Potomac counties in Virginia will rotate teaching sessions at the museum for students, said museum spokesman Frank McNally.
"When students come with their school groups ... it will be a real learning experience," McNally said. "It won't just be a day off from the classroom."
If the Air and Space annex looks massive, it's because it has to be - - and was meant to be. Apart from storing many of the museum's largest artifacts, the new facility was designed to resemble an airport. The second floor of a 164-foot observation tower, built like an air traffic control tower, will give visitors a close look at airliners landing and taking off at Dulles. The first floor will eventually house equipment that replicates the inside of a control tower.
Work will continue on the center and visitors will be able to watch specialists do restoration work on artifacts that will become featured exhibits.
One of the features on which work will continue is the installation of visual displays that will accompany many of the exhibits. Using Quick Time Virtual Reality photography, specialists are devising a way for guests to examine the planes inside and out.
"Because we don't let people get inside our aircraft, there's so much you don't get to see," Ezell said.
Thirty-six photographs of each plane are taken and worked into a display that will give visitors a sense of what it would be like sitting in the planes' cockpits.
"Museums have this love-hate thing," said Dennis Biela, a photographer with LightSpeed Media, which was contracted by the museum to create the displays. "They want you to come and look at all the stuff but they don't want you to touch anything."
Another feature that will give visitors more than a glance at aviation are flight simulators -- a virtual piloting experience -- and a 487-seat IMAX theater. Visitors will be charged fees for the simulator rides and the theater.
A food court, gift shop and a parking lot with a 2,000-car capacity will be available for public use Dec. 15. A bus service will later operate between the mall and the new facility. There will be fees for the bus service.
For more information about the complex, call 202-357-2700 or visit si.edu/visit.
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