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NUCLEAR
Unprotected nuclear weapons multiply
Problems Cited at Nuclear Plant in South [New] Jersey
Problems persist at U.S. nuclear plant
Nuclear expert in cancer warning
URANIUM Acquisition Complete
Hard Weapons for Soft Targets
"Uranium in the Wind"
Of Pynchon, Thanatos and Depleted Uranium
Slovakia wants to postpone closure of nuclear reactor by two years
India, US begin talks on deepening nuclear, strategic ties
Iran, Russia nuclear deal 'close'
Homage to Truthtellers
Danger of North Korea missile launch fading
Missile defense almost armed, but is it ready?
Russia makes nuclear plea to Iran
America's nuclear fears: rhetoric or real concern?
Prices help uranium industry rebound
Rocky Flats building won't be demolished with explosives
Problems Cited at Nuclear Plant in South Jersey
EDITORIAL: Yucca vote
White House won't appeal Yucca ruling
MILITARY
Afghan Election Concerns Subside
Candidate Drops Boycott of Afghan Election
Junk missiles, bomb dumps threat to Indian cities
EU not likely to lift China arms ban this year
Poland eyes arms deal with Iraq
EU could lift China arms ban 'in sensible way': British FM
Sudan accuses Uganda of supplying arms to southern rebels: report
Contracts Awarded
Scrapping submarine program a possibility if boats not safe: Graham
Taiwan's Chen Seeks to Restart Cross-Strait Talks
In an Overture, Taiwan's President Calls for Opening Peace Talks
Plan for Investigation Into Afghan Election Eases Dissent
Romanians Pitch Rumsfeld on Base Location
Violence Persists as Rumsfeld Visits Iraq
Rebels Loyal to Shiite Cleric Begin Handing In Arms in Iraq
Israeli Troops Probed for Killing Gaza Schoolgirl
EU agrees plans to replace NATO in Bosnia
Indonesia missed opportunity to restore military ties
Spies "lap up" info from torture
New Scrutiny of the Flow of Iraqi Oil to American Consumers
North Korea warns against attempts to bring nuclear issue to U.N
American Deserters Find a Mixed Reception in Canada
U.S. to double military in Colombia
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
New Base to Monitor Border in Northeast
U.S. Returns 'Enemy Combatant' to Saudi Arabia After 3 Years
POLITICS
Senate Vote on Tax Bill Cleared
Senate Approves Bill Worth $140 Billion in Corporate Tax Breaks
Toledo Tube War: 14,273 Ads and Counting
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh
Players: David Addington
Indymedia's Internet Servers Confiscated
US seizes independent media sites Anti-globalisation protests in London
Not shown in base theaters
A Doctrine Under Pressure: Pre-emption Is Redefined
GOP Hopeful Raises War Doubts
Why I will vote for John Kerry for President
ENERGY
Text of Prepared Remarks by Sen. John Kerry
OTHER
Mount St. Helens Releases New Column of Steam From Crater
Presidential Debaters Clash on Environment
Christopher Reeve, 'Superman' and Crusader for Stem Cells
ACTIVISTS
War Protesters Stage Downing Street Demo
Tempe, Arizona, O13: Debate Update 10/07
-------- NUCLEAR
Unprotected nuclear weapons multiply
WASHINGTON, (UPI)
Oct. 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/upi/2004/1011-173743-us-nuclear.html
Four countries that secretly built their nuclear programs against the wishes of the international community now possess more than 400 nuclear weapons, says a report released in Washington Monday.
Two of these unrecognized nuclear states, India and Pakistan, publicly tested their nuclear devices in May 1998. The third, Israel, is still an undeclared nuclear state but has dropped enough hints to let the world know that it has nuclear weapons. The fourth, North Korea, continues to defy U.S.-led international efforts to shut down its nuclear plants.
There is also an exclusive club of five nuclear weapon-states, an internationally recognized status conferred by the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which includes the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China.
Since the 1998 nuclear tests, both India and Pakistan have publicly declared their nuclear arsenals, but this status is not formally recognized by international bodies. Neither of the two countries has signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
Statistics through December 2003 collected by a Washington-based nuclear watchdog -- the Institute for Science and International Security -- show that India possesses 55-115 nuclear weapons, compared to Pakistan's 50-90. Pakistan also has 1,000-1,250 kilograms of highly enriched uranium or uranium-235 enriched to 20 percent or more.
India also is believed to possess this weapons-grade fissile material, but the report does not reveal how much. India, however, has 300-470 kilograms of plutonium compared to 20-60 kilograms of Pakistan.
Pakistan mainly relies on uranium for making nuclear fuel while India relies on plutonium.
The institute that compiled this report is the same that published a report in 2003 that Pakistan's chief nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan was selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea. Published a year before Khan's public confession in February, the report caused a sensation in the United States but was rejected by Pakistan as speculative.
The institute reports that military nuclear stocks in India, Pakistan and Israel are continuing to grow and urges the international community to slap a ban on the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons to prevent further proliferation.
Pakistan, India and Israel are placed in the category of de facto nuclear powers. North Korea is listed as an ambiguous state while South Africa is listed as the only country which dismantled its nuclear program. It did so at the end of the Apartheid regime.
According to the report, Israel has 510-650 kilograms of plutonium and has stockpiled 110-190 nuclear weapons. North Korea has 15-38 kilograms of plutonium and 2-9 nuclear weapons. And South Africa, although it dismantled its nuclear programs in the early 1990s, still has a large stock of unirradiated uranium, about 430-580 kilograms.
The institute complains that Israel's plutonium and HEU stocks remain difficult to estimate. Similarly, India may now be producing HEU in significant quantities in a gas centrifuge plant it has been working on for many years, but the surveyors -- David Albright and Kimberly Kramer -- did not have an estimate for India's HEU stocks.
Pakistan's fissile material stockpile, the report says, has always been difficult to assess, but its stock now appears to be large enough to rival that of India.
North Korea has produced separated plutonium in unknown quantities during two periods and may now be enriching uranium, the survey warns.
But the total stockpile of fissile material -- the key ingredient in nuclear weapons -- and weapons of these five countries are still very small compared to what more advanced nations possess. The United States, the first nation to make nuclear bombs in 1945, is believed to posses 10,240 nuclear weapons, Russia 8,400, China 390, France 350 and Britain 200.
Describing these stockpiles as huge, the report says that at the end of 2003 there were more than 3,700 metric tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium, enough for hundreds of thousands of nuclear weapons, in about 60 countries. Although some fissile material is disposed of, more material is produced, causing the total to grow each year.
This is worrisome not only because the world has yet to come up with an accepted method of plutonium disposition, but also from a security standpoint, says David Albright, one of the surveyors and president of the institute that conducted the survey. (We still don't know) how safe is that plutonium and highly enriched uranium.
The stocks of plutonium and HEU in the world are roughly equal, as are stocks of civil and military fissile material. However, most plutonium is in civilian stocks and most HEU is controlled by militaries.
The world's acknowledged nuclear weapon states hold considerable amounts of military HEU and plutonium. Most of the plutonium and HEU in military stocks are in nuclear weapons, reserves, dismantled weapons, and naval and production reactor programs.
Some military fissile material is being transferred to civil stocks and disposed of in civil programs. Russia, Britain, and the United States have all declared a portion of their military plutonium excess to military requirements. This excess plutonium, about 107 metric tons, has been dedicated to peaceful purposes, but its disposition as fuel in power reactors continues to be delayed. Russia and the United States have also declared excess HEU.
This excess HEU is to be converted into low-enriched uranium, which is less of a proliferation risk. By the end of 2003, Russia had converted 200 metric tons of military HEU into LEU to be used as fuel in nuclear power reactors. The United States had converted about 50 metric tons of its declared excess HEU stock of about 170 metric tons. Each year, roughly 30 to 40 metric tons of military HEU are converted to low-enriched uranium.
The survey warns that total unirradiated civil plutonium stocks are not expected to decrease in the next 15 years. A positive sign is that Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland and likely Germany will reduce their inventories to zero or near zero. Stocks in Britain, Japan, Russia and France are projected to remain large, even though France and Japan expect to use a considerable amount of plutonium as mixed oxide fuel.
About 50 metric tons of HEU were in worldwide civil research and power-reactor programs as of the end of 2003. The use of HEU fuel in research reactors has diminished as a result of extensive cooperative efforts between the U.S. Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactor program and many other governments. The program focuses on developing suitable low-enriched uranium fuels to replace HEU fuel in research reactors.
Every year, the global stock of civilian-controlled plutonium grows by 70-75 metric tons. The growth is in irradiated fuel discharged from nuclear power reactors. As of the end of 2003, about 1,370 metric tons of civil plutonium stocks were in irradiated fuel. About 330 metric tons of civil plutonium were in unirradiated form. The unirradiated plutonium has either been separated in civil power reactor programs or is military material that has been declared excess to defense needs.
But Albright warns that unirradiated plutonium, because it is less contaminated with other radioactive constituents, is more of a proliferation risk than plutonium remaining in irradiated fuel.
However, based on an assessment of the amount of spent fuel reprocessed and the amount of plutonium used in mixed oxide fuel, the report estimates that roughly 235 metric tons of plutonium from power reactors remained in unirradiated form at the end of 2003.
Roughly 15-20 metric tons of plutonium are separated from irradiated power reactor fuel each year, while only 10-15 metric tons of this unirradiated plutonium are made into mixed oxide fuel for use in light-water reactors.
A sobering conclusion is that ... total unirradiated civil plutonium stocks are not expected to decrease in the next 15 years, said Albright.
-------- accidents and safety
Problems Cited at Nuclear Plant in South [New] Jersey
October 11, 2004
NY TIMES
By JOHN SULLIVAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/nyregion/11salem.html
Government and industry experts have identified a wide array of problems at one of the country's largest nuclear power plants - the Salem nuclear power station in southwestern New Jersey - including a leaky generator, unreliable controls on a reactor, and workers who were so discouraged by lack of maintenance that they stopped calling for repairs.
Earlier this year, a private consultant told the company that owns the Salem plant, which has the second-largest nuclear energy output in the United States, that the plant was deficient in dozens of critical aspects, from the reliability of equipment and the availability of spare parts to supervision in a control room.
Another consultant found that some employees were reluctant to report problems because they were afraid of angering their superiors. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission is investigating reports from at least two employees that superiors retaliated against them after they expressed concerns about safety.
The reports were made public by the company soon after it received them this year, but they received scant public attention.
Most of the problems have to do with lax maintenance, and federal officials say it is critical that they be fixed because, if ignored, they could lead to more serious safety issues. The federal officials say the nuclear plant is safe to operate, and executives at the company that owns the plant, P.S.E.G. Nuclear L.L.C., said that the plant met all safety standards even with the problems that had been identified, and that they were doing everything possible to address the concerns of experts and regulators and to fix the equipment problems.
Consultants' reports show that the plant was in the bottom quarter of the nation's 103 nuclear plants in terms of maintenance and detection of problems, according to plant managers.
In the past few months, P.S.E.G. has replaced many senior managers at the Salem complex. The company plans to shut down one of the station's three reactors for extensive repairs this fall and has adopted a new maintenance program to whittle down the backlog of complaints about failing or faulty equipment. The company also said that it had already fixed some problems cited in the various reports, and that other problems, like the reactor's controls and the generators, were scheduled to be fixed this fall.
Still, A. Christopher Bakken III, who became the company's president and chief nuclear officer on July 1, estimated that it could take two years to improve the company's ability to detect and repair maintenance problems.
"This is not a quick fix," Mr. Bakken said in an interview. "I believe we are making measurable progress, but this is a long-term thing."
The federal investigation at Salem, with its emphasis on preventive maintenance, reflects a change at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which for years concentrated on equipment failures rather than human performance. Driven in part by the increasing need for maintenance at the nation's aging stock of nuclear plants, regulators have begun paying more attention to ways of ensuring that nuclear operators catch small problems before they get worse.
Still, this is not the first time that P.S.E.G. has found itself under regulatory scrutiny for failing to address employees' warnings about equipment problems. In 1995, the company voluntarily closed two of Salem's reactors for two years because poor maintenance had degraded the plant's equipment.
For the past two years, the regulatory commission has repeatedly warned P.S.E.G. that its system for detecting maintenance problems was unacceptable. In its most recent report, the commission warned of rusted metal supports on water pipes to a reactor, poor insulation on piping, and poor maintenance that led to the failure of a pump valve.
In March, the consultants hired to evaluate the plant added to the list of problems: emergency diesel generators had 160 backlogged maintenance orders, some older than 18 months; water circulation pumps repeatedly failed; workers complained of "oil leaks and roof leaks"; hydraulic systems used to move the control rods inside one reactor leaked; fumes from one generator were so bad that workers nearby had to wear breathing masks; and engineers were forced to bypass nine nonworking sensors used to measure the reaction in the nuclear core because there were no replacement parts.
The consultants concluded: "The plant physical condition reflects management and staff tolerance for degraded equipment condition."
Because of the possible consequences of an accident at any of the 103 nuclear plants in the country, the federal regulatory commission is charged with maintaining close oversight of nuclear operations. Serious accidents have been extremely rare, although disasters like the partial meltdown in 1979 at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania have demonstrated the high stakes involved with nuclear power.
The regulatory commission began a special investigation of the operations at Salem last fall, after receiving troubling information about the plant "in various allegations and N.R.C. inspections over the past few years," according to the commission report.
As a result of its nine-month investigation, which concluded in July, the commission has increased the number of its inspections and has approved the company's plan to fix the outstanding problems.
Watchdog groups, like the Union of Concerned Scientists, have called on the commission to close the plant until everything is fixed, but regulators say such drastic action is not needed now.
The commission started emphasizing the monitoring of maintenance equipment after workers discovered two years ago that boric acid had nearly eaten through the steel reactor vessel at the Davis-Besse plant east of Toledo, Ohio. A subsequent federal investigation criticized plant managers for not detecting and repairing maintenance problems.
"Until the change that the N.R.C. made recently, they had been assuming that a bad safety culture would manifest itself in some measurable way," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private nonprofit organization in Washington. "What Davis-Besse taught them was, that may be true but intervention at that point may be too late."
Salem's reactors, which provide electricity to more than half of P.S.E.G.'s two million customers in New Jersey, sit on the Delaware River about 15 miles south of Wilmington, Del. About 1,800 employees service three reactors - Salem 1, Salem 2 and Hope Creek - set amid a maze of buildings and pipes.
Over the past few years, workers' ability to keep up with maintenance problems began to fray, according to several inquiries. Steel struts rusted, oil pooled on the deck beneath one gigantic generator, water dripped through building roofs. As the maintenance orders piled up, some workers gave up on all but critical requests.
Earlier this year, a consultant wrote, "Staff still believes some items will not get fixed because 'that's the way it is.' "
Like any other business, nuclear plants operate under pressure to produce profits, and time spent partly or completely shut down can mean millions of dollars in lost revenue. P.S.E.G. insists that safety comes first, but unfinished repairs made some employees think their superiors were placing too much emphasis on the bottom line, according to investigators.
Things came to a head in March 2003, when a critical piece of safety equipment, a turbine bypass valve, jammed open in the Hope Creek reactor. The valve helps to control pressure inside the reactor. Operators shut down the reactor, causing the valve to close on its own. Once the reactor was down, operators and senior managers discussed whether to repair the valve before starting up again, and according to later reports, the discussions grew heated at times.
In the end, the valve was fixed first, but the fact that managers considered restarting the reactor without repairing it shocked some workers. Kymn Harvin, a manager who helped employees report problems, said one manager complained that if they had not fixed the valve, "it would have been grounds for taking the keys away."
Dr. Harvin reported the manager's concerns to the chief nuclear officer at the time, but instead of addressing the problem, she said, the company fired her.
"In my role as the person who is supposed to speak up about these issues, I bring them forward and then get nailed," said Dr. Harvin, who has since filed a lawsuit against P.S.E.G.
Edwin Selover, the general counsel for P.S.E.G.'s parent company, Public Service Enterprise Group, said Dr. Harvin lost her job as part of a general reorganization at the plant. "It did not have anything to do with safety concerns," he said.
Dr. Harvin complained to federal regulators last fall, just before they began their investigation into conditions at Salem. Regulators say the investigation into her allegation was continuing.
In September 2003, the regulatory commission opened a review that ultimately involved 40 staff members from the commission's Region 1 office near Philadelphia and its headquarters outside Washington. The regulators interviewed more than 60 Salem employees during a nine-month investigation. The commission declined to characterize the size of the inquiry, but Mr. Bakken of P.S.E.G. said, "It was the biggest one I have ever been involved in."
Regulators released very few details from the investigation and would not discuss the matter in depth, instead referring to public letters the commission sent the plant's operators. In the first, on Jan. 28, regulators said the investigation raised questions about operators' "ability to effectively address potential safety issues." The regulators told P.S.E.G. to hire consultants to evaluate operations at the plant.
The company had already hired three independent consultants to review operations. Their reports, delivered this spring, were scathing. One group, Utilities Service Alliance, a nuclear industry group that helps analyze plant conditions, described details of equipment problems, from faulty water pumps to bad reactor sensors. Another team, headed by James P. O'Hanlon, the former president and chief nuclear officer of Dominion Energy in Virginia, found that some managers emphasized production over cautious decisions. In one case, managers delayed shutting a reactor after operators reported a stuck water valve. The delay, the team found, supported the view that managers concentrated too much on production and scheduling.
The team also criticized managers for expecting employees to work around worn-out equipment and for intervening in decisions better left to control room workers.
Mr. Bakken said his company had acted to address the concerns raised in the consultants' reports. For one thing, he said, the company has placed a new emphasis on maintenance and has told workers they should report any problems without hesitation. He said control-room supervisors, rather than senior managers, have been given authority over operational decisions.
On July 30, when the regulators issued the results of their investigation saying the plant was safe, they also warned that improvements were needed. Echoing the consultants, regulators said weaknesses in leadership had "led to a perception among some staff and managers that the company has emphasized production to the point that negatively impacts the handling of emergent equipment issues."
The commission's regional administrator, Samuel J. Collins, said extra federal inspections scheduled for the plant would monitor the company's progress in making required repairs. He said the company has taken steps to address outstanding problems, but "we won't hesitate to take stronger actions if needed."
Private watchdog groups have urged regulators to take a stronger stance, arguing that the reactors should be shut until problems are fixed.
"The operating margin is too thin," said Norm Cohen, coordinator of the Unplug Salem Campaign, a private advocacy group. Speaking of the failure to report maintenance problems, he said, "It is very difficult to fix the human problem while the plant continues to run."
Mr. Bakken disagrees. Even taking the consultants' criticism into account, the plant meets federal safety standards, he said.
He said company was investing millions in plant repairs this year. The more aggressive repair operation, he said, will help convince employees that the company is serious about addressing maintenance and safety concerns.
"It is in everyone's best interest to be honest about what we are doing," Mr. Bakken said. "I am confident we can correct this problem, and the team here can deliver."
--------
Problems persist at U.S. nuclear plant
The New York Times
John Sullivan NYT
October 11, 2004
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=543005.html
NEW YORK Government and industry experts have identified a wide array of problems at one of the largest nuclear power plants in the United States - the Salem nuclear power station in southwestern New Jersey - including a leaky generator, unreliable controls on a reactor and workers who were so discouraged by lack of maintenance that they stopped calling for repairs.
Earlier this year, a private consultant told the company that owns the Salem plant, which has the second-largest nuclear energy output in the country, that the plant was deficient in dozens of critical aspects, from the reliability of equipment and the availability of spare parts to supervision in a control room. Another consultant found that some employees were reluctant to report problems, because they were afraid of angering their superiors. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission is investigating reports from at least two employees that superiors retaliated against them after the employees expressed concerns about safety.
The reports by federal and industry officials were made public by the company soon after it received them this year, but they received scant attention.
Most of the problems involve lax maintenance, and federal officials say it is critical that they be fixed because, if ignored, they could lead to more serious safety issues. The federal officials say the nuclear plant is safe to operate, and executives at the company that owns the plant, PSEG Nuclear, said that the plant met all safety standards even with the problems that had been identified, and that they were doing everything possible to address the concerns of experts and regulators and to fix the equipment problems.
Consultants' reports show that the plant was in the bottom quarter of the nation's 103 nuclear plants in terms of maintenance and detection of problems, according to plant managers.
In the past few months, PSEG has replaced many senior managers at the Salem complex. The company plans to shut down one of the station's three reactors for extensive repairs this fall and has adopted a new maintenance program to whittle down the backlog of complaints about faulty equipment. The company also said that it had already fixed some problems cited in the various reports, and that other problems, like the reactor's controls and the generators, were scheduled to be fixed this fall.
Still, A. Christopher Bakken 3rd, who became the company's president and chief nuclear officer on July 1, estimated that it could take two years to improve the company's ability to detect and repair maintenance problems.
"This is not a quick fix," said Bakken. "I believe we are making measurable progress, but this is a long-term thing."
The federal investigation at Salem, with its emphasis on preventive maintenance, reflects a change at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which for years concentrated on equipment failures rather than human performance. Driven in part by the increasing need for maintenance at the nation's aging stock of nuclear plants, regulators have begun paying more attention to ways of ensuring that nuclear operators catch small problems before they get worse.
Still, this is not the first time that PSEG has found itself under regulatory scrutiny for failing to address employees' warnings about equipment problems. In 1995, the company voluntarily closed two of Salem's reactors for two years because poor maintenance had degraded the plant's equipment. For the past two years, the regulatory commission has repeatedly warned PSEG that its system for detecting maintenance problems was unacceptable. In its most recent report, the commission warned of rusted metal supports on water pipes to a reactor, poor insulation on piping, and poor maintenance that led to the failure of a pump valve.
In March, the consultants hired to evaluate the plant added to the list of problems: Emergency diesel generators had 160 backlogged maintenance orders, some older than 18 months; water circulation pumps repeatedly failed; workers complained of oil leaks and roof leaks; and engineers were forced to bypass nine nonworking sensors used to measure the reaction in the nuclear core because there were no replacement parts.
The consultants concluded: "The plant physical condition reflects management and staff tolerance for degraded equipment condition."
Because of the possible consequences of an accident at any of the 103 nuclear plants in the country, the federal regulatory commission is charged with maintaining close oversight of nuclear operations. Serious accidents have been extremely rare, although disasters like the partial meltdown in 1979 at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania have demonstrated the high stakes involved with nuclear power.
-------- britain
Nuclear expert in cancer warning
October 11, 2004
Ayreshire.co.uk
http://icayrshire.icnetwork.co.uk/news/nationalnews/scottishnews/tm_objectid=14741003&method=full&siteid=73592&headline=nuclear-expert-in-cancer-warning-name_page.html
A cancer time-bomb has been created for Scotland by radioactive emissions from Sellafield, an expert has claimed.
Nuclear expert Dr Chris Busby believes the west Cumbrian plant is sending a wave of toxic plutonium northwards.
A British Nuclear Fuels spokesman said: "The more radioactivity we have to discharge, so levels of emissions cannot keep going down."
-------- canada
URANIUM Acquisition Complete
CanAlaska Ventures completes Phase One Uranium Acquisition.
(PRWEB)
October 11, 2004
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2004/10/emw166451.htm
Vancouver, BC Canada -- CanAlaska Ventures Ltd. "CanAlaska" (TSX Venture: CVV - OTCBB: CVVLF) has completed its first phase of property acquisitions and has acquired approximately 48,000 hectares (approximately 120,000 acres) or 480 square kilometers of prospective Uranium claims in the Athabasca Basin, Saskatchewan.
The Athabasca Basin hosts several major Uranium deposits including Cigar Lake and McArthur River, two of the highest grade Uranium deposits in the world. Production from the Athabasca Basin currently accounts for 32% of the worlds' supply of Uranium and is expected to increase to 50% by the end of the decade. Uranium exploration within the Athabasca Basin has been at a relatively low level and it is evident that the potential for the discovery of other deposits remains high. Peter Dasler, President, noted "before commencing its staking program, CanAlaska carried out a comprehensive due diligence program taking into account existing geological and geophysical data, and as a result, has identified and acquired projects that are well located and which it is believed have considerable potential."
Staking is expected to continue through the Fall and Winter in order to position the Company and its shareholders for what CanAlaska believes will be the largest expansion in Uranium exploration since the 1970's. Harry Barr, Chairman of CanAlaska stated, "Our objective is simply to control one of the largest Uranium exploration portfolios in the world. It is our belief that our activities will create new jobs and have a positive impact on the economy." CanAlaska's, Canadian technical team is stationed in Saskatchewan guiding the acquisition process and preparing for Fall and Winter exploration programs.
CanAlaska is also actively exploring for gold in the Hemlo Gold Belt and nickel in the Voisey Bay area of Labrador. In New Zealand the Company has assembled a series of grass roots and advanced gold exploration projects, which are budgeted for detailed exploration and drill testing in early 2005.
The qualified person for this release is Peter Dasler, P. Geo, President of CanAlaska Ventures Ltd.
About CanAlaska CanAlaska is a mineral exploration company with Uranium, gold, base and platinum group metal projects in Alaska, British Columbia, Labrador, Ontario, Quebec and New Zealand. Management's objective is to create shareholder wealth through the exploration and development of diversified mineral project portfolio.
To learn more about the exploration and mining activities for Harry Barr publicly traded companies go to: www.goldplatinumgroup.com.
For CanAlaska Uranium Project information go to: http://www.canalaska.com/s/Projects.asp?ReportID=88871&_Type=Projects&_Title=Uranium-Project. For a comprehensive June 2004 Briefing Paper entiled "Canada's Uranium Production & Nuclear Power issued by the Uranium Information Centre go to: http://www.uic.com.au/nip03.htm
On behalf of the Board of Directors "Harry Barr" Harry Barr, Chairman
Investor Contact: Peter Dasler President Tel: 604.685.1870 Toll Free 1-800-667-1870 Email: e-mail protected from spam bots Web: www.canalaska.com
The TSX Venture has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release: CUSIP#137089108.
This news release contains certain "Forward-Looking Statements" within the meaning of Section 21E of the United States Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations are disclosed in the Company's documents filed from time to time with the British Columbia Securities Commission and the United States Securities & Exchange Commission.
-------- depleted uranium
Hard Weapons for Soft Targets
From: jobak17@yahoo.co.uk
Date: Mon Oct 11, 2004 3:57pm
"We cannot under any circumstances acquiesce in the non-utilisation of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier". Winston Churchill
On March 28th 2003, a US A-10 aircraft fired into a convoy of five British vehicles near Basrah in a 'friendly fire' incident. It was reported by the Guardian newspaper that the British troops who retrieved the bodies wore "chemical warfare suits...because of the threat from the depleted uranium used in American weapons".
Two days later, on the morning of March 30th 2003, an Iraqi troop carrier passing through Kibla, a residential suburb of Basrah, broke down and signalled to a second troop carrier to come to its assistance. As the Iraqi soldiers were trying to sort out the mechanical problem, an A-10 fired rounds of depleted uranium ammunition into both vehicles causing instant inferno. At the same time, two young men were entering a nearby house. Thinking they too were soldiers, the pilot targeted the house. The soldiers were incinerated, as were the two boys in the house, Jelaal and Nasir aged 21 and 18. A young cousin sustained severe burns on his leg. The explosive blasts created a plume of uranium oxide dust, some of it so fine that is entered the atmosphere as a gas. The heavier particles landed close to the vehicles and inside the building. Neighbours and family buried the dead; the grieving parents and remaining eight children continued to live in what was left of their home, and dozens of local children played daily in and around the burnt out vehicles. No one warned them of the nature of the bullets that had and would continue to cause so much death and destruction.
In July 2004, an Iraqi environmental scientist, who was researching DU, happened to be driving through Kibla with his fiancé. They were on the way to church to arrange their wedding. His fiancé mentioned to him that she always got a headache after passing some burnt out vehicles in the area, so a few days later, he went to investigate. His Geiger counter immediately told him that the area was radioactive and later, equipped with full radioactive gear, he cleaned the troop carriers and damaged area of the house to the best of his ability. He then went straight to the British military in Basrah, explained the situation and asked for their help. Apart from some sympathy from an environmental adviser, who has subsequently returned to the UK, the response was very dismissive and no action has been taken. The scientist also notified the World Health Organisation but has had no response at all.
A few weeks after this photographer Jenny Matthews, Dr Al-Ani and myself happened to be in Basrah and were taken to visit the family in Kibla. We walked around the burnt troop carriers and watched the rising dial of the Geiger counter, as wind whipped up the dust around us. Children were playing all around and were very excited to see us. In the house we spoke to the mother and daughters, two of whom, Ibtehal and Delaal, are suffering from breathing problems and skin rashes, a younger boy, Kemal who is now thirteen, is losing his night vision, and the burns sustained by their cousin Sa'd are still not healing properly.
Our own enquiries through the British Embassy in Basrah resulted in the following response, "The clean up of DU is the responsibility of the civil administration, with assistance from the international community, after any armed conflict." In this instance the civil administration is the Iraqi Interim Government and, we wonder, which bit of the international community? - Apparently not the US or UK. After the war of 1991, 24 US vehicles caught in DU friendly fire were returned to the United States and it took three years to fully decontaminate them. The clean up of the environment itself, is of course not possible. Nature excels at recycling. Radioactive particles have already entered Iraq's air, water, soil and vegetation and are working their way through the food chain. Nor do such particles respect 'borders' - the wind, sun and rain will move them endlessly.
During the Gulf War of 1991 the US and Britain used up to 350 tons of DU shells in southern Iraq. They were used mainly on the tanks and trucks returning from Kuwait. Despite the fact that they were used mainly in a desert area, the health problems in Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have escalated. In Basrah childhood leukaemia has increased 7 fold, overall cancers 10 fold and birth deformities 20 fold. Many allied troops returning from the Gulf and the Balkans have suffered similarly. A German doctor, Dr Siegfried Horst Guenther who studied the rare health effects in Iraq after 1991 also noted severe immunodeficiencies, AIDS-like syndromes, and kidney and liver dysfunction. Other noted symptoms are reactive airway disease, neurological problems, rashes, vision degradation and night vision losses, gum tissue problems, sexual dysfunction and neuro-psychological disorders.
DU is both radioactive and chemically toxic and many doctors and scientists like Dr Guenther are convinced that the inhalation or ingestion of microscopic DU particles does have an adverse effect at a cellular level. Children, because of their fast cell growth, are particularly vulnerable. Dr Alexandra Miller from the US Armed Forces Radiological Research Institute concludes that "DU compounds can transform cells into a state that appears to be able to induce tumors, based on the changes in the physical appearance of the cell, and based on the chemical changes induced in the cells by it, and other tumor-favoring changes". She also states that the radioactive and toxic properties of DU seem to reinforce each other, thus causing more extensive damage. Depleted uranium has been found in the urine and tissue of sick veterans and civilians many years after the initial exposure, and chromosome testing by Dr Schott in Germany shows not only chromosomal damage to veterans exposed to DU but the same genetic damage in their children. DU is known to enter the sperm and the ovary and can cross the placenta. This not only accounts for the high rise in congenital deformities but indicates that such deformities could be intergenerational. Young women like Ibtehal and Delaal must not only fear for their own health, but that of any children they may bear.
To compound the health problem, some of the DU used in munitions comes from the other end of the nuclear fuel cycle and is contaminated with artificial isotopes such as U-236 and plutonium and neptunium. As depleted uranium isotopes decay they become increasingly radioactive. Moreover, according to Dr Dan Bishop, if Neptunium 235 is present, its short half life will spike the radioactivity and will triple "the alpha radiation over natural uranium and double the total alpha, beta and gamma radiation over natural radiation". The environmental and health effect of DU munitions could be far greater than is generally assumed. Samples taken from civilians in Afghanistan by the Uranium Medical Research Centre also showed excessive levels of non depleted uranium and one tissue sample from Basrah has shown the presence of enriched uranium.
The British have admitted to the use of 9 tons of uranium in the 2003 war - nine times more than in 1991, but the US refuse to be specific. The estimates range between 200 to 2000 tons. While the US and UK only admit to the use of DU in anti-tank penetrators, there is growing evidence that it is being used in a variety of other weapons. High levels of radioactivity have been found in large bomb craters such as the Ma'moon telephone exchange in Baghdad which was hit by several bunker busting bombs. The missiles cut through six layers of steel before exploding below ground level. This supports the contention that uranium is being used in some guided missiles to enhance the penetration of hard structures and to incinerate them. These large bombs could release significant amounts of uranium oxide into the atmosphere.
The difference between the war of 2003 and previous conflicts is that the use of uranium has been almost exclusively in urban, residential areas. The UK and US military justify this by saying that there are no known health effects from depleted uranium, yet are they really convinced? In fact, the military and governments have known the health risks of depleted uranium for decades. In 1991, a UKAEA report stated " The DU will be spread around the battlefield and target vehicles in varying sizes and quantities from dust particles to full size penetrators...localised contamination of vehicles and soil may exceed permissible limits and these could be hazardous to both clean up teams and the local population". In 1995 the US Army environmental Policy Institute wrote, "If DU enters the body, it has the potential to generate significant medical consequences. The risks associated with DU in the body are both chemical and radiological". All military personnel working with DU in the UK are classified radiation workers and subject to constant monitoring. Hard target testing, which took place in Eskmeals, Cumbria until 1995, was done under very strict conditions and it still costs the British tax payer £360 000 a year to maintain and protect the site. DU rounds were fired at a hard target in a concrete bunker, known as the VJ Butt and in July 2000, the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee (RWMAC) made the following report, "...a well-defined protocol is in place for workers required to enter the VJ Butt after test firing. Before they can do so, allowance is made for a cooling period during which cooling fans with three levels of air filtration are in operation. Members of the butt entry party are required to wear full protective clothing with pureflow hoods and carry personal air samplers."
All well and good, but how can the use of the same material be justified, if it is targeting houses, buses and people in Iraq? While there is acknowledged military advantage in using uranium against hard targets, it is very difficult to understand why it is also being used so liberally on 'soft' targets. In this last war on Iraq, these have included military personnel, cars, trucks, buses and houses. Even the Iraqi troop carriers hardly merited extreme penetrative force. And where in places like Kibla are the air filters and pureflow hoods to be found? When Abdul Zahra Misbal Shindi buried his dead sons he was not, like the British soldiers, provided with a chemical suit.
Kibla is not alone. The same Iraqi scientist has discovered 26 radioactive sites in just one area of Basrah. In parts of Baghdad radiation has been monitored as 1 000 and 1 900 times greater than normal background level and high recordings have been made in towns such as Samawah and Negev.
Our mission to Iraq in August was not to measure radiation, but to assess the needs of Iraqi children for our charity Child Victims of War. Basrah Children's Hospital is crying out for even the most basic equipment to treat its ever growing numbers of young leukaemia and cancer patients. Despairing doctors said that this was not really a cancer ward where children were treated, just a place where they came to die. Basrah is in desperate need of an oncology centre. If even a few of the young children we met are dying from the allied use of radiological weapons, then the lack of medicine and pain relief created by the long years of sanctions and now occupation, compounds a most terrible crime.
Joanne Baker MSc Co-ordinator Child Victims of War
----
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Breathing Uranium Oxides: A Global Medical Crisis
Dear friend, please copy and circulate the below words at will. We invite correction, comment, and contact from people who want to work to stop the use of uranium munitions, and deal with breathable uranium oxides and their consequences. John <lewallen@mcn.org> and Barbara Stephens <babs@mcn.org>
--by John Lewallen
As I write this in October, 2004, ton after ton of uranium--depleted uranium, reactor waste, and possibly just uranium--is being burned at high temperature in bullets, missiles and bombs used by the United States military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is generating a global medical crisis the like of which the human race has never seen before. The breathable uranium oxide created by this massive, ongoing incineration of uranium has radioactive and chemical toxicity for the lifetime of Earth.
Breathed, tiny particles of uranium oxide may lodge anywhere in the human body and remain fixed there for years, destroying the dna in adjoining cells with high-energy radiation. Breathable uranium oxide contaminates people most acutely at battles where it is used. Much of it has gotten into the stratosphere, to be distributed all over Earth.
The outlines of the global medical crisis of breathable uranium oxide are best described by Dr. Asaf Durakovic in his seminal article in the Croatian Medical Journal titled "Undiagnosed Illnesses and Radioactive Warfare." Dr. Durakovic's article makes clear that the human race is confronting a global medical crisis of contamination by breathing uranium oxide. Millions of victims have diseases with a host of symptoms caused by breathing uranium oxides.
The United States armed forces probably will remain fully committed to using uranium munitions until there is a U.S. Presidential directive saying that breathable uranium oxide from using uranium munitions really has creathed a medical and environmental crisis. That's because there is a big U.S. government lie that uranium munitions pose no major health or environmental problem, backed by phony scientific studies and an elaborate system to keep troops who are contaminated by breathing uranium oxide from finding out the true cause of their symptoms.
Today, as U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan shoot uranium rounds and drop uranium bombs, they are working with a top-secret munition, uranium. The locations where the uranium was vaporized, or even that it happened, is not announced. The public does not know how much uranium was vaporized by using uranium munitions, or where it was used, or when. We demand to know!
Most people relate to the nightmare of ongoing use of uranium munitions by not thinking about it. We all live in a surfeit of terrorization. I predict that the demands of troops coming home with symptoms of uranium oxide poisoning, and of troops who must face the tragedy of having children with birth defects, will bring closer the great day when the U.S. President orders a halt to using uranium munitions, and begins to lead an international effort to deal with the medical and environmental crisis of uranium oxide poisoning.
Meanwhile, please warn your friends and relatives that they face extreme hazard of breathing uranium oxide anywhere in or near where U.S. forces are operating today. At least until the dust of battle settles and people can send field teams around Iraq and Afghanistan to mark and try to clean up, there is extreme hazard of breathing uranium oxide anywhere in those criminally contaminated nations.
How Can We Deal With The Medical Crisis of Uranium Munitions?
Stop Using Uranium Munitions! Face the Global Medical Crisis of Breathing Uranium Oxide! Public Officials: Truth About Uranium Munitions, or Resign!
The United States Government is fully committed to taking tons of deadly radioactive waste and doing the most humanly destructive thing possible with it: vaporizing it at high temperature in heavily populated areas. How are we, ordinary people, going to deal with this?
As an old writer and peace activist who was involved in the expose of Agent Orange ("Ecology of Devastation: Indochina," Penguin Books, 1972), I humbly offer some strategic suggestions to the movement to deal with uranium munitions and their consequences.
We urgently need more American scientific truth-tellers in the movement! Activists focused on "depleted uranium" urgently need the help of established and respected groups. American medical scientists, you live in a world where medical scientific orthodoxy is based on a big government lie: the lie that no scientific evidence backs the claims of Dr. Asaf Durakovic and others that breathable uranium oxide is a global medical crisis.
For my colleagues now trying to crack the big, suicidal Pentagon lie about uranium munitions, long life to you, and so many thank yous from my heart! I offer these humble strategic suggestions:
1. Warn everyone about the extreme danger of breathing uranium oxides in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. Define the reason for the warning as a global medical crisis caused by breathable uranium oxide, generated by using uranium munitions.
3. Study and describe the big U.S. government lie, shared by many other governments, that uranium munitions pose no major environmental or health hazard.
4. DEMAND THAT ALL PUBLIC OFFICIALS SPEAK THE TRUTH ABOUT URANIUM MUNITIONS AND BREATHABLE URANIUM OXIDE, OR RESIGN!
As a Mendocino County, California resident, I am specifically addressing Representative Mike Thompson, and Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein: it is time to do something honorable, brave and true. Speak the truth about uranium munitions and breathable uranium oxide! Speak the truth or resign! Too many millions are being contaminated with uranium munitions now, and now our children are seduced by military recruiters into contamination zones. Enough! Truth or resign!
This is a grand, high-stakes contest between a suicidal government lie that is polluting the Earth with deadly, mutagenic, breathable uranium oxides, and truth-tellers who are discovering and telling the truth. It is vital now that truth-tellers stick to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. People have very limited attention-span on the topic of uranium munitions. That's why I recommend focus on breathable uranium oxide contamination, and warning people to avoid heavily-contaminated zones.
5. The global medical crisis caused by breathable uranium oxides from uranium munitions needs to be recognized as a working issue by major national groups of all kinds. Note that uranium oxide poisoning is specifically targeting troops who use it and the genetic integrity of their progeny.
Last spring I circulated a longer, footnoted study titled "Stop Using Uranium Munitions Now!" This study is posted at http://NuclearPress.com . It has withstood peer review. Now, in loving concert with my fiance, Barbara Stephens, we are part of the Uranium Munitions Action Group, Veterans for Peace. Check the web: the global movement to stop using uranium munitions is growing everywhere! We'll stick with it, always ready to be corrected in the direction of the truth, until some troop drops the last round back in the can and says: the hell with this!
With the help of our loving colleagues Patrick Tate, Fredy and Sherry Champagne, and others, the national U.S. Veterans for Peace at its 2004 convention endorsed the "Uranium Munitions Pledge of Resistance," a signable oath which reads, "I will not use, nor order the use of, uranium munitions." This puts Veterans for Peace squarely in support of officers and troops who refuse to use uranium munitions. At this point in time, I believe our only near-term effective approach is massive, individual civil disobedience. Refuse to use uranium munitions, and back any officer or troop who refuses to use uranium munitions.
Best Information Sites on Uranium Munitions and Global Uranium Oxide Medical Crisis:
http://umrc.net > Site of the Uranium Medical Research Center, Dr. Asaf Durakovic's group which is doing field investigation now in Iraq on depleted uranium contamination.
http://traprockpeace.org > The best activist information site.
http://NuclearPress.com > My site; I strive to present clear truth and effective strategy, and provide a network of activism for the Uranium Munitions Action Group, Veterans for Peace. John Lewallen
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Of Pynchon, Thanatos and Depleted Uranium
Weapons of Mass Destruction Found in Iraq
bellaciao.org
By WALTER A. DAVIS
11th October 2004
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=3697
I. Laugh In Brings You the News:
Jake Gittes: "Why do you need it? You've got enough money." Noah Cross: "The future, Mr. Gittes. The future."
Chinatown
The US CODE, TITLE 50,CHAPTER 40 Sec. 2302 defines a Weapon of Mass Destruction as follows: "The term 'weapon of mass destruction" means any weapon or device that is intended, or has the capability, to cause death or serious bodily injury to a significant number of people through the release, dissemination, or impact of (A) toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors, (B) a disease organism, or (C) radiation or radioactivity."
Depleted uranium (DU) is a waste product of the uranium enrichment process that fuels both our nuclear weapons and civilian nuclear power programs. In fact, over 99% of the uranium enrichment process results in this waste product, which has a half life of 4.5 billion years. DU is both a toxic heavy metal and a radiological poison. The U.S. currently has over 10 million tons of DU. As we all know, the disposal of nuclear waste is one of the unintended consequences or blowback of the development of nuclear power. A solution to the problem of DU has, however, been found. DU is now used in virtually every weapon employed by the U.S. in Iraq (and in Afghanistan and in Kosovo). To cite the most conspicuous example: every penetrator rod in the shell shot from an Abrams tank contains 10 pounds of DU. DU is selected for weapons for three reasons: it's cheap (was made available to arms manufacturers free of charge and is easy to develop); it's heavy, 1.7 times the density of lead and thus most effective at killing because it penetrates anything it hits; it's pyrophoric, igniting and burning on contact with air and breaking up on contact with its target into extremely small particles of radioactive dust dispersed into the atmosphere. The result: permanent contamination of air, water, and soil. [1]
DU was first used by the U.S. in Desert Storm. The amount used was between 315-350 tons. Five times as much was used during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Over a third of the U.S. soldiers who served in the first Gulf War are now permanently disabled. VA reports indicate 27,571 U.S. soldiers already disabled from the current war and occupation.. The Department of Energy and the Department of Defense of course continue to deny that DU has any harmful effects. A U.N. sub-commission on Human Rights has ruled that DU, which fits the definition of a "dirty bomb," is an illegal weapon. [2]
Huge chunks of radioactive debris full of DU now litter the cities and countryside of Iraq. Fine radioactive dust permeates the entire country. The problem of clean-up is insoluble. The entire ecosystem of Iraq is permanently contaminated. The Iraq people are the new hibakusha. Their fate, like that of the "survivors" of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is a condition of death-in-life. The long term health effects of DU on the Iraqui people (and on our own troops) are incalculable. There is no mask or protective clothing that can be devised to prevent radioactive dust from entering the lungs or penetrating the skin. Moreover, DU targets the DNA and the Master Code (histone), altering the genetic future of exposed populations. Because it is the perfect weapon for delivering nanoparticles of poison, radiation, and nano-pollution directly into living cells, DU is the perfect weapon for extinguishing entire populations. The Iraqi's are not alone. Vast regions of the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Balkans have been permanently contaminated with radioactive dust and debris [3]
These facts are worth bearing in mind the next time we are told what has now become a bipartisan article of faith: the Iraqi people are better off with Saddam Hussein gone. Or as Bill Maher put it on his show of Sept. 24th "Eventually they're better off."
A footnote to the above, the shape of things to come. Recently a takeover was engineered transferring the no bid University of California management contract (of 61 years duration) for the US nuclear weapons program at the nuclear weapons labs at Berkeley, Livermore, and Los Alamos to the University of Texas where the Carlyle Group ( an investment conglomerate that specializes in Defense Developments and whose members include George H.W. and George W. Bush, James Baker, the bin laden family and John Major) will assume control over it. A ramping up of the nuclear weapons program is now underway with funding at the highest level ever-even higher than during the Cold War. These developments are the first yield of the top secret meeting of 150 top U.S. officials and military contractors (chaired reportedly by Dick Cheney) held at the U.S. Strategic Command Center in Nebraska on Aug. 6th 2003 as an official commemoration of the 58th Anniversary of Hiroshima and to plan the weaponry of the nuclear future. [4]
We need a new term to describe our actions in Iraq. Genocide is inadequate. Thus: Ecocide [from Gr oikos, house; and cide, the destruction of] Ecology has two referents. It refers to the branch of biology that deals with the relations between living organisms and their environment; and the branch of sociology that deals with relations among human groups with reference to material resources and the consequent social and cultural patterns. The destruction of both is the goal of Ecocide. Ecocide is the deliberate production of a condition of permanent radiological, biological, and chemical contamination whereby death comes to inhabit an entire ecosystem. A condition of ecocide exists when life itself and all possibilities of its renewal are being systematically destroyed in an identifiable geographical area, which is also defined in terms of specifiable racial and religious characteristics. As is now known, the cumulative result of such actions may bring about this condition for the entire planet. The condition of homo sacer as described by Giorgio Agamben. [5] The European Council on Radiation Risk, for example, calculated the damage to human health of low level radiation thusfar released into the atmosphere from nuclear weapons testing to be 61,600,000 deaths by cancer alone. Moreover, in our wars since 1991 the U.S. has now released in terms of global atmospheric pollution the equivalent of 400,000 Nagasaki Bombs. [6]
II. Appointment in Samarra
"-the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event-in the living act, the undoubted deed-there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask." Ahab in Melville's Moby Dick
Does the situation described above offer us an intimation of what Sigmund Freud had in mind when he spoke of a pure culture of thanatos, the death drive?
It's always a good idea when seeking an explanation of the human motives behind actions to stick with the empirical. With stated intentions and official rationales. Otherwise we give ourselves over to psychobabble. Despite official denial by the Department of Defense that DU is harmful, a series of explanations have been put in place to account for the development and use of DU weapons. DU is cost effective, militarily efficient, and turns to productive use a waste product we'd otherwise have to dispose of at great cost. With motives and intentions thus circumscribed the decision to use DU in weaponry need not raise the spectre of anything dark in the psyche. It's all a matter of pragmatic efficiency with a little capitalist profit motive thrown in for good measure. There's only one thing wrong with this explanation. It leaves out the basis for the calculus. There's every reason to use DU and no reason not to use it if, and only if, one rationale informs all decisions. How to maximize death, regardless of consequences or alternatives. Introduce any countervailing motives and the entire chain of decisions is blocked by questions of conscience. Conscious, stated intentions then reveal themselves as functions of something else that has been conveniently rendered unconscious. What looks like a purely pragmatic matter involving nothing disordered in the psyche now reveals the opposite: the fact that thanatos so inhabits the system and everyone in it that its hegemony and the absence of anything opposed to it "goes without saying." It has become what Wittgenstein called a "form of life." [7] So deeply rooted is the force of thanatos in us that it operates automatically, habitually, and of necessity. It has become a collective unconscious. And as such is no longer accessible to those whose intentions conceal and reveal it. The reason for sticking with the empirical is now clear. Alethia. There is something insane in the empirical. It is what the historian must uncover.
Before we ask ourselves how this situation came to pass we need to ask another question. For it's easy to claim we don't know about such things because the media refuses to tell us about it. There's another reason for our ignorance, however, and it's the one we need to learn about. I refer to the possibility that we choose our ignorance because otherwise we'd lose the system of guarantees on which we depend for our identity and our understanding of history. As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesn't watch the news: "Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose. Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" [8] It would be easy to deride Mrs. Bush, to congratulate oneself on not sharing her attitude. What I hope to show , however, is that on an essential level, one that is determinant in the last instance, we are in full agreement with her and delude ourselves as long as we think otherwise.
III. The Fatality of Guarantees
"The purpose of thought is to eliminate the contingent."
Hegel
Three weeks ago my mother died. At the end of her funeral the priest left us with these words as a final reminder of what had been said repeatedly in a variety of ways for the past two days: "We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reunited with her in joy." My concern here is not with the truth or falsity of this preposterous belief, but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to deprive death of its finality. And of the terror that prospect entails. The function of guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic. There is much that we can face apparently only when we can deny it through the working of what we'll soon see is an entire system of guarantees. Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means to be a human being, to remain a child of one's needs and desires disguising that fact in the form of ideas and concepts.
The primary purpose of religion, philosophy, and culture is to provide conceptual, psychological, and emotional guarantees so that traumatic events become part of a larger framework that assures the realization of our hopes and dreams. Most people simply find life unlivable without such supports. Through the ministry of the guarantees we overcome or banish thoughts and feelings that we are convinced would deprive life of meaning, plunging us into despair. Experience accordingly becomes the movement from and to the affirmation of the guarantees through their imposition on events. The main line of Western philosophy can most profitably be seen as a series of efforts to provide a ground for the guarantees. That effort achieves one of its culminations in Hegel who defined the purpose of philosophy as the elimination of the contingent. As father of the philosophy of history, he offered that new discipline a single goal: to show that the rational is real and the real rational; that history is the story of progress, liberty, the realization of a universal humanity. Or, to put it in vulgar terms, democracy and civilization are on the march and will soon sweep the entire Middle East. In order to triumph over the contingencies of existence-- doubt about oneself, one's place in the world, and one's final end -- many guarantees are needed. Moreover, they must form a system of reinforcing beliefs such that if one guarantee is threatened other guarantees come in to fill the breach. Thereby the function of the system as a whole is assured, the triumph of the guarantees over the central contingencies of existence.
Within the system of guarantees one guarantee is superordinate. The belief that human nature is basically good. Animal rationale. We are endowed with an ahistorical essence that cannot be lost. Evil is an aberration. Consequently there is always reason for hope and the belief that no matter how bad things get we'll always find a way to recover everything that the guarantees assure.
What follows is a brief and by no means exhaustive description of the basic system of guarantees. One need not believe all of it for the system to hold. Guarantees are superfluous. If they collapse at one point, their hold becomes even stronger at another. That is one reason why the death of God gave birth to so many secular religions. The way to read what follows accordingly is for each reader to locate the guarantees that have the greatest hold over them. They identify what controls one's response to traumatic events. Or, to put it in other terms, they identify what one must overcome in oneself in order to know the ontological force of existence, contingency, and history. Perhaps one only begins to know, to think, and to respond appropriately to events once one has eradicated the entire system of guarantees.
Here then a list of some of the central planks in that edifice.
Religious: a loving creator with a redemptive purpose assures us of the triumph of goodness and the rewards of eternal life.
Philosophic: rationality gives meaning, direction, and pragmatic efficiency to the human mind and all the purposeful activities in which we engage.
Scientific: science is the fulfillment of reason and through its development we will harness nature to our needs. That guarantee gives birth to another: the technological imperative, which teaches us that all technological developments are good. In any case, the die is cast since all technological problems require for their solution the development of new technologies. [9]
Historical: History is the story of progress, of the development of those universal values through which eventually the real becomes rational and the rational real. Through that long march all contingencies are eventually overcome. A Political corollary: the democratic ideal as realized in the United States is an ultimate good; globally its benefits should be extended to all humanity.
Economic: capitalism, which is nothing but the economic realization of human nature, is the global principle that will bring the greatest good to all. Therefore, any actions required to advance it are both necessary and good. The deepest guarantees, of course, address us on a far more personal level.
Psychological: We have an identity, a self, that is strong and once attained can never be lost. Trauma is but the occasion for its recovery. We are not haunted by anything dark or disordered in our psyche, nor do our actions derive from such forces. The intentions we give offer a full account of our actions, and thus the term and limit of our responsibility.
Emotional: The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves. Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised. Health, normalcy, and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings. Hope and optimism are not only healthy attitudes, they are requirements of our nature. Biologically wired. We cannot remain for long in trauma. Recovery, moreover, must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future. The need for hope is the capstone of the entire system of guarantees. Yet it too apparently has a history. Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety. Informed of this fact by Bill Maher, the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture: "Don't they know that depression is a good thing; that it's something you have to go through in order to grow?" Not anymore.
The key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise. Thanks to religion death, suffering, and evil are deprived of their power. Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and their objects are put in their place. Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror. Science, as fulfillment of reason, assures us of domination over nature. What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of the real. [10] Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may be unmoored or may be moving to the darkest of ends. The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees. It is in the personal order, however, that the guarantees do their deepest work. Psychologically, belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency: that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary, compulsive consumption, the proof of a desperate non-identity. That spectre brings us before the greatest fear: that our psyche, not our conscious, deliberative intentions, is the author of our actions, an author who will readily do anything in order to feel safe, secure, and righteous. All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity: the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us. Resolution, catharsis (i.e., the discharge of painful tensions or awareness), and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know. It is easy to deprecate Bush and, apparently, to hold onto the idea that he's a temporary aberration. But the problem goes deeper. To revive a battle cry from the 60's, insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not of the solution. For the grandest function of the system of guarantees, as a whole and in each one of its parts, is to blind us to history. [11]
And so to take up again the question stated previously, how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about? The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by tracing a repressed history.
IV. The Nuclear Unconscious
"he begins to expand, an uncontainable lighthero and horror, engineer and Ariadne consumed, molten inside the light of himself, the mad exploding of himself."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
To recapitulate a historical fact that took over 50 years to rescue from myth: the United States did not bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki "to end the war and save countless lives." It did so for four reasons (and in the knowledge that a defeated Japan was pursuing terms of surrender through several diplomatic channels): (1)to avenge Pearl Harbor, (2) to justify the amount of money spent developing the Bomb, (3) to create a laboratory whereby our scientific, medical, and military personnel could study its effects, and (4) to impress the Russians and the world-with this opening salvo of the Cold War. In short, Hiroshima was the first act of global terrorism. That story couldn't be told, however, and still encounters strenuous resistance from most Americans, because it exposes too many of the guarantees we want to have about our Nation and its actions in history. [12]
Those actions also gave birth to another myth and another history. The story of the development of "the peaceful atom." No sooner were the tidings of the Nuclear Age broadcast to a terrified world than we heard promises of a nuclear Utopia. Through those promises a collective fantasy was created about the assurances that the peaceful atom gave us about the future. Entire cities would have all their energy needs met for the cost of a nickel. Etc. Now fifty years later we find that we can't get rid of the stockpiles of nuclear waste we've created. We find that nuclear technology is the least cost effective and most environmentally destructive source of energy ever developed. What it provides -less that 20% of our electrical energy comes at a cost of trillions of dollars and at the expense of the safe and clean technologies (wind, solar) that we must soon develop if there is to be a future. What we now know is that nuclear power was a mistake from the start and should have been aborted in its inception. Also that the cost in lives to those living near or downwind of our reactors now well exceeds the combined loss of life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[13] But to know these things we'd also have to come to know that the peaceful atom was always a fantasy, created after the fact for motives that have nothing to do with official proclamations.
Robert Oppenheimer made two prescient observations. "The use of the Bomb was implicit in its invention." "We [the scientists] did the devil's work." His error was the belief that by calling on the guarantees it would be possible to reverse the process we thereby set loose. Thus the humanistic reflections that preoccupied his final years, one of the clearest examples of the effort to reassert essentialistic ahistorical guarantees as a way of cleansing his own and our collective hands of history. What Oppenheimer thereby hoped to exorcise was the spectre that there are certain actions that are irreversible and that give history a totally new direction, permitting no return to the way things once were. Perhaps there are events in history that mark fundamental turning points in which the human psyche with no essential, ahistorical nature to protect it makes a quantum leap into a new way of being. In doing so it embraces a logic that will propel it to move in new, unseen, and unwanted directions.
Oppenheimer offers us a picture of the Los Alamos scientists that exposes the official ideology of science. He and his colleagues know what their discoveries will lead to but dissemble that knowledge. Hiding it from their consciousness they thereby, as Freud teaches, empower it. The rush to the Bomb that seized them fulfilled a desire that has little to do with value free objective inquiry. Devil's work is of a different order and draws on something else in the psyche. Here briefly is one way to constitute its meaning. In inventing the Bomb the scientists of Alamogordo realized the two sublime motives that have informed the history of science: the effort to know the secrets of nature and to harness them to our will so that its power will become an extension of our power to overcome any and all limitations, moral as well as physical. [14] (The belated effort of Leo Szilard and others to draw up a petition banning the use of the Bomb and Oppenheimer's reminder that doing so overstepped their role as scientists is merely the comedy of a reaction formation, the effort to restore the a priori cleanliness of hands that are already dirty, the nostalgic attempt to arrest a historical process that has already broken free of them, and of Oppenheimer too as Edward Teller would soon reveal.)
Once the Bomb was used the consequences of devil's work announced themselves. Nuclear fear became condition general in the United States, producing for the first time a collective national psyche. What we did to the other we could expect in return. Projection and denial assumed command over both consciousness and policy. Globally. The only way to make ourselves safe from ourselves was through the production of more nuclear weapons. Like Macbeth we had to repeat our deed, increasing its scope each time, as if somehow this would undo the original error. Teller's Hydrogen bomb promises omnipotence to a quest for power fueled by the engines of guilt and fear. The whole world became a prisoner to the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction. Bush's recent actions in Iraq merely ratify once again the basic truth: the only way to prevent U.S. aggression is to develop one's own nuclear arsenal. M.A.D. offers the only certitude, security, and "peace of mind" that is now possible. A psychotic peace. Devil's work thereby evolves the condition inaugurated by the thanatos that the Bomb released in the psyche. Death has cut itself loose from anything that could restrain it. What began as a fantasy of unlimited power ends in the assurance of total annihilation.
While we've resisted this knowledge there is another knowledge fatally tied to it that we've resisted with even greater fervor. Namely, the true story of "the peaceful atom." As a continuation of the same thanatopic process under the guise of a prolonged search for a felix culpa. For expiation and redemption. To expel any lingering (unconscious) guilt over having dropped the Bomb. How else but by finding in the atom a new guarantee. Which would enable us to claim that everything we did from the start stemmed from good motives and served finally to bring about a greater good. Technoscientific rationality as secular theodicy. The peaceful atom as Messianic historiography. Our faith in this new faith, like our rush to the Bomb, could not be questioned. And the two primary dogmas of this faith gave birth to a historical process that could not be halted since any negative results could only lead to a further investment in the process: (1) Technoscientific rationality, the new logos which will finally reveal the truth of everything, always produces good results in the end. All we have to do is develop the appropriate technology. (2) Moreover, we must do so. Technological development is the only thing that can save us.
All technical problems require new technological developments for their solution. Like the rush to the Bomb there is no way to halt or question the technological imperative no matter how troubling the results nor how great the ensuing technological problems they pose; i.e., how to contain or clean up the vast amount of nuclear waste and the radiation that now poisons the atmosphere. Having committed ourselves to "the peaceful atom" in order to deny and repress guilt we found ourselves wed to the development of civilian nuclear power because it fulfilled both a psychological necessity and what had become a technological imperative. Like the logic of nuclear weaponry leading of necessity to M.A.D., the peaceful atom was wedded to a logic that could not prevent the development of the situation we now face. We've been promised the benefits of the peaceful atom for over 50 years. Since 1945 Dr. Strangelove has operated simultaneously on two fronts. The results are now in. The production of what we now see as massive piles of shit we have no place to dump or bury. (And try sometime devising a warning sign that can be immediately deciphered 4.5 billion years from now.) Such is the nature of "devil's work." Every step you take to try to get out of it only leads you deeper into it.
Hegel found in "the cunning of reason" a way to redeem any and every historical situation: all evils are but apparent; even the darkest events serve the course of progress. 1945 inaugurates a different logic, calling for an antithetical understanding. That history lets loose consequences that cannot be controlled, consequences both for a psyche that finds itself fatally wedded to its actions with no way to return to the way it was, the guarantees it had, before those actions; and in the destructive results produced by the subsequent actions ( both military and peaceful nuclear technologies) taken to make that agent safe from its own destructiveness and the terrors its actions have unleashed or to expiate those actions by somehow turning the entire process to a good end. There was no way to forsee or prevent the situation that pursuit of the peaceful atom would create because belief in it derived from the same grandiosity that fueled the Bomb. Its task was in fact even more grandiose. Utopian and Messianic. Otherwise the unthinkable: history would have to be conceived in a radically different way. But that idea is even more terrifying than the magnitude of the nuclear pollution that now confronts us because it reveals that nothing protects us from history and the irreversible changes that certain events bring about. There are, in short, no guarantees. Nothing in the conceptual, psychological, or emotional orders that we can call on to deliver us. We face instead a different task: we must deracinate the entire system of guarantees because it is what stands between us, a correct understanding of our situation and, of perhaps greater importance, how we must learn to feel in the face of it. Einstein said the bomb changed everything except the way we think. That task still beckons.
The development traced above offers us a way to understand the Nuclear Unconscious in its movement from 1945 to the present. As a history defined by what I call the Macbeth principle. To live with the guilt of a deed one repeats that deed until one is no longer troubled by it; or what amounts to the same thing, until nothing other than it exists. A world ruled by Thanatos.
Within the psyche that development produces the necessary inner transformation. Through increasingly more rebarbative actions one progressively eviscerates the voice of conscience. Eventually it becomes so thin that it's transformed into its opposite: the fanatical voice of fundamentalism proclaiming its rectitude. We are ready for a tour of Bush's Amerika.
V. The Fantasmatic Becomes the Real
"The rational is real and the real rational."
Hegel
Here is one way to describe Amerikan foreign policy since 9-11. Fully formed fantasies of democracy sweeping the Middle East dance like sugar-plums in the neo-con imaginary awaiting the opportunity for their projection. 9-11, however, upped the ante. As return of the repressed, a terrifying case of the chickens coming home to roost, it raised the spectre of Hiroshima. A new exorcism was needed. Projection and denial were once again called on to provide the only possible psychological response. By appropriating ground-zero (the term used to identify the epicenter of the Bomb's detonation point in Hiroshima) as a symbol of what had happened to us we became fantasmatically the innocent victims of an unmotivated and unprecedented terror. Bush's "they hate us because they're jealous of our freedom." Our duty is clear: we must rid the world of evil. The trauma of 9-11 has thus become the only thing that it could be: the occasion for unleashing destructive rage toward any object deemed the target of our wrath.
Preemptive unilateralism is psychologically necessary to the fantasmatic demand. Grandiose action as the only means of restoration. Reality be damned. Thus, the unleashing of a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD), Depleted Uranium (DU) on a country, people, race, and religion that deserves that fate for being the non-cause of 9-11. The need to proclaim the fantasy over against any correction by reality has become peremptory. We know that the Iraqi people (and then the entire Middle East) will embrace us for setting them free; and surface evidence to the contrary we see new signs of progress toward that goal each day. And such is the need to delude ourselves that we can't wait to crow. Bush on the Abraham Lincoln, the first President ever to appear publicly in military uniform, imitating Bill Pullman in Independence Day, proclaiming mission accomplished.
Only our hold on Iraq deteriorates more every day. None of the things the fantasy assured happen. Two things necessarily happen, however, providing a new confirmation of Engel's Law. (1) The shelling of Iraq with DU increases, contaminating the entire infrastructure with chemical and radiation poisoning. Ecocide becomes official policy. (2) The fantasms become more fervent in their affirmation the more they prove false to reality. Bush proclaims "Democracy is on the march." Quantity has, as Engels argued, become quality bringing about a fundamental psychological change. Before Iraq neo-con fantasy was a dream that longed for projection in the belief that it could be realized in reality. It is now a delusion sustained only by denying reality. The fantasmatic has become a psychosis. There is accordingly no way it can be referred to or corrected by reality. Only one solution is now possible: reality must be eradicated. The conditions of psychotic certitude have been met. One willingly destroys the infra and eco structure of an entire country in order to sustain the fantasy that one will be embraced as a liberator for doing so. Because psychotic certitude has been attained, otherness cannot exist. Any challenge to Belief activates what has now become an underlying paranoia. Failure of reality to conform to fantasy can only be the product of conspiracy. Patriot Acts become necessary as a way to hypnotize oneself by systematically seeking out and eliminating any and all signs of dissent from the fantasy. It must become omniscient and omnipotent. Consequently, everything must become hyperreal in a blind rush to the global realization of the entire fantasmatic system because with the onset of psychosis the mad know, in the evanescence of a consciousness they cannot sustain, the actual function that the entire body of fantasms have played from the beginning.
They are the ways one flees the void within, the catastrophic condition into which one would plunge should they ever collapse. Such is the inner state of those who throw themselves into the Lord , into absolute belief systems, in order to deliver themselves from themselves. The final solution has been reached in the inner condition of the paranoid psychotic: the necessity of continued, increased explosions in order to avoid a psychological implosion.
We are now in a position to describe the Amerikan psyche-a void defined by a panic anxiety that can only be relieved by conversion to an absolute faith: Jesus for Bush and Ashcroft, Leo Strauss for neo-con ideologues; Kapital for Dick Cheney. Because the faith offers total salvation its reach must be global.
That's what Technoscientific Rationality is: the obliteration of any logic other than its development and thereby a progressive estrangement from any other way of relating to Being. That's what capitalism is: the abolition of any moral restraint preventing the imposition on people of whatever conditions will maximize profits. After all, people are nothing but consumers consuming. And it's what Christian fundamentalism Amerikan style is: the need to establish an allegory in which one is Good and thus empowered in an apocalyptic effort to rid the world of Evil. By turning Iraq into a vast thanatopolis all three imperatives achieve simultaneous fulfillment. Karl Marx, at a far more innocent time in history, saw the task of philosophy as one of extracting the rational kernel from the mystical shell of Hegelianism. That kernel was the proletariat and the materialist understanding of History the new guarantee. Living at a later stage of things, shorn of all guarantees, we face a far different task: to extract the psychotic kernel from the fantasmatic shell.
And thereby to see its objective correlative. For the fantasmatic process traced above has a mundane corollary. Converting DU into WMDs that we could deploy all over Iraq fulfilled another fantasy dear to the dream logic that informs capitalism. DU is pure waste. Shit, if you will. And like surplus production and the falling rate of profit it keeps piling up with no way to get rid of it. It's one thing when we only killed the poor bastards who had the bad luck to live downward of our reactors or the black inner city children to whom we shipped radioactively contaminated milk.[15] But now things are out of hand. We've got over 10 million tons of this useless crap. Eventually it'll seep into everything turning even our paradisiacal estates into nuclear cesspools. Unless we can find a way to really shit it out of our system. Any solution, however, must derive from the logic that informs the system--and fulfill the unconscious needs that fuel it. And then Voila! in answer to our prayers one day we see a way to turn our shit to gold. Nothing is ever lost. The deepest article of capitalist faith is fulfilled. There were no bad unintended consequences from our lengthy romance with the atom. We've found our own cunning of reason. Even our shit can be redeemed once we've developed the appropriate technology. With its discovery we seized a way to turn our waste to profit while fulfilling an even deeper need: to take a dump on everything that impedes the progress of global capitalism. Iraq is perfect. After all, the oil is the only thing there that has value. The rest of that landscape is nothing but a toilet; by relieving ourselves on it we get the true macho pleasure that comes from a good shit: the feeling that we're releasing all of our toxic matter on the Other-in this case those people of color committed to a religion that Samuel Huntington and others remind us stands unalterably opposed to the forward looking logic of modernism. The clash of civilizations and the making of world order requires no less than the shit storm that now rages all over Iraq.
The maximization of death under the reign of thanatos finds in Iraq one of its ghostliest embodiments. War in the 20th century witnessed the progressive erosion of all distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, military and civilian targets. Inflicting the greatest possible physical and psychological damage to "the enemy" became the object of military strategy. [16] Hiroshima was the first realization of that logic as a pure and unrestrained expression of thanatos as global terror. Iraq now serves to advance that logic in a new, and qualitatively different, way. Thanks to DU death is again released from all restrictions and extended over time in a way promises to bring about its omnipresence through its silent, unseen, inner working on all that lives. Death is everywhere now: in the air they breath, the food they eat, the water they drink, the shards radiating up at them from the DU debris that litters their cities, the sperm they transmit in the act of love, the cancers and birth defects, the violence to the DNA, in all the leukemias of body and of soul that will turn Iraq into one vast Thanatopolis, the city of the future, an oidos where all that lives will come to bear Death as its sole meaning, the visible and invisible sign that is present everywhere.
VI A Billet for Dubya
"Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Here, then, is a picture of our true historical situation, what we'd know if we looked at our world without the guarantees. (That antithesis to the picture drawn in section III that forever destroys all possibilities of synthesis.) The categorical imperative of the historian is to know the horror of a situation by getting at the madness behind it. One name for that madness is Nuclearism. A proper definition of it is now possible: nuclearism is the assertion of the right to unlimited power over nature through the overcoming of anything in the psyche that would question or resist that assertion. To put it concretely, there is no peaceful atom and there never was. Nuclearism has only one logic, implicit in it from the beginning. Ecocide. Another name for the madness is Capitalism. It too is wedded to a deadly imperative: the extinction of everything in the human being that opposes the logic of acquisition and consumption. The ideal condition it seeks is one where there is nothing but consumers consuming. Everything else must be purged from the psyche. When a belief becomes dominant in American psychological circles one can be sure of one thing: that belief refers to something that no longer exists. Such is the case today with self, subject, identity, and the ego.
The same goes for the countless guarantees that are invented to support that belief: as in the current emphasis on attachment theory to provide the guarantee of healthy, normal development, the perfect theory of mothering for the age of child beauty pageants.[17] In its rush to be the mental health wing of the guarantees, contemporary American psychoanalysis has become a primary barrier to the truth. That there is no self in Amerika today, only a void producing panic anxiety in the rush to compulsive consumption in an attempt to fill what progressively becomes empty of everything save one necessity. Malignant envy, the psychological disorder described by Melanie Klein, has become the only motive that remains: the desire not to attain but to destroy anything and everything that excites one's envy. Iago triumphant. Only thanatos matters. The envy that nuclearism projects unto nature, capitalism projects onto all human relations. The whole world must come to gorge itself under the golden arches. No moral restraint, no residual humanity can intrude on the necessity to reduce everything and everyone to the conditions that benefit capitalism. It's no accident that Dick Cheney's dam Lynne's time as Head of the NEH was a watershed of reactionary ideology.
The History of the U.S. since 1945 is the antithesis of secular theodicy, an eradication of the entire system of guarantees on which it depends. Events dance to a far different logic, which is present on the surface once we learn to see the psychological roots from which the decisions made there derive. That logic is one of Thanatos in the progression needed for it to become an absolute principle freed of all restrictions and certain of its command over any sources of potential resistance. Which is why the principles expressed overseas must perforce inform actions in the Homeland. The result is an Amerika that can be defined by three interconnected developments: (1) an Apocalyptic christo-fascism wedded (as in Mel Gibson's masterpiece) to sado-masochism as the only pleasure capable of convincing people that they are alive and able to feel deeply; (2) corporate capitalism in control of all political and economic decisions and alternatives so that the system is assured of its own reproduction and extension; (3) a police state through the series of Patriot Acts required to assuring the ruling order that even in the privacy of the home a condition of generalized surveillance will exist and with it the eventual extinction of any trace of otherness or resistance. To use Hegelian language, Thanatos as "Absolute Spirit In and For Itself" has attained the form it requires.
In Amerika today the condition Dostoyevsky described in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor slouches toward its final realization. Miracle, Mystery, and Authority find in Bush, Cheney, and Ashcroft the three functionaries needed to create a lasting, impermeable collective psyche. One that offers all subjects deliverance from freedom and anxiety, especially the anxiety that can never be uttered or allowed to enter consciousness-that we exist without any guarantees. Bush or miracle: the allegorization of politics and international relations in order to assure us that we are Good and everything other than us Evil. (The neo-cons offer secular versions of the same faith: western culture opposes Islamic fundamentalism, etc.) Cheney or mystery: capitalism is the ultimate truth of economic reality; whatever we have to do to secure its empire is therefore good and ultimately of benefit to the entire world. Put money in thy purse: the hidden hand is the cunning of reason assuring us of a future of benefit to all. Aschcroft or authority. Surveillance working in all subjects will complete what the Grand Inquisitor called "the happiness of man" in a condition of total obedience. Thereby Abu Ghraib becomes the inner world that defines the mass subjects relation to itself (On the surface, of course, the psychotic need to deny reality continues to take on new forms, each progressively further removed from the possibility of correction. Thus, in the latest effort to affirm that we were right all along even if we were wrong about any WMD being in Iraq, we get the following sequence: we couldn't know then what we know now; "Saddam aspired to making nuclear weapons(Bush/Cheney);" "Once out from under the sanctions, he would have developed them (Powell); "Saddam Hussein is himself a Weapon of Mass Destruction" (Guliani). We now know why were going to Mars: that's where Saddam hid the WMDs.)
Sections IV-VI describe a collective psyche. Such a use of psychoanalysis is a far cry from the justly discredited "psychohistory," which I'll indulge briefly here for purposes of an important theoretical contrast. Thus: Bush had a hard-on for Saddam from the day he took office because deposing him would enable Dubya both to avenge and to replace his father. Recall, in this connection, his statement that if we'd had the courage and determination we'd have finished the work we (i.e., his father) began in 1991. Fortinbras replaces Hamlet in Dubya's imaginary. No wonder he couldn't wait to dress himself in borrowed garb, (a miltary uniform such as his father wore as a pilot in WWII) pulled in as tight across the crotch as he could bear, and stride across the decks of the Abraham Lincoln. He finally had a dick and had to trumpet it to the world. And having found it he can't stop shaking it. All of this is of course true, irrelevant-- and pernicious whenever it functions as an ideological blinder to deflect our attention from the real psychological forces that shape history. Bush is but a part of that psyche. At times its farcicalia and village idiot, at others its fundamentalist believer (and new "great communicator") who conveys the tidings to the masses in a way sure to create in them fascination with their own fascization. Bush is convenient as a way to fixate our attention or our rage so that we won't see the puppetmaster Cheney pulling the strings. Nor, of more importance, the part that Bush and what he represents plays in the constitution of the collective psyche I've described. It is that psyche that forms the object of psychoanalytic cultural and political theory.
My attempt here has been to offer us a new way to think about the possibility that there is a collective Amerikan psyche ruled by a nuclear Unconscious that has a history that can be described in rigorous psychoanalytic terms. The operation of that psyche is not so much a question of the conscious intentions of particular individuals as of the role that different individuals and institutions play in securing the hegemony of the whole. That whole finds the man or woman it needs at each place it needs them (from Groves and Oppenheimer to Colonel Tibbets, from Cheney and Rice to Private England) because the decision to accept the call when chosen derives from an entire system of choices that each individual has made long before the call comes. The end result in each and all is the hegemony of a way of being in which it is not Reason but Thanatos that directs History. The result is the age we live in. An Age of Terrorism. State Terrorism. Everything else is a reaction.
VII. The Principle of Hope
" 'Personal density' is directly proportional to temporal bandwith 'Temporal bandwith' is the width of your present, your Now."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
To know this situation for what it is challenges what is finally the deepest and most fundamental of the guarantees. The principle of Hope. To appropriate Eliot: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness." For it is hard to look on the situation described in this essay without raising the spectre of despair. In view both of the unlikelihood that there is anything that can be done to change the situation and in terms of the amount of pain one must accept in order to sustain this knowledge. What is the purpose of knowing such things if they only produce meaningless suffering? Or, to put it another way, isn't despair the end result of a life shorn of the guarantees? Aren't we finally like the drunks in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, who know that in order to sustain the illusions that are required to go on living they must decide that Hickey was mad and that all he revealed to them about their lives a product of that madness?
It is time to admit what the need for Hope really amounts to. Denial of responsibility for certain situations under the assumption that knowing them correctly would lead to despair. The concept of despair, in short, is no more than a rhetorical ploy to prematurely terminate one's awareness of a situation so that one can cling, in the face of it, to hope and all the other emotional and psychological needs that follow in its train. Despair remains an empty concept. We don't know what it is. And we never will as long as we use the need for Hope to prevent the discovery of our capacity to endure. We will only know what we are capable of when we get rid of hope. Whether despair is what we will find on the other side of it is something we can't know. For all hope really signifies is a testament to our weakness and our fears. Perhaps we are called to something beyond it. What Shakespeare called tragic readiness. For in opening ourselves to the possibility of despair we also open ourselves to the possibility of self-overcoming as well as to a discovery of a praxis that lies on the other side of the many paralyses created by the guarantees. We can't know "what is to be done?" as long as we keep trying to transcend our situation with values and guarantees that we insist must remain a-historical and in service to an essentialistic and a-historical theory of human nature. (For the ethical implications of this idea see below, section IX.)
VIII. The Evil of Banality
" The man has a branch office in our brain called the ego and its mission is bad shit. We know exactly what they're doing and do nothing about it."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
As we struggle to develop a concept of evil equal to our situation, Hannah Arendt remains an invaluable source. Not so much for what she said, but for what she failed to say due to the self-imposed limit she placed on her thought. I refer to her life-long avoidance, suspicion, and eschewal of psychoanalytic concepts. Yet in Eichmann Arendt identified a new kind of criminal. One who commits a crime under circumstances where they can't know or feel they're doing wrong. For Arendt that fact does not mitigate Eichmann's guilt. I want now to suggest that it magnifies it. Eichmann served the Reich apparently for no motive other than to advance his career. But the ease with which he went along with everything he was asked to do does not reveal the absence of choice or intention but the true mode of it's presence. Eichmann's service to the final solution was a function of the choices of a lifetime, the choices that eventuated in making him the kind of man he was. It is there that his responsibility lies. Eichmann is responsible, in short, for his psyche. And there is only one relationship he can have to that psyche-guilt. Eichmann is responsible for making himself the kind of man who could become Eichmann.
The great and still unconstituted contribution of psychoanalysis to our moral history is the expanded understanding it offers us of our ethical responsibility. It's always pretty to restrict responsibility to conscious intentions. This is the primary way we escape self-knowledge in all our important dealings. We only let ourselves know what we want to know about our motives. In one of his late reflections Freud asserted that we are responsible for our dreams. I take that statement to mean that we are responsible for what our dreams reveal about the desires and disorders that define us and that must therefore become our self-knowledge. Which is another way of saying that we are responsible for our psyche. Our ethical duty is to gain knowledge of it as the author of our actions. The fatal choice one may make one day is not a result of bad luck or simply going with the flow. It's a function of the choices one made long before the fatal one became irresistible. In this as in so much else Eichmann and Tibbets are one, brothers of the architects of Abu Ghraib and their progeny. Adorno said that Hitler gave the world a new moral imperative: so act that Auschwitz will never again be possible. Freud also gave it a new moral imperative: to become responsible for one's unconscious and all the suppressed motives and desires that inform one's "intentions," for it is from one's psyche that one thinks and acts in all one's dealings in the world. Both imperatives are extreme and necessarily connected. That extremity is perhaps the true measure of our historical situation.
IX. Final Jeopardy
"Nothing can trouble the dominance of the true image." Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
"Is there anything more evil than shooting children in a school yard or flying planes into buildings?" One hears this rhetorical question often today. Getting it firmly implanted in our minds seems to be one of the current ideological functions of the media. A correct response requires careful reflection on the single circumstance that underlies the knee-jerk response. The power of the image. The promise inherent in Technoscientificrationality is deliverance from that reality. Killing for it, like everything else, occurs at a distance. In the inaugural moment: Tibbets in his Enola Gay unable to imagine what he has just done as a human act. "It was all impersonal." [18] And today: in the silent, secret, midnight ways that radiation poisoning works from within, like a deed without a doer, separated in space and time from its absent cause. Perhaps killing at a distance is the far greater evil precisely because it abrogates the image and the human connection between slayer and slain. If I kill another man with my bare hands my deed is immediate to my embodied consciousness. To kill that way you have to feel hate, fear, anguish, remorse, etc. whereas to kill from a distance or invisibly is to render the whole thing impersonal. With the desired result: the ability, for example, of the man who dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima, incinerating 200 to 300,000 people in a second, condemning another 2 to 300,000 to the condition of hibakusha, the walking dead, to boast proudly for over 59 years now that he has never felt a moment of regret or remorse. Tibbets' lack of moral imagination is one with his representative status as precursor. For now it is a thing of trifling and contemptible ease to form policies and take actions that litter a landscape with DU while denying that the stuff has any long term medical or environmental effects. [19] The evil of killing at a distance is that is makes death unreal. Protected from the image, all who participate in the deed are delivered over to a pure and impersonal calculus. (An aside: if we really want to support our troops we must achieve for them a new Bill of Rights. No one should ever be told to use weapons without being given a full knowledge of the long term human and environmental consequence of those weapons. To do otherwise is to deprive our soldiers of the choice that makes them human.)
The powers that be learned one lesson from Vietnam. No more images. The mistake was to let us see the carnage, every night, up close, over TV. The news entered our consciousness at the register where genuine change is possible. Where horror is felt. Free of the tyranny of the concept, the hypnotic power of the guarantees. Desert Storm was the corrective: the ninetendo war, a war broadcast to look just like another one of the video games we'd been programmed to love. Prohibition of the image is now a fundamental article of faith of our religion. No images are allowed to come back to us from Iraq II. (Michael Moore's real crime was to give us a brief glimpse at what the mainstream media proscribe.) The abolition of the image is one of the primary conditions of Ecocide. Everything must be rendered abstract, invisible, unreal. No image can be allowed to trouble our sleep, to lacerate our soul. For then we might begin to know that there is indeed an evil far worse than shooting children in schoolyards or flying airplanes into buildings.
To move us toward that knowledge let me end with the forbidden, which I must here try to convey solely through the more abstract medium of words since I've not yet gained permission to reproduce a photograph I saw a week ago. It's the picture of an Iraqi baby, a victim of DU, who was born with no nose, mouth, eyes, anus or genitals and with flipper limbs, a common result of radiation exposure in utero. That child's body, full of red open ulcers, is twisted in knots, its ulcerated face contorted in a look of unspeakable suffering. An authentic image of the sacredness of human life. Of the preciousness of every breath. To look at that child is to realize one's duty to mourn it, to give voice to its right to invade our consciousness and expose the evil of those who prate on about the right to life while refusing to let us see what they've reduced life to. Luke, 17:1-2. The image of that child must become the force in our minds that enables us to deracinate all guarantees that would protect us from the reality of that child's situation. Or, to put it another way, every time one chooses catharsis, resolution, and renewal that child is born again, condemned to an unspeakable suffering.
That is why its image must embolden us to question the most hallowed of the guarantees, the one I've refrained from discussing until now. In the face of such evil what is to be done? To fight it is one ever justified in resorting to violence? No, we are told, because "if we do so we become just like them." This ethical principle supposedly holds above and beyond any situation we might face. Ever. Because it assures the guarantee that no matter what happens we will never get our hands dirty. History can't intrude on the categorical imperative. Whatever action one takes one must assure oneself of one's ethical purity. Even if that means there is nothing that one can do and after it has been demonstrated that there are no non-violent ways to change the situation. Perhaps we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of such an ethic. Bush did the moral imagination one favor. His preemptive unilateralism made official what has been clear for so long but denied due to its implications. There is no body to which we can turn for Justice: not the U.N., the World Court, or any other framework of International Law. The U.S. will flaunt its contempt for such bodies whenever it suits its purpose. And thus another mode of peaceful, non-violent praxis is deprived of its guarantee. But then what is to be done? I can't offer an answer. Because I don't have one? Because to do so would be to drive the last nail into the coffin of Hope? Because any answer would only serve to deliver us from the trauma we have perhaps only begun to experience? Because doing so would minimize the psychological terrorism of the essay? Or, for a final hypothetical reason, which I included when delivering an earlier oral version of this essay to a Conference on Depleted Uranium: because to do so would legally open everyone who hears it to the charge of taking part in a conspiracy? Such warnings need not be attached to what we read. Surely we can preserve that guarantee. But of course we can't. Thanks to the Patriot Act the same warning must now accompany the written word.
Walter A. Davis is professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of Deracination: Historiocity, Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative. He can be reached at: davis.65@osu.edu.
ENDNOTES:
(1) I've relied on numerous sources for the factual bases of this essay. An extremely useful website is Depleted Uranium Watch. See also: www.umrc.net/contact.asp and www.informationclearinghouse.into/article5941.htm. On the nature of depleted uranium see: www.umrc.net/whatIsDU.asp.
(2) In connection with this paragraph, see: http://www.sfbayview.com/081804/Depleteduranium081804.shtml;
(3) In connection with this paragraph, see: http://www.traprockpeace.org/rokke du 3 ques.html; and traprockpeace.org/chrisbusby08may04.html. Desert Storm was not, however, the first use of DU. DU was used by Israel under U.S. Army supervision in 1973. For purposes of this essay I've bracketed the way events in Iraq relate to the Palestinian problem.
(4) On this takeover, see the report by Leuren Moret for The Danish Peace Academy: www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/stealth.htm. For examples of the nuclear weapons planned for development, see: www.Haarp.alaska.edu/haarp; www.dtic.mil/jointvision/jupub2.htm; and www.popsci.com (Defense 2020). Recently 153 million dollars of DU weapons including bunker busters ( or to use official language and thus gain insight into the libidinal bases of the new technologies, Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrators) was sold to Israel. The purpose of all these developments is to blur the distinction between conventional and nuclear war. Iraq is the systematic eradication of that distinction, and as such the first shape of things to come.
(5) Giorgio Agamben, Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford UP, 1998).
(6) See: www.fredsadademiet.dk/library/stealth.htm.
(7) See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. For example, #129: "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something-because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his inquiry do not strike a person at all.-And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful." One purpose of this essay is to show that our responsibility is precisely to see and become aware of such things and to trace the full implications of their historical operation. History deprives us of the luxury of leaving the social, ideological, and communal bases of our thoughts and feelings in the dark, however convenient or natural it is to do so.
(8) I ran across this delight quote in Mark Crispin Miller's Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order (Norton, 2004), p.298.
(9) Jacques Ellul's great book The Technological Society remains the definitive study of this dilemma.
(10) Martin Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology offers a magisterial meditation on the ontological implications of technology.
(11) The description and critique of the guarantees offered here is a simplified statement of the argument I develop at length in Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (SUNY P, 2001).
(12) On this see especially the confession of the architect of the myth, McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (Knopf,1992) and Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial (Putnam, 1995).
(13) See, for example, Harvey Wasserman, Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation (Delacorte,1982).
(14) Chapters 3 and 4 of Deracination develop an extended psychoanalytic discussion of the idea summarized here.
(15) See: http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/stealth.htm.
(16) As Richard Rhodes shows in The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon and Schuster, 1986) this was the primary rationale behind General Grove's argument that Kyoto be chosen as the city to receive the first Atomic Bomb.
(17) Some of the central texts behind these "developments" in psychoanalysis: Heinz Kohut ,The Restoration of the Self; Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love; Peter Fonagy, Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis; and Stephen Mitchell, Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis.
(18) See The Paul Tibbets Story by Paul Tibbets with Claire Stebbins and Harry Franken (Stein and Day, 1978), p.227.
(19) The Department of Energy continues to insist that there is no evidence to support the claim that DU is harmful; and of course they've lined up the usual scientists to support the proposition, despite all the evidence that now exists in our returning soldiers, that we simply do not know what DU does. Last time I checked the tobacco industry was still denying a scientific link between smoking and lung cancer. Though false the claim by the Department of Energy is also pernicious, since not knowing what the effects of a weapon will be is a prima facie reason not to use it. That is, what stands forth once one cuts through the defenses and obfuscations is that the 1 of the 4 rationales for Hiroshima not mentioned previously in this essay remains a primary motive. We are still creating laboratories so that our scientific, medical, and military personnel can study the effects of our weapons. If we kill our own in the process, that too has been for a long time a matter of indifference. As Henry Kissinger put it, apropos of Vietnam: "Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy. ( See Monika Jensen-Stevenson, Kiss the Boys Goodbye (E.P. Dutton, 1990) Finding out the full range of its destructive powers is now the primary reason for using a weapon. That is why to use any weapon that has not been fully tested in terms of all its possible consequences should be classified as a War Crime. (Of course the powers that be can always claim-and this explanation has already been floated that the source of all the cancers etc. of the Iraqi people stem from Saddam's use of chemical and biological weapons. A result, that is, of the weapons we gave him, a transfer presided over by none other than Donald Rumsfeld.) [On this see: www.newscientist.com Pynchon vivant. Which leads to a concluding fantasy of how the clean up of Iraq should begin. Each of them-Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Perle, Rove and all the others should be given a sack and sent to fill it with chunks of the radioactive debris that now fills Iraq. They should then be required to take that sack home and use it as their pillow. Pleasant dreams.
http://www.counterpunch.org/davis10092004.html
by : WALTER A. DAVIS Monday 11th October 2004
-------- europe
Slovakia wants to postpone closure of nuclear reactor by two years
Mon Oct 11, 2004
(AFP)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/slovakia_eu_nuclear
BRATISLAVA (AFP) - Slovak Economy Minister Pavol Rusko insisted that the closure of a nuclear reactor deemed unsafe by the European Union should be delayed by two years, despite a pledge in the country's EU accession treaty to close it in 2006.
Slovakia agreed as a condition for joining the EU to close the two oldest reactors at its Jaslovske Bohunice nuclear power plant -- the first was due to close by the end of 2006 and the second by the end of 2008.
But speaking on Monday Rusko said closing both simultaneously in 2008 was a better solution, repeating his belief that a two-stage closure would double the risks for safety during the two-year transition period.
"If the priority of the European Union is really safety and not economically weakening Slovakia, it has to clearly respect our solution, which will increase the safety of the nuclear power station's operation until 2008," he told a press conference.
Rusko argued that both reactors were built as a unit and that changing the nuclear fuel in the second for two years after the first has been put out of service "would increase the risk to a level which is not acceptable in Europe".
But in order to follow Rusko's recommendation Slovakia will need to negotiate with its 24 European Union partners.
"We respect the international accession treaty but if the safety criteria are the main reason for the signature of such a treaty I don't see any reason to reject a solution which is better for safety," he said.
Rusko first mooted the idea of prolonging the blocks' lifespan in March, immediately provoking outrage in neighbouring nuclear-free Austria.
The two oldest blocks at Bohunice date back to 1978 and 1980 and are equipped with Soviet-origin reactors. They account for 22.6 percent of Slovakia's total electricity production.
The nuclear power station also has two newer blocks which went into service in 1984 and 1985 and are due to continue beyond 2010.
-------- india / pakistan
India, US begin talks on deepening nuclear, strategic ties
(AFP)
Oct 11, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041011/wl_sthasia_afp/india_us_nuclear_041011072229
NEW DELHI - India and the United States began talks on deepening cooperation in nuclear and strategic areas, less than a month after Washington lifted sanctions it had imposed on Indian facilities in 1998, officials said.
US Under Secretary of State for Commerce Kenneth Juster was holding talks with Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran and would later meet National Security Adviser J. N. Dixit, Indian and US officials said.
Juster would also meet India's Commerce Secretary S.N. Menon during his two-day visit, the officials said.
The aim of the talks is to find ways to improve ties in the high-tech trade, defence and civilian nuclear sectors and in space programmes, an Indian official said.
On September 17, Washington announced it was lifting nuclear export controls on Indian organisations after New Delhi assured US officials they would address American non-proliferation concerns.
The move was the latest easing of sanctions imposed on New Delhi after it declared itself a nuclear power in 1998.
Those sanctions resulted in a freeze on exchanges in nuclear and other high-tech sectors such as "dual-use technology" which finds applications in both civilian and military use.
Along with lifting the controls, Washington said it would ease export licensing policies to expand bilateral cooperation in commercial space programs.
The deal was the first phase under the "Next Steps In Strategic Partnership With India" agreed in January between President George W. Bush and Singh's predecessor Atal Behari Vajpayee.
During the talks with Juster, India will ask the United States to withdraw sanctions it had imposed recently against two Indian scientists accused by Washington of selling technology for weapons of mass destruction to Iran, a report said Monday.
New Delhi would also ask Washington to remove the subsidiaries of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) from its list of embargoed units, the Times of India reported.
"We are looking for a more symmertrical relationship with the US," the report quoted foreign secretary Shyam Saran as saying.
To address US concerns on proliferation, India was willing to allow Washington to appoint an export control attache at its embassy in New Delhi, the report added.
-------- iran
Iran, Russia nuclear deal 'close'
(AP)
October 11, 2004
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/11/iran.nuclear.ap/index.html
TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran and Russia say they are close to finalizing a long-delayed protocol on returning spent nuclear fuel to Russia, paving the way for the launch of a Russian-built nuclear power plant in southern Iran in 2006.
Russia has said it will not ship nuclear fuel to Iran until both countries sign an agreement under which all spent fuel would be returned to Russia. The agreement is intended to prevent Iran from using spent fuel to make nuclear weapons.
"The agreement on returning spent nuclear fuel is in the final stage," Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Tehran at a news conference Sunday. "I think it will be signed soon."
The signing has been delayed repeatedly by what both countries say are mainly financial details. Iran says it doesn't have facilities to store the spent fuel. Moscow wants to pay in order to take back the fuel to Russia.
The fuel agreement will pave the way for the inauguration in 2006 of Iran's first light-water 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor being built by Russia in Bushehr, southern Iran.
It was not immediately clear exactly when the agreement would be signed.
The $800 million Bushehr contract has drawn years of protests from the United States, which says the project could help Tehran build nuclear weapons.
Lavrov, who arrived Sunday on an official visit, also called on Iran to implement a demand from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, that it freeze all work on uranium enrichment activities, including uranium reprocessing, a technology that can be to produce nuclear fuel or nuclear weapons.
"The IAEA board has called on Iran to suspend all uranium enrichment activities voluntarily, not as an obligation," he said. "This is to the interests of Iran and all that Tehran responds positively to IAEA."
Iranian counterpart Kamal Kharrazi swiftly rejected the call.
"It is Iran's legitimate right to master nuclear technology including uranium enrichment," Kharrazi told reporters. "There is no talk of stopping it. It's not something Iran can accept."
"However, Iran is open to any proposal or mechanism to ensure that it won't go towards nuclear weapons."
Iran is not prohibited from uranium enrichment under its obligations to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But for months it has faced international pressure to suspend such activities as a good-faith gesture.
Iran said last week it has converted a few tons of raw uranium into a gas, a key to achieving the nuclear proficiency it covets, risking confrontation with an international community that fears Tehran's goal is to create atomic weapons, not nuclear energy.
Under international pressure, Iran last year suspended actual uranium enrichment -- injecting hexafluoride gas into centrifuges used to enrich uranium -- and says it still remains committed to the pledge.
However, Tehran has rejected demands to stop all other activities related to uranium enrichment, like building centrifuges and converting raw uranium.
Iran's conservative-dominated parliament is already considering legislation to force the government to resume actual uranium enrichment, which, if approved, will end Iran's pledge not to inject gas into centrifuges.
Iran's nuclear program has become a matter of national pride and is one of few issues where the conservative parliament and reformist government of President Mohammad Khatami agree.
Iran, Russia nuclear deal 'close'
-------- iraq / inspections
Homage to Truthtellers
by Gordon Prather,
October 11, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=3761
Well, Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence Charles Duelfer has just sung his "swan song" to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Although their names weren't mentioned, Duelfer's song essentially constitutes long overdue homage to (a) Hans Blix, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency; (b) Scott Ritter, former Chief Inspector of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq; and (c) General Hussein Kamal, former czar of Saddam's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.
You see, in order to obtain a Gulf War ceasefire in 1991, Iraq had unconditionally accepted UNSCR-687, which required Iraq's full cooperation in the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless - under UNSCOM supervision - of:
1. All chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities;
2. All ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometers and related major parts, and repair and production facilities;
Iraq also unconditionally accepted UNSCR-707, which required Iraq's full cooperation in the destruction, removal or rendering harmless - under IAEA supervision - of all nuclear-weapons-usable materials, all potentially-related subsystems or components and all potentially-related research, development, support and manufacturing facilities.
To insure Iraqi's "full cooperation," the Security Council (UNSC) imposed economic sanctions, effectively requiring all Iraqi foreign trade - export and import - to be conducted through a UN agency.
Duelfer's principal findings are these;
1. Frantic to get the UN sanctions lifted, Iraq had "essentially destroyed" all illicit weapons - as well as most weapons-usable materials and precursors - by the end of 1991.
2. By 1996, "nothing remained," not even a production capability.
3. Saddam never attempted to reconstruct any of those capabilities.
Surprise, surprise?
Not to Bush or Cheney, and maybe not to Kerry.
You see, back in 1995, General Kamal - Saddam's son-in-law - had defected to Jordan, carrying with him thousands of Iraqi WMD program documents. Kamal was extensively debriefed by UNSCOM, IAEA and CIA weenies.
Kamal claimed that Iraqis had destroyed immediately after the Gulf War, all remaining chem-bio agents and weapons they had produced for the Iran-Iraq War. The IAEA had discovered and destroyed what remained of the unsuccessful Iraqi nuke program.
According to Kamal, "nothing remained."
By 1997, the UN inspectors were able to report - confidentially - to the Security Council that Kamal had indeed told the truth.
Oh, there were some "bookkeeping" inconsistencies. The amounts of chem-bio materials the Iraqis claimed to have made didn't always equal the amounts they could prove they had destroyed. But, by 1997, the shelf-life - and hence, the effectiveness - of those chem-bio agents would have long since passed.
Hallelujah! Iraq was effectively WMD-free! Whereupon, several members of the Security Council proposed that the "sanctions" imposed on Iraq in 1991 be lifted.
President Clinton wouldn't allow it.
Rationale?
Well, the UNSC resolutions didn't require Iraq to be WMD-free. They merely required Iraq's "complete cooperation" with UN inspectors. Clinton argued that the Iraqis weren't providing "complete cooperation."
So, on Aug. 14, 1998, Congress resolved, "That the Government of Iraq is in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations, and therefore the president is urged to take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligations."
Then, on Oct. 31, 1998, Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which declared, "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime."
Armed with that "authority," Clinton attempted - from 20,000 feet - to remove Saddam from power at year's end.
As the bombing of Saddam's palaces was an obvious attempt to assassinate him, Saddam ceased "cooperating" with the UNSCOM inspectors, who had fled Iraq on the eve of the attempt.
Then, in November 2002, President Bush got the Security Council to pass UNSCR-1441, which afforded Iraq "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations under relevant resolutions of the Council."
Bush claimed he had "slam-dunk" intelligence that Saddam had been reconstructing his nuke and chem-bio programs.
However, once back in Iraq, the UN inspectors reported - right up till the eve of the invasion - that they were receiving "complete cooperation" from the Iraqis. Furthermore, they could find no "indication" that there had been any attempts to reconstruct Iraq's WMD programs or facilities since 1991.
Now, a thousand American deaths later, Duelfer is singing the same tune.
-------- korea
Danger of North Korea missile launch fading
AFP
11 October 2004
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/view/111142/1/.html
TOKYO: The possibility of North Korea launching a ballistic missile has diminished as activities at missile bases in the Stalinist state were returning to normal, a Japanese press report says.
As a result, the Japanese destroyer Kongo equipped with an Aegis missile tracking system has been ordered home from the Sea of Japan (East Sea) facing the Korean peninsula, the major daily Yomiuri said, quoting Japanese Defence Agency sources.
North Korean military activities stepped up in early September, including vehicular movement in and around ballistic missile sites, alerting the United States and its Asian allies against a possible missile launch.
"The series of the military activities seem to have just been exercises by North Korean forces," Yomiuri quoted a government source as saying. "Though the activities have not ceased completely, 70 percent of the forces have returned to normal operations."
North Korea's Rodong missile, with a range of some 1,300 kilometers (810 miles), can hit most areas in Japan.
North Korea, at the centre of an international outcry against its nuclear arms ambitions, stunned the world in 1998 when it fired a Taepodong-1 missile over Japan, claiming it was a satellite launch.
Japan sent the Aegis-equipped destroyer Myoko on September 21 to the Sea of Japan to monitor North Korean activity, along with patrols by an EP-3 surveillance plane. The Myoko was replaced by the Kongo early this month.
The United States sent similar destroyers to the Sea of Japan.
On Monday, the US Aegis-guided missile cruiser Lake Erie called at the Japanese port of Niigata to give crew members a rest and to replenish supplies, according to press reports.
-------- missile defense
Missile defense almost armed, but is it ready?
Denver Post
By Bruce Finley
October 11, 2004
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%7E11676%7E2459594,00.html
Colorado Springs - Leading military experts say the $70 billion missile defense system about to be declared "operational" is far from proven and that an upcoming rollout may be a politically motivated sham.
The five interceptors recently lowered into ground silos would offer only limited protection even if they did work, experts told The Denver Post.
Some contend that activating the system this year, as promised by the Bush administration, could hurt Americans by triggering an arms race. Some say the president is ill-advised on the defense system.
Any claim that interceptors can knock down enemy missiles is doubtful, said Phil Coyle, former chief weapons tester for the Department of Defense.
Bush administration officials "have no way of knowing that (it's ready), because the system has no demonstrated capability to work in realistic conditions," said Coyle, whose duties before he retired in 2001 included assessing missile defense. Declaring the system operational "makes no sense," he said.
"This is like deploying a new military jet fighter with no wings, no tail and no landing gear, and without testing it to see if it could work with no wings, tail or landing gear," Coyle said.
A congressional investigation of missile defense is in progress.
A previous Government Accountability Office study found modeling and simulations have been insufficient to show whether missile defense will work and that decision-makers lack information to judge what an effective system might cost.
Broader questions loom, too, about whether missile defense begun during the Cold War is appropriate now, given the annual $10 billion-plus- a-year price tag.
The system is designed to stop long-range ballistic missiles that only Russia, China and perhaps North Korea and Iran could fire - not the cruise missiles the Central Intelligence Agency says have spread to nearly two dozen countries. The main threats to Americans today are thought to be terrorists who rely on low-tech tactics.
President Bush has made missile defense a priority, boosting funding and promising to deploy an effective system in 2004. Defense chiefs and their contractors have been scrambling to get that done.
"The Bush administration feels a strong sense of urgency about having an operational system. Making the statement presumably helps his election prospects," said Loren Thompson, senior analyst at the Lexington Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. "Missile defense is more feasible today than it was during the Cold War, but it's not as important as it was because the threats are so diminished. The challenges we face today are of a different character."
Defense officials say formal activation will proceed, although no date has been given. Bush in August said perfecting the system could enable him to tell tyrants: "You fire, we're going to shoot it down."
Technical problems postponed an interceptor test last week. Current exercises involve turning on sensors to see if they transfer information properly.
At U.S. Northern Command, Air Force Gen. Ralph Eberhart, in charge of homeland defense, casts missile defense as essential because "today, if (enemies) launch a missile our way, we can't do anything about it." An initial limited capability will mean interceptors could "intercept or destroy a small number of missiles," Eberhart said. "That's more capability than we have today. And that's better than no capability."
With the click of a computer mouse at high-security facilities inside Cheyenne Mountain or at Schriever Air Force Base on the prairie, Army troops are supposed to be able to launch interceptor missiles from ground silos and knock down enemy missiles before they hit the United States.
Over the past three months, military crews with cranes lowered five of the 54-foot missiles into top-secret silos at Fort Greely, in central Alaska.
"The president has issued his edict. We are working toward that," said Col. Gary Baumann, commander of the Army's newly formed 100th Missile Defense Brigade.
Yet no field tests of interceptors have been done since December 2002, and key satellite and radar components aren't completed. Launching interceptors from U.S. soil is tricky because launch rockets dump highly toxic fuel.
The eight tests done were over the Pacific Ocean with interceptors fired from Kwajalein Atoll at missiles carrying beacons flying known routes. The results: five for eight. In two tests, kill vehicles failed to separate from launch rockets.
President Clinton signed the National Missile Defense Act of 1999 that required deployment of missile defense "as soon as is technologically possible."
Today, defense chiefs "have made the determination that it is technologically feasible," said Rick Lehner, spokesman for Defense Department's Missile Defense Agency.
"We believe we have proved (the system) sufficiently enough to provide this limited defense capability. People may argue with that. But we believe it is the right thing to do," Lehner said. "We really can't do advanced testing without the system being operational. You want to actually use the elements of the operational system. You can only do that when it is operating. ... We plan to do a lot of testing."
Sen. John Kerry's position: activating an unproven system is misleading.
"There's no reason to declare the system operational until it is ready," Rand Beers, Kerry's chief foreign policy adviser, told The Denver Post. To do so when facilities still are under construction "sends a signal that the administration is prepared to represent something to the American people and the world that isn't in fact correct," said Beers, a former White House official.
Kerry has not opposed missile defense in concept. But he has said he'd cut spending and use savings to help pay for 40,000 new Army troops, Beers said. Kerry's view is that "we've got a lot of other priorities for critical elements of national security that we really need to be attending to," he said.
Bush campaign officials had no comment.
Pentagon plans describe missile defense components working in synch across nine time zones to protect Americans from missiles fired by hostile nations such as North Korea or by "nonstate actors" such as terrorists.
The North Korean threat "is very real and getting worse these past six months," said Sen. Wayne Allard, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and supporter of missile defense.
North Korea's two-stage rockets could reach California, and "the accuracy will probably come with time," said Allard, R-Colo. "... I am pleased we've got missiles in the ground and we are starting to test them. I don't think it's likely that we can afford to defer any of our budget provisions for missile defense."
Today's missile defense efforts began in 1984 during the Cold War, when President Reagan announced the dream of deploying a technological shield. Defense officials have spent more than $70 billion developing components: satellite sensors to detect launches, radar to track missiles, and interceptor missiles topped with 122-pound kinetic "kill vehicles."
Yet in April, a GAO study concluded that the system "has not been tested under unscripted, operationally realistic conditions" and that military officials face "the challenge of demonstrating whether the capabilities being fielded ... will perform as intended when the system becomes operational in 2004."
Decision-makers in the Defense Department and Congress "do not have a full understanding of the overall cost of developing and fielding the ballistic missile defense system and what the system's true capabilities will be," the study said.
Critics say announcing activation of missile defense could spur enemies to accelerate their own missile and other weapons programs.
The new U.S. limited capability "isn't limited, it's nonexistent," said Victoria Samson, a former missile war games developer at Schriever Air Force Base, now a research analyst at the Center for Defense Information think tank in Washington.
"It's an embarrassment, really, when you look at how little they've been able to do with so much money," Samson said. "And other countries may use what we put out there as a reason to be more aggressive in their missile systems. North Korea is one example. China is another. This missile defense system can spur missile races. It is highly destabilizing."
-------- russia
Russia makes nuclear plea to Iran
BBC
By Sadeq Saba
11 October, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3733698.stm
A general view of Iran's first nuclear reactor, being built in Bushehr Moscow say it wants to press ahead with its co-operation Russia has urged Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment programme in order to avoid possible sanctions from the UN Security Council.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow would continue nuclear co-operation with Tehran if it complies with the UN nuclear agency (IAEA).
In its meeting last month, the IAEA called on Iran to suspend its nuclear fuel cycle.
The US accuses Iran of secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons.
The Russian foreign minister's visit to Tehran is widely seen as a mission to convince Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment programme as required by the IAEA.
Russia has been helping Iran to build its first nuclear power plant in the southern port of Bushehr.
Presidential visit
Despite increasing pressure from Washington to abandon the project, Moscow has insisted that it is determined to press ahead with its nuclear co-operation with the Islamic Republic.
But Russia is now concerned that if Tehran does not comply with the IAEA's ultimatum to suspend the uranium enrichment activities by the end of November, Iran could be referred to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.
At his press conference in Tehran, Mr Lavrov said Moscow was against such a measure. Any sanctions against Iran would threaten the $800m (£445m) Bushehr deal.
Russia is also keen to continue its lucrative economic relations with Iran, a key partner for Moscow in the region. It is believed that if Mr Lavrov's mission to Tehran is successful, Mr Putin may visit the country afterwards.
Construction of the Bushehr power plant has been severely delayed for other reasons. But now the Russian foreign minister and his Iranian counterpart say their countries are close to signing a deal on the supply and return of nuclear fuel for the plant.
-------- terrorism
America's nuclear fears: rhetoric or real concern?
With recent mentions of nuclear proliferation, scare tactics of the past are making a return
Tri-Valley Herald
By Ian Hoffman
October 11, 2004
http://www.trivalleyherald.com/Stories/0,1413,86~10669~2460152,00.html#
A fearsome weapon of American politics -- the rhetorical mushroom cloud -- is back.
Every two decades, the men who would be president and leader of the free world have dropped the prospect of nuclear horror on a peaceful electorate.
In 1964, Republican challenger Barry Goldwater called H-bombs "merely another weapon" useful for "lobbing" into "the men's room of the Kremlin." President Lyndon Johnson created a nuclear icon in American political advertising.
She was a little girl in a field plucking petals off a daisy, "One, two, three, four." She looked up startled as the camera drew viewers into darkness of her pupil, then an thermonuclear detonation swallowed the screen. "Vote for President Johnson on Nov. 3," an announcer said. "The stakes are too high for you to stay home."
The Daisy Girl ad aired only once. Goldwater was annihilated.
Democrat Walter Mondale went back to the well of Cold War anxiety in 1984 and assailed Ronald Reagan for not pursuing arms control with the Soviets. Mondale lost.
As if on a circadian clock, 20 years later, President Bush calls nuclear terrorism "the great nexus, the great threat to our country" and mocks Sen. John Kerry as putting the war against it to a "global test." Kerry is accusing the president of neglecting pursuit of al-Qaida and real nuclear dangers in Russia, North Korea and Iran for an incompetent war against an unarmed Iraq.
Both men appear to take nonproliferation seriously. And on this much, they agree: The greatest threat to America today is having terrorists acquire a nuclear weapon and deliver it in a U.S. city.
But does fighting nuclear terrorism by stemming the spread of weapons have political currency? Will Americans warm to it as a chief object of U.S. security policy?
"It's a bumper-sticker sentiment that's not likely to move a lot of voters," said one Bush administration official.
It did move a nation to war. It was Bush's leading rationale for invading Iraq.
Now fighting nuclear terror is a banner for both campaigns.
Here's a quick look at the expanding nuclear problem, what the candidates would do about it and some expert opinions.
In brief, the president and the senator share some goals and strategies, vary on questions of money and priority but most of all perceive the problem across an ideological chasm: Bush sees bad or rogue nations as the problem and favors quicker resort to military force over arms control and inspections.
Kerry sees nations arming with dangerous weapons for their own perceived security; he would wield inspections and diplomatic clout to stop them before using a military assault.
Bush's argument could come from the NRA playbook. Kerry's deals and coalitions offer a broader tool kit, but they can take longer and time is not an ally.
Each says the other puts Americans in danger. It's clear that nuclear proliferation is a large, multi-layered problem that the United States under any leader can't solve alone.
Enforcing nonproliferation
The three countries are a nuclear nightmare in the making.
Pakistan -- A U.S. ally never mentioned in a presidential debate. Pakistan nuclear father A.Q. Khan headed a network that funneled uranium enrichment methods to Iran, North Korea and Libya, and nuclear bomb blueprints to at least Libya.
Bush stretched in saying the Khan network was shut down. Most of the network remains unjailed, and U.S. investigators still are identifying middlemen. There is fear they may still have enrichment and bomb plans.
But Pakistan's own weapons and materials are at risk in a country where President Musharraf has barely escaped assassination attempts by al-Qaida-like cells and where elements of the nuclear establishment have extreme Islamist sympathies. U.S. officials quietly are working on securing those weapons.
Harvard nonproliferation expert Matthew Bunn rates Pakistan as a "huge" risk for nuclear terrorism.
"If you can have 41 heavily armed terrorists showing up without warning in a Moscow theater, imagine how many might show up at a remote Pakistan weapons facility. And would the guards fight or help?" he said.
"It's a big problem but these guys don't even talk about it because they don't have a program where they can say I'm going to spend twice as much as my opponent," said Henry Sokolski, a Reagan administration nonproliferation official who worked in the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz.
North Korea and Iran -- Both launched nuclear programs years before Bush listed them in the "axis of evil" and the Pentagon ordered nuclear attack plans for "contingencies" there.
North Korea had frozen its pursuit of plutonium in ex change for Clinton administration guarantees of fuel oil and reactors that produce less plutonium. Nuclear inspectors sealed its reactor fuel rods and installed cameras to watch over them. The Bush administration accused North Korea and then Iran of secretly building uranium enrichment facilities.
With the U.S. preparing for war in Iraq, North Korea kicked inspectors out, withdrew from the nonproliferation treaty and processed its fuel rods into plutonium for bombs.
Iran supports Hezbollah and has links to al-Qaida. Unchecked, it could be two years or less from its first nuclear weapon.
Nonproliferation experts credit Bush for seeking international backing to deal with them. Kerry also favors the president's Proliferation Security Initiative, now a 14-nation coalition aimed at forcibly stopping illicit weapons shipments by sea and air.
Sokolski further endorses the Bush administration's willingness to invade Iraq in the name of disarmament. "That's what's been missing for 30 years is someone to enforce these rules (against pursuing nuclear weapons.)"
But several fault the administration for communicating threats to North Korea and Iran while failing to offer any incentive to abandon their weapons pursuits.
When the Los Angeles Times asked what lesson Iran should draw from the invasion of Iraq, a senior administration official said its mullahs should "take a number."
Threats like that strengthen Tehran's desire for a nuclear deterrent, said Stanford political science and arms-control expert Scott Sagan.
Same in North Korea, said Matthew Bunn at Harvard, "They have done pretty much everything wrong. They basically have fiddled while the North Koreans built."
In the first presidential debate, voters were treated to seeming diplomatic esoterica: Bush favors six-party talks including China. Kerry wants direct U.S.-North Korea talks.
Sig Hecker, a former director of Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab who toured North Korean nuclear facilities this year, said both are needed.
"What's clear at this point is the trust that has to sustain any kind of agreement doesn't exist between North Korea and the United States of America," he said.
Securing bombs, fissile material
The greatest threat of nuclear terrorism, according to most nonproliferation experts, rests in hundreds of tons of poorly secured nuclear materials in Russia and research reactors scattered in 40 countries.
Starting in the 1950s, the United States and Soviet Union planted these nuclear seeds around the globe, as gifts to allies. More than 100 of these reactors are powered by highly enriched uranium -- the easiest material to fashion into an atom bomb -- yet often secured by a fence and a night watchman.
Also part of the threat: undisclosed thousands of tactical nuclear weapons in Russia that, unlike strategic weapons of typically higher explosive yield, have never been the subject of an arms-control treaty.
In the Sept. 30 debate, Sen. Kerry said Bush "cut the money" for securing foreign bombs and materials. Bush countered that he actually had increased nonproliferation funding by 35 percent.
In his first budget request, the president proposed a 20 percent cut in money for securing foreign nuclear weapons, materials and know-how. It was Congress that reinstated the money, adding $200 million.
After Sept. 11, the president sought increases for the Energy Department's nonproliferation programs, for a net gain of 35 percent over spending in the last Clinton budget. But three-fourths of this increase was for U.S. nonproliferation research and disposing of surplus U.S. weapons plutonium, not per se for securing materials abroad.
Discounting for inflation, administration spending solely on foreign nuclear security has declined slightly from pre-Bush years. The programs, however, have grown under the Bush administration to securing bombs for the Russian Navy and Strategic Rocket Forces, keeper of Russia's missiles.
At the administration's current pace, Kerry says securing Russian nuclear materials will take 13 years, a figure drawn from analyses by Bunn at Harvard's Managing the Atom project.
Kerry says he will get it done in four years, with more money and appointment of a White House nonproliferation czar to drive the issue.
"The biggest difference between the two campaigns is that Kerry is trying to put more money into a wider set of nuclear security measures than the Bush administration has been willing to do," said Stanford's Sagan.
But Kerry's four-year timetable is Bush's. Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham flew to Moscow and urged his Russian counterpart to accelerate the programs. Abraham cut two years off the Clinton administration deadline and set a new completion date of 2008.
But there's no guarantee that Abraham's deadline or Kerry's is achievable. Nuclear security in Russia lies in the hands of large, slow and secretive bureaucracies. More money won't necessarily result in faster progress.
Ultimately, Russians, not American presidents, control the pace.
"The major problem isn't 13 years or four years. We're not going to do it at all," said Hecker at Los Alamos, pioneer of the original U.S.-Russian scientific contacts that evolved into the nonproliferation programs. "Only the Russians can secure their nuclear materials, and we're at a point now where money is no longer a limiting factor."
"Russia is a place that still produces plutonium, and it's a place that doesn't like to tell you what it's got or what it's doing," Sokolski said. "It's not something that can be solved in a short period of time by force feeding of money and priorities."
The pace of securing Russian nuclear materials is partly a function of strategy and differences in philosophy. American security experts went after the smallest, typically least secure Russian nuclear facilities first, where negotiating access was easiest. They started with instant-security kits -- bricked over windows and radiation detectors at exits to stop smuggling -- then moved in with multiple fences, watched over by cameras and intrusion-detection sensors, plus software to keep inventory.
The Russians prefer guards.
"We don't think that's a good approach because guards get tired, guards go to sleep and guards can be tempted by Russian organized crime," said Longworth.
Negotiating access to larger, more sensitive Russian nuclear installations has been tougher, especially at two weapons assembly and disassembly plants where most remaining bomb materials are stored.
Two programs have been stalled, and one was killed, in thorny negotiations over access and liability protections for U.S. corporations working in Russia. Several want blanket indemnification, since destroying weapons facilities is dangerous and Russian courts are unpredictable. Russian officials agreed to standard protections but have balked at what they see as the Bush administration's insistence that American contractors be free of lawsuits for knowingly placing Russians at risk of death or serious injury.
"It's been a painful issue for this department," said Bush nuclear nonproliferation chief Paul Longworth of the National Nuclear Security Administration.
But what the administration wants is a political hard sell in Russia.
Harvard's Bunn said the stalemate has "delayed by at least a couple of years now the destruction of a couple of thousand bombs' worth of plutonium."
"If you can't resolve that issue, you've tied up billions of dollars of work," said William Hoehn, an analyst at the Russian American Nuclear Security Council, a nonprofit that monitors the programs. "I think if you can get both (U.S. and Russian) presidents to buy into this agenda and whip their bureaucracies into getting this done, it can be done in four years."
NNSA's Longworth said the president would name a nonproliferation chief if he thought it would help.
"Some of this stuff just takes time. It's hard," he said. "When you ask people how they would do it faster or better, the only thing they've come up with is a czar."
Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Prices help uranium industry rebound
Associated Press
October 11, 2004
http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2004/10/11/build/wyoming/30-uranium-rebound.inc
DOUGLAS, Wyo. - Watching a computer screen, Pat Drummond monitors a complex system of pipelines and vats that produces 55-gallon drums of uranium, weighing 600 to 1,000 pounds each, ready to be shipped to nuclear power plants across the globe.
Drummond, who began mining at age 16 in his native Scotland, is among a dwindling number of workers in an industry that has been plagued by low prices for more than a decade, but is finally seeing a rebound.
"Mining's in my blood," Drummond said in a thick brogue during a recent afternoon at the Smith Ranch-Highland mine in east-central Wyoming. "I enjoy the challenge of uranium, and given the price wars of the last 15 years, it's been a challenge staying in the industry."
Prices are nearly triple what they were four years ago, and Cameco Corp., a Canadian firm that owns the last two active uranium mines in the United States, is stepping up exploration and production.
The Saskatchewan firm holds a fifth of the world uranium market, but may soon be joined by other companies reopening or starting operations to meet rising demand.
Uranium produced at Smith Ranch is typically yellowish powder, or "yellowcake," which is sent to other plants to be enriched and formed into pellets to fuel nuclear reactors. About 20 percent of America's electricity comes from steam created by nuclear fission.
Yellowcake prices were $7.10 per pound in December 2000 but have risen steadily and recently surpassed $20 for the first time since 1984.
Uranium was discovered by German chemist Martin Klaproth in 1789. It was used in the 19th century mainly to give vases and glassware a yellow-green color. After its radioactive properties were discovered in 1896 by Pierre and Marie Curie, other scientists began trying to unlock more of uranium's atomic secrets.
In the 1940s, the U.S. government began buying large amounts of uranium in the effort to produce the world's first atomic bomb. After World War II, the Atomic Energy Commission began examining peaceful uses. The first privately funded nuclear energy plant came online in 1959 in Illinois.
By the 1970s, about 250 nuclear reactors were planned across the United States - but then an accident in Pennsylvania changed all that.
"Three Mile Island hit, and starting in the 1980s, utilities started canceling plants," said David Miller, a Wyoming state lawmaker from Riverton and geologist with more than 25 years experience in uranium exploration and consulting. "Only 104 were actually constructed, and one's been taken off-line.
[False - http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=3&catid=19 - JH]
"The investing public, the lay public, everyone kind of turned on nuclear power at that time. The uranium market collapsed on all those canceled plants."
A second blow came when the Soviet Union fell apart, and enriched uranium removed from Russian bombs was blended down to reactor-grade fuel and dumped on the market.
The third jolt occurred when the Clinton administration privatized a government-owned uranium-enrichment program, and 70 million pounds of yellowcake was unloaded on the market to guarantee a dividend to stockholders.
"You basically have had a long period of inventory liquidation, which pushed prices down to quite low levels, and during this time you also pushed production down," said Jeff Combs, president of Ux Consulting Co., of Roswell, Ga. Exploration also tapered off.
Wyoming once had about eight uranium operations, producing 12 million pounds per year. Now it has one.
After the bottom fell out, the Legislature lowered taxes on the industry, then totally exempted uranium producers from paying any severance taxes until the price stayed at $14 or higher for six straight months.
That threshold has now been reached, and the state began collecting revenue again in June.
"If the markets are there for it, I think they'll mine as much as they can, and we'll see an increase in tax revenues as a result," said Randy Bolles, administrator of the state Mineral Tax Division.
With exploration almost nonexistent for many years, the gap has widened between supply and demand.
Global uranium production is about 90 million pounds per year, while consumption is 160 million to 180 million pounds by the 435 reactors in the world, Miller said. Thirty-five more reactors are under construction in China, Taiwan, India, Brazil and Eastern Europe, which will further increase demand.
America's 103 reactors are housed in 66 plants that have cranked out more than 700 billion kilowatt hours for five straight years, but American uranium production peaked in 1980 at 43.7 million pounds, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
By 1990, U.S. production had dropped to 8.9 million pounds. Last year, it was only about 2 million, with most coming from the Smith Ranch-Highland mine north of Douglas, Wyo., and Cameco's other active mine, the Crow Butte operation near Crawford, Neb.
Both use a method more environmentally friendly than conventional open-pit mining. It is known as "in situ leaching." Water rich in oxygen and carbon dioxide is circulated through an underground reserve, loosening uranium from sand and sending it to the surface.
Tiny beads of resin attract and remove uranium from the water. The heavy metal is then compressed, dried, sealed in drums and loaded onto trucks for shipment. The water is reinjected into the ground.
Permitting of Smith Ranch in the late 1980s and early 1990s met no opposition. Only 82 workers are needed, compared to up to 500 at a typical open-pit mine.
April Frausto, at 18 the youngest employee, samples water from monitoring wells encircling the mining zone.
"It's a good job just for getting out of high school. Most of the kids, they work at McDonald's," she said. "I like being outside. I like the animals the most. The deer - it's nice. And out here, you see them a lot."
Indeed, mule deer and pronghorn antelope are everywhere. Eagles, hawks and owls are also abundant above the rolling grasslands north of Douglas.
Mine manager Ralph Knode is thankful prices are finally rebounding.
"We just survived 15 years of horrible market," he said. "Now, it's sort of like a renaissance. Now you're finally starting to see that you're not just treading water, but you're actually moving forward."
The mine had five exploratory drilling rigs in 2002. Now it has nine.
For Drummond, that's job security.
"As long as there's development, and you're making uranium, and selling it at a good price, you're here for a long time," he said.
-------- colorado
Rocky Flats building won't be demolished with explosives
ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 11, 2004
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/military/20041011-1121-wst-rockyflats.html
BOULDER, Colo. - Officials have abandoned a plan to blow up a plutonium processing plant at the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, saying it can't be scoured clean enough to make detonation safe.
The 300,000-square-foot Building 371 and its 3-foot-thick, earthquake-resistant walls will have to be demolished manually, cleanup contractor Kaiser-Hill Co. said.
Kaiser-Hill is in charge of the $7 billion project to clean up the plant west of Denver. Rocky Flats manufactured plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons from the 1950s to 1989, when it was shut down because of safety problems and the end of the Cold War. The site will eventually become a national wildlife refuge.
Kaiser-Hill had state and federal approval to detonate the building and use the rubble to fill in its 65-foot-deep basement, but only if the above-ground portion could be cleaned to "free-release" level - clean enough to be used in someone's backyard.
Kaiser-Hill spokesman John Corsi said a vault where plutonium was processed and later stored cannot be brought up to that standard.
Instead, the vault will be demolished and its rubble will be shipped away for disposal as low-level radioactive waste. Debris from the rest of the building will fill in the basement and be covered.
Corsi said that should occur next summer.
Steven Gunderson, Rocky Flats cleanup coordinator for the Colorado Department of Health and Public Environment, said manually dismantling the vault will require "an engineering marvel."
The Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments, representing government officials from communities near Rocky Flats, wants to know more about the change.
"How do you know you can do it safely and that you can monitor what's happening?" said David Abelson, executive director of the coalition.
-------- new jersey
Problems Cited at Nuclear Plant in South Jersey
October 11, 2004
By JOHN SULLIVAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/nyregion/11salem.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Government and industry experts have identified a wide array of problems at one of the country's largest nuclear power plants - the Salem nuclear power station in southwestern New Jersey - including a leaky generator, unreliable controls on a reactor, and workers who were so discouraged by lack of maintenance that they stopped calling for repairs.
Earlier this year, a private consultant told the company that owns the Salem plant, which has the second-largest nuclear energy output in the United States, that the plant was deficient in dozens of critical aspects, from the reliability of equipment and the availability of spare parts to supervision in a control room.
Another consultant found that some employees were reluctant to report problems because they were afraid of angering their superiors. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission is investigating reports from at least two employees that superiors retaliated against them after they expressed concerns about safety.
The reports were made public by the company soon after it received them this year, but they received scant public attention.
Most of the problems have to do with lax maintenance, and federal officials say it is critical that they be fixed because, if ignored, they could lead to more serious safety issues. The federal officials say the nuclear plant is safe to operate, and executives at the company that owns the plant, P.S.E.G. Nuclear L.L.C., said that the plant met all safety standards even with the problems that had been identified, and that they were doing everything possible to address the concerns of experts and regulators and to fix the equipment problems.
Consultants' reports show that the plant was in the bottom quarter of the nation's 103 nuclear plants in terms of maintenance and detection of problems, according to plant managers.
In the past few months, P.S.E.G. has replaced many senior managers at the Salem complex. The company plans to shut down one of the station's three reactors for extensive repairs this fall and has adopted a new maintenance program to whittle down the backlog of complaints about failing or faulty equipment. The company also said that it had already fixed some problems cited in the various reports, and that other problems, like the reactor's controls and the generators, were scheduled to be fixed this fall.
Still, A. Christopher Bakken III, who became the company's president and chief nuclear officer on July 1, estimated that it could take two years to improve the company's ability to detect and repair maintenance problems.
"This is not a quick fix," Mr. Bakken said in an interview. "I believe we are making measurable progress, but this is a long-term thing."
The federal investigation at Salem, with its emphasis on preventive maintenance, reflects a change at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which for years concentrated on equipment failures rather than human performance. Driven in part by the increasing need for maintenance at the nation's aging stock of nuclear plants, regulators have begun paying more attention to ways of ensuring that nuclear operators catch small problems before they get worse.
Still, this is not the first time that P.S.E.G. has found itself under regulatory scrutiny for failing to address employees' warnings about equipment problems. In 1995, the company voluntarily closed two of Salem's reactors for two years because poor maintenance had degraded the plant's equipment.
For the past two years, the regulatory commission has repeatedly warned P.S.E.G. that its system for detecting maintenance problems was unacceptable. In its most recent report, the commission warned of rusted metal supports on water pipes to a reactor, poor insulation on piping, and poor maintenance that led to the failure of a pump valve.
In March, the consultants hired to evaluate the plant added to the list of problems: emergency diesel generators had 160 backlogged maintenance orders, some older than 18 months; water circulation pumps repeatedly failed; workers complained of "oil leaks and roof leaks"; hydraulic systems used to move the control rods inside one reactor leaked; fumes from one generator were so bad that workers nearby had to wear breathing masks; and engineers were forced to bypass nine nonworking sensors used to measure the reaction in the nuclear core because there were no replacement parts.
The consultants concluded: "The plant physical condition reflects management and staff tolerance for degraded equipment condition."
Because of the possible consequences of an accident at any of the 103 nuclear plants in the country, the federal regulatory commission is charged with maintaining close oversight of nuclear operations. Serious accidents have been extremely rare, although disasters like the partial meltdown in 1979 at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania have demonstrated the high stakes involved with nuclear power.
The regulatory commission began a special investigation of the operations at Salem last fall, after receiving troubling information about the plant "in various allegations and N.R.C. inspections over the past few years," according to the commission report.
As a result of its nine-month investigation, which concluded in July, the commission has increased the number of its inspections and has approved the company's plan to fix the outstanding problems.
Watchdog groups, like the Union of Concerned Scientists, have called on the commission to close the plant until everything is fixed, but regulators say such drastic action is not needed now.
The commission started emphasizing the monitoring of maintenance equipment after workers discovered two years ago that boric acid had nearly eaten through the steel reactor vessel at the Davis-Besse plant east of Toledo, Ohio. A subsequent federal investigation criticized plant managers for not detecting and repairing maintenance problems.
"Until the change that the N.R.C. made recently, they had been assuming that a bad safety culture would manifest itself in some measurable way," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private nonprofit organization in Washington. "What Davis-Besse taught them was, that may be true but intervention at that point may be too late."
Salem's reactors, which provide electricity to more than half of P.S.E.G.'s two million customers in New Jersey, sit on the Delaware River about 15 miles south of Wilmington, Del. About 1,800 employees service three reactors - Salem 1, Salem 2 and Hope Creek - set amid a maze of buildings and pipes.
Over the past few years, workers' ability to keep up with maintenance problems began to fray, according to several inquiries. Steel struts rusted, oil pooled on the deck beneath one gigantic generator, water dripped through building roofs. As the maintenance orders piled up, some workers gave up on all but critical requests.
Earlier this year, a consultant wrote, "Staff still believes some items will not get fixed because 'that's the way it is.' "
Like any other business, nuclear plants operate under pressure to produce profits, and time spent partly or completely shut down can mean millions of dollars in lost revenue. P.S.E.G. insists that safety comes first, but unfinished repairs made some employees think their superiors were placing too much emphasis on the bottom line, according to investigators.
Things came to a head in March 2003, when a critical piece of safety equipment, a turbine bypass valve, jammed open in the Hope Creek reactor. The valve helps to control pressure inside the reactor. Operators shut down the reactor, causing the valve to close on its own. Once the reactor was down, operators and senior managers discussed whether to repair the valve before starting up again, and according to later reports, the discussions grew heated at times.
In the end, the valve was fixed first, but the fact that managers considered restarting the reactor without repairing it shocked some workers. Kymn Harvin, a manager who helped employees report problems, said one manager complained that if they had not fixed the valve, "it would have been grounds for taking the keys away."
Dr. Harvin reported the manager's concerns to the chief nuclear officer at the time, but instead of addressing the problem, she said, the company fired her.
"In my role as the person who is supposed to speak up about these issues, I bring them forward and then get nailed," said Dr. Harvin, who has since filed a lawsuit against P.S.E.G.
Edwin Selover, the general counsel for P.S.E.G.'s parent company, Public Service Enterprise Group, said Dr. Harvin lost her job as part of a general reorganization at the plant. "It did not have anything to do with safety concerns," he said.
Dr. Harvin complained to federal regulators last fall, just before they began their investigation into conditions at Salem. Regulators say the investigation into her allegation was continuing.
In September 2003, the regulatory commission opened a review that ultimately involved 40 staff members from the commission's Region 1 office near Philadelphia and its headquarters outside Washington. The regulators interviewed more than 60 Salem employees during a nine-month investigation. The commission declined to characterize the size of the inquiry, but Mr. Bakken of P.S.E.G. said, "It was the biggest one I have ever been involved in."
Regulators released very few details from the investigation and would not discuss the matter in depth, instead referring to public letters the commission sent the plant's operators. In the first, on Jan. 28, regulators said the investigation raised questions about operators' "ability to effectively address potential safety issues." The regulators told P.S.E.G. to hire consultants to evaluate operations at the plant.
The company had already hired three independent consultants to review operations. Their reports, delivered this spring, were scathing. One group, Utilities Service Alliance, a nuclear industry group that helps analyze plant conditions, described details of equipment problems, from faulty water pumps to bad reactor sensors. Another team, headed by James P. O'Hanlon, the former president and chief nuclear officer of Dominion Energy in Virginia, found that some managers emphasized production over cautious decisions. In one case, managers delayed shutting a reactor after operators reported a stuck water valve. The delay, the team found, supported the view that managers concentrated too much on production and scheduling.
The team also criticized managers for expecting employees to work around worn-out equipment and for intervening in decisions better left to control room workers.
Mr. Bakken said his company had acted to address the concerns raised in the consultants' reports. For one thing, he said, the company has placed a new emphasis on maintenance and has told workers they should report any problems without hesitation. He said control-room supervisors, rather than senior managers, have been given authority over operational decisions.
On July 30, when the regulators issued the results of their investigation saying the plant was safe, they also warned that improvements were needed. Echoing the consultants, regulators said weaknesses in leadership had "led to a perception among some staff and managers that the company has emphasized production to the point that negatively impacts the handling of emergent equipment issues."
The commission's regional administrator, Samuel J. Collins, said extra federal inspections scheduled for the plant would monitor the company's progress in making required repairs. He said the company has taken steps to address outstanding problems, but "we won't hesitate to take stronger actions if needed."
Private watchdog groups have urged regulators to take a stronger stance, arguing that the reactors should be shut until problems are fixed.
"The operating margin is too thin," said Norm Cohen, coordinator of the Unplug Salem Campaign, a private advocacy group. Speaking of the failure to report maintenance problems, he said, "It is very difficult to fix the human problem while the plant continues to run."
Mr. Bakken disagrees. Even taking the consultants' criticism into account, the plant meets federal safety standards, he said.
He said company was investing millions in plant repairs this year. The more aggressive repair operation, he said, will help convince employees that the company is serious about addressing maintenance and safety concerns.
"It is in everyone's best interest to be honest about what we are doing," Mr. Bakken said. "I am confident we can correct this problem, and the team here can deliver."
-------- us nuc waste
EDITORIAL: Yucca vote
Las Vegas Review-Journal
October 11, 2004
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Oct-11-Mon-2004/opinion/24951235.html
Listen to some politicos talk, and you'd think Yucca Mountain is the burning issue for most Nevada voters, that a candidate's position on the proposed nuclear waste repository is the driving factor when a Silver State resident decides for whom to cast a ballot.
Turns out that's simply not the case.
In a Review-Journal poll conducted last month, only 3 percent of respondents named Yucca Mountain as the most important issue in deciding their presidential vote. A poll released last week by a smaller local media outlet registered a similar result -- and also found a whopping 57 percent don't consider Yucca Mountain important at all.
In fact, Nevada voters are like those everywhere: Their primary concerns are homeland security, the war in Iraq and the economy. Yucca Mountain barely registers.
But you wouldn't know that listening to pandering politicians and their echoes in the media.
-----
White House won't appeal Yucca ruling
October 11, 2004
Las Vegas SUN
By Benjamin Grove <grove@lasvegassun.com>
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2004/oct/11/517646766.html
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration will not ask the Supreme Court to reverse a lower court ruling on Yucca Mountain after all.
Legal documents filed Friday put to rest speculation that White House officials were still mulling an appeal to a lower court ruling. The July 9 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia dealt a setback to the nuclear waste dump project.
The documents also appeared to settle questions about whether White House officials were in conflict with their own federal agencies.
Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency officials had said they intended not to appeal to the nation's highest court.
But the Department of Justice's Office of Solicitor General on Sept. 23 filed court documents in the Yucca case asserting its right to file one.
"We are now in a position to report" there will be no appeal, Solicitor General attorneys said in court documents filed Friday.
Election-year politics may be at play as Bush and challenger John Kerry vie for Nevada's five electoral votes in Nevada, where a majority of voters are opposed to the plan to construct a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain.
Nevada Democrats criticized Bush for indicating that he would respect the federal appeals court ruling, while at the same time reserving the right to appeal it. Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., had said she fully expected Bush to appeal -- after the election.
The July 9 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals said the EPA unlawfully deviated from National Academy of Sciences recommendations when the EPA set a 10,000-year radiation standard for Yucca. The academy recommended that the nuclear waste repository should be held to a stricter standard -- that it be required to contain high doses of radiation for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years.
The Energy Department has said all along that the appeals court decision was "workable," department spokesman Joe Davis said again Friday. The department position has been that the department would work with the EPA to develop a "regulatory response" to the court decision -- not to appeal to the Supreme Court, Davis said.
EPA officials have held the same position.
Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval said the solicitor general's decision Friday not to appeal demonstrates the strength of Nevada's legal argument on the radiation issue.
"The D.C. Circuit left little upon which to base an appeal, and this proves it," Sandoval said.
One appeal is planned, however. The Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear power industry's top lobby group, has signalled it will ask the Supreme Court to review the radiation standard issue.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Election Concerns Subside
Several Candidates Back Off Assertions Of Voter Fraud
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21832-2004Oct10.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 10 -- Controversy clouding Afghanistan's historic first presidential election eased Sunday when several major opposition candidates backed off from assertions that voter fraud and errors at polling places had rendered Saturday's vote meaningless and illegitimate.
As thousands of ballot boxes began reaching the capital by donkey, taxi and helicopter to be counted at an army base, Afghan and international officials reiterated their praise for the massive, peaceful demonstration of civic will shown by millions of voters, and they played down the complaints of voting irregularities initially made by 15 candidates.
"I'm still celebrating. The Afghan people voted yesterday, in the millions . . . and nothing else matters to me," President Hamid Karzai said. He said his opponents' protests had "hurt my Afghan sentiment" and that the reported problems at polling places, especially the marking of voters' thumbs with washable instead of indelible ink, "did not diminish the value people gave to the vote."
Final results are not expected for several weeks, but scattered exit polls by an American delegation observing the election showed Karzai with a clear majority of votes and his principal challenger, Yonus Qanooni, a former cabinet minister, running a distant second. More than 10.5 million men and women registered to vote, and turnout was described as massive by international election observers and the United Nations.
Officials also emphasized that despite dire predictions of attacks at the polls by the Taliban militia and other armed groups, no serious attacks had occurred Saturday. Afghan and international security forces had discovered and successfully thwarted a number of possible bombing plots and other attacks, officials said.
"Yesterday was a huge defeat for the Taliban," said Lt. Gen. David Barno, commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. "The Taliban didn't show."
The Islamic militia had repeatedly threatened to sabotage the elections through bombings and other violent assaults.
Robert Barry, who headed the European delegation monitoring the election, said the opposition candidates' demands to nullify the vote were "unjustified" and would "put into question the expressed will of millions of citizens." He called for a "thorough and transparent investigation" of the polling complaints and said they should be "dealt with as the law provides."
Several of Karzai's key opponents said Sunday that they would accept an impartial investigation into the allegations of multiple voting and ink mix-ups, rather than insisting that the entire election be declared invalid and held again.
Mohammed Mohaqeq, a candidate who is a former planning minister and a leader of the ethnic Hazara minority, said an independent commission should "examine the vote," and that if it is satisfied, then the election "should be ruled legitimate."
Qanooni, a former interior and education minister from the ethnic Tajik minority, also reportedly said he would accept the findings of an independent commission. Election officials said they were in the process of setting up a panel to look into the candidates' complaints.
According to diplomats and other sources, the opposition candidates, who announced they were boycotting the election halfway through the polling Saturday afternoon, began to think twice after realizing the great majority of Afghans were happy about the election and that public opinion was turning against them.
"Some candidates now believe they acted in too much of a rush. Their statements were not well received," said a Western diplomat who met with many of the complaining candidates Saturday night and Sunday. "Most of them are now looking for a way out without losing face."
Nevertheless, several candidates maintained their assertion that the government had abetted multiple voting to increase the margin of victory for Karzai, a politically moderate tribal aristocrat who has governed Afghanistan since being installed by a U.N.-sponsored conference in December 2001.
Karzai is still widely expected to win a five-year term when the votes are tallied, but the eleventh-hour challenge by Qanooni, a respected bureaucrat and former leader of the Islamic guerrilla movement that defended Afghanistan against Soviet troops in the 1980s, raised the possibility of a second-round vote, which would prolong the election process for many weeks.
Homayoun Shah Assefy, a lawyer who ran against Karzai, said he received many calls from polling places in southern and eastern Afghanistan -- strongholds of Karzai's ethnic Pashtun constituency -- complaining of irregularities that favored Karzai.
"This was not an accident. It was pre-organized," Assefy said. "Yesterday I thought this was an historic day, but unfortunately it was a black day for democracy and the future of democracy in Afghanistan." He said that in a certain polling station, one individual voted 100 times.
The turnaround by Mohaqeq, Qanooni and others appeared to be partly the result of intensive lobbying by key international figures here, especially U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. The envoy met with many of the opposition candidates, saying publicly only that he was "here to help."
The Bush administration has made an enormous political and economic investment in Afghanistan's comeback since the U.S.-led military defeat of the Taliban militia in late 2001. The Afghan-born Khalilzad has played a forceful role in pressing for changes to keep the process on track, and his weekend lobbying blitz was no exception.
Western diplomats said Sunday night that Khalilzad had not offered any political deals to the boycotting candidates, but had made clear that they were on the wrong side of Afghan public opinion as well as international wishes. Karzai also said Sunday that he had not engaged in any "horse trading" with his opponents after the vote.
--------
Candidate Drops Boycott of Afghan Election
October 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-Election.html?ei=5094&en=8cf091de7b1cb7f8&hp=&ex=1097553600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- The main opposition candidate in Afghanistan's first-ever presidential election backed off a boycott of the vote, saying Monday that he would accept the findings of an independent commission to look into alleged cheating.
Ethnic Tajik candidate Yunus Qanooni, considered the likely runner-up to interim President Hamid Karzai, made the announcement at his Kabul home on Monday, a day after two other candidates also peeled away from the boycott. He said he had made his decision after a meeting with U.N. representative Jean Arnault and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.
``I don't want to be against the election and I appreciate the good will of the people of Afghanistan,'' Qanooni said. ``I want to prove to the people of Afghanistan that the national interest is my highest interest.''
The announcement was a huge victory for election organizers, who agreed to set up the panel on Sunday in hopes it would end the crisis that emerged when all 15 opposition candidates announced the boycott -- in the middle of Saturday's voting.
Massooda Jalal, the only female candidate, and ethnic Hazara candidate Mohammed Mohaqeq said Sunday they would end their boycott in favor of setting up the panel.
A senior Western official who met with some of the 15 candidates on Sunday said many had decided to back down and support the investigative team.
``Some of the candidates say they made that statement (the boycott) in too much of a rush,'' the official said on condition of anonymity. ``They are now looking for a way out that allows them to save face.''
Election observers, the U.S. Embassy and Karzai have all sought to put the best face possible on the vote, noting that Taliban rebels were mostly silent and that turnout was high in a nation that has never before tasted democracy.
The vote also came off with almost no violence, despite rebels' threats to disrupt the election.
At least three rockets slammed into the capital, Kabul, not far from the U.S. Embassy on Monday, killing one man and damaging the roof of a mud-brick house, police and witnesses said. U.S. Embassy staff went into bunkers as a precaution, though there was no indication any of the rockets hit embassy grounds, spokeswoman Beth Lee said.
It was not clear who was behind the attacks, but suspicion immediately fell on Taliban rebels. Rocket attacks are common in Afghanistan, though they are much more rare in the capital.
An exit poll conducted by an American group closely tied to the U.S. Republican Party and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development projected Monday that Karzai would win the election with the outright majority needed to avoid a second round.
But final results were not expected until the end of October.
``The counting will be done in full view of cameras,'' Karzai told NBC. ``Afghan television will telecast it direct from the counting stations. I am confident enough the count will be conducted properly.''
The survey by the International Republican Institute said the U.S.-backed Karzai would finish ahead of Qanooni by an overwhelming 43 percentage points, in what it called ``preliminary'' findings.
The group, which sent a 13-member observer team to monitor the elections, said that Karzai was well over the 50 percent mark necessary to avoid a runoff. But it did not give a breakdown of support for all the candidates, nor did it release supporting data.
The group based its findings on 10,050 survey responses called in from its workers in the field and said it believes the results to be accurate within 1-2 percentage points.
``The numbers and enthusiasm both were very, very great. It was unbelievable. A day of celebration, really, for the Afghan people,'' Karzai said Monday on NBC's ``Today'' show. ``People braved attacks by terrorists and went to the election. ... This is really a victory of the Afghan people over terrorism.''
Karzai added that the election should be a slap in the face to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida followers.
``This election ... is a strong reminder to him that people don't want them, that the people want a different life. So he should be much more afraid today than he was the day before yesterday or before that. He must be trying to hide even in a tighter place than he was a few days ago. We will find him one day, sooner or later,'' Karzai said.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also praised the elections as an ``enormous accomplishment'' and voiced his hope that the January vote in Iraq will be an equal success.
``It is not an easy task to turn the dictatorship, as in the case of Afghanistan, and it won't be an easy task in Iraq,'' Rumsfeld said in Macedonia after making an unannounced visit to Iraq.
Boxes of ballots, some arriving by mule, were not expected to finish reaching counting centers until at least Tuesday.
Before the tallying of votes can start, the numbers of received ballots are checked against a list of votes cast to ensure none of the ballot boxes have been stuffed with fraudulent votes, U.N. officials said.
Then, the ballots from various districts are mixed together so no one knows which area favored which candidate.
Actual counting may not start until Wednesday or Thursday, said electoral spokesman Sultan Baheen. Aykut Tavsel, another electoral spokesman, said candidates have until Tuesday evening to file formal complaints, and that the commission doesn't want to start the count until after it has reviewed them.
Security chiefs in the provinces and Baheen said no major attacks had been reported on the transporting of the ballot boxes.
The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David Barno, told The Associated Press the election could sound the rebels' death knell, and that Taliban leaders might ``eventually look for ways to reconcile with the government that comes in.''
Poll organizers decided Sunday they would form an independent commission to investigate the weekend balloting.
``There is going to be an independent commission made to investigate it,'' electoral director Farooq Wardak said. ``There could be mistakes; we are just human beings. My colleagues might have made a mistake.''
The panel will include former Canadian diplomat Craig Jenness and Staffan Darnolf, a Swedish election expert. The third member was yet to be announced, officials said.
In Washington, U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice predicted that ``this election is going to be judged legitimate,'' adding, ``I'm just certain of it.''
The opposition complaint was focused on allegations that the supposedly indelible ink used to mark voters' thumbs in some polling stations could be rubbed off, allowing some people to vote more than once.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder also said he thought Karzai was likely to emerge victorious.
``It is my opinion that he will do it, and in the first round,'' the German leader said in a joint news conference with Karzai after meeting with German soldiers who are part of the 9,000-strong NATO-led peacekeeping force.
Associated Press reporters Stephen Graham in Kandahar, Burt Herman in Mazar-e-Sharif and Daniel Cooney and Paul Haven in Kabul contributed to this report.
-------- arms
Junk missiles, bomb dumps threat to Indian cities
October 11, 2004
News International, Pakistan
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/oct2004-daily/11-10-2004/world/w6.htm
NEW DELHI: India on Sunday searched cargo containers for military ordnance after stumbling across huge piles of shells and missiles imported along with scrap metal by private dealers, the army said. "What we have recovered so far in New Delhi and nearby towns alone can start a little war," a spokesman from the army's bomb disposal unit said at Delhi's Tughlaqabad district which houses a state warehouse for cargo containers.
Some of the projectiles imported with scrap have been found in Delhi's commercial district of Mayapuri, police said, adding that they have also recovered tank turrets and dismantled machineguns originating from countries in Asia, Africa and the Gulf. The hunt for war junk in imported scrap began after 10 workers died and dozens were injured in a private foundry September 27 after Iranian-made shells blew up during handling in New Delhi's bustling industrial suburb of Sahibabad.
Experts on Saturday found 100 shells from metal consignments at Tughlaqabad and said the arsenal comprised mortar rounds, anti-tank shells, anti-aircraft missiles and fragmentation shells. In a similar hunt on Sunday, the experts in the northern city of Jaipur recovered 20 live shells from a private foundry, police superintendent Anand Srivastava said. He said police on Saturday recovered more than 1,000 mortar rounds and bombs from another local factory but only 90 of these were unstable. "Tonnes of scrap buried probably along with live shells is being dug out and searched," Srivastava added.
"Some of the ordnance is unstable and it's a miracle they did not blow up the ships that ferried them to India," he said as the army destroyed part of the Tughlaqabad cache on Sunday. In the nearby city of Ghaziabad, four shells were found in two of 11 trucks that were searched, an army spokesman said.
Police also found 50 shells in containers in the western port of Kandla during the nationwide hunt for war junk, officials said Sunday but added the bombs had been disarmed before the shipment.
----
EU not likely to lift China arms ban this year
October 11 2004
Financial Times
By Daniel Dombey in Luxembourg
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/82096448-1ba9-11d9-8af6-00000e2511c8.html
The European Union is likely to wait until next year before lifting its arms embargo on China, even though most EU governments favour ending the ban.
That was the message from an EU foreign ministers' meeting in Luxembourg on Monday, where officials weighed their words carefully in the wake of strong US lobbying to keep the embargo and equally strident calls from France to bring it to an end.
Washington says that ending the EU embargo could make it easier for China to invade Taiwan.
But many EU governments maintain that the ban is an outdated symbol of a pariah status Beijing no longer deserves and that EU controls would prevent any significant increase in Chinese military capacity.
"After the discussion it's clear that we need more time at the moment to consider," said Ben Bot, Dutch foreign minister, who chaired the meeting.
The arms embargo is not on the agenda of next month's foreign ministers' meeting, which means it would be difficult to lift it before the next EU-China summit on December 8.
"The idea is to send a positive signal to the summit that there is a general disposition to lift the ban in the near future," said a French spokesman.
President Jacques Chirac is currently visiting China with a group of French businessmen who have signed about E4bn ($5bn, £2.75bn) of contracts.
Several EU governments, such as the UK, want to wait until after the US elections, toughen the EU's own general code of conduct on arms exports and see improvements to China's record on human rights before lifting the ban.
"We are not in any sense, quote, against the lifting of the embargo, but it has got to be done in a proper and sensible way . . . as agreed by the whole of the EU," said Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary.
At a private lunchtime discussion with other ministers, he added it was "likely" that most of the arms exports currently prohibited by the embargo would be caught by the code of conduct.
In line with previous announcements, the EU also formally decided to end an arms embargo on Libya in light of the country's decision "to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction programmes".
The EU also announced a package of sanctions against Burma, which has failed to fulfil promises to carry out democratic reforms and release Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader.
----
Poland eyes arms deal with Iraq
WARSAW (AFP)
Oct 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041011181328.msf789vh.html
Poland is negotiating an arms deal, including the sale of helicopters, with Iraq, the country's defence minister said Monday, adding the bargaining was tough.
"At this moment a major delegation from the Iraqi defence ministry is in Poland and visiting production sites," Jerzy Szmajdzinski said, according to the Polish PAP news agency.
"Difficult negotiations are in progress."
In September the Polish arms manufacturer Bumar signed a deal worth 53 million dollars to supply weapons and ammuntion to the Iraqi army.
"The new contracts would multiply that value," the minister said, refusing to give details of the Iraqi delegation's visit.
"I would like the negotiations to be successfully concluded," he explained.
Bumar said last month it was negotiating a possible deal to update Iraq's Russian-made T-72 battle tanks and sell Baghdad helicopters.
In May it lost out to the US ANHAM group in a contest to close a deal with the Iraqi army worth 425 million dollars.
Poland is a backer of the US-led intervention in Iraq and administers a zone in the south of the country at the head of a 6,500-strong force, 2,500 of them Poles.
President Aleksander Kwasniewski has said Warsaw wants to withdraw its troops from Iraq during the course of next year, adding that no firm withdrawal date had been decided.
Poland is the fourth largest troop contributor to the US-led forces in Iraq, but there is strong opposition to the deployment at home.
-----
EU could lift China arms ban 'in sensible way': British FM
LUXEMBOURG (AFP)
Oct 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041011101817.psri2wye.html
The European Union could consider lifting an arm embargo imposed on China after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, but only in a "proper and sensible way," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Monday.
His comments came as EU ministers discussed lifting the ban, with France in particular pushing for an end to sanctions which Paris says are the product of "another time."
"We wish to see the arms embargo reviewed. We're not in any sense 'against' the lifting of the embargo, but it's got to be done with a proper and sensible way," he told reporters ahead of the talks.
The EU ministers were set to discuss the issue at the Luxembourg talks, but no decision was expected according to diplomats.
The EU imposed the embargo after the 1989 crackdown resulted in the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Despite booming trade ties, the issue has remained a sore point in EU-China relations.
Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing expressed confidence last week that the 15-year-old embargo would "soon" be lifted, after meetings on the sidelines of an Asia-Europe (ASEM) summit in Vietnam.
But the EU's Dutch presidency struck a more cautious note, with Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot saying a final decision was unlikely to come until after an EU-China summit in The Hague in early December.
French President Jacques Chirac, on a visit to China, said in an interview with China's state news agency Xinhua that he would press for an early lifting of the embargo.
But Britain and Scandinavian countries have so far backed the US stance that lifting the embargo would be premature, arguing it would increase regional instability and send the wrong signal about China's human rights record.
-----
Sudan accuses Uganda of supplying arms to southern rebels: report
KHARTOUM (AFP)
Oct 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041011120200.te2chhk8.html
Sudan has accused Uganda of supplying the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) with heavy weaponry to step up the pressure on Khartoum which is already bogged down with the crisis in Darfur, a media report said Monday.
The semi-governmental Sudanese Media Center quoted officials as charging that the government of Uganda had shipped weapons across the border and into SPLA-controlled areas in southern Sudan last week.
"Kampala has provided these weapons so that the SPLA could (launch) an attack against the Sudanese army" which would coincide with an offensive by the two main rebels groups in the western Darfur provinces, the report said.
There was no official confirmation but the report comes as the latest in years of mutual accusations by Khartoum and Kampala that each supports and arms the other's opposition groups.
Khartoum has been repeatedly accused of assisting the Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel Ugandan organisation which has been waging for almost two decades a brutal war from northern Uganda and sanctuaries in southern Sudan.
The Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army kicked off a fresh round of talks in Kenya four days ago in a bid to end their 21-year-old conflict, Africa's longest-running civil war.
-------- business
Contracts Awarded
Washington Technology
Washington Post
Monday, October 11, 2004; Page E04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22967-2004Oct10?language=printer
Anteon International Corp. of Fairfax won a five-year, $150 million contract from the Army to provide specialized information technology services for two multinational computer networks that support forces combating terrorism.
AT&T Government Solutions of Vienna won a two-year, $1.8 million contract to install and maintain a new high-speed backbone network for the U.S. Forest Service.
DigitalNet Holdings Inc. of Herndon won a $10.3 million contract from the Defense Information Systems Agency to provide an information assurance solution.
Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda won a $3 billion contract from the U.S. Postal Service to build and manage its telecommunications infrastructure.
ManTech International Corp. of Fairfax won a $2.4 million contract from the Health and Human Services Dept. to support development of technical and policy guidelines for a registry of health care volunteers.
Northrop Grumman IT of Herndon won a $2.9 million contract to automate data collection from water meters in Hartford, Conn.
Pinkerton Computer Consultants Inc.'s Fairfax-based government solutions division won a five-year, $6.5 million contract with the Drug Enforcement Agency to upgrade the agency's Web architecture.
Resource Consultants Inc. of Vienna, SI International Inc. of Reston and Strategic Resources, Inc. of McLean won contracts totaling $586 million to provide the Army with human resources, personnel and support functions.
SI International Inc. of Reston won a $3.8 million contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory to provide scientific, engineering and administrative services.
Xacta Corp. of Ashburn won a $6.8 million contract to build an automated message handling system for the Air Force.
AAI Corp. of Hunt Valley won a $23.4 million contract from the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command for contractor logistics support for the Shadow unmanned aerial vehicle system.
Clark Construction Group LLC of Bethesda won a $16.1 million contract from the Army National Guard for conversion of the 167th Airlift Wing Base from C-130 to C-5 Aircraft.
Defense Contracting Command awarded contracts for human resources, recruiting and retention support services to the following contractors in the amounts indicated:
• Anteon Corp. of Fairfax, $118.1 million.
• Strategic Resources Inc. of McLean, $646 million.
• SI International Inc. of Reston, $458.3 million.
• Resource Consultants Inc. of Vienna, awards of $401.3 million, $118.1 million and $151.7 million.
• Management Support Technology Inc. of Fairfax, $29.7 million.
• Ventura Group of Fairfax, $29 million.
• BCP International of Alexandria, awards of $26.1 million and $177.1 million.
• Booz Allen & Hamilton Inc. of McLean, $181.7 million.
Northrop Grumman Information Technology of Herndon won a $6 million contract from the 21st Space Wing, Peterson Air Force Base, to provide operations, maintenance and logistical support for the Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance System.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP of Washington won a $6 million contract from the Army Corps of Engineers for design of the National Museum of the Army.
Harkins Builders Inc. of Marriottsville won a $39.9 million contract from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for construction of a U.S. Army Reserve Center at Fort Meade.
Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine of Rockville won a $14.4 million contract from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center for support of the Naval Research Health Center in San Diego through studies of symptoms, morbidity, hospitalizations, reproductive outcomes, mortality, and other health-related issues among service members and Defense Department beneficiary groups.
Northrop Grumman Newport News Shipbuilding Corp. of Newport News won a $20.9 million contract from the Naval Sea Systems Command for drydocking for the U.S.S. Oklahoma City.
Spry Networks Inc. of Washington won a $25.9 million contract from the Navy for financial management support services for the Trident II D5 Missile System.
McKesson BioServices of Rockville won a $19.2 million contract from the National Institutes of Health for Centralized Chemopreventive Agent Repository and Drug Support.
US Business Interiors of Largo won a $7.52 million contract from the Homeland Security Department -- Border and Transportation Security for TSA Field Furniture Management.
Planning Consultants Inc. of Virginia Beach won a $55.1 million contract from the Navy for system engineering and analysts/advanced technology support.
Cosmos Corp. of Bethesda won an $8.3 million contract from the National Science Foundation for evaluation of the Math and Science Partnership Program.
Lockheed Martin of Manassas won a $51 million contract from the Air Force for pre-system development and demonstration of the Airborne Maritime and Fixed Station Joint Tactical Radio System.
Louis Berger Group Inc. of Washington and the Services Group Inc. of Arlington won a $119.1 million contract from the Agency for International Development for Iraq private sector growth and employment generation.
BSA/JB&B Joint Venture of Columbia won a contract of up to $24 million from the Air Force for hospital operations and maintenance services.
EAI Corp. of Abingdon won a $350 million contract from the Navy for nuclear biological and chemical equipment and services.
IBM Consulting Services of Fairfax won a $3 million contract from the United States Postal Service for professional, administrative and management support services.
Boeing Corp. of Anaheim, Calif., and Lockheed Martin of Manassas won a $104 million contract from the Air Force for the Airborne Maritime and Fixed Station Joint Tactical Radio System and Pre-System Development and Demonstration.
Environmental Technology Inc. of Virginia Beach won a $4.8 million contract from the General Services Administration for environmental services.
FC Business Systems Inc. of Springfield won a $2.5 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
LEM Consulting Inc. of Alexandria won a $2.5 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Northrop Grumman Information Technology of Falls Church won an $8.8 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department for a NIAID bioinformatics integration support contract.
Abacus Technology Corp. of Chevy Chase won a $16.7 million contract from the Air Force for contractor engineering and technical support.
Gilford Corp. of Beltsville won a $22.8 million contract from the Department of State for renovation of the chancery and annex building at the U.S. Embassy in Rome.
Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. of McLean won a $12.8 million contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for financial accounting and business support services.
Computer Sciences Corp. of Arlington won a $3 million contract from the Defense Contracting Command for Joint Theatre Air and Missile Defense Organization System engineering technical assistance support services.
Polk & Taylor LLC of Washington won a $34.4 million contract from the General Services Administration for a lease of office and related space.
Legin Group of Germantown won a $1.51 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department for the HRSA Grants Application Center.
Dixon Group Inc. of Washington won a $1.2 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department for logistical and publication support for the Office of the Director, NIAID.
Science Applications International Corp. of McLean won a $3.3 million contract from the Army for military support to public diplomacy.
McKesson BioServices of Rockville won a $19.2 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department for Centralized Chemopreventive Agent Repository and Drug Support.
American Society for Engineering Education of Washington won a $2 million contract from the Air Force for a summer faculty fellowship program.
Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health of Baltimore won a $13.73 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department for operation of a facility for the testing of malaria vaccines in adult human subjects.
McKesson BioServices Corp. of Rockville won a $5.8 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department for research services.
Sterling Park Parcel 12 LLC of Bethesda won a $29.6 million contract from the General Services Administration to lease computer and office-related space.
IBM Business Consulting of Fairfax won a $1.2 million contract from the United States Postal Service for retail marketing support and analysis.
Naval Air Systems Command Aircraft Division of Patuxent River won a $1.64 million contract from the Navy for flight instructor training.
M.C. Dean Inc. of Chantilly won a $1.5 million contract from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for an electronic security system upgrade.
Air Service International of Warrenton won a $4.4 million contract from the Agency for International Development for scheduled and unscheduled air transportation services for USAID/DRC.
Engineering Services Network Inc. of Arlington won a $3 million contract from the Air Force for information technology services.
Virginia Commonwealth University, Office of Sponsored Programs Administration of Richmond won a $5.24 million contract from the Social Security Administration for technical assistance and training for youth transition process demonstration cooperative agreement grantees.
Northrop Grumman Information Technology Inc., Defense Enterprise Solutions of McLean won a $49.5 million contract from the Air Force for the Reliability and Maintainability Information System.
Select Inc. of Clifton, Va. won a $7.12 million contract from the Homeland Security Department -- Border and Transportation Security for employee assistance.
Marshall Communications Corp. of Ashburn won a $1.1 million contract from the Homeland Security Department -- Direct Reports to provide satellite services for quick deploy units.
Cederquist Rodriguez Ripley PC of Norfolk won a $1.5 million contract from the Navy for architectural design and engineering services for projects at the U.S. Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Cummins Power Systems Inc. of Glen Burnie won a $1.12 million contract from the Army for diesel engines and components.
Pragmatics of McLean won a $117.62 million contract from the Army for information technology equipment.
MicroPact Engineering Inc. of Herndon won a $91 million contract from the Army for information technology equipment.
Daston Corp. of McLean won a $10.6 million contract from the Army for information technology equipment.
ADDX Corp. of Alexandria won a $20.4 million contract from the Army for information technology equipment.
AlphaInsight Corp. of Falls Church won a $78 million contract from the Army for information technology equipment.
Academy for Educational Development of Washington won a $20.1 million contract from the Agency for International Development for Ambassadors' Girls' Scholarship Program.
MasiMax Resources Inc. of Rockville won a $2.4 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department for publication for NIDA notes and Science and Practice Perspectives.
Staff writer Judith Mbuya contributed to this report.
-------- canada
Scrapping submarine program a possibility if boats not safe: Graham
Oct 11, 2004
Canadian Press
MURRAY BREWSTER
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1845&ncid=737&e=2&u=/cpress/20041011/ca_pr_on_na/submarine_grahamhttp://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1845&ncid=737&e=2&u=/cpress/20041011/ca_pr_on_na/submarine_graham
GLASGOW, Scotland (CP) - Canada's defence minister cautioned Monday that no swift decisions should be made about Ottawa's controversial submarine program in the wake of the fire aboard HMCS Chicoutimi that killed a submariner and left the vessel adrift and powerless on the North Atlantic.
"I would rule nothing out at this time," Bill Graham said at a hotel in this Scottish city when asked if he would ponder scrapping the sub program.
But Graham was quick to add he needed to know exactly what happened aboard the Chicoutimi last week before he could make any decisions about the future of Canada's submarines. He said he'd wait to hear what a naval inquiry learns of the tragedy.
Instead, Graham focused his attention on the crew of the Chicoutimi.
"When you hear the accounts, I can only say that if it wasn't for the courage and determination of the crew of the Chicoutimi, this could have been much worse," he said. "Canadians will be very proud when they hear the full story."
Hearing the full story, however, might be difficult since military boards are usually closed-door affairs and Graham would not commit to opening this one to public scruntiny.
Graham said Canadian commanders were happy with the decision to acquire the second-hand vessel from Britain.
"The commanders are telling me this is the right equipment that they have got," Graham said. "Let's take time before we abandon a program or become discouraged."
Lieut. Chris Saunders died and two of his crewmates were injured as a result of the electrical fire that crippled the diesel-powered submarine three days after it left Scotland and headed for Canada.
The vessel was left adrift in rough seas some 160 kilometres northwest of Ireland before being towed back to the Scottish naval base of Faslane on Sunday.
Graham, who toured the stricken sub Monday, seemed disturbed by the level of damage, describing it as an "unimaginable degree."
He said it was more extensive than he imagined and after hearing what the crew went through, he was amazed that no one else was killed.
While calling the idea of dropping the glitch-filled sub program a remote possibility, Graham conceded there might be no other option if the inquiry determines the warships are badly flawed.
But he added: "I don't rule anything out but I also don't engage in speculation on something that's not likely to happen."
"Of course we're reviewing" the submarine program, he said. "Our primary function and focus is the safety of our crews and we're not going to put ships to sea that are not safe."
Prime Minister Paul Martin said in Moscow on Monday that he'll raise the submarine disaster with British Prime Minister Tony Blair later this week when the two leaders meet at a summit on governance in Hungary.
Martin wouldn't discuss the potential for a related lawsuit against the British.
"I'd like to have all of the facts before I take it any further," he told a news conference.
Still, Martin defended the four vessels leased from the Royal Navy.
"As you know, the navy feels very strongly that these are the right subs and that they do have the matter well in hand."
Martin Shadwick, a defence analyst with York University in Toronto, said Monday that scrapping the submarine program would be a worst-case scenario for the Canadian government.
He said the navy will fight hard to keep the subs.
"The question for the navy is: If these submarines are given up, would they get replacements?" Shadwick said.
"It's very hard to imagine in the current budgetary environment that the navy would be allowed to go out and buy four new submarines from, say, the Germans . . . They might lose their entire submarine arm."
Shadwick said a more likely option is for the Chicoutimi to be dropped from the program, depending on the extent of damage from the fires.
"It may be best to walk away from one of the four," he said.
Graham said that the necessity of the submarines will be considered as part of his overall defence review, which is underway.
The litany of problems with the four diesel-powered subs, including hull dents, rust, flooding and cracked pressure hulls, have been news in Canada for the last few years.
"Once we have the facts, we can all make our decisions. We're a great ally of the U.K.," Graham said. "We work together on many, many fronts and we will work this out as friends do."
After meeting his British counterpart, Geoff Hoon, Graham dismissed questions about any legal action.
"When we know the cause, I'm confident that relations between Britain and Canada, that our friendship and collaboration between our forces are such we'll work these out as allies and friends have always worked out all issues," Graham said. "But let's see the facts before we can even talk about such things."
Ottawa signed a $750 million lease with the British government in 1998 to acquire the subs, but malfunctions and refitting the boats to Canadian standards has seen the cost of the program balloon to almost $1 billion.
-------- china
Taiwan's Chen Seeks to Restart Cross-Strait Talks
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 11, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21593-2004Oct10.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan, Oct. 10 -- President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan, in a conciliatory gesture aimed at China's newly consolidated leadership, proposed a fresh start Sunday for long-suspended talks to improve relations and lower tension across the Taiwan Strait.
Chen suggested that China's president, Hu Jintao, might be more flexible in addressing Taiwan's concerns now that former president Jiang Zemin has retired and left Hu in charge of the Chinese military in addition to the presidency and the Communist Party. In that light, Chen declared, Taiwan is willing to resume discussions on the basis of a previous agreement that there is only one China, but that Beijing and Taipei have differing interpretations of what that means.
"We are aware of the transfer of power and personnel reshuffling on the other side of the strait," Chen said in a National Day address. "We hope that, with greater wisdom, both sides can create better opportunities for new development of cross-strait relations."
Chen said his government was willing to return to the artful ambiguity of the 1992 Hong Kong accord as a starting point for improving ties. Renewed contacts, he said, would "seek possible schemes that are not necessarily perfect but acceptable as preparation of a step forward in the resumption of dialogue and consultation."
In the context of Taiwanese politics and Chen's long-standing goal of formal Taiwanese independence, the president's proposal was seen here as a concession designed to improve the atmosphere, lower tensions and refute charges that he is not interested in getting along with the mainland. "This is quite a departure from the position of the ruling party," said Lo Chih-cheng of the National Institute of Policy Research in Taipei.
The Chinese government in Beijing, which has insisted on acceptance of the "one China" principle as a condition for further talks, had no immediate reaction, saying it was studying Chen's proposal. In Washington, however, the State Department hailed Chen's suggestion as a possible avenue toward resumption of discussions.
"We welcome the constructive message conveyed in President Chen's speech, which we believe offers some creative ideas for reducing tensions and resuming the cross-strait dialogue," Darla Jordan, a department spokeswoman, told the Associated Press.
Chen's refusal to accept the "one China" principle has long been cited by Chinese leaders as the main reason discussions on improving ties have been suspended even since before Chen took over in 2000.
The 1992 Hong Kong accord was reached by Chinese and Taiwanese cross-strait specialists under Taiwan's previous government, led by the Nationalist Party. Chen and his independence-minded group, the Democratic Progressive Party, had not previously embraced it, taking a clearer stand that there are two countries, one on either side of the 100-mile-wide strait.
Chinese officials have said repeatedly that they believe Chen is determined to lead Taiwan to independence, no matter what he says at any given moment. Although foreign China specialists have reported hearing talk of new ideas in Beijing recently, officials there have for months described China's Taiwan policy as a stalling tactic, saying little can be done until Chen's leadership of the self-governing island ends.
True to his past, Chen balanced Sunday's conciliatory gesture with insistence that, even if talks resume, nothing can be done to change Taiwan's status without the consent of its people. While he declared his acceptance of the ambiguity of the 1992 Hong Kong accord, he also emphasized his long-standing insistence that Taiwan is a sovereign entity entitled to U.N. membership and diplomatic recognition.
"The sovereignty of the Republic of China is vested with the 23 million people of Taiwan," he said. "The Republic of China is Taiwan, and Taiwan is the Republic of China. This is an indisputable fact."
To underline that contention, Foreign Minister Mark Chen announced that from now on the government would designate itself the "Republic of China (Taiwan)" in official documents, instead of just Republic of China. The policy was inaugurated Saturday in an agreement with the central African nation of Chad, one of only about two dozen countries that maintain relations with Taiwan rather than with China.
In the context of the hairsplitting semantics that mark the China-Taiwan dispute, the shift was seen as small but reflective of Chen's deep convictions on the long, evolving argument over Taiwan's status.
When Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces were defeated by the Communists of Mao Zedong in 1949, they took refuge on Taiwan with the claim that they, not the Communists, were the true rulers of China. As a result, they continued to call themselves the Republic of China and asserted they one day would return to the mainland and regain control. Sunday's National Day celebration, for instance, marked the date in 1911 when Sun Yat-sen founded the Republic of China.
Given that perspective, Taiwan's Nationalist rulers for years readily agreed there was only one China, including Taiwan. But Chen's party, with its Taiwanese nationalism, has never accepted that outlook. And now, more than half a century later, even the Nationalists have moved toward the idea of separate countries.
Chen's gesture toward the "one China" principle cherished by Beijing therefore went against a historical tide flowing in the other direction, with Chen and his party leading the way. In an interview Friday, for instance, Mark Chen, the foreign minister, described his government's stand in a way that seemed to leave no room for the "one China" principle.
"If [Chinese officials] can recognize that Taiwan is a country, [as] the People's Republic of China is a country," he said, "if they can do that, then we can sit down and talk." He added: "We are a country. I think we want to maintain the status quo at this point."
--------
In an Overture, Taiwan's President Calls for Opening Peace Talks With Mainland China
October 11, 2004
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/international/asia/11taiwan.html?pagewanted=all
TAIPEI, Taiwan, Oct. 10 - President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan on Sunday called for opening peace talks with mainland China, in a conciliatory overture following President Hu Jintao's consolidation of power last month in Beijing,
In a National Day speech here, Mr. Chen called for an emphasis on arms control, in light of mainland China's buildup of ballistic missiles pointed at Taiwan and a recent threat by Taiwan to aim rockets at Shanghai if the mainland attacks.
"I propose that both sides should seriously consider the issue of arms control and take concrete actions to reduce tension and military threats across the Taiwan Strait," Mr. Chen said. "In the long term, both sides should formally end the state of hostility across the Taiwan Strait and establish confidence-building measures through consultations and dialogues," he said later.
Mr. Hu asked President Bush in a telephone call last Thursday to abandon plans to sell Taiwan surveillance aircraft and other military equipment. After talks in Beijing on Saturday with Mr. Hu, President Jacques Chirac of France warned at a news conference, "We are worried about the tense situation in this region that is currently worsening."
Beijing had no response to President Chen's proposal. Foreign policy analysts predicted that mainland officials would initially reject it.
Beijing officials deeply distrust and dislike Mr. Chen for his decades of advocacy of greater political independence for Taiwan - which made his conciliatory tone on Sunday all the more noteworthy.
But Mr. Hu's recent consolidation of power in China - he became chairman of the Central Military Commission after former President Jiang Zemin resigned - has increased interest in Taipei and Washington in trying to reduce tensions across the Taiwan Strait. Mr. Hu, who leads the fourth generation of political leadership in Communist China, has said practically nothing publicly about Taiwan since becoming president two years ago.
"Cross-strait relations are not necessarily a zero-sum game, there will never be a winner unless it's a win-win situation for both sides," Mr. Chen said. "I believe the fourth-generation leadership on the other side of the strait should be able to fully understand this point."
Next January will be the 10th anniversary of a speech by Mr. Jiang that laid out a fairly hard line on Taiwan. Taiwanese officials have been hoping that by taking a softer tack now, they might prompt a review and revision of that policy. Mr. Chen's room for political maneuvering is limited, at least until legislative elections on Dec. 11. His Democratic Progressive Party, which has traditionally favored greater independence, looks increasingly likely to capture a majority for the first time with its allies, the smaller Taiwan Solidarity Union.
The two parties favoring closer relations with the mainland - the Nationalist Party and the People First Party - are in a fratricidal struggle and are expected to lose seats under Taiwan's complex electoral rules.
In the section of President Chen's speech that is likely to receive the greatest scrutiny in Beijing, he suggested for the first time that officials from Taiwan and mainland China revive a brief flurry of contacts in Hong Kong in 1992 and Singapore in 1993. Those contacts were possible because the Nationalist Party was still ruling Taiwan and Taiwan and China agreed then that they both had a One-China policy, and agreed to disagree on exactly what that was.
But Mr. Chen also made a series of assertions of Taiwanese sovereignty that were certain to infuriate mainland officials. Most notably, he seemed to define the Republic of China, the legal name the government here has used for decades, as the island of Taiwan but not the mainland.
"The sovereignty of the Republic of China is vested with the 23 million people of Taiwan," he said. "The Republic of China is Taiwan, and Taiwan is the Republic of China. This is an indisputable fact."
Andrew Yang, the secretary general of the independent Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, said Mr. Chen seemed to want to revive the 1992 contacts while distancing himself from the acceptance of the One-China policy. "It seems that the premise is to reopen the dialogue on an equal footing," as talks between sovereign countries, something that Beijing is unlikely to accept, he said.
Persuading the mainland to accept limits on arms purchases could also be difficult: rapid economic growth on the mainland has allowed the People's Liberation Army to invest heavily in new missiles and other equipment. Taiwan is still struggling to find the money to pay for American weapons that President Bush approved for sale three years ago.
Mr. Chen said his government was planning chartered flights between the mainland and Taiwan and wanted to improve protections for cross-straits investments. Taiwan is one of the biggest sources of investment on the mainland.
A parade preceding the president's speech reflected his conciliatory tone. Instead of rows of soldiers shouting martial slogans about retaking the mainland, honor guards from the army, navy and air force performed a dancelike drill with twirling rifles to the melody from "La Bamba." Girls in traditional southeast Chinese attire twirled parasols, and boys pulled streamers of bright green, the color of President Chen's party.
The choice of music was partly to honor visiting diplomats from several small Latin American countries that are among the handful of nations, mostly dependent on Taiwanese aid, that still have diplomatic relations with Taipei instead of Beijing. In another measure of Taiwan's eroding diplomatic clout, ceremonies here gave prominence to an obscure ally who came up: Prime Minister Absalom T. Dlamini of Swaziland.
Chris Buckley contributed reporting from Beijing for this article.
-------- colombia
Plan for Investigation Into Afghan Election Eases Dissent
October 11, 2004
By AMY WALDMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/international/asia/11afghan.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 10 - The quest by opposition candidates to have Afghanistan's first presidential election nullified appeared to fade Sunday, as some candidates moderated their stance in light of a consensus proclaiming the election, while not problem-free, a success because of the high turnout and the low level of violence.
Two of 15 candidates who had said they wanted the election redone because of accusations of irregularities, most notably problems with supposedly indelible ink intended to prevent multiple votes, said they would accept the results of an independent investigation that officials announced Sunday. Negotiations were continuing with others to ensure a similar compromise.
While reports trickled in about improper interventions in voting by both poll workers and political party representatives loyal to a range of candidates, outside observers again pronounced the election largely positive. International organizations, which spent $200 million to finance the election, indicated that they had little patience for would-be spoilers challenging the vote's validity.
"The candidates' demand to nullify the election is unjustified," said a statement from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which had sent 40 electoral experts to Afghanistan. Such action would call into question the "expressed will of millions of Afghan citizens who came out to vote, carried out voter registration and manned the polling stations despite great personal risk."
The organization said a thorough and transparent investigation was the way to resolve candidates' complaints: "Oct. 9 was a historic day in Afghanistan, and the millions who came to the polls clearly wanted to turn from the rule of the gun to the rule of law. If their aspirations are to be met, disputes about the validity of election results should be dealt with as the law provides."
Foreign diplomats and United Nations officials were also carrying that message to the discontented candidates, primarily Yunus Qanooni, the strongest rival to President Hamid Karzai, the front-runner. A Western official said Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States ambassador, had met with Mr. Qanooni, among other candidates, and suggested that Mr. Qanooni's could best help his own political future by not appearing to thwart the will of the Afghans who voted in unexpectedly large numbers and with what appeared to be great satisfaction.
On Sunday, there were still no figures on turnout, and the counting had not begun. Ballots were still being brought to eight regional counting centers and tallied to determine turnout. Officials expect a final result to take two or three weeks.
The voting on Saturday was surprising in several respects. Despite threats, Taliban insurgents failed to disrupt the polling. Officials said Sunday that they believed that the deployment of 100,000 security forces - as well as the Taliban's own incompetence - had helped thwart attacks. In one instance, the security forces discovered a fuel tanker in Kandahar loaded with five tons of explosives. Afghan military officials said that there had been a total of 36 attacks on the process, but that most had been unsuccessful.
Three policemen and one Afghan militiaman were killed late Saturday when they were attacked as they guarded ballot boxes being transported in Uruzgan Province, but the ballots arrived safely, Afghan officials said.
Instead, it was the controversy over the ink that tainted a day otherwise suffused by the uplifting spirit of a nation's first real taste of a broadly participatory democratic election. When it became clear on Saturday morning that the ink, whether because it was improperly applied or defective, often came off easily, Mr. Karzai's rivals gathered to denounce the election, insisting that there had been widespread cheating and fraud.
But on Sunday, two of the candidates took a more measured tone. Muhammad Mohaqeq, a powerful leader from the Hazara ethnic group, instead called for an independent investigation by the United Nations, with input from the candidates, and said the election should be redone only if the investigation turned up evidence of fraud.
Masooda Jalal, the only woman among the candidates, also said she was standing separately from the others and would respect the outcome of an independent inquiry.
Afghan and Western officials said the investigation of complaints would probably be conducted by a panel appointed by the United Nations and would consist of foreign observers.
The Western official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said many of the opposition candidates were now "looking for a way out" - one that would allow them to save face - from their blanket denunciation of the election. The official, who had met with some of the candidates, said that some now believed that they had rushed to judgment on Saturday, and that their statement had not had the effect they expected in deterring Afghans from voting.
Based on reports from election observers, journalists and voters, it was also clear that irregularities might have been perpetrated by people loyal to a number of the candidates, including Mr. Qanooni. His supporters, as well as those of Mr. Karzai, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum and Dr. Jalal, were accused of guiding or pushing voters to select their candidate, although not in significant numbers so far.
But the Free and Fair Elections Foundation of Afghanistan said that over all, a "fairly democratic environment" had been observed in the polling centers by its 2,300 observers.
United Nations and Afghan electoral officials said they were satisfied with the election process in the five southern provinces. "Generally it was free and fair, except for some technical issues," said Sonja Bachmann, deputy head of the United Nations mission in Kandahar.
She said officials contacted by telephone in the five provinces said the failure of the indelible ink reported elsewhere had not been an issue in the south.
An international election observer, who asked to remain anonymous, said the voting had been mostly "positive," with evident irregularities like under-age voting and poor training of elections officials, but nothing on a broad scale that would make the result illegitimate. But there were so few international observers that they were able to witness only a very small sample of the voting.
Representatives of some of the presidential candidates opposed to Mr. Karzai complained of numerous irregularities and accused United Nations and election officials of bias in their activities.
"The election was not even 1 percent equal to international standards," said Maulavi Ghulam Muhammad, the representative for the presidential candidate Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai. He said he had numerous reports from his political representatives of multiple voting, helped by the indelible ink's inability to withstand washing, and government or election officials encouraging or forcing voters to select Mr. Karzai.
One political observer, a supporter of Mr. Qanooni's from Kandahar Province, was beaten by representatives of Mr. Karzai and was unable to walk, Mr. Muhammad said. An intelligence officer, Akbar Khan, corroborated the story.
Yet Mr. Muhammad and other candidate representatives said they did not intend to formally complain to the election commission, since they did not consider the Afghans working for the commission and the United Nations to be impartial. Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Kandahar for this article.
-------- europe
Romanians Pitch Rumsfeld on Base Location
October 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Romania-Rumsfeld.html?pagewanted=all
CONSTANTA, Romania (AP) -- One day after visiting Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld toured a spruced-up military base here Monday and heard a Romanian government sales pitch for making it a new American outpost within easy reach of potential hot spots in the Middle East and Central Asia.
No deal was struck, and Rumsfeld's aides discouraged reporters traveling with him from thinking he was scouting for new bases. But the facilities in Constanta clearly are among bases the Pentagon is considering for occasional training and air access, though not permanent troop basing.
Asked after one of several briefings for Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials where he thought the United States will agree to make Mihail Kogalniceanu one of its rotational bases, Romania Defense Minister Ioan Mircea Pascu told an American reporter, ``Of course I hope so, you know. But it's not in our hands.''
Rumsfeld did not make any public comment. An official traveling with him who discussed the matter on condition of anonymity told reporters that the Romanians are eager to make a deal for the base, which is a combination of an air base, an adjacent army station and nearby training ranges.
``They wrote the menu. We have to figure out what we want to pick, if anything,'' the official said, adding that he expected a final decision to be made sometime in 2005. He said it was likely that a U.S. government assessment team would visit Romania this fall to check more details.
The air base is used by Romanian reserves, and the mechanized infantry brigade that uses the adjacent army post is about to abandon it, the official said, leaving plenty of room for the Americans.
As many as 3,500 U.S. troops were stationed here in February and March 2003 to prepare for the start of the war in Iraq. U.S. Army paratroopers based in Italy used Constanta as a staging base for their airlift into northern Iraq in the opening days of the war. It also was used as an air transport hub by the Air Force during the Afghanistan war. No U.S. troops are based here now.
Later Rumsfeld flew to Bucharest, the Romanian capital, for meetings with senior government leaders on Tuesday. He is scheduled to attend NATO meetings Wednesday and Thursday at a resort in central Romania.
Rumsfeld flew here from Skopje, Macedonia where he met with senior government officials. At a news conference in Skopje, Rumsfeld said the Bush administration supports Macedonia's efforts to become a NATO member.
Macedonia is a former republic of Yugoslavia and it is struggling with its own ethnic tensions between the Muslim, Slavic, and ethnic Albanian parts of its population.
Rumsfeld told reporters he had encouraged the Macedonian government to fully implement a 2001 agreement to achieve more political power sharing among its ethnic groups.
``Success in moving closer to NATO will depend in large part on implementation of the 2001 framework agreement, including the creation of stronger, more effective local government,'' he said.
In August Macedonia adopted a law to decentralize political power as part of the 2001 agreements. A Nov. 7 national referendum will determine the fate of that new step.
Rumsfeld said the August legislation ``certainly helps strengthen democracy here at the grass-roots level. The Macedonian people face a clear choice between a future with NATO in which stability and economic growth can flourish or a return to the past. We support your sovereignty and territorial integrity and your vision to become a part of NATO.''
Rumsfeld and his Macedonian counterpart, Vlado Buckovski, signed an agreement to increase cooperation in combatting the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Under terms of the agreement the United States will provide equipment and training materials valued at $258,000 to monitor and detect trafficking of elicit weapons material.
At a ceremony in Skopje, Rumsfeld awarded Bronze Star medals to two Macedonian soldiers for exceptional valor in combat actions in Iraq in which they were credited with saving the lives of at least two U.S. soldiers in 2003.
(SUBS penultimate graf, Rumsfeld signed ..., to correct to Macedonian minister signed, sted Romanian)
-------- iraq
Violence Persists as Rumsfeld Visits Iraq
Two Car Bombs Kill 11 in Baghdad
By Josh White and Naseer Nouri
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, October 11, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21435-2004Oct10?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Oct. 10 -- Two car bombs in Baghdad killed at least 11 people Sunday, including one American soldier, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld visited U.S. troops and diplomats in the capital and at a remote desert air base.
Rumsfeld, making his first visit to Iraq since May and his sixth overall, held a town hall-style meeting with more than 1,500 U.S. Marines at Al Asad air base in western Iraq. Likening the fight against terrorism to the Cold War, he told the Marines they were participating in a "task for a generation" and stood at "ground zero" in the "struggle against fanaticism, extremism and terrorism."
Rumsfeld said more violence was likely as Iraq moved toward elections that are planned for January. "Those who are determined to take back Iraq, back to a dark place, are trying to derail the new Iraqi government. . . . They're trying to snuff out any signs of progress," Rumsfeld said. "Their goal is to topple moderate governments. The extremists have made Iraq a key campaign in their struggle."
Rumsfeld flew to the air base, the current home of the 3rd Marine Air Wing, early Sunday morning from Manama, Bahrain, then made unannounced flights into northwestern Iraq and on to Baghdad, where he met with Gen. George W. Casey, the most senior U.S. general here, and U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte.
Rumsfeld concluded his day in Iraq by flying to the northern oil center of Kirkuk. Commanders there told Rumsfeld that efforts to integrate the Iraqi National Guard and police into regular security patrols and missions have significantly reduced the number of insurgent attacks and allowed an ethnically diverse city council to begin taking control. The secretary also met with South Korean troops in Irbil before departing Iraq under a rare drizzle and flying to Skopje, Macedonia.
Rumsfeld's travels did not place him in proximity of the bombings in Baghdad. In the first attack, a U.S. soldier was killed when a vehicle detonated near a military convoy in east Baghdad. The second explosion was near the main Iraqi police training academy, where recruits and applicants often gather in large numbers.
Ali Dahaan, 45, said he was stuck in traffic on Palestine Street when a minibus exploded outside the police academy. He said he covered his daughter's eyes each time someone carried a piece of a body past the car.
"I am without hope," the Iraqi businessman said. "I will go to the passport office to get my family passports and leave Iraq. But I don't know what will become of the people who have no money to go. They have to live here and face these explosions."
In the east Baghdad slum of Sadr City, U.S. forces and the militia of Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr observed the spirit of an initiative aimed at ending almost daily combat there and bringing a large part of Iraq's insurgency into its nascent political process.
Monday will be the first of five days during which militia members are to surrender their weapons in exchange for cash payments. Iraqi security forces then will be free to search suspect houses. In return, Iraq's interim government will free all Sadr followers not convicted of a criminal or civil offense, said Qasim Daoud, Iraq's national security adviser.
"We are trying to concentrate on the concept of the rule of law, disarming all of the illegal militias and arresting all of the terrorists," Daoud said. "These concepts are paramount in our minds."
In addition to the killing of the soldier in Baghdad, the U.S. military also announced the death of a Marine in Anbar province on Saturday, when a car bomb exploded beside a Marine convoy outside the city of Fallujah.
In his comments to the Marines at Al Asad air base, Rumsfeld said that the days ahead could bring increased activity by insurgents but that "victory ultimately only comes to those who are resolute and steadfast."
Rumsfeld said, however, that 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces are seeing fewer attacks and that as more Iraqi security forces are trained and armed, the situation will steadily improve. "I don't want to be accused of saying it's a rosy picture out here," he said. "It's tough work."
So far, about 100,000 Iraqis have been trained, equipped and readied to serve in the country's security forces, and U.S. officials hope that number will rise to about 145,000 by the end of January. A senior military officer told reporters Sunday that there should be 27 Iraqi battalions by then, the equivalent of three divisions.
Rumsfeld said he had no specific plans to boost U.S. troop levels in Iraq before the elections but that such decisions would depend on whether his generals ask for more help. Casey said he will ask for more troops if he needs them. Rumsfeld also said he could go to coalition partners for more help but expects Iraqi forces to be sufficient.
"This is their country," Rumsfeld said. "It is Iraqis who will have to build this country, it is Iraqis who will have to defend this country."
In Kirkuk, Rumsfeld delivered the same message to Iraqis, saying: "Sovereignty without the ability to protect it isn't sovereignty. What you're doing is to ensure the sovereignty of this country. We can help, but we can't do it. You have to do it."
In Baghdad, Ryiadh Abu Arshad, who watched the aftermath of one of Sunday's bombings while munching a sandwich at a food stand, dismissed the Americans' plans as "100 percent wrong."
"No police in the world are able to stop any terrorism," he asserted. "You need a strong army, and since the American army, the best in the world, couldn't stop it, nobody will. So let's accept it as part of our life. Maybe in the next minute, you and me will die here by the next rocket or car bomb. Who knows?
"Let me finish my sandwich so at least I will die not hungry."
Correspondents Karl Vick and Steve Fainaru contributed to this report.
--------
Rebels Loyal to Shiite Cleric Begin Handing In Arms in Iraq
October 11, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/international/middleeast/11CND-IRAQ.html?hp&ex=1097553600&en=dc097e074e59a9eb&ei=5094&partner=homepage
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 11 - Militiamen loyal to a firebrand Shiite cleric began turning in heavy weapons today in Baghdad as the first step of a peace offer with the interim government and the American military.
Three police stations in the vast slum of Sadr City, where support runs highest for the cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, collected hundreds of rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds and other arms. Militiamen were paid for their weapons. The payments sometimes amounted to hundreds of dollars. The weapons buyback program is scheduled to run through Friday.
In an interview at an American base on the edge of Sadr City, Col. Robert B. Abrams, commander of the First Brigade of the First Cavalry Division, charged with controlling the volatile neighborhood, said he was "cautiously optimistic" about the Sadr organization's efforts, despite the fact that Mr. Sadr and his fighters violated truces several times over the summer.
"He has a stated agenda at this point to enter the political arena in this country," Colonel Abrams said. "If he were to bring his militia back together, he knows he'll never have that chance again."
The colonel said that at the end of the week, his officers and Iraqi security forces will make a final tally of the amount of heavy weapons turned in, then give feedback to Mr. Sadr's aides. After that, he said, his soldiers will work with the Iraqi police and national guard to conduct searches throughout Sadr City to root out anyone who still possesses illegal weapons. According to Iraqi law, each household is allowed to have one AK-47 per adult male.
Violence continued to rage in the Iraqi capital following suicide car bombs Sunday that killed at least 10 Iraqis and an American soldier.
The American military said in a statement that two American soldiers were killed and five were wounded in a rocket attack today at 8 a.m. in southern Baghdad. In the northern city of Mosul, a suicide car bomber attacked an American convoy, killing two civilians and wounding 18, hospital sources said in a Reuters report. The American military said there were civilian and military casualties.
The First Brigade has been engaged in heavy fighting with members of the Mahdi Army, Mr. Sadr's zealous militia, since Mr. Sadr rallied his supporters in early August to battle Marines in the southern holy city of Najaf. The marines routed the Mahdi Army there and gained control of a central shrine, forcing many of the militiamen to flee back to their homes in Sadr City. It fell to the First Brigade to force Mr. Sadr to the negotiating table by keeping up attacks against the militia.
American soldiers currently have fairly good control over the bottom third of Sadr City, but less oversight over the rest of the neighborhood, which measures almost nine square miles, Colonel Abrams said.
He said his troops kill more than 10 fighters on a slow day, more than 40 on a medium-paced day and more than 100 on a busy day. Asked how many busy days his soldiers had encountered, he simply said, "A lot, a lot." Starting about a month ago, the colonel's unit began staging almost nightly airstrikes, using fighter jets and an AC-130 gunship to fire missiles and cannons into the streets. The soldiers decreased the number of ground patrols. The reason for this change in tactics, the colonel said, is because Sadr City "is a minefield right now; it's a very complex minefield."
Militiamen recently began a prolific campaign to plant roadside bombs throughout the streets of the slum, using plastic explosives, artillery shells and other material. On one stretch of road measuring less than 5,000 feet, First Brigade soldiers found 120 bombs, about one every forty feet. Roadside bombs are the most common killers of American soldiers in Iraq, and the colonel said he decided to rely more on airstrikes to root out the militia.
American soldiers have had to do much of the fighting in Sadr City because of weaknesses in the Iraqi police force here, Colonel Abrams said. He estimated that at least 7,000 police officers are needed to properly secure Sadr City, a place of 2.2 million people. Of the 800 police officers assigned to the area, he said, only 500 show up for work.
"They're out-manned, out-gunned and, until recently, out-led by the militia," the colonel said. Because the police officers generally come from Sadr City, their families also face intimidation from Sadr followers, he added.
The Mahdi Army is less a discreet military organization than a populist movement, and, as in the past, it will be difficult to tell whether it has actually disbanded. Colonel Abrams said he intends to scrutinize the command structure of the militia to see if it holds together. But the ultimate measures of whether Mr. Sadr actually honors his peace offer are whether American soldiers and Iraqi security forces can move freely throughout Sadr City, whether reconstruction projects can get under way and whether Iraqis working with the Americans and the Iraqi government are intimidated, he added.
As for this week, he said, "my forces are operating in and around the area and are prepared to respond on short notice in the even that something bad happens."
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Troops Probed for Killing Gaza Schoolgirl
October 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast-probe.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli troops who killed a Palestinian schoolgirl in the Gaza Strip are under investigation for riddling her with bullets although she proved to have posed no threat to them, military sources said on Monday.
Iman al-Hams, 13, was shot some 20 times on Oct. 5 as she walked past an Israeli military outpost en route to school in Rafah, a refugee camp on Gaza's border with Egypt that has seen frequent violence during a four-year-old Palestinian uprising.
``Israeli soldiers stormed the area, the girl left the bag and tried to run,'' Omar Abu Khalifa, 25, a Palestinian witness who lives nearby, told Reuters. ``Bullets hit the (girl's) bag and then soldiers opened fire on the girl.''
Military sources said Hams was shot after walking into an area marked with no-entry signs at a time of ongoing gunfire from Rafah.
Spotted about 230 feet away, the girl was mistaken for a militant and soldiers wrongly believed her book satchel may have contained a bomb, the military sources said.
``The soldiers fired warning shots into the air. The figure dropped the bag and fled. The soldiers had no way of knowing it was a girl. The soldiers then fired at and hit the figure,'' a military source said. ``The outcome was grave and regrettable.''
Israeli media, quoting unnamed soldiers at the scene, said the girl was shot at close range and that the outpost commander even delivered a ``coup de grace'' to ensure she was dead. ``There was a lot of shooting, but I did not take part. To me it (the figure fired at) looked like a girl,'' a soldier, whose identity was withheld, said on Channel 2 television.
A military source said a probe into Hams's death was under way but ``it is too early to speak of criminal charges.''
Tensions are high in the Gaza Strip as Israel gears up for a pullout from the occupied territory slated for next year.
Israeli forces stormed northern Gaza on Sept. 30 to crush militants firing rockets into the Jewish state, the biggest offensive there since the Palestinian revolt erupted in 2000.
Twelve days of clashes have claimed the lives of at least 92 Palestinians and three Israelis.
Lieutenant-General Moshe Yaalon, the chief of army staff, told Israeli ministers on Sunday that troops at the outpost believed the girl had been sent by Rafah militants to lure them outdoors so they could be picked off by snipers.
Human rights groups regularly accuse Israeli troops of excessive force against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and say few abuses are prosecuted.
The Israeli army insists its troops behave ethically in the face of militants who often use suicide tactics, and says all abuse complaints are investigated.
Hams's family voiced little faith in the Israeli inquiry.
``We demand the prosecution of Iman's killer, (but) we do not trust the Israeli judicial system,'' the girl's older brother, Ehab, told Reuters. ``My sister was an innocent little girl.''
-------- nato
EU agrees plans to replace NATO in Bosnia
Oct 11, 2004
LUXEMBOURG (AFP)
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041011124446.5ssj4rcv.html
European Union foreign ministers Monday agreed plans to take over peacekeeping duties in Bosnia from NATO on December 2, aiming to put the country "irreversibly on track towards EU membership."
The 7,000-strong "Althea" force, which will replace the NATO-led Stabilisation Force (SFOR), will be the biggest military operation yet undertaken by the 25-nation bloc.
"It will sustain our long-term objective of a stable, viable, peaceful and multiethnic Bosnia and Hercegovina, coooperating peacefully with its neighbours and irreversibly on track towards EU membership," the EU said after approving the force's operational plan.
The move came after NATO leaders in June moved to wind up the alliance's mission in the former Yugoslav republic, where an inter-ethnic war raged from 1992 to 1995 and claimed more than 200,000 lives.
Postwar Bosnia-Hercegovina is now split into two highly autonomous entities -- the Muslim-Croat Federation and Republika Srpska.
NATO has been gradually cutting back its troop numbers there, dropping from 60,000 personnel in 1995 to around 7,000 currently. It will still keep its headquarters in Sarajevo after the EU takes over.
British Major General David Leakey will head the EU force, which will use NATO hardware, and has already taken up quarters in the Bosnian capital.
The new force is to be assisted by partner countries that include Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, Morocco and Switzerland.
An EU police force has been on the ground since last year
-------- pacific
Indonesia missed opportunity to restore military ties: US ambassador
JAKARTA (AFP)
Oct 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041011122431.npx9hs2n.html
Indonesia missed an opportunity to restore military ties with the United States by failing to make its soldiers accountable for abuses in East Timor, the outgoing US ambassador said Monday.
"I consider it a misgiving on my part that I'm leaving without having normalized mil-mil relations because it was there to have," Ambassador Ralph Boyce told reporters.
"So that's a regret on my part but it's not a regret because we didn't do something. It's a regret because the Indonesians didn't take the opportunity," said Boyce, who ends a three-year term here on October 22 before taking up a new posting in Bangkok.
United States officials have repeatedly expressed their disappointment at the outcome of Jakarta's human rights tribunals set up to try military, police and civilian officials accused of abuses in connection with East Timor's bloody 1999 separation from Indonesia.
In August, the Indonesian supreme court overturned the ad hoc tribunal's conviction of four Indonesian security officers, meaning that no members of the security forces were found guilty of rights abuses in East Timor.
Only two of the 18 original defendants stand convicted, and both are East Timorese civilians.
Adam Ereli, deputy spokesman of the State Department, has said the process "was seriously flawed and lacked credibility."
Military cooperation with the United States was sharply reduced in 1999 when Congress in Washington passed the so-called Leahy Amendment during the East Timor turmoil.
Under the Leahy Amendment, assistance is suspended until certain conditions are met, including effective measures to bring to justice members of the armed forces and militia groups suspected of rights abuses.
"After three years we have not in fact substantively changed our relationship with (the Indonesian Armed Forces) all that much because the much-touted East Timor ad hoc trials on human rights violations didn't produce anything," Boyce said.
The United Nations alleges that the Indonesian military and militias it created murdered at least 1,400 people before and after East Timorese voted in August 1999 for independence. They also deported about 200,000 people to Indonesian West Timor and destroyed close to 70 percent of all buildings in the territory, according to UN prosecutors.
Restoration of military equipment assistance depends on accountability over the East Timor abuses while funds for military education have hinged on another case, the ambush killing of two Americans in Papua province two years ago.
Indonesia expressed hope in June that the Papua case was no longer an obstacle after the US decided to charge Anthonius Wamang, a Papuan separatist rebel, with the killings.
The decision vindicated the Indonesian military following allegations they were involved, the Indonesian foreign ministry said.
-------- spies
Spies "lap up" info from torture
(Reuters)
By Peter Graff
11 October, 2004
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=601161
LONDON - British spies "lap up" information gathered through torture, hurting Britain's ability to fight for human rights, the ambassador to Uzbekistan has said in a leaked memo obtained by Reuters.
In the memo, ambassador Craig Murray complained to superiors in London that British officials were "selling their souls for dross" -- accepting bogus confessions tortured out of detainees and designed to trick Washington and London into supporting Uzbekistan's harsh policies and giving it military aid.
Reuters obtained the secret July memo on Monday from a source who requested anonymity. Excerpts from it also appeared in the Financial Times on Monday.
"We receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek Security Services, via the U.S. We should stop," Murray wrote. "This is morally, legally and practically wrong.
The practice "fatally undermines our moral standing. It obviates my efforts to get the Uzbek government to stop torture; they are fully aware our intelligence community laps up the results."
A spokeswoman for the foreign office declined to comment on the memo itself but said: "Britain never uses torture to get information."
But she added: "We recognise there is a need for intelligence on counterterrorism to protect the safety of British nationals. It would be irresponsible to rule this information out of hand."
Uzbekistan, an ex-Soviet republic in central Asia, has become an ally of the United States since the September 11 attacks, offering air bases for warplanes flying over Afghanistan. It denies it systematically practises torture.
Its government has battled Islamist guerrillas, some of whom were based in Afghanistan. But human rights groups say Uzbekistan has exaggerated the threat to win Western support and justify draconian policies, including torture.
Murray said he had raised his concern in London and was briefed by Foreign Office officials that it was "not illegal for Britain to obtain and use intelligence obtained through torture" as long as the information was not used as evidence in trials.
He was also briefed by an official from British intelligence who told him that spies found "some of the material very useful indeed with a direct bearing on the war on terror".
But Murray said the material was disinformation designed to trick the United States and Britain into giving aid.
"TORTURED DUPES"
"Tortured dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the U.S. and the UK to believe: that they and we are fighting the same war against terror.
"I repeat that this material is useless -- we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful," he wrote.
"The aim is to convince the West that the Uzbeks are a vital cog against a common foe, that they should keep the assistance, especially military assistance, coming, and they should mute the international criticism on human rights and economic reform."
Murray said Britain's own spy agency lacked the knowledge to evaluate the material, which it received from the American CIA.
"MI6 have no operative within a thousand miles of me and certainly no expertise that can come close to my own in making this assessment," he wrote.
He described meeting an old man who was forced to watch his sons being tortured until he signed a confession admitting links to Osama bin Laden. "Tears were streaming down his face. I have no doubt they had as much connection with bin Laden as I do."
Britain has never denied that its spies use information that may have been obtained through torture abroad. In fact, the government has argued that it should be allowed to use such information in tribunals determining whether foreign terrorism suspects can be held without charge.
The High Court upheld that practice, which is now before a panel of the House of Lords sitting as Britain's highest court.
The Foreign Office spokeswoman said Britain's policy toward Uzbekistan is "political engagement". "We are pushing Uzbekistan to fully implement a plan of action to stop torture."
-------- un
THE U.N. PROGRAM
New Scrutiny of the Flow of Iraqi Oil to American Consumers
October 11, 2004
The New York Times
By SIMON ROMERO and SCOTT SHANE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/international/middleeast/11crude.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position=
As Saddam Hussein pressed the United Nations oil-for-food relief program for more money that he used to buy banned weapons, an unwitting ally may have been the American driver. Almost until the eve of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, American oil companies were among the largest purchasers of Iraqi crude oil.
The role that the companies, including ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, played in the oil-for-food program is now coming under greater scrutiny in the wake of a report by the chief arms inspector for the Central Intelligence Agency that disclosed how extensively Mr. Hussein was abusing profits from the oil sales.
Executives at the two companies insisted over the weekend that their purchases of Iraqi oil were not illegal or unknown in international oil markets in recent years. Industry analysts also said they did not know of any improprieties by the companies.
"All of our purchases of Iraqi crude were conducted in full compliance with the program," a spokesman for ChevronTexaco, Michael Barrett, said.
In 2001, Iraq was the source of 7 percent of all United States petroleum imports, ranking sixth behind the largest foreign suppliers: Saudi Arabia, Canada, Venezuela, Mexico and Nigeria, according to the Energy Department.
Yet while such imports were considered routine, disclosures about irregularities in how the Iraqi government selected partners to market the oil have led to several investigations of the program - by the United Nations, Congressional committees and a federal grand jury. The United States attorney's office in Manhattan has issued subpoenas to several American companies whose names appear on the Iraqi list as having received vouchers for Iraqi oil.
A spokesman for the House International Relations Committee said yesterday that the committee was exploring which oil companies had received Iraqi oil or had been trading in the vouchers. While committee investigators had been concentrating on the connection between vouchers and Iraqi arms purchases, the report issued last week by Charles A. Duelfer, the arms inspector, that named United States oil companies as recipients of vouchers was now prompting the panel's investigators to expand their inquiry to include the United States oil companies as well.
In the meantime, an investigator associated with the independent United Nations-appointed panel looking into corruption in the oil-for-food program, said that his group had not begun investigating whether or how American and other oil companies had benefited. The panel, led by Paul A. Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve system, is concentrating on accusations of wrongdoing by United Nations employees and companies like Cotecna Inspection of Switzerland and Saybolt International, a Dutch concern, which the United Nations hired to monitor parts of the program.
The investigator said that the panel would only begin to focus on oil companies that got Iraqi crude oil, with or without United Nations authorization, after this initial phase of the inquiry was completed, which is likely to be weeks or even months away. The investigator noted that the panel did not have subpoena power and lacked the authority to take punitive action against any company, American or foreign. Under the oil-for-food program, he said, member countries, not the United Nations, were responsible for ensuring that their companies obeyed sanctions against Iraq.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee has also joined the inquiry, with the chairman, Representative Joe L. Barton, Republican of Texas, sending a letter last Thursday to the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, asking Mr. Annan to release "any information in U.N. possession which relates to the use of oil-for-food money to produce chemical weapons in Iraq."
The oil-for-food program, over its life, resulted in $64.2 billion in sales, making it the world's largest relief program, American officials say. The amount of oil sold fluctuated as the program went on. At the start, in December 1996, Iraq was allowed to sell only $2 billion worth of oil every six months. That limit was raised to $5.26 billion every six months by December 1999 and then was lifted altogether, until the oil-for-food program came to an end in March 2003.
The program allowed Iraq the power to determine, with certain exceptions, whom it sold oil to and whom it bought goods from, based on the profits of the sale, according to the United Nations, but the United Nations had veto authority over all the contracts. For a United States oil company to participate, it first needed permission from Washington. The revenue ultimately financed $31 billion of relief supplies and equipment, including $1.6 billion of oil-industry spare parts and equipment, among other items, according to the United Nations.
At the same time, Mr. Hussein was imposing illegal surcharges, collecting kickbacks and smuggling oil outside the approved program, generating almost $11 billion in illicit revenue, which he used to buy weapons, other prohibited items and to build lavish palaces, according to the Duelfer report.
Moreover, oil experts have said, the largest source of money from unreported oil sales was from Iraq's illicit sale of oil to neighboring Turkey and Jordan. Neither the United States nor Britain objected to these sales to staunch Middle East allies until Mr. Hussein's government began making similar oil shipments to Syria. Only then did Washington protest the deals, the experts said.
Regardless of the route through which this oil reached world markets, the United States was the single largest importer under the United Nations program, with as much as half the oil in certain periods processed at American refineries for sale in this country.
During the first seven months of 2002, the United States imported an average of 566,000 barrels a day from Iraq, with big importers including ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, Valero Energy and Koch Petroleum, according to the Energy Department.
These American companies acquired the oil after it passed through a complicated route of trading concerns and intermediaries. The Duelfer report said that Bayoil, a Houston-based trading company, and Oscar S. Wyatt Jr., a prominent Texas energy investor with a long history of dealings in Iraq, were among those who received vouchers to buy Iraqi oil under the program. Their receipt of these oil allocations does not mean that they did anything illegal.
Mr. Wyatt did not respond yesterday to requests for comment, and messages left at Bayoil's offices were not answered.
Illustrating the convoluted way Iraqi oil reached the United States, the Energy Information Administration estimated in late 2002 that about 30 percent of it was first sold to Russian companies, with the rest bought by companies from nations including Cyprus, Sudan and Pakistan.
The Iraqi oil was resold to intermediaries who then marketed it internationally, largely to American oil companies. For example, in 2001, the energy administration estimated that significant amounts of Iraqi crude oil wound up at American refineries, some of which had been built decades ago in part to handle Iraqi blends.
Almost 80 percent of crude oil from the Basra region and more than 30 percent of oil from Kirkuk went to the United States in 2001, according to the energy administration. Imports of Iraqi oil under the program grew from an average of 89,000 barrels a day in 1997, to a peak of 795,000 barrels in 2001, and then declining to 459,000 barrels a day in 2002, the Energy Department said.
Eric Lipton and Judith Miller contributed reporting for this article.
--------
North Korea warns against attempts to bring nuclear issue to U.N. Security Council
October 11, 2004
SOO-JEONG LEE
Associated Press Writer
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/10/11/international0657EDT0460.DTL
North Korea on Monday blamed the United States for the stalemate in talks on its nuclear weapons programs, and warned it would use a "war deterrent force" if Washington brought the nuclear dispute before the U.N. Security Council.
The United States, North and South Korea, Japan, China and Russia have met for three rounds of talks aimed at getting the North to give up its nuclear ambitions, but little progress has been made. A fourth round slated for September never took place because the North refused to attend.
"If the U.S. applies more sanctions to the DPRK by putting the U.N. in motion, the DPRK will promptly and resolutely react to it with self-defensive war deterrent force," the North's official news agency, KCNA, said.
"Sanctions mean a war and war does not know any mercy," KCNA said.
DPRK stands for Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea's official name.
"The DPRK is not in a position to come out to the talks because the U.S. has deliberately laid a stumbling block in the way of the dialogue," KCNA added.
North Korea has issued similar warnings in the past especially at the height of tensions last year, shortly after the current nuclear dispute erupted when U.S. officials said North Korea admitted to running a secret nuclear program in violation of international agreements.
The warning by North Korea came despite reassurances from Washington that it wants to resolve the nuclear crisis through the six-party talks, instead of going to the Security Council, which could consider sanctions.
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told Japanese broadcaster NHK that the United States, Japan, South Korea, China and Russia all want a denuclearized Korean Peninsula.
"And that being the case, there is no rush to go to the U.N.," he said.
U.S. officials have also repeatedly said they have no plans to invade North Korea. Pyongyang says it wants security guarantees and economic aid in exchange for addressing concerns about its nuclear activities.
However, the U.N. nuclear chief last week urged the Security Council to act on the North Korean dispute because the North had withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty early last year.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said a passive response by the Security Council could set "the worst precedent of all."
-------- us
American Deserters Find a Mixed Reception in Canada
A Few Iraq War Objectors Follow Well-Worn Path of Vietnam Era
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 11, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22671-2004Oct10?language=printer
TORONTO -- Jeremy Hinzman enlisted in the Army in Boston, did a tour in Afghanistan and prepared for elite Ranger school. Then came orders to go to Iraq. He neatly piled his Army gear in his living room at Fort Bragg and fled to Canada with his wife and baby.
"No matter how much I wanted to, I could not convince myself that killing someone was ever right," Hinzman, 25, said in an interview here.
Spec. Hinzman is a deserter, one of at least four who have followed the path of Vietnam War resisters a generation ago to seek refuge in Canada. Here, they have been embraced by many from that time -- former peaceniks who are now pillars of the community.
The government is less welcoming. Despite Canada's opposition to the Iraq war, the government also is opposing the deserters' refugee applications, saying the soldiers are not persecuted. It is resisting the argument that the Iraq war is illegal.
"Canada is worried if they grant us refugee status, others would come up," said Hinzman.
The deserters in Canada provoke anger in the United States among people who argue they are shirking a duty to which they willingly agreed. "There's no draft. These people volunteered for the military," said Jerry Newberry, a spokesman of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in St. Louis. "These people want to have their cake and eat it, too."
Hinzman, a slender, studious young man, accepts the criticisms. He replies that his objections to the military evolved after he enlisted. Well before he was ordered to Iraq, he applied for noncombatant duty. Had that been granted, he said, he would have served his obligation, would even have gone to Iraq as a medic or cook or anything that did not involve offensive operations.
"If I was in a situation where bullets were whizzing by, I'd be fine with that," he said. "I'm not saying I wouldn't be scared, but I would have soldiered on -- as long as I wasn't pulling a trigger."
Hinzman spends his days reading and taking care of Liam, his 2 1/2-year-old son, in the small backyard of the family's basement apartment in downtown Toronto. He and his wife, Nga Nguyen, a biologist and social worker who was barely 3 when her family fled Laos after the Vietnam War, take turns cooking vegetarian meals.
They are in legal limbo while Hinzman's case works its way through the Immigration and Refugee Board, which has scheduled a hearing for Dec. 6. They hope to get work permits and find jobs, but until then, as they pay for rent, food and lawyers' fees, their savings from Jeremy's three years in the Army dwindles.
"I told Jeremy I would support his decision, whether he left or he went to prison," said Nguyen, 31. "At least we are together as a family, and alive."
Hinzman makes occasional speeches along with two other U.S. deserters who have gone public, Pvt. Brandon Hughey, 19, and David Sanders, a Navy enlistee. At least one other deserter is in Canada, according to Jeffrey House, an attorney for the Americans, but has remained out of sight.
House, 57, said he felt a chill of recognition when Hinzman first came to his office. Thirty-four years earlier, House had crossed the border from Wisconsin rather than obey a draft notice during the Vietnam War.
Estimates of how many Americans came to Canada in those times to avoid service in the war range from 30,000 to 90,000. They were invited by the prime minister at the time, Pierre Trudeau, who in 1969 declared Canada to be "a refuge from militarism."
On taking office in 1977, President Jimmy Carter pardoned the draft dodgers and allowed deserters to apply for resolution of their cases. Many of the Americans went home. Others stayed in Canada, and many flourished. Today they include several judges, scores of university professors, a popular radio host, a music promoter, politicians and a film critic.
"It's a big decision," House said of his client's action. "I respect and admire his decision."
House has argued to the refugee board that Hinzman is fleeing an illegal war. The lawyer said he is prepared to argue that the Iraq war has produced a pattern of war crimes -- he says the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison is exhibit number one -- that justifies a soldier's refusal to serve.
The government responded that the legality of the war was not an issue, and that anyway, the U.S. presence in Iraq had been sanctioned by the United Nations by the time Hinzman fled Fort Bragg in January. The government's lawyer declined to discuss the case, as did spokesmen for the board and the Citizenship and Immigration Agency.
Others, however, have taken up the Americans' cause. A music promoter organized a concert in June to raise funds for them. A public relations firm in western Canada set up a Web site, now brimming with messages of support.
"There's a very strong feeling against the war in Iraq here," said Carolyn Egan, president of the United Steelworkers' local council, which voted to support Hinzman. Unlike the Vietnam resisters, she said, these deserters "are not coming off college campuses filled with a political ideology. They seem to be honest young men who have made very personal decisions that they cannot support the war."
Hinzman was raised in Rapid City, S.D., finished high school and worked as a baker for a while. Through mutual friends, he met and dated Nguyen, whose family had fled Laos in 1975.
They moved to Boston, got married, and Hinzman enlisted in the Army in January 2001 because, he said, it seemed an honorable vocation, steady, and with college benefits. He was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division and made 17 parachute jumps in training.
"The Army did give me focus and structure in my life," he said. "When I enlisted, I figured I would be deployed. I thought if I was called up to do it, I could do it. But I was ignorant, probably stupidly, of an ingrained inhibition to killing another human being."
Hinzman said he was repelled by the chants of "Kill! Kill!" in basic training and was more drawn to his readings of Buddhism.
"I was on the verge of going to Ranger school," he said. "But the flip side of that was I was going through internal debate about whether I could do this. I finally decided no."
In 2002, he applied for a conscientious objector status that would have kept him in the Army, but as a noncombatant. While his request was pending, his unit shipped out to Afghanistan. Hinzman went and was assigned to duties as a dishwasher and cook while his unit was in Kandahar from December 2002 to July 2003. In Afghanistan, a first lieutenant denied his application, saying the claimed reasons were "not congruent with the definition of conscientious objector."
Hinzman returned with his unit to Fort Bragg. But in late 2003, he was told they were being sent to Iraq. He and Nguyen talked at length, and "it became more and more obvious" he would refuse to go, he said. "It is an illegal war. I wasn't going to kill or be killed to subsidize gas for someone to drive their SUVs."
Last New Year's Day, Hinzman helped install scopes on Army tanks. The next night, with a three-day leave ahead, he and his family quietly put belongings in their Chevrolet Prism and drove toward Canada.
They crossed at Niagara Falls at 6 p.m. Jan. 3, telling the border officer they were "visiting friends." It was a bit of a pun. Hinzman had been in touch with the Quakers -- the Religious Society of Friends -- and was headed for sanctuary in a Quaker meeting house in Toronto.
They called their parents. "Everyone has been very supportive," Hinzman said. "With the only exception being my grandpa. He has some issues with it, even though he thinks the war is wrong. I think he has a different concept of duty."
"I think the U.S. is a great country," Hinzman said. "But the direction that it's heading now is not a good one. I don't want to be a part of it. There is something to be said for staying and being a voice of opposition. But I wasn't called for that.
"Some people have put us as cowards, others have put us as victims," he mused. "I would say neither is true. I chose to do this. I feel I exhausted all the options I had."
--------
U.S. to double military in Colombia
New York Times
October 11, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/10/11/MNGST974081.DTL
Bogota, Colombia -- The number of U.S. military personnel in Colombia will double, to 800, in the coming months, based on a weekend vote in the U.S. Congress.
The action was welcomed by President Alvaro Uribe's government for its fight against Marxist rebels but condemned by human rights groups, who warned of a sharp escalation in the conflict.
The 2005 U.S. Defense Department authorization act, approved Saturday by Congress, also permits the Bush administration to increase the number of U.S. citizens working for private contractors in Colombia to 600 from 400.
The soldiers and many of the contractors will, among other things, develop and analyze intelligence on rebel movements and train Colombian troops in counterguerrilla operations.
U.S. officials said more U.S. personnel were urgently needed to help the government's nine-month offensive against the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
Lifting the congressionally mandated limits on troops and contractors, a little-noticed measure in the 5,000-page Pentagon authorization bill, is seen by some analysts and rights advocates as a step toward larger U.S. troop commitments.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
New Base to Monitor Border in Northeast
By Michael Hill
Associated Press
Monday, October 11, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22666-2004Oct10.html
PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. -- The federal government opened a base Friday where airplanes, helicopters and high-speed boats will set out to intercept terrorists, drug smugglers and illegal immigrants trying to cross the nation's vast northeastern border.
The new Air and Marine Operations facility, formerly an Air Force base in New York's northeastern corner, is one of five that will be responsible for tightening surveillance along the U.S.-Canadian border and will cover a heavily wooded stretch from western New York to Maine.
Department of Homeland Security helicopter pilot Dennis Del Grosso said agents are looking for anything, from low-flying planes trying to skirt radar to drug runners riding snowmobiles.
"Vehicles, boats and airplanes that carry drugs or illegal immigrants can just as easily carry terrorists or weapons of mass destruction," said Charles E. Stallworth II, director of Air and Marine Operations.
Two planes and two helicopters will be based at the new facility, along with about 40 people. Boats will regularly patrol Lake Champlain and other waterways, Homeland Security officials said. Planes also will patrol Lake Ontario and western Lake Erie.
On a demonstration helicopter run Friday, pilots flew a quick, low loop to a stretch of border barely discernible amid an endless expanse of woods. But flying at 580 feet, those aboard could zero in on cars on the highway and people golfing or mowing lawns.
The first such facility opened in August in Bellingham, Wash. Others are tentatively planned for near Detroit, Grand Forks, N.D., and Great Falls, Mont.
Stallworth said the five bases, when operational, will let agents respond within an hour anywhere along the border's more than 4,000 miles.
The northern bases are part of a larger effort by homeland security officials to watch the largely unprotected border more closely after the terrorism of Sept. 11, 2001.
Periodic patrols are made by radar-equipped planes from Plattsburgh and other points, but the permanent stations are designed to allow regular surveillance.
Similar air patrols have been conducted along the Mexican border for more than three decades.
-------- prisons / prisoners
U.S. Returns 'Enemy Combatant' to Saudi Arabia After 3 Years
October 11, 2004
By TERENCE NEILAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/international/middleeast/11CND-HAMD.html?hp&ex=1097553600&en=f52aa3920f9e6829&ei=5094&partner=homepage
An American-born man held for three years without trial in United States prisons after being accused of fighting with the Taliban was returned to his home in Saudi Arabia today.
The 24-year-old man, Yaser E. Hamdi, who holds joint Saudi-American citizenship, was freed after a decision by the Supreme Court in June that Americans held in the United States as "enemy combatants" must be able to contest their detention.
"He came home," his father, Esam Hamdi, told Reuters by telephone. "He just arrived and we are happy to see him."
Yaser Hamdi's lawyer, Frank Dunham Jr., of Alexandria, Va., said his client returned home on a military plane, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Dunham said he talked with Mr. Hamdi by telephone just after the plane landed, and said Mr. Hamdi told him he felt "awesome."
The Bush administration had chosen not to put Mr. Hamdi on trial but to negotiate his release with his lawyer. As the talks went on, Mr. Hamdi's release was delayed.
In a statement today, the State Department chief spokesman, Richard Richard A. Boucher, said Mr. Hamdi had been transferred to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from the Naval brig at Charleston, S.C. Mr. Hamdi had previously been held at the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Under the terms of his release, Mr. Hamdi agreed to renounce his American citizenship, not to sue the United States government and not to leave Saudi Arabia for five years. Mr. Hamdi, who was captured on a battlefield in Afghanistan is also forbidden ever to travel to Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Pakistan or Syria.
The Saudi official news agency, Spa, said on its Web site that Mr. Hamdi renounced his citizenship "immediately" on arrival.
Questions have been raised by Saudi officials about how they can enforce the agreement about Mr. Hamdi's not leaving the country.
Mr. Hamdi was born in Louisiana in 1980 to Saudi parents and raised in Saudi Arabia and became a Saudi citizen. He was captured on a battlefield in Afghanistan in late 2001 during the American-led fight against the Taliban regime.
He contends that he never fought against the United States and that he had been trying to get out of Afghanistan when he was captured.
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
Senate Vote on Tax Bill Cleared
La.'s Landrieu Had Sought a Tax Benefit for Reserve, Guard Employers
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 11, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22204-2004Oct10.html
A corporate tax bill that would dole out nearly $140 billion in business breaks over the next decade was scheduled for a Senate vote today after an unexpected delay yesterday over its failure to include a tax credit for employers who keep active-duty National Guard troops and reservists on their payrolls.
The most comprehensive corporate tax legislation in 20 years appears to have the votes to pass easily, as it has already done in the House. But Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) brought progress to a halt during an unusual Sunday session, demanding a vote on her 10-year, $2.5 billion Guard and reserve provision.
A compromise was reached last night, making a vote possible in a holiday session of the Senate today. Senators also will vote on pending bills covering military construction and homeland security. Landrieu's action infuriated some of her colleagues -- especially Republican leaders -- who had hoped to return home for the political campaign.
The legislation culminates more than two years of efforts to repeal a $5 billion-a-year export subsidy that was ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization. The European Union imposed punitive tariffs on a variety of U.S. products in response to the WTO ruling, and manufacturers lobbied Congress to replace the export subsidy with equivalent tax breaks acceptable under international trading rules.
But that modest aim grew into a 633-page bill with 276 separate provisions that benefit restaurant owners and Hollywood producers; makers of bows and arrows; NASCAR track owners; native Alaskan whalers; and importers of Chinese ceiling fans. The central provision, worth about $76.5 billion over the next decade, would lower the tax rate on corporate profits from 35 percent to 32 percent for all domestic producers -- a broadly defined term that includes such activities as traditional manufacturing, architectural design and filmmaking.
Those cuts are offset over the first 10 years by tax loophole closures and other revenue raisers.
Supporters say the bill will spur job creation, simplify the Byzantine tax code governing overseas profits and provide needed tax relief to the beleaguered manufacturing sector. They emphasized the bill's provisions clamping down on egregious tax shelters and the urgent need to lift the rising EU sanctions.
"This bill's not perfect, but we all say many, many times we should not let perfection be the enemy of the good," said Sen. Max Baucus (Mont.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. "It's very clear the plusses outweigh the minuses."
But the bill has elicited condemnation from budget watchdogs, liberal interest groups, some lawmakers and Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, all of whom see it as a special-interest giveaway that will exacerbate the record budget deficit.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) dismissed it as "a lobbyist's dream and a middle-class nightmare." Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called it "the worst example of the influence of special interests that I've ever seen."
Public health groups have protested that the bill includes a $10 billion buyout for tobacco farmers, but does not link that buyout to the regulation of tobacco product by the Food and Drug Administration.
But even before Landrieu's delay, passage seemed unstoppable, in large part, McCain said, "because there's something in it for everyone." The Senate voted 66 to 14 yesterday to cut off debate on the measure, leaving opponents at most 30 hours to hold off a final vote. Even the bill's sharpest Senate critics indicated they would ultimately go along.
"There are items in this bill that some of my constituents would find absolutely laughable, but I just have to tell them we have to laugh sometimes," Landrieu said.
Under congressional rules, Landrieu could not amend the corporate tax bill with her National Guard provision because the legislation had been approved by House and Senate negotiators. Instead, she wanted to add the employer tax credit to a separate measure that expands retirement savings opportunities for Guard troops and reservists.
Republicans objected that the Landrieu measure would favor Guard and reserve troops over active-duty forces, whose only income is their military pay.
--------
Senate Approves Bill Worth $140 Billion in Corporate Tax Breaks
October 11, 2004
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/business/11CND-TAX.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 11 - The Senate today approved a bill handing out about $140 billion in corporate tax breaks.
The 633-page bill, which has already been passed by the House, passed the Senate today on a vote of 69 to 17. It is loaded with hundreds of provisions that provide benefits to a wide range of interests, including the General Electric Company, oil drillers, shipbuilders, cruise ship operators, importers of ceiling fans, corn farmers, tobacco farmers and even foreign gamblers.
Despite widespread criticism of the bill as a Christmas tree of special-interest provisions, the House passed it by a vote of 280 to 141 on Friday, and the Senate voted, 66 to 14, on Sunday to cut off a potential filibuster.
But Senate leaders were blocked from voting until today by Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, who was furious that the final bill did not include $2 billion in tax credits for companies that keep paying employees who are called to active duty from military reserves and the National Guard.
Ms. Landrieu finally won agreement for a vote - whose effect would be purely symbolic - on a measure that would declare the Senate's support for giving those employers some tax credits. The largest provisions of the corporate tax bill repeal a $5 billion annual tax break for exporters that has been declared illegal by the World Trade Organization, and replace it with a tax reduction for manufacturers in the United States.
The bill's tax breaks are worth about $140 billion over 10 years, but it is supposed to raise the same amount of money by closing tax shelters, raising customs fees and eliminating the old tax benefit.
On Friday night, Senate leaders overcame objections by opponents of the bill, including Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who were angry that it would provide a $10 billion buyout for tobacco farmers without subjecting tobacco products to regulation by the Food and Drug Administration.
Opponents could not muster enough votes to block the bill through a filibuster, so Mr. Kennedy and his allies settled for separate voice votes in favor of tobacco regulation and against new overtime rules.
But those bills are unlikely to become law because the House has not passed similar measures.
-------- propaganda wars
Toledo Tube War: 14,273 Ads and Counting
Ohio City Bombarded With More Political Spots Than Any Other U.S. Market
By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22734-2004Oct10?language=printer
TOLEDO -- The cacophony starts before the first light of dawn, like an agitated rooster. It doesn't quit until after the last bar in this hardworking town has stopped serving.
"I'm George W. Bush and I approved this message."
"John Kerry offers a fresh start . . . "
"I'm not a big fan of Bush, but what's Kerry gonna do for me?"
Just about anywhere Toledoans turn their television dials these days, another commercial for the presidential campaign is on the screen. They interrupt "Jeopardy!" and "The Bachelor," the soap operas and the 6 o'clock news. A curiosity when they began to trickle onto the air back in March, the ads now tumble forth in a relentless parade of persuasion.
Between March and late September, 14,273 commercials about the presidential race aired on Toledo's four leading TV stations, according to the ad tracking firm TNSI/Campaign Media Analysis Group of Arlington. That number makes this smokestack city at the western tip of Lake Erie the epicenter of the presidential air wars; Toledo ranks as the most advertised-to market of any in the big battleground states.
The city's elevated profile has something to do with its cross-border locale -- TV signals here lap over into southern Michigan, another swing state -- but it is mostly because of Toledo's prominence in the heated battle for Ohio's 20 electoral votes. The city is the urban center of northwestern Ohio, which could be the most closely contested region in this critical swing state.
Although Toledo and surrounding Lucas County are reliably Democratic, the 12-county area reached by the city's TV stations is not. President Bush defeated Democrat Al Gore in this part of the state by about 17,000 votes in 2000, 50 percent to 46 percent. Republicans are counting again on the surrounding rural counties, such as Williams and Defiance by the Indiana line, to offset Democratic strength among unionized workers and African Americans closer to town.
Both sides learned some lessons about the value of advertising four years ago. Behind in the polls by double digits, Gore turned off the ad spigot and stopped making campaign appearances in Ohio in early October, effectively ceding the state to Bush. The Democrats lost Ohio all right -- but by just 3.6 percentage points statewide.
The experience left Democrats and Republicans alike with a profound sense of "what if" and a determination not to take anything for granted this time. "You're seeing everything both sides have in Toledo," said Jim Ruvolo, chairman of Kerry's Ohio campaign. "No one's holding anything back."
It certainly did not appear there was any holding back to anyone tuning in earlier this month, when political ads were as thick as rush-hour traffic, even at non-rush hours. Candidate spots often run back-to-back on programs here, with a Kerry ad followed by a Bush ad followed by a Kerry ad. During "13 Action News" at 6 p.m. on a recent Thursday, the Democratic National Committee, the Kerry campaign and the Bush campaign peppered viewers with a total of six commercials during one 19-minute stretch.
This has certainly been good news for Toledo's depressed local economy, or at least for the four TV stations that are broadcasting almost all of the commercials. Spending on political spots in Toledo will surpass $8 million between July and Election Day, estimated Mary Gerken, general sales manager of WTVG, the city's ABC station. This is about three times the total during the entire 2000 campaign, she said. (The Bush and Kerry campaigns declined to discuss their expenditures in detail.)
The messages flying over the airwaves go all over the political map. One Bush commercial features a series of clips of Kerry taking seemingly contradictory positions on the Iraq war -- here saying it was the "wrong war," there saying the world is better off without Saddam Hussein, and again saying, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion [to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan] before I voted against it." One of Kerry's ads does triple duty: He attacks the war's cost, promises to "stop at nothing" to get the terrorists and then says he'll "fight for a stronger middle class."
The "I'm not a big fan of Bush" ad comes not from Kerry or the DNC but from the anti-Bush Media Fund, one of several independent "527" organization that have been plying Ohio's airwaves since just after the beginning of the year. The commercial features a middle-age man in a hard hat whose question ("but what's Kerry gonna do that's different?") is answered by a narrator. "For 20 years, John Kerry has fought for jobs," the narrator says. ". . . Under Bush-Cheney, Ohio has lost 230,000 jobs while they give no-bid contracts to Halliburton."
"Halliburton," the hard-hat guy repeats glumly.
David Davis, a political science professor at the University of Toledo, said all the advertising has the same motive: to sway undecided voters and to spur the faithful to show up on Election Day. But he noted that advertising can do only so much in a political campaign. Organizational work such as voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives, as well as day-to-day developments in the campaign count, too, Davis said.
Indeed, the ad barrage raises an obvious question: Is anyone being persuaded by all of this?
In some ways, it is almost irrelevant in Toledo. Ruvolo acknowledges there is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy driving the air wars here: Both sides feel they have to have ads on the air simply because the other guy has his ads on the air. "It is kind of an arms race," he said, a bit sheepishly.
Toledoans interviewed in random encounters on downtown streets generally express fatigue -- and a bit of bewilderment -- about what they're seeing on their TV screens. Walking into the Lucas County courthouse on a sunny fall afternoon, James King, 64, an executive with a health management company, offered the jaded view. "We're kind of sick of them," he said. "It seems like they've been going on forever. I really think it's turning everyone off. When you see as many negative ads as we've seen, you have to believe that it's turning more people off than getting people excited about the election."
King described himself as "a ticked-off conservative" who is leaning toward Kerry. But his choice wasn't shaped by any messages he has picked up from a few thousand political ads. "I'm alarmed at what has happened to the conservative agenda under this president," he said. "The deficit is a disaster. I deplore this war. The government has gotten bigger, not smaller. [Bush] has injured the party and its ideals."
Over on Adams Street, Najie Olive, the owner of Ranya's restaurant, still is not sure which way he is voting. The ads, he said, have not been especially helpful. "It's pretty much tit for tat," he said. "It's like a teeter-totter. They just keep swinging back and forth. . . . I guess I haven't really become tired of it. I'm just immune to it."
A block away, by a statue of native son William McKinley, the assassinated 25th president, teacher Rick Buss was asked whether he can remember any of the TV commercials he has seen. Buss, 54, thinks hard for a moment, holding his hand to his forehead. "Oh, boy," he said finally, stumped. "There's just so many of them that they kind of blur together. The average person can't differentiate who's saying what. It's very confusing."
In fact, the most memorable ad for Sara Agocs, 25, has been "the one President Bush did attacking John Kerry's service in Vietnam. It seemed very unfair to me." Informed that the ad was aired by an independent group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and not the Bush campaign, Agocs seems surprised.
"See, I didn't know that," she said. "All these independent agencies. I don't know what's coming from who."
Yet even if the sources of the ads and the messages are somewhat indistinct, Buss and Agocs can identify the general themes each side is promoting -- that Kerry (according to the Bush campaign) has taken inconsistent positions on many issues and thus cannot be trusted, and that Bush (according to Kerry) has mismanaged the war in Iraq and the economy and does not deserve another four years.
It's not much, but both sides hope it's enough come Election Day.
--------
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh spills the secrets of the Iraq quagmire and the war on terror
NewsCenter
By Bonnie Azab Powell
11 October 2004
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/10/11_hersh.shtml
BERKELEY - The Iraq war is not winnable, a secret U.S. military unit has been "disappearing" people since December 2001, and America has no idea how irreparably its torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has damaged its image in the Middle East. These were just a few of the grim pronouncements made by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour "Sy" Hersh to KQED host Michael Krasny before a Berkeley audience on Friday night (Oct. 8).
The past two years will "go down as one of the classic sort of failures" in history, said the man who has been called the "greatest muckraker of all time" and (paradoxically) the "enfant terrible of journalism for more than 30 years." While Hersh blamed the White House and the Pentagon for the Iraq quagmire and America's besmirched world image, he was stymied by how it all happened. "How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this government?" he asked. "They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself, How fragile is this democracy?"
From My Lai to Abu Ghraib
That fragility clearly unnerves him. Hersh summarizes his mission as "to hold the people in public office to the highest possible standard of decency and of honesty...to tolerate anything less, even in the name of national security, is wrong." He tries his best. More than any other U.S. journalist alive today, he embodies the statement that "a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government," a belief defined by the conservationist Edward Abbey.
His country has not always thanked him for it - neocon Pentagon adviser Richard Perle has called Hersh "the closest thing we have to a terrorist," while his 1998 book on John F. Kennedy's administration, "The Dark Side of Camelot," cost him many friends on the left. But Hersh's reputation remains more bulletproof than most. The author of eight books, he first received worldwide recognition (and the Pulitzer) in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War. 1982's "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House," painted Henry Kissinger as a war criminal and won Hersh the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times book prize in biography.
Most recently, as a staff writer for the New Yorker, Hersh has relentlessly ferreted out the behind-the-scenes deals, trickery, and blunders associated with the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Back in May 2003, he was the first American reporter to state unequivocally that we would not find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (A mea culpa from a Slate journalist who doubted Hersh on WMDs also inadvertently confirms his prescient track record.) And in April of this year, he broke the story of how U.S. soldiers had digitally documented their torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqis at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The several articles he wrote for the New Yorker about Abu Ghraib have been updated and edited into his latest book, "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib."
"Bush scares the hell out of me"
Hersh came to Berkeley at the invitation of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and the California First Amendment Coalition. His appearance in the packed ballroom of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union was the fitting end to a week of high-profile events in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.
The Hersh event began only minutes after the second debate between President George W. Bush and John Kerry concluded. Krasny naturally asked Hersh - who had watched the debate at North Gate Hall stone-faced in the middle of a rowdy crowd - what he thought of the match.
"It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me," Hersh answered. "What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community. They know in ways that none of us know, the incredible gap between what is and what [Bush] thinks."
With that, he was off and running. One could safely say that for the next hour, Hersh proceeded to scare the hell out of most of the audience by detailing the gaps between what they knew and what he hears is actually going on in Iraq.
While his writing is dense but digestible, in person Hersh speaks with the rambling urgency of a street-corner doomsayer, leaping from point to point and anecdote to anecdote and frequently failing to finish his clauses, let alone his sentences. His train of thought can be difficult to catch a ride on. This evening, it was a challenge for Krasny to slow him down long enough to get a word or question in edgewise. For example, here's a slice of raw Hersh on the current situation in Iraq:
I've been doing an alternate history of the war, from inside, because people, right after 9/11, because people inside - and there are a lot of good people inside - are scared, as scared as anybody watching this tonight I think should be, because [Bush], if he's re-elected, has only one thing to do, he's going to bomb the hell out of that place. He's been bombing the hell of that place - and here's what really irritates me again, about the press - since he set up this Potemkin Village government with Allawi on June 28 - the bombing, the daily bombing rates inside Iraq, have gone up exponentially. There's no public accounting of how many missions are flown, how much ordnance is dropped, we have no accounting and no demand to know. The only sense you get is we're basically in a full-scale air war against invisible people that we can't find, that we have no intelligence about, so we bomb what we can see.
And yet - despite the more than 1,000 deaths of U.S. soldiers and the horrific number of Iraqi casualties - Bush continues to believe we are doing the right thing, according to Hersh. "He thinks he's wearing the white hat," he said, adding that is what makes this administration different from previous ones whose hypocrisy Hersh has exposed. Bush and the neocons "are not hypocrites."
Enter the utopians
"I think it's real simple to say [Bush] is a liar. But that would also suggest there was a reality that he understood," explained Hersh. "I'm serious. It is funny in sort of a sick, black humor sort of way, but the real serious problem is, he believes what he's doing." In effect, Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other neocons are "idealists, you can call them utopians." As Hersh understands them, they really believe that the solution to global terrorism began with invading Baghdad and will end only with the transformation of the last unfriendly government in the Middle East into a democracy.
"No amount of body bags is going to dissuade [Bush]," said Hersh, despite the fact that Hersh's sources say the war in Iraq is "not winnable. It's over." As for Kerry's war plans, Hersh said he wished he could tell him to stop talking as if the senator's plan for Iraq could somehow still eke out a victory there. "This is a disaster that's been going on. It's a civil war, the insurgency. There is no 'win' anymore in this war," he argued. "As somebody said, 'We're playing chess, they're playing Go.'"
Later, Hersh shared something he had yet to write about. Sources were suggesting that the many acts of domestic terrorism in Iraq that U.S. officials have been attributing to suspected Al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are in fact a smokescreen set up by the insurgents. "They decided to wage war against their own population," he said. "It's a huge step, with enormous consequences....The insurgency has simply deflected what they're doing onto this man. And we fell for it."
What is worse, he said impatiently, was that because U.S. forces had "privatized" so many of Iraq's institutions, it had decimated the job market in the country."This is why Bush can talk about 100,000 people wanting to go work in the police or in the army. It's because there's nothing else for them to do. They're willing to stand in line to get bombed because they want to take care of their family," he said.
Hersh has been accused many times of sympathizing with "the enemy," and told that his publicizing of incidents like the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib torture only fan the flames of anti-American sentiment around the world. He related that he's been asked if he feels guilty about the beheadings of two Americans who were wearing uniforms like those worn at Abu Ghraib. "As if the Iraqis needed me to tell them what's going on in that prison!" he responded. He also repeated a question often posed to him: "Was it immoral to go in ... [T]he idea that Saddam was a torturer and a killer, doesn't that lend a patina of morality to going after him?" The answer to that one, he said unsmilingly, "is of course, Saddam tortured and killed his people. And now we're doing it."
In addition to adding more details to the woeful chronology of the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which the military stopped the abuse only after Hersh's story brought it crashing down onto front pages around the world - four months after it was first reported to the Department of Defense - Hersh speculated on why those dehumanizing techniques had been used. He was sure that they were not, as some have claimed, the "stress outlet" or other spontaneous recreational ideas of young soldiers from West Virginia. Instead, he said, they were the outgrowth of a massive manhunt for information, any information, about first Al Qaida, the Taliban, and then the Iraqi insurgency:
My government has a secret unit that since December of 2001 has been disappearing people just like the Brazilians and the Argentineans did. Rumsfeld decided after 9/11 that he could not wait. The president signed a secret document...There's a team of people, they fly in unmarked planes, they fly in Gulfstreams, they have their own choppers, they don't carry American passports, and they just grab people. And maybe in the beginning I can understand there was some rationale. Right after 9/11 we were frightened, we didn't know what to do ...
The original idea behind the sexually humiliating photos taken at Abu Ghraib, Hersh said he had heard, was to use them as blackmail so that the newly released prisoners - many of whom were ordinary Iraqi thieves or even civilian bystanders rounded up in dragnets - would act as informants. "We operate on guilt, [Muslims] operate on shame," Hersh explained. "The idea of photographing an Arab man naked and having him simulate homosexual activity, and having an American GI woman in the photographs, is the end of society in their eyes."
And the fact that Americans had perpetrated such acts - and refused to take responsibility for it - ended America's role as any kind of moral leader in the eyes of not just the Middle East, but the world, Hersh railed. He talked about an Israeli, a longtime veteran of the troubles between his country and the Palestinians, who had emailed him to say, in essence, "We've been killing them for 40 or 50 years, and they've been killing us for 40 or 50 years, but we know that somewhere down the line we're going to have to live with those SOBs...If we had treated our Arabs the way you treated them in Abu Ghraib, the sexual stuff, the photographs, we couldn't live with them. You guys do not begin to understand what you've done, where you have put yourself in the Arab world."
"They just shot them one by one"
There was more - rumors of atrocities around Iraq that to Hersh brought back memories of My Lai. In the evening's most emotional moment, Hersh talked about a call he had gotten from a first lieutenant in charge of a unit stationed halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. His group was bivouacking outside of town in an agricultural area, and had hired 30 or so Iraqis to guard a local granary. A few weeks passed. They got to know the men they hired, and to like them. Then orders came down from Baghdad that the village would be "cleared." Another platoon from the soldier's company came and executed the Iraqi granary guards. All of them.
"He said they just shot them one by one. And his people, and he, and the villagers of course, went nuts," Hersh said quietly. "He was hysterical, totally hysterical. He went to the company captain, who said, 'No, you don't understand, that's a kill. We got 36 insurgents. Don't you read those stories when the Americans say we had a combat maneuver and 15 insurgents were killed?'
"It's shades of Vietnam again, folks: body counts," Hersh continued. "You know what I told him? I said, 'Fella, you blamed the captain, he knows that you think he committed murder, your troops know that their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Complete your tour. Just shut up! You're going to get a bullet in the back.' And that's where we are in this war."
The story seemed to leave Hersh sincerely, deeply saddened. While his critics may call him a "muckraker" and unpatriotic, on Friday night it was obvious that Hersh takes the crumbling of America's image, very, very personally.
"My parents were immigrants," Hersh said. "They came here because America meant something...the Statue of Liberty and all that stuff, because America always was this bastion of morality and integrity and a place for a fresh start. And it's right in front of us, not hidden, that they've taken this away from us."
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Players: David Addington
In Cheney's Shadow, Counsel Pushes the Conservative Cause
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 11, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22665-2004Oct10.html
Since he took office, Vice President Cheney has led the Bush administration's effort to increase the power of the presidency. "I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job," he said after a year in office, calling it "wrong" for past presidents to yield to congressional demands. "We are weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years."
Cheney has tried to increase executive power with a series of bold actions -- some so audacious that even conservatives on the Supreme Court sympathetic to Cheney's view have rejected them as overreaching. The vice president's point man in this is longtime aide David Addington, who serves as Cheney's top lawyer.
Where there has been controversy over the past four years, there has often been Addington. He was a principal author of the White House memo justifying torture of terrorism suspects. He was a prime advocate of arguments supporting the holding of terrorism suspects without access to courts.
Addington also led the fight with Congress and environmentalists over access to information about corporations that advised the White House on energy policy. He was instrumental in the series of fights with the Sept. 11 commission and its requests for information. And he was a main backer of the nomination of Pentagon lawyer William J. Haynes II for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. Haynes's confirmation has been a source of huge friction on Capitol Hill.
Colleagues say Addington stands out for his devotion to secrecy in an administration noted for its confidentiality. He declined to be interviewed or photographed for this article, and he did not respond to a list of specific points made in the article.
Addington, 47, was a lawyer and GOP staffer on congressional committees on intelligence and the Iran-contra matter, before Cheney chose him to serve as general counsel at the Pentagon when Cheney was defense secretary.
Even in a White House known for its dedication to conservative philosophy, Addington is known as an ideologue, an adherent of an obscure philosophy called the unitary executive theory that favors an extraordinarily powerful president.
The unitary executive notion can be found in the torture memo. "In light of the president's complete authority over the conduct of war, without a clear statement otherwise, criminal statutes are not read as infringing on the president's ultimate authority in these areas," the memo said. Prohibitions on torture "must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority. . . . Congress may no more regulate the president's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield." The same would go for "federal officials acting pursuant to the president's constitutional authority."
"The Framers understood the [commander in chief] clause as investing the president with the fullest range of power," the memo said, including "the conduct of warfare and the defense of the nation unless expressly assigned in the Constitution to Congress." That "sweeping grant" of power, it continued, is given because "national security decisions require the unity in purpose and energy in action that characterize the presidency rather than Congress."
On the job, colleagues describe Addington as hard-edged and a bureaucratic infighter who frequently clashes with others, particularly the National Security Council's top lawyer, John Bellinger. Officials say disputes between Addington and Jack Goldsmith, head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, led Goldsmith to resign after eight months in the job; Addington had sought to persuade OLC to take a more permissive line on torture.
Still, even foes admire Addington's work ethic and frugality; he takes Metro from his home in Alexandria instead of using his White House parking space.
Addington's influence -- like Cheney's overall -- extends throughout the government in his bid to expand executive power. He goes through every page of the federal budget in search of riders that could restrict executive authority. He meets daily with White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and often raises objections to requests for information from Congress or the public, officials say. He also routinely works to defeat proposals from the State Department, where the pervasive internationalist philosophy is at odds with Cheney's neoconservatism.
Occasionally, others in the administration have sought to keep Addington out of the loop to avoid his inevitable objections. When the White House agreed, under pressure from Congress, to appoint a commission to investigate the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Cheney's office did not know about it until a reporter from The Washington Post called to inquire.
There has been something of a backlash against Addington's philosophy within the administration, where some believe his aggressive legal arguments have caused the courts to become more suspicious of executive authority. That was a common complaint when the Supreme Court in June dealt the administration major defeats in the Hamdi and Rasul cases regarding terrorism detainees.
The court ruled that U.S. citizens held as "enemy combatants" are entitled to contest the government's case in court. It also ruled that al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could ask to be set free by a U.S. judge. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote: "A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens."
"Addington adds to the problems the president has with the courts," said Bruce Fein, who was an official in the Reagan Justice Department and worked with Addington during the Iran-contra probe. Fein said Addington is the "intellectual brainchild" of overreaching legal assertions that "have resulted in actually weakening the presidency because of intransigence."
Fein said Cheney and Addington, while arguing that they are reclaiming executive authority, are actually seeking to push it to new levels. Many of the restraints on executive authority -- the War Powers act, anti-impoundment legislation, the legislative veto and the independent counsel statute -- have already disappeared or become insignificant.
"They're in a time warp," Fein said. "If you look at the facts, presidential powers have never been higher."
In part, Cheney and Addington may be reflecting the reality from when they served in Congress, Cheney as a Republican leader and Addington as a staff member. During the Iran-contra hearings, Addington was heavily involved in arguing that Congress was improperly tying the hands of the president by preventing him from helping Nicaragua's contras.
Cheney and Addington became close in 1984, when Addington was a lawyer on the House intelligence committee, one of Cheney's panels. After their time together at the Pentagon, where Addington was known as Cheney's "gatekeeper," Addington became president of a Cheney political action committee, Alliance for American Leadership, that helped fund a 1996 presidential exploration bid for Cheney.
--
In Profile
David Addington
Title: Counsel to Vice President Cheney.
Education: Bachelor's degree, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service; law degree, Duke University School of Law.
Age: 47.
Family: Wife; three children.
Career highlights: Senior vice president and general counsel, American Trucking Associations; partner, Holland & Knight; counsel, Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell; president, Alliance for American Leadership; general counsel, Defense Department, 1992-93; special assistant to the secretary of defense; special assistant and then deputy assistant to President Ronald Reagan for legislative affairs; counsel, House committees on intelligence and foreign affairs, 1984-87; assistant general counsel, CIA, 1981-84.
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Indymedia's Internet Servers Confiscated
by Stefania Milan (Inter Press Service)
October 11, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/milan.php?articleid=3762
LONDON - Agents from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Thursday seized two Internet servers in Britain that host the Web sites of the global news network Indymedia. Two days later, there was still no clarification of why the computers were confiscated or who is holding them.
The confiscation came just days before the European Social Forum, the region's major civil society gathering, in which Indymedia is to have a strong presence.
Indymedia - as the Independent Media Centers are known - is a network of more than 140 national and thematic "open-publishing" Web sites where independent activists or journalists can publish their news articles, stories and other material online, with no editorial filter.
Created in 1999 to report on the protests against the World Trade Organization's ministerial conference in the U.S. city of Seattle, Indymedia has since become the main news source of the anti-globalization movement, continuing to serve as an alternative to mainstream media outlets worldwide.
The two servers seized on Thursday were located in the London offices of the U.S.-based company Rackspace, one of the network's hosting providers. On Saturday, it was not yet clear why the computer hardware had been seized or who is now holding it.
More than 20 national Web sites - some of the countries affected are Uruguay, France, Italy, Brazil, England and Germany - were out of service for at least 24 hours.
Most of those sites have been reinstated using substitute Internet servers - but Indymedia activists fear that a great deal of digital material may have been lost.
The seizure came just one week before the start of the third edition of the European Social Forum (ESF) in London, Oct. 15-17.
In parallel to the ESF, Indymedia promoted a four-day event on "communication rights and tactical media production" in collaboration with other organizations such as the Association for Progressive Communication and the World Association of Christian Communications.
"This attack against Indymedia is an affront to communication rights and the right to privacy," said an Indymedia activist organizing the European Forum on Communication Rights, in London Oct. 14.
"Rackspace UK complied with a legal order," the company declared in a statement, saying that it "is acting as a good corporate citizen and is cooperating with international law enforcement authorities." The company did not provide any more details.
"It is not an FBI operation. Through a legal assistance treaty, the subpoena was on behalf of a third country," FBI spokesman Joe Parris told Agence France-Presse.
Apparently, the request for the FBI action was submitted by government agencies in Switzerland and Italy. The FBI acted in compliance with the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT).
The MLAT establishes procedures for signatory countries to collaborate in investigations regarding international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering.
"But these allegations have no relation with Indymedia activities," an Indymedia activist who preferred to remain anonymous told IPS.
"We do not understand why the FBI has acted against Indymedia, which is an open communication project organized through public meetings and mailing lists. We think there must be some hidden reason behind," said the activist.
The seizure triggered strong reactions by many civil society groups around the world.
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) called for an investigation into the "intolerable and intrusive" action that silenced the Web sites.
"More intimidation than crime-busting," IFJ general-secretary Aidan White said. "The seizing of computers and the high profile nature of this incident suggests that someone wanted to stifle these independent voices in journalism."
According to the IFJ, the confiscation might be related to a court case heard Sept. 30 in San Jose, Calif., against some Indymedia activists who denounced the Web-based flaws in the electronic voting machines to be used in the Nov. 2 U.S. presidential election.
But it is not the first time that Indymedia has suffered such attacks. A month ago the FBI asked Indymedia to take down a photo of undercover Swiss police published on the Indymedia Nantes (France) site.
Indymedia was attacked during the protests against the meeting of the world's eight richest countries (G8) in Genoa, in July 2001, when the Italian riot police damaged its media center.
"In the seized servers there was all the information related to Genoa events. We are very worried," Laura Tartarini from the Genoa Legal Forum said. The Legal Forum is the group of lawyers set up before the G8 meeting to deal with legal consequences of the protests.
Together with the Legal Forum, some Italian Indymedia activists are currently examining the videos recorded during the protests to help those activists accused of vandalism now being processed in Genoa court.
"Ironically, this violation of the freedom of speech comes while the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society, begun in 2003 in Geneva and to be concluded in Tunis in 2005, is still ongoing," said Italian senator Fiorello Cortiana.
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US seizes independent media sites Anti-globalisation protests in London
11 October, 2004
Indymedia reports on the anti-globalisation movement
The FBI has shut down some 20 sites which were part of an alternative media network known as Indymedia.
A US court order forced the firm hosting the material to hand over two servers in the UK used by the group.
Indymedia says it is a news source for the anti-globalisation movement and other social justice issues.
The reasons behind the seizure are unclear but the FBI has reportedly said the action was taken at the request of Italian and Swiss authorities.
Legal action
The servers affected were run by Rackspace, a US web hosting company with offices in London.
It said it had received a court order from the US authorities last Thursday to hand over the computer equipment at its UK hosting facility.
The way this has been done smacks more of intimidation of legitimate journalistic inquiry than crime-busting Aidan White, International Federation of Journalists "Rackspace is acting as a good corporate citizen and is cooperating with international law enforcement authorities," said a statement by the company.
It said it was responding to an order issued under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty. Under the agreement, countries assist each other in investigations such as international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering
The reasons behind the action against the Indymedia websites are unclear.
The group said the servers affected had hosted the sites of more then 20 local collectives and audio streams for several radio stations, as well as several other projects.
"Indymedia had been asked last month by the FBI to remove a story about Swiss undercover police from one of the websites hosted at Rackspace," said the group in a statement.
"It is not known, however, whether Thursday's order is related to that incident since the order was issued to Rackspace and not to Indymedia."
'Intolerable and intrusive'
A FBI spokesperson told the AFP news agency that it was not an FBI operation, saying the order had been issued at the request of Italian and Swiss authorities.
The seizure has sparked off protests from journalist groups.
"We have witnessed an intolerable and intrusive international police operation against a network specialising in independent journalism," said Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists.
"The way this has been done smacks more of intimidation of legitimate journalistic inquiry than crime-busting."
The UK site of Indymedia is back up and running but several of the other 20 sites affected are still offline.
In the US, the civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said it was working with Indymedia over how to react to the seizures.
"The constitution does not permit the government unilaterally to cut off the speech of an independent media outlet, especially without providing a reason or even allowing Indymedia the information necessary to contest the seizure," said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl.
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Not shown in base theaters, Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11" arrives on DVD
By Nancy Montgomery,
Stars and Stripes Pacific edition,
Sunday, October 10, 2004
http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=24811
YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan - The highest-grossing documentary in movie history, winner at the Cannes Film Festival, hailed in Boston but banned in Kuwait, "Fahrenheit 9/11" never made it to Yokosuka Naval Base theaters - or to any movie theater located on a military base.
But the DVD version of Michael Moore's cinematic indictment of the current commander-in-chief and his administration came in the doors at the base video store this week - and went right out again.
Employees of the store, operated by Softland Video, said all 22 copies it received Tuesday were checked out that day, and when they came back, they went out again. The movie was available for home viewing last week at most overseas military bases.
Francis Anglada, a retired petty officer first class who now works for Morale, Welfare and Recreation, got the last one in stock on Thursday around 11:30 a.m. He'd been waiting a long time to see it, and said it was a "scandal" that it never showed in base theaters.
"If you look at all the evidence," Anglada said, "there's no reason they couldn't have gotten it in time."
Whether military base theaters would show the documentary, which lambastes President Bush and his administration for almost all their policies after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States, was in question for some time.
In June, when the movie came out in theaters, AAFES, the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, said it was pursuing prints, and that it eschewed politics when choosing movies, basing decisions only on profits and popularity.
"If 'Fahrenheit 9/11' proves popular in the private sector and prints are available, the movie will be shown," AAFES spokesman Judd Anstey said in June.
By the end of July, AAFES said it was trying to get the film for overseas bases but there weren't enough prints to go around.
But a spokesman for the Fellowship Adventure Group, formed to distribute Moore's film in conjunction with Lions Gate Films and IFC Films, said it told AAFES in mid-July that prints of "Fahrenheit 9/11" would be available, and that "from that point on, they were unresponsive."
In August, AAFES said it was not going to show the film. Anstey said then that the movie's Oct. 5 DVD release didn't give AAFES enough time to draw sufficient audiences to the theaters.
Those responsible for films shown on naval bases said in July that a decision whether to air the movie was "under review."
"I will contact you when that decision has been made," said Ingrid Mueller of the Navy MWR Communications Group in an e-mail to Stars and Stripes. No further communication was made.
A Department of Defense civilian in Naples who corresponded via e-mail in June with a decision-maker at the Navy Motion Picture Service in Tennessee had no better luck. When the civilian asked if the movie would play at overseas bases, the NMPS official said no decision had been made. "Why do you have such an interest in this movie?" the NMPS official asked, according to an e-mail. The civilian agreed to share his correspondence with Stars and Stripes but asked that his name not be used.
"I think it's reprehensible they'd practice this kind of censorship," the DOD civilian said.
Last month, the official again told the civilian no decision had been made, adding, "There's not a great deal of 'wanna see' on the part of our customers - actually you seem to be the most interested party. Our survey of the field is informal - asking ships, base theater managers and CO's if they have had requests," the official's e-mail said.
Anglada, getting his copy on Thursday, said that view didn't seem grounded in reality, based on the huge success of the movie in the United States.
"The population on the base reflects the population you have stateside," he said.
Some overseas military members did see "Fahrenheit 9/11" on the big screen, however. It played in Japan - where Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said he did not plan to see it - and in South Korea as well as in European cities. Some servicemembers saw it when they went home on leave.
According to a review in the New York Times, the movie mixes "sober outrage with mischievous humor ... blithely trampling the boundary between documentary and demagoguery, Mr. Moore takes wholesale aim at the Bush administration, whose tenure has been distinguished, in his view, by unparalleled and unmitigated arrogance, mendacity and incompetence."
Although even the film's admirers have pointed out inaccuracies - and when it showed in France many theaters had a list of those problems with the movie for patrons' review - it's been seen by many as a politically galvanizing force.
"It almost made me want to throw my ID away," said one petty officer third class who saw the movie while he was home on leave in Florida. "It shows how Bush reacted (when he was told about the 9/11 attacks). He just keeps reading. It shows how he tries to cut the veterans' benefits. It shows they don't care about us."
The sailor's words, spoken in the Yokosuka video store, got the attention of Petty Officer 2nd Class Mark Dutton. Dutton had just said he didn't know much about the movie and that he'd rather see "Van Helsing" or "Troy," also new releases. But after hearing his fellow sailor's recommendation, Dutton changed his mind.
"I want to see it now. In fact, I might buy it," Dutton said. "Anything that makes the government look bad, they don't want us to see."
Capt. King Dietrich, the base commander, said he'd probably rent it too, even though he expects "parts of it" to irritate him.
Southland Video representative Merion Elliott said no renters so far had offered an opinion on the film, although when she asked one man what he thought, he called it "interesting."
Elliott said Southland was interested to see how well the movie did as a DVD rental and thought it might be popular because so many on the bases had not seen it.
According to a Reuters report, the movie sold about 2 million DVD and VHS units on its first day in release, making it the most successful documentary ever released on home video.
Even retired Army Gen. Tommy Franks had something to say about the film. In August, while lamenting the apparent extremes of political thought in the country and the resulting polarization, he said, "We're at a point in our country where it's either all about 'Fahrenheit 9/11' or it's all about ultra-conservatism.
"My experience in this grand democracy," Franks said, "has been that life in America is somewhere between those two poles, and so I try to stay away from the hyperbolic in this thing - that 'Well, Michael Moore had it all right' or 'He was a lyin', cheatin', no good son of a gun.' I mean, there's fact and there's fiction involved in that particular piece, just like there's fact and there's fiction in the other extreme ... "
Patrick Dickson contributed to this report.
-------- us politics
NEWS ANALYSIS: FOREIGN POLICY
A Doctrine Under Pressure: Pre-emption Is Redefined
October 11, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/politics/11preempt.html?pagewanted=all
CRAWFORD, Tex., Oct. 10 - Under pressure to explain anew his decision to invade Iraq in light of a damaging report from the C.I.A.'s top weapons inspector, President Bush appears to be quietly redefining one of the signature philosophies of his administration - his doctrine of pre-emptive military action.
Traditionally, pre-empting an enemy is all about urgency, striking before the enemy strikes. In the prelude to the invasion in March of last year, Mr. Bush and his aides stopping short of saying Saddam Hussein posed an "imminent" threat. Still, they used urgent-sounding language at every turn to explain why they could not afford to wait for inspectors to complete their work, or for the United Nations Security Council to come to a consensus on authorizing military action. "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," he said in a speech delivered Oct. 7, 2002.
But the C.I.A. report released last week, written by Charles A. Duelfer, described the evidence as anything but clear and the peril as far from urgent. Mr. Hussein's military power began waning after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the report concluded. While Mr. Hussein most probably wanted to rebuild his illicit weapons, there is no evidence he had started by the time Mr. Bush was delivering that speech.
So over the last five days, with some subtle changes of language and a new previously undiscussed justification for the war, Mr. Bush appears to have expanded the conditions for a pre-emptive military strike. He no longer talks about urgency. Instead, for the first time, he has begun to argue that a military invasion is justified if an opponent is seeking to avoid United Nations sanctions - "gaming the system" in his words.
"We did not find the stockpiles we thought were there," Mr. Bush told supporters in Waterloo, Iowa, on Saturday. "But I want you to remember what the Duelfer report said. It said that Saddam Hussein was gaming the oil-for-food program to get rid of sanctions. And why? Because he had the capability and knowledge to rebuild his weapon programs. And the great danger we face in the world today is that a terrorist organization could end up with weapons of mass destruction."
Then, returning to the line he has used in his debates with Senator John Kerry, and one that always elicits applause, he added: "Knowing what I know today, I would have made the same decision. The world is safer with Saddam in a prison cell."
Taken at face value, Mr. Bush appears to be saying that under his new standard, a country merely has to be thinking about developing illicit weapons at some time. "He's saying intent is enough," said Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor who under the Clinton administration headed the National Intelligence Council, the group that assesses for the president when countries have trespassed that hard-to-define line.
"The classical definition for pre-emption was 'imminent threat,' " Mr. Nye said. Then, with the development of the president's "National Security Policy of the United States," that moved to something less than imminent, because, as Mr. Bush argued, it is often hard to know when a country is about to attack. Now, said Mr. Nye, "the Duelfer report pushed him into a box where capability is not the standard, but merely intention."
Of course, discerning changes of policy in the heat of a political campaign is always risky. Candidates will often push a policy or a doctrine to the breaking point to differentiate themselves from their opponents. So as the campaign has come down to its last three weeks, Mr. Bush has torqued his stump speech to make it clear that in a post-Sept. 11 world, he will strike quickly, while Mr. Kerry hesitates, negotiates or creates a "global test" for action.
The "global test" phrase comes from a statement by Mr. Kerry in the first presidential debate that Mr. Bush now regularly throws back at him. "Now he says he wants a global test before we take action to defend our security," Mr. Bush said on Saturday in Chanhassen, Minn., waiting for the crowd to yell "Boo!"
When the audience obliged, he added that "The problem is that the senator can never pass his own test," going on to list military action that Mr. Kerry has opposed, including in the Persian Gulf war.
In fact, Mr. Kerry has not done much to define when he would take pre-emptive action. He has said he would reserve the right, and criticized Mr. Bush for making pre-emption a doctrine. In the second debate on Friday, Mr. Kerry made it clear that Iraq did not meet his test: "Gut-check time," he said. "Was this really going to war as a last resort?"
But when the subject turned to Iran, Mr. Kerry tried to sound more hard-line than Mr. Bush, who he said had ignored nuclear developments in both Iran and North Korea. "If we have to get tough with Iran, believe me, we will get tough," he said, without describing how close he would let the country get to a nuclear weapon before acting. Mr. Bush, in an interview with The New York Times in August, declined to draw that line, either.
The result is that America's allies - and perhaps its voters - are more confused than ever about what will drive Washington to war. To listen to Mr. Bush in the last few days, a country that merely desires to obtain the world's worst weapons is a potential target - but he has clearly avoided threatening Iran and North Korea, the two nations racing fastest toward such weapons. To listen to Mr. Kerry, Iraq's intentions to rebuild its arsenal some day clearly did not meet the Kerry test: Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, he said the other day, "may well be the last two people on the planet who won't face the truth about Iraq."
It may be that the election must pass before Washington sends a clear signal. "If I had a piece of advice for America's allies," a senior foreign policy adviser to Mr. Bush said a few weeks ago, "it's this: Turn your television sets off until this is all over."
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GOP Hopeful Raises War Doubts
Coors Wonders If Congress Would Still Authorize Iraq Action
By T.R. Reid
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 11, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22737-2004Oct10.html
The Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Colorado suggested yesterday that Congress would not have voted to authorize a war in Iraq if the members had known "what we know today." GOP candidate Pete Coors went on to say that, "based on weapons of mass destruction," the United States should be more concerned about Iran and North Korea than Iraq.
Coors, who will host President Bush at a large fundraiser today in Denver, has described himself as a "strong backer of the war on terror." But discussing the war yesterday on NBC's "Meet the Press," the brewery executive raised doubts about whether Congress would still give Bush the authority to wage war in Iraq, given the change in intelligence assessments since the congressional vote in 2002.
"I suspect that, given what we know today, there would be a much different outcome than we had a couple of years ago," Coors said.
Despite repeated questions from host Tim Russert, Coors declined to say whether he would vote for a war in Iraq, based on current intelligence. "I don't think it's appropriate today to second-guess what decision would be made today, based on the information we have," he explained.
"We can say weapons of mass destruction, no weapons of mass destruction," Coors said. "Clearly, we should be more worried today, actually, about Iran and North Dakota than we are -- that is, North Korea -- than we are about Iraq, based on weapons of mass destruction."
Seated next to Coors, the Democratic candidate for the Senate seat, state Attorney General Ken Salazar, said he would vote today for a resolution giving the president authority to act in Iraq. But Salazar criticized Bush's management of the war.
"We have a mess on our hands," Salazar said, citing the comments of three Republican senators who have warned recently that the war is going badly. "What we ought to be doing is learning from the mistakes that have been made and also looking forward to what we ought to do in Iraq to try to stabilize the country."
Salazar and Coors are engaged in one of the tightest Senate races this fall, and one that offers Democrats the chance to pick up a seat that had been considered safely Republican.
The popular incumbent, Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, was considered a sure bet for reelection until last spring. Then Campbell got snarled in a federal investigation of financial kickbacks in his office. Citing health problems, he dropped out of the race.
Salazar, who has had bipartisan support in previous Colorado elections, appears to hold a slim lead in the contest, based on recent polls. But Coors, whose family-owned brewery is a point of pride for Coloradans, enjoys universal name recognition and has proved to be an engaging campaigner.
A recurring problem for Coors is he has sided with the conservative wing of his party in Colorado in opposing marital and adoption rights for gay couples, while the company that bears his name is promoting itself energetically among gay consumers.
Russert raised the issue yesterday. "Why the conflict between the marketing your company does," he asked, "and these [political] positions, which are opposed to those taken by the gay community?"
Coors replied that "everyone in this country should be valued for what they are, and I believe that's the way we recognize it at our company."
Salazar said the difference between Coors, the brewer, and Coors, the candidate, "shows the two faces of Pete Coors."
Both candidates appeared to stumble when Russert asked them to explain how they would deal with the federal budget deficit.
Challenged to explain his plan to continue cutting taxes and still balance the budget, Coors said the tax cuts would create jobs, stimulate the economy and increase federal revenue.
That standard answer has caused Coors problems in his home state, however, because his company has not increased employment despite four tax cuts under the Bush administration.
Salazar said he would seek to end "fiscal recklessness in Washington" and cited proposals to cut federal spending on prescription drugs and other expenses.
But Salazar also said he favors further tax cuts for the middle class.
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Why I will vote for John Kerry for President
The Union Leader
By JOHN EISENHOWER
October 11, 2004
http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showa.html?article=44657
EDITORS NOTE: This commentary was originally published Sept. 9, 2004.
THE Presidential election to be held this coming Nov. 2 will be one of extraordinary importance to the future of our nation. The outcome will determine whether this country will continue on the same path it has followed for the last 31/2 years or whether it will return to a set of core domestic and foreign policy values that have been at the heart of what has made this country great.
Now more than ever, we voters will have to make cool judgments, unencumbered by habits of the past. Experts tell us that we tend to vote as our parents did or as we "always have." We remained loyal to party labels. We cannot afford that luxury in the election of 2004. There are times when we must break with the past, and I believe this is one of them.
As son of a Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, it is automatically expected by many that I am a Republican. For 50 years, through the election of 2000, I was. With the current administration's decision to invade Iraq unilaterally, however, I changed my voter registration to independent, and barring some utterly unforeseen development, I intend to vote for the Democratic Presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry.
The fact is that today's "Republican" Party is one with which I am totally unfamiliar. To me, the word "Republican" has always been synonymous with the word "responsibility," which has meant limiting our governmental obligations to those we can afford in human and financial terms. Today's whopping budget deficit of some $440 billion does not meet that criterion.
Responsibility used to be observed in foreign affairs. That has meant respect for others. America, though recognized as the leader of the community of nations, has always acted as a part of it, not as a maverick separate from that community and at times insulting towards it. Leadership involves setting a direction and building consensus, not viewing other countries as practically devoid of significance. Recent developments indicate that the current Republican Party leadership has confused confident leadership with hubris and arrogance.
In the Middle East crisis of 1991, President George H.W. Bush marshaled world opinion through the United Nations before employing military force to free Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Through negotiation he arranged for the action to be financed by all the industrialized nations, not just the United States. When Kuwait had been freed, President George H. W. Bush stayed within the United Nations mandate, aware of the dangers of occupying an entire nation.
Today many people are rightly concerned about our precious individual freedoms, our privacy, the basis of our democracy. Of course we must fight terrorism, but have we irresponsibly gone overboard in doing so? I wonder. In 1960, President Eisenhower told the Republican convention, "If ever we put any other value above (our) liberty, and above principle, we shall lose both." I would appreciate hearing such warnings from the Republican Party of today.
The Republican Party I used to know placed heavy emphasis on fiscal responsibility, which included balancing the budget whenever the state of the economy allowed it to do so. The Eisenhower administration accomplished that difficult task three times during its eight years in office. It did not attain that remarkable achievement by cutting taxes for the rich. Republicans disliked taxes, of course, but the party accepted them as a necessary means of keep the nation's financial structure sound.
The Republicans used to be deeply concerned for the middle class and small business. Today's Republican leadership, while not solely accountable for the loss of American jobs, encourages it with its tax code and heads us in the direction of a society of very rich and very poor.
Sen. Kerry, in whom I am willing to place my trust, has demonstrated that he is courageous, sober, competent, and concerned with fighting the dangers associated with the widening socio-economic gap in this country. I will vote for him enthusiastically.
I celebrate, along with other Americans, the diversity of opinion in this country. But let it be based on careful thought. I urge everyone, Republicans and Democrats alike, to avoid voting for a ticket merely because it carries the label of the party of one's parents or of our own ingrained habits.
John Eisenhower, son of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, served on the White House staff between October 1958 and the end of the Eisenhower administration. From 1961 to 1964 he assisted his father in writing "The White House Years," his Presidential memoirs. He served as American ambassador to Belgium between 1969 and 1971. He is the author of nine books, largely on military subjects.
-------- ENERGY
-------- energy
Text of Prepared Remarks by Sen. John Kerry, Regarding Energy Independence
Mon Oct 11, 2004
US Newswire
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=669&ncid=669&e=1&u=/usnw/20041011/pl_usnw/text_of_prepared_remarks_by_sen__john_kerry__regarding_energy_independence231_xml
To: National Desk, Political Reporter
Contact: Allison Dobson of Kerry-Edwards 2004, 202-464-2800;
Web: http://www.johnkerry.com
SANTA FE, N.M., - Following is a text of remarks as prepared for delivery by Sen. John Kerry, regarding energy independence:
Thank you, Governor Richardson for that great introduction. America may be in the grips of an energy crisis, but with Governor Richardson at the helm, there is no shortage of energy or enthusiasm here in New Mexico.
Before we begin, let me say a few words about the loss of a man who was truly America's hero my friend, Christopher Reeve. Teresa and I were deeply saddened to learn of his death, and we send our prayers to his loving wife Dana, his children, and his entire family. Chris was an inspiration to all of us. Without leaving his wheelchair, he was able to make great strides toward a cure for conditions like his. His tireless efforts will always be remembered and honored and in part because of his work, millions will one day walk again. As Chris once said, "So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable." I know that one day we will realize Chris' inevitable dream.
For 60 years, New Mexico has been at the leading edge of change and innovation. In a very real sense, we won World War II right here in this state. In the summer of 1942, with the scars of Pearl Harbor still fresh, Americans were gearing up for battle. Yes, planes and tanks had to be built at a record pace, strategies conceived, battles planned, and young Americans dispatched to frontlines around the globe. But Franklin Roosevelt knew that we needed something more. He knew we had to marshal America's most brilliant minds and best technology. The initiative he created was called the Manhattan Project, and it was headquartered at Los Alamos.
Today, we have an equally important challenge: to make America energy independent in the 21st century. Only then can we grow our economy as we should, protect our environment as we must, and keep our country as safe as it can be.
To do this, we need a president who will lead us there. We need a president who believes in America's great potential and who believes that the middle class is America's greatest strength. We need a president who can see the problems facing America, and who will make the right choices to solve them.
But in the past four years, in nearly every decision he's made, George W. Bush has chosen the powerful and well-connected over middle class Americans.
The only people George Bush's policies are working for are the people he's chosen to help. They're working for drug companies. They're working for HMOs. And they're certainly working for the big oil companies.
The results are clear: 1.6 million private sector jobs have been lost. The cost of health care is up 64 percent. College tuition is up more than 35 percent. And the typical family is making $1,500 less each year -- while the cost of nearly everything continues to rise.
Right now, oil prices are at an all-time high, with no end in sight. In most parts of the country, a gallon of gas costs nearly $2 up 30 percent since George Bush took office. In the last four years, the cost of heating the average home with heating oil has gone up 91 percent. And high energy costs have pushed up prices across the board -- from the food you put on your table to the clothes your children wear.
A thirty percent increase in gas prices means a lot more profit for this President's friends in the oil industry. But for most middle class Americans, the Bush gas tax is a tax increase they can't afford. The funny thing is, George Bush is trying to scare you into thinking that I'm going to raise your taxes. But to borrow a saying, when it comes to George Bush's record on gas prices, he can run but he can't hide. Facts are stubborn things, Mr. President. Four years ago, when he was running for president, George Bush said, "What I think the president ought to do is get on the phone with the OPEC cartel and say, we expect you to open your spigots!" Today, four years later, with gas prices at record levels, we're still waiting for George Bush to make that phone call! The spigot is nearly shut his energy policy has failed -- and middle class families pay the price every time they fill up the gas tank.
Instead of standing up for you, George Bush has chosen secret meetings with the energy industry behind closed doors in the White House, where they can make their case, but there's no one there to make yours. And then the president when all the way to the Supreme Court to protect the identity of his secret energy advisors.
And after four years of empty rhetoric and inaction, the Republican-controlled Congress is ending another session without passing a good energy bill for America. At the end of the day, George Bush just couldn't get it done. Just like with jobs, health care, and education, the President has more excuses than results.
Year after year, President Bush has proposed budgets that shortchange investments in clean, renewable, domestic sources of energy -- like wind, solar, and biomass. He ignores energy conservation. When it comes to developing a real energy policy, George Bush has run out of gas.
Just like on every other issue, they'll tell you they have an energy plan. But as usual, it's a plan that warms the hearts of their powerful friends and leaves you out in the cold.
Their plan includes tax breaks totaling nearly $15 billion for George Bush's friends in the oil and gas industries. The president's plan, not surprisingly, provides sweetheart deals for Halliburton including an exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act so they can do more drilling. It's no wonder Senator John McCain has called the Bush bill the "No lobbyist left behind act."
What's worse, the Administration's own economists have found that their energy plan won't reduce gas prices or reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. In fact, the Bush energy policy hurts other businesses and slows economic growth. For example, the airline industry will spend an extra $11.4 billion on fuel this year. Truckers will spend an additional $15.6 billion. And farmers will spend an additional $2.8 billion. Even the Chairman of the President Council of Economic Advisors admitted recently, "High energy prices are now a drag on the economy."
Higher gas prices have cost the American consumer $34 billion since George Bush took office. But guess who's profiting from all this? That's right -- the people who wrote the energy plan in the first place the big oil companies. The money you're paying at the pump is going directly from your wallets straight into the hands of oil companies and oil producers. Over the past three years, the big three oil companies have earned a record $38.6 billion in profits.
The Bush plan also threatens the environment by exempting all oil and gas drilling sites from parts of the Clean Water Act. It blocks efforts by 28 states to get oil companies to clean up polluted drinking water and it saddles taxpayers with an $8 billion cleanup bill. And it opens sensitive wildlife habitats like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Otero Mesa here in your backyard to big oil and gas drillers.
Worst of all, George Bush's plan does nothing to reduce our dangerous dependence on foreign oil.
Today, we are importing 2.5 million barrels of oil from the Middle East every single day. In the last four years, the amount of foreign oil we consume has risen to sixty-one percent. When they went to war, this Administration's energy experts projected that oil would be as low as $28 a barrel today. Last week, gas prices hit a record $53 a barrel and one big reason is because of this president's gross mismanagement of the war in Iraq.
As president, I have a real energy plan to harness the full force of America's technology and make this nation independent of Middle East oil in ten years. My plan will increase fuel efficiency, lower energy prices, produce alternative and renewable sources of energy, and create new jobs here at home. I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation, not the Saudi Royal family.
My five-point plan will make America safer, stronger and more secure.
First, as President, I will speed up investment in technologies that save energy and create alternative fuels. Through a new Energy Security and Conservation Trust Fund, Americans will have a guaranteed commitment to reducing our dependence on oil. We only have three percent of the world's oil reserves. There is no way for us to drill our way out of this crisis. We have to invent our way out of it. American creativity has to drive the process and new American jobs, good jobs here at home, will be our reward.
Today, the funding for our energy security is sporadic, uncertain, and insufficient. We may not have the greatest oil reserves on Earth, but we do have great resources of intellect and invention to find new fuels and to conserve and optimize traditional ones. So the trust fund I propose will take existing royalties that corporations now pay for the right to drill on public lands and dedicate that money to Research and Development so that we can have cleaner and more abundant energy sources.
We know that the road to more energy independence depends on making our cars and trucks more energy efficient. One out of every seven barrels of oil in the world is consumed on America's highways. That's why my plan contains economic incentives to build the energy-efficient cars, trucks, SUVs, and buses of the future. And I am determined that by the year 2020, 20 percent of America's energy will come from domestically produced alternative fuels like ethanol.
Second, my plan reduces energy bills for American consumers. Under the Bush Administration, many Americans will be spending $500 more this winter to heat their homes. My plan will rein in out-of-control gas prices for families, farmers and businesses by restoring American leadership abroad, simplifying gasoline rules, deploying our Strategic Petroleum Reserve when appropriate, ensuring fair competition in the energy marketplace and helping industry, schools and homes increase energy efficiency and cut their energy bills. To begin with, my administration will enact efficiency standards to cut the federal energy bill by 20 percent -- saving $2 billion a year. We will help states, municipalities, businesses, and consumers do the same.
Third, we will diversify sources of energy. For four years, this administration has sat by while our dependence on foreign oil has increased. My plan will focus on finding new sources of energy. We will make clean coal a real part of our energy future. We will ensure that by the year 2020, twenty percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources like wind and solar. We will seek new sources of oil in non-OPEC countries. We will increase the supply of natural gas by developing domestic natural gas sources that are already open for leasing and drilling. And we will enhance our ability to move natural gas from Alaska and Canada.
Fourth, our energy grid is vulnerable; it can and must be strengthened. The August 14, 2003 blackout resulted in the loss of electricity for more than 50 million people and cost our economy $6 billion. The footprint of the blackout on both sides of the US-Canadian border included great urban areas that are heavily industrialized and important financial centers. More than a year after the August 14th blackout, George Bush hasn't taken any action to ensure that the lights don't go out again. We will.
Fifth, we will create 500,000 new clean energy jobs in America by providing incentives to invest in clean energy technologies and encourage job creation. Here in New Mexico, in places like the new wind farm in Quay County, you've seen how investments in renewable energy protect the environment while they also produce new jobs.
America once led the world in the production of clean energy products and the payrolls that go with them. We have to do it again whether it's in wind or biomass, solar or clean coal.
My friends, sixty years after the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Sandia and all our national laboratories continue to push the boundaries of knowledge. You can continue to strengthen our national security if we invest in your capacity to safeguard our environment and make America independent of Mideast oil. You understand that what's good for the earth is good for the people, good for our economy and good for a safer and stronger America. And you are leading with a uniquely American question: What if?
So much promise stretches before us. America needs to climb the next mountain, look to the next horizon, and ask: What if?
For the sake of our childrenfor the sake of our security for the sake of our economy for the sake of our environment we must meet that challenge and make America energy independent of Mideast oil.
What if we do that? I know we can. We just have to believe in ourselves. Let's start making it happen twenty-two days from now! Paid for by Kerry-Edwards 2004, Inc.
http://www.usnewswire.com/
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Mount St. Helens Releases New Column of Steam From Crater
Associated Press
Monday, October 11, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22659-2004Oct10.html
MOUNT ST. HELENS, Wash., Oct. 10 -- Mount St. Helens vented a new column of steam Sunday, a lazy plume that rose out of the crater of the snow-dusted volcano.
The billow of steam rose from an area where a large upwelling or bulge of rock has been growing on the dome-shaped formation of rock in the crater. The plume rose several hundred feet above the 8,364-foot volcano, and light wind slowly blew it toward the south and southeast.
The venting reminded scientists of the volcano's activity 20 years ago, when it built the dome after its catastrophic 1980 eruption.
"It's a view . . . reminiscent of the years in the 1980s during dome building and a few years after when the system was hot and water was being heated and vapor was rising and steam clouds were forming," said Willie Scott, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
The plume appeared to be mostly steam, and scientists said any volcanic ash probably was from eruptions in the 1980s.
The venting probably was produced by a combination of rain water percolating down to hot rocks and volcanic gas coming from deeper levels, scientists said.
The steam emission followed an increase in earthquake activity over the previous two days, with quakes of magnitude 2.4 occurring every two minutes until Sunday, when the vibrations were more frequent but weakened to magnitude 1 or less.
"What has been peculiar about these earthquakes is that there seems to be a disproportionate number of them that are uniform in size," said seismologist Tony Qamar at the University of Washington's seismic lab in Seattle.
It indicates that pressure in the system is very uniform, which may suggest magma is constantly moving upward, he said. "The pressure will build up, the rock will break, and then you'll get an earthquake," Qamar said.
"Exactly where the magma is, since we don't have visuals, we just can't say," said Jeff Wynn, the U.S. Geological Survey's chief scientist for volcano hazards at Vancouver.
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Presidential Debaters Clash on Environment
October 11, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-11-04.asp
The response of President George W. Bush to a debate question about his environmental record was met with disbelief by his challenger, the Democratic nominee Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts at the second of three presidential debates Friday night in St. Louis.
In keeping with the Town Hall meeting format for the debate, the environmental question was put by audience member James Hubb, who asked, "Mr. President, how would you rate yourself as an environmentalist? What specifically has your administration done to improve the condition of our nation's air and water supply?"
The President said his administration has proposals on the table to reduce pollution from off-road diesel engines, increase the wetlands, fix inner city brownfields, and "a Clear Skies Initiative to reduce sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury by 70 percent."
President George W. Bush outlines his environmental position at the second of three presidential debates October 8 in St. Louis. (Photos courtesy Commission on Presidential Debates) "Over time is technology is going to change the way we live for the good for the environment," said the President. "That's why I proposed a hydrogen automobile - hydrogen-generated automobile. We're spending $1 billion to come up with the technologies to do that."
"That's why I'm a big proponent of clean coal technology, to make sure we can use coal but in a clean way," he said. "I guess you'd say I'm a good steward of the land."
"The quality of the air's cleaner since I've been the President. Fewer water complaints since I've been the President. More land being restored since I've been the President," Bush said.
"Boy, to listen to that," exclaimed Kerry. "The President, I don't think, is living in a world of reality with respect to the environment."
"When it comes to the issue of the environment, this is one of the worst administrations in modern history," Kerry charged. "The Clear Skies bill that he just talked about, it's one of those Orwellian names you pull out of the sky, slap it onto something, like 'No Child Left Behind' but you leave millions of children behind. Here they're leaving the skies and the environment behind."
"If they just left the Clean Air Act all alone the way it is today, no change, the air would be cleaner that it is if you pass the Clear Skies act. We're going backwards," Kerry said.
"They're going backwards on the definition for wetlands. They're going backwards on the water quality," said Kerry.
Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for President, called the Bush administration the worst ever for the environment. "They pulled out of the global warming [agreement], declared it dead, didn't even accept the science," Kerry challenged. "I'm going to be a President who believes in science."
The leaders of Environment2004, a Democratic environmental advocacy organization, which could be expected to back Kerry's position, does so because, they say, the President's assertioins contained "numerous inaccuracies" and amounted to a "gross misrepresentation of the President's real record."
The group released a detailed comparison of Bush's representation of his record during the debate compared with what has actually taken place. Environment2004 counted more than 350 actions of past administrations to protect the environment that have been rolled back by the Bush administration, and they accuse the President of "abandoning the Republican party's conservationist roots dating back to Teddy Roosevelt."
President Bush said, "Off-road diesel engines - we have reached an agreement to reduce pollution from off-road diesel engines by 90 percent."
Environment2004 points out that the decision the president was referring to was originally proposed under the Clinton administration.
Then the President said, "I've got a plan to increase the wetlands by three million [acres]."
Environment2004 reminds voters that In October, 2001, President Bush's administration reversed the policy his father, President George H.W. Bush called "no net loss" of wetlands. This means that for every acre of wetlands destroyed by development, at least one more acre would be created.
Yet in 2003, the Bush administration announced its intent to eliminate Clean Water Act protections for isolated waters that are not connected to a navigable waterway, "threatening the ecological health of 20 million acres of wetlands, and rivers and steams nationwide that would lose protection of their headwaters," Environment2004 says.
Following a meeting with hunters and anglers groups, Bush announced that he would reinstate the no net loss of wetlands policy, yet he has not withdrawn the new rule to eliminate wetlands protections. His administration has weakened the environmental standards for general permits to fill wetlands and streams, Environment2004 says.
On the Clear Skies Initiative, Environment2004 says the proposal "would allow five times as much mercury into the environment from dirty coal-burning power plants as the current Clean Air Act would allow for at least 10 years longer, through the year 2018 - 26 tons a year versus five tons - and three times as much mercury after that - 15 tons a year versus five tons."
Even Republicans agree with Environment2004's assessment of George w. Bush's environmental record as President. In an Op-Ed piece in the New Hampshire newspaper, the "Concord Monitor," published on September 23, 2004, two prominent Republicans criticized the President's "sorry environmental record."
Former EPA Administrator Russell Train accepts the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the current President's father, President George H.W. Bush. He also served as the first chairman of the President's Council on Environmental Quality, as under secretary of the Interior, and as chairman of the World Wildlife Fund. (Photo courtesy Medal of Freedom) Russell Train was the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Rick Russman is on the board of the National Environmental Trust and chairs the Granite State Conservation Voters Alliance. He was a New Hampshire state senator for 10 years and served as chairman of the Senate Environmental Committee. Both are long-time members of REP America, the grassroots Republican organization for environmental protection.
"Except in a few instances," they write, "the environmental policies of the Bush administration are a disgrace."
"The administration's policies to promote energy, mining and timber interests with little regard for the interests of common citizens represent a throwback to an era of exploitation," write Train and Russman. "The administration's assault on the environment has increased pollution and health threats in New Hampshire, according to a report by Environment2004."
"The administration weakened the Clean Air Act to allow aging power plants to continue spewing sulfur, mercury and other contaminants into the skies," write Train and Russman. "These end up in New Hampshire's air and waters. This pollution from Midwestern power plants and other sources forms smog that threatens the 65,000 New Hampshire residents who suffer from asthma. It falls as acid rain that damages New Hampshire's forests and waters."
"Mercury pollution has forced New Hampshire to establish a fish consumption advisory that covers all its lakes and rivers. Infants, children, pregnant women and women of child-bearing age are particularly vulnerable to mercury. Mercury affects a child's ability to learn, most notably impairing memory, attention and fine motor function," Train and Russman write.
On Friday night during the debate, President Bush responded to the environmental question by saying, "We proposed and passed a Healthy Forest Bill, which was essential to working with, particularly in Western states, to make sure that our forests were protected."
"What happens in those forests because of lousy federal policy, is they grow to be, they, they are, they're not harvested," he stammered. "They're not taken care of. And as a result, they're like tinderboxes. And over the last summers, I've flown over there. And so this is a reasonable policy to protect old stands of trees and at the same time make sure our forests aren't vulnerable to the forest fires that have destroyed acres after acres in the West."
But in reality, Environment2004 says, "The Bush administration has launched a three-pronged attack on our National Forests for the benefit of timber companies that engage in unsustainable logging practices which cannot support long term jobs."
1. It has dismantled the Roadless Rule, which was to protect 58.5 million acres of America's last remaining wild, but unprotected National Forests from logging and road building.
2. It has eliminated protection for old growth-dependent species and salmon in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest, making it easier for logging to take place there.
3. Its "misleadingly named Healthy Forest Initiative" threatens the national forests by reducing the level of environmental analysis and public participation required for logging projects on 20 million acres. In fact this initiative does little to protect communities from wildfires, since it allows logging to continue targeting the largest, most valuable trees.
Experts say logging can increase the intensity and frequency of forest fires because logging debris is highly flammable, logging roads allow people into forests where arson or accident is a frequent cause of fires, and logging dries out forests, Environment2004 points out as have many environmental and forest conservation groups.
During Friday night's debate, the President defended his much criticized decision not to send the Kyoto climate protocol to the U.S. Senate for ratification. Signed under the Clinton administration, the agreement limits the emission of greenhouse gases linked to global warming by industrialized countries.
The United States is the world's biggest greenhouse gas polluter, but the President defended his position, saying, "Well, had we joined the Kyoto treaty, which I guess he's referring to, it would have cost America a lot of jobs."
"It's one of these deals where, in order to be popular in the halls of Europe, you sign a treaty. But I thought it would cost a lot - I think there's a better way to do it."
Kerry replied by saying, "The fact is that the Kyoto treaty was flawed. I was in Kyoto, and I was part of that. I know what happened. But this president didn't try to fix it. He just declared it dead, ladies and gentlemen, and we walked away from the work of 160 nations over 10 years."
That is why it is that people in some parts of the world do not like the United States, Kerry said. "The president's done nothing to try to fix it. I will."
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) has given the Bush administration a failing grade on environmental performance.
"Deceptively named initiatives such as 'Healthy Forests' and 'Clear Skies,' mask the Bush administration's agenda of allowing industry to increase their profits at the expense of environmental protection and public health, the LCV said. "In particular, the Bush administration has attacked, weakened or undermined laws providing clean air, clean water, and toxic waste cleanups."
The third and final presidential debate is scheduled for Wednesday, October 13 at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. It will cover domestic policy, so it is possible that the environment will again be a topic of debate.
-------- genetics
Christopher Reeve, 'Superman' and Crusader for Stem Cells, Dies
October 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/arts/11WIRE-REEVE.html?ei=5094&en=d4ce63e266ccefef&hp=&ex=1097553600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=
COUNT KISCO, N.Y. -- Actor Christopher Reeve, who soared through the air and leapt tall buildings as "Superman," turned personal tragedy into a public crusade, becoming the nation's most recognizable spokesman for spinal cord research -- from a wheelchair.
Reeve went into cardiac arrest Saturday at his Pound Ridge home, then fell into a coma and died Sunday at a hospital surrounded by his family, his publicist said. He was 52.
His advocacy for stem cell research helped it emerge as a major campaign issue between President Bush and his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. His name was even mentioned by Kerry during the second presidential debate Friday evening.
Reeve, left paralyzed from the neck down after a riding accident and who pushed for funding to help others like himself, was hospitalized the following day. In the last week Reeve had developed a serious systemic infection from a pressure wound, a common complication for people living with paralysis.
Dana Reeve, Christopher's wife, thanked her husband's personal staff of nurses and aides, "as well as the millions of fans from around the world who have supported and loved my husband over the years."
Reeve's life changed completely after he broke his neck in May 1995 when he was thrown from his horse during an equestrian competition in Culpeper, Va.
Enduring months of therapy to allow him to breathe for longer and longer periods without a respirator, Reeve emerged to lobby Congress for better insurance protection against catastrophic injury and to move an Academy Award audience to tears with a call for more films about social issues.
"Hollywood needs to do more," he said in the March 1996 Oscar awards appearance. "Let's continue to take risks. Let's tackle the issues. In many ways our film community can do it better than anyone else. There is no challenge, artistic or otherwise, that we can't meet."
Dr. John McDonald treated Reeve as director of the Spinal Cord Injury Program at Washington University in St. Louis. He called Reeve "one of the most intense individuals I've ever met in my life."
"Before him there was really no hope. If you had a spinal cord injury like his there was not much that could be done, but he's changed all that, he's demonstrated that there is hope and that there are things that can be done."
He returned to directing, and even returned to acting in a 1998 production of "Rear Window," a modern update of the Hitchcock thriller about a man in a wheelchair who becomes convinced a neighbor has been murdered. Reeve won a Screen Actors Guild award for best actor.
"I was worried that only acting with my voice and my face, I might not be able to communicate effectively enough to tell the story," Reeve said. "But I was surprised to find that if I really concentrated, and just let the thoughts happen, that they would read on my face. With so many close-ups, I knew that my every thought would count."
In 2000, Reeve was able to move his index finger, and a specialized workout regimen made his legs and arms stronger. He also regained sensation in other parts of his body. He vowed to walk again.
"I refuse to allow a disability to determine how I live my life. I don't mean to be reckless, but setting a goal that seems a bit daunting actually is very helpful toward recovery," Reeve said.
Dr. Raymond Onders, who implanted electrodes in Reeve's diaphragm in a groundbreaking surgery to help him breathe, called Reeve "very compassionate."
"Even though he struggled with his own disease, he would still help patients throughout the United States and the world really with this type of problem," Onders told ABC News' "Good Morning America."
Onders said that in addition to the ulcer, Reeve "had other problems last week."
"Many different problems develop after nine years of being dependent on a ventilator, not being able to move yourself, having intestinal problems ... It just slowly builds up over the years."
Before the accident, his athletic, 6-foot-4-inch frame and love of adventure made him a natural, if largely unknown, choice for the title role in the first "Superman" movie in 1978. He insisted on performing his own stunts.
Although he reprised the role three times, Reeve often worried about being typecast as an action hero.
Though he owed his fame to it, Reeve made a concerted effort to, as he often put it, "escape the cape." He played an embittered, crippled Vietnam veteran in the 1980 Broadway play "Fifth of July," a lovestruck time-traveler in the 1980 movie "Somewhere in Time," and an aspiring playwright in the 1982 suspense thriller "Deathtrap."
More recent films included John Carpenter's "Village of the Damned," and the HBO movies "Above Suspicion" and "In the Gloaming," which he directed. Among his other film credits are "The Remains of the Day," "The Aviator," and "Morning Glory."
Reeve also made several guest appearances in the WB series "Smallville" as Dr. Swann, a scientist who gave the teenage Clark Kent insight into his future as Superman.
Reeve was born Sept. 25, 1952, in New York City, son of a novelist and a newspaper reporter. About the age of 10, he made his first stage appearance -- in Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Yeoman of the Guard" at McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.
After graduating from Cornell University in 1974, he landed a part as coldhearted bigamist Ben Harper on the television soap opera "Love of Life." He also performed frequently on stage, winning his first Broadway role as the grandson of a character played by Katharine Hepburn in "A Matter of Gravity."
Reeve's first movie role was a minor one in the submarine disaster movie "Gray Lady Down," released in 1978. "Superman" soon followed. Reeve was selected for the title role from among about 200 aspirants.
Active in many sports, Reeve owned several horses and competed in equestrian events regularly. Witnesses to the 1995 accident said Reeve's horse had cleared two of 15 fences during the jumping event and stopped abruptly at the third, flinging the actor headlong to the ground. Doctors said he fractured the top two vertebrae in his neck and damaged his spinal cord.
While filming "Superman" in London, Reeve met modeling agency co-founder Gae Exton, and the two began a relationship that lasted several years. The couple had a son and a daughter, but were never wed.
Reeve later married Dana Morosini; they had one son, Will, 12. Reeve also is survived by his mother, Barbara Johnson; his father, Franklin Reeve; his brother, Benjamin Reeve; and his two children from his relationship with Exton, Matthew, 25, and Alexandra, 21.
There was no immediate announcement of funeral plans.
A few months after the accident, he told interviewer Barbara Walters that he considered suicide in the first dark days after he was injured. But he quickly overcame such thoughts when he saw his children.
"I could see how much they needed me and wanted me... and how lucky we all are and that my brain is on straight."
-------- ACTIVISTS
War Protesters Stage Downing Street Demo
PA News
11 Oct 2004
By Laura Scott,
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3611928
Anti-war activists took their message to the Prime Minister's doorstep today by chaining themselves to a giant home-made submarine outside the gates of 10 Downing Street.
Around 20 protesters from Trident Ploughshares, which campaigns to disarm the UK's Trident nuclear weapons system, joined in the demonstration.
Protesters' faces - painted with the yellow and black three-bladed radiation warning symbol - poked out from some of the submarine's many portholes as they sat chained by their wrists inside it.
The hollowed-out structure itself, which was made from a thick black plastic-type material and was lying across the breadth of the gates on a large swathe of blue cloth to represent the sea, was daubed with anti-war messages.
A giant banner running the length of the submarine read "Trident: Britain's weapons of mass destruction", while others stuck to the side read "Warning! New UK/US Nuke pact - all life is downwind" and "WMD: We like preaching but go on breaching".
Police described it as a "peaceful protest".
A spokesman for Scotland Yard added: "We can confirm there are approximately 20 people demonstrating outside Downing Street. There have not been any arrested. It's a peaceful protest."
More than 200 Trident Ploughshares activists have so far signed a pledge to prevent nuclear crime, according to their website.
The group described its mission statement on the website: "We believe that the use, or threatened use, of nuclear weapons is totally immoral and irresponsible and that the Trident system is illegal under international law."
The focus of the anti-war campaign, according to the website, is on the UK's Trident nuclear weapons system and, in particular, four submarines carrying between 12 and 16 missiles based at Faslane, near Glasgow.
--------
Tempe, Arizona, O13: Debate Update 10/07
infoshop.org
October 11 2004
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/10/11/7813134
The final debate held before the November presidential elections will be in Tempe, Arizona on Wednesday October 13, 2004. The Monsoon Anarchist Collective is active in organizing against the debates and has issued a call to action inviting anarchists, anti-authoritarians, and radicals to join us in Phoenix to bring the real debate into the streets.
The debate will be held in Gammage Auditorium, located at the southwest corner of the Arizona State University campus. Nearly a quarter mile of the streets (Apache and Forest) in two directions will be closed from October 12th until the 14th. Gammage will be protected by chain link fence topped with barbwire along with an 8-foot high security wall that will also be used at the two previous debates.
Convergence Space: A convergence space has been set up (not by MAC) at Gentle Strength Co-op (234 W. University, one block west of Mill Ave.) in Tempe. It will be open from the evening of Friday Oct 8 thru Thursday Oct 14. This space will include an indymedia center.
Debate Events (not planned by MAC):
Update: Some new events have been added to the October 13 Alliance Calendar. Check those out here.
Sunday October 10th
Unlearning Oppression Workshop
1PM- 4pm, Convergence Space. This experiential workshop will examine systems of oppression including racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, xenophobia, linguicism, and other "isms." Be prepared to stay for the entire workshop.
Out of Occupied Palestine: Voices of Hope and Resistance 2pm-5pm, Convergence Space. Documentary film from Gaza and panel discussion with organizers and activists presenting firsthand accounts from their personal experience in the Gaza, West Bank, Israel and the US.
Monday October 11th
Free (For All) Market: What is that? The major parties' presidential candidates agree on the "benefits" of a "free" trade economy. Yet, more and more of us can't get what we need and others of us are bogged down in excess. Join us for a joyful display of what a truly "free" market would look like while expanding our vision of the possibilities for creating a fair economy.
WHEN: NOON - 4:00 PM
WHERE: Birchett Park in Tempe (at the corner of Mill and Apache)
WHAT SHOULD I BRING? Bring your spare phone or tomato seeds.
Bring your ability to juggle or knit. Read some poetry, feed a neighbor. Share what you can and take what you need at the Free (for all) Market, where everyone benefits and creativity blossoms!
Tuesday October 12th
Stop Recruitment and the Military Draft Rally & March
Meet at the Memorial Union, 11:30 am. to hear Dennis Kyne speak about Sponsored by Arizona Counter Recruitment Coalition, Dennis Kyne will speak and play, following rally we will march to the Military Recruitment Cluster located on Dorsey and Broadway, between McClintock and Rural. Aim of this march and rally is to raise awareness of recruitment practices targeting poor and minorities, the military draft bills currently before Congress, and likelihood of recruits being exposed to depleted uranium.
Know Your Rights Forum with Eleanor Eisenberg from the AZCLU hosted by Phoenix Copwatch. This forum is specifically for people who will be demonstrating at or around the debate. 5pm, location TBA.
"Support The Truth" Forum & Music: Gulf War I veteran and activist Dennis Kyne shares his experiences with the miltary, including his and other soldiers' exposure to Depleted Uranium, and speaks out against the two Draft bills currently before congress. This event will also include music by Dennis.
Location: Neeb Hall (ASU)
Time: 5:30 -- 6:30 pm
Wednesday October 13th
"Unemployment" aka "Pink Slip" Line
Time: 10:00 am
(http://www.theunemploymentline.org) The line will form across the street from the Twin Palms Hotel at 225 E. Apache--just east of Mill. As the nation focuses on the final presidential debate in Tempe, you can join The Unemployment Line: a unique protest spotlighting the disastrous effects of current economic policies leaving over 8 million Americans unemployed, with a net loss of over a million jobs since 2001. Imagine Arizona activists waving pink slips and forming a symbolic unemployment line at the debate site, with the nation's media watching! To sign up for The Unemployment Line in Tempe or for more information, send an email to mlombardi@pfaw.org
Demonstrations, March, Street & Puppet Theatre
3:00-8:00PM.
The debate is focused on domestic issues, so expect the theme of the march to reflect the topic.
Update: March route will start at Daley Park. The March leaves at 4pm. Hey you! There was a call put outfor "all Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, Queers of color, Drag Queens, Sex Radicals, Political Militants, and ALL OTHERS being excluded from "traditional" culture to meet for a peaceful march and demonstration of protest outside of the Presidential Debate." Meet with everyone else at Daley Park at 3pm. After the debate ends, Gov. Janet Napolitano and Sen. John McCain will host a postdebate party for the rich and their friends in government. Tickets for the event are not available to the public, as the event is invitation only. The party will be held at the Tempe Mission Palms hotel right off Mill Avenue and Fifth St. The Palms is half a mile north of the Gammage auditorium.
Update: The East Valley Tribue reported that the FBI has contacted local Muslims and other valley residents. See here for more information including information on your rights if you're questioned by law enforcement.
So far there is no known "free speech zone" or rather, free speech is not known to be limited to one specific area. The Gammage Auditorium, where the debate is to be held, will of course be fenced in and protected. There is an area on the ASU campus (SRC field) where protesters will be encouraged to hang out (out of sight of public view). No doubt the neighborhoods surrounding the area will have a larger than usual police presence, virtually militarizing the area. Tempe residents can count on their movement being restricted and expect their civil and human rights to be violated. Phoenix Copwatch is putting on a know-your-rights forum on October 6th at 7pm that will specifically touch on the rights of the residents in the area during the debate.
All Tempe Police officers will be on duty and the city is hiring off duty officers from surrounding departments (Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, Phoenix PD, Gilbert PD, Scottsdale PD, ASU PD, and the Secret Service) for the week of the debates. Tempe PD's 20 horse mounted unit was to begin conducting practice drills at ASU last week in preparation for the debate protests, but the training was moved to a "secret location" after word of the training leaked out to the press. The Tempe PD has told inquiring parties that officers did not want to be photographed during the training and that is why it was moved.
Let us know you're coming, email us at pac@phoenixanarchist.org
Monsoon Anarchist Collective's Call to Action here: http://arizona.indymedia.org/news/2004/09/21705.php
October 13th Alliance: http://www.spidel.net/octoberdebate/
Phoenix Anarchist Coalition: http://www.phoenixanarchist.org
Arizona Indymedia Center: http://arizona.indymedia.org/
ASU resource page and logistics for the debates: http://www.asu.edu/debate/
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