NucNews - December 21, 2004



-------- NUCLEAR 

US asked to take firmer line against N-proliferation

By Khalid Hasan, Tuesday, December 21, 2004 Pakistan Daily Times

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_19-12-2004_pg7_45

WASHINGTON: The United States and its allies have failed to take a “firmer line” against states outside the circle of five recognised under the NPT, according to an expert.

Henry D. Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Centre, maintains in a paper contributed to a new book on the subject published by the Strategic Studies Institute that the US and its allies would have to actively contest the notion that all states have a natural right to acquire nuclear weapons. He also wants the notion challenged that if a nation’s security is threatened, it has a right to break out of the NPT. He warns that if that were not done, North Korea’s recent accumulation of nuclear technology under false “peaceful” pretenses and its withdrawal from the Treaty is sure to be only the first of such defections. The US and its allies, he recommends, should also take a stronger stand against non-NPT states.

Sokolski charges that the US and its allies have frequently done the contrary of what he recommends. “For example, Israel’s India’s and Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons has been excused as being ‘understandable’. Recently, the chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission visited two of India’s nuclear weapons production reactors and extended American nuclear ‘safety’ cooperation to New Delhi. Earlier, the US government did all it could to waive and bend mandatory legal sanctions directed against India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear tests in 1998. More recently, the United States refused to identify Pakistan as a nuclear proliferator despite repeated reports of Pakistani nuclear assistance to North Korea and Iran. As for Israel, the United States did far too little to stop its nuclear weapons programme and has done nothing publicly to get it to stop production of plutonium at its weapons plant at Dimona.”

He points out that while Washington protested against North Korea’s violation of the NPT, it did little or nothing to Pyongyang’s actual withdrawal from the Treaty. He argues that the notion that states have a right to nuclear weapons and that, if this right is not exercised, they should be compensated with free access to all types of nuclear technology has “more than run its course” in the case of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Referring to an Irish resolution introduced at the United Nations as far back as 1958-59, Sokolski argues that “if we want an NPT agreement that will reduce rather than fan further nuclear proliferation,” a return to that resolution would be the best route to take. “That will require that the Unites States and other nuclear technology exporting states recognise that much of what they are willing to share is too close to bomb-making and a nation quickly diverting such technology to military ends cannot be safeguarded against.”

Sokolski believes that light water reactors in Iran will bring it dangerously close to having a large arsenal of near-weapons-grade plutonium after only 15 months of operations. The same is true of North Korea if either of the two light water reactors the United States, Japan and South Korea are helping to build are completed. “It is even clearer that Russia’s, Pakistan’s and China’s sharing of fuel fabrication, plutonium separation and uranium enrichment technology and hardware with Iran and North Korea simply is too close to bomb-making to allow for any monitoring that would afford timely warning of possible military diversion,” he writes.

The nuclear expert warns that if nothing is done to shore up US and allied security relations with the Gulf Cooperation Council states and with Iraq, Turkey and Egypt, Iran’s acquisition of even a nuclear weapons breakout capability could prompt one of more of these states to try to acquire nuclear weapons option of its own. If the US fails to hold North Korea accountable for its violation of the NPT or lets it hold one or more nuclear weapons, while appearing to reward its violation with a new deal, South Korea and Japan – and later perhaps Taiwan – will have a powerful basis to question Washington’s security commitment to them and their pledges to stay non-nuclear.

Sokolski is of the view that if there is support for stronger action, exports made outside established international procedures might be banned and targeted for interdiction. “The rule would apply not just to Iran, which has announced its desire to export its nuclear expertise, but to China, North Korea and Pakistan, who trade in nuclear and missile technology. It also could include Israel, which has exported technology to China, and India, a state that announced a military cooperative agreement with Iran and its intent to export military technology internationally.” If the UN cannot be persuaded to adopt such a measure, countries might then choose to act on their own. He includes among “currently worrisome cases” Pakistan contemplating transferring nuclear warheads legally under its control to Saudi Arabia, “as its generals have privately suggested they might.” He proposes that any strategic weapons-related assistance “a Pakistan, or a North Korea, China, Iran or Russia might want to give to other states should be announced before shipment or else run the risk of being interdicted.

In his opinion, “this international common usage would give the world’s Indias, Israels and Pakistans who cannot be made weapons state members of the NPT a formal way to uphold international nonproliferation norms.

-----

Nuclear Solutions Technology Update: Application Feasibility of Gravity Based Detection for Shielded Nuclear Weapons validated by U.S. Government Sponsored Research

WASHINGTON, Dec. 21, 2004 (PRIMEZONE)

http://www.primezone.com/newsroom/news_releases.mhtml?d=69941

Nuclear Solutions, Inc. (OTCBB:NSOL) released the following:

Use of gravity to detect nuclear weapons was researched by the U.S. government in the early 1990s and found to be potentially viable for arms control applications under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). Now Nuclear Solutions, Inc. is working to produce a gravimetric sensor that overcomes the limitations of previous designs for the purpose of practically and effectively detecting a "loose nuke" in transit through a border entry point.

"The levels of radiation emitted by weapons-grade plutonium and uranium are relatively low, and easy to shield," said Nuclear Solutions Chief Executive Officer Patrick Herda, "which makes conventional detection practically impossible under several very likely transit scenarios."

The Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA) has previously sponsored research and experimentation into the concept of detecting and quantifying nuclear warheads for arms control verification applications by measuring their associated gravitational signatures. Proof-of-principle experiments were performed to characterize the capabilities and limitations of gravimetric detection for applications related to START.

The research report, entitled Proof of Principle Tests: Gravity Gradiometer Utility for Onsite Inspection Applications (Contract No. DNA001-90-C-0168), concluded, "Using current gravity gradiometer technology, (it was) demonstrated that gravitational signatures of simulated (weapons) can be measured successfully" and that "gravity gradiometry accurately and reliably discriminated small variations in mass distributions as well as small asymmetries in mass."

Although the experiment validated the potential utility of using gravitational signatures for arms control applications, it did not address the problems anticipated in gravitational signature collection in an actual inspection. It found that "identification of a particular missile system (i.e., its specific identity) will require future signal analysis and algorithm development."

"I found the experimental results from the DNA report to be very encouraging for our present development effort," Herda said, "keeping in mind that the previous experiment did not evaluate our new approach and should not be mistaken for government validation of our patent-pending technology."

He added, however, "the principle of measuring changes in gravitational fields to determine the existence of a mass anomaly that could signal the presence of heavy metals was successfully carried out in the DNA experiment, and its feasibility, given a robust and fieldable sensor pack, is not in question."

Development of Nuclear Solutions' new sensing concept may result in a highly sensitive, portable, and low-cost detection system that responds to minute gravitational gradient anomalies produced by high-density nuclear materials like plutonium and uranium -- and is unaffected by radiation shielding techniques.

When fully funded and developed, this patent-pending approach using gravimetric sensing techniques could become a useful tool in the fight against nuclear terrorism worldwide.

Nuclear Solutions is progressing as anticipated with its intellectual property development, and further updates concerning the company's shielded nuclear weapons detection technology and European business development activities are expected within the next two weeks. Additionally, a progress update on nuclear micro-battery technology is expected by the end of January.

About Nuclear Solutions, Inc.:

Nuclear Solutions, based in Washington, D.C., is an emerging innovative technology development company that is committed to exploring, developing, and commercializing viable product technologies enabling partner companies to offer new and improved products in the following areas:

Nuclear Weapon Detection for Homeland Security & Defense

The development of advanced technology to detect shielded nuclear materials and terrorist nuclear weapons

Nanotechnology/MEMS applications

The development of long-lived nuclear micro-power sources, based on three U.S. Patents (5,087,533; 6,118,204; 6,238,812), to power applications in the emerging field of Nanotechnology, Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, and the new generation of low power microelectronics.

Environmental Technology

Development of a patent pending process to remediate tritiated water via an advanced separation technique.

More information about Nuclear Solutions, Inc. may be found on its website, www.nuclearsolutions.com

Disclaimer: The matters discussed in this press release are forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties such as our plans, objective, expectations and intentions. You can identify these statements by our use of words such as "may," "when," "expect," "believe," "anticipate," "intend," "could," "estimate," "goal," "continue," "plans," "planning," "would," "when," "feasible," or other similar words or phrases. Some of these statements include discussions regarding our future business strategy and our ability to generate revenue, income, and cash flow. Additional funding is required to develop the technology described herein. The actual future results for the Company could differ significantly from those statements. Factors that could adversely affect actual results and performance include, among others, the Company's limited operating history, dependence on key management, financing requirements, technical difficulties commercializing any projects, government regulation, technological change, and competition. In any event, undue reliance should not be placed on any forward-looking statements, which apply only as of the date of this press release. Additionally, patent pending status does not guarantee that a patent will issue or that the technologies herein, including gravimetric sensor technology will be commercially successful. Accordingly, reference should be made to the Company's periodic filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

CONTACT:  John Dempsey, Vice-President
          Nuclear Solutions, Inc.
          202-787-1951
          info@nuclearsolutions.com



-------- accidents and safety

Security of uranium questioned
Training drill mishap in U.S. raises concerns
 	
By Matthew L. Wald The New York Times
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
 
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/21/news/nuke.html

OAK RIDGE, Tennessee In the predawn hours of Sept. 2, at the plant that stores the United States' stockpile of highly enriched uranium, guards wearing body armor and carrying loaded submachine guns were dispatched to intercept a group of men that had apparently set off an intrusion alarm. But the target group turned out to be a second team of guards that was conducting a mock attack with laser-tag equipment.

The armed guards, a "shadow force" maintained in reserve during such drills, rushed through the dark, ready, people involved said, to shoot at the men they believed were intruders.

Such a deployment is almost unheard of, security experts said, and had it led to a shooting, it could have destroyed the ability to hold such drills, a crucial tool in determining if the plant is adequately defended. The plant, Y-12, is owned by the Department of Energy but is defended by a contractor, Wackenhut.

"For two minutes, it was mass confusion," said one of the guards on duty that night. "People asked several times, 'Is this a drill?' Nobody would clarify."

He and another guard involved agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity, saying they had been threatened with losing their jobs if they spoke with outsiders about the incident.

The incident was not the only problem drill at Y-12, which is part of the Oak Ridge complex, in eastern Tennessee. In January, the inspector general of the Energy Department reported that during a similar laser-tag drill at the weapons plant in 2003, the team playing defense performed unexpectedly well. The reason, the inspector general said, was that the defenders appeared to have gotten advance knowledge of the attack, including which building would be attacked and whether a diversion would be used.

The results were "tainted and unreliable," the inspector general found.

The Energy Department official in charge of the site, William Brumley, and a Wackenhut official, Martin Anderson, said neither problem was serious. Both said that no one was in danger in the Sept. 2 incident, although Anderson said that the confusion raised anxiety levels and that communications that night could have been "crisper."

Security here is not only a matter of keeping intruders out, Brumley said. Technicians still maintain nuclear warheads, and security is also a matter of making sure that nothing is smuggled out, he said.

The intruder threat is not limited to theft. A suicidal terrorist who gained access to the uranium here might be able to assemble it in a few minutes into a nuclear explosive, and detonate it on the spot, experts say.

Though Y-12 is a weapons plant, the drill incident may have implications for the civilian nuclear industry. This year, the trade association that represents the power reactor operators hired Wackenhut to help conduct similar "force-on-force" drills at the 63 nuclear power plant sites. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the contract in the hope that Wackenhut would bring more expertise to the drills, which in the past have varied widely by site. Wackenhut provides security at about half the plants. During security drills at Y-12, the plant is vulnerable because half the people on duty are carrying laser guns, not real weapons, and are distracted by the exercise.

A second guard involved in the Sept. 2 exercise said that from the chatter on the radio, the guards had concluded that "it was time to go fight."

A third person involved that night, apparently either a guard or a supervisor, submitted an anonymous letter to the union safety officer calling the error that sent armed guards out to chase unarmed colleagues "an almost fatal tragedy," because the guards could have seen the exercise players firing their laser-equipped guns, which are made from real guns, and would have shot them. As they had trained, the guards came at the site of the alarm from two directions, people on duty that night said.

The two guards who agreed to speak about the Sept. 2 event said they heard the dispatcher say "armed suspects" over the radio link, but according to Wackenhut and Energy Department managers, the dispatcher said, "I have people in the area." The anonymous letter referred to four armed adversaries.

An official of the guards' union said investigators from the inspector general's office recently began questioning guards about their training, to determine whether Wackenhut had provided all the training that it told the government it had.

Some guards say that their time for target shooting and for physical conditioning had been cut back; one said that the records the investigators showed him indicated he had had firearms drill time that he never had.

The inspector general's office said it would not comment, and a Wackenhut official said he was unaware of the investigation, although he said the government sometimes audited training records.

Wackenhut's contract was due to expire Dec. 31 but has been extended for three months while Energy Department officials decide whether it should be renewed for a few years, or re-bid, or whether the guard force should be integrated into the main contractor work force.

---------

Security Drill at Weapons Plant Raises Safety Questions

By MATTHEW L. WALD
December 21, 2004 NY TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/21/national/21nuke.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Dec. 16 - In the predawn hours of Sept. 2, at the plant that stores the nation's stockpile of highly enriched uranium, guards wearing body armor and carrying loaded submachine guns were dispatched to intercept a group of men who had apparently set off an intrusion alarm. But the target group turned out to be a second team of guards, who were conducting a mock attack with laser-tag equipment.

The armed guards, a "shadow force" maintained in reserve during such drills, rushed through the dark, ready, people involved said, to shoot at a group whom they believed were intruders.

Such a deployment is virtually unheard of, security experts said, and had it led to a shooting, the incident could have destroyed the ability to hold such drills, a crucial tool in determining if the plant is adequately defended. The plant, called Y-12, is owned by the Department of Energy but is defended by a contractor, Wackenhut.

"For two minutes, it was mass confusion," said one of the guards on duty that night. "People asked several times, 'Is this a drill?' Nobody would clarify."

He and another guard involved in the incident agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity, saying they had been threatened with firing if they spoke with outsiders about the incident.

The incident was not the only problem drill at the plant, which is part of the Oak Ridge complex, near Knoxville. In January, the inspector general of the Energy Department reported that during a similar laser-tag drill at the weapons plant in 2003, the team playing defense performed unexpectedly well. The reason, the inspector general said, was that the defenders appeared to have gotten advance knowledge of the attack plans, including which building would be attacked and whether a diversionary tactic would be used.

The results were "tainted and unreliable," the inspector general found.

The Energy Department official in charge of the site, William J. Brumley, and a Wackenhut official, Martin Anderson, said neither problem was serious. Both said that no one was ever in danger in the Sept. 2 incident, although Mr. Anderson said that the confusion raised anxiety levels and that communications that night could have been "crisper."

Security here is not only a matter of keeping intruders out, Mr. Brumley said. Technicians still maintain nuclear warheads, and security is also a matter of making sure that nothing is smuggled out, he said.

The intruder threat is not limited to theft. A suicidal terrorist who gained access to the uranium here might be able to assemble it in a few minutes into a nuclear explosive, and detonate it on the spot, experts say.

Though Y-12 is a weapons plant, the drill incident may have implications for the civilian nuclear industry. Earlier this year the trade association that represents the power reactor operators hired Wackenhut to help conduct similar "force-on-force" drills at the 63 nuclear power plant sites. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the contract in the hope that Wackenhut would bring more expertise to the drills, which in the past have varied widely by site. Wackenhut provides security at about half the plants.

During security drills at Y-12, the plant is vulnerable because half the people on duty are carrying laser guns, not real weapons, and are distracted by the exercise.

A second guard involved in the Sept. 2 exercise said that from the chatter on the radio, the guards had concluded that "it was time to go fight." A third person involved that night, apparently either a guard or a supervisor, submitted an anonymous letter to the union safety officer calling the error that sent armed guards out to chase unarmed colleagues "an almost fatal tragedy," because the guards could have seen the exercise players firing their laser-equipped guns, which are made from real guns, and would have shot them. As they had trained, the guards came at the site of the alarm from two directions, people on duty that night said.

Officials at Wackenhut and at the Energy Department acknowledge that while there was an error, there was little danger of a killing because the players were alerted to the problem quickly, when the dispatcher called a "code October," which meant that the players should halt the exercise immediately, and the members of the "attack" team decided to hide themselves inside a building to avoid their oncoming comrades. For reasons that are disputed by participants, it took much longer to alert the shadow force.

Outside security experts had a harsher assessment. Peter Stockton, who was a special assistant to the secretary of energy in the Clinton administration and is now with the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group in Washington, said: "When you introduce live ammo in one of these things, it can be a disaster. If somebody had come around the side of the building, chances are they would have been killed."

Mr. Stockton said he had observed about 75 such drills over the years and had never seen a shadow force sent to track people during a drill, although they are often dispatched because a mechanical alarm system has activated somewhere.

The two guards who agreed to speak about the Sept. 2 event said they heard the dispatcher say "armed suspects" over the radio link, but according to Wackenhut and Energy Department managers, the dispatcher said, "I have people in the area." The anonymous letter referred to four armed adversaries.

An official of the guard's union said investigators from the inspector general's office recently began questioning guards about their training, to determine whether Wackenhut had provided all the training that it told the government it had. Some guards say that their time for target shooting and for physical conditioning had been cut back; one said that the records the investigators showed him indicated he had had firearms drill time that he never had.

The inspector general's office said it would not comment, and a Wackenhut official said he was unaware of the investigation, although he said the government sometimes audited training records.

Drills and firearms training were suspended for a while in the fall, because two weeks after the September drill, guards who were supposed to be using blank rounds to practice discharging and reloading their weapons turned out to have at least one live bullet in their supply. Someone shot a live round through a wall and then through a refrigerator in the next room.

The Y-12 plant, which employs about 400 guards, who are referred to as guards but dress like commandos, is ringed with watchtowers that look like the control tower for a small airport, except that the glass is obviously heavier-duty, and fencing protects the tower from someone throwing a grenade up to the window level.

The 800-acre heart of Y-12 is surrounded by a two-and-a-half mile barrier of steel walls, fences, barbed wire, motion sensors and cameras, which enclose a jumble of rusting, decrepit buildings. Some of the buildings date from World War II, and workers there enriched uranium for the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The name Y-12, like those for many Manhattan Project factories, and the Manhattan Project itself, was selected to give no clue about its function.

Wackenhut's contract was due to expire on Dec. 31 but has been extended for three months while Energy Department officials decide whether it should be renewed for a few years, or re-bid, or whether the guard force should be integrated into the main contractor work force.

Mr. Brumley, the Y-12 site manager, said that merging the guards with the main work force might help with the job of controlling materials as they are moved around the plant. Employees pass through metal detectors on the way out as well as on the way in, and quantities of uranium as small as drill shavings must be accounted for, he said.

--------

Radioactive people set off alarms 

Certain medicines are especially troublesome for anti-terror authorities 

By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER 
Tri-Valley Herald, Pleasanton, CA (Bay Area)
 
Article Last Updated: Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - 3:03:48 AM PST 
 
http://www.trivalleyherald.com/Stories/0,1413,86~10669~2610595,00.html 
 
In placing radiation detectors in key cities, ports and border crossings, defense scientists and the federal government are finding remarkable amounts of radioactive material moving around the country.

Kitty litter, granite and truckloads of porcelain toilets headed for Home Depot and Lowes are setting off radiation alarms. And they're not remotely as "hot" as the humans.

With the explosion of nuclear medicine, physicians are giving radioactive drugs to people an estimated 20 million times a year.

For a few days to several weeks, those people are emitting gamma rays, beta particles or X-rays that can radiate beyond the walls of cars, buses and subway trains to reach the attention of anti-terror authorities.

"If you have a radiomedical treatment, you are the hottest thing around," said Linda Groves, an ex-Navy captain who analyzes radiation-detection data for Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore.

In the event of alarm, authorities are pulling over and questioning motorists whose vehicle come up radioactive.

"I did some deployments, and we scared some little old ladies to death," Groves said. "Doctors are not doing a good enough job of telling folks what they're carrying."

As agencies of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security look for smuggling of ingredients for nuclear and "dirty" bombs, authorities in many places are stopping roughly one in every 1,000 vehicles and cargo shipments for closer inspection and questioning.

Most alarms are for cargo -- everything from nuclear-reactor fuel to

Fiestaware saucers to small cesium sources trucked around to construction sites to test the integrity of welds. But depending on their proximity to big cities and major hospitals, as many as one-third of radiation alarms in public places and thoroughfares are being triggered by medical patients.

"Even if it's 10 percent, that means on any given day, just people driving on the highways, one out of every 10,000 are running around radioactive," said Page Stoutland, head of nuclear and

radiological countermeasures at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

At one New York port, as many as one in 1,000 truck drivers are turning up radioactive, which indirectly suggests they're getting good preventive health care. Increasingly, truckers, police and other workers in sensitive or stressful jobs are getting mandatory stress tests requiring a trace dose of a radioactive substance.

Thallium 201 illuminates blood flow in the heart and is the most common radiopharmaceutical. It also sets off radiation alarms for up to 30 days, according to a recent study by Lionel Zuckier, a radiology professor at the New Jersey Medical School and director of nuclear medicine at University Hospital in Newark and colleagues. Another radioactive drug used in thyroid treatments, iodine-131, can last up to 95 days. That's longer than doctors thought, based on their own detection devices, Zuckier said.

That's because U.S. Customs, Border Patrol and Transportation Security Administration officials are carrying radiation detectors that can be 1,000 times more sensitive than nuclear-medicine cameras in major hospitals, Zuckier said. Those cameras provide stunningly detailed shots of the human body in part by ignoring most of the artificial radiation.

"That's why we get an image that makes some sense. Otherwise it would be a blur," he said.

The homeland-security detectors are designed to take in as much radiation as possible and have hair-trigger alarms set just above natural background.

"These things are extremely sensitive," Zuckier said. "It's a whole new level of detection."

The startling radiation readings on Americans in the wild is just one of several insights into the human and natural world that the U.S. government is getting as it deploys new sensing devices and monitoring technologies nationwide.

Bioterrorism detectors are picking up bits of anthrax and other natural pathogens on the wind. Airport metal detectors are fingering people who have knee and hip replacements or shrapnel from old war wounds. Chemical agent detectors sometimes sniff hair sprays, cleaning agents and traces of pesticides, which share some similarity with nerve agents.

In some public places, such as subways, scientists have been dismayed at having to recalibrate their chemical or biodetectors to ignore sizable amounts of airborne grime.

"There are not too many bugs but dirt and brake dust and all that," said Livermore's Stoutland. "It's just amazing our lungs will take that assault."

These are what scientists call background or "noise." For radiation detection, it has an acronym, NORM, for "naturally occurring radioactive material."

"We call them nuisance sources. What we're trying to do is develop some procedures or engineered solutions so they aren't the nuisance that they are," said Sandia's Groves.

One answer, recommended by the international Society of Nuclear Medicine and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, calls for doctors to give a card or letter to their patients explaining their treatment and set up a hotline so anti-terror officials can double-check.

"To us it's a matter of patient privacy," said NRC spokesman David McIntyre. "They may not want to talk about their treatment when all of a sudden sirens start going off."

But eventually defense scientists would prefer not to bother radioactive patients at all. The problem is that homeland-security radiation detectors are mostly dumb; they can't tell what kind of radiation they're detecting or how energetic the particles or rays are. With more detailed, spectroscopic tests, radioactive humans stand out like a sore thumb, unmistakable for a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb.

Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com . 



-------- business

USEC May Have to Pay Timbers $18 Million
Firm Plans Talks With Former Chief

By Annys Shin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 21, 2004; Page E02

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15182-2004Dec20?language=printer

USEC Inc., a supplier of enriched uranium based in Bethesda, said yesterday that it may have to pay former chief executive William H. "Nick" Timbers Jr. up to $18 million if it is found that Timbers was terminated without cause.

USEC announced Timbers's abrupt departure last week, offering no explanation. USEC Chairman James R. Mellor is serving as chief executive until the board finds a replacement.

But a filing yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicated the parting was not entirely amicable. USEC officials said the company plans to "engage in a dialogue" with Timbers over the terms of his termination and that any dispute would be subject to arbitration.

If Timbers can show he was terminated without cause, the company estimated it would have to make a maximum cash payment of $18 million under terms of his employment contract, reducing its after-tax earnings by $8 million, the filing said. The rest, said spokesman Charles Yulish, was previously accrued.

"USEC believes that it is not obligated to provide the payments and benefits required," the company said in the filing.

Timbers, a former investment banker, became USEC's chief executive in 1999, after overseeing its transition from a government corporation to a publicly traded company. Timbers agreed to a five-year contract, with automatic one-year extensions, unless he or the board chose not to renew the contract, according to the company's March 31 proxy statement filed with the SEC. Timbers received an annual salary of no less than $600,000, in addition to performance-based annual bonuses, stock options and other benefits.

Timbers's contract provided that he would receive a severance package under two circumstances: if he was terminated by the company without cause or if he departed "for good reason." In either circumstance, it requires USEC to pay him a cash lump sum equal to three times the sum of his average annual base salary and bonus for the most recent three years, continue providing benefits for up to three additional years, and supply him with office space and administrative support for two years.

In 2003, Timbers received a salary of $660,000 and a bonus of $612,448. He also owns 1.3 million shares of USEC stock. Timbers did not return phone calls to his home last night seeking comment.

USEC supplies enriched uranium to nuclear power plants around the world. It has struggled in recent years because of low prices for uranium, dumping by foreign competitors and outmoded enrichment plants.



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

-------- depleted uranium

Rare Pneumonia Found Among U.S. Soldiers in Iraq

Tue Dec 21, 2004 09:10 PM ET
By Andrew Stern (Reuters)

http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=healthNews&storyID=7153331

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A rare and sometimes deadly pneumonia has hit 18 U.S. soldiers deployed in Iraq, and Army medical investigators are at a loss to explain the cause, according to a study published on Tuesday.

In a report appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center said two of the soldiers had died from the rare illness, called acute eosinophilic pneumonia, or AEP.

No common source was found for the outbreak that occurred between March 2003 and March 2004 among the soldiers in Iraq. The study covered only that time period and there was no indication whether cases have continued to show up since then.

The 18 victims studied ranged in age from 19 to 47 and all used tobacco, with three-quarters recently taking up the habit. All but one reported "significant exposure to fine airborne sand or dust" while in Iraq.

While only 18 cases have been reported among 183,000 troops deployed in Iraq during the time period involved, the authors said the cases are still significant because the disease is very rare in the general population.

The illness was not immediately diagnosed in several victims, who suffered fever and respiratory failure. Several had to be put on mechanical ventilators to help them breathe and were administered corticosteroids. Months later, a few reported continued breathing problems or wheezing.

"Inquiries to the Iraqi health officials did not suggest that AEP was occurring in the local population or that there has been an unusual increase in the incidence of pneumonia of any kind during the study period," the report said.

The report's author, Dr. Andrew Shorr, warned the illness can strike suddenly and mimic more common ailments such as acute respiratory distress syndrome or community pneumonia.

The report follows another battle zone study in November that found an unexpectedly high number of U.S. soldiers injured in the Middle East and Afghanistan had tested positive for a rare, hard-to-treat blood infection.

Army doctors at that time said 102 soldiers were found to be infected with the bacteria Acinetobacter baumannii. The infections occurred among soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and three other sites between January 2002 and August.

Although it was not known where the soldiers contracted those infections, the Army at that time said the outbreak highlighted a need to improve infection control in military hospitals.

Eighty-five of the bloodstream infections occurred among soldiers serving in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the report said. Normally military hospitals see only one such case every year, it added. 

--------

National Academies news: Gulf War and Health

21 Dec 2004 Medical News Today

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=18117

The available evidence is too sparse or of insufficient quality to determine whether the majority of health problems that may be experienced by Gulf War veterans could be associated with exposures to fuels for military vehicles, propellents in Scud missiles, or substances given off by combustion sources such as oil-well fires, exhausts, and tent heaters, according to the latest report on the Gulf War and health from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. However, data from studies of occupational and environmental exposures to air pollution, vehicle exhaust, and other combustion products led the committee that wrote the report to conclude that exposure to such substances is associated with an increased risk of lung cancer.

"Studies of people exposed to air pollution, vehicle exhaust, and burning of coal or other heating and cooking fuels consistently show that such exposures are linked to an increased risk for developing lung cancer," said committee chair Lynn Goldman, professor, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. "This provides sufficient evidence that exposure to combustion products during the Gulf War could be associated with lung cancer in some veterans." Military personnel may have encountered combustion products from diesel-fueled heaters in poorly ventilated tents, cooking stoves, vehicle exhaust systems, and oil-well fires. "It should be emphasized that smoking is the major culprit for lung cancer, accounting for 80 percent of all cases, according to the American Cancer Society," Goldman added.

The committee also found some evidence that exposure to combustion products is linked to asthma and cancers of the nose, mouth, throat, and bladder, as well as to low birth weight and premature births in women exposed while pregnant; the data were weaker in these cases, however. The data on whether the majority of cancers, neurological problems, and other health problems are associated with exposure to fuels, propellants, or combustion products were inadequate to draw conclusions. "While we would like to have more definitive answers to questions about the specific diseases that may be associated with these substances, in most cases the evidence simply is not strong enough or does not exist," Goldman said.

Because scant information exists on actual exposure levels experienced by individual service members -- a critical factor when assessing health effects -- the committee could not draw specific conclusions about Gulf War veterans' chances of developing lung cancer or any other health problems as a result of exposures. No systematic monitoring of air contamination from oil-well fires was conducted in the Persian Gulf region until May 1991, and this monitoring did not measure levels of contamination produced by other combustion sources, such as heaters or engines. Moreover, no data are available that would allow comparisons between levels of exposure to air contaminants during the Gulf War and exposures to similar contaminants in civilian occupational and environmental settings.

Veterans who have experienced chronic health problems following their service in the Persian Gulf region are asking whether exposure to various chemical, biological, or environmental agents might be responsible. This IOM report is the third in a series that responds to requests from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Congress to examine the health effects of potentially harmful agents to which Gulf War veterans might have been exposed. The first report focused on potential health effects from depleted uranium, pyridostigmine bromide, sarin, and vaccines; the second centered on insecticides and solvents. These reports did not directly assess whether health effects could occur as a result of service in the Gulf War.

For the current report, the committee evaluated the published, peer-reviewed research on exposure to unburned fuels, combustion products, and hydrazines and nitric acid -- components of the propellant used for Scud and other missiles -- for any evidence of links to specific cancers, neurological effects, or other health problems that persist after exposure. More than 600 oil-well fires were ignited in Kuwait by retreating Iraqi troops during the Gulf War conflict, sending up large plumes of smoke that occasionally remained low to the ground. Troops also may have been exposed to combustion products through vehicle exhaust, heaters in poorly ventilated tents, and cooking stoves. Military personnel may have had contact with hydrazines and nitric acid when they disarmed or disposed of Scud missiles or were downwind of a missile explosion. They also may have come into contact with fuels when refueling ground vehicles, aircraft, and equipment.

Of the approximately 800 studies reviewed in detail for this report, most involved individuals who were exposed to these agents in occupational settings over long periods of time. Only a small number actually studied veterans who may have been exposed while serving in the Persian Gulf. The committee carefully assessed the quality, limitations, and relevance of each epidemiologic study, and used five categories to describe the strength of the evidence.

SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE OF A CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP, the strongest level of evidence, means that many studies have established a clear link between exposure to an agent and a health outcome. Among the other requirements, there must be a plausible biological explanation for the relationship. None of the compounds evaluated in this report met these criteria.

Evidence that establishes a link between exposures and a health outcome with reasonable certainty, but fails to meet the higher standard of proof needed for causality, is characterized as SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE OF AN ASSOCIATION. The evidence for an association between lung cancer and combustion products falls into this category.

When a limited number of studies suggest that a link exists, but without reasonable certainty, the evidence is said to be LIMITED OR SUGGESTIVE OF AN ASSOCIATION. This category describes the evidence for links between combustion products and nasal, oral, laryngeal, and bladder cancers; asthma; and low birth weight and preterm births by women exposed while pregnant. Likewise, the evidence for an association between hydrazine exposure and lung cancer fits this definition.

If several studies of adequate quality consistently fail to show a positive association at any level of exposure, the evidence is described as LIMITED OR SUGGESTIVE OF NO ASSOCIATION. And evidence that lacks sufficient quality, consistency, or statistical power to draw any conclusion is judged to be INADEQUATE OR INSUFFICIENT TO DETERMINE WHETHER AN ASSOCIATION EXISTS. The majority of the evidence on fuels, combustion products, and propellants falls into this final category.

The study was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The Institute of Medicine is a private, nonprofit institution that provides health policy advice under a congressional charter granted to the National Academy of Sciences. A committee roster follows.

A pre-publication version of GULF WAR AND HEALTH, VOL. 3: FUELS, COMBUSTION PRODUCTS, AND PROPELLANTS is available on the Internet at HTTP://WWW.NAP.EDU. Reporters may obtain a copy from the Office of News and Public Information (contacts listed above).

[ This news release and report are available at HTTP://NATIONAL-ACADEMIES.ORG ]

INSTITUTE OF MEDICINE
Board on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
COMMITTEE ON GULF WAR AND HEALTH: LITERATURE REVIEW OF SELECTED ENVIRONMENTAL PARTICULATES, POLLUTANTS, AND SYNTHETIC CHEMICAL COMPOUND

LYNN R. GOLDMAN, M.D., M.P.H. (CHAIR)
Professor
Bloomberg School of Public Health
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore

MELVYN C. BRANCH, M.S., PH.D.
Joseph Negler Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of Colorado
Boulder

MICHAEL BRAUER, SC.D.
Professor
School of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canada

MARK D. EISNER, M.D., M.P.H.
Assistant Professor
Department of Medicine
University of California
San Francisco

ERIC GARSHICK, M.D., M.O.H.
Staff Physician
Pulmonary/Critical Care Section
Veteran's Affairs Boston Healthcare System
West Roxbury, Mass.

RUSS B. HAUSER, SC.D., M.D., M.P.H.
Assistant Professor of Occupational Health
Department of Environmental Health
Harvard School of Public Health
Boston

JOEL KAUFMAN, M.D., M.P.H.
Associate Professor
Departments of Medicine and Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences
University of Washington
Seattle

RICHARD MAYEUX, M.D., M.SC.
Director
Sergievsky Center, and
Co-Director
Taub Institute
College of Physicians and Surgeons
Columbia University
New York City

CHARLES POOLE, SC.D., M.P.H.
Associate Professor
Department of Epidemiology
University of North Carolina School of Public Health
Chapel Hill

BEATE R. RITZ, M.D., PH.D., M.P.H.
Associate Professor
Department of Epidemiology
UCLA School of Public Health
Los Angeles

JOSEPH V. RODRICKS, PH.D.
Principal
Institute for Health Risk Sciences
ENVIRON International Corp.
Arlington, Va.

RICHARD B. SCHLESINGER, PH.D.
Chair and Professor
Department of Biological Sciences
Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Pleasantville, N.Y.

JAMES S. TAYLOR, M.D.
Head
Section of Industrial Dermatology
Department of Dermatology
Cleveland Clinic Foundation
Cleveland

MARK J. UTELL, M.D.
Professor
Departments of Medicine and Environmental Medicine
University of Rochester School of Medicine
Rochester, N.Y.

WILLIAM M. VALENTINE, PH.D., D.V.M.
Associate Professor
Department of Pathology
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Nashville, Tenn.

JUDITH T. ZELIKOFF, PH.D.
Associate Professor
Institute of Environmental Medicine
New York University School of Medicine
Tuxedo

INSTITUTE STAFF

CAROLYN FULCO, M.S.
Study Director

Contact: Christine Stencel or Chris Dobbins
news@nas.edu
202-334-2138
The National Academies 

-----

NUCLEAR FUEL RECYCLING: Acid test

The Asahi Shimbun
(IHT/Asahi: December 21,2004) 

http://www.asahi.com/english/nation/TKY200412210161.html

The Rokkasho reprocessing plant begins a crucial test to determine the viability of extracting plutonium from spent nuclear fuel.

`There is no risk of a chain reaction occurring (with depleted uranium) ... .'

JAPAN NUCLEAR FUEL OFFICIAL Discussing the safety of the test

The government's program to recycle spent nuclear fuel kicks into high gear today when the country's first commercial reprocessing plant in Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture, finally begins tests using uranium.

Much attention is focused on the tests: Any flaws or accidents that reveal the potential for radioactive contamination could jeopardize the entire recycling plan.

Over the next year, the plant, built and operated by Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd., is expected to run tests using about 53 tons of depleted uranium left over from the enrichment of natural uranium to make fuel.

Originally scheduled to begin in June of last year, the tests were delayed by the discovery in 2002 of construction flaws in the pool used to store spent fuel.

The reprocessing facility, built at a cost of 2.14 trillion yen, is located on a vast 3.8-million-square-meter compound in a remote site in the northern part of the prefecture. In its final stage, the test will involve extracting plutonium from spent fuel that is cut into small pieces several centimeters in size and chemically treated with nitric acid.

Because the plutonium can then be used as fuel in reactors, the recycling program has been hailed as an answer to the nation's problem of energy security.

The hope is to process up to 800 tons of the 900 to 1,000 tons of spent fuel produced at power plants every year, yielding about 4.5 tons of plutonium.

Initially, the plutonium was meant for use in fast-breeder reactors, but plans changed after an accident at the nation's sole prototype fast-breeder reactor, Monju, in 1995. Now, the plan is to mix plutonium with uranium for use as a fuel in conventional light-water reactors.

Since its major facilities were completed in 2001, the Rokkasho plant has geared up for operations in stages, first by running tests with water and chemicals. The latest test involving depleted uranium will determine whether the spent fuel can be safely cut up into pieces and dissolved in nitric acid.

The final stage, called the active test, in which spent fuel is actually reprocessed, is scheduled to begin in December 2005.

This month, Japan Nuclear Fuel sought to reassure locals in leaflets handed out to each of the 4,000 households in the Rokkasho area. The company says that the test will only raise by an estimated one-10,000th the level of naturally existing radioactivity in the area.

The company also took the unusual step of posting on its Web site 190 potential emergency scenarios, including possible leaks of low-level radioactive wastewater from pipe joints and breakdowns of the machinery used to cut the spent fuel into pieces.

In each case, however, the company concluded that the environment would not be seriously affected.

The depleted uranium to be used in the test contains less fission-prone uranium-235 than does natural uranium and is thus easier to handle.

``There is no risk of a chain reaction occurring (with depleted uranium) and no need to even think about people being seriously exposed to radioactivity,'' said an official with Japan Nuclear Fuel.

Because of the low risk, depleted uranium has been used in tests at other nuclear facilities. However, when the Tokai Reprocessing Plant for research and development, run by the Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute in Ibaraki Prefecture, conducted a uranium test for 19 months from 1975, 39 incidents of minor trouble involving the substance were reported.

Government officials are eager to avoid a repeat of the sodium leaks that plagued the Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor in the 1995 accident. It was that accident that led the government to suspend development of fast-breeder reactors for commercial use.

A similar serious accident at Rokkasho could spell the end of the nation's nuclear fuel recycling program.

In June, the government's Atomic Energy Commission brought together experts to debate whether the current nuclear fuel recycling plan should proceed.

They concluded last month that although the current plan is more costly than not recycling spent nuclear fuel at all, it was a good plan and should proceed.

But some nuclear experts warn it will take two to three years to fix problems that may arise during the uranium test and that the Rokkasho facility may miss the target date of July 2006 to start operations.

The Rokkasho facility can anticipate running into trouble. The French company Cogema, which offers technical support to Japan Nuclear Fuel, has reported about 1,500 troubling incidents of some kind at the company's nuclear recycling plants since the 1990s.

Hideyuki Ban, co-director of the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center, cautioned the Atomic Energy Commission's panel that the Rokkasho facility may fail to function even up to half of its capabilities.

And unless the uranium test is an overwhelming success, the power companies may once again urge that the recycling program be scrapped altogether.

Because it requires such careful handling to prevent radioactive contamination, utilities operating nuclear power plants have been concerned about taking the next step of reprocessing actual spent nuclear fuel.

Decommissioning costs also begin to mount. It is estimated it would cost 450 billion yen to decommission Rokkasho after the uranium test. But the cost jumps to an estimated 1.55 trillion yen if spent fuel is processed.

----

U.S. uranium loaded into controversial Japanese plutonium reprocessing plant
Greenpeace calls for cancellation of dangerous program

[21 December 2004, Rokkasho, Aomori, Japan] 

http://www.greenpeace.or.jp/press/2004/eng/20041221_html

Activists from Greenpeace protested this morning at the Rokkasho Nuclear Reprocessing plant, located in northern Japan, as the operator introduced nuclear material into the plant for the first time. The plant will eventually be used to produce plutonium, a key component of nuclear weapons. Japan already has approximately 40 tons of plutonium, but does not have a reactor that burns plutonium fuel. The Greenpeace banner reads "Do not start reprocessing" in Japanese and English. Japanese Nuclear Fuel Limited, the plant operator announced that they will start uranium tests on December 21st. Some 150 protesters from all over Japan got together to protest against the plant's commissioning.

"Start of the uranium commissioning means the start of radioactive contamination. We should stop reprocessing before the contamination gets worse. There is no concrete plan to use plutonium produced from Japanese reprocessing. There is no justification to produce plutonium." Said Atsuko Nogawa, nuclear campaigner of Greenpeace Japan.

Some 30 tons of depleted uranium arrived by ship in the morning of 20th. Some of uranium was originally supplied by the United States, despite warnings that it is sanctioning plutonium proliferation. Additional Japanese origin depleted uranium will also to be used for the commissioning.

"Plutonium production by Japan must stop, and spent nuclear fuel should be treated as nuclear waste. We already have stockpiled several thousands nuclear weapons worth of Plutonium (about 40 tons). If full scale operation of Rokkasho reprocessing starts it will keep adding 7,000-8,000 kilograms of plutonium yearly. The Bush administration has signed off on these tests, despite knowing the dangers in this region from nuclear proliferation. Both the Japanese government and U.S. administration need to rethink their dangerous plans, before it's too late" Nogawa ATSUKO continued.

The Rokkasho plant has taken 20 years to build and is a relic before it even opens. While it was being built, the use of plutonium to generate electricity has proven to be a failure by other countries on economic, environmental and proliferation grounds. Commercial scale of reprocessing is already done by UK and France. The French plant operated by Areva/COGEMA has failed to secure contracts with its national utility, EDF beyond 2007. Rokkasho was built with French technology and workers.

Uranium commissioning is expected to take 12 months, to be followed by spent fuel tests, scheduled for December 2005. However, given the many problems experienced over the years during construction of the multi-billion dollar plant, it is expected that there will be further delays.

For background information see: http://www.stop-plutonium.org/

For further information, please contact:
Greenpeace Japan
Atsuko Nogawa, Nuclear campaigner +813 5338 9800,
mobile phone +81 903654 4035
Kazue Suzuki, Campaign Director +81 90 2249 1502
Keiko Shirokawa, Media Officer, +81 90-3470-7884 



<a name="europe"></a>

-------- europe

Poland to build nuclear power plant by 2023

WARSAW (AFP) Dec 21, 2004

http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041221144542.zje9yhyx.html

Poland plans to build its first nuclear power station by the year 2023 in order to comply with requirements restricting greenhouse gas emissions, Deputy Economy Minister Jacek Piechota said Tuesday.

"Before 2023, we will have to have clean energy in the Polish electric power system," he told the radio station RMF FM.

"Round about 2023, we will no longer be able to respect very strict environmental norms, especially concerning greenhouse gases."

"The priority for the next 15 years will be to develop renewable electrical energy resources; windpower, biomass and hydro-electric power. But these resources will not suffice," the official added.



-------- india / pakistan

India Successfully Test-Fires Surface-To-Surface BrahMos Cruise Missile

India has so far only test-fired BrahMos, which has a range of 280 kilometres (175 miles), from aboard warships since its development by Indian and Russian experts in 2001

New Delhi (AFP) Dec 21, 2004

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/missiles-04zzzm.html

India on Tuesday successfully test-fired for the first time a surface-to-surface version of the supersonic missile BrahMos it has jointly developed with Russia, the Press Trust of India reported.

The flight test was conducted at 1230 a.m (0700 GMT).

Top army brass were present to witness the event including Lieutenant General J.J. Singh, who is shortly due to take over as the chief of the Indian army.

India has so far only test-fired BrahMos, which has a range of 280 kilometres (175 miles), from aboard warships since its development by Indian and Russian experts in 2001.

BrahMos was on display at the January 26 Republic Day military parade, and an unspecified number of countries are said to be interested in buying the cruise missile, which carries a conventional warhead.

India has developed an array of ballistic missiles in its goal to achieve military self-reliance and eventually become a major player in the global arms industry.



-------- iran

Iran makes powder for uranium enrichment but not violating nuclear freeze - diplomats

VIENNA (AFP) Dec 21, 2004

http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041221153109.6fgupky3.html

Iran is making a uranium powder that is part of the enrichment process that can make nuclear weapons but does not violate a nuclear freeze agreed with the EU, diplomats said Tuesday.

Iran is finishing sensitive nuclear activities it started before the freeze began November 22. The process is going slowly due to mechanical problems, though it is expected to be finished by February, diplomats said.

Iran and the EU opened talks in Brussels on December 13 on giving Tehran trade, technology and security rewards in return for its freeze of uranium enrichment, which makes fuel for civilian nuclear reactors but also, in highly refined form, the explosive core of atomic bombs.

The United States is warily watching the freeze and the Iran-EU negotiations, as it charges that Iran is using the suspension to gain time to secretly develop nuclear weapons and has pushed for hauling Tehran before the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.

Making the powder, uranium tetrafluoride (UF4), is as far as Iran can go in enrichment, according to the agreement reached last month with EU negotiators Britain, France and Germany and endorsed by the UN watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

UF4 is the precursor to UF6 gas that is fed into high-spinning centrifuges in order to filter out enriched uranium.

Iran was already processing 37 tons of the uranium ore known as yellowcake into UF4 when it struck the deal.

Iran is allowed to finish this at its uranium conversion plant in Isfahan, since it is otherwise difficult to clear the conversion machines, a diplomat told AFP.

The diplomat said there have apparently been "some technical problems with the plant" which have slowed down Iran's effort to finish processing the yellowcake.

"It may take weeks to finish this," a Western diplomat close to the IAEA said, adding that the last batch of UF4 is expected to be "spit out" by February 5.

The IAEA, which is monitoring Iran's enrichment suspension, had reported last month that Tehran indicated it would bring material at Isfahan into a "safe, secure and stable state not beyond UF4."

The IAEA has been investigating Iran's nuclear programme for almost two years but on November 29 adopted a toned-down resolution on the programme in return for the enrichment halt.

This came after Iran tried, and failed, to get 20 centrifuges exempted from the freeze for research purposes and after Iran processed UF4 into UF6 up until the start of the suspension on November 22.

A Western diplomat said Tuesday that the continuing UF4 processing was "foreseen and negotiated and is definitely not in violation of the agreement."

--------

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-iran.html

Iran Readies Uranium for Nuke Enrichment - Diplomats

By REUTERS
Published: December 21, 2004
Filed at 6:50 a.m. ET

VIENNA (Reuters) - Iran will continue preparing
raw ``yellowcake'' uranium for enrichment, a
process that can be used to make nuclear weapons,
until the end of February, despite a recent pledge
to freeze all such activity, diplomats said.

``The Iranians have decided to continue UF4
(uranium tetrafluoride) production until the end
of February,'' a diplomat told Reuters. Two other
diplomats in Vienna, where the U.N.'s
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is
based, confirmed the report.

UF4 is the precursor to uranium hexafluoride
(UF6), the gas that is fed into centrifuges which
spin at supersonic speeds to purify it for use as
fuel in civilian nuclear power plants or in atomic
weapons. Iran recently pledged to freeze all
activities linked to uranium enrichment as a
confidence-building gesture.

The United States accuses Iran of pursuing nuclear
weapons under cover of a civilian atomic energy
program, a charge Iran denies. Washington has also
told the European Union's ``big three'' -- France,
Britain and Germany -- that Tehran has no
intention of honoring its pledge to freeze
enrichment work.

In September, Iran announced it would process 37
tonnes of yellowcake for enrichment, an amount
that nuclear experts said could yield enough
material for up to five weapons if it was later
enriched to weapons-grade purity.

When Iran made the suspension pledge to the EU big
three last month, it agreed not to convert any
uranium that was not already inside the conversion
facility. However, Tehran changed its plan and
decided that none of the 37 tonnes of uranium
would be left in raw yellowcake form, the
diplomats said.

``This goes beyond the agreement to only convert
what was absolutely necessary,'' one diplomat
said.

Earlier on Tuesday, Hossein Mousavian, Iran's
chief delegate to the IAEA, told the official IRNA
news agency that it was natural for Iran to
continue with its nuclear program.

``It is natural that the Islamic Republic
continues all its nuclear activities. Iran has
only suspended the fuel cycle voluntarily in the
framework of its policy to build trust without any
legal obligations,'' he said.


2.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran.html

Iran Atomic Work Breaks Spirit of Accord - Diplomats

By REUTERS
Published: December 21, 2004
Filed at 10:16 a.m. ET

VIENNA (Reuters) - Iran's decision to keep
preparing raw uranium for enrichment, a step on
the way to making nuclear weapons, breaks the
spirit though not the letter of its pledge to
freeze all such activity, diplomats said on
Tuesday.

Under a deal Iran reached with three EU nations to
freeze all enrichment activity as of Nov. 22,
preparing ``yellowcake'' uranium for enrichment is
strictly prohibited. But the accord allowed Iran
to finish some limited uranium conversion work
that it had already begun before the suspension
took effect.

But Iran will now continue enrichment-related work
until February, Western diplomats told Reuters.

Continuing the work that long ``would certainly
violate the spirit of the agreement,'' a Western
diplomat said. ``Iran has a legal basis for doing
it, but it will not inspire much confidence in
them,'' another diplomat said.

Iran's chief delegate to the Vienna-based
International Atomic Energy Agency said separately
that Iran would press ahead with its nuclear
program. Western diplomats said this would include
work broadly but not explicitly covered by last
month's suspension accord.

``The Iranians have decided to continue UF4
(uranium tetrafluoride) production until the end
of February,'' one diplomat told Reuters.

UF4 is a precursor to uranium hexafluoride (UF6),
the gas that is fed into centrifuges which spin at
supersonic speeds to purify it for use as fuel in
civilian nuclear power plants or in atomic
weapons.

Two other diplomats confirmed the report. One said
Iran appeared to be exploiting a loophole in the
promise it made to France, Britain and Germany to
freeze enrichment activity.

``It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone,'' said one
Western diplomat. Whenever there is a loophole in
an agreement, the Iranians find it and use it to
their advantage, he said.

The United States accuses Iran of pursuing nuclear
weapons under cover of a civilian atomic energy
program, and has told the EU it believes Tehran
has no intention of honoring its pledge to freeze
enrichment work.

One Western diplomat close to the IAEA said the
deal between the EU's ``big three'' and Iran
actually permitted Tehran to convert an entire
batch of 37 tons of yellowcake, with which it had
been ``testing'' its conversion facility at
Isfahan.

When Iran announced its plans to test the Isfahan
plant in September, nuclear experts said that 37
tons of yellowcake could yield enough uranium for
up to five nuclear weapons, if it was later
enriched to bomb grade purity.

FIRST DEAL FELL APART

Iran first promised to suspend its enrichment
program in exchange for a package of political and
economic benefits from the EU big three in October
2003. The deal fell apart after Iran used a
loophole in the agreement to continue producing
and testing centrifuge components.

Earlier on Tuesday Hossein Mousavian, Iran's chief
delegate to the IAEA, told the official IRNA news
agency that it was natural for Iran to continue
with its nuclear program.

``It is natural that the Islamic Republic
continues all its nuclear activities. Iran has
only suspended the fuel cycle voluntarily, in the
framework of its policy to build trust, without
any legal obligations,'' he said.

Mousavian also said that Washington wanted talks
with Tehran, with which it broke ties 24 years
ago, to discuss a number of issues including
Iran's nuclear program.

``The United States wants negotiations with Iran
and definitely doesn't like having a mediator in
between, even if the Europeans want to mediate,''
IRNA quoted him as saying.

Several Western diplomats said the idea of such
talks was premature, but that Washington would
have to join the negotiations if the EU3 plan to
persuade Iran to abandon its enrichment program
permanently was to work.

But the United States says Tehran cannot be
trusted and refuses to participate in the
negotiations, diplomats say.

3.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-iran-usa.html

U.S. Seeking Talks with Iran - Iran Official

By REUTERS
Published: December 21, 2004
Filed at 7:56 a.m. ET

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Washington wants to hold direct
talks with Tehran, with which it broke ties 24
years ago, to discuss a number of issues including
the Islamic state's nuclear program, a senior
Iranian security official said on Tuesday.

Hossein Mousavian, one of Iran's chief nuclear
negotiators, also said Iran had no objections to
European Union efforts to involve Washington in
negotiations aimed at dispelling international
concerns about Iran's atomic ambitions.

But a Western diplomat in Tehran said talk of
Washington joining the nuclear dialogue with
Tehran was premature.

EU officials privately acknowledge that their
efforts to persuade Tehran to give up sensitive
nuclear activities, such as uranium enrichment,
have little chance of success without full U.S.
support and involvement in the talks.

``The United States wants negotiations with Iran
and definitely doesn't like having a mediator in
between, even if the Europeans want to mediate,''
the official IRNA news agency quoted Mousavian as
saying.

``But they are after comprehensive and conclusive
talks which cover all disputed issues,'' he said.

U.S. and Iranian officials have held occasional
talks in the past on specific issues such as
Afghanistan and Iraq. But talks broke down last
year when Washington accused Iran of providing
shelter for al Qaeda members behind bombings in
Saudi Arabia.

``The Europeans have launched massive efforts to
bring the United States into the nuclear
negotiations,'' said Mousavian, who is secretary
of the foreign policy committee on Iran's Supreme
National Security Council.

``We have no objection to the Americans joining
the Europeans in this process,'' he added.

U.S. COULD HAMPER IRAN-EU TALKS

Washington accuses Iran of trying to make atomic
arms under the cover of a civil nuclear energy
program. Iran denies this.

``If the Americans want to hamper the Iran-EU
cooperation, they can be effective and no one can
deny it ... US interaction with Europe in this
process is important from our point of view,
nevertheless our partner is Europe not America,''
Mousavian said.

``I don't reject the possibility of nuclear talks
between Iran and the United States, but I cannot
predict the future.''

The Western diplomat in Tehran said the EU ``has
been very clear that negotiations would have a
much bigger chance of success if the Americans put
their shoulders behind it.''

But he said skepticism remained high in Washington
that Iran was negotiating in good faith rather
than trying to buy time to continue with a nuclear
arms drive at a later stage.

``We're a long way from the Americans taking a
seat at the negotiating table,'' he said.

U.S. fears that Iran has no intention of giving up
a quest for atomic bombs are likely to have been
exacerbated on Tuesday by reports from
Vienna-based diplomats that Iran is continuing to
ready large amounts of uranium for enrichment.

Uranium enrichment is a process that can be used
to make fuel for nuclear power reactors or to make
atomic warheads.

``The Iranians have decided to continue UF4
(uranium tetrafluoride) production until the end
of February,'' a diplomat told Reuters on
condition of anonymity. Two other diplomats in
Vienna, where the U.N.'s International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) is based, confirmed this.

UF4 is the precursor to uranium hexafluoride
(UF6), the gas that is fed into centrifuges.

Iran recently pledged to freeze all activities
linked to uranium enrichment as a
confidence-building gesture.



-------- israel

Israeli proposes a path to NATO

By Steven Erlanger The New York Times
Tuesday, December 21, 2004

http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2004/12/20/news/nato.html

HERZLIYA, Israel The death of Yasser Arafat has been like the holing of a dam on a long-blocked river, with a sudden and powerful surge of optimism and new ideas in the Middle East, even if some of them are still rather muddy.

One of the most intriguing is the suggestion that Israel, which has always seen itself as a singular David among Goliaths, should consider joining NATO. The idea, at least, is that closer ties to the Atlantic alliance - and perhaps eventual membership - would embed Israel in the West and, by providing security guarantees, give it more confidence to make a comprehensive peace.

Such logic stands in contrast with a core lesson that Israel's founding generation took from the Holocaust: In the end, the Jewish people should count only on themselves to guarantee their survival.

But Uzi Arad, a former Israeli intelligence official and now the director of the Institute for Policy and Strategy, says it is time for Israel to "drop its Groucho attitude" toward NATO and work "to establish a solid and comprehensive partnership with both the United States and Europe."

Arad heads an annual conference here on security that draws senior Israeli and foreign policy makers and analysts. This year, he is urging Israel to get over its mistrust of alliances and lessen its isolation. He argues that the prospect of a nuclear Iran makes better ties with NATO more logical and urgent.

"The Euro-Atlantic community is Israel's natural habitat," he said.

In his efforts, he has been joined by former American and European officials who helped manage the two expansions of NATO since the Soviet collapse and draft NATO's Partnership for Peace, which has countries like Georgia and Azerbaijan trying to make changes for possible membership.

One former American official, Ronald Asmus, now with the German Marshall Fund, said he wondered why NATO, which extends through Turkey and is fighting in Afghanistan, was seeking partnership with Georgia and not Israel.

"Israel is already a Western democracy that shares our values and interests in a part of the world that is becoming central to NATO," Asmus said. "So why is Israel off limits?"

Of course, the prospect of closer ties with Israel would create debate within NATO, especially in the absence of a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement. But first Israel itself needs to talk through the military and political pros and cons, and decide if the organization is a club it wants to associate with.

While the idea of Israeli membership may seem a stretch, it could only be raised because NATO is reinventing itself. Originally a military alliance designed to deter or fight the Soviet Union in Europe, NATO has become a broader and more political association of democracies with a partnership role for former enemies, including Russia.

Especially after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, NATO is concerned much more with terrorism than with tanks and is developing a Middle Eastern avocation, since that is where most of today's threats to its members lie. From Islamic radicalism to potential Iranian nuclear missiles, the threats are much the same as Israel faces, and Israeli intelligence knows a great deal about them.

For Israel, the collapse of the Oslo accords and the last four years of warfare with the Palestinians have badly undermined the dream of a Jewish state taking its proud place as an integral part of the Middle East, accepted by its neighbors. Like Oslo, it was a lovely vision, but it is in tatters.

In economic, trade and technology terms, too, Israel's connections to Europe dwarf any it has with its own region. Half of Israel's imports come from the European Union, which absorbs a third of Israel's exports. And Israel already has a very close relationship with the Union and its institutions. Still, Israelis worry that the occupation of Palestinian territory, Israeli settlement policies and the last four years of fighting have badly hurt their reputation in Europe, and even in the United States.

The Israeli military is skeptical about closer NATO ties, Israeli officials say, because it fears losing any freedom of action. Israel retains a fierce commitment to doing whatever may be necessary to preserve its existence and security, however distasteful such actions may be to others - whether assassinating Hamas leaders, detaining suspects without trial or destroying the homes of suicide bombers and militants.

There is also the question of Israel's privately acknowledged nuclear capacity. And Europeans express some anxiety about how Arab nations might react.

The benefits for Israel would be significant, said an ambassador here from a European NATO country. Threats and risks the Middle East may present, he said, include not only a nuclear Iran but also "an Islamicized Saudi Arabia or a collapsing Egypt." For Europeans, too, he said, there is a potential benefit beyond Israel's military and intelligence assets.

"We mustn't let Israel divide Europe from the United States," he said. "NATO can help the Israelis extricate themselves from this mess of occupation."

But before anything can happen, the Israelis will have to think through their future interests, NATO officials say.

"The initiative will have to come from the Israeli side," said Britain's ambassador to NATO, Peter Ricketts. "But if so, there will be a strong echo back."



-------- korea

North Korea's nukes: advanced, but hidden

Nuclear-safeguard scientists says North Korea has enough plutonium for about nine bombs

By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
December 21, 2004

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1221/p01s04-woap.html

VIENNA – Scientists charged with international nuclear safeguards now assume that North Korea has a cache of weapons-grade plutonium slightly larger than a basketball, or enough for about nine bombs - since North Korea, for technical reasons, had to reprocess the plutonium or lose it.

Moreover, they say, any credible future deal with the regime run in absolute secrecy by leader Kim Jong Il will require a minimum of seven or eight months of nearly unlimited access to North Korea - to uranium mines, dismantled plants, research and development, active or retired scientists, all records, and any sites deemed relevant.

Such access would go far past anything Mr. Kim has ever allowed.

Next week is the second anniversary of a standoff between the international community and Kim's regime.

On Dec. 30, 2002, IAEA inspectors monitoring 8,000 spent fuel rods were kicked out of North Korea in a move regarded at the time as a breach of what had been regarded as an inviolable "red line."

The move followed an esca- lation between the US officials and North Korea over a second, secret uranium program the US said the North was conducting.

Six-party talks on Korea hosted by China have stalled for half a year. Kim is thought to have awaited the US elections; Washington is preoccupied with the Iraq war. Yet unlike Iraq, which has proved to have no weapons of mass destruction, the North has, if anything, developed its program with ardor, scientists say - a further challenge to the Non- Proliferation Treaty, global security, and the White House.

Scientists here assume Kim has up to nine bombs of fissile material not only because North Korean scientists are capable of reprocessing fuel rods - but because to the threat of rust.

As time elapsed, Kim had to choose whether to scrap his hard-earned nuclear stockpile or reprocess it, says a Vienna-based diplomat with close ties to the inner circle of Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

"The rods were canned, welded, and placed under water for cooling [in the early 1990s]. But we know the welds were corroding, and plutonium reacts very badly to rust," says the diplomat. "DPRK [North Korea] would have had to reprocess for safety considerations, and that is what we assume."

Access denied

The Vienna-based diplomat says that after December 2002, the IAEA was "blind."

"It can't see inside buildings, we don't have anyone on the ground," he comments. "We [need] six to eight months to restore a loss of continuity of information and knowledge. That means use of whatever technology is needed to verify, and unfettered access."

Such access would fall just short of the carte blanche that IAEA inspectors got in Iraq after the first Gulf War, but would be more than they have now secured through "additional protocols" granted for Iran. In Iran, inspectors have to give a few hours' notice. In North Korea, they will ask for snap inspections. Because it would go far past anything the North has so far allowed, many experts are skeptical Kim will agree to this.

While the IAEA has no direct evidence of an "enriched uranium" program, preliminary results from an IAEA investigation of the network of Abdul Khan, suggests the Pakistani scientist was a major supplier of aid and materials to North Korea, Libya, and Iran. While Libya seemed incapable of taking its program through the steps required to develop a uranium program, North Korea "needed little prompting," the diplomat says.

"You give someone the plans to assemble a complicated piece of furniture and they get home and make it halfway through. Then they have to call for help," the diplomat says. "That wasKhan's role. The Libyans constantly had trouble. We know Khan gave the North Koreans enough to get a good start, and we know they and the Iranians didn't need to call [Khan] as often. The Libyans finally couldn't run this stuff, but the DPRK has the people, trained in Moscow."

For example, the diplomat points out, the North Koreans took the design plans for an early-generation British plutonium Magnox reactor, built a 5-megawatt reactor, and were in the process of building 50- and 200-megawatt reactors. The Magnox had design flaws that the North worked out on its own.

Had the two larger reactors gone online as scheduled in 1995, they would have been capable of producing five to 10 bomb "cores" per year, according to the IAEA's website.

Last December, the IAEA sent a "nonpaper" to all participants in the six-party talks outlining "minimum requirements" for a genuine deal. It included access to whatever people, records, and sites they might deem necessary. IAEA officials want any such agreement backed by Security Council guarantees in case of violations.

Currently, IAEA officials are engineering the language used for North Korean access so it does not appear overly harsh. Words containing concepts like "unlimited," or phrases like "any place, anytime," are thought to echo language used in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was defeated in 1990. Because of that, a new rhetoric is employing such phrases as "full and final," "unfettered access, "complete and comprehensive."

"We need unfettered access, not to punish North Korea, but because there is no way to guarantee any safety otherwise," the diplomat notes. "At the same time, we don't want a US-run verification. If we get that, it will undermine our agency's credibility. We won't appear impartial."

Jon Wolfstahl, deputy director of the Nonproliferation Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has been on the ground in North Korean facilities as part of an earlier US program for dismantling the program. He says it would take longer than seven to eight months of "unfettered" access to know the exact state of any weapons development.

"If it's just to find out what happened to the plutonium it would take longer than that," he says, noting earlier estimates that it would take two to three years just to answer questions about programs through the early 1990s.

Postelection approach

Now that the US elections are over, it is still unclear how the Bush team will address North Korea. Mr. Wolfstahl feels the talks are fragmenting. Last June, the US appeared to back off from tough language requiring a "complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantling" (CVID) - but recent statements suggest the White House has readopted tougher language. Many Asia policymakers in Washington are deeply distrustful of a regime run on the basis of a cult of adulation for Kim, and whose diplomacy is legendary for its cleverness and dissimulations.

Both the US and Chinese team leaders of the talks, James Kelly and Wang Yi, also appear further removed from the process, with Mr. Kelly expected to retire from the State Department and Mr. Yi being assigned to Japan.

Some US experts and even IAEA officials caution against assuming too much about North Korea's capability. They say that in strict empirical terms, there is almost no evidence of bomb material. They describe a world that exists between circumstantial evidence, and hunches. "We can't actually say for certain we know that the North has any processed plutonium," said one Western nuclear expert in Vienna.

Paul Kerr, a specialist at the Arms Control Association in Washington, says that, "You could store it, but there are risks to that. There are safe ways to store it, but that appears to be beyond the capabilities of the North Koreans."

In the past, North Korea has built warehouses that appear from satellite imagery to be the exact proportions for a nuclear plant, and in the right location. But after North Koreans were paid millions of dollars to look inside, it was found to be empty.

Khan and his associates sold at least $100 million of equipment to Libya, including a nearly completed uranium enrichment facility, IAEA officials told the Los Angeles Times earlier this month.

IAEA officials and scientists say the North is pursuing its goals no matter the human cost.

Stories and eyewitness accounts of the North's brand of applied science have proliferated inside the IAEA in recent years, including those describing humans doing work that, in other states, only machines would do.

"I've talked to a Canadian eyewitness to the movement of nuclear material out of casks, who saw about a hundred men wearing lead aprons run into the plant and haul out rods one at a time. No other country would accept that, but the North Koreans will do what it takes to reach their goal," the diplomat says.

North Korea's program dates to the early 1980s, when Kim's father, Kim Il Sung, embarked on a nuclear path. By the late 1980s, the state had a reactor running.

The first Gulf war showed that Iraq was quickly developing a nuclear capability. The senior Kim invited IAEA inspectors in, hoping they would verify North Korea's declaration that it had no weapons-grade nuclear material.

Yet new technology and experience derived from Iraq allowed inspectors to find traces of weapons-grade plutonium. This sparked a crisis that led to an "Agreed Framework," administered by the IAEA, between the US and North Korea. But no other activity was monitored except the plutonium fuel rods and several other sites, and was regarded even at the time as incomplete.

"There are no plans for another rounds of talks," says Derek Mitchell, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Right now, the ball is in North Korea's court.

• Howard LaFranchi contributed from Washington.



-------- russia

Russia Builds Nuclear Power Capacity, Relicenses Chernobyl Era Reactors

MOSCOW, Russia, December 21, 2004 (ENS)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2004/2004-12-21-01.asp

Russia's power grid got an infusion of nuclear energy Thursday when the Kalinin nuclear power plant's third generating unit was commissioned. The event drew Russian President Vladimir Putin to the reactor, located in the village of Udomlya in the north of the Tver region, 330 kilometers (205 miles) from Moscow.

The new unit is a 1,000 MW pressurized water reactor that is estimated to have cost 40 billion rubles (US$1.4 billion) to build.

The Kalinin nuclear power plant is operated by Rosenergoatom. (Photo courtesy PNL)
President Putin went to inspect the new generating unit and chaired a meeting of the State Council at Udomlya that focused on the problems of Russia's nuclear industry.

At the meeting, the President told journalists that two more nuclear power plants would be put into operation before 2010, and 10 older nuclear power stations in the country would have their service life extended.

Operating license renewals will be given to the 10 old nuclear reactors, which are the first generation of Soviet designed units (RBMK-1000 and VVER-440). The Chernobyl reactor that exploded and caught fire on April 26, 1986 in the world's worst nuclear disaster was a light water graphite reactor of the RBMK design.

The decision to delay the shutdown of old reactors and grant new licenses for the Leningrad, Kola and Novovoronezh nuclear plants is considered dangerous by anti-nuclear citizens groups.

"The decision to continue operation of first generation reactors in Russia is the most dangerous political step since Chernobyl tragedy. Russian authorities learnt nothing out of largest catastrophe at nuclear facility in the history of humankind," said Vladimir Slivyak, co-chairman of Ecodefense, a Russian anti-nuclear organization demanding the immediate shut down of old reactors.

"Allowing nuclear industry to keep Chernobyl-type reactors in operation is no less than global threat to whole Europe," Slivyak warned.

All 10 units were designed and built long before the Chernobyl catastrophe, and it is not possible to bring their safety level up to modern standards, he said.

Chernobyl-type RBMK reactors have already been shut down in Ukraine, Slivyak said.

The last two RBMKs exist in Lithuania where the first unit will be shut down and decommissioned by the end of this month, while the second unit is expected to be taken out of operation by 2007.

A first generation VVER-440 has already been shut down in Bulgaria, and dates to shut down the rest of the older nuclear units in Eastern Europe are fixed.

President Putin emphasized the "need to observe stringent safety requirements over the entire process."

He pointed to the importance of "work to steadily minimize the negative effects of nuclear production and facilities on the environment, including through the adoption of modern technologies to reprocess nuclear materials."

At the State Council meeting, for the first time in history, Putin announced that the amount of solid radioactive waste accumulated at Russian facilities is nearly 70 million metric tons.

For a long time, environmental groups have demanded open information on the amount and condition of the radioactive waste accumulated in the country, but the nuclear industry has kept those numbers secret.

But the figure of 70 million metric tons announced by Putin does not include liquid radioactive waste, and its amount remains unknown to Russians, Slivyak said.

The stockpile of spent nuclear fuel from Russian civilian nuclear power plants alone is close to 17,000 metric tons of the overall amount, Putin said.

Existing Russian infrastructure is not able to cope with this amount of waste. The planned construction of a huge specialized storage facility and reprocessing plant in Zheleznogorsk, outside Krasnoyarsk in Eastern Siberia, will help to solve the problem, Putin said.

Putin said that facilities where radioactive waste and nuclear materials are stored must be better protected, a position supported by Russian environmentalists. They have been repeatedly calling on authorities to improve control over stockpiles of materials that may be used in nuclear weapons or dirty bombs.

A number of statements by President Putin calling for higher security at nuclear sites did not result in any improvements in 2004, Slivyak said, presenting the question of whether the nuclear industry management can guarantee safety and adequate level of protection for its sites.

But Russia is now committed to limit its greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol which will come into force February 16, 2005 because of Russia's ratification. Nuclear power plants emit no greenhouse gases, so although waste is a problem, they appear desirable to the Russian government.

-------- 

U.S. Contractor Will Replace Russian Plutonium Power with Coal

WASHINGTON, DC, December 21, 2004 (ENS)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2004/2004-12-21-09.asp#anchor2

American and Russian contractors will work together to replace two nuclear reactors used for heating and electricity in the closed city of Seversk, Russia with coal fired boilers.

The project is part of an effort to permanently shut down the last three weapons-grade plutonium production reactors in Russia.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has signed a $285 million contract with the Washington Group International, Inc. (WGI) to refurbish an existing coal fired heat and electricity plant. The two reactors in Seversk, a nuclear weapons site near Tomsk, Russia, produce enough plutonium to make a few bombs per week.

"I am pleased we have reached the point where a contract is now in place for the refurbishment of electric power generating facilities which will allow us to shut down the plutonium production plants in Seversk, Russia, said NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks.

"The continued operation of these plutonium production plants causes both nonproliferation and nuclear safety concerns, and when shut down will be two less sources of nuclear weapons grade plutonium. I look forward to the continued cooperation with our Russian partners on worldwide nonproliferation issues."

NNSA and its Russian counterpart, the Federal Atomic Energy Agency (Rosatom), will work cooperatively with WGI, a U.S. contractor, and Rosatomstroi, the Russian integrating contractor, to procure equipment and manage construction.

The project at Seversk will involve refurbishing or replacing existing coal-fired boilers, providing one new high pressure coal-fired boiler, replacing turbine generators, completing construction of the fuel supply system, and refurbishing the industrial heating unit and ancillary systems. The project is scheduled for completion in December 2008.

Another equally important part of the mission is to shut down the third plutonium production reactor near Zheleznogorsk, another nuclear weapons site in Russia. Deputy Secretary of Energy Kyle McSlarrow has approved the cost and schedule range for this project, which will help facilitate the permanent shutdown of the remaining plutonium production reactor. 

--------

Russia to Test Mobile Version of Missile

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 21, 2004
Filed at 1:40 p.m. ET

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Missile-Test.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia will test-fire a mobile
version of its Topol-M intercontinental ballistic
missile Friday, a news agency reported Tuesday.

The Topol-M system will be fired from the Plesetsk
base in the far northern region of Arkhangelsk,
the Interfax agency said, citing an unidentified
Defense Ministry official.

The test will be the last for the mobile Topol-M
system, and the system will then be deployed, the
official said. Topol-Ms will serve the chief
weapon for Russia's strategic missile forces for a
long time, he said.

Topol-Ms can carry up to 2,600 pounds of warheads,
have a range of about 6,000 miles and reportedly
can maneuver in ways that are difficult to detect.
The missile has been deployed in silos since 1998.

Russian strategic forces have conducted regular
test-launches of Soviet-built ballistic missiles
to check their readiness. But funding shortages
have left the military struggling to extend the
lifetime of Soviet-built missiles.

In October, President Vladimir Putin announced
Russia was developing a new nuclear missile system
that he said would be unlike any weapon held by
other nuclear-armed country.

--------

Russia Successfully Test-Fires Missile

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 22, 2004
Filed at 7:10 a.m. ET

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Russia-Missile-Test.html?oref=login

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia successfully test-fired a
heavy intercontinental ballistic missile on
Wednesday in a launch intended to extend the
lifetime of aging Soviet-built weapons.

It was the first time that an RS-20V Voevoda,
which NATO identifies as the SS-18 Satan, had been
fired from its combat positions in Russia since
the 1991 Soviet collapse. Previously, such
missiles had been launched from the Russian-leased
Baikonur cosmodrome in the former Soviet republic
of Kazakhstan.

The missile, which was launched from a silo in the
Orenburg region in the southern Ural Mountains,
hit a designated target on a testing ground on the
Far East Kamchatka Peninsula, more than 3,750
miles away.

``The main result of the launch was the
confirmation of the technical characteristics of
the missiles, which have no analogues in the
world,'' Russia's Strategic Missile Forces said in
a statement. It added that the missile had been on
combat duty for 16 years before the launch.

The Russian strategic forces have conducted
regular test launches of Soviet-built ballistic
missiles to check their readiness. The post-Soviet
funding shortage has left the military struggling
to extend the lifetime of Soviet-built missiles,
since the government lacks the funds to quickly
replace them with new weapons.

Military officials have said that Russia would
keep its arsenal of about 150 SS-18s for another
10 to 15 years, even though the missiles were
already past their designated lifetime and were to
be scrapped this decade under earlier plans.

The heavy missile, capable of slamming 10
individually guided nuclear warheads at targets
more than 6,800 miles away, is the heaviest weapon
in Russia's inventory. The SS-18 and another
multi-warhead missile, the SS-19, have formed the
core of the Russian strategic forces since Soviet
times.

--------

Washington Group Gets DOE Contract

12.21.2004, 04:20 PM Forbes

http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/2004/12/21/ap1724384.html

Construction and mining company Washington Group International Inc. reported Tuesday it received a $285 million contract to refurbish electric power plants in Siberia.

The deal is part of a Department of Energy initiative to permanently retire three weapons-grade plutonium producing reactors in Russia.

Washington Group said it will refurbish and rebuild coal-fired power plants near Tomsk, Russia, allowing the Russians to permanently shut down two of three nuclear reactors and honor an agreement with the United States. The company said it will work on the project with Russian subcontractors over a 60 month period.

The company posted revenue of $2.5 billion for 2003.

Shares of Washington Group rose 63 cents, or 1.6 percent, to close at $39.65 on the Nasdaq. 

----

WGI wins contract for Russian job

Idaho Statesman staff
Edition Date: 12-22-2004

http://www.idahostatesman.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041222/NEWS02/412220317/1029

Washington Group International Inc. said Tuesday it received a $285 million contract to refurbish electric power plants in Siberia.

The deal is part of a Department of Energy initiative to permanently retire three weapons-grade plutonium-producing reactors in Russia.

Washington Group said it will refurbish and rebuild coal-fired power plants near Tomsk, Russia, allowing the Russians to permanently shut down two of three nuclear reactors and honor an agreement with the United States. The company said it will work on the project with Russian subcontractors over a five-year period.


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


-------- colorado

Slight taint among Flats deer

Tuesday, December 21, 2004 Denver Post

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~2610124,00.html

Only two of the 26 animals tested at the future refuge could have posed any health risk if eaten, officials say. Critics oppose opening the former nuclear weapons site.

By Theo Stein
Denver Post Staff Writer

Thirteen of 26 deer killed at the future Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge had detectable levels of radioactivity in their tissues, but only two had levels high enough to pose a small health risk if consumed by humans, a new study shows.

Those findings support a U.S. Fish and Wildlife proposal to allow limited hunting of deer on the former nuclear weapons plant's 6,240 acres, officials said. About 150 deer inhabit the refuge.

Meanwhile, a vocal contingent of citizens continues to oppose opening the Rocky Flats refuge to the public because of concerns about the human health risk from exposure to plutonium and other chemicals left in the soil.

But at least one longtime Rocky Flats watchdog said the deer sampling results were reassuring.

"This is a case where the best science we can apply to the facts indicates there isn't a risk," Victor Holm of the Rocky Flats Citizen Advisory Board said Monday. "This refuge will be a worthwhile addition to open space in the Boulder area."

The results from the deer study, released Monday, comes after federal officials finalized a recreation plan that would permit limited hunting and hiking, biking and horseback activity.

The refuge is expected to open to the public after the $7.2 billion cleanup is finished in 2006.

Refuge manager Dean Rundle said low levels of plutonium, americium and uranium in the sampled deer show that limited hunting - involving roughly a dozen disabled or youth hunters per year - is appropriate.

"And we would expect, in time, all those levels would decline, because the source of the pollution would be cleaned up," Rundle said.

The chemicals were identified in tests of deer bone, organs and muscle tissue, according to federal biologist Mark Sattelberg.

But he added that the levels of two chemicals, uranium and americium, were similar to background levels detected in deer collected near Fort Collins and at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Commerce City, another wildlife refuge created around a Cold War-era weapons plant.

Under the worst-case scenario, a human who consumed the most highly contaminated deer for 70 years would risk a 1 in 210,000 chance of developing cancer, Sattelberg said.

However, others worry about lingering health risks from radioactivity in soil and vegetation near the old Rocky Flats plant, which released plutonium byproducts and other wastes during a series of fires and spills before the FBI raid that shut the facility in 1989.

Len Ackland, a University of Colorado journalism professor who wrote a book on the site's history, remains skeptical of the federal plans.

He wonders what undisclosed problems have led the Department of Energy to permanently close off roughly 1,000 acres at the site, including the former industrial complex where plutonium bomb triggers were manufactured.

"If one-sixth of the site is too contaminated for the Fish and Wildlife Service to take ownership, then why is the agency continuing with their plans to open (the refuge) to public use?" Ackland asked.

Agency officials said they need to maintain control over that area to monitor groundwater contamination and armored soil and rock covers that will be built over contaminated areas.

In addition to limited public access to trails, refuge managers will seek to improve habitat for the Preble's meadow jumping mouse and may reintroduce the sharp-tailed grouse, a chunky plains game bird.

Staff writer Theo Stein can be reached at 303-820-1657 or tstein@denverpost.com 


-------- nevada

Radioactive Abandoned Nevada Copper Mine Handed to Feds

SAN FRANCISCO, California, December 21, 2004 (ENS)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2004/2004-12-21-09.asp#anchor5

At the request of the state of Nevada, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has agreed to assume primary responsibility for the cleanup of the Yerington mine site - an abandoned copper mine contaminated with radioactive materials.

Earlier this month, the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection (NDEP) asked the federal agency to take on the responsibility as lead agency to assure the adequate cleanup of the mine.

The Yerington mine site, about 55 miles southeast of Reno, is located on six square miles, half of it federal land.

The site produced copper for the Anaconda Company for about 30 years until 1978. The new owner, the Arimetco Company, abandoned the site in 2000 after going bankrupt.

Since 2000, the NDEP, EPA and the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), have been addressing pollution at the site. The soil and groundwater at the site are contaminated with several different metals - including copper, lead, arsenic, and mercury - and radioactive materials, including uranium and thorium.

"Our goal is to build on the progress which has already been made by the agencies," said Keith Takata, director of the EPA's Superfund program for the Pacific Southwest region. "As lead agency, we will be able to use the Superfund law to address the complex technical issues at the site."

Lyon County, the city of Yerington and the Yerington Paiute Tribe all support the NDEP's request.

The NDEP's request stemmed from recent information showing that the site is "significantly more complex than previous data indicated," the state agency said.

Samples analyzed last summer indicated levels of radiation in soil samples as high as 30 times above the EPA's standard. Earlier this year, groundwater testing of drinking water wells revealed uranium concentrations ranging from four times above the EPA's standard in some wells to as much as 200 times above the standard.

The EPA will be the lead agency responsible for the site cleanup, in accordance with the Superfund law. Under the Superfund law, EPA generally requires the parties responsible for the pollution to implement the cleanup. The EPA anticipates working with the Atlantic Richfield Company, a prior owner of the site, to implement the clean up. 


-------- tennessee


Security Drill at Weapons Plant Raises Safety Questions

By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: December 21, 2004
New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/21/national/21nuke.html?oref=login

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Dec. 16 - In the predawn hours of
Sept. 2, at the plant that stores the nation's
stockpile of highly enriched uranium, guards
wearing body armor and carrying loaded submachine
guns were dispatched to intercept a group of men
who had apparently set off an intrusion alarm. But
the target group turned out to be a second team of
guards, who were conducting a mock attack with
laser-tag equipment.

The armed guards, a "shadow force" maintained in
reserve during such drills, rushed through the
dark, ready, people involved said, to shoot at a
group whom they believed were intruders.

Such a deployment is virtually unheard of,
security experts said, and had it led to a
shooting, the incident could have destroyed the
ability to hold such drills, a crucial tool in
determining if the plant is adequately defended.
The plant, called Y-12, is owned by the Department
of Energy but is defended by a contractor,
Wackenhut.

"For two minutes, it was mass confusion," said one
of the guards on duty that night. "People asked
several times, 'Is this a drill?' Nobody would
clarify."

He and another guard involved in the incident
agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity,
saying they had been threatened with firing if
they spoke with outsiders about the incident.

The incident was not the only problem drill at the
plant, which is part of the Oak Ridge complex,
near Knoxville. In January, the inspector general
of the Energy Department reported that during a
similar laser-tag drill at the weapons plant in
2003, the team playing defense performed
unexpectedly well. The reason, the inspector
general said, was that the defenders appeared to
have gotten advance knowledge of the attack plans,
including which building would be attacked and
whether a diversionary tactic would be used.

The results were "tainted and unreliable," the
inspector general found.

The Energy Department official in charge of the
site, William J. Brumley, and a Wackenhut
official, Martin Anderson, said neither problem
was serious. Both said that no one was ever in
danger in the Sept. 2 incident, although Mr.
Anderson said that the confusion raised anxiety
levels and that communications that night could
have been "crisper."

Security here is not only a matter of keeping
intruders out, Mr. Brumley said. Technicians still
maintain nuclear warheads, and security is also a
matter of making sure that nothing is smuggled
out, he said.

The intruder threat is not limited to theft. A
suicidal terrorist who gained access to the
uranium here might be able to assemble it in a few
minutes into a nuclear explosive, and detonate it
on the spot, experts say.

Though Y-12 is a weapons plant, the drill incident
may have implications for the civilian nuclear
industry. Earlier this year the trade association
that represents the power reactor operators hired
Wackenhut to help conduct similar "force-on-force"
drills at the 63 nuclear power plant sites. The
Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the
contract in the hope that Wackenhut would bring
more expertise to the drills, which in the past
have varied widely by site. Wackenhut provides
security at about half the plants.

During security drills at Y-12, the plant is
vulnerable because half the people on duty are
carrying laser guns, not real weapons, and are
distracted by the exercise.

A second guard involved in the Sept. 2 exercise
said that from the chatter on the radio, the
guards had concluded that "it was time to go
fight." A third person involved that night,
apparently either a guard or a supervisor,
submitted an anonymous letter to the union safety
officer calling the error that sent armed guards
out to chase unarmed colleagues "an almost fatal
tragedy," because the guards could have seen the
exercise players firing their laser-equipped guns,
which are made from real guns, and would have shot
them. As they had trained, the guards came at the
site of the alarm from two directions, people on
duty that night said.

Officials at Wackenhut and at the Energy
Department acknowledge that while there was an
error, there was little danger of a killing
because the players were alerted to the problem
quickly, when the dispatcher called a "code
October," which meant that the players should halt
the exercise immediately, and the members of the
"attack" team decided to hide themselves inside a
building to avoid their oncoming comrades. For
reasons that are disputed by participants, it took
much longer to alert the shadow force.

Outside security experts had a harsher assessment.
Peter Stockton, who was a special assistant to the
secretary of energy in the Clinton administration
and is now with the Project on Government
Oversight, a watchdog group in Washington, said:
"When you introduce live ammo in one of these
things, it can be a disaster. If somebody had come
around the side of the building, chances are they
would have been killed."

Mr. Stockton said he had observed about 75 such
drills over the years and had never seen a shadow
force sent to track people during a drill,
although they are often dispatched because a
mechanical alarm system has activated somewhere.

The two guards who agreed to speak about the Sept.
2 event said they heard the dispatcher say "armed
suspects" over the radio link, but according to
Wackenhut and Energy Department managers, the
dispatcher said, "I have people in the area." The
anonymous letter referred to four armed
adversaries.

An official of the guard's union said
investigators from the inspector general's office
recently began questioning guards about their
training, to determine whether Wackenhut had
provided all the training that it told the
government it had. Some guards say that their time
for target shooting and for physical conditioning
had been cut back; one said that the records the
investigators showed him indicated he had had
firearms drill time that he never had.

The inspector general's office said it would not
comment, and a Wackenhut official said he was
unaware of the investigation, although he said the
government sometimes audited training records.

Drills and firearms training were suspended for a
while in the fall, because two weeks after the
September drill, guards who were supposed to be
using blank rounds to practice discharging and
reloading their weapons turned out to have at
least one live bullet in their supply. Someone
shot a live round through a wall and then through
a refrigerator in the next room.

The Y-12 plant, which employs about 400 guards,
who are referred to as guards but dress like
commandos, is ringed with watchtowers that look
like the control tower for a small airport, except
that the glass is obviously heavier-duty, and
fencing protects the tower from someone throwing a
grenade up to the window level.

The 800-acre heart of Y-12 is surrounded by a
two-and-a-half mile barrier of steel walls,
fences, barbed wire, motion sensors and cameras,
which enclose a jumble of rusting, decrepit
buildings. Some of the buildings date from World
War II, and workers there enriched uranium for the
bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The name Y-12, like
those for many Manhattan Project factories, and
the Manhattan Project itself, was selected to give
no clue about its function.

Wackenhut's contract was due to expire on Dec. 31
but has been extended for three months while
Energy Department officials decide whether it
should be renewed for a few years, or re-bid, or
whether the guard force should be integrated into
the main contractor work force.

Mr. Brumley, the Y-12 site manager, said that
merging the guards with the main work force might
help with the job of controlling materials as they
are moved around the plant. Employees pass through
metal detectors on the way out as well as on the
way in, and quantities of uranium as small as
drill shavings must be accounted for, he said.



-------- MILITARY 


-------- prisoners of war

FBI Agents Allege Abuse of Detainees at Guantanamo Bay

By Dan Eggen and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 21, 2004; Page A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14936-2004Dec20?language=printer

Detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were shackled to the floor in fetal positions for more than 24 hours at a time, left without food and water, and allowed to defecate on themselves, an FBI agent who said he witnessed such abuse reported in a memo to supervisors, according to documents released yesterday.

In memos over a two-year period that ended in August, FBI agents and officials also said that they witnessed the use of growling dogs at Guantanamo Bay to intimidate detainees -- contrary to previous statements by senior Defense Department officials -- and that one detainee was wrapped in an Israeli flag and bombarded with loud music in an apparent attempt to soften his resistance to interrogation.

In addition, several agents contended that military interrogators impersonated FBI agents, suggesting that the ruse was aimed in part at avoiding blame for any subsequent public allegations of abuse, according to memos between FBI officials.

The accounts, gleaned from heavily redacted e-mails and memorandums, were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union as part of an ongoing lawsuit. They suggest that extremely aggressive interrogation techniques were more widespread at Guantanamo Bay than was acknowledged by military officials.

The documents also make it clear that some personnel at Guantanamo Bay believed they were relying on authority from senior officials in Washington to conduct aggressive interrogations. One FBI agent wrote a memo referring to a presidential order that approved interrogation methods "beyond the bounds of standard FBI practice," although White House and FBI officials said yesterday that such an order does not exist.

Instead, FBI and Pentagon officials said, the order in question was signed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in December 2002 and then revised four months later after complaints from military lawyers that he had authorized methods that violated international and domestic law.

In a Jan. 21, 2004, e-mail, an FBI agent wrote that "this technique [of impersonating an FBI agent], and all of those used in these scenarios, was approved by the DepSecDef," referring to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz.

Deputy Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said in a statement last night that Wolfowitz "did not approve interrogation techniques." Whitman also said "it is difficult to determine" whether the impersonation technique "was permissible or not," but that such a tactic was not endorsed by Rumsfeld.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said in an interview that the incidents described in the documents "can only be described as torture."

The government is holding about 550 people detained in the war on terrorism at a prison on the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay. Some have been held for nearly three years without charges or access to attorneys. Several dozen have taken advantage of a June ruling by the Supreme Court and petitioned federal courts to challenge their imprisonment.

Some of the FBI memos were written this year after a request from agency headquarters for firsthand accounts of abuse of detainees, officials said.

An overall theme of the documents is a chasm between the interrogation techniques followed by the FBI and the more aggressive tactics used by some military interrogators. "We know what's permissible for FBI agents but are less sure what is permissible for military interrogators," one FBI official said in a lengthy e-mail on May 22, 2004.

In another e-mail, dated Dec. 5, 2003, an agent complained about military tactics, including the alleged use of FBI impersonators. "These tactics have produced no intelligence of a threat neutralization nature to date and . . . have destroyed any chance of prosecuting this detainee," the agent wrote. "If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will be not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [by] the 'FBI' interrogators."

In another e-mail, an unidentified FBI agent describes at least three incidents involving Guantanamo detainees being chained to the floor for extended periods of time and being subjected to extreme heat, extreme cold or "extremely loud rap music."

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water," the FBI agent wrote on Aug. 2, 2004. "Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more."

In one case, the agent continued, "the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."

In an e-mail dated Aug. 16, 2004, an agent from the FBI's inspection division reported observing a detainee sitting in an interview room at Guantanamo Bay's Camp Delta "with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a strobe light flashing." The same agent said that he or she did not witness any "physical assaults" while at Guantanamo.

A detainee, Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi of Sudan, an alleged paymaster for al Qaeda and accused associate of Osama bin Laden, has claimed similar abuse in documents contesting his imprisonment that were filed in federal court in Washington last month. He alleges Guantanamo Bay interrogators wrapped prisoners in an Israeli flag, showed them pornographic photos and forced them to be present while others had sex. Military officials denied his allegations.

The documents also contain what may be the first witness account of the use of military dogs to intimidate detainees during interrogations at Guantanamo Bay. In an undated and heavily redacted memo, initially classified "Secret," an FBI employee reported that members of the agency's Behavioral Analysis Unit had witnessed the use of "loud music/bright lights/growling dogs" during interviews by U.S. military personnel at the island prison.

The Army was embarrassed by photos of snarling military dogs and cowering detainees in Iraq, which officials acknowledged later had violated the Geneva Conventions protections for military prisoners. But officials have maintained steadfastly that the technique was never used in Guantanamo Bay.

The issue is particularly pertinent to statements by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who commanded the Guantanamo Bay prison from October 2002 to March 2004. Miller has acknowledged urging in September 2003 that military dogs be sent to Iraq to help deter prison violence, but he told a team of Defense Department investigators in June -- and many reporters -- that "we never used the dogs for interrogations while I was in command" of Guantanamo Bay.

Miller's statement contradicted other sworn testimony -- by the senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad -- that Miller acknowledged using dogs to intimidate prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and recommended a similar approach in Iraq.

Miller, who took over the Iraq prison operation after the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, recently left that job for an assignment as the Army's chief of installations and could not be reached through Army and Pentagon spokesmen yesterday. Air Force Maj. Michael Shavers, a spokesman on Guantanamo Bay issues, said he had no comment on the allegation of use of dogs.

Staff writer Peter Baker and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report. 

--------

Guantanamo Review To Free Second Man
Prisoner to Be Sent to Home Country

Associated Press
Tuesday, December 21, 2004; Page A22

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14899-2004Dec20?language=printer

A military review has determined that a second prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is wrongly classified as an enemy combatant, and he will be released to his home country soon, a Pentagon official said yesterday.

Navy Secretary Gordon England would not provide the man's name or nationality, and the circumstances of his original capture were not immediately available. The State Department has been notified of the decision and will make arrangements to return him home.

The prisoner would be the second to be released under a military process instituted to help satisfy the Supreme Court's ruling this summer that prisoners at Guantanamo could challenge their detentions through the U.S. court system.

To bolster its case for each of the prisoners against any such challenge, the Pentagon set up tribunals to review the circumstances of their capture and other factors to determine whether they are properly held. The military has conducted 507 of those tribunals and has about 50 to complete, England said. In 292 cases, the prisoner took part in the hearing and the rest refused, England said. Both of the prisoners released spoke in their own defense.

In the hearings, formally called combatant status review tribunals, a three-person panel studies the prisoner's case and forwards its findings to Rear Adm. James M. McGarrah, who issues a final ruling.

He has concurred with the panel 230 times -- to release two prisoners and to continue holding 228 others. The rest of the cases are pending.

England stopped short of saying the latest prisoner determined to be wrongly classified as an enemy combatant had been held as a mistake.

"I don't think there's a right or wrong answer to this. I think this is a gray area," he said.

Another 200 Guantanamo prisoners have been released through other arrangements; some have been freed outright and others have been turned over to the custody of their home countries.

Of those, England said, at least 12 are known to have returned to the battlefield.

"You don't want to release people who could harm Americans or other people," England said. "On the other hand, people do have rights." 

--------

With Rumsfeld Under Fire New Questions Emerge About His Role in Prisoner Torture

Tuesday, December 21st, 2004 Democracy Now!

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/21/1535212

As debate grows over President Bush's decision to keep Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for a second term, we speak with columnist Joe Conason of Salon.com about a recently disclosed FBI memo that indicates that "marching orders" to abandon traditional interrogation methods came directly Rumsfeld himself. [includes rush transcript] President Bush held the 17th press conference of his presidency Monday, a day before he headed out to Camp David and Crawford ranch for the holidays. At the hour-long news conference, Bush strongly defended Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the Iraq war, admitted serious problems in training Iraqi forces, and laid out his second-term domestic agenda. Today, we are going to be looking at a number of the issues raised at Bush's end-of-the-year news conference including his plan for Social Security, the White House policy on torture, and Donald Rumsfeld.

Since claiming victory in the 2004 presidential election, President Bush has moved swiftly in his unprecedented reshuffling of his cabinet. And the process has certainly not been without its share of controversy. Bush's nominee to replace Tom Ridge at the Department of Homeland Security, Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, went down amid widespread allegations of corruption, possible tax fraud, mafia connections, misuse of property and a litany of other concerns. In a moment we are going to look at his nominee for Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, and the issue of the administration's use of torture.

But first, we turn to one of the officials who is remaining at his current post--Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. There is a brewing debate in Washington, particularly within the ranks of the Republican Party, over Bush's decision to keep Rumsfeld on for a second term. Prominent Republican Senators like Trent Lott and John McCain have both publicly questioned Bush's decision to keep him. That controversy gained new fuel this week when Rumsfeld admitted he had not personally signed letters to families of soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, relying instead on a rubber-stamp machine. On Monday, President Bush defended Rumsfeld at a White House Press conference.

    * President Bush, news conference, December 20, 2004.
    * Joe Conason, author of the best-selling book "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How it Distorts the Truth." He is the editor-at-large at The New York Observer. He writes a column for Salon.com. His latest piece is called "Torture Begins at the Top," about a recently disclosed FBI memo that indicates that "marching orders" to abandon traditional interrogation methods came directly from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, President Bush defended Rumsfeld at a White House news conference.

      REPORTER: You talked about the big picture elements of the secretary's job, but did you find it offensive that he didn't take the time to personally sign condolence letters to the families of troops killed in Iraq. And if so, why is that an offense that you are willing to overlook?

      GEORGE W. BUSH: Listen, uh, I know how -- I know Secretary Rumsfeld's heart. I know how much he cares for the troops. He and his wife go out to Walter Reed and Bethesda all the time to provide comfort and solace. I have seen the anguish in his -- heard the anguish in his voice and seen his eyes when we talk about the danger in Iraq and the fact that youngsters are over there in harm's way. He is a good, decent man. He's a caring fellow. Sometimes perhaps his demeanor is rough and gruff, but beneath the rough and gruff, no nonsense demeanor is a good human being who cares deeply about the military and deeply about the grief that war causes.

AMY GOODMAN: President Bush at his news conference on Monday. We turn now to Joe Conason who wrote a piece this week at Salon.com called “Torture Begins at the Top.” A recently disclosed F.B.I. memo indicates that marching orders to abandon traditional interrogation methods came from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself, says Joe Conason, who joins us on the phone. Welcome to Democracy Now!

JOE CONASON: Good morning, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Can you tell us further what you understand about this F.B.I. memo?

JOE CONASON: Well, this memo is an internal email within the F.B.I. from be a unnamed F.B.I. special agent to one of the supervisors of F.B.I. counter-terror activities, and specifically of F.B.I. agents who were conducting interrogations in Guantanamo. The memo explains -- the memo was written around the time that -- of the exposure of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. So the memo is trying to explain what's called walk back the cat in intelligence lingo, go back and look at what had happened. As the F.B.I. and the Pentagon and other defense – other intelligence agencies considered how to handle the prisoners who were coming out of Afghanistan, how to interrogate them, what the best methods were. What it says is that the F.B.I. argued strongly against abusive techniques in Guantanamo, and argued with two ranking generals, General Dunlavey and General Geoffrey Miller who figured largely in the Abu Ghraib scandal because he went to Iraq after setting up the system at Guantanamo, and that the response of the military was, of these generals was, you can try your methods, but we have our marching orders from the SecDef, which is what the memo says and the SecDef is military jargon for the Secretary of Defense. In other words, this is an acknowledgement by the F.B.I. in the internal memo that the military was behaving towards these prisoners in a manner that had been ordered by Donald Rumsfeld's office. That the allegations of abuse and in some cases torture had grown out of an attitude that ordinary conventions and international law did not have to be observed in the treatment of these prisoners.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Joe Conason his piece is called “Torture Begins at the Top.” What about the ACLU documents that indicate that the interrogators at Guantanamo dressed as or identified themselves as F.B.I. to throw people off, that they were actually from the Pentagon, to deflect criticism of the Pentagon.

JOE CONASON: Well, that's a very interesting -- that's news today. I didn't know about that when I wrote this story. These documents -- there are now hundreds and thousands of documents that the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, has pried loose from various agencies that have been involved in the interrogating of prisoners, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the F.B.I., the Pentagon, the C.I.A., and there's quite a bit of news to be found in all of these documents. That's kind of the latest thing, which appears on the front page of The New York Times today. The Times has actually been doing a pretty good job of digging out these documents and going through them, although it was funny that I found this reference to the SecDef, and that had not appeared yet in the Times at that point. To me, that's the smoking gun, because the question is how high up did this mandate for abuse go? We know that the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, who you said you were going to talk about later, and people in his office, played a role in trying to create a legal rationale for this, but now we know that the Secretary of Defense, at least according to the F.B.I.'s own documents, also played a role in encouraging much, much more aggressive and possibly abusive, I think abusive, treatment of these prisoners.

AMY GOODMAN: Just at the -- right around the time you have just put out this piece, your other piece, “Rumsfeld the Bungler.” Seven months before the Defense Secretary's recent exchange, another grunt had complained about inadequate armor. Very briefly, summarize that.

JOE CONASON: That story showed that according to the Pentagon's own transcripts, the Secretary of Defense had been asked at a town hall meeting in Baghdad back in May when he made a sort of a very brief visit to Iraq. He had been asked publicly about the lack of armor for military vehicles there by another soldier. He had allowed General Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, who was with him at the time, to answer, and basically they said, well, we're going to get you all of the armor you need. Seven months later, we had the same question come up again because they had not done it.

AMY GOODMAN: Joe Conason, thanks for being with us.

JOE CONASON: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Joe Conason of salon.com. His book is called, Big Lies: The Right Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth. 

----

FBI Agents Allege Abuse of Detainees at Guantanamo Bay

By Dan Eggen and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 21, 2004; Page A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14936-2004Dec20?language=printer

Detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were shackled to the floor in fetal positions for more than 24 hours at a time, left without food and water, and allowed to defecate on themselves, an FBI agent who said he witnessed such abuse reported in a memo to supervisors, according to documents released yesterday.

In memos over a two-year period that ended in August, FBI agents and officials also said that they witnessed the use of growling dogs at Guantanamo Bay to intimidate detainees -- contrary to previous statements by senior Defense Department officials -- and that one detainee was wrapped in an Israeli flag and bombarded with loud music in an apparent attempt to soften his resistance to interrogation.

In addition, several agents contended that military interrogators impersonated FBI agents, suggesting that the ruse was aimed in part at avoiding blame for any subsequent public allegations of abuse, according to memos between FBI officials.

The accounts, gleaned from heavily redacted e-mails and memorandums, were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union as part of an ongoing lawsuit. They suggest that extremely aggressive interrogation techniques were more widespread at Guantanamo Bay than was acknowledged by military officials.

The documents also make it clear that some personnel at Guantanamo Bay believed they were relying on authority from senior officials in Washington to conduct aggressive interrogations. One FBI agent wrote a memo referring to a presidential order that approved interrogation methods "beyond the bounds of standard FBI practice," although White House and FBI officials said yesterday that such an order does not exist.

Instead, FBI and Pentagon officials said, the order in question was signed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in December 2002 and then revised four months later after complaints from military lawyers that he had authorized methods that violated international and domestic law.

In a Jan. 21, 2004, e-mail, an FBI agent wrote that "this technique [of impersonating an FBI agent], and all of those used in these scenarios, was approved by the DepSecDef," referring to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz.

Deputy Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said in a statement last night that Wolfowitz "did not approve interrogation techniques." Whitman also said "it is difficult to determine" whether the impersonation technique "was permissible or not," but that such a tactic was not endorsed by Rumsfeld.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said in an interview that the incidents described in the documents "can only be described as torture."

The government is holding about 550 people detained in the war on terrorism at a prison on the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay. Some have been held for nearly three years without charges or access to attorneys. Several dozen have taken advantage of a June ruling by the Supreme Court and petitioned federal courts to challenge their imprisonment.

Some of the FBI memos were written this year after a request from agency headquarters for firsthand accounts of abuse of detainees, officials said.

An overall theme of the documents is a chasm between the interrogation techniques followed by the FBI and the more aggressive tactics used by some military interrogators. "We know what's permissible for FBI agents but are less sure what is permissible for military interrogators," one FBI official said in a lengthy e-mail on May 22, 2004.

In another e-mail, dated Dec. 5, 2003, an agent complained about military tactics, including the alleged use of FBI impersonators. "These tactics have produced no intelligence of a threat neutralization nature to date and . . . have destroyed any chance of prosecuting this detainee," the agent wrote. "If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will be not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [by] the 'FBI' interrogators."

In another e-mail, an unidentified FBI agent describes at least three incidents involving Guantanamo detainees being chained to the floor for extended periods of time and being subjected to extreme heat, extreme cold or "extremely loud rap music."

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water," the FBI agent wrote on Aug. 2, 2004. "Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more."

In one case, the agent continued, "the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."

In an e-mail dated Aug. 16, 2004, an agent from the FBI's inspection division reported observing a detainee sitting in an interview room at Guantanamo Bay's Camp Delta "with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a strobe light flashing." The same agent said that he or she did not witness any "physical assaults" while at Guantanamo.

A detainee, Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi of Sudan, an alleged paymaster for al Qaeda and accused associate of Osama bin Laden, has claimed similar abuse in documents contesting his imprisonment that were filed in federal court in Washington last month. He alleges Guantanamo Bay interrogators wrapped prisoners in an Israeli flag, showed them pornographic photos and forced them to be present while others had sex. Military officials denied his allegations.

The documents also contain what may be the first witness account of the use of military dogs to intimidate detainees during interrogations at Guantanamo Bay. In an undated and heavily redacted memo, initially classified "Secret," an FBI employee reported that members of the agency's Behavioral Analysis Unit had witnessed the use of "loud music/bright lights/growling dogs" during interviews by U.S. military personnel at the island prison.

The Army was embarrassed by photos of snarling military dogs and cowering detainees in Iraq, which officials acknowledged later had violated the Geneva Conventions protections for military prisoners. But officials have maintained steadfastly that the technique was never used in Guantanamo Bay.

The issue is particularly pertinent to statements by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who commanded the Guantanamo Bay prison from October 2002 to March 2004. Miller has acknowledged urging in September 2003 that military dogs be sent to Iraq to help deter prison violence, but he told a team of Defense Department investigators in June -- and many reporters -- that "we never used the dogs for interrogations while I was in command" of Guantanamo Bay.

Miller's statement contradicted other sworn testimony -- by the senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad -- that Miller acknowledged using dogs to intimidate prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and recommended a similar approach in Iraq.

Miller, who took over the Iraq prison operation after the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, recently left that job for an assignment as the Army's chief of installations and could not be reached through Army and Pentagon spokesmen yesterday. Air Force Maj. Michael Shavers, a spokesman on Guantanamo Bay issues, said he had no comment on the allegation of use of dogs.

Staff writer Peter Baker and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report. 


-------- russia / chechnya

Putin makes abrupt reversal on Ukraine

Posted 12/21/2004 (AP) 
	
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-12-21-ukraine_x.htm

KIEV, Ukraine — Russian President Vladimir Putin, who openly backed Viktor Yushchenko's rival for president of the Ukraine, said in an abrupt reversal Tuesday that he could work with an administration headed by the pro-Western candidate.

"We have worked with him already and the cooperation was not bad," Putin said during a visit to Germany. "If he wins, I don't see any problems."

Yushchenko was prime minister from 1999 to 2001, and before that he headed the Central Bank for six years.

Putin irritated the West had quickly congratulating Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, the Moscow-backed candidate, after last month's presidential runoff against Yushchenko, only to see his purported victory canceled because of vote-rigging. A new runoff will take place Sunday.

In eastern Ukraine, a pro-Yushchenko convoy of about 50 vehicles dubbed the "friendship journey" was turned back by supporters of Yanukovych after it reached the outskirts of Donetsk, a city that is the prime minister's base.

The presidential campaign has split Ukraine, with the west and Ukraine's cosmopolitan capital backing the reformist, Western-leaning Yushchenko, while the Kremlin-backed Yanukovych has received strong support from the industrial east, which favors closer ties with Russia.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who spoke with Putin at a news conference in the northern German town of Schleswig, said he and Putin agreed that "nobody has the right to meddle and that the result of the Dec. 26 vote will have to be respected."

Ukraine's Supreme Court ordered the revote after annulling the fraud-marred Nov. 21 runoff. Mass opposition protests in Kiev preceded the court's decision.

Yushchenko would like to nudge the country of 48 million people toward the European Union and NATO. Ukraine has a brigade of troops in Iraq, has lost nine soldiers killed in the conflict, and is one of the top recipients of U.S. aid.

Yanukovych on Tuesday pledged Tuesday to fight any attempt to split Ukraine, speaking a day after a bruising televised debate with his presidential rival where both candidates acknowledged the urgent need for unity in this divided nation.

"I do not intend to not put up with attempts to divide Ukraine, to split Ukraine territorially, linguistically or religiously," Yanukovych said at a meeting with foreign diplomats in the Ukrainian capital.

In the debate, Yushchenko accused his rival of stealing millions of votes in last month's runoff while Yanukovych warned that Yushchenko would never win over Ukraine's Russian-speaking east, and called on his opponent to work together to heal the wounds exposed by the bitter race.

Both candidates have moved to win support beyond their traditional bases, and Yushchenko convoy was an attempt to win over some of Yushchenko's toughest critics.

About 300 cars adorned with blue-and-white banners and flags — Yanukovych's campaign colors — waited for the convoy of Yushchenko supporters outside the Donetsk city limits. In the city, up to 3,000 youths rallied and chanted, "We are for Yanukovych." They burned an effigy of Yushchenko.

Earlier, Olga Khodovanets, a coordinator of the opposition convoy, said they had received permission from Donetsk officials to enter the city. There were fears of possible violence, but Mayor Aleksandr Lukyanchenko told the Interfax news agency that "police will be able to ensure order" and he said permission had been given for the group to hold a rally in Donetsk.

Yanukovych, meanwhile, has moved to distance himself from outgoing President Leonid Kuchma, while also reaching out to Yushchenko with conciliatory calls to form a unity government after the vote.

"We, regardless, will search for compromises and will find them," he said during the debate. "After the election, despite whoever wins, I think we should hold a forum of national accord."

Yanukovych also urged whoever loses Sunday's rerun to accept defeat. 


-------- us

U.S. Marines suffer most suicides in five years

21 Dec 2004 23:52:25 GMT
Source: Reuters

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N21442310.htm

LOS ANGELES, Dec 21 (Reuters) - Suicides of U.S. Marines have reached their highest level in five years, prompting a Defense Department effort to encourage Marines to seek mental health services, a Marine Corps spokesman said on Tuesday.

But spokesman Bryan Driver said there was no evidence linking the higher suicide rate with the long tours of duty and frontline fighting Marines have engaged in in Iraq.

There have been 32 confirmed or probable suicides among 178,000 Marines this year, surpassing the 28 who killed themselves in 2001 as the United States invaded Afghanistan, Driver said.

The Marines, the smallest of the U.S. armed services by number of troops, have had the military's highest suicide rate -- about 25 per year among 178,000 active duty troops since 1999, the year the government began keeping detailed records.

"What we found out when we looked into the circumstances are relationship problems, financial problems, legal problems. Those are the three main triggers in these Marines' lives," Driver said.

The suicide data was first reported on Tuesday by the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The Camp Pendleton, California-based 1st Marine Expeditionary Force has had more than 200 soldiers killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

The U.S. Defense Department has contracted with private provider Ceridian Corp.<CEN.N> to provide mental health services to Marines, Driver said.

The military suicide rates remain well below suicide rates of about 21 per 100,000 for similar civilian populations, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. 



-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE


-------- torture

Attorney General Nominee Gonzales Advised CIA on 'Acceptable' Torture Techniques

Tuesday, December 21st, 2004 Democracy Now!

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/21/1535224

We speak with Newsweek investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff about Alberto Gonzales, President Bush's nominee for Attorney General, and his role in advising the CIA on how far could the agency go in interrogating suspects. And we examine a secret Justice Department memo from 2001 that claims there are effectively "no limits" on presidential power to wage war. [includes rush transcript] As the debate over Rumsfeld's future continues, most politicians on both sides of the aisle predict that Bush will have little difficulty in passing his new cabinet nominees through their Senate confirmation proceedings. But that doesn't necessarily mean, his nominees won't face serious questions. One of the most heated hearings could come when Bush's nominee to replace John Ashcroft as the US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, appears in front of the Senate. That is the focus of a story in the latest issue of Newsweek magazine called "Torture's Path." The lead author of that piece is investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff. In a moment, he will join us on the phone from Colorado. But first, we wanted to play another clip from yesterday's press conference when Bush was asked about the use of torture in the so-called war on terror.

    * President Bush, news conference, December 20, 2004.
    * Michael Isikoff, investigative correspondent for Newsweek.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: That's the focus of a story in the latest issue of Newsweek called "Torture’s Path.” The lead author on the piece is investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff. In a moment, he’ll join us on the phone from Colorado. But first we wanted to play another clip from Monday's news conference when President Bush was asked about the use of torture in the so-called war on terror.

      GEORGE W. BUSH: We are a nation of laws, and -- and to the extent that people say: ‘Well, America has no longer a nation of laws,’ that does hurt our reputation. But I think it’s an unfair criticism. As you might remember, our courts have made a ruling. They looked at the jurisdiction-- the right of people in Guantanamo to have habeas review, and so we're now complying with the court's decisions. We want to fully vet the court decision, ‘cause I believe I have the right to set up military tribunals. And so the law is working to determine what presidential powers are available and what's not available. We're reviewing the status of the people in Guantanamo on a regular basis. I think two hundred and some-odd have been released. But you gotta understand the dilemma we're in. These are people that have got scooped up off a battlefield, attempting to kill U.S. troops. And I want to make sure before they're released that they don't come back to kill again. And so, it's -- I think it's – it’s important to let the world know that we fully understand our obligations in a society that honors rule of law to do that. But I also have an obligation to protect the American people, to make sure we understand the nature of the people that we hold, whether or not there's possible intelligence we can gather from them that we could then use to protect us. And so, we'll continue to work the issue hard. 

AMY GOODMAN: President Bush at his news conference. Michael Isikoff of Newsweek is on the line with us. Your reaction?

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Well, it's interesting when the President talks about the commitment to the rule of law. Of course – and then cites these Guantanamo tribunals. Of course, those tribunals are taking place only because the Supreme Court rebuked the Bush administration for its handling of -- of the detainees at Guantanamo, not providing them any access to the courts, any right to challenge their detention. That was a policy that was set firmly early on by the White House, a decision the President made based on the recommendations of his White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, that Geneva Convention protections should not apply to any of the prisoners at Guantanamo, and that the U.S. courts had no jurisdiction over what was taking place at Guantanamo. Those were key legal decisions that were made early on in the Bush administration based on advice from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and that stand was – was shot down by the Supreme Court in its decision last June; and so, as a result, what the President is citing now are things that the administration is doing after being told it was not following the law.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, talking about a 2001 memo revealing the push for broader presidential powers. While you start the piece talking about, there may be some heated discussion around Alberto Gonzales, it doesn't really sound like that from the Democratic senators. It may well be that military lawyers come forward and challenge Gonzales, but not the senators.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Well, we certainly know there's going to be a lot of very precise questioning or attempts for precision in the hearings to pin Gonzales down on exactly where he stood during all these legal debates that were going on during the administration about what course to take on Guantanamo Bay, on executive powers, on the use of torture. And one of the things we reported, of course, is that Gonzales was very much involved in the discussions that led up to this now controversial August 1, 2002, torture memo that seemed to give sort of unlimited – sort of blank check to the President and everybody on down to handle detainees in whatever way they saw fit, a highly restrictive definition of what torture is. The memo (and this is the memo to Gonzales from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel) put a definition that was so restrictive, it said that only acts that caused sev -- that were specifically intended to cause severe pain and suffering or organ failure would qualify. In other words, anything that was specifically intended for something else but had an incidental purpose of causing severe pain and suffering wouldn't cut it; and more broadly, and I think more troubling to sort of constitutional scholars, is the assertion that the President, as commander–in-chief, could essentially disregard international treaties and U.S. domestic law governing torture, so long as he was acting under -- in what he thought was the defense of the country. Now, it is true Gonzales later walked away from that assertion, and said that it was, ‘overly broad, unnecessary, and irrelevant to any of the decisions the President has made,’ but it does give quite a window into what the executive powers asserted were.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Isikoff, can you talk about how you found the memo?

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Now, which memo are we talking about?

AMY GOODMAN: Can you -- Well, talking about the -- You have several memos, but --

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: While you have reported in the past on the 2001 memo, you didn’t have all the details of it until recently.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Oh, yes. This is a – This is a new memo that we did report about this week, which is quite interesting, which is sort of an ur or meta memo on – on all these issues, which is a memo written by John Yoo, the very conservative lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Counsel, to Gonzales's office, September 25, 2001, just two weeks after the September 11th attacks which basically said that there were no limits on the President's ability to respond to the September 11 attacks, and it specifically says in there that the President can wage war preemptively against any countries any – I’m sorry, any terrorist groups or countries that harbor them, regardless of whether or not they had anything to do with the September 11th attacks. This is not a position that the White House ever publicly affirmed during this period, and of course, it does seem to lay a legal groundwork for the invasion of Iraq, just two weeks after the September 11th attacks. And this memo is new. It has not been out before, and I discovered it, quite interestingly, because in preparation for confirmation hearings, the Senate has been asking for as many of these memos as they can get, and any that are not declassified, the White House has a hard time refusing to turn over. So, late last week, they very quietly posted this memo on a website belonging to the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. You have to go on the memorandums and opinions section of the memo – of -- of the website. There's nothing that tells you it's there. And then if you happen to click on the year 2001, going back four years, and look under September, this memo miraculously for the first time appears. It was -- it's quite an interesting way to make something public.

AMY GOODMAN: So, explain exactly the significance of this memo.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: I think it gives -- it is the first inkling into where the lawyers of the Bush Administration stood on questions of executive power that were to run through all the issues that were to flow in – in the months and years afterwards relating to all the issues we're talking about, the basic position is that as commander-in-chief, the President -- there are no limits on the President's power to protect the country. That means that decisions about war can be taken preemptively, without congressional approval, that decisions on handling of detainees, who -- and the need to extract information from them can be taken without limits, because of military necessity, and decisions about such matters as the Geneva Conventions can be taken, the President is free to disregard those. So, it all flows from this very expansive view of executive authority that was first laid out in this September 25, 2001, memo.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Isikoff, I want to thank you very much for joining us. I assume you’ll be covering the Alberto Gonzales confirmation hearings.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: I will, indeed.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you. 


-------- POLITICS


-------- us politics

America's war on itself

Bush's wrecking tactics over climate change follow an established pattern of self-destruction

George Monbiot
Tuesday December 21, 2004
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1377970,00.html

I have a persistent mental image of US foreign policy, which haunts me even in my sleep. The vanguard of a vast army is marching around the globe, looking for its enemy. It sees a mass of troops in the distance, retreating from it. It opens fire, unaware that it is shooting its own rear.

Is this too fanciful a picture? Both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were groomed and armed by the United States. Until the invasion of Iraq, there were no links between the Ba'athists and al-Qaida: now Bush's government has created the monster it claimed to be slaying. The US army developed high-grade weaponised anthrax in order, it said, to work out what would happen if someone else did the same. No one else was capable of producing it: the terrorist who launched the anthrax attacks in 2001 took it from one of the army's laboratories. Now US researchers are preparing genetically modified strains of smallpox on the same pretext, and with the same likely consequences. The Pentagon's space-based weapons programme is being developed in response to a threat which doesn't yet exist, but which it is likely to conjure up. The US government is engaged in a global war with itself. It is like a robin attacking its reflection in a window.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in its assaults on the multilateral institutions and their treaties. Listening to some of the bunkum about the United Nations venting from Capitol Hill at the moment, you could be forgiven for believing that the UN was a foreign conspiracy against the United States. It was, of course, proposed by a US president, launched in San Francisco and housed in New York, where its headquarters remain. Its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, characterised by Republicans as a dangerous restraint upon American freedoms, was drafted by Franklin D Roosevelt's widow. The US is now the only member of the UN security council whose word is law, with the result that the UN is one of the world's most effective instruments for the projection of American power.

The secret deals in Iraq for which the United Nations is currently being attacked by US senators were in fact overseen by the US government. It ensured that Saddam could evade sanctions by continuing to sell oil to its allies in Jordan and Turkey. Republican congressmen are calling on Kofi Annan to resign for letting this happen, apparently unaware that it was approved in Washington to support American strategic objectives. The US finds the monsters it seeks, as it pecks and flutters at its own image.

So we could interpret the activities of Bush's government at the climate talks in Buenos Aires last week as another vigorous attempt to destroy its own interests. US economic growth depends on the rest of the world's prosperity. The greatest long-term threat to global prosperity is climate change, which threatens to wreck many of America's key markets in the developing world. Coastal cities in the US - including New York - are threatened by rising sea levels. Florida could be hit by stronger and more frequent hurricanes. Both farms and cities are likely to be affected by droughts.

In February, a leaked report from the Pentagon revealed that it sees global warming as far more dangerous to US interests than terrorism. As a result of abrupt climate change, it claimed, "warfare may again come to define human life... As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern re-emerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies." The nuclear powers are likely to invade each other's territories as they scramble for diminishing resources.

So how does George Bush respond to this? "Bring it on." The meeting in Buenos Aires was supposed to work out what the world should do about climate change when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012. Most of the world's governments want the protocol to be replaced by a new, tougher agreement. But the Bush administration has been seeking to ensure both that the original agreement is scrapped, and that nothing is developed to replace it.

"No one can say with any certainty," Bush asserts, "what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided." As we don't know how bad it is going to be, he suggests, we shouldn't take costly steps to prevent it. Now read that statement again and substitute "terrorism" for "warming". When anticipating possible terrorist attacks, the US administration, or so it claims, prepares for the worst. When anticipating the impacts of climate change, it prepares for the best. The "precautionary principle" is applied so enthusiastically to matters of national security that it now threatens American civil liberties. But it is rejected altogether when discussing the environment.

The Kyoto protocol is flawed, the Bush team says, because countries such as China and India are currently exempted from cutting their emissions. But instead of helping to design a treaty that would eventually bring them in, the US teamed up with them in Buenos Aires to try to sink all international cooperation. It even supported Saudi Arabia's demand that oil-producing countries should be compensated for any decline in the market caused by carbon cuts.

The result is that the talks very nearly collapsed. On Saturday, 36 hours after they were due to have ended, and while workmen were dismantling the rooms in which the delegates were sitting, the other countries managed to salvage the barest ghost of an agreement. The US permitted them to hold an informal meeting in May, during which "any negotiation leading to new commitments" is forbidden. According to the head of the US delegation, the time to decide what happens after 2012 is "in 2012". It's like saying that the time to decide what to do about homeland security is when the plane is flying into the tower.

Wrecking these talks is pretty good work for a country which, as it refuses to ratify the protocol, doesn't even have negotiating rights. But this is now familiar practice. The US tried to sink the biosafety protocol in 1999, even though, as it hadn't signed, it wasn't bound by it. It sought to trash the 2002 Earth Summit, though Bush failed to attend. This isn't, as some people suggest, isolationism. It is a thorough and sustained engagement, whose purpose is to prevent the world's most pressing problems from being solved.

And the result, of course, is that the catastrophe described by the Pentagon is now more likely to happen. The US has just spent millions of dollars in Buenos Aires undermining its own peace and prosperity. Of course we know that its delegation was representing the interests of the corporations, not the people, and that what's bad for America is good for Exxon. But this does not detract from the sheer, self-immolating stupidity of its position.

The US has every right to beat itself up. But unfortunately, while chasing itself around the world, it tramples everyone else. I know that appealing to George Bush's intelligence isn't likely to take us very far, but surely there's someone in that administration who can see what a monkey he's making of America. 

-------- 

56 Percent in Survey Say Iraq War Was a Mistake
Poll Also Finds Slight Majority Favoring Rumsfeld's Exit

By John F. Harris and Christopher Muste
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 21, 2004; Page A04

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14266-2004Dec20?language=printer

President Bush heads into his second term amid deep and growing public skepticism about the Iraq war, with a solid majority saying for the first time that the war was a mistake and most people believing that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld should lose his job, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

While a slight majority believe the Iraq war contributed to the long-term security of the United States, 70 percent of Americans think these gains have come at an "unacceptable" cost in military casualties. This led 56 percent to conclude that, given the cost, the conflict there was "not worth fighting" -- an eight-point increase from when the same question was asked this summer, and the first time a decisive majority of people have reached this conclusion.

Bush lavished praise on Rumsfeld at a morning news conference yesterday, but the Pentagon chief who soared to international celebrity and widespread admiration after the terrorist attacks three years ago can be glad he answers to an audience of one. Among the public, 35 percent of respondents approved of his job performance and 53 percent disapproved; 52 percent said Bush should give Rumsfeld his walking papers.

Seven weeks since his reelection victory over Democrat John F. Kerry and four weeks before his second inauguration, the poll suggests Bush is in a paradoxical situation -- a triumphant president who remains acutely vulnerable in public opinion on a national security issue that is dominating headlines and could shadow his second term.

While the results are bad for Bush as people look at past decisions -- whether the Iraq war should have been waged in the first place -- the president has more support for his policies over the choices he faces going forward.

A strong majority of Americans, 58 percent, support keeping military forces in Iraq until "civil order is restored," even in the face of continued U.S. causalities. By a slight margin, 48 percent to 44 percent, more voters agreed with Bush's position that the United States is making "significant progress" toward its goal of establishing democracy in Iraq. Yet, by a similar margin, the public believes the United States is not making significant progress toward restoring civil order.

This was just one area where there was considerable ambivalence and even pessimism about the challenges confronting U.S. policy in the coming months.

On the question of whether Iraq is prepared for elections next month -- a topic widely debated among national security experts -- 58 percent of respondents believed the violence-plagued country is not ready. Nonetheless, 60 percent want elections to go forward as scheduled -- even though 54 percent do not expect honest results with a "fair and accurate vote count." Fifty-four percent are not confident elections will produce a stable government that can rule effectively.

Bush waged his reelection campaign heavily on national security, but the polling data reaffirm what similar surveys showed during the campaign: He is winning only half the case.

A full 57 percent disapprove of his handling of Iraq, a number that is seven percentage points higher than a poll taken in September. But the president's core political asset, public confidence in his leadership on terrorism, remains intact, albeit down significantly from even a year ago. Fifty-three percent approve of his record on terrorism, while 43 percent do not. Those numbers were 70 percent and 28 percent a year ago this week.

The public splits down the middle on Bush's overall job performance, with 48 percent approving while 49 percent disapprove, percentages that closely approximate results taken just before the election. By contrast, President Bill Clinton had an approval of 60 percent in a poll taken just before he began his second term.

The Post-ABC results are consistent with other newly released surveys. Time magazine, which this week named Bush its "Person of the Year," found that 49 percent approve of his job performance, little changed from before the election. A Pew Research Center survey, meanwhile, showed that the angry divisions about Bush that marked the 2004 campaign were hardly bridged by the election's end -- nor were the sharply divergent appraisals of reality. By emphatic majorities, Bush voters were upbeat on whether things are going well in Iraq and with the economy, while Kerry voters were negative.

The Post poll also showed such partisan divides on many foreign policy and national security questions. In a potential trouble sign for the White House, Republicans' support for Bush on these questions is lower than the Democratic opposition. And majorities of independents side with the Democrats in their skepticism toward the administration's course.

There are sharp partisan divisions over Rumsfeld, with about two-thirds of Democrats and slight majorities of independents disapproving of his job performance and believing he should be replaced. Smaller majorities of Republicans, about six in 10, approve of Rumsfeld and want him to stay in the job.

There are similar splits on Iraq. Majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents agree the elections should be held. But more than two-thirds of Democrats and about six in 10 independents believe that Iraq is not ready for elections and that the vote will not be fair and will not produce a stable Iraqi government, in contrast to a majority of Republicans. Opinion is even more sharply divided over the outcome of elections. Seven in 10 Democrats and five in nine independents believe elections will not produce a stable government in Iraq, while more than two-thirds of Republicans believe they will.

A total of 1,004 randomly selected Americans were interviewed Dec. 16 to 19. The margin of sampling error for the results is plus or minus three percentage points. 



-------- OTHER


-------- environment

EU Clamps Down on Heavy Metal Cadmium in Batteries

REUTERS BELGIUM: December 21, 2004

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/28657/story.htm

BRUSSELS - EU environment ministers agreed on Monday to clamp down on using cadmium in batteries in a bid to stop the toxic heavy metal from seeping into water supplies and polluting the atmosphere.

Cadmium in consumer batteries will be banned, but cordless power tools, medical equipment, emergency lighting and alarm systems will be exempt.

Exposure to cadmium, most often found as nickel-cadmium in rechargeable batteries, has been linked with kidney and liver diseases. EU battery laws have been under review since 1997.

Batteries contain heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and mercury that can be harmful if they leak into water supplies or eventually produce noxious gases which enter the atmosphere.

Such pollution can occur when used batteries are dumped in landfills or incinerated.

After four years, the ban would be reviewed by the European Commission, which would then be encouraged to propose removing power tools from the list of exceptions -- a sop to countries like Sweden and Denmark who wanted a total cadmium battery ban.

The European Parliament will have to approve the ban.

The ministers also set collection targets for all types of portable batteries, hoping to boost recycling rates that vary widely across the 25-nation bloc. Belgium has one of the highest rates, while that of Britain is low by comparison.

EU governments will have to ensure that 25 percent of all used batteries are collected on their territories over an initial period four years following the date when they alter national laws to reflect the new EU legislation.

This rate rises to 45 percent after eight years -- the equivalent of about 5 billion batteries a year.

The Commission, the EU's executive arm, had proposed tougher collection targets, seeking to close a loophole where batteries used in vehicles and industry are already recycled but batteries in domestic appliances tend more often to be dumped.


-------- health

Mobile Phone Radiation Harms DNA, New Study Finds

REUTERS GERMANY / NETHERLANDS: December 21, 2004

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/28652/story.htm

MUNICH / AMSTERDAM - Radio waves from mobile phones harm body cells and damage DNA in laboratory conditions, according to a new study majority-funded by the European Union, researchers said on Monday.

The so-called Reflex study, conducted by 12 research groups in seven European countries, did not prove that mobile phones are a risk to health but concluded that more research is needed to see if effects can also be found outside a lab.

The $100 billion a year mobile phone industry asserts that there is no conclusive evidence of harmful effects as a result of electromagnetic radiation.

About 650 million mobile phones are expected to be sold to consumers this year, and over 1.5 billion people around the world use one.

The research project, which took four years and which was coordinated by the German research group Verum, studied the effect of radiation on human and animal cells in a laboratory.

After being exposed to electromagnetic fields that are typical for mobile phones, the cells showed a significant increase in single and double-strand DNA breaks. The damage could not always be repaired by the cell. DNA carries the genetic material of an organism and its different cells.

"There was remaining damage for future generation of cells," said project leader Franz Adlkofer.

This means the change had procreated. Mutated cells are seen as a possible cause of cancer.

The radiation used in the study was at levels between a Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) of between 0.3 and 2 watts per kilogramme. Most phones emit radio signals at SAR levels of between 0.5 and 1 W/kg.

SAR is a measure of the rate of radio energy absorption in body tissue, and the SAR limit recommended by the International Commission of Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection is 2 W/kg.

The study also measured other harmful effects on cells.

Because of the lab set-up, the researchers said the study did not prove any health risks. But they added that "the genotoxic and phenotypic effects clearly require further studies ... on animals and human volunteers."

Adlkofer advised against the use of a mobile phone when an alternative fixed line phone was available, and recommended the use of a headset connected to a cellphone whenever possible.

"We don't want to create a panic, but it is good to take precautions," he said, adding that additional research could take another four or five years.

Previous independent studies into the health effects of mobile phone radiation have found it may have some effect on the human body, such as heating up body tissue and causing headaches and nausea, but no study that could be independently repeated has proved that radiation had permanent harmful effects.

None of the world's top six mobile phone vendors could immediately respond to the results of the study.

In a separate announcement in Hong Kong, where consumers tend to spend more time talking on a mobile phone than in Europe, a German company called G-Hanz introduced a new type of mobile phone which it claimed had no harmful radiation, as a result of shorter bursts of the radio signal.

(Additional reporting by Doug Young in Hong Kong)


-------- ACTIVISTS

Free Mordechai Vanunu - Info & Action Alert #44 - December 21, 
2004
 
From the U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu
http://www.vanunu.com and http:// <http://www.nonviolence.org/vanunu/>
www.nonviolence.org/vanunu/
 
** PLEASE FORWARD TO SYMPATHETIC LISTS **
 
1)  Whistleblower Vanunu Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize by 
Laureate Mairead Maguire
 
2)  Write to Mordechai Vanunu
 
==========================================
 
[On December 19, over 40 journalists, including seven T.V. cameras, attended a standing room only press conference in East Jerusalem to hear Mairead Maguire, Mordechai Vanunu and Issam Makhoul.  Below is the press release issued afterwards by the International Campaign to Free Vanunu.]
 
PRESS RELEASE
INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN TO FREE VANUNU
 
WHISTLEBLOWER VANUNU NOMINATED FOR NOBEL PEACE 
PRIZE BY LAUREATE MAIREAD MAGUIRE
KNESSET MEMBER CALLS FOR VANUNU'S FREEDOM
 
In a press conference held in East Jerusalem on December 19, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire (Ireland), announced that she is nominating Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu for the prize in 2005. Vanunu has been nominated for the prize every year since 1989. Maguire received the Nobel Prize in 1976, in recognition of her work for peace in Ireland. "Mordechai Vanunu has paid a heavy price in order to protect us all from nuclear weapons. We are all indebted to him for telling the truth to power and I have come to thank him on behalf of his human family," Maguire said. Explaining that she had arrived in Israel from a women's peace conference in Jordan, Maguire urged Israelis and Palestinians to work nonviolently for peace. The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate urged the Israeli government to free Vanunu from the restrictions that keep him hostage in Israel and to "let Mordechai come home for Christmas."  Maguire added, that she would continue to nominate Vanunu for the award "until he gets it."
 
Issam Makhoul, Member of the Israeli Parliament (Knesset), who in February 2000 initiated the first parliamentary debate on nuclear policy ever to be held in Israel, stated: "Only those who struggle for total disarmament of the Middle East, including Israel, of all weapons of mass destruction – nuclear, biological and chemical – has the moral right to condemn Iran for its nuclear project. The countries that equip Israel with the means to launch nuclear warheads, that supply it with submarines and enable it to develop its missiles, do not have the moral right to condemn the Iranian nuclear project. Anyone who opposes the Iranian project must also oppose the Israeli nuclear arsenal.
 
"Along with Mordechai Vanunu, I and other Israeli activists refuse to be silenced. We continue to demand, that our government reveal the truth about its WMDs, enable a full international inspection of all WMD sites and dismantle its arsenal. To this end, we are currently involved in organizing an international conference on a nuclear-free Mediterranean area, to be held in April 2005. This date marks the first anniversary of Vanunu's release from prison. This date will hopefully mark the beginning of an anti-nuclear movement in Israel.
 
"Mordechai Vanunu is not a traitor, he is an Israeli hero. The nuclear bomb does not protect Israel, it endangers Israel."
 
Mordechai Vanunu , recently elected rector of Glasgow University in Scotland, described the restrictions that were imposed on him when he was released from 18 years imprisonment, in April 2004, the subsequent police harassment and threats to which he has been subjected, and the impact that they have on his ability to rebuild his life. Asked why he refuses to speak to the Israeli media in Hebrew, Vanunu answered – in Hebrew: "The government of Israel refuses to recognize my human rights. I am prohibited from speaking to foreigners. I say to the Israeli public: I am not your enemy. All I want is for Israel to abolish its nuclear weapons, to respect the rights of the Palestinian people and to let me go free." Continuing in English, Vanunu stated, that he has no further secrets to reveal about Israel's nuclear reactor and that he demands the right to express his anti-nuclear views, to speak freely to the media and to write his prison memoirs. All he wants for Christmas, Vanunu said, was to be free to leave Israel and celebrate with his adoptive family in the USA.
 
Contact information:
 
In Israel: Rayna Moss: Tel. 972-507-368236, email: 
 <mailto:legalese@netvision.net.il> legalese@netvision.net.il
In the USA: Felice Cohen-Joppa, Tel/Fax 520-323-8697, email: 
freevanunu@mindspring.com
In Britain: Ernest Rodker, Tel/Fax: +44 20 7378 9324 e-mail: 
campaign@vanunu.freeserve.co.uk
In Norway: Fredrik Heffermehl,Tel. +47-2244 8003 Fax: +47-2244 
7616 email:  <mailto:fredpax@online.no> fredpax@online.no
 
http://www.vanunu.com/
 
http://www.vanunu.co.uk/
 
http://www.vanunu.org/
 
 
==============
2)  Write to Mordechai
 
Mordechai would love to hear from his friends and supporters.  
You can write to him at:
Mordechai Vanunu
c/o Cathedral Church of St. George
20 Nablus Road
PO Box 19018
Jerusalem 91190
Israel
 
and email him at vanunumvjc@hotmail.com

--------

Inauguration protesters plan weeklong, family-friendly events

The Associated Press
Posted 12/21/2004 12:52 PM
	
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-12-21-inaugural-protests_x.htm

Groups targeting President Bush's economic agenda, the legitimacy of his election and the war in Iraq plan a week of events to counter his inauguration Jan. 20.

"Our intention is to show President Bush and the world our movement is energized, mobilized and determined to fight back," said Gael Murphy, of the activist group Code Pink.

Inauguration week will feature rallies, marches and demonstrations with the focus on peaceful, family-friendly gatherings, said organizer Shahid Buttar. Hundreds of groups throughout the country will participate, Buttar said, including Mobilization for Global Justice and the Committee to ReDefeat the President, a PAC that sees Bush's presidency as illegitimately won.

The groups have received permits for parks around the city, Buttar said, but they are still waiting for clearance to march along the Inaugural Parade route. More details will be released once all permits have been secured, said David Lytel, founder of Redefeat Bush.

Bush, who will be in a security area known as the "Red Zone," will be surrounded by blue, the color assigned to Democratic-voting states, Lytel said.

"What I expect is more people will be here to protest Bush's inauguration than to inaugurate him," Lytel said.

Lytel said his group will film events on Inauguration Day and release a documentary online that evening. They also plan a protest near the Capitol on Jan. 6, the day Congress will certify the electoral votes and officially declare Bush the winner.