NucNews - December 3, 2004



-------- NUCLEAR 


-------- accidents and safety

Bomb-cleanup standards tied to higher cancer risk

ASSOCIATED PRESS
BY H. JOSEF HEBERT
December 3, 2004

http://www.freep.com/news/nw/dirtybomb3e_20041203.htm

WASHINGTON -- Standards for cleanup after a "dirty bomb" terrorist attack would permit long-term radiation levels that pose cancer risks many times greater than those allowed at Superfund sites, nuclear waste dumps and commercial reactors, according to a draft of a government proposal.

The Homeland Security Department is expected to issue the proposed guidelines, which have been developed over the last two years, within a few weeks. They would become final after a 60-day comment period.

The draft acknowledges that the consequences from a dirty bomb, a device that spreads radioactive material using conventional explosives, "may range from a very small, localized area ... to conceivably many square miles."

As a result, the interagency task force developing the guidelines decided against issuing specific numerical radiation levels to guide long-term cleanup goals, although a draft written last year contained specific allowable radiation levels proposed by different agencies.

The latest version of the draft says cleanup efforts should be guided by radiation benchmarks established by federal agencies and various advisory groups, such as the International Commission on Radiation Protection and the Health Physics Society.

The ICRP benchmark would allow long-term radiation levels up to 10,000 millirems over a 30-year period, a level equivalent to as many as 50,000 chest X-rays, said Daniel Hirsch, head of an antinuclear advocacy group, Committee to Bridge the Gap.

The benchmark levels from the Health Physics Society would allow an area to continue to emit 100 millirems to 500 millirems per year, the equivalent of as many as 2,500 chest X-rays over 30 years.

According to government cancer-risk calculations, exposure to 500 millirems per year is estimated to produce about 1 additional instance of cancer for every 80 people exposed, said Diane D'Arrigo of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a nuclear industry watchdog group.

By comparison, the Environmental Protection Agency requires cleanup standards at Superfund toxic waste to assure an additional cancer risk no greater than 1 in 10,000 people exposed, said D'Arrigo.

The draft says the guidelines are "not intended to define 'safe' or 'unsafe' levels of exposure or contamination" but represent "the approximate levels at which the associated protective actions are justified."

Copies of the draft, as well as an earlier version dated July 18, 2003, were obtained and provided Thursday by the Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

Don Jacks, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said he could not comment on the contents of the draft.

-----

U.S. to Issue “Dirty Bomb” Cleanup Guidelines

Friday, December 3, 2004 by National Journal Group

http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2004_12_3.html#D25D4281

The U.S. Homeland Security Department is expected before the end of the year to issue draft guidelines for cleaning an area following a “dirty bomb” attack, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, Oct. 25).

The latest draft of the document states that areas might have to be put off-limits permanently and “existing land uses may not be practicable” following the explosion of a radiological device.

An earlier draft of the guidelines written last year detailed allowable radiation levels, according to AP, but the latest version says cleanup efforts should be guided by radiation benchmarks established by federal agencies and advisory groups such as the International Commission on Radiation Protection and the Health Physics Society.

“They basically punted,” said Daniel Hirsch, head of an anti-nuclear advocacy group, Committee to Bridge the Gap.

Those benchmarks allow for radiation levels above what is accepted over long periods at U.S. Superfund and nuclear waste sites and commercial reactors, nuclear watchdog groups said. That could increase the incidence of cancer for those exposed to the radiation, the organizations said.

The guidelines are “not intended to define ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’ levels of exposure or contamination” but represent “the approximate levels at which the associated protective actions are justified,” according to the most recently obtained draft.

Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman Don Jacks said he could not comment on the draft, saying the document could still change as it goes through the final approval process.

After being issued, the guidelines must undergo a 60-day comment period, AP reported.

“Trying to interpret (the guidelines) now is way ahead of the curve,” Jacks said (H. Josef Hebert, Associated Press/Seattle Post Intelligencer, Dec. 2).

Meanwhile, Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals Inc. is developing what would be the first approved drug for acute radiation sickness, Reuters reported yesterday.

“If a major city were hit with a nuclear device, it has been estimated that close to a million people would be exposed to the radiation,” said Richard Hollis, the company’s chief executive.

Neumune, the company’s experimental radiation sickness drug, seems to be effective in healing radiation injury, said Terry Pellmar, scientific director at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute. Extremely high radiation levels render it less effective, Reuters reported.

Company representatives are scheduled to meet with U.S. regulators this month to discuss details for a final animal study of Neumune, according to Reuters. (Deena Beasley, Reuters, Dec. 2).


-------- asia

U.S. intent questioned

UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
By Jong-Heon Lee
December 03, 2004

http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041202-092430-7974r.htm

SEOUL — Is the United States planning to use South Korea as a base for potential military intervention in a conflict between China and Taiwan?

    The question was raised Tuesday by a South Korean lawmaker who cited a classified defense document that a purported U.S. plan to use American troops stationed in South Korea as a "stabilizer" of northeast Asia is designed to intervene militarily in a conflict between China and Taiwan.

    If true, the plan is sure to provoke an angry response from China and spark concerns that South Korea could be involved in a potential China-Taiwan conflict, which could alter the political landscape in the region.

    In a press conference at the parliament building in Seoul, Roh Hoe-chan of the opposition Democratic Labor Party revealed the document, drafted by the South Korean Defense Ministry before high-level military talks with Pentagon officials in July 2003 on the future of the military alliance between Washington and Seoul.

    [In related developments, the United States and South Korea recently agreed to relocate the main U.S. headquarters from Yongsan Military Reservation in Seoul to Camp Humphreys, about 25 miles south of Osan, by 2008. In May, Washington announced plans to shift 3,600 troops from South Korea to Iraq, and the following month, American officials reportedly proposed to their Korean counterparts withdrawing up to a third of the 37,500 U.S. troops in South Korea.

    [Other changes of the U.S. posture in Korea have been put off until security-policy talks with the South Korean government early next year, when President Bush's second-term Cabinet is in place.]

    "The U.S. plan to use its troops in South Korea as a regional stabilizer is aimed at militarily intervening in regional disputes," Mr. Roh said.

    South Korea also has been preparing for Washington's plans to change the role of U.S. Forces Korea, which traditionally has been considered a "fixture" on the Korean Peninsula to deter North Korea and its 1.1 million-strong army.

    "It is the first time for a document to confirm that U.S. Forces Korea is seeking a new role targeted at China and North Korea," Mr. Roh said. "The United States clarified its intention to intervene militarily in North Korea and China."

    Until this year, the United States had 37,500 troops stationed in South Korea under a bilateral defense treaty signed after the 1950-1953 Korean War. The number was reduced to 33,900 in the summer, when 3,600 troops deployed near the heavily armed demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas were transferred to Iraq.

    The United States plans to withdraw about 9,000 more troops from South Korea by 2008, saying the reduction is part of its global defense posture review aimed at transforming the U.S. Army into a more mobile, agile force to better cope with new threats such as terrorism.

    The troop-reduction plan touched off security concerns because South Korea has relied on U.S. protection for national security for more than a half-century, while focusing its resources on building the economy.

    Mr. Roh said Washington's plan is designed to play a greater role in regional conflicts. If China were involved in military conflict with Taiwan, or the North Korean regime abruptly collapsed, the document proposed pre-emptive U.S. military intervention, he said.

    The document outlines three scenarios for how the U.S. forces might react on the basis of the level of regional tension as they expand their security role beyond the Korean Peninsula, Mr. Roh said.

    "In the midlevel scenario, Washington will intensify its pressure on Pyongyang if it continues trying to develop nuclear weapons. This will eventually irritate Beijing, leading to full-scale conflict between China and the United States," he said.

    The high-level scenario includes involvement of U.S. Forces Korea in disputes between China and other northeast Asian powers, military intervention in conflicts between China and Taiwan, and use of its armed forces to manage a crisis on or near the Korean Peninsula in case of the sudden collapse of the North Korean regime, the document said.

    "This document shows the role of U.S. Forces Korea will not be limited to an anti-terrorist war, and proposes its intervention militarily in potential regional hegemonic countries like China as well as in North Korea," Mr. Roh said.

    U.S. and South Korean officials have denied Mr. Roh's accusations, saying the main role of U.S. Forces Korea will continue to be a deterrent force against North Korea.

    The South Korean Defense Ministry dismissed Mr. Roh's remarks as "utterly untrue." The ministry document he cited was only a compilation of academic papers and other materials a South Korean official had prepared for potential discussion at the Seoul-Washington defense talks, the ministry said.

    The presidential National Security Council also denied Mr. Roh's accusations, saying it has never seen the document.

    But Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon said last month that South Korea was not opposed to U.S. forces playing a greater role in northeast Asia unless it meant a weakening of the combined defense posture for ensuring peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.

    "I admit the necessity of what the Americans call strategic flexibility," Mr. Ban told the Korea Times, saying the global security situation had changed in the past 50 years.

    Another government official raised concerns that Seoul could be involved in a China-Taiwan conflict if U.S. troops stationed in South Korea were mobilized for the regional dispute.

    In case of a war across the Taiwan Strait involving Taipei's push for independence, the two Koreas are likely to be involved because the South and the North have defense treaties with the United States and China, respectively.

    Under the bilateral defense treaty, the United States automatically would react to a North Korean invasion and South Korea is required to help the U.S. side in case of conflict. Along this line, South Korea has sent 3,600 troops to join the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.

    "The two Koreas should move toward further reconciliation and cooperation so that they can remain away from any China-Taiwan military conflict," a government official in Seoul said.

    "Greater inter-Korean cooperation would help each refuse outside pressure. It is one of few options for South and North Korea to avoid getting involved in the China-Taiwan conflict," he said, adding that this was his personal opinion. 


-------- china 

China Launches New Class of Nuclear Sub

By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
Associated Press Writer
Dec 3, 9:41 PM EST

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CHINA_SUBMARINE?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME

WASHINGTON (AP) -- China has launched the first submarine in a new class of nuclear subs designed to fire intercontinental ballistic missiles, U.S. defense officials said Friday.

The submarine is, at a minimum, months away from having missiles installed and going on a cruise, one official said, discussing foreign weapons developments only on the condition of anonymity. Still, it is further evidence of China's intentions to expand both its nuclear weapons and submarine forces, officials say.

It was widely known that China was building the new class of nuclear-missile submarine, called the "Type 094," but the launch is far ahead of what U.S. intelligence expected, one official said.

The launch was first reported in The Washington Times. The newspaper reported that U.S. intelligence spotted the sub at a shipyard 250 miles from Beijing.	

It would be China's first submarine capable of launching nuclear weapons that could reach the United States from the country's home waters, officials said.

The Chinese military has also been developing a new class of submarine-launched ballistic missile, called the JL-2, that is expected to have a range in excess of 4,600 miles. The Type 094 submarine would carry these missiles, but it is not clear whether the missiles are ready for deployment.

Previously, China has had only one submarine capable of launching nuclear missiles, called the Type 092, or Xia, class. In 2001, a Pentagon report said the Xia was not operational. Its missiles were of an older class that could fly only 600 miles.

Successful cruises by the Type 094 would give China a new strategic deterrent against the United States, no longer limited to land-based ICBMs and weapons carried on aircraft. But U.S. defense officials say China lags behind the United States in its ability to hide submarines from sophisticated sonars and other sensors.

China is also modernizing its land-based nuclear missile force, replacing its estimated 20 ICBMs with more modern versions. In a report on China's military issued last May, the Pentagon said China's cache of ICBMs could increase to 30 by next year and 60 by 2010.

Although considered unlikely in the near term, the most likely avenue for conflict between the United States and China is over Taiwan, which China regards as a rogue province. Taiwan is seeking high-tech weaponry from the United States, including diesel submarines and anti-submarine aircraft.

The United States, France, Russia and the United Kingdom all have submarines capable of launching ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.


On the Net:
Defense Department: http://www.dod.gov 

--------

Beijing warns EU on weapons ban

bbc
3 December, 2004

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4065091.stm

China has warned the EU that it risks damaging bilateral ties unless it lifts a 15-year embargo on selling arms to Beijing.

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui said the ban, imposed after the 1989 crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square, was "outdated".

Mr Zhang also denied that lifting it would fuel an arms race with Taiwan.

The ban is expected to be discussed at a China-EU summit in the Netherlands on 7-9 December.

"If the ban is maintained, bilateral relations will definitely be affected," Mr Zhang told reporters. "We think this is a kind of political discrimination."

He denied that lifting the ban would affect relations across the Taiwan strait.

China claims Taiwan is part of its territory and regularly threatens to use force against the island if it ever seeks formal independence.

Geopolitics

Germany and France have called for the arms ban to be lifted, while the US and some EU countries are in favour of it remaining in place.

Washington has threatened to stop the transfer of some sensitive military technology to European countries if it were to be abolished.

China pressed for the ban to be lifted at an Asia-Europe Meeting (Asem) in Hanoi in October, but was not successful.

It will also be on the agenda of a visit to China by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder from Monday.

Fifteen years on from Tiananmen Square, when hundreds of unarmed protesters were killed by Chinese troops, there are continuing concerns among the international community about the country's human rights record.

But analysts say the row is more about geopolitics and domestic economies than human rights.

The US is concerned that arms sold to China by the EU could be used against Taiwan asnd risk sucking the US into a regional conflict.

France and Germany, meanwhile, believe China could prove a fertile market for their arms and related industries. 

-----

China tests ballistic missile submarine

THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Bill Gertz
December 3, 2004

http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20041202-115302-2338r

China's military has launched the first of a new class of ballistic missile submarines in what defense officials view as a major step forward in Beijing's strategic weapons program.

    The new 094-class submarine was launched in late July and when fully operational in the next year or two will be the first submarine to carry the underwater-launched version of China's new DF-31 missile, according to defense officials.

    "When fully operational, it will represent a more modern, more capable missile platform," said one official familiar with reports of the new submarine.

    A second intelligence official said building submarines is a top priority of the Chinese, and the Type 094 will be "China's first truly intercontinental strategic nuclear delivery system."

    The new Type 094 was spotted by U.S. intelligence agencies at the Huludao shipyard, located on the coast of Bohai Bay, some 250 miles northwest of Beijing.

    The submarine is in the early stages of being outfitted and is not yet equipped with new JL-2 submarine-launched nuclear missiles.

    The submarine is believed to be based largely on Russian nuclear submarine technology, the officials said.

    A CIA report made public last week stated that Russia was a major supplier of technology to China's naval nuclear propulsion programs.

    The launching of the new missile submarine appears ahead of schedule. A Pentagon report on Chinese military power made public in May stated that the new Chinese missile submarine would not be deployed until around 2010.

    A Defense Intelligence Agency report produced in 1999 and labeled "secret" stated that the new submarine is part of a program by China of "modernizing and expanding its missile force."

    "Mobile, solid-fuel missiles and a new ballistic missile submarine will improve the force's ability to survive a first strike," the report said, "while more launchers, on-board penetration aids, and possibly multiple warheads will improve its ability to penetrate missile defenses."

    The DIA report stated that China is expected to field one new ballistic missile submarine by 2020.

    A Chinese Embassy spokesman had no immediate comment.

    In a related development, U.S. intelligence officials said the Chinese suffered a setback in their JL-2 missile program when a test flight of the JL-2 missile failed over the summer.

    The JL-2 missile program was delayed by the test failure but is continuing to be developed, the officials said. China conducted tests of the JL-2 in 2002 and last year.

    Richard Fisher, vice president of the Washington-based International Assessment and Strategy Center, said the launch of the new missile submarine is "an astounding development."

    "The 094 has followed 093 development far more rapidly than the assessments in the annual Pentagon reports on the PLA," Mr. Fisher said, referring to the China's People's Liberation Army.

    China also recently launched a new attack submarine known as the Type 093. Additionally, U.S. intelligence agencies were surprised by China's disclosure in July of a third new type of submarine known as the Yuan-class, a diesel-electric attack submarine.

    "In the very near future, China will have a secure, second-strike nuclear attack capability that it will use to bolster its nuclear strategy of seeking to deter the United States from aiding Taiwan after a PLA attack," Mr. Fisher said.

    Mr. Fisher said the JL-2 likely will have multiple warheads.

    The new submarine will make it more difficult for the U.S. military to take part in a defense of Taiwan because of the threat of nuclear retaliation, he said.

    The Pentagon has deployed a new missile defense system, but a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency has said the current interceptor system is designed to stop a long-range North Korean missile, but not an attack from Chinese or Russian missiles.

    A 1999 report by the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China stated that the new missile submarine will likely benefit from stolen U.S. nuclear warhead designs.

    The report stated that the JL-2 is expected to have a longer range than the DF-31 and that 16 JL-2s will be deployed on the new submarine.

    The range of the JL-2 is estimated to be about 7,500 miles, enough "to strike targets throughout the United States," the report said.

    "Instead of venturing into the open ocean to attack the United States, the Type 094-class submarines could remain near [Chinese] waters, protected by the [People's Liberation Army,] Navy and Air Force," the report said.

    The new submarine will be a major improvement over China's current ballistic missile submarine known as the Xia, which is equipped with medium-range missiles.

    The current Xia submarine is considered so noisy to underwater detection gear that its chances of surviving attack submarine strikes in ocean waters are limited. 



<a name="du"></a>

-------- depleted uranium

Gulf War Syndrome whistleblower is man on a mission
 
(Agencies) 3 December, 2004

http://www.keralanext.com/news/?id=73359

Health News, "I AM just a doctor, a scientist who did not compromise with his dignity, honour and integrity for a few dollars. I cannot be bought and my honour is not for sale." This is how Asaf Durakovic, the whistleblower on Gulf War Syndrome or the effect of depleted uranium on soldiers used in the first Gulf War, describes himself.

Frail but firm in his belief, Durakovic, who served as the chief of the medical unit of the US Army during the first Gulf War, withstood pressure from the US, British and Canadian governments to put the lid on the use and effects of the depleted uranium on soldiers and civilians.

The Second National Convention for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, held in Jaipur recently, honoured him with the Nuclear-Free Future Award for bringing to the world's notice the first case of 'radioactive warfare'.

Durakovic, who heads the Washington-based Uranium Medical Research Centre, says a recent UK study has found that inhaling depleted uranium dust caused severe illnesses among the soldiers.

Durakovic, who is conducting medical research on soldiers who fought in two Gulf wars, says he has found in them a high ratio of depleted uranium that was used in the tank shells for higher penetration power. 

Another startling disclosure Durakovic made during the Jaipur conference was that his latest studies have found alarmingly high levels of non-depleted uranium among the people living in Afghan cities of Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif. These chemicals were used in bombs that were dropped on Afghan cities in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the US.

He said levels hover around 2,500 nanogram per litre of urine sample, whereas the normal level would be around 10. Durakovic says his critics claim that it is natural uranium deposits that got mixed with the dust because of the bombing.

Rubbishing such claims, Durakovic says Afghanistan has no such high-level of uranium deposit and the uranium that found in the samples was an isotope that is enriched. It is not natural.

Canadian citizen Durakovic says: "We are working on various mathematical models but we are still really very far away". Durakovic says a 'malicious' campaign has been mounted against his work but my mission will go on."  

-----

'Uranium' claims man is to sue

A man who claims his body was contaminated with depleted uranium when he worked at a Somerset defence company is to take his case to the High Court.

bbc.co.uk
3 December, 2004

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/4064361.stm

Richard David used to work at Normal Air Garret Ltd - now known as Honeywell - in Yeovil, and says he developed a cough within weeks of starting work.

He has now been diagnosed with a terminal lung condition.

Honeywell says it has never used depleted uranium either in its products or on-site.

Mr David began working at the company in 1985 making aerospace parts, but had to leave because of poor health 10 years later.

He is believed to be the first civilian to sue for such damages and the case begins in the High Court on Monday.

-----

Ex-Defence Worker to Sue over Uranium

Scotsman.com
By Sarah Cade, PA
3 Dec 2004

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3837909

A former British defence worker who claims he was contaminated by depleted uranium at a factory is suing the firm in a High Court battle, he said today.

In what is believed to be the first civilian case of its kind, Richard David is claiming damages against Normalair Garrett – now owned by Honeywell Aerospace – which owned the factory in Yeovil, Somerset, where he worked as component fitter between 1985 and 1995.

Mr David, also known as Nibby, claims he was affected by depleted uranium (DU). He said he suffers from respiratory problems, kidney defects and finds it painful to move his limbs.

The 49-year-old, from Seaton, Devon, said medical tests had revealed mutations to his DNA and damage to his chromosomes. He believes his illness was caused by exposure to the radioactive waste product DU.

Mr David fitted components for fighter planes and bombers. He has never served in the armed forces or worked in the Middle East.

The case, which is due to start at the High Court in London on Monday, could have far-reaching implications for many Gulf war veterans, aerospace workers and civilians in former war zones.

Mr David claims he was forced to give up his job due to ill health in 1995 and believes that his lung condition will shorten his life. He said he “can’t risk” having children because of damage to his DNA.

He won legal aid to fight the case but has chosen to represent himself at the hearing, which is due to last 10 days.

He said: “I don’t have any legal representation so I am representing myself. It is a real David versus Goliath case.

“I am confident I will win. I hope to set a precedent for other cases of people who have suffered from the effects of depleted uranium.”

A growing body of scientists now believe that when DU is inhaled as a fine dust, it can cause a range of illnesses including cancer, birth defects and kidney damage.

DU is believed to be a possible cause of Gulf war syndrome, which has allegedly left many veterans with health problems. The radioactive waste product was used in coalition anti-tank weapons in both Gulf wars.

A spokeswoman for Honeywell said the company has never used DU in its products or on site. Elma Peters said it was company policy not to comment on legal cases.

-----

Depleted uranium in Iraqi cities

thedailystar
Shahid Khandker
December 03, 2004

http://www.thedailystar.net/2004/12/03/d41203110280.htm

The weekly Guardian recently published an article stating that British soldiers returning from the Gulf will be offered tests on the levels of depleted uranium in their bodies to check if they are in danger of kidney damage and lung cancer as a result of exposure. The ministry of Defence announced this measure responding to an warning from the Royal Society, Britain's top scientific body, that soldiers and civilians might be exposed to toxic levels. Experts have calculated that between 1,000 and 2,000 tonnes of depleted uranium were used by the coalition in the Iraq war so far -- more than three times the amount used in the first Gulf War and to make matters worse, this time it was primarily spread in Iraq's cities, not on the battlefields.

The uranium and its radioactive decay products will remain toxic for over 4 billion years...and will slowly destroy the genetic future of the Iraqi people.

But the death and destruction will not be contained within the borders of Iraq! Winds will spread it throughout the Middle East and beyond. The US has carried out its plan now on Afghanistan and Iraq...which country next?

Syria, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Lebanon, Kuwait, the Gulf States, and Iran will breathe the invisible war too... and they may share the fate of the Iraqi people, the caretakers of the cradle of civilisation. 

----

The Greatest Crime of Historic Time

Friday, December 03, 2004 4:12:18 PM
by Victor Connor
V.Connor@insightbb.com

http://www.warfolly.vzz.net/thegreatestcrime.html

The greatest crime against humanity in all historic time has now been committed by the United States government. It dwarfs Joseph Stalin's killing of 7,000,000 Ukrainians in the 1930s and Adolph Hitler's killing of 6,000,000 Jewish people in the 1940s. This crime will cause the premature deaths of TENS of MILLIONS of people and will give a horribly debilitating disease to TENS of MILLIONS more. It is indiscriminate mass murder - genocide. My statements may be dramatic, but they are absolutely true.

Since October of 2001, the United States military has used approximately 3,000 tons of depleted uranium munitions against people in Afghanistan and Iraq. This will soon cause the serious health problems to include respiratory disease, kidney problems, rashes, birth defects, and the number of cancers of those people to jump to over 500,000 people each year. How do I know this? Because the United States military used 375 tons of depleted uranium munitions against Iraq in 1991 and the cancer rate in children measured in Iraqi hospitals rose from 32,000 per year in 1990 to 130,000 in 1997. According to U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs official reports, U.S. casualties from Gulf War 1 now exceed 180,000 and already over 30,000 are now disabled from Gulf War 2. We've now used eight times what we did in 1991 and radiation has long been known to cause cancer. This is well known by our federal government.

In a document dated October 30, 1943 and declassified June 5, 1974, three major scientists (Drs. James Conant, A. H. Compton, and H. C. Urey) wrote to Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, who was the head of the atom bomb project, concerning "Radioactive materials as a military weapon." In that document they stated:

"As a gas warfare instrument the material would be ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke and distributed by a ground-fired projectile, land vehicles, or aerial bombs. In this form it would be inhaled by personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small. It has been estimated that one millionth of a gram accumulating in a person's body would be fatal. There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty"

Proponents of depleted uranium weaponry will state that depleted uranium is only half as radioactive as normal uranium, which is true. This would mean that it would take TWO millionths of a gram accumulating in a person's body to be fatal according to Conant, Compton and Urey. Unfortunately, it isn't known exactly how much uranium ore would be sufficient to cause death over a short period of time, but we do know it caused the cancer deaths of workers during the two years the Manhattan Project existed in making our first three atomic bombs. Since then, scientists have learned a lot more about the debilitating effects to animals exposed to higher than normal radiation levels.

In fact, increased cancer rates downwind of American nuclear power plants are well documented, even though not well reported. Nuclear power plants in the United States release small amounts of radioactive gases on a daily or weekly basis. Compared to the depleted uranium usage in Iraq and Afghanistan, these are extremely small amounts, but the communities that live within fifty miles of the normal downwind area from these nuclear power plants have higher rates of cancer. One particularly telling fact is where nuclear reactors have been shut down for a few years and then restarted. The cancer rate among infants and young children who were born after the shutdown quickly fell to national averages, before rising again after the reactors were restarted.

It takes about eight tons of regular uranium ore to make one ton of enriched uranium to be used in nuclear power plants. This leaves seven tons of depleted uranium. Depleted uranium is composed primarily of three isotopes of uranium; it is 99.8% of U-238, 0.2% of U-235 and 0.0008% of U-234; collectively one microgram of it will constantly emit about 120 alpha particles every day for millions of years. One alpha particle has enough energy to disrupt the genetic information in the nucleus of a cell, but when this happens hundreds of local cells are affected by the instability of the zapped cell.

To get a better understanding how radiation affects a human body, think of it this way. We live in a dynamic universe. We are constantly bombarded with radiation from outer space, even though we are far from the sun and other stars. There are trace amounts of uranium and radon among other naturally decaying elements throughout the surface of the Earth. Collectively, these sources affect all of the cells in our body, but it is a question of the rate of impact on our cells. On average each cell in a body is hit about one to two times a year from a natural source of radiation. Compare that with one millionth of a gram of depleted uranium ingested into a body - this will hit thousands of cells every day. In terms of the rate of increase, this means that many of the cells that are nearby depleted uranium particles are being zapped at a rate that is 100,000 times more than normal. This will either kill the cells or cause massive genetic defects.

The mechanism for this crime against humanity is as follows. A depleted uranium projectile smashes into a vehicle or building.

For example, each Abrams tank round contains about 10 pounds of solid depleted uranium while each 30 mm round fired by the A10 Warthog has about 3/4 pound of solid depleted uranium. After the collision, about half of the projectile is turned into powder 10 microns (ten one millionths of a meter) or smaller. A human hair is normally between 60 and 100 microns thick and that proverbial millionth of a gram of depleted uranium would fill a cube 37 microns on each side. This dust now blows wherever the wind takes it. We have already found depleted uranium in Iraq twenty five miles from an impact site. This radioactive dust blows in cities, in parks, on crops, in the rivers, and everywhere. They can be breathed in or ingested from food and drink. Particles on the order of 2.5 microns are perfect for implanting themselves in our lungs. A small number of these would be like smoking over ten packs of cigarettes every day forever and children one, two and five years old are getting this into their lungs.

If we used 375 tons of depleted uranium in the first Gulf War, think how the people of Iraq and Afghanistan will feel and be affected now that we used 3,000 tons of depleted uranium against them. And its terrible effects will be there forever.

Although many Americans believe that we are making life better for Iraqis because we removed a brutal dictator and are giving them democracy, Hussein averaged a few thousand tortures and murders per year (and they were highly directed at his political dissidents), whereas we will soon be causing the deaths and terribly debilitating diseases of hundreds of thousands of people per year and these deaths will include babies and infants (Hussein seldom purposefully ever hurt the very young).

What we are doing is indiscriminate genocide of the Muslim people in the Middle East. The wind blows in all directions and Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Syria and Turkmenistan are all Muslim countries and are on Iraq's and Afghanistan's borders.

Does it make sense to destroy Iraq in order to save it?

Is this the will of the compassionate Christian or the politically responsible Republican or Democrat? Is our federal government doing a good thing? Not being a Christian or a Republican or a Democrat, I don't understand it. Even though I'm not a Christian, Muslim or Jew, I still believe that you are good people, but as terribly uninformed as I was a few months ago.

You may ask: why are we doing this. The answer seems clear to me. Corporations are the driving force behind our federal government. They have taken control of the executive branch of the federal government which has eclipsed the legislative and judicial branches. The executive branch is no longer responsive or accountable to the will of the people, and is out of control. They are highly affected by corporate lobbyists and take their direction from corporations because money talks.

The defense industry lobbyists want the federal government's supply of depleted uranium. Since the nuclear power industry has found no acceptable way to safely dispose of the leftover radioactive materials they produce, there are over 900,000 tons of depleted uranium still lying around waiting to be made into military weapons because it has no other commercial use and it makes big profits for the defense industries in not having to produce it themselves. These big profits can then be used to make large donations to federal politicians who follow corporate directives. It's a vicious and deadly cycle.

Now I know many people are caught up in the eternal debate of who's better, Democrat or Republican, when in fact they are just two sides of the same coin. The reality is that both parties are controlled at higher levels and many things that are problems to society are huge money-makers to the above partisan forces. Depleted uranium is one such problem. While many Americans are misdirected, people in the Middle East are dying and will soon start to die unnecessarily by the hundreds of thousands each year and for as long as they live in those regions. And what's even worse is that as long as we keep using depleted uranium weapons, we will be permanently polluting more and more of the Earth.

Don't think that this depleted uranium won't affect us here in the United States. 30,000 returning soldiers have depleted uranium in their urine. This means that many of them will have it in their semen and genetic damage and birth defects will start to skyrocket here at home. This is a Pandora's Box that is still open. Do you have the personal integrity and humanity to shut it?

It is still not too late. U.S. Army and the Department of Defense have regulations and orders in place that mandate medical care for all DU casualties and require thorough environmental clean up of all DU contamination (http://www.traprockpeace.org/rokke_du_3_ques.html ), but our nation's military leaders and President Bush simply refuse to comply with these legal requirements. This makes sense from a business point of view, because ultimately corporations would lose too many profits.

Christians, would Jesus want us to keep polluting the Middle East with deadly radioactive waste?

Abraham Lincoln said, "To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men." In the case of being silent about depleted uranium, we would also be accomplices to murder.

Criticism of the government is not incompatible with good citizenship; it is a prerequisite. For some reason, many people believe that criticism of the government is unpatriotic, when in fact it is the most important responsibility of a patriotic citizen and is the very first change that our founding fathers made when amending our Constitution.

Note: This article has been reviewed and approved by Dr. Doug Rokke. Doug is the former head of the Pentagon's Depleted Uranium Project, who replied the following: Vic: This is excellent~! I did some minor editing.

thank you doug rokke

Vic Connor has a B.S. in Physics, M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and was accepted to do doctoral work in three different subjects: physics, computer science and mathematics. Professionally, he worked at the Endicott, NY IBM engineering lab as a design engineer and software programmer and later as a systems engineer at a sales branch. He also worked as an assistant professor of Applied Computer Science at Illinois State University.



-------- europe

Swiss nuclear reactor to stay online
The government has given a power company unlimited authorisation to operate a controversial nuclear reactor in northern Switzerland.

Swissinfo

December 3, 2004

http://www.nzz.ch/2004/12/03/english/page-synd5382296.html
	
Green groups say the authorities have surrendered to the demands of the nuclear lobby, which is pushing for more power plants.

The authorities gave the green light to the continued operation of the Beznau II reactor on Friday, despite opposition from the German and Austrian governments as well as environmental organisations such as Greenpeace.

The government said it based its decision on advice from its nuclear security division as well as the Federal Committee on Nuclear Security.

Greenpeace claims that the reactor, which went online in 1971, is ten times more likely to melt down than another reactor at the Gösgen plan which was built nearly a decade later.
Safety issues

But the energy ministry said the decision would encourage the operator to invest in upgrading the plant and improving safety at the reactor site.

The Swiss Energy Foundation (SEF), which has been lobbying against nuclear power for 30 years, says the authorities have given in to the powerful economic interests of power-plant operators.

Green Party parliamentarian and SEF president Geri Müller expressed doubt that any power company granted unlimited authorisation to manage a nuclear reactor would “invest in expensive safety measures”.

He also questioned whether a recent move to distribute iodine tablets to households living near the reactor was “enough to ensure people’s safety”.

Monitoring

The government has made it clear that authorisation to operate the reactor can be withdrawn at any time if it decides that security is insufficient at the site.

Greenpeace argues that the criteria that have to be fulfilled to force the closure of a reactor need to be clearly established. The SEF also warns that there are no clearly defined safety levels.

Authorisation for Beznau II, along with the Mühleberg reactor near the capital, Bern, has until now only been granted for fixed periods of time.

The three other Swiss reactors – Beznau I, Gösgen and Leibstadt – already benefited from unlimited authorisations.

Leibstadt was the last Swiss nuclear power plant to open in 1984. Plans to build another reactor in Kaiseraugst, not far from Basel, were abandoned following widespread opposition during the 1980s.
Looking ahead

The Swiss do not appear ready to abandon nuclear power. Last year voters rejected two initiatives calling for an official end to nuclear power and a moratorium on nuclear-plant construction.

Recently, pressure on the government to consider new plants has increased, with power companies warning that current nuclear reactors will have to be decommissioned by 2020.

Dori Schaer, who headed a government committee that laid the groundwork for Switzerland’s planned electricity law, says the power companies have a point.

“We don’t know how to replace the power supplied by the nuclear reactors when they are finally switched off,” she told swissinfo.

“Renewable energy sources have failed to live up to their billing and cost too much. Given that it takes over ten years to authorise and build a new plant, time is of the essence.”

swissinfo with agencies

-----

UK Wrong To Withhold Nuke Waste Plan - EU Court Adviser

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
December 3, 2004

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/28416/story.htm

BRUSSELS - Britain was wrong to withhold information from the European Commission about the disposal of radioactive waste from the shut down of a nuclear reactor, a top adviser at the EU's highest court said on Thursday.

But Advocate General Leendert Geelhoed of the European Court of Justice said European Union member states should have the right to keep back information if the state considers it crucial to its defence interests.

The EU executive brought a case to the European Court of Justice against Britain for failing to provide the Commission with a plan for the disposal of radioactive waste from the decommissioning of a reactor known as "Jason".

It is not the only dispute between Britain and the EU executive over nuclear-related issues.

Geelhoed's opinion came a day after the Commission launched a probe to check whether Britain's plan for a state-owned nuclear decommissioning body conforms with EU state aid rules.

Jason was a low power research and training reactor in the UK Department of Nuclear Science and Technology located at the Roval Naval College in Greenwich, southeast London. It was operated from 1962 to 1996.

The United Kingdom argued that the EU rules only applied to waste coming from nuclear plants operating for civil and commercial uses and it was therefore not obliged to provide the data.

Geelhoed's opinion concluded Britain had breached its obligations by failing to inform the Commission, but said states should be able to hold back under certain circumstances.

"In the case of each plan to dispose of defence-related radioactive waste, member states should be entitled to withhold information from the Commission only if they consider this absolutely necessary for the protection of their essential defence interests," he wrote.

Judges at the Luxembourg-based court will now begin deliberating. Decisions usually take three to six months after the opinion is given.

In another case, the Commission said in October that Britain faced legal action over its failure to notify Brussels how it disposes of radioactive waste at the Atomic Weapons Establishment, home to its nuclear weapons industry.


-------- iran

Iran Nuclear Freeze Only Temporary, Cleric says

By VOA News

3 December 2004

http://www.voanews.com/english/2004-12-03-voa22.cfm

A senior Iranian cleric says Iran's suspension of its nuclear program is temporary.

Former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani told worshippers during prayers Friday, Iran could resume enriching uranium within six months.

Mr. Rafsanjani, the head of the Expediency Council, Iran's final arbiter on legislation, said Iran has the right to enrich uranium at low levels to fuel nuclear power stations.

Earlier this week, the International Atomic Energy Agency spared Iran the fate of being referred to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions after Tehran agreed to suspend its nuclear program.

The United States has accused Iran of secretly seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

-----

Iran's Nuclear Issue
    
TomDispatch.com
By Dilip Hiro
03 December 2004

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/120404I.shtml

    Imagine a pious Muslim faced with a ban on fabricating a certain kind of weapon. He is committed to obeying unquestioningly the fatwas of his religious leader and yet discovers that producing such a weapon, or threatening to do so, is a strong lever for gaining benefits from a powerful group living in the neighborhood. Replace "a pious Muslim" with "Iran," and "a powerful group" with the 25-member European Union (EU), and the above sentences aptly sum up the current Iranian-EU relationship.

    Enriched by millions of daily encounters in bazaars, Iranians are adept at bargaining and confident in the knowledge, acquired over centuries, that skillful bargaining and brinkmanship go hand in hand. This is what just happened in Paris between the officials of Iran and the the EU troika - France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The subject was Tehran's nuclear program; the occasion, the run-up to the finalization of an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report for its 35-strong board of governors on November 15. The Iranians dragged out the bargaining until the last minute before initialing a deal subject to the approval of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) in Tehran.

    It was a deal that was meant to prepare the way for further negotiations. Iran has agreed to suspend its uranium enrichment and reprocessing programs until a "grand bargain" is reached in which the EU guarantees nuclear, political, and trade concessions in return for Tehran's indefinite suspension of the same programs. Though negotiated by the troika, the agreement's ownership lies with the European Union as a whole. To the undisguised relish of the Iranians, this deal killed the Bush administration's pet plan to refer the Iranian case to the United Nations Security Council for censure or the possible imposition of sanctions for its alleged breaches of the IAEA nuclear protocol.

    Both Iran and the EU have a stake in seeing that the next round of negotiations, starting on December 15, succeeds. By clinching a deal with the European Union, the Iranian leadership aims to achieve two strategic objectives: improve Iranian living standards through a Trade and Cooperation Agreement with the EU, and forestall the Bush administration's "hegemonistic designs" by widening of the political gap between the United States and the European Union over Iran.

    The EU threesome has stayed firmly on the Iranian diplomatic path, despite American pressures, in order to protect the interests of its companies which already have lucrative contracts in Iran's oil and gas industry and are hopeful of securing more in the future.

    Countering American Hegemony

    With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Islamic Republic's opposition to the imperial ambitions of the two superpowers narrowed to the winner of the Cold War: Washington. At a joint press conference with visiting Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev in February 2000, for instance, Hassan Rouhani, secretary-general of Iran's SNSC, summarized his country's foreign policy in this way: "Cooperation among Iran, Russia, India and China is very important if one hopes to confront the hegemonic policies of America."

    That was one year before the arrival of George W. Bush in the White House, his unveiling of a thoroughly unilateralist foreign policy based on "preventive" force, the ominous inclusion of Iran in his "Axis of Evil," and, of course, his illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. That, in turn, led French President Jacques Chirac to articulate a competing vision of a multi-polar world in which the United States, the European Union, China, India, and Russia all would be poles. In this context, it was no accident that Paris was chosen as the venue for the recent Iranian/EU negotiations.

    In Iran, even diehard conservatives now agree that developing cordial relations with the European Union is an effective and necessary way to curb Washington's designs on their country. They are also realistic enough not to underestimate the power of the Bush administration: It successfully pressured Japan to withhold its signature on a $2 billion deal to develop the enormous Azadegan oilfield in Iran, and the EU to suspend its nine-month-old negotiations with Tehran on the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA).

    But then, Iranian conservatives and others are equally aware that, singularly, on the issue of Iran, even Britain has stood apart from the U.S. and with its European partners. As a consequence, the British Foreign Minister Jack Straw - as they are well aware - is derided by the hawks in Washington, the effective makers of Middle East policy, as "Ayatollah Straw." They wish to see this policy gap between Washington and London maintained, if not widened.

    To Each Its Own Interests

    At the same time, Iranian leaders want to extract maximum possible benefits for their country in their dealings with the European Union. The most effective way to do this, unsurprisingly, was to acquire as many bargaining chips as possible. And so they resumed the manufacture of centrifuges for enriching uranium in July - but only after the EU troika had reneged on its part of a deal it had signed with Tehran in October 2003. The three European countries delivered neither promised technological and economic benefits to Iran, nor did they address Tehran's security concerns which are closely tied up with the denuclearization of the Middle East (read: Israel and its sizeable nuclear arsenal). They even failed to get the Iran file downgraded at the subsequent IAEA governors' meeting - as stated in the agreement.

    So on October 31, amid chants of "Allahu Akbar" ("God is great") and "Death to America," all 247 members present in the Iranian parliament unanimously called on the government to restart the country's uranium enrichment program, using its already manufactured centrifuges, and to exercise its right to complete the nuclear fuel cycle enshrined in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which Iran is a signatory.

    A nuclear fuel cycle consists of mining uranium ore (in which only seven out of every 1,000 uranium atoms are the lighter fissile isotopes U235, the rest being the heavier U238), processing it into uranium oxide (yellow cake), transforming it into uranium tetraflouride (UF4) gas, and then uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas, followed by enriching UF6 to varying degrees of U235 purity: 3.5-4% pure for use in nuclear power reactors, 10-20% pure for use in research reactors, and 90%-plus pure and so usable in nuclear weapons.

    In a nuclear power plant, the fuel consists of sealed rods containing hundreds of pellets of 3.5-4% pure uranium. When hit by high energy neutrons, these pellets undergo a controlled chain reaction, emitting intense heat which transforms the surrounding light (ordinary) water into steam. That then runs the plant's electricity generating turbines. Once these fuel rods have yielded their energy, they are called "spent rods." These can be reprocessed with the aim of extracting from them plutonium (Pu239 or Pu241), which could be used as fissile material for nuclear weapons. (Although as yet there are no commercial electric plants using plutonium fuel, Pu239 and Pu241 do contribute towards generating heat for uranium-fuelled plants.) Nuclear fuel thus produces both electric power and more nuclear fuel, and is therefore, in principle, a renewable source of energy.

    Therein is the rejoinder to those in the United States who argue that, given Iran's enormous oil and gas resources, its government does not need nuclear power plants. Oil and natural gas deposits, being finite, will not last forever whereas a nuclear fuel cycle can be self-perpetuating. These critics ignore the fact that, despite its vast oil deposits and the largest gas reserves in the world, Russia has a thriving nuclear power industry at home. Furthermore, it exports its technology. Having already built the Iranian nuclear power station near Bushehr, it remains the favorite contractor for the eight more such plants that Iran plans to build in the near future.

    Meanwhile, it is Iran's hydrocarbon resources - an estimated nearly 10% of global petroleum reserves and the second largest gas deposits in the world - that are at the root of the pressures that British and French oil companies are exerting (discreetly) on their respective governments to cut a diplomatic deal with Tehran on the nuclear issue, and thus torpedo the American plan to take the issue to the UN Security Council with the possibility of economic sanctions or, in the future, worse.

    The list of the European oil companies with ongoing oil contracts with Iran - Royal Dutch-Shell, Elf, Total SA, Agip of Italy, as well as BG (British Gas), Enterprise, Lasmo, Monuument, and so on - is so extensive that no major European Union member can afford to ignore such interests.

    The Europeans are not the only ones. Last month the visiting Chinese Foreign Minister Li Xhaoxing signed an oil-and-gas deal with Iran, and Chinese officials assured Hussein Mousavian, deputy to Rouhani,, in Beijing that China would block any move at the IAEA to refer the Tehran nuclear dispute to the UN Security Council.

    Bargaining over the Shape of the World

    Whatever agreement emerges out of the "grand bargain" between Iran and the European Union, its nuclear component will be verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In his annual report to the UN General Assembly on November 1, IAEA director-general Muhammad El Baradei said that Iran needed to restore the international community's confidence by suspending enrichment after previously providing the IAEA "information that was at times changing, contradictory and slow in coming."

    A fortnight later, what the EU troika actually got from Iran was an agreement "to cease to develop or operate facilities to produce fissile material, including any enrichment or reprocessing capability." "Reprocessing," a term that applies to the spent fuel rods, had not been demanded by the IAEA.

    The Iran-EU deal came on the heels of a direct intervention by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei. In his Friday prayer sermon on November 5, he declared that "developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons" is forbidden under Islam and "our believing nation," and added: "They accuse us of pursuing nuclear weapons program. I am telling them as I have said before that we are not even thinking about nuclear weapons."

    What apparently drove Khamanei to this public statement was his determination to frustrate the Bush administration's plan to isolate Iran. He had used a similar argument when, in October 2003, protests arose at home over Iran's agreement to sign an additional protocol allowing IAEA inspectors access to any sites they wished to visit. He insisted then that the decision to cooperate with the IAEA was taken "widely and carefully" in the interests of the Islamic Republic to "foil an American-Zionist maneuver" to isolate Iran.

    Since that moment both Iran and the EU threesome have raised their horizons. Besides adding in the reprocessing of the spent nuclear fuel rods from civilian projects, the Europeans plan to introduce the issues of human rights and political reform into their upcoming negotiations with Iran for the "grand agreement."

    Tehran's wish list includes the reaffirmation of its right to a nuclear energy program for peaceful purposes; access to imported nuclear fuel at market prices for its reactors; support for Iran's acquisition of a light water research reactor; help with regional security concerns, including combating drug trafficking; the resumption of talks on the Trade and Cooperation Agreement; support for Iran's application for World Trade Organization membership; and the keeping of the Iraq-based Mujahedin Khalq Organization on the EU's list of terrorist organizations.

    Much tough talking lies ahead between the EU and the Middle East's most strategic nation. All the more so when, as 34 IAEA governors welcomed Iran's decision on the suspension of all enrichment and reprocessing activities, Jackie Sanders, the Bush administration's representative, promptly followed up her very reluctant yes-vote with a nine-page statement asserting repeatedly that Iran has a clandestine nuclear weapons program without offering any back-up evidence.

    Dilip Hiro is the author of "Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After" as well as "The Essential Middle East: A Comprehensive Guide." His forthcoming book is "The Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and Its Furies" (Nation Books). He is based in London, writes regularly for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Observer, the Guardian, and the Nation magazine, and is a frequent commentator on NBC, CNN, BBC, and Sky TV.
    A version of this piece will appear in print in issue #740 of Middle East International. 

-----

Powell Says U.S. Can't Hunt Iran Nukes in Caves

By REUTERS
Published: December 3, 2004
Filed at 5:29 p.m. ET

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran-powell.html?oref=login

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin
Powell said on Friday that Washington had no way
to force Iran to allow U.N. inspectors
unrestricted access to suspected nuclear sites
despite U.S. doubts Tehran would come clean on its
own.

``I can't make sure it is going to happen,'' he
told Reuters in an interview as he prepares to
leave office. ``You can't look in every cave that
might be in Iran.''

Powell also said Iran's agreement with European
nations last month to suspend some suspicious
nuclear activities was inadequate, but the
international community must still press Iran to
reveal the full extent of its program.

The Bush administration fears the Islamic republic
may be developing a nuclear weapon at secret
sites, where it may continue to work, while it has
agreed to open other facilities to inspectors.

Powell ackties. It noted the freeze was voluntary
and non-binding.

The United States' false warnings about Iraq's
nuclear capabilities have undermined similar U.S.
claims about the dangers of Iran's programs.

Diplomats and arms experts neau in Vienna)



-------- japan

Supreme Court to hear Monju appeal
Government sees glimmer of hope in battle to save fast-breeder reactor

The Japan Times
Dec. 3, 2004

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20041203a2.htm

The Supreme Court said Thursday it will hear the government's appeal of a Nagoya High Court ruling that nullified the 1983 approval of the troubled Monju experimental fast-breeder nuclear reactor project in Fukui Prefecture.

The decision by the court's First Petty Bench suggests the top court is considering reversing or changing the lower court ruling. When the Supreme Court decides to hold a hearing, it often alters or overturns a lower ruling. The Monju case will be heard March 17.

In January 2003, the Nagoya High Court nullified government approval 20 years ago of the experimental reactor project in Tsuruga. The ruling overturned a Fukui District Court ruling in 2000 that dismissed a lawsuit filed by residents, most of whom were living near the reactor.

The Nagoya High Court's Kanazawa branch supported a claim by 32 plaintiffs that the massive sodium coolant leak at Monju in 1995 was a result of flawed safety assessments that were carried out on the prototype reactor prior to construction.

"Flaws exist in the safety assessment (procedures) needed to prevent an accident, such as the leakage of radioactive material inside a reactor into the neighboring environment," the high court said. It also ruled that the safety assessments had to be completely redone.

The landmark decision -- the first in the nation to let plaintiffs nullify a nuclear reactor and halt its construction or operations -- dealt a severe blow to the government's nuclear energy program, especially its goal of recycling spent nuclear fuel and using extracted plutonium at fast-breeder reactors.

The Fukui District Court rejected the plaintiffs' demands to have the government's original approval of Monju invalidated, and ruled that the reactor's basic design was not the cause of the sodium coolant leak.

According to the high court, Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corp., known then as Donen, applied for permission to build the plant in 1980. The government gave its approval in May 1983. Donen is the predecessor of the state-run Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute.

The residents filed their suit in 1985, and the initial judicial debate revolved around their eligibility as plaintiffs. In 1992, the Supreme Court recognized the eligibility of all the plaintiffs and sent the case back to the Fukui District Court for trial proceedings.

The reactor was operating at 40 percent capacity when the sodium coolant leaked in December 1995, sparking a fire. Its operator tried to cover up the accident and submitted a false report.

The Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute is hoping to restart Monju, which has been shut down since the accident, and has obtained approval to renovate it, but local residents have not given the green light for renovation work to begin.

Monju is a government-designed prototype for future reactors envisioned to play a key part in Japan's nuclear fuel recycling plans, in which plutonium is created by reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. By using plutonium-uranium mixed-oxide fuel, fast-breeder reactors like Monju are supposed to be able to produce more plutonium than they consume.

-----

Pacifist Japan to study developing first long-range missile: report

TOKYO (AFP)
Dec 03, 2004

http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041203044413.ug67vniz.html

Pacifist Japan will study developing a long-range surface-to-surface missile amid growing concern about North Korean and Chinese vessels in surrounding waters, a report said Friday.

The potential new missiles could effectively end Japan's self-imposed ban on offensive weapons, two months after an expert panel recommended the country acquire the ability to attack foreign bases. Japan has a pacifist constitution.

The Yomiuri Shimbun, which quoted anonymous defense officials in its report, said Japan's concern was North Korean spy and Chinese naval vessels which have been moving more frequently in seas near Japan.

The newspaper said the Defense Agency plans to study the new missile "as a measure to counter a possible invasion on a remote island several hundred kilometers (miles) away from mainland Japan."

China last month expressed regret after one of its nuclear submarines entered Japanese waters for two hours near disputed islands, triggering a two-day chase on the high seas between the Asian powers.

Japan's current ground-based missiles are only capable of hitting air or seaborne targets as opposed to targets in other countries. Under the 1947 constitution, Japan can use the weapons only if the country comes under direct attack.

A Defense Agency spokeswoman declined to comment on the report.

In October, an advisory panel to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi called for Japan to change its long-standing position against the use of force and develop the ability to launch pre-emptive strikes on foreign missile vessels.

The Yomiuri said the plan to build the long-range ground-to-ground missiles will be included in a defense plan, set to be approved by the cabinet in mid-December, which will set priorities for the five years from April 2005.

The plan comes at the same time that Japan updates its defense policy guidelines for the first time since 1995. Ruling coalition officials say the new outline will for the first time refer to China as a threat.

Japan has been reducing its aid to China as its neighbor's economy grows, amid widespread anti-Japanese sentiment in China linked to Japan's bloody wartime occupation.



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


-------- colorado

Flats refuge proposal jells
16 miles of trails included in the final conservation concept

Denver Post
By Kim McGuire
December 03, 2004

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~2573302,00.html

The public will be able to hike, cycle and ride horses on about 16 miles of existing trails through the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons complex after it becomes a wildlife refuge in 2007, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials said Thursday.

Addressing the Rocky Flats Citizens Advisory Board, refuge managers gave a sneak peek inside the final conservation plan being proposed for the 6,240-acre site.

The plan is awaiting final approval from the Interior Department, which could issue a decision within two weeks.

"At this point, we don't expect any changes to the document, but just realize there is a slight chance that an 11th-hour decision could change this," said Laurie Shannon, planner for the refuge.

The plan was developed after an extensive public comment period, which culminated with a series of meetings in the spring in Westminster, Boulder, Arvada and Broomfield.

At that time, residents urged refuge managers to do everything from building a gigantic fence around the site to allowing unrestricted access.

Now, after sorting through about 5,000 comments, the agency has made some "minor tweaks" to its recommended alternative spelled out in an earlier draft document, Shannon said.

The final plan calls for:

Limited hunting that is restricted to the disabled and youths, likely on weekends. Muzzle-loading guns are prohibited, but shotguns and bow and arrows can be used.

Improving habitat at the site for the Preble's meadow jumping mouse and other native species. The agency will also consider reintroducing the sharp-tailed grouse.

Offering limited environmental-education classes for high school and college students at the site.

Allowing limited public access to 16 miles of existing trails. Of those, most will be multi-use. For the first five years, however, refuge managers will only allow short hikes on the site's northern portion.

While the plan calls for limited public use, refuge visitors won't have access to about 1,200 polluted acres within the industrial core of the former weapons complex. That property will continue to be maintained by the Energy Department.

Over four decades starting in 1952 until an FBI raid shut it down in 1989, Rocky Flats produced plutonium triggers for more than 70,000 nuclear warheads. Consequently, the site was polluted by radioactive materials used in the production of those weapons.

The $7.2 billion cleanup is expected to be finished in 2006.

Dean Rundle, the Rocky Flats Refuge manager, said the site's pollution is more clearly addressed in the final plan.

"We heard very clearly from a significant number of people that they did not buy the fact that just because we were not cleanup decisionmakers we shouldn't address some of the residual contamination," Rundle said. "So we decided to provide more information that relates to health and safety."



-------- new jersey

Oyster Creek defenders face foes at hearing

Asbury Park Press 
By NICHOLAS CLUNN
12/03/04

http://www.app.com/app/story/0,21625,1131564,00.html

About 300 people listen as state lawmakers conduct a hearing into safety precautions at the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant.
BRICK -- An Assembly member from Bergen County last night criticized Oyster Creek nuclear power plant officials for relying on sirens to alert the public in the event of an emergency at the Lacey reactor.

The remarks by Assemblyman Robert M. Gordon, D-Bergen, about the way authorities would signal people to turn to emergency broadcasts was a concern that hasn't been talked about much during previous debates surrounding the future of the country's oldest commercial reactor.

He asked officials from plant owner AmerGen about the sirens' effectiveness during a special public hearing held to discuss whether Oyster Creek should operate for another 20 years after its initial license expires in 2009.

Gordon said the sirens are less effective than newer, higher-tech methods and cited as an example high-speed telephone dialing with recorded messages.

Bud Swenson, Oyster Creek vice president, said that he would look into Gordon's concerns.

About 300 people, including members of about 15 advocacy groups on both sides of the issue, attended the public hearing called by the Assembly Environment and Solid Waste Committee to better understand the merits and drawbacks of renewing the reactor's operating license.

ADVERTISEMENT
Committee members will consider the input given when drafting a resolution that would establish the state's official position on Oyster Creek's plan to seek a license renewal from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Several union leaders attended the meeting to support Oyster Creek and its workers.

Calling criticisms of license renewal "politically and environmentally shortsighted," Wyatt Earp, president of the Monmouth-Ocean AFL-CIO, announced last night that the 70,000-member labor union he leads would lend its support to plant owner AmerGen.

Citing confidence in the NRC to ensure Oyster Creek's future safety, a union leader with the 35,000-member New Jersey International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers said the group will announce its support for license renewal at a news conference today.

Located off an undeveloped stretch of Route 9, the plant employs 450 workers and last year pumped $52 million into Ocean County's economy, according to plant figures.

Oyster Creek's 650-megawatt reactor produces 9 percent of New Jersey's electricity, enough to power 600,000 homes. According to the electrical workers' union, 20 percent of electricity delivered by Jersey Central Power & Light Co. is generated at the plant.

Before the meeting, U.S. Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, D-N.J., said in a written statement that "a science-based report that looks into the health and reliability questions that have been raised by both sides should be conducted." It was not clear whether Lautenberg would be satisfied with the review procedures already in place.

Sitting on the dais last night were the five Democratic members of the seven-person committee. Assemblymen John Rooney, R-Bergen, and Larry Chatzidakis, R-Burlington, had prior engagements.

Sirens tested annually
During an annual test in June, emergency management officials sounded 42 sirens across central Ocean County to test a system that would alert people about an emergency at the plant.

People within a 10-mile radius of the plant can hear the sirens, meant to signal people to tune in to a radio or television station that carries emergency instructions in the event of a radioactive release from the 650-megawatt reactor.

Lacey resident Dave Most, a 46-year-old instrument technician at the plant, was among 20 or so plant workers who attended the meeting. Most said he came out to defend fellow workers.

"We have boilermakers. We have electricians," explained Most. "It's their livelihood."

The hearing outside Trenton was a rarity for the Assembly committee. Public hearings on legislation to protect 400,000 North Jersey acres from development were the only times this year it met outside the capital.

Committee Chairman John F. McKeon, D-Essex, has said the committee may hold additional hearings regarding Oyster Creek.

Nicholas Clunn: (609) 978-4597 or nclunn@app.com 



--------

Progress slow at N.J. nuke plants
PSEG Nuclear chief meets with federal regulators

By MELISSA TYRRELL / The News Journal
12/03/2004

http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2004/12/03progressslowatn.html

PSEG Nuclear officials characterized their work to improve safety conditions at the Salem and Hope Creek reactors on Artificial Island in New Jersey as "fragile progress" at a meeting Thursday in New Castle with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

PSEG has been under heightened oversight by the commission for the past year as it seeks to improve conditions and operations at the three-reactor complex across the Delaware River from Augustine Beach.

President and Chief Nuclear Officer Chris Bakken also said the two Salem units would be offline temporarily so that oil spilled from the Athos I tanker last week doesn't get into the plant's water intake valves.

"We're trying to demonstrate to the public as well as our employees that we're placing safety over production," Bakken said.

Last year the commission launched a review of the complex based on employees' complaints. In January, the commission sent a letter to PSEG questioning the station's "work environment, particularly the handling of equipment and operational decision making."

In a self-assessment released in March, PSEG Nuclear officials gave its complex poor marks in encouraging employees to raise safety and equipment concerns.

Along the way, PSEG named a new chief nuclear officer for the plant to make major fixes that the company said will take several years. It also invested $800 million to upgrade the "material condition" of the Hope Creek and twin Salem reactors over the next five years.

The Hope Creek and Salem I and Salem II reactors employ 1,800 people. It is the nation's second-largest nuclear complex and generates more than half the electricity PSEG produces.

One problem cited by the commission was a backlog of maintenance problems.

Michael Brothers, PSEG vice president of site operations, said the company has worked hard to improve the quality of corrective actions, but now it needs to work on how quickly it can make those fixes.

He cited this as progress, noting that a year before the company focused on timeliness instead of quality, which led to recurring problems.

Officials also noted more training for quality-assessment workers and those who handle employee complaints.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials encouraged the company to increase education on how to file a complaint or report a problem - especially for employees who want to remain anonymous.

During a public comment session, PSEG whistle-blower Nancy Kymn Harvin told the audience and commission officials that she was skeptical of the work being done.

She said she still hears about employees who were transferred from their departments for noting problems and executives who have lied to the NRC about progress.

She urged Bakken to remove a controversial 20-foot-high pump inside Hope Creek that is known to vibrate and roar, alarming workers.

Bakken has delayed a $7 million overhaul until after preparing to do other work on the highly radioactive unit. He said the work could be done all at once so crews would not be exposed to radiation twice.

"They don't want to worry about catastrophic failure," Harvin said of employees who want the pump removed, adding her former co-workers "deserve a safe and great place to work."

Earning the trust of employees and the public will take "quarters and years, not months," Bakken said.

"I think we're not far off on that assessment," NRC Reactor Projects Director Randolph Blough said of Bakken's view that his company is making tenuous gains. "We see that fragility as well."

This article contains information from the Associated Press.

Contact Melissa Tyrrell at 838-3189 or mtyrrell@delawareonline.com.


-------

PSEG on safety: 'Fragile progress'

Friday, December 03, 2004
By BILL GALLO JR.
Staff Writer

NEW CASTLE, Del. -- A PSEG Nuclear official Thursday night told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the utility is making "fragile progress" in its long-term plan to improve the work environment at its nuclear generating complex on Artificial Island in Lower Alloways Creek Township.

"We certainly are not here to tell you everything is fixed," said Chris Bakken, president of PSEG Nuclear and its chief nuclear officer.

Thursday's meeting was prompted by concerns by the NRC, the federal agency which regulates the nation's 100-plus nuclear power plants, that serious problems existed at the Island, specifically, in its problem identification and resolution process and what it deemed was not a safety conscious work environment.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission earlier this year told PSEG Nuclear to take action to prevent a "chilled" work environment at its three plants -- Salem 1, Salem 2 and Hope Creek. The NRC was acting on claims that workers had been reluctant to raise what they deemed were safety issues for fear of retaliation from management. Also, some workers said they had simply given up offering their ideas for solutions to problems because they believed management wasn't listening.

At earlier meetings with the NRC this year, PSEG Nuclear officials outlined their plant to resolve the problems. Thursday's meeting was in a way, an offering of a report card of sorts to the federal regulators on the progress the utility believes it is making.

Top officials from the utility presented a power point presentation featuring a large group of graphs and charts they said show both progress and areas where the authority needs to improve.

Bakken said he believes it will take 18 to 24 months "to show progress I would view as sustained."

At earlier meetings NRC officials had emphasized that any "quick fix" would be looked upon with suspicion by the agency.

Bakken, who took charge at the Island this spring, has pledged to be more open with both employees and the public on how he is implementing changes.

One of the large concerns among workers had been the backlog of needed repairs which the utility said has decreased.

But other equipment problems relating to the operation of the plants remain a concern.

Bakken said one of the major changes has been his order to produce quality work without the regard to time.

"A year ago we were so focused on a timeline that quality suffered," he said.

Employee surveys taken by an outside firm will be done again in 2005, officials said to gauge progress. The utility also has established boards to deal with employee complaints about work issues.

John Carlin, PSEG Vice President-Nuclear Assessment, said his team has become much more aggressive on quality issues at the plant. He said officials had put "more teeth" in quality assessment and have not been afraid to issue stop-work orders if they deemed a job was not being handled properly.

The meeting between the NRC and PSEG Nuclear was held in a New Castle motel function room. About 100 people filled the room -- mostly staffers from either the utility or NRC, Island workers and anti-nuclear activists.

Another appraisal of PSEG's progress is expected to be presented to the NRC in the early spring.

Meanwhile, the agency and the utility are expected to meet later this month to discuss preliminary findings from a special inspection the NRC conducted after problems at Hope Creek forced its shutdown on Oct. 10.

Among those in the audience Thursday night questioning the utility and the NRC was Dr. Kymn Harvin, a former organizational development manager at the plant, who has filed a lawsuit claiming she was fired for raising safety concerns.

"You can make numbers say anything you want," she said referring the to utility's presentation.

Harvin urged the utility to replace a vibrating recirculation pump at the Hope Creek plant which remains off line.

"The problems can't be blamed on past management. They are yours," she said.

Harvin said utility officials "had an opportunity to take a giant step in restoring trust (by replacing the pump) and you blew it."

The utility said the pump will be replaced during the next refueling outage at the plant.

The hearing came on the same day that PSEG Nuclear announced that it would shut down its two operating reactors, Salem 1 and Salem 2, because of concerns that a massive oil spill upstream could foul the water intakes for its cooling system.

 Copyright 2004 NJ.com. All Rights Reserved.

--------

Nuclear plants to shut down as oil spill spreads

By ERIC TUCKER Staff Writer, (856) 794-5114
Press of Atantic City, December 3, 2004

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com

PHILADELPHIA - The Delaware River oil spill has so far touched 70 miles of shoreline across three states and is likely to continue spreading, officials said Thursday.

Two nuclear reactors in southern New Jersey will shut down today because of fears that the water-intake valves which provide coolant for their reactors could be clogged by oil from the spill, their operator said.

Protective booms were put in place around the water intakes at the Salem I and Salem II plants, but their operator, Public Service Enterprise Group, said the barriers might not block heavier globs of crude oil floating beneath the river's surface.

Workers participating in the massive cleanup effort had recovered 7,140 gallons of the oil-tainted water as of Thursday afternoon, while nearly 4,000 additional gallons have evaporated since the Friday night accident, said Coast Guard Lt. Buddy Dye.

"There is still mobile oil out there. It is still available to spread," said Edwin Levine, scientific support coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Officials offered no new information about the cause of the oil spill, saying they had yet to determine the object that punctured two holes in the hull of the Athos I as the Greek tanker maneuvered into a port near Paulsboro, Gloucester County, N.J. Investigators have said they are looking into whether the tanker struck a propeller or some other object on the river's floor.

Even with the cause undetermined, the company that owns the vessel, Tsakos Shipping and Trading SA, is prepared to take responsibility for the accident, a spokesman said.

"Our owners today accept the responsibility. They spilled the oil," said the spokesman, Michael Hanson.

Officials also declined to provide an updated projection of the amount of oil spilled from the tanker. Coast Guard officials said earlier this week that 473,500 gallons of the Venezuelan crude could have leaked from the vessel in what they called a "worst-case scenario." Dye said that figure, far above the 30,000 gallons initially reported as lost, would continue to be used as the Coast Guard collects data from sonar ships.

Investigators have found no contamination of drinking water supplies, but they did discover an area south of Little Tinicum Island where oil had reached the bottom of the river.

The nuclear reactors, in Lower Alloways Creek Township, Salem County, were expected to be shut down for several days, PSEG said. A third reactor had been shut down before the spill. A spokesman for the company said consumers would not be affected.

"We feel this is the prudent thing to do, and we're going to analyze the situation and determine if the oil could affect operations," said A. Christoher Bakken, chief nuclear officer of PSEG.

Federal and state agencies have advised hunters and boaters to stay off tributaries and not hunt waterfowl until further notice.

Nearly a week after the spill, the Coast Guard is continuing to step up its cleanup and investigation operations. Fifteen state and federal agencies and five companies have responded, and roughly 1,000 people - including contractors and Coast Guard reservists and auxiliary members - were to be involved on Thursday.

The Coast Guard has set up its command center at a Holiday Inn in Philadelphia, where dozens of officers, civilians and others collected data in a first-floor room cluttered with color-coded maps, laptops, fax machines and cell phones.

A team at one table was responsible for making sure that crews cleaning the spill had the equipment they needed; another team was coordinating the removal of waste and debris; a third group marked the impact of the spill on maps.

"Every micromanaged deal of the operation, it's handled here," said Petty Officer Kimberly Smith, a Coast Guard spokeswoman.

The oil spans a 55-mile stretch of the Delaware River from the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge to the Delaware Memorial Bridge, appearing in heavy concentrations in some areas and as a light sheen in others. The 70 miles of affected coastline includes tributaries of the river and other noncontiguous areas of water.

The Associated Press, Jerome Montes and Daniel Walsh contributed to this report.

To e-mail Eric Tucker at The Press:

ETucker@pressofac.com 

-----

Salem 1, Salem 2 shut down

Friday, December 03, 2004
By BILL GALLO JR.
Staff Writer

http://www.nj.com/news/sunbeam/index.ssf?/base/news-2/110206561029600.xml

LOWER ALLOWAYS CREEK TWP. -- The two operating nuclear reactors at the Artificial Island generating complex will be taken off line today as a precaution because of the possible effects of a massive oil spill upstream in the Delaware River, utility officials said late Thursday.@@PSEG Nuclear operators will begin reducing power at the Salem 1 and Salem 2 reactors today en route to completely shutting both reactors down. The third nuclear reactor on the Island, Hope Creek, is currently off line for refueling.@@Utility officials are concerned that oil from the spill which is making its way downriver, may reach the water intake structures for the nuclear plants.@@Utility officials estimate the shutdown of Salem 1 and Salem 2 units will cost them between $1.5 and $2 million a day depending on prices and the electric market.@@The Salem 1 and 2 units, which are operating at full power, draws and then discharges two million gallons of water a minute from the Delaware River to cool the two reactors. Hope Creek, when in operation, draws considerably less because of its use of a cooling tower in its cooling system.@@If the oil did reach the intake structures it could be drawn in and circulated through the plants' cooling systems.@@"Our first ground rule is to be safe and this is the right thing to do to ensure the safety of the stations,&quot; said Chris Bakken, president of PSEG Nuclear and its chief nuclear officer, in a statement released by the utility.@@"It's their decision. It's a conservative one," said NRC spokeswoman Diane Screnci. "We encourage them to be conservative."@@As of Thursday, the sheen from the crude oil spill which took place Friday in the river near a Paulsboro refinery stretched as far south as the Island. The oil had made its way as far north in the river as the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge.@@Officials had originally said 30,000 gallons of crude oil had spilled from the Athos I, but this week the U.S. Coast Guard, which monitors the river, said that it couldn't account for 473,500 gallons from the ship's tanks. Officials said much of that oil might still be in the ship, and called the prospect of a 473,500 gallon leak a "worst-case scenario."@@If every drop of that oil did leak from the ship, it would rank as the worst spill in the river's history, topping the 435,000 gallons that gushed from the tanker Grand Eagle in 1985.@@On Thursday, PSEG Nuclear began placing booms around the water intake structures at both the Salem and Hope Creek plants. The boom is a barrier placed in the water approximately 18 inches deep. It is relatively effective in controlling the spread of oil that is lying on top of the water or floating close to the surface. However, since the oil spilled in the Delaware was crude oil, it is expected that heavier globs of oil might be suspended in the river at varying depths, rendering the booms less effective, company officials said.@@PSEG Nuclear officials said they will continually monitor river conditions and its plans for the reactors could change.@@How much of the oil reaches the nuclear plants depends on river currents and the weather.@@This is not the first time Mother Nature has played a role in whether the plants can operate.@@In the spring, river grasses, ripped from their roots by the incoming and outgoing tides and ice have caused operators to reduce power -- and water intake -- at the facilities.@@Ice in the river must also be monitored.@@The last time all three reactors were shut down at the Island was in September 2003 after the remnants of Hurricane Isabel raked the area.@@High winds from the storm whipped up a salty spray off the river and bay.@@The salt coated equipment in the Island's switchyards causing equipment failure and arcing. Because of this, all three reactors were shut down.@@The Island began producing and sending out electricity again after the switchyard equipment was powerwashed to remove the salt residue.@@PSEG Nuclear said it is tracking costs the company may incur associated with the oil spill "with full expectation of recovery of those costs from responsible parties." 


-------- vermont

Residents Near Vermont Yankee Need Better Alert System

VERNON, Vermont, December 3, 2004 (ENS)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2004/2004-12-03-09.asp#anchor5

On October 12, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) completed an inspection of the emergency preparedness program at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in preparation for an NRC decision on whether to allow the Vermont Yankee to generate 20 percent more electricity.

The inspectors concluded that the operator, Entergy, was not making a "best effort" attempt of distributing and maintaining tone alert radios in areas of the emergency planning zone that are outside of siren coverage.

Tone alert radios are integral to the Alert Notification System in case of an emergency at the plant. They complement the pole-mounted siren system in areas where there is inadequate "sound" siren coverage such as in a mountainous terrain, the NRC said.

In its efforts to advertise the availability of the tone alert radios, Entergy ultimately placed the onus on these individuals who needed or had them and not on Entergy.

This is contrary to the NRC’s view of a "best effort" as denoted in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) design guidance and for what was accepted by FEMA and the NRC.

Contributing to this finding was the fact that an accurate listing or registry of those residents who had or needed tone alert radios was not current; thus, because of the lack of an updated registry, it could not be determined to what extent tone alert radios are needed in the emergency planning zone and, therefore, uncertainty results on how the system was to be maintained.

This finding was classed as one "with some increased importance to safety, which may require additional NRC inspection."

"A majority of the population remained protected by the sirens and a large percentage of tone alert radios remained functional throughout the emergency planning zone," the agency said.

Entergy has put in route alerting when sirens are actuated for areas covered by tone alert radios, and so the finding does not present a safety concern. Entergy is continuing with longer-term corrective measures including making the offers of radios to local citizens and re-establishing a current registry by the end of the year.

A second report contains the results of a special inspection to look into two spent fuel segments that were reported missing at the facility. The team concluded the pieces found in July 2004 are the pieces misplaced in January 1980. One apparent violation was also identified: Entergy did not adequately account for the two fuel rod pieces from 1980 through 2004.

Both final inspection reports and the earlier preliminary findings are posted on the NRC website at: http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/plant-specific-items/vermont-yankee-issues.html.

The findings of both inspections will be discussed publicly at a meeting of the Vermont State Nuclear Advisory Panel (V-SNAP) on December 16 at Brattleboro Union High School, beginning at 6 pm.

This meeting replaces NRC meetings that had been scheduled for November 9, but were postponed because of concerns that the expected high attendance would exceed the capacity of the facilities.

“We appreciate V-SNAP’s agreement to moderate a meeting on a topic of great interest to many citizens in Vermont. We believe they will provide structure to the meeting process and help us hold a constructive meeting,” said Wayne Lanning, NRC Region I Director of Reactor Safety. 



-------- us nuc waste

Judge blocks Hanford waste initiative

The Associated Press

12/3/2004

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-12-03-hanford-waste_x.htm

YAKIMA, Wash. (AP) — A judge Thursday temporarily blocked a voter-approved initiative that bars out-of-state shipments of radioactive waste to the most contaminated nuclear site in the nation.

Washington voters last month overwhelmingly approved Initiative 297, which forbids the Department of Energy from sending more radioactive waste to the Hanford nuclear site until all existing waste there is cleaned up. The initiative was to have taken effect Thursday.

But the federal government went to court in hopes of blocking the law, calling it a "draconian" measure that also violates federal laws governing interstate commerce and nuclear waste. Hanford, a federal site, is immune from state regulation, the government argued.

The government also warned that some cleanup would stop and workers would be idled if the initiative were to take effect.

Lawyers for the state, however, had given assurances that officials were still reviewing the initiative and would not begin to implement it in the next 60 days.

Judge Alan McDonald sided with the federal government Thursday in granting a temporary restraining order, citing the importance of continuing clean-up activities at Hanford.

A hearing on a preliminary injunction was set for Dec. 13.

Sheryl Hutchison, spokeswoman for the state Ecology Department, said the ruling was not unexpected.

"We're satisfied that shipments will not be coming in, and over the next 10 days we will prepare a vigorous defense," she said.

More than 10,000 people work at the 586-square-mile reservation, which was created in World War II as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. It remains the most contaminated site in the nation, with cleanup costs expected to total $50 billion to $60 billion.



-------- MILITARY 


-------- asia

Thai military drops "peace bombs"

(Reuters)
By Ed Cropley
Dec 3, 2004
	
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=857&ncid=757&e=10&u=/nm/20041203/od_uk_nm/oukoe_thailand_birds

BANGKOK  - Hundreds of Thai school children and air force recruits have loaded an estimated 100 million origami birds onto military transport planes in preparation for a "peace bombing" of the violent Muslim south of the country.

The little pieces of folded paper, to be dropped from the air on Sunday to mark the birthday of Thailand's revered king, Bhumibol Adulyadej, are meant to sow peace, harmony and goodwill in the three southernmost provinces, where an 11-month insurgency has claimed nearly 500 lives.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whose government has struggled to get to the root of the violence, has defended his paper-bird scheme against opponents who say the government is just dumping 48 plane-loads of rubbish.

"Don't criticise against the wishes of the majority of Thais," Thaksin told Reuters on Friday at a sending off ceremony for the paper birds at Bangkok's military airport.

The birds, folded out of everything from bank notes to plastic sheets, covered the floor of an aircraft hangar to a depth of more than two metres (7 feet).

Ceremony organiser Group Captain Chakrapong Homkrailas put the number of birds at 100 million.

"I think this is some sort of world record," Chakrapong said, as ant-like columns of recruits and children carried thousands of plastic sacks across the airport tarmac and into the bellies of five Hercules C-130 military transport planes.

Some people in the mainly Muslim deep south, which has a century-long history of ethnic and religious hostility towards the largely Buddhist administration in Bangkok, question the symbolism behind the gesture.

In 1948, the Thai air force was called in to bomb parts of the south along the border with Malaysia to quell a rumbling Muslim separatist insurgency.

"The paper birds are not a traditional symbol for us," said leader of Abdullaham Abdulsamad of the Narathiwat Islamic Council. "It's a different culture. Our people do not understand what the birds stand for.

Thaksin's initial intention was to drop 62 million paper cranes, one for every person in the country. A media blitz, which included a cabinet meeting to teach ministers how to fold the birds, sparked origami fever the length and breadth of the land.

The birds will be flown to the provinces of Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani in Thailand's south, where they will be loaded onto 48 smaller planes for dispersal.

Whatever the differences between Thai Buddhists and southern Thai Muslims, who are ethnic Malay and speak a Malay dialect, someone will have to clean up tonnes of paper afterwards. 



-------- business

Spy plane crashes into school

The Australian
December 03, 2004

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11575012%255E1702,00.html

AN unmanned spy plane believed to be operated by a US security firm crashed into a school in the Afghan capital Kabul without causing any casualties, an eyewitness and sources told AFP today.

The unmanned 1.5m-long drone smashed into a window at the French-funded Istiqlal high school close to President Hamid Karzai's palace, according to a senior official at the school.

DynCorp, a private US security company that guards the president, uses drones to survey the grounds around the palace, a source close to Karzai told AFP.

"It crashed shortly after 1pm (7.30pm AEDT yesterday) on a window of the centre which was broken and nobody was injured," said the director of the school's cultural centre Daniel Massat-Bourrat.

Two heavily-armed Americans in plain clothes jumped the wall of the palace into the school grounds and removed the wreckage, offering to pay for repairs, Mr Massat-Bourrat said.

"They presented themselves with a code name: planet," Mr Massat-Bourrat said.

The drone did not belong to the US military, spokesman Major Mark McCann said. Three US military unmanned craft have crashed in Afghanistan this year, with the last coming down on November 24.

DynCorp maintains a heavy presence in Kabul and trains Afghanistan's fledgling police force. In August, a bomb outside the company's office in the capital killed nine people including four of its employees.

The Istiqlal school, which has 5600 pupils, is jointly financed by the Afghan ministry of education and France. Its alumni include Ahmad Shah Masood, the resistance hero killed by suspected Taliban in September 2001. 



-------- chemical weapons

EPA to Allow Pesticide Testing on Humans

Canada Free Press
by Steven Milloy, www.junkscience.com
December 3, 2004

http://www.torontofreepress.com/2004/milloy120304.htm

The Environmental Protection Agency is drafting a policy to once again allow the consideration of experimental tests on humans in the setting of chemical exposure limits.

It’s the right thing to do — as long as the Bush administration is prepared to defend the policy from the savage attacks that should be expected from environmental activists.

Adblock
Under the new policy being developed, manufacturers that want to test pesticides and other chemical products on human volunteers would submit proposals to the EPA for review. The agency would approve studies unless they are deemed unethical or significantly deficient in design. The data could then be considered by the agency in the setting of permissible levels of exposure to chemicals.

The Clinton administration placed a moratorium on such voluntary human testing in 1998. Environmental activists and other Bush administration-haters will no doubt try to liken the return of voluntary human testing to past instances of criminal human experimentation — such as Nazi concentration camp experiments, the Tuskegee syphilis study (in which the U.S. Public Health Service purposefully left African-American men with untreated syphilis) and the U.S. government’s secret human radiation experiments (in which people were unknowingly injected with plutonium).

I can even envision a twist to the 2001 television commercial produced by the Democratic National Committee in response to the Bush administration’s decision to review the Clinton administration’s eleventh hour rule concerning arsenic in drinking water. Instead of the little girl in the TV ad asking, “May I please have some more arsenic in my water, Mommy?” she might in 2005 ask, “Mommy, is it time for my pesticide pill?”

Don’t fall for this nonsense. The testing of chemicals on human volunteers isn’t new, has rigorous safety standards, and helps establish more evidenced-based chemical exposure limits. What’s more, opposition to voluntary human testing (aside from the Bush-bashing aspect) is really just about restricting pesticide use — it’s got nothing to do with ethical concerns.

Until the Clinton administration moratorium on voluntary human testing, pesticide manufacturers could conduct experimental safety tests either on human volunteers or laboratory animals. Manufacturers often prefer testing on human volunteers because such tests produce results that are easier to convert into real-world permitted exposure levels.

In a typical experiment involving humans, volunteers are exposed to very low levels of a chemical, perhaps up to the point when the very first biochemical changes in the blood, or the very earliest clinical signs of the chemical (such as slight dizziness) are observed. The highest exposure level where either no significant biochemical or clinical changes are observed is then divided by 10 (an arbitrary factor used to provide a margin of safety for potentially more sensitive people in the population) to arrive at the permitted exposure level.

The procedure for setting a permitted exposure level based on laboratory animals is similar, except that the arbitrary factor used ranges from 100 to 1,000 or more, supposedly representing the increased uncertainty in extrapolating safety levels from lab animals to humans.

But testing of laboratory animals can get pretty weird. Years ago, researchers for a pesticide manufacturer debated with EPA staff about the level at which the insecticide aldicarb caused the first significant clinical effects to be observed in laboratory dogs — the controversy centered around how soft was “too soft” for dog stool.

Human testing, in contrast, is much more straightforward — the effects observed during the experiment are those that the permitted exposure levels are designed to avoid. Laboratory animal testing typically results in much more stringent safety levels that make pesticide use more costly and difficult. Safety levels determined by laboratory animal testing may be set so low as to render a pesticide’s use impractical, causing a manufacturer simply to withdraw it from the market.

This was precisely the goal of the environmental extremists who pressured the Clinton administration to adopt its moratorium on human testing — a policy that forced in 2000 the withdrawal from the consumer market of the widely used insecticide Dursban. In February, the National Academy of Sciences endorsed voluntary human testing so long as the EPA ensured that such testing was necessary, scientifically valid, provided real benefits and was conducted according to ethical standards and procedures.

That sounds like a reasonable plan that will ensure that pesticides — which provide incalculable agricultural and public health benefits — can be evaluated on the basis of scientific data relevant to humans, rather than the divination of safety levels based on the texture of doggie-doo.

Steven J. Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a columnist for FoxNews.com. 



-------- china

Chinese sub

Inside the Ring
December 03, 2004
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm

    China's navy recently deployed an attack submarine in what defense officials say was a rare demonstration of out-of-area underwater operations.

    U.S. intelligence agencies recently published a classified map of the submarine's movements throughout the western Pacific.

    The submarine was detected throughout its voyage beginning in late October through mid-November from its home port of Ningpo south past Taiwan to Guam — where the U.S. Navy has three attack submarines and plans to deploy up to seven more.

    The submarine then sailed near Okinawa, where it was detected by Japan's navy. The discovery prompted Japan to demand an explanation from Beijing, which promptly issued an apology and explained that the submarine was in Japanese waters as the result of a technical error. 



-------- iraq

Fallujah refugees in desperate need of aid: UN

Reuters
December 3, 2004

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200412/s1256867.htm

More than 200,000 people who fled Fallujah ahead of the US offensive have yet to return and many are in desperate need of aid, with temperatures in Iraq heading towards freezing, a new UN emergency report says.

Figures compiled by the International Organisation for Migration show that 210,600 people, or more than 35,000 families, have taken refuge in towns and villages around Fallujah.

Nearly all those people remain outside the city, where the population was estimated at 250,000-300,000 before the attack.

US forces are maintaining a cordon around Fallujah as sporadic fighting continues.

Troops are preventing refugees from returning, saying they want to stagger the return so that basic facilities can be restored before people go home.

Most areas of the city remain without power, water, sewage and other basic services.

It is expected to take much longer than previously thought to start reconstruction as hundreds of buildings are completely destroyed.

"The return to Fallujah may take a matter of months rather than days, as was previously suggested by multi-national forces," the document said.

The report, entitled Emergency Working Group - Fallujah Crisis, has been compiled by various aid agencies.

It says access to the camps for internally-displaced people is sporadic due to insecurity and military operations.

"Some sites have received assistance, whereas others... are reportedly difficult to access even by the Iraqi Health Ministry," it said.

It describes shortages of fresh food and cooking oil, and says there is serious concern about the cold.

Since October, when families first began fleeing Fallujah, temperatures in central Iraq have fallen from around 30 degrees Celsius to 2 degrees Celsius and sometimes colder overnight.

Many families fled with the clothes they were wearing and a few personal items, unprepared for the change in weather.

"The temperature has dropped, underscoring an urgent need for winterisation items and appropriate shelter," the report said.

The only aid agency that has managed to get into Fallujah to help the people who remained during the furious two-week offensive is the Iraqi Red Crescent Society.

It arrived with three truck loads of food and medical supplies, eight ambulances and several doctors, about 10 days ago and is working from offices in the city centre.

The US military is also attempting to provide assistance.

At one aid distribution point it recently delivered a supply of American snack food, including frosted flakes, granola bars and bagel chips to needy families, many of whom were left confused by the foreign food and frustrated.

The offensive on Fallujah was designed to rid the city of insurgents holed up there for months and put Iraqi security services back in charge in time for elections due on January 30. 

-----

Departing troops test Iraq coalition

THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Sharon Behn
December 03, 2004

http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041202-115257-6961r.htm

About one-third of coalition troops in Iraq, other than British and American soldiers, have left or are scheduled to be withdrawn after Jan. 30 elections, and remaining coalition members say they will be hard-pressed to fill the gaps.

    Troops from the Netherlands and Hungary are to leave in mid-March; Poland — which ranks fourth in terms of numbers — intends to downsize its troop force; and Italy — the third largest troop provider — may not extend its present commitment, which ends this month, by more than three to six months.

    The moves will reduce the multinational force on the ground by almost 2,200 troops by the end of March, bringing the total number of international soldiers who will have pulled out since the start of the war to just over 5,000 — about one-third of the coalition effort not including American and British forces.

    Most coalition members say they will not decamp even if the security situation deteriorates, but decisions on troop deployments often rest on parliamentary votes, not executive decisions.

    U.S. government officials are working to continue to build the coalition, said army spokesman Lt. Col. Joe Yoswa in Washington.

    "We are working with NATO [and] we continue to have open lines of communication with our coalition partners and others who may want to join us," he said.

    Altogether, 13 countries have pulled out their troops or are planning to leave or reduce their presence. Nevertheless, according to Lt. Col. David C. Farlow of Central Command, coalition force strength after the invasion peaked last month with approximately 25,800 soldiers — roughly 9,000 of them British — with fresh troops from other countries such as Georgia more than making up for the troops that left.

    Concrete country-by-country numbers are hard to come by. "We do not provide a comprehensive listing of countries that are supporting the operations there with forces on the ground," said Col. Farlow, citing security concerns.

    Although countries like South Korea and Japan recently joined the effort, other nations appear to be on their way out — using the January election as justification. The departures will increase pressure on allies who have vowed to stick with the United States until the end.

    Robert Killebrew, a retired Army colonel who writes extensively on national security issues, said problems caused by the withdrawals would be more political than military, but that there was a risk in relying too heavily and too soon on Iraqi troops and police.

    "We seem to be betting on the fact that the Iraqi army and national guard will be able to stand up and be effective as some allies pull out. I think that's a tremendous gamble," said Mr. Killebrew. Iraqi police and army have been regularly threatened and killed, and have often fled when attacked.

    Col. Yoswa said the Iraqis "improve their own security capabilities" daily. Asked how long it would be until the Iraqi forces could face the terrorist threat on their own, he said: "The situation continues to be dynamic. Every day they get closer, [but] I don't think you can put a time frame on it."

    Mr. Killebrew believes there will be more, not less, violence after the elections as terrorists and insurgents try to prevent a new government from taking over. As it is, gunfire, mortar attacks, car bombings and roadside bombs are a daily event in the capital.

    Apart from British forces, most coalition troops have been serving in a division under Polish command in the central-southern section of Iraq, covering restive cities like Najaf and Karbala. As coalition members leave, pressure is being put on those left behind.

    "There's a limit to what they can handle," said Robert Jamro, managing director of Polish Exchange, who works closely with Polish officials.

    "First the Spanish left, then the Dominicans pulled out. [The Poles] were somehow patching the holes, but at some point we can't patch all that," he said.

    Hungary has decided to withdraw its 300 troops — which were dealing mainly with transport and logistics for the whole division — forcing remaining troops to reorganize.

    An estimated 300 to 500 Polish troops are expected to leave after the elections, and Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko — who may yet win the presidency — has said he would bring home the roughly 1,650 soldiers that country has in Iraq.

    "So, at some point, there is nothing under the Polish command," said Mr. Jamro, who said he expects the status of the multinational division will change. Its members may be incorporated into a U.S. division, he said.

    Apart from British troops, the U.S. military has not had to work directly with troops from other coalition countries — all with different mission statements and different languages, uneven training levels and varied cultural approaches.

    Under Polish command, the lingua franca, for example, was Russian, followed at one point by Spanish. When the 1,300-strong Spanish contingent left in April, it became even harder to communicate with the small contingents from Latin America, most of whom eventually left.

    Another 1,300 troops are expected to leave by mid-March — this time the Dutch. That would bring the total expected to leave in the next four months to at least 2,400. Italy is also considering what to do with its 3,000 troops, whose commitment expires Dec. 31. One Italian diplomat said he expected Rome to renew its commitment for three to six months.

    Pro-U.S. European partners say that a lack of concrete recognition by Washington of their efforts for the past two years has fed the exodus. Some countries felt that they should have been offered a greater role in the profitable reconstruction effort.

    Seoul, which has been asked to extend its troop strength in the face of stiff domestic opposition, was miffed when President Bush failed to mention its participation in the war effort when he addressed the Republican convention in September.

    "It was a minor error by a speechwriter, and a senior official of the administration called his counterpart to explain. But many people are not quite certain that we are duly recognized for such a major contribution," said National Assembly member Chung Eui-yong.

    South Korea is building up its troop presence in Iraq to 3,600 soldiers, which will displace Italy as the third largest contingent after the United States and Britain. The South Korean Cabinet last week agreed to extend the South Korean reconstruction mission in northern Iraq for another year.

    The Bush administration has emphasized on the multinational nature of the Iraq war, and coalition partner diplomats are quick to say that they are in Iraq for the Iraqis, not to win concessions from Washington.

    "But at the same time, when you work alongside the U.S., and are open to the U.S. viewpoint on the war on terror, you also want to convince your public by showing them that the relationship with the U.S. is two-way street," said one European diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

    Many participating countries had expected to win more on reconstruction projects or, like Poland, to have visa restrictions waived. Polish citizens need visas to enter the United States, while nationals from France and Germany — which opposed the war and have refused to send forces — do not face the same regulations.

    The diplomat said that coalition members may decide to send some forces back to Iraq under a NATO umbrella to train Iraqi forces, changing the profile of their participation.

    "We are trying to get more NATO involvement and more EU involvement and build on that," the diplomat said.

--------

Iraq: The U.S. Wrong All the Way

Al-Jazeerah, 
By Sam Hamod
December 3, 2004

http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2004%20opinions/December/3%20o/Iraq%20The%20U.S.%20Wrong%20All%20the%20Way%20By%20Sam%20Hamod.htm 

I've heard many generals say that we should have sent more troops into Iraq. This is pure out and out Nonsense! In truth, no matter how many troops we send into Iraq, nor how many we've sent, will make it possible for America to conquer and occupy Iraq. More troops may kill more people, and more of the troops will be killed, but it will all be to no avail in the end. The Iraqis and other Muslims from around the world will come to fight against us in Iraq and elsewhere; thus, in the end, we will lose more than we could possibly gain by our misadventure into Iraq.

We should never have gone into Iraq. That is what went wrong and is still wrong with the American action in Iraq.

First, what would you do if someone invaded your country and decided to take it over? Wouldn't you fight back? Of course you would. For those of who still have some common sense and are not hypnotized by the lies of the media--we are aware that anyone would defend his or her country. So why is it so hard for Americans to realize that what are called "insurgents" and "terrorists" are actually Iraqis defending their families, their homes and their country against outside invaders. Thus, to the Iraqis and to most of the world, at least 85% according to recent world wide surveys, our American troops are seen as the "terrorists" who do not belong in Iraq and it is our troops who are committing the atrocities with the illegal use of the outlawed napalm, poison gas and phosphorous shells.

We have also committed significant and continuing war crimes in Iraq: 1. Taking over hospitals and not allowing patients to come in for treatment. 2. Our torture and deprivation at Abu Ghraib. 3. The bombing of major civilian populations, knowing full well that there were no military targets therein. 4. Depriving civilians of medical aid, water, electricity and the freedom of move about in order to take care of their needs. The list could go on, but these are only a few matters that have been listed by the International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International and by the United Nations.

Somehow, the American people believe Iraq is their country to do with as they wish. This is utter nonsense, it shows our country is out of touch with reality.

American troops are told the Muslims in Iraq are "satan's people" and that they should be killed. Ironically, Islam is closer to Christianity than any other religion--yet the uneducated mass of evangelical preachers have no idea of Islam or the try Christianity--they are preaching a distorted Christianity and they have made up lies about Islam so that our troops are following these lies as truth.

American troops often have pictures of 9/11 and the Twin Towers in their camps and such words as "They did this to us," and "Now let's kill their asses for this," and other such lies. The Iraqis had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, yet Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and others continue these lies to our troops and to our public. This is insanity of the worst sort.

We also cannot win in Iraq. All America can do is to kill a lot of people, poison them with Depleted Uranium, leave the children worse off than ever (this according to a UN health report of today that said Iraqi children are far worse off than before the American invasion of Iraq).

America is also making more enemies among Muslims throughout the world; something that will not go away in a year or two, but will be alive for possibly centuries--just as the Crusades are remembered to this day!

It it time we brought our troops home--in order to save their lives, their bodies, their physical and mental health, and to save the lives and health of thousands of Iraqis. It is not a lack of troops that is wrong in Iraq, is is that we never should have been there and do not belong there now.

And let us also understand that Vichy like puppets like Allawi are not for or from the Iraqi people--they are transplants who have been and will continue to be rejected by the Iraqi people until they either leave or are assassinated.

Sam Hamod is an expert on the Middle East and Islam. He is the former editor of 3rd World News in Wash, DC and former Director of The Islamic Center of Wash, DC; he also edits, http://www.todaysalternativenews.com  . He may be reached at shamod@cox.net 

--------

Slow Pace in Iraq Surprises NATO Commander

AP Dec 3, 2004
	
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&ncid=736&e=6&u=/ap/20041203/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_nato

BAGHDAD, Iraq - NATO (news - web sites) commander Gen. James Jones on Friday expressed surprise at the slow pace of restoring security to Iraq (news - web sites), saying he had believed the insurgency here would have been brought under control faster than in Afghanistan (news - web sites).

Jones also urged NATO member states opposed to the U.S.-led war in Iraq — in particular Germany and France — to join other members of the bloc in training Iraqi military forces.

"For everybody that sits out of the mission, it increases the pressure on those who are committed and makes the future challenging ... and more difficult," said Jones.

Jones arrived in Baghdad with Jaap De Hoop Scheffer, secretary-general of the Brussels-based alliance.

NATO has sent about 70 troops from Italy, Hungary, Norway and Canada to Iraq to run a training program for officers of the interim government's security forces.

Jones said he had believed Iraq's insurgency would have been brought under control sooner than Afghanistan's, which U.S.-led forces invaded following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

"I am very pleased with what is going on in Afghanistan (in restoring security), but at the beginning I would have projected the opposite, with Iraq coming along faster," Jones told reporters.

Military planners had anticipated that insurgents in Afghanistan would try to sabotage the Oct. 9 presidential elections. NATO deployed an additional 2,000 troops to safeguard the ballot, bringing its total peacekeeping force in that country to 9,000.

"But the insurgents have not been able to materialize (in Afghanistan)," said Jones.

Scheffer, who inaugurated NATO's training facility in Baghdad's Green Zone, which houses the U.S. Embassy and interim Iraqi government, sidestepped a question on whether NATO forces would take a combat role in Iraq.

"Of course there is an area where (the security) is problematic, but NATO has decided on the training mission and NATO will embark on the training mission in the present situation," he said.

Scheffer also said it was important for Iraq's national elections to take place on Jan. 30 as scheduled "because that is what this training is all about, to see the political process in this country developing."

NATO expects to deploy 250 trainers, supported by 1,500 to 2,000 troops, to Iraq, alliance spokesman Col. Petter Lindqvist said. 


-------- israel / palestine 

Girl's killing puts focus on soldiers

THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Joshua Mitnick
December 03, 2004

http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041202-092434-8388r.htm

TEL AVIV — The calculated killing of an unarmed Palestinian schoolgirl in the Gaza Strip in October has prompted unusual public scrutiny of the Israeli army and its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

    A military court last week indicted a company commander in the Oct. 5 killing of 13-year-old Iman Hams after she wandered near an army outpost.

    In two counts of improper use of firearms, prosecutors charge that the officer, identified only as "Capt. R," needlessly fired several rounds of bullets into the girl's body at close range.

    Details of the incident came to light last week after military video and audio recordings of the incident were leaked to news media. The cold-blooded way the girl was killed — even after she had been identified as an unarmed and nonthreatening child — has disturbed commentators and former military officers.

    "If a real court battle is conducted in this case," wrote Amos Harel, a military correspondent for the Ha'aretz newspaper, "the trial of the company commander will turn into a discussion about the [Israel Defense Force's] behavior in the Gaza Strip during the past years and about the freedom of action it has allowed itself in the name of confronting terror in this war."

    An internal review of the incident submitted to Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon supported Capt. R's contention that he was unaware that the girl did not pose a threat when his unit opened fire.

    It also supported his argument that he did not fire into the girl's body, but into the ground next to her to ward off militants from the nearby border town of Rafiah.

    "She was close to the outpost by infiltration standards," said Capt. Jacob Dallal, an army spokesman. "When a suspicious figure approaches an outpost, they're allowed to open fire."

    But a subsequent investigation by military police and the tape of the soldiers' chatter showed that others in the unit already had identified the girl as an unarmed child trying to flee the scene when the initial command was given to open fire.

    "This is the commander," Capt. R is heard saying on the tape at the conclusion of the incident. "Anyone who moves in this zone — even if it's a 3-year-old child — must be killed. Over."

    The army said it routinely documents its field operations through video and audio recordings. The tapes were leaked to the press by either the soldiers in the unit or the commander's attorney.

    Though Gen. Yaalon has since admitted that the killing was a "grave" mistake, observers are questioning the ability of the army to investigate the treatment of Palestinian civilians.

    "The investigations in the army have become bankrupt," reserve Col. Ilan Katz, a former deputy chief military prosecutor, told the online edition of the Ma'ariv newspaper. "Action needs to be taken immediately because it is no longer possible to have any faith in the army inquiries."

    The schoolgirl shooting is one of three incidents in the past few weeks that have thrown into question whether the army is adhering to its code of conduct.

    Earlier last month, at a checkpoint outside the West Bank city of Nablus, a Palestinian musician was told to unpack his violin for inspection.

    A picture of the musician playing his instrument for the soldiers appeared on the cover of Ha'aretz, reminding many older Jews of prisoners being forced to perform for Nazi officers during the Holocaust.

    The army denied newspaper reports that the soldiers had forced the violinist to perform, saying the man had done so of his own volition.

    In the third incident, reported by the newspaper Yediot Ahronot, a group of soldiers photographed themselves while desecrating the bodies of Palestinian militants killed in a gunfight.

    "All three [incidents] are very troubling," especially when taken together, said Dan Meridor, a former Likud Party justice minister and head of parliament's Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee. "It's unlike what we thought the Israeli army should be." 



-------- landmines

Countries Gather to Lighten the World's Burden of Landmines

NAIROBI, Kenya, December 2, 2004 (ENS)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2004/2004-12-02-03.asp

A project to clear anti-personnel land mines from a wildlife sanctuary in southern Africa was introduced today at a global conference on land mines in an effort to give thousands of elephants and local residents fresh hope.

The initiative, backed by the California based organization Roots of Peace, demonstrates that land mines are an environmental as well as a humanitarian concern.

The US$1 million project initially aims to clear mines, sown during the Angolan civil war, to help restore an ancient elephant migration route linking Botswana with Zambia and Angola.

There are very few ecotourism initiatives in Angola, mainly because of land mines. Restoring this area is part of a plan to create a large transboundary park known as the Okavango/Upper Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area which will stretch from Zimbabwe through Botswana, Namibia, Angola and Zambia.

An estimated 120,000 elephants, whose numbers are growing at five percent annually would be able to move north into Angola and Zambia if the mines were cleared.

The Roots of Peace elephant project was announced during the Nairobi Summit for a Mine-Free World taking place at the headquarters of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The Nairobi Summit is the first five year review of the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning anti-personnel mines. At the Summit, the international community is expected to adopt a powerful action plan to address challenges that remain on the path towards a mine-free world.

Heads of state and ministers of foreign affairs from several countries are expected to address the Summit’s two day high level session that opens today.

At the Summit Ethiopia became the 144th state to accept the Ottawa Convention. The announcement came Monday on the first day of the Summit.

“I am ecstatic that on the first day of this historic event one of the world’s most mine-affected states has joined the effort to end the suffering caused by anti-personnel mines,” said Summit President Ambassador Wolfgang Petritsch of Austria.

Petritsch noted that Ethiopia will destroy its existing stockpiles of anti-personnel mines within four years, clear mined areas within 10 years, and cease any use, production or transfer of the weapons immediately.

“Every state in Sub-Saharan Africa except Somalia has now accepted the Ottawa Convention’s comprehensive solution to the humanitarian catastrophe caused by anti-personnel mines,” said Ambassador Petritsch. “In addition, I have great hope that Somalia will soon join this global movement given as the new Somali Prime Minister has confirmed that he will attend the Nairobi Summit.”

The official five year review document offers a hopeful outlook. Since it was adopted in Oslo on September 18, 1997, the Convention’s "unique spirit of cooperation has been sustained, ensuring the Convention’s rapid entry into force and over five successful years of implementation," the document states.

The review charts progress and points out considerable challenges that remain before the world will be free of mines.

Despite great progress towards universal adherence, 51 countries have not yet ratified or acceded to the Convention, including the United States.

"The U.S. will not sign the Ottawa Convention because of concern for the safety and security of our men and women in uniform, and because of our responsibilities around the world for the security of friends and allies," the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs said in a statement issued November 26.

"The Ottawa Convention would remove from U.S. forces munitions our commanders say they may need for these purposes, munitions that self-destruct or self-deactivate within hours or days of being used, and thus do not remain hazardous to innocent people after the military conflict has ended," the State Department said.

"The U.S. has ratified the Amended Mines Protocol to the Convention on Conventional Weapons, a separate international landmine treaty that establishes reasonable, transparent and verifiable standards for the use of landmines to minimize risks to civilians," said the State Department, which assured the global community that "at present, the United States maintains no minefields anywhere in the world, and has not exported anti-personnel landmines since 1992."

But 12 countries that are not parties to the Ottawa Convention have used anti-personnel mines since the Convention entered into force - Ethiopia, Georgia, India, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Myanmar, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Sri Lanka and Uzbekistan, as well as Iraq under its former regime, according to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), a network of 1,400 nongovernmental organizations in 90 countries.

The ICBL has estimated that six countries that are not Parties to the Ottawa Convention may hold a total of more than 180 million stockpiled antipersonnel mines. They are China, India, South Korea, Pakistan, the Russian Federation and the United States.

Together, the Parties have destroyed more than 37 million landmines since the Ottawa Convention took effect.

From a financial perspective, the five year review acknowledges that some States Parties, particularly developing countries, do not possess the financial means to destroy their stockpiles of antipersonnel mines given pressing needs in other areas.

"It should be recognized that while an investment of typically less than US$1 per mine will destroy a stockpile of mines, the costs to clear emplaced mines are hundreds or thousands of times higher," the review document says.

Many States Parties do not have the means to obtain accurate data on casualties or even a general sense of the extent to which populations are at risk underscores the need for assessments in order to determine what needs to be done to initiate or advance mine education activities.

From a technical perspective, the remaining main challenges include the destruction of a unique type of mine, the PFM1 mine, the review document explains.

This type of mine is tough to destroy because it cannot be disarmed once armed, and it contains a liquid explosive that gives off toxic fumes once detonated.

Belarus, which is a Party to the Convention, holds millions of PFM1 mines. In addition, some States that are not Parties including one signatory, Ukraine, have large stockpiles of them, the review says, pointing out that "the destruction of those stockpiles would be an important challenge should they join the Convention."

Another technical challenge relates to a lack of expertise by some Parties to develop and implement national stockpile destruction plans.

Mine detection efforts are getting more creative, although most mine clearance still depends on the mainstays - manual deminers, mine detection dogs and mechanical systems.

But new techniques are in development. Tests have been conducted on combined ground penetrating radar and metal detectors and on infrared detectors.

The use of creatures other than dogs to detect antipersonnel mines is being investigated, with certain types of rats, trained honey bees, and genetically modified plants showing some promising results.

Once areas have been demined, they can be converted - carefully - to peaceful uses.

Roots of Peace, which works with bodies including the UNEP, the United Nations Development Programme UNDP, the United Nations Mine Action Service and the UK based Mine Advisory Group, is developing agricultural projects in de-mined areas.

In Afghanistan, the de-mined areas have been restored into grape growing fields and in Cambodia, the once deadly soils are now being used to cultivate rice.

"Together we have planted rice in Cambodia, grapes in Afghanistan, orchards in Croatia and wheat in Iraq converting swords into plough shares in war torn countries," said Heidi Kuhn, founder and president of Roots of Peace.

UNEP, which has a Post Conflict Assessment Unit (PCAU) based in Geneva, has carried out studies in several war-torn countries and regions including the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.

It recently conducted a post conflict assessment of Liberia and has received similar requests from other African countries including Angola.

Henrik Slotte of the Unit said, " Mines and unexploded ordnance (UXO's) have been problem in many areas where UNEP-PCAU has been working such as Afghanistan, in Kosovo, in Serbia-Montenegro, in Bosnia-Hertzegovina and in Iraq."

"In addition to immediate risks for the local population and returning refugees after the conflicts, mines and UXO's are also posing a threat to the wildlife and to the use of nature protection areas such as National Parks and wildlife reserves," Slotte said.

Klaus Toepfer, UNEP's executive director, said, "Land mines are among the horrendous legacies of war that play their deadly role in perpetuating poverty. The direct threat to people from these seeds of misery must be our first concern but it is clear that the environment, upon which local people depend for items such as food, shelter and natural medicines suffers, too."

"Land mines effectively bar people from productive land forcing them to clear forests and other precious areas for agriculture with consequences for the fertility of soils, accelerated land degradation and loss of wildlife," said Toepfer. "We need more initiatives like this Roots of Peace and Conservation International project in Angola that not only remove these discarded weapons but replace them with the chance for local people to earn a sustainable livelihood."

Access to "opportunities to earn a living and be accepted as part of society" is an important part of the Landmine Survivors Summit Declaration issued Sunday after the parallel gathering of survivors in Nairobi convened by Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan.

In their Declaration, the survivors called upon Ottawa Convention States Parties to do many things including, "integrate landmine survivor assistance into national health and rehabilitation policies and development programs."

In addition, the survivors ask for recognition that "as a necessary condition of adequate victim assistance, landmine survivors must be treated on an equal basis with all other members of society and protected from discrimination on the basis of their disability in accordance with recognised civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights."

Read the Survivors Summit Declaration here.

View the Draft Five Year Review of the Ottawa Convention.



-------- pakistan / india

Gulled by Gul

THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
December 03, 2004

http://washingtontimes.com/commentary/20041202-083644-9557r.htm

"The leadership vacuum created by the sad demise of [Palestinian] President Arafat can only be filled by Osama bin Laden and [Taliban leader] Mullah [Mohammad] Omar, the real leaders that are the only dedicated individuals with the mass support of the Muslim world," said the front-page statement in Pakistan's mass circulation, Urdu-language newspaper Nawa-e-Waqt. The author was none other than Gen. Hamid Gul, the notorious former head of Pakistan's intelligence service (ISI), perennial agitproper and America-hater, who is "strategic adviser" to the six-party coalition of politico-religious extremists known as MMA.

    In a subsequent Nov. 19 interview in the same newspaper, Gen. Gul flayed U.S. foreign policy now in the hands of "warrior princess" Condi Rice. He said: "The U.S. has created the dilemma of the sociopolitical and economic collapse in Pakistan. Now with Rice's appointment, the U.S. will influence and control Pakistan's nuclear program, which is our only remaining strength, through which the right nuclear balance in the region [with India] is maintained."

    MMA plans nationwide protests this week against President Pervez Musharraf's military offensive in the federally administered tribal areas (FATA) to find Osama bin Laden. Presumably to pre-empt the extremist demonstrations, Mr. Musharraf announced military operations in FATA were now completed and the army was satisfied bin Laden was not hiding somewhere in the 2,500-kilometer-long Afghan-Pakistan frontier region. The unmarked border snakes through rugged mountains and remote plains, and with less than 10,000 troops engaged in the search, and the first snowfalls of winter, finding the proverbial needle in a haystack would have been easier.

    If anyone knows bin Laden's whereabouts, it would be Gen. Gul. An internal CIA assessment describes Gen. Gul as Pakistan's "most dangerous man." The general doesn't hide his admiration for bin Laden and is a personal friend of Mullah Omar. Bin Laden and Gen. Gul share a geopolitical vision that merges Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and the oil riches of a post-monarchy Saudi Arabia in a revived Muslim caliphate.

    Earlier this year, Gen. Gul told a closed meeting of MMA leaders at a wake for the wife of the coalition's vice president Sami ul-Haq, they should begin planning Mr. Musharraf's succession. Gen. Gul's candidate: Abdel Qader Khan, father of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and, opinion surveys say, the country's most popular man since Ali Jinnah, founder of the republic.

    "Musharraf and the new Prime Minister Aziz are just the informers and not the real leaders of Pakistan as they were not elected by the people," Gen. Gul said in a recent interview that called for "elected and brave only" leaders. Mr. Musharraf has survived eight assassination plots.

    Gen. Gul's candidate is the same Mr. Khan who confessed to running the world's first international black market for nuclear materials and bomb-making wherewithal. His clients were Iran, North Korea — two of the three members of President Bush's axis of evil (the third was Iraq) — and Libya (now on probation in reform school).

    Mr. Khan first began catering to the Iranian ayatollahs' nuclear yearnings in February 1986. At that time, the secret program was split up and compartmentalized into raw materials, uranium enrichment, plutonium reprocessing, technology procurement and weapons design.

    In the 1980s, there was no yarn about the need for nuclear power to cover nuclear weapons goals. Iranian Majlis speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani said in an address to Pasdaran officers, rebroadcast on Oct. 6, 1988, "We should fully equip ourselves both in the offensive and defensive use of chemical, bacteriological and radiological weapons." The $800 million deal with Russia for nuclear reactors at Busheir was a convenient smoke screen for the different phases of the nuclear weapons program scattered in the rest of the country.

    Negotiations between Europe's Big Three and Iran, and IAEA and Iran, are pure cat-and-mouse charades. Iran is already trying to fit a WMD warhead to a long-range missile. And IAEA lacks authority to scour the country for nuclear weapons.

    After burrowing their way into the club courtesy of Pakistan's nuclear Daddy Warbucks, Iran and North Korea are now the world's ninth and 10th nuclear powers. The fiercely anti-American Mr. Khan also sent two nuclear engineers to Afghanistan before September 11, 2001, to confer with Mullah Omar (on an agricultural project, Pakistan lamely explained when the news leaked). Gen. Gul was also in Afghanistan for two weeks immediately prior to September 11.

    Mr. Musharraf granted A.Q. Khan a full pardon. He was allowed to keep his lucre stashed in foreign banks. Mr. Musharraf realized bringing such a national icon to trial would have triggered nationwide riots.

    Worse than riots, A.Q.K.'s handiwork may well precipitate a wider regional conflict. Both Israel and the United States have said a nuclear Iran is unacceptable. Iran, on the other hand, sees itself bracketed between two countries now occupied by the U.S. — 20,000 U.S. troops to the east in Afghanistan and 135,000 to the west in Iraq. Again, seen from Tehran, Iran is surrounded by half the world's nuclear powers — Russia, Israel, Pakistan and India.

    So Iran has legitimate security concerns. And the fear of U.S. armed forces on its flanks has strengthened the grip of hard-liner ayatollahs.

    Before Operation Iraqi Freedom, some prominent neoconservatives advocated hitting Iran first, not Iraq. They argued, as the Iraqi hawks did about Baghdad, that countless millions were anxiously waiting to be liberated. For the U.S. to take on Iran and its 70 million people without a clear casus belli would make Iraq look like a walk in the park. The inevitable strategic debacle would topple Pakistan's President Musharraf and bring about Gen. Gul's vision of a nuclear caliphate.

    The U.S. Defense Science Board in a 111-page report this week found U.S. credibility among Muslims is down to zero and urged policymakers to spend more time "listening" to their intended audience and use messages that "seek to reduce, not increase, perceptions of arrogance, opportunism and double standards."

    At the same time, another U.S. survey showed anti-American prejudice and hostility in Europe far exceeding those during the Vietnam War. Today, every large European country has a Muslim minority of several million. A preemptive U.S. attack on Iran would only worsen matters for the Bush administration and governments still backing the U.S. in Iraq. We would likely be on the receiving end of a paroxysm of global rage — and Osama bin Laden, as Hamid Gul suggested, anointed the Muslim world's Jihadi-in-Chief.

    Unencumbered by image problems in Europe and the Muslim world, where it has long been seen as the villain, Israel is ready and able to seriously disrupt Iran's nuclear buildup, much the way it killed Saddam Hussein's reactor at Osirak before it went critical in 1981. Israel won't wait for a wink and a nod from the White House before acting. But the U.S. will be blamed anyway.


    Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large for The Washington Times and United Press International. 



-------- prisoners of war

Abuse at U.S. prisons in Iraq mirrored at jails in Afghanistan
Report says lax rules invited mistreatment

Washington Post
R. Jeffrey Smith, 
December 3, 2004

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/12/03/MNGGPA5N4P1.DTL&type=printable

Washington -- A recent classified assessment of U.S. military detention facilities in Afghanistan found that they have been plagued by many of the problems that existed at military prisons in Iraq, including weak or nonexistent guidance for interrogators, creating what the assessment described as an "opportunity" for prisoner abuse.

The inspection, conducted this summer by a one-star Army general, has not been publicly released by the Defense Department. But three government officials privy to its conclusions said this week that the report had found a wide range of shortcomings in the military's handling of prisoners in Afghanistan, including an unwarranted use of rectal exams instead of metal wands to search for contraband.

Army Brig. Gen. Charles Jacoby, who was ordered to conduct the survey in May by the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan after the military's abuse of Iraqi prisoners became public knowledge, found that just half of the roughly two dozen U.S. prisons in Afghanistan had posted written orders spelling out approved interrogation practices.

Jacoby also found those practices in need of revision and better enforcement, according to the government officials. Lacking any approved guidance, U.S. military commanders in the field were using their own judgment about how prisoners should be handled, opening the door to abuse and a loss of valuable intelligence, the officials said Jacoby concluded.

At the time of Jacoby's visit, senior U.S. military officials in Iraq and Washington had known for more than four months about photographic evidence of abused prisoners in Iraq. Senior U.S. military officers in the region also had known for more than five months about an Army report alleging abuses by a CIA- Special Operations Forces group in Iraq.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. military operation in Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Pamela Keeton, said Thursday that while Jacoby did not find any instances of abuse under way during his visit, he did find that prison officers needed better military rules and training.

She said, for example, that before his inspection, prisoners could be held for indefinite periods at temporary prison facilities, where representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross had no access to them. Now, Keeton said, U.S. military rules bar the detention of any prisoner at a temporary prison for more than 10 days without release or transfer to a regular prison, and Red Cross representatives must be provided access within 15 days of their detention.

Keeton also said the practice of conducting invasive bodily searches among prisoners had been stopped in most cases.

Efforts also have been made to curtail the number of temporary prisons in the field, she said. Jacoby's report suggested that the worst conduct may have occurred at such facilities.

Although the report represents the military's first attempt to survey the scope of prison shortcomings in Afghanistan, suggestions of widespread abuses there had turned up earlier this year, when Army investigators looked into mistreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Many of the officials at Abu Ghraib had served in Afghanistan and honed their approach to handling prisoners there, according to two Defense Department reports issued in August.

The reports said, for example, that the idea of using dogs to intimidate prisoners at Abu Ghraib migrated from Afghanistan, where U.S. soldiers noted that many citizens feared dogs. Other methods transferred to Iraq included stripping prisoners, forcing them into stress positions and depriving them of light, sleep or human contact.

Also, a report by investigators with the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, completed in May on the eve of Jacoby's visit and stamped "For Official Use Only," implicated more than two dozen military police officers in the deaths of two Afghan prisoners in Bagram, Afghanistan, in 2002.

That Army report, obtained by the Washington Post, also said a senior officer of the 377th Military Police Company based in Cincinnati and eventually deployed to Iraq had admitted he knew his soldiers were striking detainees in Afghanistan, and it concluded that his dereliction of duty contributed to routine prisoner mistreatment.

The report listed a range of abuses committed by members of the 377th and a battalion of military intelligence officers from Fort Bragg, N.C., during their deployment to Afghanistan.

U.S. forces have "tightened up procedures for training up our people to handle and care for the prisoners," Keeton said. They now have standard operating procedures in place, she said, and mechanisms to enforce them.

Page A - 13
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/12/03/MNGGPA5N4P1.DTL 



-------- russia / chechnya

Russia May Launch Anti-Terror Strikes

Associated Press
By JUDITH INGRAM
Dec 3, 2004
	
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=518&ncid=732&e=10&u=/ap/20041203/ap_on_re_eu/russia_terrorism

MOSCOW - Russia may use cruise missiles and strategic bombers in preventive strikes against terrorists outside its borders, the commander of Russia's air force said Friday.

Russian leaders have claimed a right to pre-emptive strikes before, for example threatening neighboring Georgia that it would pursue Chechen rebels allegedly sheltering on its territory.

But Gen. Vladimir Mikhailov's comments to the ITAR-Tass news agency aired on Friday were the most direct yet in Russia's rising rhetoric on attacking terrorists abroad. Mikhailov did not specify what targets the air force could potentially go after.

Neither the Soviet Union nor Russia have publicly conducted air strikes outside their borders with the exception of the war in Afghanistan (news - web sites). Soviet pilots flew missions in Korea and during the Mideast wars of the 1960s-70s, but that was done covertly.

"If ordered, our missile-carrier aircraft will attack the terrorists with long-range, highly precise cruise missiles and aerial bombs. We will make use of everything we have," Mikhailov said.

Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and other top officials have said that preventive strikes against terrorists could involve all means except nuclear, but they never went into such specifics as suggesting the use of strategic bombers.

ITAR-Tass commented that Russia had initiated discussion of preventive strikes over a year ago "due to Washington's regular employment of this method in international affairs." ng on its territory.

Following terrorist attacks in August and September, Russian President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites), and other top military officials have been more pointed in their threats of pre-emptive strikes against terrorists abroad.

Russian analysts said Mikhailov's announcement did not appear to be targeted at a specific country. Russia would be unlikely to send strategic bombers to attack neighboring Georgia, independent military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer said.

"They are saying: 'Yes, we can do this, we have this capability, more or less, we can attack but we are not planning to,'" Felgenhauer said. "This is what great powers always do, warning they have the ability to attack.

Alexander Pikayev, a senior analyst with Moscow's Institute for Global Economy and International Relations, said Mikhailov may have simply been trying to promote the air force in order to get more budget funds.

Meanwhile, Russia's Federal Security Service said Friday that an Arab mercenary who was killed in southern Russia late last month was a top representative of the al-Qaida terror network in the troubled North Caucasus region, which includes Chechnya (news - web sites).

The dead man was identified last month as Akhmed Sambiyev, otherwise known as the "White Arab," and security officials said at the time of the killing that he was either Syrian or Turkish.

The Federal Security Service on Friday identified him as a Syrian called Marvan. He was killed on Nov. 25 when he put up armed resistance to arrest in the southern region of Ingushetia, which borders on Chechnya.

Russia has played up claims of a large foreign mercenary presence among Chechen rebels to shore up its argument that they are closely linked to international terrorists, justifying the Kremlin's harsh response. 



-------- space

Team Vandenberg prepares for GMD

By 1st Lt. Lucas Ritter
Staff writer, Friday, December 3, 2004 Space & Missile Times

http://www.vandenberg.af.mil/space-missile-times/story_1-lead/leadstory.htm

See also
http://www.vandenberg.af.mil/space-missile-times/story_2/story2.htm

A base-wide exercise took place Nov. 22 and 23 to test
the base’s preparedness for the ground-based midcourse
defense mission.

The two-day exercise was the final prep period before
the GMD assets are to be placed in the silos and the
program nears its operational state here at
Vandenberg.

“The GMD Pathfinder exercise was designed to test and
evaluate the procedures we use to secure and support
the GMD systems that are being deployed at
Vandenberg,” said Maj. Christopher Drap, 30th Space
Wing inspector general’s office.

Most of the exercise scenarios focused on the convoy
procedures and response to security threats. The 30th
Logistics Readiness Squadron was tested with several
mishaps during the convoy of an interceptor from the
missile assembly building to the silo.

Another scenario had the 30th Security Forces Squadron
responding to hostile persons at a GMD launch
facility.

“Other events involved emergency response, such as a
wildfire and a medical emergency,” Major Drap said.
“We also included some events that tested requests for
communication repair and CE support as well as launch
schedule de-confliction.

The battle staff was activated for the exercise, which
gave wing leadership the chance to observe how
responses were handled. The battle staff also
exercised command and control and used the exercise to
update and refine checklists.

“The exercise was a success, Team Vandenberg will be
ready,” Major Drap said. “Improvements have already
been identified and incorporated into the procedures
to assure the highest level of security and support to
the GMD mission.”

Vandenberg along with Fort Greely, Alaska will be
operational locations for GMD assets. Vandenberg will
receive its interceptor missile later this month. A
team from the Missile Defense Agency will also be on
base this month to certify Vandenberg for the GMD
mission.



-------- spies

The Persian puzzle, or the CIA's?

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Dec 3, 2004 Asia Times

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FL03Ak01.html

TEHRAN - The Persian Puzzle is the name of a new book by Kenneth M Pollack, author of The Gathering Storm: The Case for Invasion of Iraq , widely regarded as a main justification for Iraq's illegal invasion last year. Pollack, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst now at the Brookings Institution, seeks to explore the roots of problems between Iran and the United States over the past quarter-century. In so doing, however, Pollack unfortunately proves incapable of breaking free from a CIA school of thought that, in addition to denigrating Iran's national character, consistently predicts the imminent demise of the Islamic regime in Iran.

Concerning the former, much like Graham Fuller, another former CIA analyst and author of The Center of Universe: The Geopolitics of Iran (Westview Press, 1991), Pollack indulges in criticizing Iranian emotionalism, xenophobia, exaggerated "self-importance", "considerable ignorance of many of its policymakers", etc, thus making a mockery of objective analysis bereft of such abstract generalization smacking of what the late Edward Said labeled "Orientalism".

According to Pollack, the "clock is ticking" for regime change in Iran, reminding us of the rosy predictions of another CIA analyst, Raul Grecht, who in the early and mid-1990s wrote articles, for instance in the influential Foreign Affairs, under the pseudonym Edward Shirley, about the "meltdown" of the Islamic Republic of Iran, so imminent that Grecht advised the US government against even bothering to locate any moderates in the Iranian system in order to enter into dialogue with them.

A decade or so later, it is of course a legitimate question to ask what is behind this persistent CIA knack for vilifying Iranian national character and taking the risk of going on record with respect to regime change, even though there are few, if any, visible signs of regime change in today's Iran. Is it because of an undeclared, subliminal CIA grudge harking back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution that caught the US government totally by surprise, notwithstanding the complaint of then US president Jimmy Carter that a few months prior to the revolution he was never told by the agency that Iran was in a pre-revolutionary stage? Or is it because the CIA has received so much flak recently over what Pollack in his new book refers to as "our 25-year experience misstating Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" that the likes of Pollack want to redeem the agency in the guise of former CIA analysts?

Clearly, even with their high-tech pool of information, no present or former CIA analyst, or for that matter anyone else, is capable of historical clairvoyance with respect to a future regime change in Iran. Certainly, one may cite the indicators of regime instability and its opposite for a "scientific" study of political trends inside Iran enhancing the potential for political transformation, but to leapfrog from such limited studies to the categorical, albeit metaphoric, conclusion that the "clock is ticking" - in other words, it is simply a matter of time - is to substitute teleology for empirical research.

Related, Pollack presents a skewed analysis of post-revolutionary state-building in Iran and simultaneously refers to the present regime as the "worst sponsor of terrorism" and also as an increasingly moderate regime that "has no history of reckless behavior". At times, Pollack appears undecided as to where the chips are falling regarding the evolution of the Iranian system, contradicting himself particularly when discussing the Iranian nuclear issue.

On the one hand, Pollack claims that Iran's possession of nuclear bombs will stimulate a back-to-the-past policy of "aggressive" foreign policy by Tehran aimed at undermining its neighbors, using past tense, and on the other, accusing Tehran of precisely such "aggressive" actions as terrorism and subversion, using present tense. As a result, the book leaves a confusing impression of the post-ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini political system in Iran, partly due to Pollack's failure to touch on important facets of Iran's foreign policy, such as Iran's role in regional conflict management.

A major flaw of the book is that it claims that the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) permits nuclear weaponization through "transparency", whereby all the fissile stages, save "loading the material" in a bomb, can be done under the watchful eyes of the NPT. This is, without doubt, a caricature of the NPT and its safeguard mechanisms, which Pollack may have been cognizant of had he devoted minimal attention to the intrusive Additional Protocol of the NPT, signed by Iran last December.

The biggest flaw of the book, however, is that it adds precious little to our knowledge of the subject matter. A fairly average summarizer of pre-existing approaches (eg, the grand bargain approach, which Pollack endorses by nuancing it), the book reads like a polished doctoral dissertation, and a mediocre one at that, one that insists Iran is to blame for most, if not all, of the problems in the current US-Iran quagmire, in part by psychologizing deep-seated, even structural conflict, and insisting that if only the Iranians could set aside their "emotionalism", then they could see the light of rapprochement with the US.

In an ideal world, authors explicitly espousing war and armed conflict would be chastised for contributing to "hate literature", and the likes of Pollack would at least not be treated as media celebrities as they are in the US today. But sadly we live in a unipolar Orwellian order where truth is a casualty of ideological warfare, espoused under the veneer of "clashing civilizations", and certainly ill-equipped to deconstruct the discourse of warmongers who use the considerable resources at their disposal to lay the groundwork of public diplomacy for America's next military gambit.

The Persian Puzzle is, in conclusion, highly recommended as a useful reading for the students of the CIA and the US government to decipher the riddle of a whole array of (former) CIA analysts sold to the historical determinism of regime change in Iran, as part and parcel of its perpetual demonization reaching its apex in George W Bush's "axis of evil".

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and "Iran's Foreign Policy Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World Affairs, co-authored with former deputy foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003. He teaches political science at Tehran University.

----

The Return of PSYOPS
Military's media manipulation demands more investigation

FAIR Media Advisory (12/3/04)

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1983

The Los Angeles Times revealed this week (12/1/04) that the U.S. military lied to CNN in the course of executing psychological warfare operations , or PSYOPS, in advance of the recent attack on Fallujah. This incident raises serious questions about government disinformation and journalistic credibility, but recent discussions of the government's propaganda plans have excluded some valuable context.

In an October 14 on-air interview, Marine Lt. Lyle Gilbert told CNN Pentagon reporter Jamie McIntyre that a U.S. military assault on Fallujah had begun. In fact, the offensive would not actually begin for another three weeks. The goal of the psychological operation, according to the Times , was to deceive Iraqi insurgents into revealing what they would do in the event of an actual offensive.

This operation raises obvious questions about the government's use of media to broadcast disinformation at home and abroad-- not to mention questions about journalistic gullibility and reluctance to question official claims . But the CNN story has received little pick-up so far from other news outlets-- and when it is covered, it's treated like an isolated episode, even though recent history shows that U.S. government plans to deceive journalists and the public are widespread and systematic, not aberrational.

Shortly before the launch of the "war on terror," an unnamed Pentagon war planner seemed to warn journalists everywhere when he told Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz: "This is the most information-intensive war you can imagine... We're going to lie about things." (9/24/01)

In February 2002, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) was "developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations" in an effort "to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries."

The story got widespread attention, and the Pentagon announced that the office would be eliminated. But considerably less media attention was paid when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later said that, while the OSI had been closed, its mission would be taken up by other agencies.

As Rumsfeld put it, "I went down that next day and said 'Fine, if you want to savage this thing, fine-- I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.'" (FAIR Media Advisory, 11/27/02 ) So the revelation that a misinformation campaign bearing a striking resemblance to the description of the OSI was actually being carried out ought not to come as a total surprise.

Earlier this year, another Los Angeles Times scoop (6/3/04) revealed that one of the most enduring images of the war-- the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in a Baghdad square on April 9, 2003-- was a U.S. Army psychological warfare operation staged to look like a spontaneous Iraqi action:

"As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel-- not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images -- who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking."

CNN 's history of voluntary cooperation with PSYOPS troops is also worth considering. In March 2000, FAIR and international news organizations revealed that CNN had allowed military propaganda specialists from an Army PSYOPS unit to work as interns in the news division of its Atlanta headquarters.

As FAIR reported at the time (3/27/00), some PSYOPS officers were eager to find ways to use media power to their advantage. One officer explained at a PSYOPS conference that the military needed to find ways to "gain control" over commercial news satellites to help bring down an "informational cone of silence" over regions where special operations were taking place.

And a 1996 unofficial strategy paper written by an Army officer and published by the U.S. Naval War College ("Military Operations in the CNN World: Using the Media as a Force Multiplier") urged military commanders to find ways to "leverage the vast resources of the fourth estate" for the purposes of "communicating the [mission's] objective and endstate, boosting friendly morale, executing more effective psychological operations, playing a major role in deception of the enemy, and enhancing intelligence collection."

Of course, the full extent of these programs is not yet known. But the fact that the U.S. government is intentionally lying to journalists, and by extension to the public, should be big news. Unfortunately, the L.A. Times report is generating little mainstream media attention. CNN 's Aaron Brown reported the story (12/1/04), admitting that "none of us are particularly comfortable when we're talking about things, about ourselves if you will."

Brown also made another, even more revealing comment:

"There is an important and explicit bargain between the press and the Pentagon in a time of war. We don't do anything to endanger the troops or operations. They don't lie to us. Each is essential in a free society and each is made more complicated by the information age, but it seems that sometimes in an effort to mislead the enemy the military has come close, very close, to crossing the line and misleading you."

Of course, in this case the military did not come "very close" to misleading the public; they did mislead the public. And while Brown may have confidence that such a "bargain" exists between the press and the military, it would appear that the Pentagon does not agree. If journalists were more willing to accept the old adage that "all governments lie," we might all be better served.

----

General Says He No Longer Objects to Bill on Spy Post

The New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON and ERIC SCHMITT
December 3, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/03/politics/03panel.html?oref=login&oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 - The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, said Thursday that his public concerns about a sweeping intelligence overhaul bill had been resolved in the final version of the legislation, a remark that appeared to undercut a group of House Republicans who had cited the general's opposition in blocking a final vote.

General Myers's remarks came as the bill's supporters on Capitol Hill offered new optimism over its prospects and said President Bush appeared to be ready to mount a strong, last-minute lobbying campaign to pressure wavering House Republicans to approve the bill when members of Congress return to Washington next week for a brief meeting.

Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who is the chief Senate architect of the bill , said, "I am basing my optimism on the incredibly persuasive powers of the president of the United States, the commander in chief, who wants this legislation."

The compromise bill, which was hammered out by a House-Senate conference committee last month and has been endorsed by President Bush, would enact the major recommendations of the independent Sept. 11 commission and establish the cabinet-level job of national intelligence director to oversee the C.I.A. and the government's other spy agencies.

Senate aides said Ms. Collins received a call on Thursday from Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, to say that the president considered passage of the bill to be a priority during the lame-duck session of Congress scheduled for next week, despite continuing reports of Pentagon opposition.

Although General Myers's comments at a meeting with several reporters were cryptic and he declined to offer an endorsement to the overall intelligence bill, he said that a series of concerns he had raised in a highly publicized letter to the House in October had been worked out "satisfactorily."

"The issue that I specifically addressed in a letter to Chairman Hunter has been accommodated," he said, referring to Representative Duncan Hunter of California, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and the bill's leading critic in the House.

In the Oct. 21 letter, which was released to reporters, General Myers offered his support to Mr. Hunter and other House Republicans who want to limit the budget powers of a national intelligence director. Mr. Hunter and his allies want the Pentagon to retain direct control over billions of dollars in spending by three spy agencies that operate within the Defense Department but have many civilian clients: the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Although its spending is secret, the National Security Agency, which is responsible for electronic eavesdropping in foreign countries, is widely understood to have the largest budget among the nation's spy agencies, including the C.I.A.

"Establishing the budget process in this manner would allow the combat support agencies to continue their outstanding support to the war-fighters," General Myers wrote in the letter, which Mr. Hunter and other House Republicans have repeatedly cited in arguing against the bill. Senate Republicans have raised no similar objections to the legislation.

With his comments Thursday, General Myers suggested that his concerns in the letter had evaporated, and that House Republicans could no longer use the letter in blocking a vote.

"The issue I commented on, I understand, has been worked satisfactorily in the conference," he said, declining other comment on negotiations over the bill.

Spokesmen for Mr. Hunter, whose opposition blocked a final vote on the bill last month, did not return phone calls on Thursday.

Congressional officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the White House was reported to be ready to provide Mr. Hunter with a letter in which President Bush would assure him that the White House would not allow the bill to interfere with the military's chain of command, the criticism raised repeatedly by Mr. Hunter in recent days.

They said the White House appeared to be willing to override the objections of the bill's other chief critic among House Republicans, Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who opposed the legislation after it was stripped of law enforcement and immigration provisions that had been criticized by civil liberties groups.

"The president is working to try to bring everybody together so that we can move forward and get this intelligence reform passed," said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman. "It is something that he is working very hard on, and we will continue to do so in hopes of getting it passed next week."




-------- un

Oil-for-Food Scandal: U.S.-Led Attack on the UN or Proof of Corruption That Could Take Down Kofi Annan?

democracynow.org
December 3rd, 2004

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/03/1451205

We host a debate on the United Nations oil-for-food scandal, a controversy that has been brewing for months. Some say it's part of the US-led attack on the integrity of the United Nations as retribution for its stance on the invasion of Iraq; others say it shows corruption in the UN that reaches all the way up to the secretary general. [includes rush transcript - partial] It is a controversy that has been brewing for months. Some say it's part of the US-led attack on the integrity of the United Nations as retribution for its stance on the invasion of Iraq; others say it shows corruption on the part of an institution that the US has termed soft on dictators and an obstruction to US policy. President Bush Thursday called for what he termed a "full and open" accounting of the U.N. oil-for-food program. But he would not say whether he thought U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan should resign.

Earlier this week, Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota called on Annan to resign. Coleman is investigating corruption in the now defunct oil-for-food program. He said former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein reaped some $21 billion from the program because of Annan's lack of oversight. But Coleman's estimate is higher than some others. A State Department official was quoted by Reuters as saying the calls for Annan's resignation were "premature." Here is some of what President Bush had to say on Thursday.

    * President Bush, speaking on December 2, 2004. 

At issue is a $64 billion program for Iraq, administered by the United Nations and supervised by the 15-nation Security Council. For months, accusations of corruption within the program have been consistently launched at Annan and other UN officials.

In one of the more complicated twists in the story, Kofi Annan's son, Kojo, worked for a Swiss firm that inspected goods under the program and is under investigation. On November 29, UN spokesperson Fred Eckhardt had this to say.

    * Fred Eckhardt, UN Spokesman speaking on November 29, 2004.

Here is what Annan himself had to say about his son and the oil for food controversy.

    * Kofi Annan, U.N. Secretary-General.

To discuss this issue, we are joined now by two people who have been following this story very closely.

    * Claudia Rosett, journalist-in-Residence at The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
    * Joy Gordon, professor of philosophy at Fairfield University. She is currently working on a book on the Iraq sanctions to be published by Harvard University Press.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

[partial transcript]

AMY GOODMAN: As we talk about the Oil-For-Food controversy, now raging over at the United Nations, we are joined by Claudia Rosett who is one of those who broke the story. Her latest piece is "Secretary and Son: Kofi Annan Isn't Kojo's Keeper But He Can't Shirk Responsibility For The U.N." We're also joined by Joy Gordon who has written extensively about the oil for-food program in The Nation and Harper's. Her piece, "The U.N. Is Us: Exposing Saddam Hussein's Silent Partner." We will begin with Claudia. Can you lay out what you see the controversy or scandal to be?

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Oh, the basic scandal is that the U.N. began by providing what was supposed to be a relief program to feed sick and hungry people in Iraq and ended up providing cover for an enormous scam in which billions, pick your estimate, but without any question, billions upon billions were grafted by Saddam Hussein and his many business partners out of the money pumped from the oil wells of Iraq that was supposed to fund this relief program. And part of the question is to what extent was the U.N. oblivious and to what extent was it actually complicit. That's really what the investigations at this point, at least some of them, are looking into. As far as it concerns the U.N. itself. That's the core of the problem. How on earth did it happen? I mean such, this is the largest amount of money grafted out of a relief program probably in history.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the particular twist of the connection now or the taint to the Secretary General himself?

CLAUDIA ROSETT: The Secretary General himself has a son, Kojo Annan, who worked for a company that was--on the day that his contract lapsed with them at the end of 1998, this company, which is based in Geneva, Switzerland, was hired to inspect the relief goods arriving in Iraq under this program, to authenticate that they were what they were supposed to be. And there's some question about how well that got done, according to the U.N.'s own internal audit, one of which leaked this spring. The story gets very complicated. There are many layers to this thing. But the, and at that point, sometime back, the understanding given out by the U.N. was that Kojo Annan's connection with this company called Cotecna had ended. It's then turned out that no, Cotecna had continued to send payments to the son of the Secretary General under the label of paying him not to set up competing operation with their business in West Africa. These payments had continued until February of this year, is what we have now learned. In other words, the payments continued for three months longer than the full duration of Cotecna's contracts with the U.N. under the Oil-For-Food program. We don't know at this point whether anything wrong was done in that, this particular piece of the story, but what we do know, this qualifies by any lights as a conflict of interest, and it's the kind of thing where at the very least, it should be disclosed. It's the kind of thing the public should have known about from the start.

AMY GOODMAN: Joy Gordon, you are a professor of philosophy at Fairfield University, completing a book on the sanctions program in Iraq and your piece in Harpers begins, "The Bush Administration was still reeling from the revelations about Abu Ghraib prison this year when supporters of the President suddenly took note of a dramatic new scandal involving Iraq. 'The richest rip-off in world history,' wrote William Safire." Can you talk about your take on what's happening?

JOY GORDON: Sure. I actually think that this thing with Cotecna is something of a red herring. If you look at, well, and if you look at how the accusations are typically framed, it's the U.N. failed to do this or how could the U.N. have done nothing in the face of the smuggling and kickback. In fact, what's crucial here is to make a distinction about the different entries within the U.N. There's a difference between the Security Council and the Secretariat, and many of the policies that permitted the smuggling and kickback to take place were, cannot be laid at the feet of the Secretary General. They are the policies of the Security Council and the Secretary General has no control over the Security Council. And if we look at the claim that the U.N. failed to catch contracts with pricing irregularities, well again, that goes to the Security Council whose job was to review all of these contracts and if we look at the policies and the failures of, that are now being laid at the feet of the United Nations, many of them, in fact, are due not only to the Security Council but to particular members within the Security Council. For many of these things, the policy for example that allowed the Iraqi government to choose who it would trade with, well that was a Security Council Resolution 986 in combination with a Security Council-approved memorandum of understanding. And the member states, including the United States, were in support of that. If we look at the committees, if we look at the Council's failure to block contracts with pricing irregularities, and it was the Security Council's responsibility, not the Oil-For-Food staff, they did not have the authority to block contracts, only to present information to the Security Council, then in fact what we see is none of the members of the Security Council, including the United States, chose to block contracts where there were obvious price irregularities, even when U.N. staff presented that information with documentation to them.

AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Joy Gordon, author of among her pieces, "The U.N. Is Us: Exposing Saddam Hussein's Silent Partner," and Claudia Rosett, who has exposed this story in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Sun. We want to turn now to Denis Halliday. He was in our studios about a week ago, the former Assistant U.N. Secretary General who was in charge of the Oil-For-Food program. This is what he had to say about it.

      DENIS HALLIDAY: I think it's because the U.N. has become irritating. The Secretary General has finally woken up to his responsibility and has announced that the war is illegal, which has sort of threatened the United States I think, and Britain perhaps. And the old frustration of the neo-con right wing who feels the U.N. is a threat, international law is unacceptable. Its part of the rejection by the Bush regime of Kyoto, of the ICC, of all the other international laws which the rest of us in the world feel are so important, but are rejected by Congress, because they feel it impinges on the constitution and their function, and so on.

      AMY GOODMAN: When Charles Delfer addressed the congressional subcommittee, he singled out a former U.N. Official, Benon Sevan, as a recipient of some 13 million barrels of oil from Saddam Hussein. Sevan has denied the charges. He was your boss in Iraq?

      DENIS HALLIDAY: No, I worked directly for the Secretary General, but he became the boss of Von Sponeck a few years after my period in Baghdad.

      AMY GOODMAN: And what do you believe? Do you believe his denials?

      DENIS HALLIDAY: I believe Mr. Sevan is innocent until proven guilty. I think the point to make, however, is that we put together $64 million – sorry, $64 billion from Iraqi oil sales, gross. The U.N. took off 35%. They gave 30% to Kuwait while Iraqi children were dying for lack of water and adequate foodstuffs. That's a crime in a sense in my view, and many of us believe sanctions in fact turned out to be genocidal. But the Oil-for-Food program did extraordinarily good work. We fed over 20 million Iraqis every day for many years. We saved, I would think, hundreds of thousands of lives. This so-called scandal is a fiction in my view. Now if some members of the Secretariat broke the rules, they must be prosecuted like any other normal human being. I don't believe the Secretariat is the problem. The problem is the United Nations and its member states, particularly Washington and London, who make the decisions, who designed the sanctions, who designed the Gulf War and the most recent invasion. These are the people who make the decisions that impact on Iraq. They are the ones who knew who was happening. They allowed the Baghdad government to have hard currency from Jordan and Turkey and other smuggling arrangements and kickbacks. They know all about this, it's nonsense to put the finger on Kofi Annan or the Secretariat.

      AMY GOODMAN: Do you think, so Kofi Annan should open all the documents, just make the U.N. transparent on this?

      DENIS HALLIDAY: Absolutely. I cannot understand why he's holding back information. They should open the doors, open the files. People like Von Sponeck and myself and others should be made available to Volcker and to those in Washington who are concerned. I think we can show a different light here. This is not a complex issue. This is a known private sector quantity, approved by Washington.

AMY GOODMAN: Former Assistant U.N. Secretary General Denis halliday who is in charge of the Oil-For-Food program in Iraq. Claudia Rosett, your response?

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Sure. Kofi Annan, the Secretary General, does have one thing he can do with the Security Council. And it can be a powerful thing. He can speak up. And it's true that he can't tell the member states, he can't force the member states to do something, but he has been quite outspoken on some of the things that, on which he's disagreed. On this program, in fact, he spoke up quite often protesting the U.S. and U.K. putting contracts on hold. But he never got up and used his considerable public platform to say we are seeing evidence of massive corruption going through this program. There are huge pricing irregularities, also the Secretariat collected $1.4 billion from Saddam's oil funds. That's a huge amount of money to basically monitor the integrity of this program. They did not use that money to sufficiently monitor the oil revenues, the amount of oil flowing out, plus the many billions that ended up becoming the illicit money that we are talking about. They did not use their $1.4 billion to really adequately look at the pricing problems. Whenever they presented to the Security Council, it was, as far as we can see, given the U.N. secrecy, which is part of the problem here, it was pretty minimal. They were not beating on drums and saying Saddam is scamming 20% out of contracts for baby formula, which appears to have been the case. They were very quietly relaying now and then odds and ends, but they really made no per se systematic attempt to use their enormous funding to really keep track of this. So, that's part of the problem. And I think when the, it's the fact that the secretariat had the actual budget to monitor the program, hire the inspectors. That’s where it's not a red herring.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But I'd like to ask you on that point, Joy Gordon in one of her articles in The Nation has noted that on at least 70 occasions, the staff of the United Nations did bring to the attention of the 661 committee, the Security Council body that was in charge of implementing the sanctions, pricing irregularities, and yet the Security Council, the member states which include also the United States, chose not to do anything about it. So to what degree is our own government, was our own government, complicit or had knowledge of these problems beforehand and did not do anything about it until now?

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Well it was the least culpable of all of them. We are the only one who tried to stop anything here. Far worse were the other three. The U.S. and the U.K. were the only one whose tried to stop anything. Far worse were the other three permanent five members, Russia, France and China, who just never protested anything here, who wanted the program to continue and expand. But again, if you go back to the Secretariat, can you point me to a single instance where Kofi Annan, who has spoken out quite freely with his views about the U.S. approach to Iraq, you know, he felt in recent times he's talked about he thinks it was illegal, he finds it inconceivable. He put his opinions quite strongly on record. Inconceivable that France, Russia or China could ever let corruption influence their votes in the Security Council. So, we have him speaking up quite boldly on these scores. Can you point to a single instance where he spoke up to say this program has going on within it major problems of graft and fraud and theft, which is basically taking the money, taking money meant to feed the people of Iraq, which is ending up scamming things like functional medicine out of their supplies and sending them substandard goods? Can you point to a single instance where he got up and said that?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Joy Gordon, we give you the last word. Can you respond to this point and the larger one of where this story should go from here.

JOY GORDON: Sure. I do think we need to look at the U.S. role in this and I do think we need to acknowledge how much of this information was completely known to every member of the Security Council, including the U.S. and the U.K. If you look for example at the smuggling, according to now the Delfer report as well as the Congressional Research Service report, what we see is that there was no lack of information that it was going on. What we see is that every single year from 1994 on, the U.S. administrations issued waivers saying we would not impose sanctions against Jordan and Turkey, which were jointly engaged in over $5 billion of smuggling in the most visible public way. So it's not for lack of information. And I think again, we just have to look, if we, if there's a concern about information, there was not enough information made public and, by the way, there was an enormous amount of information made public, but if the objection is this piece of information should have been posted on the web site in addition to the massive amount that was already there, well, we have to look at the Security Council. That was the body that said here's what will be released publicly, here's what will be not released publicly. We have to look at the Security Council. What are the criteria for reviewing contracts? What do we require in them? That was the Security Council. What are the procedures? That was the Security Council. What the Secretariat did was simply implement the procedures established by the Security Council and, on multiple occasions, informed the Security Council when there were irregularities in the case of the kickbacks on the import contracts over 70 times. It was not the secretariat's job to block contracts. They simply didn't have authority. When there were pricing irregularities, they took it exactly to the body that could act on that. If we look at the surcharges on the oil, again, it's exactly the same thing. As soon as it became apparent, U.N. staff, the oil overseers, went to the Security Council, said this is what's going on and it was up to the Security Council members to act. I think that's where we need to look.

AMY GOODMAN: Joy Gordon, Claudia Rosett, I want to thank you for being with us. We will certainly continue to follow this controversy. 

-----

Russia, China, Britain Rally to Back Annan

Associated Press
By EDITH M. LEDERER
Dec 3, 2004	

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/UN_ANNAN_UNDER_FIRE?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- The European Union threw its political weight behind beleaguered U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Friday but the United States again refused to back him and a U.S. senator reiterated his call for the U.N. chief to resign.

Outside the United States, there is no clamor for Annan's resignation, and the secretary-general has been picking up support from many of the 191 U.N. member states. He has the important backing of the four other veto-wielding members on the U.N. Security Council - Russia, China, Britain and France.

In a show of support from the powerful European Union, the ambassador of the Netherlands, which currently holds the EU presidency, went to Annan's 38th floor office at U.N. headquarters Friday morning to express support to the secretary-general on behalf of the 25-nation bloc.

Earlier, U.S. Ambassador John Danforth, whose resignation as envoy to the United Nations was confirmed late Thursday, met the secretary-general. Danforth said that Annan's future wasn't discussed, but he refused several times to back him - virtually the same stance taken Thursday by President Bush.

Danforth was asked whether the United States had confidence in Annan in view of Washington's calling for a thorough, comprehensive and objective investigation of the allegations of corruption in the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq.

It's important that those interested in the success of the investigation "go into this with an open mind - and that means neither prejudging it on the side of innocence or the side of guilt," said Danforth. The envoy will return to his home in St. Louis when Bush's first term ends in January.

Several U.S. newspapers have called for Annan to be replaced because of the oil-for-food allegations, but Sen. Norm Coleman's demand for the secretary-general to resign made headlines earlier this week.

The Minnesota Republican reiterated in a CNN interview on Friday that the U.N. chief executive presided over the "greatest fraud and theft" in the history of the United Nations.

"You need credibility and you can't have that if the guy who is in charge is still in charge," said Coleman, who is leading one of five U.S. Congressional investigations into the oil-for-food accusations.

The program began in 1996 to help Iraqis cope with U.N. sanctions imposed after Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. It allowed Saddam's government to sell unlimited quantities of oil provided most of the proceeds went to buy food, medicine and humanitarian goods and to compensate victims of the 1991 Gulf War.

Two weeks ago, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations which Coleman chairs said it had uncovered evidence that Saddam's government raised more than $21.3 billion in illegal revenue by subverting U.N. sanctions and the oil-for-food program.

The secretary-general has appointed former U.S. Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker to head an independent inquiry into the program, handing over all U.N. documents and ordering U.N. officials to cooperate.

The 54 African nations sent a letter or support to Annan Tuesday, and he got strong backing Wednesday at a meeting with 11 ambassadors including Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Pakistan, South Korea and Turkey.

-----

Bush seeks 'full disclosure' at U.N.

THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Bill Sammon
December 03, 2004

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041202-115310-1899r.htm

President Bush yesterday called for "full disclosure" of the United Nations oil-for-food scandal, although he declined to join Republican demands for the ouster of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

    "It's important for the integrity of the organization to have a full and open disclosure of all that took place with the oil-for-food program," Mr. Bush said during an Oval Office appearance with Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo.

    Mr. Bush also vowed not to postpone Iraq's elections, scheduled for Jan. 30 and promised to oblige U.S. commanders who requested additional troops to provide security during the contest.

    The president did not directly answer a reporter who twice asked whether Mr. Annan should resign. Such a move was demanded Wednesday by Sen. Norm Coleman, Minnesota Republican, who is investigating the oil-for-food scandal.

    "We share the concerns that members of Congress have," said White House press secretary Scott McClellan. "The American people want to have assurances, from their standpoint, with the taxpayer dollars that go to support multilateral organizations like the United Nations."

    The Senate Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations, which is chaired by Mr. Coleman, has disclosed that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime skimmed billions from the oil-for-food program, which was administered by the United Nations. The program was ostensibly designed to let Saddam sell a small amount of oil to pay for food and humanitarian assistance for Iraqi civilians.

    But there is growing evidence that Saddam used his illegal revenues to bribe officials in France, Russia and other nations that later opposed the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq. It has been revealed that Mr. Annan's son, Kojo, accepted money from a Swiss company that had a contract with the oil-for-food program.

    On Oct. 21, Mr. Annan said of the scandal: "We want to get to the bottom of it and clear it as quickly as possible."

    But since then, investigators have said, the United Nations has been less than fully cooperative.

    "When an organization says there's going to be serious consequences if something doesn't happen, it better mean what it says," Mr. Bush said yesterday. "The United States participates in multilateral organizations, and we expect those organizations to be effective."

    The president was reprising rhetoric he used in 2003, when the United Nations balked at enforcing its own resolution promising "serious consequences" against Saddam. Mr. Bush views the burgeoning oil-for-food scandal as a similar test of the United Nations' credibility.

    "I look forward to the full disclosure of the facts [and an] honest appraisal of that which went on," he said.

    The president's comments were echoed by State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

    "It's not our job to prejudge the facts," he said. "We have urged the United Nations to make available documents that Congress has requested so that those investigations will have access to all of the facts that they need."

    But Mr. Coleman said his probe already has gathered enough facts to demonstrate that Mr. Annan must step aside.

    "The most extensive fraud in the history of the U.N. occurred on his watch," Mr. Coleman wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. "As long as Mr. Annan remains in charge, the world will never be able to learn the full extent of the bribes, kickbacks and under-the-table payments that took place under the U.N.'s collective nose."

    Mr. Coleman is conducting one of two major investigations into the oil-for-food scandal. The other was commissioned by the United Nations and is being conducted by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

    But Mr. Volcker has no subpoena power, and his report eventually must be turned over to Mr. Annan, who can decide how much of it, if any, to make public.

    Also at yesterday's Oval Office appearance, Mr. Bush dismissed a reporter's suggestion that Iraq's elections, scheduled for next month, should be delayed until security is improved.

    "The elections should not be postponed," he said. "It's time for the Iraqi citizens to go to the polls, and that's why we are very firm on the January 30th date."

    Mr. Bush defended his decision to send additional U.S. troops to Iraq and extend the stays of others in order to beef up security. He said he was merely granting the request of U.S. commanders in Iraq.

    "We want to help them have their presidential elections," he said of the Iraqis. "And at some point in time, when Iraq is able to defend itself against the terrorists who are trying to destroy democracy, as I've said many times, our troops will come home with the honor they have earned."

    Meanwhile, the president said the United States is watching the election crisis in the Ukraine "very carefully." He also said Russia should not try to influence any new election that the Ukrainians might hold to resolve the dispute sparked after a recent contest marred by widespread fraud.

    "The will of the people must be known and heard," he said. "And therefore, we will continue to monitor and be involved in a process that encourages there to be a peaceful resolution of this issue." 

-----

Ambassador to Leave U.N. Job Next Month
Danforth Says He'll Spend Time With Wife

Washington Post
By Colum Lynch
December 3, 2004

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29353-2004Dec2.html

UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 2 -- John C. Danforth, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, resigned less than six months after taking the job, citing a desire to spend more time with his wife, Sally, who has undergone a painful recovery from a fall last year that left her ankle badly broken.

Danforth's decision to step down by Jan. 20 marks the end of one of the shortest tenures for a U.N. ambassador and leaves a key vacancy in the administration's foreign policy team. But it will provide Danforth with a last chance to achieve a top priority, overseeing the signing of a peace agreement ending a 21-year war between Sudan's Islamic government and Christian-backed Sudanese rebels by the end of the year.

President Bush selected Danforth, 68, in June to lead U.S. efforts to persuade the United Nations to expand its presence in Iraq and play a major role in the country's Jan. 30 elections. Danforth plans to depart 10 days before the Iraqi elections, in which the United Nations is playing a relatively marginal role.

Danforth was recently rumored as a replacement for Colin L. Powell as secretary of state, but Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was nominated. He viewed himself as an outsider in Washington and confessed to colleagues that he often bridled under the State Department's strict guidance on policy matters.

Danforth also expressed frustration at the difficulties of implementing policy at the United Nations, citing Security Council reluctance to impose sanctions on Sudan for engaging in mass killings in Darfur. "While the U.N. is an important part of multilateralism, which is essential to U.S. foreign policy, it's very difficult to get strong resolutions passed," Danforth said in a recent interview. "It's built for compromise, and it's built for wordsmithing. It's difficult to create real policies because of the ornate structure of multilateralism, at least the U.N.'s version of it."

Members of Danforth's staff said that they were stunned by his decision to return to St. Louis. "I didn't see it coming," one U.S. official said. But other administration officials said that Danforth was viewed as having a single strength -- his expertise on Sudan -- and that there was no future for him.

Danforth said in a recent interview that while he "admired" Bush and considers him a friend, they never had a close personal relationship and they rarely spoke while he was serving as U.N. ambassador. "I've known his family more than I've known him," Danforth said.

Danforth, an Episcopal minister, told Bush in a resignation letter dated Nov. 22 that he and his wife decided to return to private life "after a lot of thought and prayer."

"Forty-seven years ago, I married the girl of my dreams, and, at this point in my life, what is important is to spend more time with her," he wrote. "Because you know Sally, you know my reason for going home."

He also wrote: "I want you to know how much I appreciate the opportunity to serve the United States at the United Nations. It has been an important time to be in this position, especially as we attempt to enlist greater U.N. participation in the future of Iraq, and as we advance the interest you have personally shown in helping the desperate people of Sudan."

Danforth was elected to his first of three terms as U.S. senator from Missouri in 1976. His first major foray into foreign policy was on Sept. 6, 2001 -- five days before al Qaeda attacked the United States -- when Bush appointed him special envoy to Sudan.

Danforth told Bush he would be prepared to carry out special presidential missions in the future. "There may be occasions when I can serve you from St. Louis, as I did as your special envoy for peace in Sudan. If so, please don't hesitate to call."

Danforth hinted at his desire to leave government service in a recent interview, saying: "I'm not some government guy. Really, what I am is Sally Danforth's husband and a midwestern guy. And so in my own mind, I'm sort of on loan to do this for a little bit."

Staff writer Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.



--------



 <a name="usmilitary"></a>

-------- us

Army Wages War on Modern Menaces 

Wired News
By Noah Shachtman
Dec. 03, 2004

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65905,00.html

ORLANDO, Florida -- About 1,400 thick-armed sergeants, scruffy-bearded engineers and card-passing defense contractors gathered near SeaWorld this week.

They weren't here to see Shamu. Instead, the group convened in exurban Orlando's JW Marriott resort to swap ideas about the future of war and show off research that might make the guerrilla conflict American troops now face a little shorter and a little less ugly.

Here's a sample of what they discussed at the biannual Army Science Conference:

Bright future, dark cloud: Computer visionary Ray Kurzweil thinks everything is going to be just great. In a keynote address (.ppt), the inventor and entrepreneur foretold a day when pollution and poverty would be all but eliminated. Computers, thousands of times smarter than human brains, would emerge. And people would live forever, thanks to cancer-slaying, nano-sized machines.

But there was one dark note in Kurzweil's otherwise sunny preview of the next half century: the specter of biological weapons, engineered for genocide. As people gain understanding of the way the body works, the potential for making truly malevolent agents increases, too. These pathogens are poised to become "the real existential threat we face," Kurzweil intoned. "It's potentially more destructive than an atomic weapon. There's really no stopping it."

Imagine, Kurzweil told Wired News after his talk, a deadly agent that could spread easily, like the common cold, but is stealthy, incubating in the body for years before it strikes. "That's the real nightmare scenario," he said.

But there is a way out, he said: begin a massive, tens-of-billions of dollars "national effort" to build expertise in decoding and defeating these new, viral enemies. Such an effort might emulate, loosely, the fight against software viruses.

"Within hours, certainly within a day or two of any virus being detected, it's diagnosed and reverse-engineered," Kurzweil said.

The push would build on the success of containing Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, which was sequenced in just a month as opposed to the 15 years it took with the human immunodeficiency virus.

Maj. Gen. Lester Martinez-Lopez, who heads the Medical Research and Materiel Command at Ft. Dietrich, Maryland, agreed that the SARS response does make for a "good model." At Ft. Dietrich, the general's researchers tested more than "200,000 drugs and chemicals against the virus in just four months," he said.

Like Kurzweil, Martinez-Lopez is extremely concerned about the possibility of a genetically engineered agent being unleashed. But by gathering researchers together to study better-known pathogens, like anthrax or smallpox, a "flexible infrastructure (that) can respond to these threats" is beginning to emerge, he said.

- - -

Shoot to protect: In Iraq, American troops face no deadlier threat than rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs. Some tanks now come equipped with protective measures against the weapons. But for most soldiers, the only defense is to shoot the guy holding the RPG before he can let one off. Even so-called up-armored Humvees will shred if hit by a well-placed RPG shot. In late November, 22-year-old Army National Guard Spc. David L. Roustum was killed when an RPG slammed into his Humvee.

The Army's Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, or TARDEC, is one of several Defense Department groups looking for a way to give those troops in Hummers another layer of defense. TARDEC's solution: blast the RPG in midair, before it gets a chance to hit.

In another few years, Hummers' roofs could be covered with a dozen tubes, each filled with a foot-long mini-rocket called the FCLAS -- short for Full Spectrum Active Protection Close-In Shield. Every FCLAS would have a pair of radio-frequency sensors inside. One in the nose would detect incoming RPGs and fire off a counterstrike. A second sensor, in the rocket's side, would go off when the RPG comes within range. The FCLAS would then detonate, letting loose a hail of explosive fragments, destroying the grenade in the process. The whole attack and response would take no more than a few seconds.

The FCLAS has been tested, most recently at Camp Williams in Utah. Another trial, with multiple rockets launching at once, is scheduled for January. But it will be a while before soldiers in the field get FCLAS protection. The weapon's safety software hasn't been worked out, said FCLAS' project manager, Steve Caito. "And we have to make sure that if someone throws a rock, or a bird flies by, that it doesn't go off."

- - -

A whole new kind of K ration: If it's good enough for ravers, it's good enough for U.S. troops. That's the thinking, apparently, behind the Army's decision to test the animal tranquilizer ketamine as a way to soothe injured soldiers.

The drug -- known in clubs as Special K -- has been reducing partygoers to gurgling blobs for more than a decade. This year, the Army has been running final, phase III Food and Drug Administration trials on a quarter-dose nasal inhaler of ketamine to see if it can substitute for morphine.

"With morphine, the soldier's just gorfed, he can't do anything," said Col. Bob Vandre, of the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command. "With this, he can drive his truck, or shoot his gun."

Vandre said he knew full well that ketamine "had been snorted by people at rave parties" and that "it makes you kind of weird, sort of like acid."

However, he promised, the military's dose of ketamine would not have the same effects.

"It doesn't make you weird," Vandre said. "But it does reduce pain."

The ketamine snort is one of several novel treatments Vandre was showing to people at the conference. Further up the treatment-development pipeline is a temporary blood replacement. The magic ingredient comes in a tiny bottle, which is filled with small bubbles just 2 microns across. The bubbles in this dodecafluoropentane emulsion swell to double size when they get in the lungs. Once they flow to the rest of the body, the bubbles distribute oxygen more efficiently than normal red blood cells, Vandre said. Forty cubic centimeters -- just 8 teaspoons -- would be as good at delivering oxygen as all of the blood flowing inside a person.

"We've taken mice, drained out all of their blood, and replaced it with a saline solution and this," Vandre said. "They walk around like nothing's happened."

At least for a half hour or so. That's when the bubbles begin to lose their fizz, and the mouse needs its blood back.



-------- venezuela


-------- war crimes

Serbia & Montenegro: Will Sympathetic Testimonies Help Milosevic?

Balkanalysis.com
December 03 2004

http://www.balkanalysis.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=455	 
	  	
  	Other Balkans Articles While it’s unlikely that they’ll end up convincing a judiciary set up and administered by the prosecution, recent witnesses called up by Slobodan Milosevic in his defense at the Hague have at least given the former Yugoslav president a chance for his side of the story to come out in the media. If the evidence they present is compelling enough, it may make it harder for the architects of NATO’s 1999 war – Clinton, Albright, Holbrooke and Blair – to weasel out of appearing.

Although Milosevic has requested their presence, few find it likely that they will ever show up. Yet should the defense testimony now being unveiled challenge any specific statements or actions of these leaders, the mass media at very least will be forced to review the status quo.

They will have to be dragged into it kicking and screaming of course: as the New York Times snidely put it: “…the [Hague] remains evidently concerned about how Milosevic will behave during this second part of the trial, given his record of ignoring court procedures and his penchant for using the trial as a political platform.”

As if the very existence of the whole tribunal was not a political platform! After starting off with gusto in September, Milosevic has continued with predictably friendly witnesses – the Russians – who have largely obliged by corroborating his side of the story. Yet some of the testimony is interesting in that it is more than the mere harangue Milosevic and Co. have produced so far about a concerted Western anti-Serb campaign. While there may be some truth to this, the judges will have to decide based on facts. So it was therefore interesting when the most illustrious man yet to appear, Russian Prime Minister (from 1998-99) Yevgeny Primakov, peppered his diatribe with references to long-forgotten events from early on in the Yugoslav wars. Reuters states:

“…Primakov said the West was wrong to assume that Milosevic wanted to create a ‘Greater Serbia’ or to unify all Serbs in a state as the multi-ethnic Yugoslav federation crumbled. During his first meeting with the former Serb strongman in 1993, Primakov said he specifically asked Milosevic whether he had plans for a ‘Greater Serbia.’ ‘He said this could only be achieved in theory and at the price of great bloodshed and 'I'm not prepared to do that,' Primakov said of Milosevic's reply. ‘He had no plans and conducted no actions to achieve a Greater Serbia.’

Primakov noted that Milosevic accepted the 1993 Vance-Owen peace plan for Bosnia and imposed an economic blockade after the Bosnian Serb parliament rejected the plan.”

Primakov, a Russian foreign minister before his brief tenure as prime minister, laid the primary blame for fueling war on the Clinton Administration and especially Germany, which was the first country to recognize its old Nazi ally, Croatia. He also fingered the Germans for supporting their other Nazi-era allies, the Kosovo Albanians, in the guise of aiding KLA “freedom fighters.” Primakov declared that “…the initiators and provocateurs of so many events in Kosovo was the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army,” and noted the oft-suppressed fact that the Kosovo refugee crisis began only after NATO airstrikes started in March 1999.

Primakov’s final and most compelling claim was that Milosevic had told him “…he was prepared to pull his forces out of Kosovo if NATO withdrew from the border with Macedonia.” However, lamented Primakov, “…we never had the chance to tell what we had achieved… barely had our plane taken off [from a meeting in Belgrade] then the bombing of the airport started.”

Another esteemed Russian to testify on Milosevic’s behalf was the Soviet Prime Minister from 1985-1990, Nikolai Ryzhkov, who appeared on November 23. He characterized the NATO airstrikes as “…simply an aggression against a sovereign country.” A former Russian general, Leonid Ivashov, appeared at the same time and repeated the accusations – though apparently, without offering many specifics.

Throughout the trial, Milosevic has been characterized as “belligerent,” uncooperative and especially, “defiant.” This suits just perfectly the prosecution and prosecutory media that pretend to be annoyed by it. The longer he talks without saying anything specific, the better their chances.

However, the trial will ultimately depend on whether the defendant’s witnesses can specifically contradict the prosecution’s on various points. It is unlikely that Clinton, for example, will be forced to appear unless there is a clear allegation made against something he allegedly did (or didn’t) say or do. Barring such a turn of events, however, it seems likely that Slobo will be more of an irritant than legal sensation for the media. 



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


-------- courts / tribunals

Evidence Gained By Torture Allowed

News Services
December 3, 2004

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29738-2004Dec2.html

U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of foreigners as enemy combatants are allowed to use evidence gained by torture in deciding whether to keep them imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the government conceded in court yesterday.

The acknowledgment by Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle came during a U.S. District Court hearing on lawsuits brought by some of the 550 foreigners imprisoned at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The lawsuits challenge their detention without charges for as much as three years so far.

Attorneys for the prisoners argued that some were held solely on evidence gained by torture, which they said violated fundamental fairness and U.S. due process standards. But Boyle argued in a similar hearing Wednesday that the detainees "have no constitutional rights enforceable in this court."

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon asked if a detention would be illegal if it were based solely on evidence gathered by torture, because "torture is illegal. We all know that."

Boyle replied that if the military's combatant status review tribunals "determine that evidence of questionable provenance were reliable, nothing in the due process clause [of the Constitution] prohibits them from relying on it."

Corzine Vows to Restore

Public's Faith in N.J.

Democratic Sen. Jon S. Corzine declared he is running for governor of New Jersey, pledging to restore the public's faith in a state battered by scandals over money and sex.

The former head of investment firm Goldman Sachs & Co., who spent $63 million of his personal fortune to win his first-term Senate seat from New Jersey in 2000, is considered an early favorite to fill the post of former Democratic governor James E. McGreevey, who left office after admitting to a gay adulterous affair.

"We need a governor whose first priority is to earn the trust of the people of this state," Corzine said as he announced his candidacy in Newark. "I believe there's been far too much abuse of power in the state. I believe we ought to change that culture."

McGreevey left office last month after admitting in August that he was gay and had cheated on his wife with a man he had hired to head the state's Homeland Security Department.

Corzine, 57, the first Democrat to announce his candidacy, said he will not take public funds and will use his own money on the campaign.

White House Urges Nobel Winner's Release

The White House expressed concern over a reported decision by Burma's military rulers to extend the house arrest of opposition icon and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

"We note with deep concern reports that the Burmese regime has extended her detention for an additional year," the White House said in a statement. "If true, this represents a return to a pattern of unacceptable backtracking on commitments the regime itself has made to move toward democracy and national reconciliation."

The statement called for Burma to free Suu Kyi "immediately and unconditionally."

Suu Kyi, 59, is the 1991 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. She has spent most of the past 15 years confined to her home in Rangoon, with no telephone and requiring official permission to have visitors.


-------- drug war

Afghans Angered, Sickened by Anti-Drug Spraying

By Hayatullah Gaheez and Amanullah Nasrat
KABUL, Afghanistan, December 3, 2004 (ENS)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2004/2004-12-03-02.asp

Omardin, a farmer in the Pacheeragam district in Nangarhar province, pointed to the contents of a black plastic bag. Inside, he said, was a substance he claimed was sprayed from an airplane as part of a drug-eradication effort in the country.

He said his son has been made ill by the chemicals.

"I never even bothered to grow poppy, but because of the Americans, my God-given only son is sick," he said, shaking with anger. "His skin is sore and his body aches."

As his eyes welled up with tears, Omardin vowed, “If my son dies, I will join the Taleban, and I will kill as many Americans as I can find."

Omardin is not the only person who believes that foreigners - perhaps the Americans - are spraying opium crops with herbicides here as part of a counter-narcotics program.

Eyewitnesses in the eastern provinces of Nangarhar and Kunar have reported seeing aircraft spraying poppy fields. Doctors in the region, meanwhile, said the sudden outbreak of skin diseases and respiratory ailments are due to a mysterious chemical they have so far been unable to identify.

Afghan government officials have promised to investigate these claims. Jawed Ludin, spokesman for Afghan president Hamed Karzai, denies that the government authorized such aerial spraying in the Khogiani and Shinwari districts of Nangarhar. An official delegation is now studying soil samples taken from poppy fields in the area.

Afghanistan is the world’s biggest producer of opium, accounting for three-quarters of global output. According to newly-released United Nations statistics, opium cultivation in 2004 increased by 64 percent over the previous year.

Worried that Afghanistan may be evolving into a "narco-mafia" state, the United States, Europe and the United Nations have pledged to get tough on the opium trade. But the U.S. military has insisted that its forces are not involved in crop eradication.

"U.S. troops are not involved are not involved in eradication, which would include the spraying of poppy fields, which we do not do," U.S. military spokesman Major Mark McCann told Agence France-Presse last week.

A U.S. embassy spokesperson in Kabul declined to comment, saying questions on the subject could be asked in an upcoming press conference.

Last month, however, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) announced that it had joined with the State Department and the Department of Defense in developing a new Counternarcotics Implementation Plan for Afghanistan. Under the program, the DEA announced that it will assist in destroying clandestine labs and seizing precursor chemicals, raw opium, and opiate stockpiles.

To achieve that, the DEA said it is expanding its presence in Afghanistan by permanently stationing additional special agents and intelligence analysts in the country to enhance Afghanistan’s counter-narcotics capacity.

In addition, the DEA announced it would deploy foreign advisory and support teams to Afghanistan early next year to provide guidance and conduct bilateral investigations that will identify, target, and disrupt illicit drug trafficking organizations.

These teams, the agency said, will help with the destruction of existing opium storage sites, clandestine heroin processing labs, and precursor chemical supplies.

U.S. law enforcement agencies such as the DEA and the FBI already maintain a sizable presence in Afghanistan.

Haji Din Mohammad, the governor of Nangarhar province, is convinced that aerial eradication is already underway and that the United States is behind it. At a recent press conference, he said, "The crops were eradicated, and farmers have seen big planes flying over the fields and spraying."

And in a separate press conference, General Mohammad Daoud, deputy interior minister in charge of counter-narcotics characterized aerial eradication as "illegal."

Asked about official U.S. denials of their involvement in such a program, Din Mohammad said, "They control the airspace, and no plane can fly over Afghanistan without their permission."

Local residents blame the Americans for an outbreak of illness.

Sayed Asadullah, 47, a resident of Kaga district, Nangarhar province, showed a reporter a dozen children between the ages of 10 and 14 who complained of severe body aches.

Abed, 11, said, "A few days after the chemicals were sprayed, I found I had a sore throat and this terrible ache."

Mohammad Sediq, 14, said his throat was hoarse from the substance sprayed on the fields.

"Ever since I ate some spinach from our field next to the opium field, I've had a sore throat," he said.

"It is all the result of the Americans' chemicals," said Asadullah.

Others blamed the crop spraying for the death of livestock.

A resident of Asmar district, Konar province, said 14 of his animals had died. "We took all our sick animals to the veterinarian, but he couldn't do anything," he said.

Dr. Abdul Ghafoor, the veterinarian who examined the animals, said they were suffering from serious respiratory problems. Ghafoor said he suspected the animals were suffering from a form of chronic asthma caused by inhalation of poisonous chemicals.

"This kind of disease is rare in Afghanistan," he said.

Several doctors in the region also blamed exposure to chemicals for the outbreak of various illnesses among their human patients.

Dr. Samiullah Akbari, an ear, nose and throat specialist, said, "Those chemicals are insecticides for destroying crops. If human beings ingest them, they cause very bad stomach ailments."

Dr. Abdullah Momand, who specialises in treating skin diseases, said the cases of skin irritation were "undoubtedly" caused by contact with a chemical agent.

Momand was pessimistic about the ability of Afghan medicine to deal with the outbreak.

"To tackle these illnesses would require a huge amount of money," he said. "Treatment is difficult in Afghanistan, and the preventive care patients need cannot be found in these clinics."

{Published in cooperation with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. Hayatullah Gaheez is a freelance writer in Jalalabad. Amanullah Nasrat is an IWPR staff reporter in Kabul.}



-------- homeland security / national intelligence

Ex-NYPD Official To Succeed Ridge
Nominee Was Commissioner on 9/11

Washington Post
By Mike Allen and John Mintz
December 3, 2004

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29236-2004Dec2.html

President Bush has chosen Bernard B. Kerik, the New York police commissioner during the attacks on the World Trade Center, to take over the Department of Homeland Security from its first leader, Tom Ridge, administration officials said yesterday.

White House officials described Kerik, who campaigned aggressively for Bush's reelection, as a proven crisis manager who can straighten out the lines of authority in the infant department and work to prevent a catastrophic attack or cope with its aftermath. Other Republicans said Kerik would provide a telegenic presence, and one presidential adviser pointed out that Kerik "brings 9/11 symbolism into the Cabinet."

Kerik will appear with Bush at the White House today, a senior administration official said. Some Bush officials said they were concerned about his lack of Washington experience, because commanding respect within the Cabinet and with Congress remains a challenge for the agency.

Bush also surprised Republicans yesterday by naming Nebraska Gov. Michael O. Johanns, 54, a dairy farmer's son who was the party's leading candidate in an upcoming U.S. Senate race, as secretary of agriculture. If confirmed, he will succeed Ann M. Veneman, an original member of Bush's Cabinet who said two years ago that she is fighting breast cancer.

In a third change as Bush reshapes his government for a second term, U.N. Ambassador John C. Danforth, 68, a former U.S. senator from Missouri, submitted his resignation after five months on the job.

Officials said Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson will announce his resignation soon and is likely to be replaced by Mark B. McClellan, a physician and economist who is administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Bush chose Kerik, 49, after the commissioner's former boss, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, "made an impassioned personal plea to the president to give Kerik the job," one administration official said. White House officials said several people recommended Kerik and he was chosen on merit, not because of Giuliani.

The department that Kerik inherits from Ridge faces challenges on nearly every one of its high-priority fronts. The department, a collection of 22 preexisting agencies and offices, is under criticism for what some say is a failure to address many security gaps, such as protecting U.S. ports and chemical plants, securing the United States' borders with Mexico and Canada, and helping the country's first responders to prepare for attacks.

A number of panels of experts have concluded that the department is severely underfinanced and understaffed in many of its key functions. In particular, Homeland Security has almost no high-level staff members who are assigned to develop strategies about key policy problems.

At the New York City Police Department, Kerik is credited with improving relations with the city's minority communities after years of friction. He also was in charge during a period of declining crime rates in the city, although some experts say that was less a result of Kerik's policies than of demographic factors.

Kerik resigned as commissioner two months after the Sept. 11 attacks, citing a desire to spend time with his family. After the invasion of Iraq, he took the job of directing the training of Iraqi law enforcement officials, an effort that has met with mixed success. Many of the trainees have fled at the first sign of danger, but Kerik's defenders say he can hardly be blamed for that.

A high-ranking business executive who is familiar with Kerik's tenure as police commissioner and as head trainer of Iraqi police recruits expressed shock at his selection, and said Kerik is not an accomplished manager. "Management just simply isn't his strong suit," the executive said.

A number of New York elected officials praised the selection. "Coming from New York, Bernie Kerik knows the great needs and challenges this country faces in homeland security," Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement.

Bush said during an October campaign appearance with Kerik in New Jersey that the former commissioner "knows something about security -- he's lived security all his life."



-------- POLITICS

Putin Opposes Rerun in Ukraine
Kuchma Gets Support in Election Crisis

Washington Post
By Daniel Williams
December 3, 2004

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27863-2004Dec2.html

KIEV, Ukraine, Dec. 2 -- President Leonid Kuchma won crucial political support on Thursday from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who sided with him in rejecting an opposition demand to repeat the presidential runoff election of 11 days ago.

The call for a new vote, prompted by widespread allegations of fraud in the Nov. 21 balloting, has been at the core of mass demonstrations in Kiev, the capital, in favor of opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko. The United States and the European Union favor another election.

Kuchma flew to Moscow and told Putin at an airport meeting, "I do not know a single country whose laws would allow such a rerun."

Putin concurred, saying: "A repeat of the runoff vote may fail to work. A rerun can be held twice, three times, 25 times until one of the parties gets the desired result."

Putin had backed Kuchma's candidate, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, and visited Ukraine twice during the campaign to support him. Yanukovych ran on a platform of close relations with Moscow, a stand that fits with Putin's view that Ukraine is part of the "near abroad" of former Soviet republics within Russia's sphere of influence.

Yanukovych was officially declared the winner of the runoff by about 3 percentage points, but international monitors agreed with Yushchenko that the process was plagued by fraud, and Ukraine's parliament subsequently declared the vote invalid in a nonbinding resolution.

In Washington, President Bush indirectly criticized Russia's role in the crisis. "I think any election, if there is one, ought to be free from any foreign influence. These elections ought to be open and fair," Bush said in response to a reporter's question about the prospect of Russian influence on a new vote in Ukraine.

The U.S. government has been eager to avoid a conflict with Putin, whom Bush regards as an ally in the war on terrorism. But the political crisis in Ukraine has divided the country between the east, where many ethnic Russians and pro-Moscow Ukrainians reside, and the west, the base of support for Yushchenko, who regards ties with NATO and the E.U. as crucial to the country's future prosperity.

Kuchma has emerged as a key player in the crisis and the main target of opposition criticism. The question of his intentions has eclipsed the issue of Yanukovych's candidacy, Western diplomats said.

Kuchma, a former Soviet factory director who is closely tied to the Russian government, decided not to seek reelection. He has served as president since 1994, all but three years of Ukraine's independence, and his opponents have accused him of leading a corrupt system dominated by major businessmen.

"Kuchma is the pivotal figure," said a senior Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Where he puts his effort may be decisive. To stall is part of it, but he still holds out hope that someone from his side could be president."

Kuchma has endorsed the idea of new elections, but wants them to start from scratch, which would open the field to new candidates and give him time to organize and fund a campaign.

During an evening rally at Independence Square in central Kiev, Yushchenko, a former prime minister who once headed the central bank, told tens of thousands of supporters that he would not engage in talks based on Kuchma's proposal. "Only a rerun of the election can save the state," he said. "They are testing our patience and nerve."

One of his leading lieutenants, Yulia Tymoshenko, asked those in the crowd if they would stay in the plaza until Yushchenko was president. They answered with a thunderous yes.

The day before, Yushchenko had appealed to his massed backers to abandon sieges at government buildings. But the protesters remained, and offices that were blocked by hundreds of people on Wednesday were still obstructed Thursday. The demonstrators, many of them young, wore ribbons and scarves of orange, Yushchenko's campaign color.

Many of Yushchenko's supporters have come to consider Kuchma the main villain of the election, and his trip to Moscow on Thursday was a source of deep resentment. "Kuchma and Putin can't be allowed to run the country," said Andrei Yurchenko, a computer technician at a Kiev research institute. He carried a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag among a group of protesters outside the Supreme Court. One line of graffiti written in the snow said, "Putin, Don't Be a Terrorist."

"It's okay to negotiate, but it must be made clear that the terms are of surrender of the criminal authorities," said Sergei Shandrenko, a colleague of Yurchenko's.

Unlike at other offices, demonstrators at the Supreme Court left a wide corridor for functionaries to enter. After four days of hearings, the Supreme Court heard final arguments Thursday on a suit by Yushchenko to invalidate the Nov. 21 vote. A decision could be announced as early as Friday.

The protesters at the court chanted, "No lies, no lies!" and "Supreme Court with the people!" They also sang Cossack folk tunes. "If the Supreme Court fails in its duties, this will go on indefinitely," said Valentina Soroka, a journalism student who also works at an extreme sports magazine. "Demonstrating is much more serious and also much better than extreme sports," she said.

If the court declares the runoff a fraud, it would open the way to a re-vote, as Yushchenko wants, or new elections, as Kuchma has proposed. In remarks to government ministers on Thursday, Kuchma held out a carrot to Yushchenko: If the opposition leader agrees to elections from scratch, Kuchma would endorse a "shorter time frame" for the vote. Under law, elections cannot take place until three months after they are announced.

Kuchma's support for new elections would open the way for him to regroup and choose a new candidate, diplomats said.


-----

Putin joins Ukraine leader against a quick runoff vote

REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
By Jonathan Thatcher
December 03, 2004

http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041202-115304-6933r.htm

KIEV — Outgoing Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma gained Russian President Vladimir Putin's backing yesterday against calls for a quick rerun of the last round of the disputed presidential election.

    The move by the Russian leader underlines Kremlin fears that if Ukraine's opposition presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko took power he would weaken links with Moscow and push Ukraine deeper into the West's embrace.

    Charging the election was rigged, the opposition wants an early repeat of the Nov. 21 runoff vote between Mr. Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych, who was backed by both Mr. Kuchma and Mr. Putin.

    Mr. Kuchma, who flew to Moscow yesterday, wants a completely new election, a longer process that could permit him to choose a new and more popular candidate. He said, however, he was prepared to speed up the process.

    "A repeat of the runoff vote may fail to work," Mr. Putin told Mr. Kuchma at an airport meeting outside Moscow.

    In a sign of the strain the crisis is placing on relations as Russia and the West vie for influence in Ukraine, President Bush took a swipe at Moscow's involvement, saying outsiders should not meddle in a new election.

    "I think any election, if there is one, ought to be free from any foreign influence. These elections ought to be open and fair," Mr. Bush told a reporter who had asked his views on a potential election and the prospect of Russian influence.

    Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski joined the fray on the side of the opposition.

    "We need to repeat the second round between the same candidates and give Ukrainians a chance to make a free choice. Once we secure fairness of the procedure, we will be sure that democracy has won," he told TVN24 television.

    Ukraine's Supreme Court was holding its fourth day of deliberations on Mr. Yushchenko's accusations that the election was rigged, with a ruling expected today.

    Mr. Yushchenko, addressing tens of thousands of supporters standing outdoors in subzero temperatures late in the evening, reiterated his opposition to holding a new election from scratch.

    "Let me say this to Kuchma, to anyone, to any politician calling for a fresh election this amounts to calling for the economic collapse of Ukraine," he said in a 40-minute speech in Kiev's Independence Square.

    "A repeat vote is a compromise which can calm the nation. ... If in the days following a Supreme Court decision, no date is set for a repeat vote, we will adopt appropriate measures."

    Russia, which has for centuries dominated Ukraine, and Poland are among mediators trying to resolve a crisis that is splitting the former Soviet republic and draining its economy.

    Mr. Putin last week congratulated Mr. Yanukovych, whose campaign he helped, on his win even before it was official, amid international charges that the election was fraudulent.

    With the next move focusing on the staging of an election of some sort, Ukraine's politicians have agreed to wait for the Supreme Court decision today.

    Mr. Yushchenko runs the risk that the mass demonstrations in his support will lose steam and he will run out of funds. He is demanding a repeat as soon as possible of only the second-round presidential runoff between him and Mr. Yanukovych. 

-----

U.S. Free-Trade Deals Include Few Muslim Countries

Washington Post
By Paul Blustein
December 3, 2004

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30078-2004Dec2_3.html

The war on terrorism was high on the mind of U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick as he signed a free-trade agreement with the Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain in mid-September. "A contest for the soul of Islam" is raging, and "we can help" by striking trade deals that generate jobs and reduce poverty, Zoellick said.

But Bahrain, an island nation with a population of 678,000, is an exception in securing access to the giant U.S. market. Excluding oil, imports from Muslim countries have increased by just 3.2 percent since 2000, their growth suppressed by tariffs of 20 percent or more on key goods such as textiles, according to an analysis of U.S. trade statistics.

Meanwhile, countries in the Andean region, sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere -- granted preferential, duty-free access to the U.S. market -- have enjoyed a comparative boom, with exports to the United States rising nearly 40 percent in some cases.

The figures reflect a bias in U.S. trade rules that work against strategic allies such as Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey. Under current rules, for example, T-shirts made in Lesotho or Peru or El Salvador come into the country duty-free, while shirts from Turkey or Pakistan are hit with a 20 percent tariff. Looking at trade statistics in light of the 2001 terrorist attacks, some analysts question whether U.S. trade policy is adequately backing the country's national security goals.

"It is hard to argue that the greater Muslim world is of less strategic interest to the U.S. than the Andean region or sub-Saharan Africa," said Brink Lindsey, vice president for research at the Cato Institute, a free-market-oriented think tank. "Our de facto discrimination against Muslim imports sends a terrible signal, and indicates we're just not putting our money where our mouth is, in terms of using every lever at our disposal to make this a safer world."

The Bush administration has hardly been stingy in providing financial assistance to its less-wealthy allies, particularly those in the forefront of confronting Muslim radicalism. Washington last year helped put together a $3 billion, five-year aid package for Pakistan, and engineered the recent deal among rich nations to forgive 80 percent of the $38 billion owed to them by Iraq.

But when it comes to trade, officials of some Muslim nations complain that the United States is failing to provide meaningful export opportunities because of protectionist pressure from U.S. industries.

"Having enhanced market access would be of enormous benefit to Pakistan," Humayun Akhtar Khan, Pakistan's commerce minister, said in an interview this fall. "The European Union has been much more forthcoming" than the United States in granting trade concessions over the past couple of years, he said. "We need help from our friends."

Khan estimated that every $1 billion in exports yields 200,000 jobs and supports 1 million Pakistanis. "Trade is a much more cost-effective way [than aid] to help a country," he said.

The United States has free-trade agreements with Jordan, Morocco and Bahrain, and has begun negotiations for similar deals with Oman and the United Arab Emirates -- smaller Arab countries whose industries would pose little threat to U.S. manufacturers.

U.S. Free-Trade Deals Include Few Muslim Countries

But the United States has specifically rejected granting trade concessions to Pakistan and Turkey, larger countries that are felt to be critical to the anti-terrorism effort. After the 2001 attacks, both countries asked for the right to export more textiles to the United States, hoping to bolster an industry important to economic growth, and which employs about 60 percent of Pakistan's industrial workforce. Both were turned down. Negotiations for a free-trade agreement with Egypt, meanwhile, have stalled.

According to calculations by Edward Gresser, a trade specialist at the Democratic Party-affiliated Progressive Policy Institute, those decisions and tariff policies kept growth in non-oil imports from Muslim nations to 3.2 percent from 2000 to 2003. For example, imports from Indonesia, a hot spot of fundamentalism and the world's most populous Muslim country, fell to $9.1 billion from $9.8 billion from 2000 to 2003, though they appear on track to bounce back this year. Gresser examined U.S. trade statistics at The Washington Post's request.

Some key non-Muslim countries did not fare well either. While the Philippines has been battling an Muslim insurgent group with U.S. assistance, imports from the country other than oil fell from $13.7 billion to $10 billion from 2000 to 2003.

The past few years were ones of sluggish growth generally for global trade. Overall, non-oil imports by the United States rose only 2.1 percent since 2000. From that perspective, the imports from Muslim countries fared better than the norm.

But trade rules also appeared to be a factor. Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia can export most goods to the United States duty-free under the Andean Trade Preference Act, and imports from those countries jumped 16 percent. Central American nations, given preferential access to the United States under the Caribbean Basin Initiative, enjoyed an increase of around 5 percent. Imports from the 38 sub- Saharan countries covered by the African Growth and Opportunity Act, meanwhile, rose 39 percent.

The U.S. reluctance to grant concessions may soon have even more adverse consequences, Lindsey said, when international textile and apparel quotas expire on Jan. 1.

Once the quota system expires, creating more of a free-for-all in the industry, China is expected to grab an enormous share of the global textile and apparel market. India is also poised to vastly expand its share. Many developing countries fear that the only way their industries can survive Chinese competition is with preferential tariffs that give them a price advantage in the United States and Europe.

"Many countries in the Muslim world are facing a trade shock" when the quotas are lifted, Lindsey said.

A senior State Department official said that although "it's certainly true that some countries are going to have difficulties as quotas come off," Pakistan and Turkey are unlikely to be hit hard. Many industry experts forecast that Pakistan and Turkey will be among the winners in a quota-free world, both because of their competitiveness and, in Turkey's case, its proximity to the European market.

Pakistani and Turkish officials question whether such optimism is justified, and other populous Muslim countries -- Egypt, Bangladesh and Indonesia, for example -- could well be among the losers. Already, Muslim countries have suffered in competition with the Chinese in products such as baby clothes, for which quotas have been eliminated. According to Gresser, the share of U.S. imports of such goods from the Muslim world dropped from 16 percent in 2001 to 11 percent in 2003, and appears headed still lower this year.

 The Bush administration says it hopes to reach a free-trade agreement with Egypt, but only after the government there shifts from its long-standing policies of protectionism and heavy government control of its economy. More ambitiously, President Bush in May 2003 announced plans to join the nations of the Middle East -- including Israel -- in a free-trade arrangement by 2013.

In an interview, Zoellick said that the proposed Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) has already sparked progress toward free markets and the rule of law in Arab countries that are prospective participants. In countries that are not yet members of the World Trade Organization, including Saudi Arabia and Algeria, the United States is trying to help make the economic policy changes necessary for entry. With Qatar and eight other nations, the United States has negotiated "trade and investment framework agreements," which set broad principles for bilateral commercial ties. For the nations most advanced in changing their economic policies, free-trade agreements are in order.

"MEFTA is designed so we can customize our engagement based on their state of development," Zoellick said.

Critics point out that MEFTA would not cover countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia, and they view it as too much of a drawn-out process. "If the administration gets what it says it wants, the benefits won't be phased in, in a meaningful way, until something like 2020, so whatever good is to come of this initiative is a long way off," Gresser said.

In Gresser's view, Washington should unilaterally grant duty-free status to goods from Muslim countries -- if they are allies in the war on terrorism -- and be patient until those nations are ready to lower their trade barriers. That idea was incorporated into legislation introduced last year by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), known as the "Silk Road Bill."

The model for that approach is Jordan. In the mid-1990s, the country was allowed to ship goods -- mostly clothing -- duty-free to the United States from "qualified industrial zones," if the goods had a modest amount of Israeli content, such as zippers. The zones helped boost Jordanian exports to the United States from $16 million in 1998 to $673 million last year. They provide jobs to more than 30,000 people, helping to hold down Jordan's high unemployment.

Bush administration officials have declined to support the Silk Road Bill, partly reflecting the clout of the U.S. textile industry. It has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the past several years, and its executives have long warned that opening the U.S. market further would create even more unemployment among people who typically lack job skills or higher education.

The support of lawmakers from the Carolinas, where the U.S. textile industry is concentrated, is essential to pass almost any controversial trade legislation. If the administration were to propose giving Muslim countries tariff-free access for their textiles, textile-state legislators would almost certainly unite to block it and other trade bills the White House hopes to enact.

"In addition to the politics, there are policy issues," Zoellick said in explaining the administration's lack of support for granting unilateral concessions to Muslim countries. "You really want to work toward greater two-way trade," which can make economies more competitive. Moreover, bilateral free-trade agreements of the sort Washington negotiates typically require partner countries to enforce the rule of law more faithfully.

The U.S. industry's power was also evident in the administration's tepid response to Egypt's recent request to establish a number of Jordan-like qualified industrial zones. Egypt is entitled to set them up, but the Egyptian government has long resisted them because of the requirement for Israeli participation. When Egypt finally said a couple of months ago that it wanted to take advantage of the program, the Bush administration sought to limit the number of Egyptian zones, drawing sharp criticism from free-trade advocates.

U.S. and Egyptian officials said they expect an agreement on the issue by year-end.

Gresser argued that a more comprehensive approach is needed that would grant quick trade benefits to the entire Muslim world. He said that while some "frontline" countries such as Pakistan benefit from programs meant to encourage trade with developing nations, those programs typically exclude industries that employ the most people. Among Pakistan's top 100 exports to the United States, for example, only five currently qualify for duty-free treatment -- gold jewelry, flags, molasses, swords and toenail clippers.

In general, Arab and Muslim partners of the United States "get aid and oil money, which are not bad things at all," Gresser said. "But oil money goes into a big national oil company, which is controlled by a few thousand people, and the government may not do a good job of spreading it around. It's not the same as the textile industry, which puts lots of people to work." 

-----

Va. Man Certified as Candidate to Replace Arafat
Ashqar Joins Ballot Despite U.S. Charges, Confinement to Home

Washington Post
By Caryle Murphy
December 3, 2004

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29870-2004Dec2.html

Ten days ago, Alexandria resident Abdelhaleem Ashqar decided that the recent death of Yasser Arafat had presented him with an opportunity he could not pass up: becoming a candidate in next month's Palestinian presidential elections.

But in addition to the long commute, there were a few obstacles to this dream.

First, the 46-year-old Ashqar was not a registered voter in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which he'd left 15 years ago to come to the United States as a graduate student.

More of a problem was that Ashqar is confined to his Alexandria home while he awaits trial in this country on federal racketeering charges.

But Ashqar pushed ahead anyway. And yesterday, the former Howard University professor was informed by the Palestinian elections committee that he has been accepted as one of 10 official candidates in the Jan. 9 vote.

"I hope that I'll win, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to win," said Ashqar, who is running as an independent. "I hope to capitalize on the votes of independents and those who want real change."

Ashqar was indicted in August with two others on racketeering conspiracy charges in Chicago for allegedly raising millions of dollars for the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. No date has been set for the trial.

Randall A. Samborn, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago, said he had no comment on Ashqar's candidacy. The terms of Ashqar's release on a $2.6 million bond prohibit him from leaving his home but do not appear to bar him from running for office.

Ashqar has pleaded not guilty to the charges. His attorney, Thomas Durkin, called them "preposterous" and "an improper attempt to criminalize political conduct in an international political dispute," referring to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ashqar denies ever being a member of Hamas, which the United States designated a terrorist organization in 1995 for carrying out suicide bombings in Israel.

However, he has been jailed twice for refusing to testify before U.S. grand juries investigating Hamas, and then protested those detentions by going on hunger strikes. He told one judge that testifying would violate his religious and political beliefs and betray colleagues.

Ashqar said he learned Monday that the Palestinian electoral authorities had accepted his voter registration under a provision for imprisoned Palestinians.

Indeed, one of Ashqar's biggest rivals is Marwan Barghouti, 45, who is serving five life terms in an Israel jail for his role in leading violent attacks on Israeli settlers and soldiers.

Barghouti is widely regarded as one of the two top contenders to win the election; the other is Mahmoud Abbas.


-----

Socialist Party in France Approves E.U. Constitution

Washington Post
By Keith B. Richburg
December 3, 2004

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29734-2004Dec2.html

PARIS, Dec. 2 -- France's opposition Socialist Party voted in favor of the European Union's proposed constitution, party leaders announced Thursday, a victory for the party's moderate, pro-European wing.

About 59 percent of party members voted yes in a series of nationwide caucuses Wednesday night. Turnout was high, with 80 percent of the party's 120,000 members casting votes.

The outcome was seen as a major boost for the party's leader, Francois Hollande, who is trying to pull the party toward the political center in advance of presidential and parliamentary elections in 2007.

Laurent Fabius, the number two official in the party and a former prime minister, had campaigned against the proposed constitution, arguing that it would make Europe too capitalistic. He argued for a more "social Europe," with its traditional reliance on strong welfare states and heavy government spending on social programs.

The battle between Hollande and Fabius became a test on which direction the party would take, and it could determine who emerges to challenge President Jacques Chirac, or his successor, for the presidency. Both Hollande and Fabius are considered contenders.

The vote provided a much-needed boost for the constitution, which faces an uphill fight. About 10 countries, including France, Britain, Spain, Denmark and Poland, will hold nationwide referendums on the constitution beginning this spring, and rejection by any large country could be enough to scuttle it. Other countries are leaving the decision to national parliaments.

Advocates say the E.U., which has 25 members, needs a constitution to help the organization function more efficiently, to give Europe a legal identity on the world stage and to establish the posts of European president and foreign minister to speak for the union.

"The Socialists have served their party, their country and Europe," Hollande said after the results were announced. "The Socialists have opened the process of ratification in all of Europe."

Opponents say the constitution would give too much power to a centralized E.U. administration in Brussels.

Much of the debate, which was tinged with anti-American rhetoric, centered on what it means to be a European and whether France and Europe should feel bound to follow the free-market policies of the United States.

Special correspondent Erika Lorentzsen contributed to this report.



-------- us politics

Samson: Even Bush can't have it all

MinutemanMedia.org
By Victoria Samson
December 3, 2004

http://www.cjonline.com/stories/120304/opi_samson.shtml

When President George W. Bush was re-elected by a clear majority of Americans, many citizens who were worried about this country's direction started wringing their hands. Their fears seemed prescient when Secretary of State Colin Powell, one of the few moderating voices in the Bush cabinet, resigned, allowing the president to nominate the more hawkish former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to the position.

With Attorney-General John Ashcroft stepping down, the United States could have chosen a fresh face for our country. Instead, Mr. Bush went with Alberto Gonzales as his pick - the man who wrote the White House memos that were used to justify torture in U.S. prisons abroad. And the Republican-dominated House and Senate seemed poised to rubberstamp the Bush administration's budget requests.

Except they haven't.

In frantic negotiations over the weekend of November 20, 2004, as the Senate and the House worked to smooth over differences between their appropriations for the FY 2005 budget, the White House lost funding for some of its prize projects.

The administration requested $27.6 million for work to begin on a Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, also known as a bunker-buster, which ostensibly would be used against underground targets (even though the United States already has methods of dealing with them). The RNEP received no funding.

The Advanced Concepts Initiatives would spend $9 million on researching new low-yield

(and possibly more usable) nuclear weapons. It lost all its requested funding.

Instead, funding was reallocated to programs that would strive to make the existing nuclear arsenal safe and reliable without breaking a decade-long test moratorium.

In an effort to increase its nuclear test-readiness posture, $30 million had been requested to cut the amount of time needed from 36 to 18 months. Instead, $22.5 million was appropriated, which still allows the United States to shorten its test readiness window to 24 months.

And the Bush administration requested $29.8 million for the Modern Pit Facility, which would construct a new plant for building plutonium pits for new nuclear weapons. All but $7 million was lost from this, and Congress put restrictions on what little funding it did allow.

These small yet important reversals do not indicate a partisan win. Rather, they should be seen as "a consequential victory for those of us who believe the United States sends the wrong signal to the rest of the world by reopening the nuclear door," according to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

Leading the fight against these new nuclear initiatives was Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio. In an administration that prides itself on its party solidarity, Hobson's decision to ignore presidential diktat and instead work to zero out funding for programs he saw as unnecessary waste is rare indeed. Even in this current climate of expansive Republican control, Hobson is determined to continue along this path. He believes that the administration "should read this as a clear signal from Congress" that, if these programs were to crop up again in next year's budget requests, they "would get the same reaction."

This is good. There are rumbles on the Hill that this is not over yet. The FY 06 budget request comes out on Feb. 1, 2005, and rumor has it that these programs will rear their ugly heads yet again. So the fight continues.

But what is encouraging is that even under these strained political circumstances, the administration's wish was not automatically granted. It will be an uphill battle, but the government still can be held accountable for its actions and funding decisions. It is up to the American public to speak up and insist upon this.

The stakes are too high not to. It is not simply the U.S. nuclear arsenal that must be reined in. Other countries are watching to see how we behave. If we choose, despite an overwhelming conventional military superiority, to sink money into new nuclear weapons, it stands to reason that other countries will use that as a justification for their military nuclear programs. Then supporters in this country will use other nations' programs as reason enough for us to expand our nuclear arsenal. It is a vicious cycle that must be halted while still possible.

Victoria Samson is a research analyst at the Center for Defense Information, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, D.C., that focuses on defense and security issues -- www.cdi.org.

-----

Rumsfeld to stay as US defense secretary: Official

WASHINGTON (AFP)
Dec 03, 2004

http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041203224700.exg89dqv.html

Donald Rumsfeld has agreed to stay on as defense secretary at US President George W. Bush's request, a senior administration official said Friday on condition he not be named.

"The president and secretary Rumsfeld spoke on Monday, the president asked him to stay, the secretary agreed, and the president is very pleased," the official said.

"This is a time of real challenge. We are waging a war against terror, and at this critical juncture secretary Rumsfeld is the right person for this position," the official said.

Rumsfeld would appear to be one of the few members of Bush's cabinet to survive the overhaul that has followed the president's re-election victory on November 2.

Other prominent members, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge have resigned.

A Pentagon spokesman, who insisted he not be identified, confirmed that the president and Rumsfeld had discussed his future earlier this week.

"I am not in a position to characterize those discussions. But I will tell you the secretary is hard at work doing his job," he said.



-------- ENERGY 

Energy Remains Challenge for Bush

Knight Ridder
By Jim Landers
December 03, 2004

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=528

WASHINGTON - Among the challenges facing President Bush in his second term is a big one left over from his first: energy.

The nation's electricity grid is strained.

Coal, oil and natural gas prices are at or near record levels.

Ice is melting in the Arctic, heating up the debate about fossil fuels and global warming.

New Republican seats in the Senate may give Mr. Bush a bill to allow oil and natural gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

Air pollution regulations in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry for president may increase auto fuel efficiency while cleaning the air. One could add 1 million barrels a day to the nation's oil supply, while the other could conceivably conserve just as much. Democrats and Republicans will war over the measures.

Even if both succeed, that would cover only a couple years' worth of U.S. oil demand growth. China's oil appetite is growing at an even faster rate, which is a major reason prices shot up around the world this year.

"You just see this tidal wave of demand coming around the world," said Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

Oil is causing the most anxiety. Some say world oil production has peaked. Others say it will soon top out everywhere but the Persian Gulf, which would concentrate enormous power in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. Still others argue the problem is access for drillers to politically sensitive areas.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Ennis, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, looks to Mr. Bush's national security team for the biggest impact on the search for solutions. "Iraq is the one country that has significant potential to increase production," he said. "There were a lot of reasons to free Iraq and make it stable, but that's a big one for the United States."

Mr. Barton, however, sees little prospect of pushing through Congress the comprehensive energy legislation Mr. Bush has favored for four years. He says he won't exhaust his committee with another attempt to pass it.

Congress has tied itself in knots trying to satisfy the many energy and environmental constituencies linked in such a bill.

Comprehensive policy Senate energy committee chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., however, vows to press ahead with an overall energy bill as well as separate budget legislation that would open the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Those are steps the White House wants as well.

"The president remains committed to enacting a comprehensive energy policy," said White House spokesman Trent Duffy.

Many in Congress expected high prices to act as the impetus to get a bill passed. Gasoline is up an average of 50 cents a gallon since Mr. Bush took office in January 2001. Natural gas prices have gone up 13 percent.

Late this year, Congress responded with loan guarantees for a natural gas pipeline reaching from the Alaskan Arctic to the lower 48 states and with tax cuts for alternate sources of energy.

Congress went along with Mr. Bush in increasing funding for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which will soon hold 700 million barrels of oil -- enough to replace all imports for about two months.

In the next few years, Mr. Yergin said, more oil will come into the market from places such as the Caspian Sea and West Africa. That will weaken oil prices and the political pressure for policy action.

"Several things have come together this year -- uncertainty in Russia, unrest in the Middle East, booming Asian oil markets -- to focus attention both on the challenge the oil industry faces to develop new supplies and also on energy security," Mr. Yergin said.

"In the next couple of years, we see a build up in non-OPEC supply coming into the system," he said. "Our view is there are ample resources if there is access and time enough to develop them. But this is one of those times when you need to do everything, from developing new resources to increasing efficiency."

California's strict new regulations mandating lower emissions of greenhouse gases may force automakers to build more fuel-efficient cars, said Therese Langer, director of transportation programs at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. The California regulation requires a 30 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2016 for new cars and light trucks.

Seven Northeastern states have in the past followed California's lead on tougher clean air standards, and may do so again.

"We definitely see the state work on this as a bright spot," Dr. Langer said. Automakers are expected to fight the California regulations in court. They disrupted earlier clean-air requirements when a federal judge ruled that only Congress had the authority to set fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. The new requirement makes no mention of fuel efficiency, saying only that consumers should save more in operating costs than the $1,000-per-vehicle price hike expected to meet the greenhouse gases test.

Mark Baxter, director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University, says opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and increasing fuel efficiency through clean air standards would buy the country time needed to come up with more far-reaching solutions to the energy challenge.

"It takes a long time to put alternatives in place, and we are in a crunch right now," he said.

Mr. Baxter is looking to nuclear fusion to power a transition to hydrogen-fueled vehicles as the way to escape dependence on insecure, diminishing oil resources. But other alternatives -- solar power, plant-based ethanol fuel, wind energy -- could also achieve breakthroughs, he said.

"We need increases in production the Republicans are backing, and conservation moves the Democrats are making, to get us over the hurdle until we have time to figure out the best alternate way for producing energy to carry not only us, but the world, forward," he said. 


-------- alternative energy

Siemens Eyes 30 Percent of Wind Turbine Market

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
December 3, 2004

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/28417/story.htm

COPENHAGEN - Denmark's Vestas may not be able to call itself the world's biggest wind turbine maker for long after German engineering giant Siemens said it was eyeing a market share of more than 30 percent.

"We would very much like to reach a market share of around 30 percent," Siemens divisional director Martin Jorgensen told Reuters at a wind industry conference in Copenhagen on Thursday.

The German company entered the wind market in October when it bought Danish wind turbine maker Bonus. Through its ownership of Bonus, Siemens currently only has a modest 6.6 percent market share, but has made it clear it will not make do with that level for long.

"We have entered into this arena in order to become either number one or number two," Jorgensen said. "We have a growth plan that involves doubling our revenues before too long."

At the end of 2003, Vestas commanded a 32 percent share and has said it plans to raise that to 35 percent.

US giant General Electric has 18 percent of the global market, Germany's Enercon commands a 15 percent share while Spain's Gamesa has 11.5 percent.  



-------- environment

Explosions tear through Houston plant

(UPI) Dec. 3, 2004

http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20041203-094215-8036r.htm

Houston, TX,   -- Multiple explosions tore through a chemical plant Friday in southwest Houston.

Fire officials said at least five people were transported to area hospitals with minor injuries, KHOU-TV, in Houston, reported.

A four-block area near the Marcus Oil and Chemical Plant was evacuated as a precaution, District Fire Chief Tommy Dowdy said.

"When it happened, it shook literally the foundation of the house," said James Campbell, a nearby resident.

Three or four night shift employees at the plant were accounted for, fire officials said.



-------- ACTIVISTS

Protestors Plan Big Anti-Nuclear Rally In New York

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
Story by Nicole Maestri
December 3, 2004

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/28413/story.htm

NEW YORK - With tensions rising over nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, peace activists on Thursday said they are planning a rally of 60,000 people next year to call for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Organizers from United for Peace and Justice and Abolition Now said they want to stage the demonstration in New York's Central Park on May 1, before a United Nations meeting to review the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The rally also comes ahead of the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan by the United States, which ended World War 2 in Asia.

The anti-nuclear weapons groups are working with the Mayors for Peace to get representatives from around the world, including the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to come to the rally and the treaty review conference.

"Survivors (of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) are growing increasingly concerned, watching developments around the world, that nuclear weapons will again be used and that nobody who will actually remember hell on earth will be alive," said Jackie Cabasso, US coordinator for Abolition Now.

United for Peace and Justice is applying with New York City's parks department to hold the rally at Central Park's Great Lawn -- the same location the coalition was denied access to this summer ahead of the Republican National Convention.

Instead, it held a rally in the streets that it estimated drew a crowd of 400,000. The police declined to estimate the size of the crowd, but it stretched out more than a mile (1.6 km) along two main avenues in central Manhattan.

Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, said at a news conference she was "optimistic" they would get permission to use the park this time.

"People's voices will be heard on May 1," Cagan said. "That is a critical moment for people in this city and this country to speak out for complete and total nuclear disarmament."

The non-proliferation treaty's objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology. The treaty, which went into force in 1970, is reviewed every five years. 

-----

Coalition Seeks FBI's Files on Protest Groups

Washington Post
By Dan Eggen
December 3, 2004

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29825-2004Dec2.html

The American Civil Liberties Union joined with dozens of activist groups yesterday in demanding information about federal counterterrorism surveillance efforts, alleging that the FBI and local police departments have targeted peaceful protest groups and law-abiding citizens for scrutiny based on their political beliefs.

In Freedom of Information Act requests filed in the District and 10 states, the ACLU and its affiliates are seeking FBI files about groups and individuals allegedly under surveillance. They are also asking for details about the operations of Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which include federal and local law enforcement officers and which coordinate counterterrorism probes regionally.

The ACLU points to several incidents over the past year involving antiwar protesters, environmental groups and religious organizations that have raised questions about the scope of counterterrorism investigations. The organization argues that the evidence suggests a pattern of broader harassment of left-leaning groups.

"We aren't trying to say that they can't and don't need to investigate people who happen to be members of political or religious groups when they have concrete evidence of criminality," said ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson. "But we have evidence that they are targeting these groups with nothing at all. . . . They shouldn't be wasting their time or our money infiltrating peace groups or collecting files on the Quakers or the Catholic Peace Ministries."

An FBI official, who would discuss details of counterterrorism cases only on the condition of anonymity, said some of the incidents highlighted by the ACLU did not involve the FBI. In other cases, the FBI was investigating legitimate potential threats connected to the national political conventions or other events, the official said.

"They've drawn their conclusion before they've done their research," the FBI official said. "All of our cases are predicated on allegations of criminal activity or national security issues. . . . If there is a threat involved, we have to look at it."

The debate is the latest in a series of disputes over the aggressive counterterrorism tactics used by federal authorities since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which prompted a restructuring of the FBI to focus on thwarting future terrorist strikes and ushered in legislation that strengthened the Justice Department's ability to conduct secret searches and surveillance.

The ACLU and other groups have been particularly critical of an FBI "intelligence bulletin" issued in October 2003 that urged local police to monitor antiwar protests and to "report any potentially illegal acts to the nearest FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force."

The ACLU also highlighted several specific cases across the country that have previously drawn condemnation from activist groups. They include subpoenas issued, and then withdrawn, in Des Moines in connection with an antiwar protest; a series of interviews conducted by federal and local authorities in connection with alleged threats on media organizations at the Democratic National Convention in Boston; and the discovery by peace activists in Fresno, Calif., that their group had been infiltrated by a member of the local sheriff's department.

Several cases have revolved around groups in Colorado, where the Denver Police Department agreed in a legal settlement last year to stop keeping "spy files" on protesters. The ACLU says some of those files were shared with the local JTTF and the FBI.

"The FBI has a history of being heavy-handed," said David Crawford, executive director of Rocky Mountain Animal Defense of Boulder, an organization whose name was among those shared with the federal terrorism task force because the Denver police had labeled it a "criminal extremist" group. "People are concerned that their name is going to end up on a list somewhere, all because they are participating in peaceful activities and exercising their free-speech rights."